Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Dietary Magnesium Intake and Radiographic Knee Osteoarthritis

Objective To examine the cross-sectional associations between dietary magnesium (Mg) intake and radiographic knee osteoarthritis (OA), joint space narrowing (JSN), and osteophytes (OST) respectively. Methods A total of 1626 subjects were included in the study. Dietary intake was assessed using a validated semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire. Radiographic knee OA was defined as Kellgren-Lawrence (K-L) Grade 2 in at least one leg. JSN and OST were assessed individually according to the Osteoarthritis Research Society International (OARSI) atlas. A multivariable logistic analysis model was applied to test the various associations after adjusting for potentially confounding factors. Results The relative odds of radiographic knee OA were decreased by 0.53 times in the third quintile of Mg intake [odds ratio (OR) 0.53, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.28–1.01], 0.40 times in the fourth quintile (OR 0.40, 95% CI 0.17–0.94) and 0.34 times in the fifth quintile (OR 0.34, 95% CI 0.11–1.00) compared with those in the lowest quintile, while P for trend was 0.111. The relative odds of JSN were decreased by 0.49 times in the third quintile of Mg intake (OR 0.49, 95% CI 0.28–0.88) and 0.37 times in the fifth quintile (OR 0.37, 95% CI 0.14–0.98) compared with those in the lowest quintile, while P for trend was 0.088. There was no significant relationship between dietary Mg intake and the presence of OST. Conclusions The findings of this cross-sectional study indicate that Mg intake is inversely associated with radiographic knee OA and JSN. It supports potential role of Mg in the prevention of knee OA. Level of Evidence LevelIII, cross-sectional study.
Bone loss after full-thickness and partial-thickness flap elevation.

OBJECTIVES the aim of this study was to histologically assess whether elevation of partial-thickness flaps results in reduced bone alterations, as compared with full-thickness flap preparations. MATERIAL AND METHODS in five beagle dogs, both mandibular second premolars (split-mouth design) were subjected to one of the following treatments: Tx1: elevation of a partial-thickness flap over the mesial root of P(2) and performing a notch at the height of the bone. Tx2: elevation of a full-thickness flap over the mesial root of P(2) and performing a notch at the height of the bone. After 4 months, sections were evaluated for: (i) vertical bone loss and (ii) osteoclastic activity using histometry. RESULTS elevation of both full- and partial-thickness flaps results in bone loss and elevated osteoclastic activity. Partial-thickness flaps can result in less bone loss than full-thickness flaps, but are subject to some variability. CONCLUSION use of partial-thickness flaps does not prevent from all bone loss. The procedure may result most of the times in less bone loss than the elevation of full-thickness flaps. Further research has to evaluate the determinants of effective outcomes of partial-thickness flap procedures.
Finally Informing the Electorate? How the Internet Got People Thinking about Presidential Politics in 2004

Recent research has suggested that traditional and online news sources may differ with respect to their ability to inform audiences. In particular, there is tentative evidence that the hyperlink structure of online newspapers, for example, can promote a more in-depth understanding of political issues than traditional news media. The authors analyze data from the 2004 American National Election Studies (ANES) to test some of these relationships empirically. Specifically, the influence of traditional and Internet news sources on both differentiated and integrated political knowledge structures among citizens are examined. The findings reveal that users of online newspapers have higher levels of both integrated and differentiated knowledge, even after controlling for print newspaper and television use. Print newspaper use is only related to factual political knowledge, and television news use is unrelated to any of the measures of knowledge about the presidential campaign.
DT-MRI Fiber Tracking: A Shortest Paths Approach

