Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
From Equal Access to Health Care to Equitable Access to Health: A Review of Canadian Provincial Health Commissions and Reports

Having achieved equality of access to health care, Canadian policymakers are setting new policy goals, within resource constraints, primarily to achieve equity of access to health. Across the country, provincial royal commissions have explored a number of policy options to achieve this goal. These options are reviewed and critically analyzed within the context of such challenges in health policy as insufficient access to high-technology care and the limits of medical care, and such external challenges as economic and demographic trends, federal-provincial disputes, and ideological beliefs. Particular attention is given to the implications of a broader definition of health and the concept of regional health authorities. Based on the provincial reviews, the authors conclude that Canada wants to achieve equitable access to health. With the shift of health policy away from the formerly protected arena of medical care, achieving equitable access to health will require both an alteration of priorities and values and considerable political will. Canada will be forced to meet these new challenges to maintain current achievements and to make its system even more successful.
Distributed Ledger Technology in Payments, Clearing, and Settlement

Digital innovations in finance, loosely known as fintech, have garnered a great deal of attention across the financial industry. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) is one such innovation that has been cited as a means of transforming payment, clearing, and settlement (PCS) processes, including how funds are transferred and how securities, commodities, and derivatives are cleared and settled. DLT is a term that has been used by the industry in a variety of ways and so does not have a single definition. Because there is a wide spectrum of possible deployments of DLT, this paper will refer to the technology as some combination of components including peer-to-peer networking, distributed data storage, and cryptography that, among other things, can potentially change the way in which the storage, recordkeeping, and transfer of a digital asset is done.
Effects of user's hand on the measurement setup in MIMO over-the-air testing

In this paper, we provide the guidelines for the selection of suitable measurement setups for reliable and cost-effective multi-probe based over-the-air test system to measure the practical MIMO device with hand effect, in reference to the free-space. The guidelines are provided for the required number of probes, minimum probe distance from the device under test (DUT), and optimum size of DUT's rotation. The planewave synthesis technique based on spherical wave theory is used to emulate a reference channel model. Practical antennas in a mobile device operating at 806 MHz with the dimensions of 12.95 cm × 6.67 cm × 0.92 cm are used as DUT. The simulated results show that minimum 6 dual-polarized probes are required for the DUT with hand effect, while 4 dual-polarized probes are needed for the DUT in free space. The minimum probe distance is 100 cm and the optimum size of the azimuthal rotation step of the DUT in the measurement is 45° regardless of the scenarios and users' hand effect.
A design of 3-dimensional sound field simulator based on acoustic ray tracing and HRTF

With the recent diffusion of multi-channel surround reproduction system for high-realistic sensation, the sound field reproduction system of room acoustics is significantly in demand. In order to simulate the room acoustics, the acoustic ray tracing based on geometric acoustics is one of effective methods. However, it cannot sufficiently simulate the wall materials, because it employs an unique scalar value as the wall impedance. So, we designed the virtual sound field simulator based on acoustic ray tracing and wall impedance acquired by real measurements. With our designed simulator, we could calculate impulse response on arbitrary capturing points in the virtual sound field. But, our former approach cannot sufficiently realize high-realistic sensation, because humans listen to the acoustic signal included in diffraction, transmission and so on causing their head and body. Therefore, it is difficult to reproduce the high-realistic sound field. In this paper, we expand the monophonic simulator to multi-channel output one with our former designed simulator. Specifically, considering transfer functions between the loudspeakers and human ears close to head (Head-Closed Impulse Response: HCIR), we designed the simulator based on acoustic ray tracing and HRTF. And on the monophonic and multi-channel simulator, we confirmed availability of the proposed method by objective evaluation.
Host lifespan and the evolution of resistance to multiple parasites

