Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Integrating knowledge in service delivery-land: a view from The Benevolent Society

This chapter offers a practice perspective on three main themes. The first is the importance of learning collaborations and partnerships that move beyond access to knowledge to engagement with and use of learning, and some of the barriers that non-profit practice organisations experience in these interactions. Second, the chapter examines the contribution of non-profit organisations to policy and research due to their connection to communities; and third, the chapter outlines examples of initiatives that illustrate strategies facilitating the mediation of knowledge across sectoral and organisational boundaries.
Efficient Gene Targeting Mediated by Adeno-Associated Virus and DNA Double-Strand Breaks

ABSTRACT Gene targeting is the in situ manipulation of the sequence of an endogenous gene by the introduction of homologous exogenous DNA. Presently, the rate of gene targeting is too low for it to be broadly used in mammalian somatic cell genetics or to cure genetic diseases. Recently, it has been demonstrated that infection with recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) vectors can mediate gene targeting in somatic cells, but the mechanism is unclear. This paper explores the balance between random integration and gene targeting with rAAV. Both random integration and spontaneous gene targeting are dependent on the multiplicity of infection (MOI) of rAAV. It has previously been shown that the introduction of a DNA double-stranded break (DSB) in a target gene can stimulate gene targeting by several-thousand-fold in somatic cells. Creation of a DSB stimulates the frequency of rAAV-mediated gene targeting by over 100-fold, suggesting that the mechanism of rAAV-mediated gene targeting involves, at least in part, the repair of DSBs by homologous recombination. Absolute gene targeting frequencies reach 0.8% with a dual vector system in which one rAAV vector provides a gene targeting substrate and a second vector expresses the nuclease that creates a DSB in the target gene. The frequencies of gene targeting that we achieved with relatively low MOIs suggest that combining rAAV vectors with DSBs is a promising strategy to broaden the application of gene targeting.
The secret life of CFTR as a calcium‐activated chloride channel

Abstract cAMP‐stimulated anion conductance is defective in cystic fibrosis (CF). The regulatory domain of CFTR, the anion channel protein encoded by the CF gene, possesses an unusually high density of consensus sequences for phosphorylation by protein kinase A (14 in a stretch of <200 amino acids). Thus it is not surprising that CFTR is viewed primarily as a cAMP‐stimulated anion channel, and most studies have focused on this mode of activation. However, there is growing evidence that CFTR also responds to Ca2+‐mobilizing secretagogues and contributes substantially to cholinergic and purinergic responses in native tissues. G protein‐coupled receptors that signal through Gαq can stimulate CFTR channels by activating Ca2+‐dependent adenylyl cyclase and tyrosine kinases, and also by inhibiting protein phosphatase type 2A. Here we review evidence for these novel mechanisms of CFTR activation and discuss how they may help explain previous observations.
Gender-Diversity, Financial Performance and Cash Holding in Family Firms

Objective - This research aims to determine the presence of partial effects on gender-diversity and financial performance variables on the cash holding of family firms on the Indonesian Stock Exchange included in the Kompas100 index. Methodology/Technique - The approach used in this research was causal associative testing using a panel data regression with a General Least Square (GLS) method using six independent variables: size, growth opportunity, dividend, return on assets, leverage, and gender diversity. Meanwhile, cash holding acts as a dependent variable. Findings - The results of the research show that the independent variables of leverage have significantly negative relationships on cash holding on the Kompas100 index of Indonesia in the period of 2013-2016. Contrary to this, return on asset has a significantly positive relationship with cash holding. Novelty - Gender diversity is an important variable of boardroom; this paper reveals the impact of gender diversity and performance on family holding firms. These results can be used to assess the performance and fundamentals of a firm.
People and teams matter in organizational change: professionals' and managers' experiences of changing governance and incentives in primary care.

