Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Quality of life of individuals with end stage renal disease: perceptions of patients, nurses, and physicians.

OBJECTIVE The objectives of this study were to describe the perceptions of physicians, nurses, and patients regarding the quality of life (QOL) of individuals with end stage renal disease (ESRD), to identify differences in ratings of QOL, and to identify predictors of perceptions of QOL for each group. DESIGN A cross-sectional, descriptive comparative design was used. Three measures of QOL, the Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, Index of Well-Being, and Time Trade-Off were used. SAMPLE/SETTING The subjects included 215 patients with ESRD (including dialysis and transplant), and 42 nurses and 7 physicians who cared for them. All were from a major tertiary care hospital renal program in western Canada. METHODS Patients were interviewed and asked to complete questionnaires relating to quality of life, health status, functional status, outlook, support, medical, and demographic characteristics. Three measures of QOL, the Self-Anchoring Striving Scale, Index of Well-Being, and the Time Trade-Off were used. Primary physicians and nurses were asked to complete the same questionnaires within one week of the patients. RESULTS It was found that there were significant differences in the ratings among the groups. The nurses' ratings of patients' QOL were significantly lower than were patients (T2 = 21.89, df = 5, 377, p < .001). Physicians' mean ratings were higher than patients' ratings (T2 = 14.24, df = 5, 338, p < .05). Correlations among patients', nurses', and physicians' ratings of QOL ranged between . 19 and . 49. It was also found that different variables explained the perceptions of each group regarding the patients' QOL. CONCLUSIONS In this study, nurses, physicians, and patients rated the QOL of individual patients differently, and different factors explained the perceptions of QOL of each group. Although findings of the study are not generalizable, it may be advisable for nurses to be aware that patients and physicians may not share their perceptions of patients' QOL.
Mutations in a regulator gene allowing Pseudomonas aeruginosa 8602 to grow on butyramide.

SUMMARY: Mutants of Pseudomonas aeruginosa 8602 were isolated which, unlike the wild-type strain, utilized butyramide as a growth substrate. One group produced amidases with altered substrate specificities, indicating that the mutations may be in the amidase structural gene. The second group of butyramide-utilizing mutants produced wild-type enzyme and were all constitutive. It was concluded that such mutants possessed mutations in an amidase regulator gene which allowed them to synthesize large amounts of amidase in the presence of butyramide. Induction of amidase synthesis by N-acetylacetamide in the wild-type strain was repressed in a competitive manner by butyramide and other amide analogues, e.g. cyanoacetamide. The constitutive mutant c11, which could not utilize butyramide for growth, was subject to severe repression of amidase synthesis by butyramide and cyanoacetamide. The regulator mutants which were able to grow on butyramide were all less sensitive to repression by butyramide. Mutant cb 2, a butyramide-utilizing regulator mutant, was relatively insensitive to repression of amidase synthesis by cyanoacetamide whereas strain b6, a butyramide-utilizing mutant producing an altered enzyme, was as sensitive to repression by cyanoacetamide as its parent strain the constitutive mutant c11. The contribution of mutations in structural and regulator genes to utilization of novel growth substrates is discussed.
Reinvestigating How Welfare Reform Inuences Labor Supply: A Multiple Testing Approach

Economic theory suggests that individual responses to welfare reform depend on pretreatment labor supply and other characteristics. Resulting changes in earnings may be positive or negative, leading to heterogenous treatment eects. In this paper, we extend the literature on treatment eect heterogeneity by introducing six nonparametric tests that are implemented using bootstrap testing of functional inequalities. The proposed tests view treatment eect heterogeneity as a multiple testing problem and make corrections for the family-wise error rate. To facilitate comparisons to the existing literature we re-examine the extent of heterogeneity in labor supply responses to the Jobs First welfare experiment across both quantiles of the earnings distribution and individual subgroups. Our results shed new light on who truly benets from welfare reform and demonstrate
Resonance-Assisted Buck Converter for Offline Driving of Power LED Replacement Lamps

LEDs are potential successors of incandescent lamps with high luminous efficacy and long lifetime. To improve the overall luminair efficacy and lifetime, the power efficiency and lifetime of LED ballasts become important factors. Efficiency gain in transformerless power converters appears attractive for applications without isolation. Driving solid-state LED bulbs in an existing lighting fixture such as PAR30 style housing from universal mains necessitates a high-voltage step-down ratio in order to produce an output voltage of about 10-20 V, which is very common in LED lighting applications. Traditional nonisolated step-down pulse width modulation buck converters may suffer from poor efficiency due to the long diode freewheeling time at small duty cycles. In this paper, we propose a resonance-assisted buck converter to achieve a high-voltage step-down ratio and high converter efficiency, whilst maintaining durability and compatibility with existing incandescent dimmers. The performance of the proposed LED driver is verified experimentally.
Economical challenges to microbial producers of butanol: Feedstock, butanol ratio and titer

