Does fiscal federalism matter for economic growth? Evidence from the United States

Fiscal federalism can improve macroeconomic performance by increasing the efficiency and performance of the public sector. The aim of this study is to analyse the long-term relationship between fiscal federalism and economic growth during the period of 1961-2018 in the United States. In this analysis, first of all, the Hatemi-J Co-integration test was used to determine the long-term relationship between the variables, and accordingly it was determined that there is a long-term relationship between the variables at the 1% significance level. Then, the causality relationship between variables was tested using Hacker-Hatemi-J bootstrap causality analysis and no causality relationship was found among the variables. Finally, a time-varying causality test was applied, since the causality relationship between variables may lose its validity at some time points, especially in global economies. It was found that there is a causality relationship between variables when sub-periods are considered

Cardiogenic Shock Due to Coronary Artery Stent Thrombosis

Stent thrombosis is an uncommon but serious complication that causes sudden death or myocardial infarction (MI). A large MI, especially with ST elevation, can cause cardiogenic shock and pose a significant incidence of morbidity and mortality. Largeness of ischemic territory is the main reason that causes cardiogenic shock. The fundamental treatment strategies are immediate coronary revascularization and perfusion support to avoid end organ damage with medically or mechanical in intensive care units. The prevention, incidences, mechanisms, management, and clinical impacts of cardiogenic shock discussed under this topic

Outcomes and effectiveness of bilateral percutaneous transluminal renal artery stenting in patients with critical bilateral renal artery stenosis

Background: The aim of this study was to assess the effects of percutaneous bilateral renal artery stenting in patients with atherosclerotic renal artery stenosis and in-hospital and 4 month outcome of the procedure, focusing on the changes in renal function and blood pressure. Methods: Five consecutive patients (mean age: 64.8 ± 9.7 years, 1 women) with bilateral renal artery stenoses underwent percutaneous interventions. We compared blood pressure, number of oral antihypertensive medications, and renal function changes preprocedure and postprocedure at 4 months follow-up. Results: A total of 5 bilateral atherosclerotic renal artery stenosis patients underwent percutaneous transluminal renal angioplasty and 10 stents were placed. Although systolic and diastolic blood pressures were significantly decreased in follow-up period, glomerular filtration rates were not significantly changed as compared with baseline data (p = 0.009, p = 0.008, p = 1.00, respectively). Also, the number of oral antihypertensive medications were significantly decreased at follow-up period (p = 0.03). Conclusions: Bilateral renal artery stenting provides a beneficial outcome such as stabilization of renal functions, significant improvement in blood pressure control and reduction in the number of oral antihypertensive medications at follow-up

Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer in Quantum Dot-Protein Kinase Assemblies

In search of viable strategies to identify selective inhibitors of protein kinases, we have designed a binding assay to probe the interactions of human phosphoinositide-dependent protein kinase-1 (PDK1) with potential ligands. Our protocol is based on fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) between semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) and organic dyes. Specifically, we have expressed and purified the catalytic kinase domain of PDK1 with an N-terminal histidine tag [His6-PDK1(ΔPH)]. We have conjugated this construct to CdSe-ZnS core-shell QDs coated with dihydrolipoic acid (DHLA) and tested the response of the resulting assembly to a molecular dyad incorporating an ATP ligand and a BODIPY chromophore. The supramolecular association of the BODIPY-ATP dyad with the His6-PDK1(ΔPH)-QD assembly encourages the transfer of energy from the QDs to the BODIPY dyes upon excitation. The addition of ATP results in the displacement of BODIPY-ATP from the binding domain of the His6-PDK1(ΔPH) conjugated to the nanoparticles. The competitive binding, however, does not prevent the energy transfer process. A control experiment with QDs, lacking the His6-PDK1(ΔPH), indicates that the BODIPY-ATP dyad adsorbs nonspecifically on the surface of the nanoparticles, promoting the transfer of energy from the CdSe core to the adsorbed BODIPY dyes. Thus, the implementation of FRET-based assays to probe the binding domain of PDK1 with luminescent QDs requires the identification of energy acceptors unable to interact nonspecifically with the surface of the nanoparticles

On the energy footprint of I/O management in Exascale HPC systems

International audienceThe advent of unprecedentedly scalable yet energy hungry Exascale supercomputers poses a major challenge in sustaining a high performance-per-watt ratio. With I/O management acquiring a crucial role in supporting scientific simulations, various I/O management approaches have been proposed to achieve high performance and scalability. However, the details of how these approaches affect energy consumption have not been studied yet. Therefore, this paper aims to explore how much energy a supercomputer consumes while running scientific simulations when adopting various I/O management approaches. In particular, we closely examine three radically different I/O schemes including time partitioning, dedicated cores, and dedicated nodes. To do so, we implement the three approaches within the Damaris I/O middleware and perform extensive experiments with one of the target HPC applications of the Blue Waters sustained-petaflop supercomputer project: the CM1 atmospheric model. Our experimental results obtained on the French Grid’5000 platform highlight the differences among these three approaches and illustrate in which way various configurations of the application and of the system can impact performance and energy consumption. Moreover, we propose and validate a mathematical model that estimates the energy consumption of a HPC simulation under different I/O approaches. Our proposed model gives hints to pre-select the most energy-efficient I/O approach for a particular simulation on a particular HPC system and therefore provides a step towards energy-efficient HPC simulations in Exascale systems. To the best of our knowledge, our work provides the first in-depth look into the energy-performance tradeoffs of I/O management approaches

