Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Results of a five-year study of 99mTc DMSA renal scintigraphy in children and adolescents following acute pyelonephritis.

BACKGROUND Renal scintigraphy, generally using 99mTc-DMSA, is the accepted reference standard for detection of renal cortical changes. The timing of the test, i.e., whether an acute 99mTc-DMSA scan, a follow-up only or both scans should be performed, however, remains open to discussion. In our study, a six-month follow- up DMSA scan was performed in all the children diagnosed with a first attack of acute pyelonephritis (APN) in two large paediatric clinics of Charles University's 3rd School of Medicine in Prague during a five-year period. All diagnoses were confirmed by a paediatric nephrologist. MATERIAL AND METHODS 382 children (267 girls, 115 boys) aged between 7 months and 19 years were included in the study. For analytical purposes, the patients were divided into 4 age groups: I--less than 1 year of age, II--1-5 years, III--5-10 years, and IV--10-19 years. In all children younger than five years, a micturition cystourethrogram (MCUG) for detection of vesicoureteric reflux (VUR) was performed between one and three months after the APN episode. Static renal scintigraphy, using an HR collimator with parallel holes was performed using a planar Gamma camera MB 9200 (Gamma Budapest) in all children six months after APN, with a complement of pinhole images, SPECT or PSPECT of the kidneys. RESULTS 1. In group I, all four children with positive VUR on MCUG had a pathological DMSA scan, while only two of the 32 patients with negative VUR had a pathological DMSA. 2. In group II, 17 children had VUR on MCUG, six of them with a pathological and 11 with a normal DMSA scan. Most of the 221 children without VUR had a normal DMSA scintigraphy; pathological findings were present in 17 children only. 3. In group III, all children with VUR, but only 5 out of 53 without VUR, had a pathological DMSA scan. 4. Five out of 50 children in group IV had a pathological DMSA. CONCLUSIONS APN occurred most frequently in group II (62.3%, or 238 children) and ranged between 10-15% in the remaining groups. APN was found very frequently in boys less than one year old and showed a marked decrease with increasing age. Among girls, however, APN incidence was observed to increase with age. Pathological renal changes were present in children with, as well as without, VUR. The incidence of pathological DMSA findings six months after APN was relatively low (44/382 patients, or 11.5%). Regular monitoring of these children is very important for detection of renal scarring.
A Conceptual Framework of Iranian Consumer Trust in B2C Electronic Commerce

B2C in the developing countries is not yet a normalcy as compared to the developed countries. In this paper, we attempt to improve trust of B2C in Iran. A number of hypotheses are outlined to prove the theories that could improve the trust. A set of questionnaires was designed to reflect hence test the hypotheses. Various related factors are tested in the collective Iranian culture. From the survey, it was found that recommendations by close friends and families are known as an influencing factor on reputation because of the collective culture. In addition, the type of payment is illustrated as an influencing factor on trust as well. Based on the findings, a refined model of Iran Trust Model (ITM) is derived. The model considers the antecedents and the consequences of trust in Iran. A prototype was implemented and tested, in which the prototype – in the form of an e-commerce website that was developed adhering to the model, for a number of weeks. This study examines antecedents and consequences of trust in Iran. Type of payment and reputation are known as the antecedents that related positively to trust. Trust has a negative relationship with risk and a positive relationship with attitude.
Global media economics : commercialization, concentration, and integration of world media markets

This text studies the increasing international marketplace for media companies, exploring the mergers and acquisitions, the impact of technology, and the implications of changing regulatory policies and a growing world economy that are the most salient features of this scene. The contributors to this volume take us around the world - from Nigeria to Singapore to Spain - to give reports on how media, political and economic issues intersect in various ways in different countries. Their essays, combined with a full account of domestic media economics, provide a comprehensive sense of the macro- and microeconomic realities of the media around the globe.
trans-Complementation of an NS2 Defect in a Late Step in Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) Particle Assembly and Maturation

