LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Safety and tolerability of NXY-059 for acute intracerebral hemorrhage: the CHANT Trial.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
NXY-059 is a free radical-trapping neuroprotectant developed for use in acute ischemic stroke. To facilitate prompt administration of treatment, potentially before neuroimaging, we investigated the safety of NXY-059 in patients with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH).


METHODS
We randomized 607 patients within 6 hours of acute ICH to receive 2270 mg intravenous NXY-059 over 1 hour and then up to 960 mg/h over 71 hours, or matching placebo, in addition to standard care. The primary outcome was safety: the mortality and the frequency of adverse events, and the change from baseline for a variety of serum, imaging, and electrophysiological measurements. We also studied the overall distribution of disability scores on the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) and the Barthel index.


RESULTS
We treated 300 patients with NXY-059 and 303 with placebo. Treatment groups were well matched for prognostic variables including Glasgow Coma Scale, risk factors, and age. The mean National Institute of Health Stroke Scale score on admission was 14 in both groups. The baseline hemorrhage volume was 22.4+/-20.1 mL in the NXY-059 group and 23.3+/-22.8 mL in the placebo group (mean+/-SD). Most hemorrhages were related to hypertension or anticoagulant use. Mortality was similar in both groups: 20.3% for NXY-059 and 19.8% for placebo-treated patients. The proportion of patients who experienced an adverse event was the same for both groups, whereas for serious adverse events the proportion was slightly higher in the NXY-059 group. However, no pattern emerged to indicate a safety concern. Serum potassium fell transiently in both groups, lower in the NXY-059 group. There were no differences in 3-month function, disability, or neurological deficit scores. The odds ratio for an improved outcome in 3-month mRS scores in the NXY-059 group was 1.01 (95% CI 0.75, 1.35).


CONCLUSIONS
NXY-059 given within 6 hours of acute ICH has a good safety and tolerability profile, with no adverse effect on important clinical outcomes.
Introduction to artificial intelligence and expert systems

• I. What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? • II. What are Expert Systems (ES)? ◦ Functional Components ◦ Structural Components • III. How do People Reason? • IV. How do Computers Reason? ◦ IV-1. Frames ◦ IV-2. Rule Based Reasoning ◾ IV-2a. Knowledge Engineering ◦ IV-3. Case-Based Reasoning ◦ IV-4. Neural Networks • V. Advantages and Disadvantages • VI. Additional Sources of Information ◦ VI-1. Additional Sources on World Wide Web ◾ Accounting Expert Systems Applications compiled by Carol E. Brown ◾ Artificial Intelligence in Business by Daniel E. O'Leary ◾ Artificial Intelligence / Expert Systems Section of the American Accounting Association ◾ International Journal of Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance and Management ◾ VI-2. Recent Books of Readings ◾ VI-3. References Used for Definitions • Photocopy Permission
Maternal serum invasive trophoblast antigen and first-trimester Down syndrome screening.

BACKGROUND
In the United States, Down syndrome screening is still performed mainly in the second trimester, using 3 or 4 markers. Moving screening into the first trimester has the advantage of earlier diagnosis. Currently, first-trimester screening typically includes maternal serum pregnancy-associated plasma protein-A (PAPP-A), the free beta-subunit of human chorionic gonadotropin (free beta), and ultrasound measurement of nuchal translucency thickness (NT). The current report describes a case-control study of serum invasive trophoblast antigen (ITA) and its possible inclusion in first-trimester screening for Down syndrome.


METHODS
As part of an earlier observational study, serum samples from 54 Down syndrome and 276 matched unaffected pregnancies were collected between 9 and 15 weeks of gestation. Samples had been aliquoted and stored at -20 degrees C for 8 years. ITA was measured and converted to weight-adjusted multiples of the median (MoM). The distributions of other first-trimester markers are from a single published study.