Butanol is an important solvent and transport fuel additive, and can be produced by microbial fermentation. Attempts to generate a superior microbial producer of butanol have been made through different metabolic engineering strategies. However, to date, butanol bio‐production is still not economically competitive compared to petrochemical‐derived production because of its major drawbacks, such as, high cost of the feedstocks, low butanol concentration in the fermentation broth and the co‐production of low‐value by‐products acetone and ethanol. Here we analyze the main bottlenecks in microbial butanol production and summarize relevant advances from recently reported studies. Further needs and directions for developing real industrially applicable strains in butanol production are also discussed.
Extending the core functionalities of Aṣṭādhyāyī 2 . 0

The paper describes new layers of linguistic annotation and explorative tools that were added to the project ‘Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0’. These additions make it possible to execute complex research queries in the digital version of Pāṇini’s grammar with minimal knowledge both of Sanskrit and database query languages. In the project ‘Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0’, we have developed a digital edition of Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit. Pāṇini introduced linguistic concepts, such as thematic roles, abstract derivation levels, rewrite rules, and pre-concepts of phonemes and morphemes, all of which are used intensively in contemporary Linguistics. In addition, the Aṣṭādhyāyī compresses the grammar rule system into text form by making use of inheritance structures, a sophisticated meta-language, and a marker system (Kiparsky 2009). Although these concepts and methods continue to be of highest scientific interest, the Aṣṭādhyāyī is rarely studied in modern formal Linguistics because readers who are not thoroughly acquainted with the Sanskrit grammatical tradition don’t understand the terse Sanskrit text. The research environment of ‘Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0’ now opens up the content, the formal structure, and the encoding mechanisms of the Aṣṭādhyāyī to a wider scientific audience. We have built a webbased database edition with annotations on several linguistic levels. While Petersen & Soubusta (2013) and Petersen & Hellwig (forthcoming) have dealt with the core database structure and the linguistic analysis, this paper describes the upper layers of annotation and introduces a customizable query mechanism for our database. In Section 2, we will describe the annotation of anuvṛtti inheritance and of word-semantic concepts. Section 3 deals with the implementation of the search engine. Section 4 illustrates what kind of research problems can be tackled with the research environment Aṣṭādhyāyī 2.0.
The Texas Heart Institute Award for Undergraduate Writing in the History of Cardiovascular Medicine and Surgery.

T his is the 8th and f inal year of the Texas Heart Institute’s Award for Undergraduate Writing in the History of Cardiovascular Medicine and Surgery. There are 2 winning papers this year, and 4 winning authors. The 1st of these papers, on the history of aspirin, appears in this issue. The 2nd winning paper, on the history of streptokinase, will appear in our September 2007 issue. We are pleased to close our competition with a double winner, and we thank all contestants from this year and from years past. Despite our discontinuation of the formal award, we remain interested in the history of cardiovascular medicine and surgery; please continue to submit work on that subject. Jonathan Miner and Adam Hoffhines are both 6th-year MD/PhD students at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Adam and Jonathan have each conducted research in laboratories of the Cardiovascular Biology Research Program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Mr. Miner grew up in Springville, Utah, and graduated from Brigham Young University with a double major in Russian and zoology. His research work involves leukocyte recruitment during inflammation. In particular, his work has focused on P-selectin and its ligand on leukocytes, PSGL-1. In his free time, he enjoys playing basketball and classical piano. Mr. Hoffhines graduated from high school in Belton, Texas, and received his BS in biochemistry in 2002 from Oklahoma Christian University. His research work has involved the biological importance of protein tyrosine-O-sulfation. He is an avid runner. Introduction
Time-Dependent Topic Analysis with Endogenous and Exogenous Processes

We consider the problem of modeling time-dependent textual data taking given endogenous and exogenous processes into consideration. Such text documents arise in real world applications, including job advertisements and financial news articles, which are influenced by the fluctuations of the general economy. We propose a hierarchical Bayesian topic model which imposes a dynamic hierarchical structure on the evolution of topics incorporating the effects of exogenous processes, and show that this model can be estimated from Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling methods. We further demonstrate that this model captures the intrinsic relationships between the topic prevalence and the time-dependent factors, and compare its performance with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) and the structural topic model (STM). The model is applied to two collections of documents to illustrate its empirical performance: online job advertisements from DirectEmployers Association and journalists’ postings on BusinessInsider.com.
Finding meaning in caring for elderly relatives: Loss and personal growth