OBJECTIVES To explore the experiences of governance and incentives during organizational change for managers and clinical staff. STUDY SETTING Three primary care settings in England in 2006-2008. STUDY DESIGN Data collection involved three group interviews with 32 service users, individual interviews with 32 managers, and 56 frontline professionals in three sites. The Realistic Evaluation framework was used in analysis to examine the effects of new policies and their implementation. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Integrating new interprofessional teams to work effectively is a slow process, especially if structures in place do not acknowledge the painful feelings involved in change and do not support staff during periods of uncertainty. CONCLUSIONS Eliciting multiple perspectives, often dependent on individual occupational positioning or place in new team configurations, illuminates the need to incorporate the emotional as well as technocratic and system factors when implementing change. Some suggestions are made for facilitating change in health care systems. These are discussed in the context of similar health care reform initiatives in the United States.
Age Effects in Earwitness Recall of a Novel Conversation

Recall of conversation is an important part of memory for events. Previous studies have focused predominantly on adults. In the present study, 195 participants ages 11 to 63 years listened to a novel audiotaped conversation. They were not informed they would later have to recall elements of this conversation. Recall was a week later. There were no age-related differences in the recall of children ages 11, 13, and 15; however, there was a difference between retention over 7 days of children and adults, with adults recalling more information correctly. No sex differences were observed. These results are evaluated in the context of research on eye- and ear-witness recall and suggestions for research are given.
Biodiversity and pest management in orchard systems. A review

Conventional agriculture is based on a high level of chemical inputs such as pesticides and fertilisers, leading to serious environmental impacts, health risks and loss of biodiversity in agrosystems. The reduction of pesticide use is a priority for intensively sprayed agricultural systems such as orchards. The preservation and promotion of biodiversity within orchards and their boundaries is therefore an issue to explore. Indeed, orchard systems contain high plant diversity and perennial multi-strata designs that provide wealthy resources and habitats to living communities such as beneficial organisms. Orchards thus offer favourable areas to maintain food-webs within the agrosystem, provided that favourable situations are not altered by cultural practices such as applying an excess of pesticides. Here, we analysed literature on the effects of the manipulation of plant diversity and habitats on the control of pests by arthropod and bird communities in apple, pear and peach orchards. Many investigations focus on the role of plant management to enhance biodiversity in orchards but only 22 research reports presenting 30 case studies were dedicated to the study of the ecosystem service provided by plant diversity for orchard pest control. The underlying mechanisms were seldom demonstrated, and the tested grass covers and tree assemblages aimed at favouring either the beneficial complex or only some beneficial species to control one or a few pests. The effect of plant management on pest control was mostly positive (16 cases) or null (9), but also negative in some cases (5). This finding reveals the difficulties of identifying selected plants or plant assemblages for the control of key pests. We conclude that further research is needed to identify the processes involved on different scales for biological control. Orchard systems should be re-designed to optimise ecosystem services provided by biodiversity.
Cav1 L‐type Ca2+ channel signaling complexes in neurons

Cav1 L‐type Ca2+ channels play crucial and diverse roles in the nervous system. The pre‐ and post‐synaptic functions of Cav1 channels not only depend on their intrinsic biophysical properties but also their dynamic regulation by a host of cellular influences. These include protein kinases and phosphatases, G‐protein coupled receptors, scaffolding proteins, and Ca2+‐binding proteins. The cytoplasmic domains of the main pore forming α1 subunit of Cav1 offer a number of binding sites for these modulators, permitting fast and localized regulation of Ca2+ entry. Through effects on Cav1 gating, localization, and coupling to effectors, protein modulators are efficiently positioned to adjust Cav1 Ca2+ signals that control neuronal excitability, synaptic plasticity, and gene expression.
An evaluation of multiplex bead-based analysis of cytokines and soluble proteins in archived lithium heparin plasma, EDTA plasma and serum samples