The Validity and Reliability of the Turkish Version of the Integrative Self-knowledge Scale

AbstractThe aim of this research is to examine the validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the Integrative self -knowledge Scale (ISKS; Ghorbani, Watson, & Hargis, 2008). Participants were 396 university students (277 were female and 119 were male) from Sakarya University. The results of confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the three dimensional model was well fitted and Chi-Square value (x2=108. 38, df=49, p=0. 00) which was calculated for the adaptation of the model was found to be significant. The goodness of fit index values of the model were RMSEA=.055, NFI=.97, CFI=.98, IFI=.98, RFI=.96, GFI=.96, and SRMR=.041. The internal consistency coefficients of three subscales were .74, .77, and .83, respectively. The overall internal consistency coefficient of the scale was .86. The corrected item-total correlations of ISKS ranged from .37 to .67. Overall findings demonstrated that this scale had high validity and reliability scores and that it may be used as a valid and reliable instrument in order to assess self-knowledge levels of individuals

The prevalence of penile pearly papules among young men

The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of pearly penile papules (PPP) among young men in Eskisehir, Turkey. This was a prospective, non-randomized, cross-sectional study. From December 2014 to September 2015, 2613 consecutive male patients who were referred to the dermatology outpatient clinic were included in the study. Patients were inspected for the presence of PPP, localization, and association with human papilloma virus (HPV). A total of 2613 patients were included in the study. The average age of the patients was 21.33±2.08 (mean ± Standard Deviation (SD); ranging from 18 to 24) years. All of the patients were white and circumcised men. Of the 2613 patients, 449 (17.18%) PPP were observed. PPP were localized on the corona of the glans penis (100%), coronal sulcus (18.9%), frenulum (15.1%), ventral shaft (5.3%), and dorsal shaft of the penis (2.4%). Of the 449 patients with PPP, 23 (5.3%) underwent treatment; 73 (16.2%) would consider removal, 7 (1.5%) had a previous treatment for HPV, and 5 (1.1%) had HPV. PPP are encountered very commonly in the pubertal age in boys and young men. All medical practitioners should be familiar with PPP. Their similarity to genital warts may generate a false apprehension of venereal disease and may lead to unwanted and hazardous treatments. Therefore, better health education is needed.  </p

Enabling Fast Failure Recovery in Shared Hadoop Clusters: Towards Failure-Aware Scheduling

International audienceHadoop emerged as the de facto state-of-the-art system for MapReduce-based data analytics. The reliability of Hadoop systems depends in part on how well they handle failures. Currently, Hadoop handles machine failures by re-executing all the tasks of the failed machines (i.e., executing recovery tasks). Unfortunately, this elegant solution is entirely entrusted to the core of Hadoop and hidden from Hadoop schedulers. The unawareness of failures therefore may prevent Hadoop schedulers from operating correctly towards meeting their objectives (e.g., fairness, job priority) and can significantly impact the performance of MapReduce applications. This paper presents Chronos, a failure-aware scheduling strategy that enables an early yet smart action for fast failure recovery while still operating within a specific scheduler objective. Upon failure detection, rather than waiting an uncertain amount of time to get resources for recovery tasks, Chronos leverages a lightweight preemption technique to carefully allocate these resources. In addition, Chronos considers data locality when scheduling recovery tasks to further improve the performance. We demonstrate the utility of Chronos by combining it with Fifo and Fair schedulers. The experimental results show that Chronos recovers to a correct scheduling behavior within a couple of seconds only and reduces the job completion times by up to 55% compared to state-of-the-art schedulers

A Performance and Energy Analysis of I/O Management Approaches for Exascale Systems

International audienceThe advent of fast, unprecedentedly scalable, yet energy-hungry exascale supercomputers poses a major challenge consisting in sustaining a high performance per watt ratio. While much recent work has explored new approaches to I/O management, aiming to reduce the I/O performance bottle-neck exhibited by HPC applications (and hence to improve application performance), there is comparatively little work investigating the impact of I/O management approaches on energy consumption. In this work, we explore how much energy a supercom-puter consumes while running scientific simulations when adopting various I/O management approaches. We closely examine three radically different I/O schemes including time partitioning, dedicated cores, and dedicated nodes. We im-plement the three approaches within the Damaris I/O mid-dleware and perform extensive experiments with one of the target HPC applications of the Blue Waters sustained-peta-flop/s supercomputer project: the CM1 atmospheric model. Our experimental results obtained on the French Grid'5000 platform highlight the differences between these three ap-proaches and illustrate in which way various configurations of the application and of the system can impact performance and energy consumption