Recent studies using cell culture infection systems that recapitulate the entire life cycle of hepatitis C virus (HCV) indicate that several nonstructural viral proteins, including NS2, NS3, and NS5A, are involved in the process of viral assembly and release. Other recent work suggests that Ser-168 of NS2 is a target of CK2 kinase–mediated phosphorylation, and that this controls the stability of the genotype 1a NS2 protein. Here, we show that Ser-168 is a critical determinant in the production of infectious virus particles. Substitution of Ser-168 with Ala (or Gly) ablated production of infectious virus by cells transfected with a chimeric viral RNA (HJ3-5) containing core-NS2 sequences from the genotype 1a H77 virus within the background of genotype 2a JFH1 virus. An S168A substitution also impaired production of virus by cells transfected with JFH1 RNA. This mutation did not alter polyprotein processing or genome replication. This defect in virus production could be rescued by expression of wt NS2 in trans from an alphavirus replicon. The trans-complementing activities of NS2 from genotypes 1a and 2a demonstrated strong preferences for rescue of the homologous genotype. Importantly, the S168A mutation did not alter the association of core or NS5A proteins with host cell lipid droplets, nor prevent the assembly of core into particles with sedimentation and buoyant density properties similar to infectious virus, indicating that NS2 acts subsequent to the involvement of core, NS5A, and NS3 in particle assembly. Second-site mutations in NS2 as well as in NS5A can rescue the defect in virus production imposed by the S168G mutation. In aggregate, these results indicate that NS2 functions in trans, in a late-post assembly maturation step, perhaps in concert with NS5A, to confer infectivity to the HCV particle.
A Maximum Principle for Beltrami Color Flow

We study, in this work, the maximum principle for the Beltrami color flow and the stability of the flow's numerical approximation by finite difference schemes. We discuss, in the continuous case, the theoretical properties of this system and prove the maximum principle in the strong and the weak formulations. In the discrete case, all the second order explicit schemes that are currently used violate, in general, the maximum principle. For these schemes we give a theoretical stability proof, accompanied by several numerical examples.
Vectorial transport and folding of an autotransporter virulence protein during outer membrane secretion

Autotransporter (AT) proteins are a large and diverse family of extracellular virulence proteins from Gram‐negative bacteria, characterized by a central β‐helix domain within the mature virulence protein. It is not clear how these proteins cross the outer membrane (OM) quickly and efficiently, without assistance from an external energy source such as ATP or a proton gradient. Conflicting results in the literature have led to several proposed mechanisms for AT OM secretion, including a concerted process, or vectorial secretion with different directionalities. We introduced pairs of cysteine residues into the passenger sequence of pertactin, an AT virulence protein from Bordetella pertussis, and show that OM secretion of the passenger domain stalls due to the formation of a disulphide bond. We further show that the C‐terminus of the pertactin passenger domain β‐helix crosses the OM first, followed by the N‐terminal portions of the virulence protein. In vivo proteolytic digestion shows that the C‐terminus is exposed to the extracellular milieu during stalling, and forms stable structure. These AT secretion and folding features can potentially facilitate efficient secretion.
Copula Based Actuarial Model for Pricing Cyber-Insurance Policies

Cyber-insurance is often suggested as a tool to manage IT security residual risks but the accuracy of premiums is still an open question. Thus, practitioners and academics have argued for more robust and innovative cyber-insurance pricing models. We fill this important gap in the literature by developing a cyber-insurance model using the emerging copula methodology. The premiums for first party losses due to virus intrusions are estimated using three types of insurance policy models. Our approach is the first in the information security literature to integrate standard elements of insurance risk with the robust copula methodology to determine cyber insurance premiums.
Combining the Ranked Output from Fulltext and Summary Indexes

This paper demonstrates the advantage of combining a ranked output from a fulltext index and another from an index generated using generic summary texts. Our main ndings are as follows: (1) The combination of a fulltext-based run and a summary-based run can signi cantly outperform either alone, especially when the fulltext evidence is emphasized. (2) The primary role of the summary index in the above combination is to promote some of the relevant documents already retrieved by the fulltext index, rather than to discover new relevant documents. (3) Moreover, though the summary quality can make a di erence for this combination approach, even simple extracts such as 5% \lead" may give signi cant improvements.
Characterizing Cohort Patterns for Italian Wages Federico Biagi