We derive a new fiber tracking algorithm for DT-MRI that parts with the locally ldquogreedyrdquo paradigm intrinsic to conventional tracking algorithms. We demonstrate the ability to precisely reconstruct a diverse range of fiber trajectories in authentic and computer-generated DT-MRI data, for which well-known conventional tracking algorithms are shown to fail. Our approach is to pose fiber tracking as a problem in computing shortest paths in a weighted digraph. Voxels serve as vertices, and edges are included between neighboring voxels. We assign probabilities (weights) to edges using a Bayesian framework. Higher probabilities are assigned to edges that are aligned with fiber trajectories in their close proximity. We compute optimal paths of maximum probability using computationally scalable shortest path algorithms. The salient features of our approach are: global optimality-unlike conventional tracking algorithms, local errors do not accumulate and one ldquowrong-turnrdquo does not spell disaster; a target point is specified a priori; precise reconstruction is demonstrated for extremely low signal-to-noise ratio; impartiality to which of two endpoints is used as a seed; and, faster computation times than conventional all-paths tracking. We can use our new tracking algorithm in either a single-path tracking mode (deterministic tracking) or an all-paths tracking mode (probabilistic tracking).
Training in Conflict-Habituated Systems: Lessons from Cyprus

For several years, a consortium of organizations has been delivering training workshops in conflict resolution to individuals from both communities on Cyprus. The result is a broadly-based, multi-track citizen peacebuilding movement that involves hundreds of Greek and Turkish Cypriots in bi-communal training, dialogue and cooperative activity. This set of workshops is grounded in a theory of practice that holds conflict resolution to be a transformational process engaging peoples' hearts and minds, and addressing the deep-rooted patterns that characterize conflict-habituated systems.The article posits six ways the training operates as a systems' intervention: as a forum for learning, where learning itself becomes a meta-goal; for capacity building, where useful skills become resources for peacebuilding; for dialogue, where participants have a safe space for engaging each other on subjects of critical interest; for community building, where people form alliances and deep bonds as a human infrastructure for peacebuilding; for modeling, where the training staff demonstrates the principles and practices it teaches; and for culture change, where the culture created in the learning community acts as an agent of change within the culture of the conflict-habituated system. This article discusses critical training issues relevant to the Cyprus project, including cultural appropriateness, linkages to Track One initiatives, evaluation, and lasting effects of the program. Lessons are drawn out that can be useful in other conflict-habituated systems.
School Leaders Facing Real Change: shifting geography, uncertain paths

A central problem for school leadership in the United States is to create settings in which success for students motivates teachers. Meeting this objective is becoming more difficult as teachers, except the most brilliant, struggle to cope with the diversity of students in a changing socio-economic climate and a context in which there is a ‘policy vacuum’, an unclear articulation of policy issues and choices, and inconsistency in policy initiatives. This is where school leaders must step in. Improvement in classrooms rarely occurs without strong leadership from building and district leaders. The fact that many school leaders in the USA were trained to exhibit authoritative rather than democratic leadership has often led to ‘democratic minimalism’, where the emphasis is on statutory fairness and majority rule, but not on full involvement of affected parties, such as teachers, students, and parents. The issues in contemporary leadership in areas of disadvantage are illustrated through the experience of one Minnesota elementary|spagf|ro|epagf| |spagf|it|epagf|school principal, and the wider implications for school leaders are discussed.
PHARMACOKINETICS OF A 40926 IN RATS 249 long-lasting levels in blood in humans above the MIC for gonococci

A40926 is a new glycopeptide antibiotic with unique activity against Neisseria gonorrhoeae and high and prolonged levels in mouse blood (B. P. Goldstein, E. Selva, L. Gastaldo, M. Berti, R. Pallanza, F. Ripamonti, P. Ferrari, M. Denaro, V. Arioli, and G. Cassani, Antimicrob. Agents Chemother., 31:1961-1966, 1987). We studied the pharmacokinetics of A40926 in rats after single intravenous and subcutaneous 10-mg/kg (body weight) doses. Concentrations in plasma and urine were determined by microbiological assay. After intravenous administration, high concentrations of A40926, ranging from 132 mg/liter at 3 min to 0.7 mg/liter at 96 h, were found in plasma. Concentrations declined with a three-exponential decay correlated with a prolonged, biphasic distribution and a slow elimination (terminal half-life, 61.22 h). After completion of the distribution, the compound was widely distributed to the extravascular space. The rate-limiting step in the elimination of A40926 from the body appears to be the slow return from the deep compartment into the central
Environmental Policy and Directed Technical Change in a Global Economy: The Dynamic Impact of Unilateral Environmental Policies