RESULTS
Median ITA MoM in Down syndrome pregnancies increase as gestational age increases (2.02 MoM at 11 and 2.44 MoM at 13 completed weeks). At 75% detection, maternal age in combination with ITA and PAPP-A measurements have an 8.0% false-positive rate, slightly lower than the 8.8% found for the free beta and PAPP-A combination; adding NT measurements reduces false positives for the 2 combinations to 2.0% and 1.8%, respectively.


CONCLUSION
Serum ITA appears to be a useful first-trimester Down syndrome marker that could replace free beta measurements while maintaining performance.
Using convolutional features and a sparse autoencoder for land-use scene classification

In this article, we propose a novel approach based on convolutional features and sparse autoencoder (AE) for scene-level landuse (LU) classification. This approach starts by generating an initial feature representation of the scenes under analysis from a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) pre-learned on a large amount of labelled data from an auxiliary domain. Then these convolutional features are fed as input to a sparse AE for learning a new suitable representation in an unsupervised manner. After this pre-training phase, we propose two different scenarios for building the classification system. In the first scenario, we add a softmax layer on the top of the AE encoding layer and then finetune the resulting network in a supervised manner using the target training images available at hand. Then we classify the test images based on the posterior probabilities provided by the softmax layer. In the second scenario, we view the classification problem from a reconstruction perspective. To this end we train several class-specific AEs (i.e. one AE per class) and then classify the test images based on the reconstruction error. Experimental results conducted on the University of California (UC) Merced and Banja-Luka LU public data sets confirm the superiority of the proposed approach compared to state-of-the-art methods. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 20 November 2015 Accepted 15 March 2016
Nutrition, dietary interventions and prostate cancer: the latest evidence

Prostate cancer (PCa) remains a leading cause of mortality in US men and the prevalence continues to rise world-wide especially in countries where men consume a 'Western-style' diet. Epidemiologic, preclinical and clinical studies suggest a potential role for dietary intake on the incidence and progression of PCa. 'This minireview provides an overview of recent published literature with regard to nutrients, dietary factors, dietary patterns and PCa incidence and progression. Low carbohydrates intake, soy protein, omega-3 (w-3) fat, green teas, tomatoes and tomato products and zyflamend showed promise in reducing PCa risk or progression. A higher saturated fat intake and a higher β-carotene status may increase risk. A 'U' shape relationship may exist between folate, vitamin C, vitamin D and calcium with PCa risk. Despite the inconsistent and inconclusive findings, the potential for a role of dietary intake for the prevention and treatment of PCa is promising. The combination of all the beneficial factors for PCa risk reduction in a healthy dietary pattern may be the best dietary advice. This pattern includes rich fruits and vegetables, reduced refined carbohydrates, total and saturated fats, and reduced cooked meats. Further carefully designed prospective trials are warranted.
Decade bandwidth high-efficiency GaN VHF/UHF power amplifier

This work discusses the design of a GaN power amplifier demonstrating high efficiency over more than a decade bandwidth using coaxial baluns and transformer matching networks to achieve over a 50MHz-500 MHz bandwidth. The power amplifier demonstrates a power added efficiency of 83%-64% over full bandwidth with 15 dB compressed gain at peak PAE.
Evaluation of two strategies (initial methotrexate monotherapy vs its combination with adalimumab) in management of early active rheumatoid arthritis: data from the GUEPARD trial.

OBJECTIVES
In early and active RA despite MTX, continuous treatment with TNF blockers in combination with MTX is recommended. To compare this strategy with an initial combination of MTX and adalimumab (ADA) given for 3 months and then adjusted based on the disease activity status.


METHODS
Prospective unblinded randomized multicentre controlled 1-year trial in which 65 patients with early (<6 months) and active [disease activity score (DAS28(ESR)) >5.1] RA were assigned to Group 1 (32 patients): MTX (0.3 mg/kg/week, maximum of 20 mg/week, without escalating dose regimen) or to Group 2 (33 patients): initial combination therapy with MTX (as in Group 1) and ADA (40 mg eow). In both groups, treatment was adjusted every 3 months. The aim was to achieve a low DAS (DAS28(ESR) <3.2).