Hosts are typically challenged by multiple parasites, but to date theory on the evolution of resistance has mainly focused on single infections. We develop a series of models that examine the impact of multiple parasites on the evolution of resistance under the assumption that parasites coexist at the host population scale as a consequence of superinfection. In this way, we are able to explicitly examine the impact of ecological dynamics on the evolutionary outcome. We use our models to address a key question of how host lifespan affects investment in resistance to multiple parasites. We show that investment in costly resistance depends on the specificity of the immune response and on whether or not the focal parasite leads to more acute infection than the co‐circulating parasite. A key finding is that investment in resistance always increases as the immune response becomes more general independently of whether it is the focal or the co‐circulating parasite that exploits the host most aggressively. Long‐lived hosts always invest more than short‐lived hosts in both general resistance and resistance that is specific to relatively acute focal parasites. However, for specific resistance to parasites that are less acute than co‐circulating parasites it is the short‐lived hosts that are predicted to invest most. We show that these results apply whatever the mode of defence, that is whether it is through avoidance or through increased recovery, with or without acquired immunity, or through acquired immunity itself. As a whole, our results emphasize the importance of considering multiple parasites in determining optimal immune investment in eco‐evolutionary systems.
Widely Tunable Short-Pulse Generation With Ultralong Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers

Ultralong bulk semiconductor optical amplifiers (bulk UL-SOAs) have tremendous four-wave mixing (FWM) efficiencies so that due to two continuous wave (CW) input signals, a broad mode comb at the output of the UL-SOA can be obtained. When using tunable single mode lasers as input signals, the generated FWM mode comb is tunable in the mode spacing and the wavelength. As a result in time domain, widely tunable pulses in the repetition rate and the carrier frequency are obtained. Since the phase signature of the FWM modes is not linear over the whole mode comb, different filtering techniques can be applied for filtering modes with linear phase in order to efficiently generate short pulses. With the optimal filtering technique, pulses with full width at half maximum of less than 2 ps and a pulse repetition rate of 20 GHz can be obtained.
MANAGING EGYPTIAN TOURISM THROUGH TOURISM GOVERNANCE

Egyptian tourism has been hit by years of political upheaval and militant violence. Egypt’s tourism authorities expect the number of tourists to drop by 13 percent in 2015/2016, compared to the year before, reaching 9 million tourists and revenues are expected to fall by 15 percent compared to last year, dropping to $6.2 billion. Egypt depends on the tourism sector as a main contributor to the country’s GDP and has been engaged in attempts to revive the ailing sector that has been reeling from years of political turmoil. To deal with the tourism crisis, the Egyptian authorities agreed to allocate $5 million to support the sector. They agreed to launch a massive campaign to promote internal tourism. However, this is not enough, better management techniques should be adapted in Egyptian tourism industry. Tourism governance could be a useful tool for managing Egyptian tourism. This could be beneficial because tourism is a sector of activity that involves multiple interrelationships among various types of stakeholders intervening in the production of goods and services consumed by tourists. Indeed, this study overall objective is to analyze governance and positioning of local actors face to manage tourism, in order to establish parameters for more effective tourism management, giving answer for questions like: what are the various issues of governance planning in relation to the development of Egypt as sustainable tourism destination? , and what is the level of commitment of stakeholders to get effectively and efficiently management?
An Examination of Community-based Meal Programs for Homeless and Under-housed People in Five Canadian Cities

The provision of free or low cost meals is an integral component of community services working to address problems of poverty and homelessness in Canada. However, there has been little systematic examination of how they function relative to clients‟ nutrition needs. The objective of this research was to investigate the scope and nature of meal programs by examining an inventory of charitable food provisioning activities, created between 2010 and 2011, in five Canadian cities. Of 290 agencies offering meal programs, 548000 meals were served every month. However, service scheduling varied throughout the week, and the majority of agencies were reliant on volunteer labour, donated food supplies, and experienced difficulties managing the current demand for food assistance. Findings from this study highlight the strengths and limitations of the current food provisioning system and a need to improve the capacity of agencies to respond to populations experiencing food insecurity in Canada.
False Negative Bone Scintigraphy in a Patient with Primary Breast Cancer: A Possible Transient Phenomenon of Bisphosphonate (Alendronate) Treatment