In this paper we characterize inter-generational and intra-generational patterns of earnings for Italian dependent workers for the period 1984-1995. Using data from the Bank of Italy’s Survey of Household Income and Wealth, we construct cohort specific age profiles for mean wages (the measure of central location here adopted) and for the 90-10 percentile differential (the inequality measure); we estimate the age profiles for three categories of workers, which differ for educational attainment; we verify how different cohorts have been doing comparatively and finally we test whether, with time, the (mean) returns to experience and education have increased. Moreover we verify how the inequality measure has changed with time and across cohorts. Our results indicate that for the three groups considered each successive generation, with the exception of those that entered the labor market in the years 1993 and 1995, have benefited from higher entry wages. At the same time we find that the age profiles for the two groups with lower education have become flatter so that we cannot conclude that more recent cohorts of middle and low educated workers are better off than their immediate predecessors. Finally we find that inequality tends to increase with age, while across-cohort variation does not seem to be very significant. JEL Classification: J31
A Testbed for Indonesian Text Retrieval

Indonesia is the fourth most populous country and a close neighbour of Australia. However, despite media and intelligence interest in Indonesia, little work has been done on evaluating Information Retrieval techniques for Indonesian, and no standard testbed exists for such a purpose. An effective testbed should include a collection of documents, realistic queries, and relevance judgements. The TREC and TDT testbeds have provided such an environment for the evaluation of English, Mandarin, and Arabic text retrieval techniques. The NTCIR testbed provides a similar environment for Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and English. This paper describes an Indonesian TREC-like testbed we have constructed and made available for the evaluation of ad hoc retrieval techniques. To illustrate how the test collection is used, we briefly report the effect of stemming for Indonesian text retrieval, showing --similarly to English-- that it has little effect on accuracy.
Explaining US Consumer Behavior and Expectations with News Sentiment

We examine the information content of a newly created news sentiment index from over 300,000 articles from some of the most widely read newspapers in the US to explain changes in the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment from 1995 to 2009. Using ARMA-models, we show that consumer expectations and sentiment are influenced by news sentiment and other variables, such as personal income and inflation. While there exists a statistically significant relationship between news sentiment and private consumption, the consumption behavior of private households can best be explained by consumer expectations and sentiment combined with changes in personal income, inflation and interest rates. We ad news sentiment to the causality chain before consumer expectations and sentiment and private consumption
Synchronization Using PGF2α and Estradiol With or Without GnRH for Timed Artificial Insemination in Dairy Cows

Abstract This study examined the use of PGF2α and estradiol benzoate (EB) either with or without GnRH to synchronize estrus in dairy cows for timed artificial insemination (TAI) under field conditions. First, Holstein dairy cows with a corpus luteum (CL) received 500 μg cloprostenol and were then randomly allocated to three groups: no further treatment (control, n=236); treatment with 1 mg EB 56 h after cloprostenol (EB group, n=339); or treatment with 1 mg EB 56 h after cloprostenol followed by treatment with 100 μg gonadorelin 24 h later (EB + GnRH group, n=216). All cows received TAI 80 h after the cloprostenol injection. In a second experiment, Holstein dairy cows with a CL received 500 μg cloprostenol and were then randomly allocated to two groups: treatment with 2 mg EB 36 h later (EB group, n=284) or treatment with 2 mg EB 36 h after cloprostenol followed by 100 μg gonadorelin 24 h later (EB + GnRH group, n=229). All cows received TAI 24 h after the EB injection. Logistic analyses revealed that the odds ratio for the probability of pregnancy when 1 mg EB was administered 56 h following cloprostenol was 1.9 and 2.0 times (P<0.001) higher in the EB (39.5%) and EB + GnRH groups (40.7%), respectively, compared with the control group (25.8%). However, pregnancy rates in cows receiving 2 mg EB 24 h following cloprostenol showed no difference compared with cows treated with EB only (32.4%) or with EB + GnRH (35.8%). These results indicate that a synchronization protocol comprising PGF2α and EB could be used for TAI in dairy herds under field conditions.
Fashion DNA: Merging Content and Sales Data for Recommendation and Article Mapping