RESULTS
From Week 12 until Week 52, seven patients in Group 1 and 11 patients in Group 2 remained in low disease activity state while receiving MTX monotherapy (P = 0.28). The 1-year area under the curve (AUC) of DAS28 was lower in Group 2 owing to an initial better response. The total intake of anti-TNF-alpha and the mean increase in total modified Sharp score was similar in the two groups.


CONCLUSIONS
Initial combination of MTX and ADA and then an adjusted based on the disease activity status achieved a faster control of disease activity but did not increase the number of patients for whom anti-TNF-alpha treatment was not needed after 12 weeks nor a better subsequent clinical or radiological outcome than a 3-month delayed initiation of anti-TNF in patients with still active disease despite MTX.
Additive impact of alfacalcidol on bone mineral density and bone strength in alendronate treated postmenopausal women with reduced bone mass.

OBJECTIVES
Assessment of additive impact of alfacalcidol 1 μg daily (Alfa) on bone mineral density (BMD) and on bone strength in postmenopausal women treated with alendronate 70 mg weekly + 500 mg calcium daily.


SUBJECTS AND METHODS
In a randomized, double-blind, placebo controlled study, 279 postmenopausal women with osteoporosis or osteopenia participated (intention to treat analysis [ITT]; aged 73.6∓4.7 years) and were treated with 70 mg alendronate (ALN) weekly and 500 mg calcium daily for 36 months. In addition, these patients received either 1 μg alfacalcidol (Alfa) or placebo (PLC) daily. BMD was measured with Dual-Energy-X-ray-Absorptiometry (DXA) at the lumbar spine and proximal femur and at forearm and tibia with peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT) at regular intervals for 36 months.


RESULTS
DXA-BMD of lumbar spine (L1-4) increased after 36 months, by 6.65% (p<0.0001) in the Alfa/ALN group versus 4.17% (p<0.0001) in the PLC/ALN group. Group difference was significant after 3 years (p=0.026). At the end of the study, significant differences were found in favor of the Alfa/ALN group in trabecular density (tibia) (p=0.002), cortical density (midshaft tibia) (p=0.043), and bone strength (p=0.001). The remaining parameters showed no differences between the treatment arms, apart cortical bone density at midshaft radius.


CONCLUSIONS
Alfacalcidol significantly increases the efficacy of alendronate treatment in osteopenic/osteoporotic postmenopausal women on spinal DXA-BMD, cortical and trabecular BMD of the tibia and also bending stiffness of the tibia.
Reply to "Comments on 'Possible experiment to check the reality of a nonequilibrium temperature' "

A simple mechanistic interpretation of our proposed experiment is presented, which allows us to clarify the points raised by the preceding Comments by Hoover, Holian, and Posch [Phys. Rev. E 48, 3191 (1993) and Henjes [Phys. Rev. E 48, 3194 (1993)]
Communication and Decision-Making in Corporate Boards

This paper develops a model of communication and decision-making in corporate boards. The key element of the paper is that the quality of board communication is endogenous, because it depends on the e¤ort directors put into trying to communicate their information to others. In the model, directors may have biases regarding board decisions and may also be reluctant to disagree with other directors. If the only interaction between directors is at the decision-making stage, when decisions are made but discussion is limited, these frictions impede e¤ective decision-making because directors decisions are not fully based on their information. However, if in addition directors can communicate their information more e¤ectively at a cost, then both stronger biases and stronger concerns for conformity at the decision-making stage might improve the boards decisions, because directors have a stronger motivation to convince others of their position. The paper provides implications for the design of board policies, including the use of open vs. secret ballot voting, the frequency of executive sessions of directors, board structure, and the role of committees. I am very grateful to my dissertation committee, Anat Admati, Paul Peiderer, and Je¤rey Zwiebel, for their guidance and valuable suggestions. I am also grateful to Francesco DAcunto, Peter DeMarzo, Darrell Du¢ e, Joseph Grundfest, Dirk Jenter, Ron Kaniel, Arthur Korteweg, Doron Levit, Andrey Malenko, George Parker, Francisco Perez-Gonzalez, Francisco Santos, Kenneth Shotts, Eric So, James Van Horne, Bilge Yilmaz, and seminar participants at the New Economic School, Stanford University, the University of Houston, and the Berkeley-Stanford joint nance student seminar for helpful comments and discussions. Address for correspondence: Stanford Graduate School of Business, PhD O¢ ce, 518 Memorial Way, Stanford, CA 94305. Email: nmalenko@stanford.edu.
Architecting for Reuse: A Software Framework for Automated Negotiation