Breast cancer is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women in developed countries. Bone is a frequent site of metastatic disease with a stage-dependent incidence. Most women with breast cancer are at risk of osteoporosis due to their age or their breast cancer treatment. Scintigraphy enables imaging of the entire skeleton with high sensitivity but limited specificity. The false positive rate varies from 1.6% to as high as 22%, while the false negative rate varies from 0.96% to 13%. We observed a 70-year-old woman with a diagnosis of breast cancer and a false negative bone scan despite extensive bone metastases. She was under alendronate treatment for osteoporosis at the time. The false negative finding might be due to a transient phenomenon of alendronate, a bisphosphonate cleared from the plasma by uptake into bone and by renal excretion. 99mTc-MDP is eliminated via the same pathways, and therefore competition may occur between the two substances. Another possible explanation for the false negative bone scan could be that bone metastases, indicating hematogenous tumor spread, are detected earlier by CT scan or MRI than by bone scan. Breast cancer patients under bisphosphonate treatment for osteoporosis must be carefully evaluated for bone metastasis during radionuclide studies with 99mTc-MDP.
Identifying hand-motion patterns via kernel discriminant analysis based dimension reduction and quadratic classifier

Mechanomyographic (MMG) signal for prosthetic control has been investigated in recent years and encouraging results in hand-motion patterns identification have been achieved. In this paper, only two accelerometer sensors were used to record the MMG signal in the forearm of fourteen able-bodied people. A kernel generalized discriminant analysis and three linear dimension reduction techniques were applied to reduce the feature dimensionality and improve the class seperability, and then the simple and commonly used quadratic classifier was implemented to identify the four hand-motion patterns. The experimental results have shown that the average identification rate reaches to a high accuracy of 95.12±3.83% by utilizing the three features extracted by kernel generalized discriminant analysis, where two wrist-related patterns are easier to identify while hand close is the most difficult one. It is concluded that two-channel MMG signal is sufficient for identifying the recorded four hand-motion patterns, which made MMG signal another prospective alternative in prosthetic hand control applications.
Antibacterial Surface Treatment for Orthopaedic Implants

It is expected that the projected increased usage of implantable devices in medicine will result in a natural rise in the number of infections related to these cases. Some patients are unable to autonomously prevent formation of biofilm on implant surfaces. Suppression of the local peri-implant immune response is an important contributory factor. Substantial avascular scar tissue encountered during revision joint replacement surgery places these cases at an especially high risk of periprosthetic joint infection. A critical pathogenic event in the process of biofilm formation is bacterial adhesion. Prevention of biomaterial-associated infections should be concurrently focused on at least two targets: inhibition of biofilm formation and minimizing local immune response suppression. Current knowledge of antimicrobial surface treatments suitable for prevention of prosthetic joint infection is reviewed. Several surface treatment modalities have been proposed. Minimizing bacterial adhesion, biofilm formation inhibition, and bactericidal approaches are discussed. The ultimate anti-infective surface should be “smart” and responsive to even the lowest bacterial load. While research in this field is promising, there appears to be a great discrepancy between proposed and clinically implemented strategies, and there is urgent need for translational science focusing on this topic.
A Comparison of Meperidine and Lidocaine for Spinal Anesthesia for Postpartum Tubal Ligation