Abstract Objective: To assess the usability of archived plasma and serum by multiplex (Luminex) analysis of circulating proteins (analytes) by evaluating the day to day variation, the effect of several freeze-thaw cycles, and the influence of the media and choice of anticoagulant. Methods: Nineteen analytes in plasma and serum from 86 head and neck cancer patients and 33 controls were evaluated: EGFR, leptin, OPN, VEGFR-1, VEGFR-2, IL-2, IL-13, PDGF-bb, TNF, PAI-1, SDF-1a, IL-4, IL-6, IL-8, eotaxin, G-CSF, VEGF, GRO-a, and HGF. Results: The correlation between measurements of the same samples analyzed on different dates was reasonable. However, samples run on different dates could exhibit different absolute values. The 75th percentile of the fold differences for samples run on different dates was 2.2. No significant difference was found between one and four freeze-thaw cycles (except for HGF), and the correlation was high. We found significant differences in mean concentrations of the majority of analytes in different media and with different anticoagulants. Only the following analytes did not show difference in mean concentrations: EDTA plasma vs. serum: leptin and VEGFR-2, LH plasma vs. serum: IL-2, IL-13, and VEGF, LH plasma levels vs. EDTA plasma: IL-2 and IL-4. Conclusion: Stored serum, LH plasma, and EDTA plasma from clinical trials can be used for analysis of circulating cytokines and proteins. Variations in measurements occur, but are within reasonable ranges. The optimal type of media depends on the analytes, as different analytes have low number of measurements below the lower limit of quantification and higher dynamic ranges in different media.
Robust Detection of Lines Using the Progressive Probabilistic Hough Transform

In the paper we present the progressive probabilistic Hough transform (PPHT). Unlike the probabilistic HT, where the standard HT is performed on a preselected fraction of input points, the PPHT minimizes the amount of computation needed to detect lines by exploiting the difference in the fraction of votes needed to reliably detect lines with different numbers of supporting points. The fraction of points used for voting need not be specified ad hoc or using a priori knowledge, as in the probabilistic HT; it is a function of the inherent complexity of data. The algorithm is ideally suited for real-time applications with a fixed amount of available processing time, since voting and line detection are interleaved. The most salient features are likely to be detected first. While retaining its robustness, experiments show that the PPHT has, in many circumstances, advantages over the standard HT.
Cost-effectiveness of active surveillance cultures and contact/droplet precautions for control of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Some have reported that adopting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines requiring contact precautions for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) had no impact on rates of nosocomial spread or infection, and may therefore waste money. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of active surveillance cultures and barrier precautions for controlling MRSA. Estimated costs of surveillance cultures and isolation measures used during an MRSA outbreak at this hospital were compared with the estimated attributable excess costs of methicillin resistance (i.e., the difference between MRSA and methicillin-sensitive S. aureus costs) for bacteraemias occurring during an MRSA outbreak not promptly controlled at another hospital. The study was set in the neonatal intensive care units of two tertiary care hospitals. Estimated costs of controlling the 10.5-month outbreak in this neonatal intensive care unit that resulted in 18 colonized and four infected infants ranged from $48 617 to $68 637. The estimated attributable excess cost of 75 MRSA bacteraemias in a second neonatal intensive care unit outbreak that resulted in 14 deaths and lasted 51 months was $1 306 600. Weekly active surveillance cultures and isolation of patients with MRSA halted an outbreak at this hospital, and cost 19- to 27-fold less than the attributable costs of MRSA bacteraemias in another outbreak that was not promptly controlled. The costs of infections at other body sites and the human cost of deaths from infection were not estimated but would further help to justify the cost of identifying colonized patients and implementing effective preventive measures.
Performance analyses of selection combining diversity receiver over α-μ fading channels in the presence of co-channel interference