If agents are to negotiate automatically with one another they must share a negotiation mechanism, specifying what possible actions each party can take at any given time, when negotiation terminates, and what the resulting agreements will be. The current state-of-the-art represents this as a negotiation protocol specifying the flow of messages. However, they omit other aspects of the rules of negotiation (such as obliging a participant to improve on a previous offer), requiring these to be represented implicitly in an agent’s design, potentially resulting in compatibility, maintenance and re-usability problems. In this paper, we propose an alternative approach, allowing all of a mechanism to be formal and explicit. We present (i) A taxonomy of declarative rules which can be used to capture a wide variety of negotiation mechanisms in a principled and well-structured way. (ii) A simple interaction protocol, which is able to support any mechanism which can be captured using the declarative rules. (iii) A software framework for negotiation, implemented in JADE [2] that allows agents to effectively participate in negotiations defined using our rule taxonomy and protocol.
Rich open educational resources for personal and inquiry learning: Agile creation, sharing and reuse in educational social media platforms

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely accessible, openly licensed multimedia documents or interactive tools that can be typically integrated in Learning Management Systems to support courses. With social media platforms becoming the central piece of the students' digital ecosystem, there is an emerging need to provide resources that can be integrated in various general-purpose open platforms. Courses are also deconstructed in smaller learning units for personal learning activities or in Massive Open Online Course sessions. As a consequence, rich self-contained educational resources embedding their pedagogical context and modality are required (these elements not being elicited anymore from the course itself). This paper presents Inquiry Learning Spaces (ILSs)-pedagogically structured learning environments that can contain labs, apps and resources-as rich OERs. Teachers can create ILSs for their students (as standalone resources or embedded in other platforms) and share them with other teachers who can adapt the ILS to their needs.
Unemployment and labour market mismatch in the European Union Countries

The purpose of this paper is to investigate some of the main drivers of high unemployment rates in the European Union countries starting from two sources highlighted in the economic literature: the shortfall of the aggregate demand and the increasing labour market mismatches. Our analysis is based on a panel database and focuses on two objectives: to measure the long and short-term impact of GDP growth on unemployment over recent years for different categories of labour market participants (young, older and low educated workers) and to evaluate the relationship between mismatches related to skills (educational and occupational) and unemployment. One of the main conclusions is that unemployment rates of young and low educated workers are more responsive to economic growth variations both in the long and short run, while unemployment rates of older workers show a greater capacity of adjustment. In addition, occupational mismatches seem to have a significant long-term impact on the changes in unemployment of all categories of unemployed, whereas the short run effect is rather mixed, varying across countries. One explanation is the fact that during crisis, economy’s structure tends to change more rapidly than labour market and educational system can adapt. * Received: 22-02-2017; accepted: 31-05-2017 1 The research is supported by the Czech Science Foundation, project P402/12/G097 “DYME – Dynamic Models in Economics”. 2 Assistant Professor, Faculty of Economic Cybernetics, Statistics and Informatics, Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Piata Romana Square 6, 1st district, Bucharest, 010374 Romania. Scientific affiliation: labour market imbalances, international comparisons, regional competitiveness, panel data models. Phone: +40 21 319 19 00. Fax: +40 21 319 18 99. E-mail: gina.dimian@csie.ase.ro (corresponding author). 3 Full Professor, Faculty of Economic Cybernetics, Statistics and Informatics, Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Piata Romana Square 6, 1st district, Bucharest, 010374 Romania. Scientific affiliation: macroeconomics, economic convergence, international relationships, international statistics. Phone: +40 21 319 19 00. Fax: +40 21 319 18 99. E-mail: liviu.begu@csie.ase.ro. 4 Full Professor, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, University of Economics. W. Churchill Sq. 4, 130 67 Prague 3, Czech Republic. Scientific affiliation: efficiency analysis, multiple-criteria analysis, data mining methods. Phone: +420 2 2409 5403. Fax: +420 2 2409 5423. E-mail: jablon@vse.cz. Personal website: http://webhosting.vse.cz/jablon. Gina Cristina Dimian, Liviu Stelian Begu, Josef Jablonsky • Unemployment and labour... 14 Zb. rad. Ekon. fak. Rij. • 2017 • vol. 35 • no. 1 • 13-44
Solution of inverse kinematic problem for serial robot using dual quaterninons and plücker coordinates