This paper builds a two-country (North, South), two-sector (polluting, nonpolluting) trade model with directed technical change, examining whether unilateral environmental policies can ensure sustainable growth. The polluting good is produced with a clean and a dirty input. I show that a temporary Northern policy combining clean research subsidies and a trade tax can ensure sustainable growth but Northern carbon taxes alone cannot. Trade and directed technical change accelerate environmental degradation either under laissez-faire or if the North implements carbon taxes, yet both help reduce environmental degradation under the appropriate unilateral policy. I characterize the optimal unilateral policy analytically and numerically using calibrated simulations.
A Mutual Catalytic Model of Formative Evaluation

This article describes the `mutual catalytic model' of programme design and formative evaluation. The model presumes two conditions under which it can be useful. Firstly, those responsible for a programme at the point of service delivery should participate equally in a programme's design and in its evaluation. This collaboration will: 1) increase the clarity of programme objectives and the level of consensus regarding them; 2) improve the evaluation design and process by connecting the evaluation with the realities at the point of service delivery; and 3) increase the likelihood that staff will use the results of the evaluation to improve programme design. Secondly, evaluators are required relatively frequently to facilitate the review of programme objectives and procedures, since reviews of this kind rarely take place without an extra stimulus and sometimes need a practical hand to guide them. In the mutual catalytic model of formative evaluation, local practitioners help to specify programme goals and improve evaluation, while evaluators help to elaborate programme goals and evaluation needs. This model is exemplified using experiences with homeless-child care centres in Seville in Spain.
Yeast Contain a Non-proteinaceous Pool of Copper in the Mitochondrial Matrix*

The yeast mitochondrion is shown to contain a pool of copper that is distinct from that associated with the two known mitochondrial cuproenzymes, superoxide dismutase (Sod1) and cytochrome c oxidase (CcO) and the copper-binding CcO assembly proteins Cox11, Cox17, and Sco1. Only a small fraction of mitochondrial copper is associated with these cuproproteins. The bulk of the remainder is localized within the matrix as a soluble, anionic, low molecular weight complex. The identity of the matrix copper ligand is unknown, but the bulk of the matrix copper fraction is not protein-bound. The mitochondrial copper pool is dynamic, responding to changes in the cytosolic copper level. The addition of copper salts to the growth medium leads to an increase in mitochondrial copper, yet the expansion of this matrix pool does not induce any respiration defects. The matrix copper pool is accessible to a heterologous cuproenzyme. Co-localization of human Sod1 and the metallochaperone CCS within the mitochondrial matrix results in suppression of growth defects of sod2Δ cells. However, in the absence of CCS within the matrix, the activation of human Sod1 can be achieved by the addition of copper salts to the growth medium.
Rigorous Estimation of Floating-Point Round-Off Errors with Symbolic Taylor Expansions

Rigorous estimation of maximum floating-point round-off errors is an important capability central to many formal verification tools. Unfortunately, available techniques for this task often provide very pessimistic overestimates, causing unnecessary verification failure. We have developed a new approach called Symbolic Taylor Expansions that avoids these problems, and implemented a new tool called FPTaylor embodying this approach. Key to our approach is the use of rigorous global optimization, instead of the more familiar interval arithmetic, affine arithmetic, and/or SMT solvers. FPTaylor emits per-instance analysis certificates in the form of HOL Light proofs that can be machine checked. In this article, we present the basic ideas behind Symbolic Taylor Expansions in detail. We also survey as well as thoroughly evaluate six tool families, namely, Gappa (two tool options studied), Fluctuat, PRECiSA, Real2Float, Rosa, and FPTaylor (two tool options studied) on 24 examples, running on the same machine, and taking care to find the best options for running each of these tools. This study demonstrates that FPTaylor estimates round-off errors within much tighter bounds compared to other tools on a significant number of case studies. We also release FPTaylor along with our benchmarks, thus contributing to future studies and tool development in this area.
Economism in the New Urban Sociology: a critique of Mullins' 'Theoretical Perspectives on Australian Urbanisation'