An approach to the performance analyses of dual selection combining (SC) diversity receiver over correlated alpha - mu fading channels with the arbitrary parameters is presented. Fading between the diversity branches and interferers is correlated and distributed with alpha - mu distribution. Infinite series expressions are obtained for the output SIR's probability density function (PDF), cumulative distribution function (CDF) and an important measure of the system's performances, the outage probability (OP). An average error probability is efficiently evaluated for coherent and non-coherent modulation schemes such as coherent frequency-shift keying (CFSK), coherent phase-shift keying (CPSK), binary frequency-shift keying (BFSK) and binary differentially phase-shift keying (BDPSK). Numerical results are presented to show the effects of various parameters such as fading severity, input SIR unbalance and the level of correlation between received desired signals and interferences on system's performances.
Empirical analysis of collaborative filtering-based recommenders in temporally evolving systems

Recommender systems benefit people's daily lives at every moment. While considerable attentions have been drawn by performance in one-step recommendation and static user-item network, recommenders' performance on temporally evolving networks remains unclear. To address this issue, this paper firstly adopts a bipartite network to describe the online commercial system. We then propose a network evolution method to simulate the mutual feedback between recommender system and its users' decisions in the evolving network with time. To investigate the long-term performance of three state-of-the-art CF-based recommenders, i.e., the user-based collaborative filtering (UCF), item-based collaborative filtering (ICF) and latent factor-based model (LFM), this online network is evolving with time driven by each tested recommender. Besides using root mean squared error (RMSE) to evaluate prediction accuracy of recommender, we also calculate the intra-similarity and popularity to study the performance of recommendation, as well as Gini coefficient to evaluate the health of online network. Experiments on two real datasets, we find that during the temporal evolving process LFM's accuracy loss is less than that of UCF and ICF, besides LFM enjoys a high accuracy in one-step recommendation. Moreover, although LFM proves to be highly accurate and stable during the temporal evolving network, ICF shows a better performance than LFM in terms of recommendation diversity, and it simultaneously benefits the health of online system. Hence, these results provide insights for the design of a next generation of recommender systems, which would tradeoffs between short- and long-term performances.
Glycocalyx Bedside Evaluation Plays A Central Role in Diagnosing Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus and in its Primary Prevention

The normal endothelial glycocalyx is composed by glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), proteoglycans and glycoproteins fully integrated into a functional layer attached to the vascular endothelial luminal surface. The shredding of the glycocalyx appears as an essential initial step in the pathophysiology of atherosclerosis and microangiopathic complications of T2DM: the degradation of the glycocalyx enables an abnormal protein filtration at glomerular level and a progressively worsening disorder of the endothelium. These abnormalities underlie both the appearance and progression of the diabetic micro-angiopathy (DMA). 11 A number of early microvascular changes with loss of the glycocalyx, before clinically apparent vascular complications, were observed in a population of children affected by type 1 diabetes mellitus.12 These results disclose the glycocalyx as a possible monitoring measurement for earlier detection of DMA and may provide a basis for new diagnostic and therapeutic strategies aiming at protection or restoration of the glycocalyx. This reinforces the importance, starting from the first decade of life, of a proper and timely assessment of the glycocalyx and the microvascular compartment. In the present paper we explore a pathophysiology of T2DM resumed in five-stages suggested by a clinical diagnosis, based on the Auscultatory Percussion (AP) of organs and viscera,13-16 and termed Quantum Biophysical Semeiotics (QBS). This novel technique allows an early assessment of the clinical and preclinical stages of T2DM. Our research is based on a case series observational study run by the senior Author, between 1982 and 2012. The inclusion criteria were the patient’s age (< 40 y.o.), an already established clinical T2DM diagnosis and the absence of the clinical signs of the DMA. The exclusion criteria were the patient’s age (> 40 y.o.) and the presence of already well known complications related to the DMA. A total of 250 patients were recruited and evaluated using the QBS diagnostic method based on the spatial (cm) and temporal (sec) reflexes’ parameters which can be observed during the AP. The following outcome measures were adopted: (1) to establish the variations over time (mean follow-up 10 years) of the parameters appreciated during Overview Mitochondria dysfunctions,1-2 blood-brain barrier impairments,3-5 endothelial6-8 and glycocalyx evaluations9-11 are novel insights into the pathogenesis and early diagnosis of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). T2DM is characterised by a localised endothelial cell dysfunction that underlies the development of both the microand macrovascular complications of the disease. Various theoretical models and experimental approaches provide data about changes to the structure and functions of the glycocalyx under various types of inflammatory conditions.8 These alterations are suggested to promote inflammatory processes in the vessels and to contribute to the pathogenesis of a
Layout constrained body-biasing for thermal clock-skew compensation

