Pharmacogenetics studies in stroke patients treated with rtPA: a review of the most interesting findings

Recombinant tissue-plasminogen activator (rtPA) is the only drug used during the acute phase of stroke. Despite its important benefits, a percentage of patients suffer symptomatic hemorrhagic transformations or a lack of early recanalization rates. These undesirable effects are associated with acute neurological and long-term functional deterioration. For the past 20 years, pharmacogenetic studies have tried to find the genetic risk factors associated with rtPA response. Most of these studies have used a gene-candidate strategy; however, recent genome-wide association studies have emerged indicating that genetic predisposition could modulate rtPA response. This review summarizes the most interesting findings in this field, including which genes and genetic variations are associated with hemorrhagic transformations and recanalization rates after thrombolytic therapy.

Relating Student Engagement Indicators to Academic Performance Using Multiple Correspondence Analysis

Student engagement is an essential device for deepening learning, achieving learning outcomes, developing competencies, and improving academic performance in education settings. It is widely receiving increased attention among various scholars and higher education leaders. However, there are increasing concerns about the academic performance of students in higher education settings. The application of statistical data analytics for mining student engagement datasets is a candidate strategy for discovering essential indicators associated with academic performance. However, widely used data analytic methods like principal component analysis are ineffective when most of the indicators captured are categorical, making them inappropriate for establishing the weighty academic performance indicators. This study’s objective was to investigate the application of multiple correspondence analysis to establish weighty student engagement indicators of academic performance. This study’s findings have indicated that higher-order learning and student-staff interaction are weighty indicators that relate student engagement to academic performance.

A Simulation Method Based on the Candidate Operation Strategies for the Combined Cooling, Heat, and Power (CCHP) System

With the change of the distributed Combined cooling, heat, and power (CCHP) system operation environment, such as the operation under the power market, CCHP needs to adopt the operation strategy based on cost minimization instead of the traditional following thermal load strategy (FTL). However, the current CCHP system simulation adopts FTL or FEL or a combination of the two; whether these strategies have the least cost has not been confirmed. In this paper, all kinds of operation strategies of the CCHP with two cooling methods are investigated according to the KKT conditions (Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions) of the optimal operation model. Among all the feasible operation strategies, most of them do not meet the KKT condition, and only 43 strategies may be the optimal ones that constitute candidate set. The conditions of the optimal operation strategy in the candidate set are obtained, and it is easy to calculate, so the optimal operation strategy can be easily selected from the candidate set. Some previously unnoticed strategies, for example, TEWM, PE-FPG, FTL-R, and FEL-L, may become optimal. A rule-based CCHP simulation method is established that selects the strategy with minimal cost as the optimal strategy from the candidate strategy set. The presented method has small time consumption and can simulate the optimal operation. The case study verified the characteristics of the proposed simulation method.

Hydroiodic Acid Additive Enhanced the Performance and Stability of PbS-QDs Solar Cells via Suppressing Hydroxyl Ligand

The recent emerging progress of quantum dot ink (QD-ink) has overcome the complexity of multiple-step colloidal QD (CQD) film preparation and pronouncedly promoted the device performance. However, the detrimental hydroxyl (OH) ligands induced from synthesis procedure have not been completely removed. Here, a halide ligand additive strategy was devised to optimize QD-ink process. It simultaneously reduced sub-bandgap states and converted them into iodide-passivated surface, which increase carrier mobility of the QDs films and achieve thicker absorber with improved performances. The corresponding power conversion efficiency of this optimized device reached 10.78%. (The control device was 9.56%.) Therefore, this stratege can support as a candidate strategy to solve the QD original limitation caused by hydroxyl ligands, which is also compatible with other CQD-based optoelectronic devices.

Tests of whether candidate A or B would fare better against C—and other polling enrichments to open up party strategy

Our main setting is a single-winner election contested by two major parties. A goal is to find whether candidate A or B of one party would be the stronger opponent running against candidate C of the other party. A poll (as many polls do) asks the same set of respondents to choose both between A and C and between B and C. The classical McNemar test and two novel extensions thereof can evaluate the difference between A and B regarding their strength against C. The first extension treats the case where some respondents answer one question but not both, a condition that the McNemar test itself does not handle well. The second covers the case where respondents who do not answer a question are probed further to see if they lean toward either candidate. We provide empirical examples related to the 2016 US presidential election. The A-versus-B strength difference vis-à-vis C can be statistically significant even if the difference between A’s showing against C and B’s showing against C is small. We argue finally that other insights helpful to party and candidate strategy can also emerge from novel augmentations to polling practices.