Since the February 1977 urban sociology symposium in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology there has been a rapid development of the new urban sociology in Australia. Mullins’ attempt to develop a Marxian theory of Australian urbanisation, (Mullins, 1981a, 1981b) coming as it does four years later, must therefore be seen as a natural and healthy development and a welcome elaboration of a perspective which in recent years has come to dominate theorisation of the urban. At the same time, the particular Marxian paradigm which has come to dominate urban theory contains a number of serious deficiencies, and in recent years there has been much critical evaluation of progress to date (see, for example, Harloe and Lebas, 1981; Lebas, 1980, 1982; Walton, 1981; Zukin, 1980). Inevitably these strengths and weaknesses have been especially prominent in earlier applications to Australian urban structure (see Kilmartin and Thorns, 1978; Sandercock, 1978; Aungles and Szelenyi, 1979). An understanding of the problems which Mullins’ analysis entails therefore depends on an appreciation of the perspective which he has attempted to apply. The new urban sociology differs from Marxian sociology in general in two main ways. In the first place, the early work on class and class conflict (by Mills, Dahrendorf, Bottomore, Ossowski, Rex, Lockwood, Gouldner and others) which has informed and heavily influenced sociology in general has not made any appreciable impact
Consumer Gift Systems

This article develops a critique of the dyadic model of consumer gift giving and an extension of the classic paradigm of gift giving as elaborated in fundamental anthropological and sociological texts. I conceptualize and present empirical evidence for the notion of a consumer gift system, a system of social solidarity based on a structured set of gift exchange and social relationships among consumers. Social distinctions, norm of reciprocity, and rituals and symbolisms are defined as key characteristics of a consumer gift system and are shown to be present in peer-to-peer music file sharing at Napster. Implications for extant research on solidarity, gift giving, and consumption are discussed, and future research directions are provided. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc.
A GENERALIZATION OF THE FRECHET DISTANCE OF TWO CURVES.

Let U be a separated uniform structure on a space E, and h any curve in E. It is easy to define' a uniform structure C on the space h(E) whose elements are the curves in E. Again, if f(x, y) is any 6cart (or quasi-distance) in E, there is an obvious definition of a function D(h1, h2) analogous to the Fr6chet distance of curves hi, h2 in a metric space, and if U is defined by a family of 6carts, we show how to define CJ by a suitable family of derived 6carts of the type D(hi, h2). Morse2 showed that for curves in a metric space the Fr6chet distance is zero if and only if the curves coincide (subject to a slight restriction on the allowable parametrizations). By an extension of his argument, we show that there exists a structure C2, defined by a subfamily of the family of 6carts which defines C, which is topologically equivalent to C, and also obtain the result, analogous to that of Morse, that the structure C is separated. Finally, we give an example to show that the structures C7, C2 are not in general the same. The notation of this paper is chosen to agree, as far as possible, with that of a subsequent paper discussing a different and more widely applicable generalization of the Fr6chet distance. 1. Notation: The Structure C and the Frechet tcarts. -Let T(T*, To, etc.) denote in general any ordinally complete simply ordered set, so that T is compact, but not in general connected, in the natural order topology. ' Throughout the present discussion, T will always be the real interval 0 < x < 1. Let E be a space (fixed throughout) with a separated uniform structure U, and the induced topology, defined by a fundamental system of sets Vj(j e J) of pairs (x, y) of elements; the sets V} (known as "entourages" or vicinities) may without loss of generality be supposed to be symmetric and open in E X E, in addition to satisfying the conditions given by Bourbaki (op. cit., pp. 86-87). By a generalized curve representation of base T, we mean a continuous mapping x = p(t), T -_ E (T having the order topology), such that T contains no nondegenerate interval on which p is constant. Two representations p: T -o E and p*: T -E are called equivalent if there is a homeomorphism v of T onto itself such that p* o v = p. By a generalized curve h, we mean a maximal set of equivalent representations. When, as here, T is a closed real interval, we omit the word "generalized. " Let V; be one of the vicinities defining the structure of E, and let Vj be the set of ordered pairs of curves h, k in E, such that there exist representations x = p(h, t) of h, x = p(k, t) of k, with the property that [p(h, t); p(k, t) ] is in Vj for each value of t in T. It is easily seen that the family of sets V} possesses the properties necessary to define a uniform' structure C7 (possibly nonseparated) on the space of all curves in E and that, if (We) is an alternative fundamental set of vicinities defining the same structure U on E, then the family (We) defines the same uniform structure C as does the family (1V;).
Online Belief Propagation for Topic Modeling