In this work we investigate on the actual capability of adaptive body bias to be applied on Clock Distribution Networks (CDNs) for dynamic compensation of thermally-induced skews. Selectively applying different bulk polarizations to the clock buffers, i.e., Forward Body Bias (FBB) to speed-up, or Reverse Body Bias (RBB) to slow down, it is possible to recover the timing phase shifts which accumulate along the clock tree paths due to on-chip thermal gradients. However, the physical implementation of such technique is not trivial: While a fine tuning of the clock buffers would require to apply a cell-by-cell biasing, design constraints due to semi-custom layout rules impose a higher granularity, that is, a physical cluster of cells, i.e., a layout row. We therefore propose a row-based ILP formulation that considers the aforementioned physical constraints and that provides optimal body bias assignment for thermal clock skew minimization. As will shown for a set of realistic benchmarks mapped into an industrial 40nm technology, our solution allows real skew compensation under different thermal profiles while avoiding unfeasible conditions where buffers placed in the same row require different bulk polarizations.
Harsh Parenting As a Potential Mediator of the Association Between Intimate Partner Violence and Child Disruptive Behavior in Families With Young Children

Young children living with intimate partner violence (IPV) are often also exposed to harsh parenting. Both forms of violence increase children’s risk for clinically significant disruptive behavior, which can place them on a developmental trajectory associated with serious psychological impairment later in life. Although it is hypothesized that IPV behaviors may spillover into harsh parenting, and thereby influence risk for disruptive behavior, relatively little is known about these processes in families with young children. The current study examines the overlap of the quality and frequency of psychological and physical forms of IPV and harsh parenting, and tests whether harsh parenting mediates the relationship between IPV and child disruptive behavior in a diverse cross-sectional sample of 81 children ages 4 to 6 years. Results suggest that mothers reporting a greater occurrence of psychologically aggressive IPV (e.g., yelling, name-calling) more often engage in psychological and physical aggression toward their children (odds ratios [ORs] = 4.6-9.9). Mothers reporting a greater occurrence of IPV in the form of physical assault more often engage in mild to more severe forms of physical punishment with potential harm to the child (ORs = 3.8-5.0). Psychological and physical forms of IPV and harsh parenting all significantly correlated with maternal reports of child disruptive behavior (r = .29-.40). Psychological harsh parenting partially mediated the association between psychological IPV and child disruptive behavior. However, a significant direct effect of psychological IPV on preschool children’s disruptive behavior remained. Implications for child welfare policy and practice and intervention, including the need for increased awareness of the negative impact of psychological IPV on young children, are discussed.
Requirements of Glucose and Incubation Under Static Conditions for Optimal Colicin E1 Induction

A rapid rate and large amounts of colicin E1 synthesis were induced by incubating colicinogenic cells without aeration in the presence of glucose. The decrease in ability of colicin induction by aeration was not due to an ample supply of oxygen, but to the simple agitation of the bacterial suspension. Sugars other than glucose that support colicin synthesis were mannose, fructose, glucose-6-phosphate, and mannitol. The effect of sugars in mutants deficient in enzymes of glucose metabolism suggested that some intermediary metabolites between glucose and pyruvate are closely related to the stimulation of colicin synthesis under these conditions. Analyses of deoxyribonucleic acid replication indicated that the induced replication of the colicin E1 plasmid deoxyribonucleic acid occurred even under conditions in which colicin was not actively synthesized.