Background and Objectives This study compares the anesthetic potency, duration, and side effects of subarachnoid meperidine and lidocaine for postpartum tubal ligation. Method Twenty healthy, unpremedicated postpartum women gave written informed consent to participate in this randomized double-blind study. After intravenous infusion of 200 mL physiologic salt solution, patients received subarachnoid injections of either lidocaine 70 mg in 7.5% glucose or meperidine 60 mg in saline while lying in the right lateral position. Heart rate, blood pressure, sensory and motor block, pain, nausea, and pruritus were recorded at intervals for up to 12 hours after injection. The time to first postoperative analgesic was also recorded. Results There were no differences between the groups in demographics, heart rate, or blood pressure at any time. Sensory or motor block developed slightly faster in the lidocaine group. One patient in each group required general anesthesia owing to inadequate sensory block. Beginning at 60 minutes, meperidine patients experienced more pruritus (P < .05). Lidocaine patients had more postoperative pain (P < .01) and required supplemental analgesia 83.3 ± 32.7 minutes after induction versus 447.6 ± 184.0 minutes in the meperidine group. No patient's oxygen saturation fell below 95%. Patients expressed equal satisfaction with both agents. Conclusions Subarachnoid meperidine and lidocaine both provide adequate anesthesia for postpartum tubal ligation. Meperidine provided longer postoperative analgesia.
Epidemiology, clinical features and management of infections due to community methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus (cMRSA)

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was initially confined to hospitals, but in the late 1970s appeared in the community in the USA, primarily among intravenous drug users. In the 1990s, community MRSA (cMRSA) strains appeared in multiple areas of the world, and spread extensively. Initially, there were problems with the definition of 'community-acquired', which was exacerbated by the fact that if a time-based definition was used without stratification for risk factors, patients with healthcare-associated MRSA would be counted. Some cMRSA strains have entered the hospital environment to cause outbreaks of infection, which has added to the difficulty in separating the two types. cMRSA strains usually possess genes for Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL), which is associated with furunculosis and necrotizing pneumonia, and sometimes possess other virulence genes such as those for toxic shock syndrome or exfoliative toxins. Antimicrobial resistance to commonly used topical and oral agents is now appearing in certain cMRSA strains, which is complicating therapy. While cMRSA strains are usually susceptible to most non-beta-lactam antimicrobials, there is a lack of clinical trial data indicating which drugs have superior clinical efficacy. DNA fingerprinting methods have become more sophisticated over the last decade, and have determined that cMRSA strains have probably arisen from virulent methicillin-susceptible strains, most likely by horizontal transfer of methicillin-resistance genes from coagulase negative staphylococci to S. aureus on a limited number of occasions, and these clones have spread extensively throughout the world by person-to-person transmission. In Australia, the dominant cMRSA clones are the Western Australia, Oceania and Queensland strains.
Are detection and treatment of thyroid insufficiency in pregnancy feasible?

A workshop entitled, "The Impact of Maternal Thyroid Diseases on the Developing Fetus: Implications for Diagnosis, Treatment, and Screening," was held in Atlanta, Georgia, January 12-13, 2004. The workshop was sponsored jointly by The National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities of The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and The American Thyroid Association. This paper reports on the individual session that examined the ability to detect and treat thyroid dysfunction during pregnancy. For this session, presented papers included: "Laboratory Reference Values in Pregnancy" and "Criteria for Diagnosis and Treatment of Hypothyroidism in Pregnancy. " These presentations were formally discussed by invited respondents and by others in attendance. Salient points from this session about which there was agreement include the following: thyrotropin (TSH) can be used as marker for hypothyroidism in pregnancy, except when there is iodine deficiency usually evidenced by elevated serum thyroglobulin (Tg). We need more longitudinal studies of TSH during pregnancy in iodine-sufficient populations without evidence of autoimmune thyroid disease to develop trimester-specific TSH reference ranges. Current free thyroxine (FT4) estimate methods are sensitive to abnormal binding-protein states such as pregnancy. There is no absolute FT4 value that will define hypothyroxinemia across methods. Total thyroxine (TT4) changes in pregnancy are predictable and not method-specific. TT4 below 100 nmol/L (7.8 microg/dL) is a reasonable indicator of hypothyroxinemia in pregnancy. Women with known hypothyroidism and receiving levothyroxine (LT4) before pregnancy should plan to increase their dosage by 30% to 60% early in pregnancy. Women with autoimmune thyroid disease prior to pregnancy are at increased risk for thyroid insufficiency during pregnancy and postpartum thyroiditis and should be monitored with TSH during pregnancy.
Ask10p Mediates the Oxidative Stress-Induced Destruction of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae C-Type Cyclin Ume3p/Srb11p