The batch latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) algorithms play important roles in probabilistic topic modeling, but they are not suitable for processing big data streams due to high time and space compleixty. Online LDA algorithms can not only extract topics from big data streams with constant memory requirements, but also detect topic shifts as the data stream flows. In this paper, we present a novel and easy-to-implement online belief propagation (OBP) algorithm that infers the topic distribution from the previously unseen documents incrementally within the stochastic approximation framework. We discuss intrinsic relations between OBP and online expectation-maximization (OEM) algorithms, and show that OBP can converge to the local stationary point of the LDA's likelihood function. Extensive empirical studies confirm that OBP significantly reduces training time and memory usage while achieves a much lower predictive perplexity when compared with current state-of-the-art online LDA algorithms. Due to its ease of use, fast speed and low memory usage, OBP is a strong candidate for becoming the standard online LDA algorithm.
Multiple-Reason Decision Making Based on Automatic Processing

It has been repeatedly shown that in decisions under time constraints, individuals predominantly use noncompensatory strategies rather than complex compensatory ones. We argue that these findings might be due not to limitations of cognitive capacity but instead to limitations of information search imposed by the commonly used experimental tool Mouselab (Payne et al., 1988). We tested this assumption in three experiments. In the first experiment, information was openly presented, whereas in the second experiment the standard Mouselab program was used under different time limits. The results indicate that individuals are able to compute weighted additive decision strategies extremely quickly if information search is not restricted by the experimental procedure. In a third experiment, these results were replicated using more complex decision tasks, and the major alternative explanations that individuals use more complex heuristics or merely encode the constellation of cues were ruled out. In sum, the findings challenge the fundaments of bounded rationality and highlight the importance of automatic processes in decision making.
In Search of Co‐variance, Causal Mechanisms or Congruence? Towards a Plural Understanding of Case Studies

Methodological reflections about case study research have increased within recent years. According to our account, there are three distinct approaches to case studies: co-variational, causal process tracing, and congruence analysis. The main goals of this article are to lay out the distinct ways in which causal inferences are drawn for the cases under study and to scrutinize the different understandings and directions of generalization within these three approaches. By doing so we highlight two aspects: First, causal process tracing and congruence analysis should be seen as two distinct alternatives to the dominant co-variational template. Second, the main characteristics of case studies, their thickness, provides only an unavoidable dilemma if we aim to generalize the findings towards a wider population of similar cases as in the co-variational template. If we would like to get deeper insights â-“ as the causal process tracing approach does â-“ or if we would like to use the empirical evidence for a broader theoretical discourse â-“ as the congruence analysis does â-“ case studies do not face a trade-off.