The literature on family caregiving has focused primarily on caregiver burden and demographic characteristics of caregiver groups. Little has been written about the existential aspects of caring for an aging relative. The article focuses on the meaning of the experience as expressed by family caregivers to elderly relatives and the role this meaning plays in enabling the family member to remain in the caregiving role. The caregiving passage includes families facing loss, identifying turning points, rediscovering a sense of self, and experiencing feelings of satisfaction and enhanced self-worth
Anxiety: An Adaptive Emotion

Anxiety as an adaptive response is a natural emotion that occurs in response to danger and prepares an organism to cope with the environment, playing a critical role in its survival. Among the components of anxiety, the expression of fear may inform other members of the group about the presence of imminent danger (i.e., an alarm cue). The environment is per‐ ceived by a filtering process that involves sensorial receptors. While coping with a stressful situation, an individual may simultaneously emit vocalizations, perform movements to es‐ cape, freeze, and deliver to the environment chemicals called alarm pheromones. These cues are recognized by the receptor-individual by specific sensory systems located in the legs and antennae in insects and olfactory sensorial systems in other organisms. In mammals, the sensorial information is integrated by anatomical and functional pathways, with the partici‐ pation of structures related to emotional memory, namely deep temporal lobe structures. Some stimuli are perceived as relevant when they contain relevant meaning according to previous experience and learning. The participation of ventral striatum and prefrontal cor‐ tex connections then leads to the selection of an adequate strategy for survival. The percep‐ tion of these cues by other individuals in the group establishes intraspecies communication and causes striking behavioral responses in the receptor subject, namely anxiety, but the consequence is likely different. While the emitting subject may be in an emergency situation that is perhaps devoid of a solution, the receptor subject may have the chance to cope with the dangerous situation by employing efficacious strategies, depending on previous experi‐ ence. The aim of this chapter is to review the participation of such anatomical pathways, their neurotransmission systems, and the resulting behavioral patterns.
Scaling Theorems for Zero Crossings of Bandlimited Signals

Scale-space filtering is the only known method which provides a hierarchic signal description method by extracting features across a continuum of scales. One of its important characteristics is that it demands the filtering involved does not create generic features as the scale increases. It has been shown that the Gaussian filter is unique in holding this remarkable property. This is in essence the so-called scaling theorem. In this paper, we propose two scaling theorems for band-limited signals. They are applicable to a broader class of signals and a bigger family of filtering kernels than in Babaud et al. (1986), Yuille et al. (1986) and Wu-Xie (1990). An in-depth discussion of our theorems and the previously published ones is also given.
OsNAC5 overexpression enlarges root diameter in rice plants leading to enhanced drought tolerance and increased grain yield in the field.

Drought conditions are among the most serious challenges to crop production worldwide. Here, we report the results of field evaluations of transgenic rice plants overexpressing OsNAC5, under the control of either the root-specific (RCc3) or constitutive (GOS2) promoters. Field evaluations over three growing seasons revealed that the grain yield of the RCc3:OsNAC5 and GOS2:OsNAC5 plants were increased by 9%-23% and 9%-26% under normal conditions, respectively. Under drought conditions, however, RCc3:OsNAC5 plants showed a significantly higher grain yield of 22%-63%, whilst the GOS2:OsNAC5 plants showed a reduced or similar yield to the nontransgenic (NT) controls. Both the RCc3:OsNAC5 and GOS2:OsNAC5 plants were found to have larger roots due to an enlarged stele and aerenchyma at flowering stage. Cell numbers per cortex layer and stele of developing roots were higher in both transgenic plants than NT controls, contributing to the increase in root diameter. The root diameter was enlarged to a greater extent in the RCc3:OsNAC5, suggesting the importance of this phenotype for enhanced drought tolerance. Microarray experiments identified 25 up-regulated genes by more than three-fold (P < 0.01) in the roots of both transgenic lines. Also identified were 19 and 18 up-regulated genes that are specific to the RCc3:OsNAC5 and GOS2:OsNAC5 roots, respectively. Of the genes specifically up-regulated in the RCc3:OsNAC5 roots, GLP, PDX, MERI5 and O-methyltransferase were implicated in root growth and development. Our present findings demonstrate that the root-specific overexpression of OsNAC5 enlarges roots significantly and thereby enhances drought tolerance and grain yield under field conditions.
Kernel Support for the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel

This paper describes a kernel interface that provides an untrusted user-level process (an executive) with protected access to memory management functions, including the ability to create, manipulate, and execute within subservient contexts (address spaces). Page motion callbacks not only give the executive limited control over physical memory management, but also shift certain responsibilities out of the kernel, greatly reducing kernel state and complexity. The executive interface was motivated by the requirements of the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel (WWT), a system for evaluating cache-coherent shared-memory parallel architectures. WWT uses the executive interface to implement a fine-grain user-level extension of Li's shared virtual memory on a Thinking Machines CM-5, a message-passing multicomputer. However, the interface is sufficiently general that an executive could act as a multiprogrammed operating system, exporting an alternative interface to the threads running in its subservient contexts. The executive interface is currently implemented as an extension to CMOST, the standard operating system for the CM-5. In CMOST, policy decisions are made on a central, distinct control processor (CP) and broadcast to the processing nodes (PNs). The PNs execute a minimal kernel sufficient only to implement the CP's policy. While this structure efficiently supports some parallel application models, the lack of autonomy on the PNs restricts its generality. Adding the executive interface provides limited autonomy to the PNs, creating a structure that supports multiple models of application parallelism. This structure, with autonomy on top of centralization, is in stark contrast to most microkernel-based parallel operating systems in which the nodes are fundamentally autonomous.
Abatacept in subjects who switch from intravenous to subcutaneous therapy: results from the phase IIIb ATTUNE study

Objective To assess safety, immunogenicity and efficacy in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients switched from long-term intravenous to subcutaneous (SC) abatacept. Methods In this phase IIIb, open-label, single-arm trial, patients who completed ≥4 years of intravenous abatacept (in long-term extensions of two phase III studies) were enrolled to receive SC abatacept (125 mg/week). The primary objective was safety during the first 3 months after switching from intravenous therapy. Results 123 patients entered the study (mean Disease Activity Score 28 (based on C reactive protein) and HAQ-DI of 3.4 and 0.94, respectively). At month 3, 120 (97.6%) patients were continuing to receive SC abatacept; no patients discontinued due to lack of efficacy. Adverse events (AEs) were reported in 49 (39.8%) patients through month 3. One patient (0.8%) discontinued due to an AE and one patient (0.8%) experienced a serious AE. Two (1.6%) patients had SC injection site reactions (erythema, pain), both with mild intensity. Clinical efficacy was maintained throughout. Limited impact on immunogenicity was observed when switching routes of administration. Conclusion These data demonstrate that patients can switch from long-term monthly intravenous abatacept to a weekly fixed dose of 125 mg SC abatacept with no increased safety concerns. This study further supports SC abatacept as an alternative treatment option for patients with RA.
DIFFERING SELECTION IN ALTERNATIVE COMPETITIVE ENVIRONMENTS: SHADE‐AVOIDANCE RESPONSES AND GERMINATION TIMING

Abstract. — Under competitive conditions, stem elongation in plants is thought to enhance fitness by increasing light interception. However, the onset of competition should vary with the species of competitor due to interspecific differences in timing of emergence and plant growth form. The fitness benefits of elongation may therefore depend on the timing of this plastic response. Phenotypic selection analyses and path analysis were used to evaluate selection acting on stem elongation at early and late life‐history stages and the combination of germination timing and elongation in an annual plant. Velvetleaf (Abutilon theophrasti) were raised in one of three environments experienced by natural populations (cornfields; soybean fields; and disturbed, weedy sites). Due to the rapid growth rate and high density of plants in disturbed areas, selection to increase seedling‐stage elongation was expected in weedy sites. Due to the wide spacing of crop plants, competition for light is initially low in cultivated fields, but intensifies as the season progresses. Selection for increased elongation at later nodes was expected in soybean fields because velvetleaf can often overtop soy and thereby increase leaf exposure. In contrast, selection against late elongation was expected in cornfields because velvetleaf are incapable of overtopping corn. Individuals that elongate would experience the carbon cost of allocating to structural tissue, but fail to experience a carbon return through increased light interception. The phenotypic selection analyses were consistent with these predictions and therefore support the role of stem elongation as an adaptation to interspecific competition. Selection also acted on the combination of germination timing and elongation. In the weedy environment, early emergence in conjunction with enhanced stem elongation conveyed the highest fitness. Reduced elongation was favored among individuals that emerged late, potentially because these individuals were unable to overtop neighbors. The results of this study demonstrate that the timing of stem elongation strongly affects competitive success. Environments that differ in the timing of competition for light select for elongation at different life‐history stages, and this selection depends on the timing of emergence.