In this paper we present a new formulation method to solve kinematic problem of serial robot manipulators. In this method our major aims are to formulize inverse kinematic problem in a compact closed form and to avoid singularity problem. This formulation is based on screw theory with dual - quaternion. Compared with other methods, screw theory methods just establish two coordinates, and its geometrical meaning is obvious. We used dual-quaternion in plücker coordinates as a screw operator for compactness. 6R-DOF industrial robot manipulators forward and inverse kinematic equations are derived using this new formulation and simulation results are given.
Malware classification using self organising feature maps and machine activity data

In this article we use machine activity metrics to automatically distinguish between malicious and trusted portable executable software samples. The motivation stems from the growth of cyber attacks using techniques that have been employed to surreptitiously deploy Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). APTs are becoming more sophisticated and able to obfuscate much of their identifiable features through encryption, custom code bases and inmemory execution. Our hypothesis is that we can produce a high degree of accuracy in distinguishing malicious from trusted samples using Machine Learning with features derived from the inescapable footprint left behind on a computer system during execution. This includes CPU, RAM, Swap use and network traffic at a count level of bytes and packets. These features are continuous and allow us to be more flexible with the classification of samples than discrete features such as API calls (which can also be obfuscated) that form the main feature of the extant literature. We use these continuous data and develop a novel classification method using Self Organizing Feature Maps to reduce over fitting during training through the ability to create unsupervised clusters of similar “behaviour” that are subsequently used as features for classification, rather than using the raw data. We compare our method to a set of machine classification methods that have been applied in previous research and demonstrate an increase of between 7.24% and 25.68% in classification accuracy using our method and an unseen dataset over the range of other machine classification methods that have been applied in previous research. © 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Risk of HIV infection among male sex workers in Spain.

OBJECTIVE
To assess HIV prevalence and predictive factors for HIV among male sex workers in Spain.


METHODS
In this study we analysed all male sex workers who visited HIV testing clinics in 19 Spanish cities between 2000 and 2002. The information was obtained during examination by means of a brief questionnaire. For repeating testers, only the last confirmed result was taken into account.


RESULTS
418 male sex workers were included in the analysis; 58% visited these clinics for the first time and 42% were repeating testers. 67% were of foreign origin, mostly from Latin America (91%). 96% had had sex with men, 18% were transvestites or transsexuals, and 3.3% had used injected drugs. HIV prevalence was 12.2% (95% CI, 9.3 to 15.8%), and rose to 16.9% among first time testers. No differences in HIV prevalence were found between injecting drug users, transvestites/transsexuals, and men from foreign countries.


CONCLUSION
Because of the high risk of HIV infection, male sex workers should be the target of specific preventive activities. Preventive and healthcare strategies that are culturally adapted to migrants are required.