ABSTRACT Srb11p-Srb10p is the budding yeast C-type cyclin-cyclin-dependent kinase that is required for the repression of several stress response genes. To relieve this repression, Srb11p is destroyed in cells exposed to stressors, including heat shock and oxidative stress. In the present study, we identified Ask10p (for activator of Skn7) by two-hybrid analysis as an interactor with Srb11p. Coimmunoprecipitation studies confirmed this association, and we found that, similar to Srb11p-Srb10p, Ask10p is a component of the RNA polymerase II holoenzyme. Ask10p is required for Srb11p destruction in response to oxidative stress but not heat shock. Moreover, this destruction is important since the hypersensitivity of an ask10 mutant strain to oxidative stress is rescued by deleting SRB11. We further show that Ask10p is phosphorylated in response to oxidative stress but not heat shock. This modification requires the redundant mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase kinase Mkk1/2 but not their normal MAP kinase target Slt2p. Moreover, the other vegetative MAP kinases—Hog1p, Fus3p, or Kss1p—are not required for Ask10p phosphorylation, suggesting the existence of an alternative pathway for transducing the Pkc1p→Bck1→Mkk1/2 oxidative stress signal. In conclusion, Ask10p is a new component of the RNA polymerase II holoenzyme and an important regulator of the oxidative stress response. In addition, these results define a new role for the Pkc1p MAP kinase cascade (except the MAP kinase itself) in transducing the oxidative damage signal directly to the RNA polymerase II holoenzyme, thereby bypassing the stress-activated transcription factors.
Central administration of galanin N‐terminal fragment 1–15 decreases the voluntary alcohol intake in rats

Alcohol consumption is considered a major risk factor for disease and mortality worldwide. In the absence of effective treatments in alcohol use disorders, it is important to find new biological targets that could modulate alcohol consumption. We tested the role of the N‐terminal galanin fragment (1–15) [GAL(1–15)] in voluntary ethanol consumption in rats using the two‐bottle choice paradigm as well as compare the effects of GAL(1–15) with the whole molecule of GAL. We describe for the first time that GAL(1–15), via central mechanisms, induces a strong reduction in preference and ethanol consumption in rats. These effects were significantly different than GAL. GAL receptor (GALR) 2 was involved in these effects, because the specific GALR2 antagonist M871 blocked GAL(1–15) mediated actions in preference and ethanol intake. Importantly, the mechanism of this action involves changes in GALR expression and also in immediate‐early gene C‐Fos and receptors‐internalization‐related gene Rab5 in the striatum. The relevance of the striatum as a target for GAL(1–15) was supported by the effect of GAL(1–15) on the locomotor activity of rats after ethanol administration. These results may give the basis for the development of novel therapeutics strategies using GAL(1–15) analogues for the treatment of alcohol use disorders in humans.
Experimentation of dioxazaborocane derivative as fluorescent material: Application to the trace detection of hydrogen peroxide

In this article, fluorescent detection method is reported for hydrogen peroxide and more widely for peroxide-based explosives compounds. Using the principle of inhibition of the photo-induced electron transfer (PET), the compound 6-(anthracen-9-ylmethyl)-2-phenyl-1,3,6,2-dioxazaborocane has been synthesized and used specifically for the detection of peroxide-based explosives. Upon testing in a laboratory detection prototype under hydrogen peroxide vapors and interfering compounds, this compound appears to be a very promising fluorescent sensor.