We present a method to determine Fashion DNA, coordinate vectors locating fashion items in an abstract space. Our approach is based on a deep neural network architecture that ingests curated article information such as tags and images, and is trained to predict sales for a large set of frequent customers. In the process, a dual space of customer style preferences naturally arises. Interpretation of the metric of these spaces is straightforward: The product of Fashion DNA and customer style vectors yields the forecast purchase likelihood for the customer-item pair, while the angle between Fashion DNA vectors is a measure of item similarity. Importantly, our models are able to generate unbiased purchase probabilities for fashion items based solely on article information, even in absence of sales data, thus circumventing the "cold-start problem" of collaborative recommendation approaches. Likewise, it generalizes easily and reliably to customers outside the training set. We experiment with Fashion DNA models based on visual and/or tag item data, evaluate their recommendation power, and discuss the resulting article similarities.
An Announced Regime Switch: Optimal Policy for the Transition Period

The novelty of this article is its theoretical framework, which allows for modeling of an announced change in the type of monetary regime operated. The behavior of a small open economy that has announced the adoption of a monetary policy regime of offsetting nominal exchange rate changes is analyzed. The optimal monetary regime for the transition period and its effects on macroeconomic stability are studied. Moreover, the evolution of business cycle synchronization over the transition is analyzed.
Including maritime transport in the EU's climate change policy: Country-based allocation and effects

The European Union (EU) is actively campaigning for the global regulation of carbon emissions generated by maritime bunker fuels because these emissions are presently barely regulated and are projected to increase significantly in the coming decades. However, since a global regulation has not been reached yet, the EU is seeking ways to include the shipping sector in its greenhouse gas reduction commitment for 2020. In this paper, we look at the effect of including the shipping sector's emissions in the EU reduction commitment that is based on the nationality of a ship. Emissions that are generated by ships owned, operated or flagged by the 27 EU countries are allocated to the EU total GHG emissions. We first analyse the effects on the reduction commitment caused by the three allocations. We then use marginal abatement cost curves (MACCs) in order to determine how much the shipping sector of the 27 EU countries, defined by the three allocations, could contribute efficiently to a total given emission reduction target for all sectors in the EU. Moreover, we use MACCs in order to determine if some country fleets could reduce emissions in the shipping sector relatively more efficiently than other countries under a given emission reduction target for all sectors. Our findings indicate that the shipping sector could contribute efficiently to the EU's emission reductions by up to 8.5%. Since the composition of the individual country fleets and applied measures are similar across countries, their individual reductions relative to their fleet-specific business-as-usual (BAU) emissions are on average the same.
Crime and the Labor Market

The same policies or technological changes that affect the labor market can also affect the extent of criminal activities. For instance, while an increase in unemployment benefits can raise unemployment duration it may also reduce crimes by unemployed. Or, a technological change in the home sector that affects participation in the market may also raise participation in criminal activities. To analyze these interactions we construct a search-theoretic model where labor market outcomes and crimes are determined jointly. The description of the labor market follows Pissarides' (2000) canonical model of unemployment extended to account for decisions to participate in the labor force. We introduce random arrivals of crime opportunities for all individuals irrespective of their labor market status. Furthermore, we allow for optimal employment contracts that internalize the effect of crime activities on job duration. We calibrate our model to US data focusing on females. We investigate whether the change in preferences for market activities that is necessary to account for female labor force participation can also account for the substantial increase in female crime over the last half century. We also look at the effects of unemployment insurance, workers' bargaining power, skill-biased technological progress and the availability of crime opportunities
Effect of different dopant in machinable ceramic on its surface flashover characteristics in vacuum

As well known, the secondary electron emission yield is one important factor for the flashover phenomena of solid materials under high electric field in vacuum. On the basis of the novel low melting temperature machinable glass ceramics for vacuum insulation system, which has excellent machinable performance and good electrical properties, different low SEE yield metal oxides including Cu2O and Cr2O3 were doped into the original glass ceramics to investigate the effects of different process technology on the surface flashover phenomena of the machinable ceramics under pulse voltage in vacuum. We found that after doping the metal oxide, the samples' surface flashover voltage has changed. Experimental results revealed that after doping metal oxide into the machinable ceramic, the sample's SEE yield relatively reduced.
Threat Effects and Trade: Wage Discipline through Product Market Competition

Abstract We present a model of the effect of heightened product market competition induced by trade liberalization on the distribution of income between profits and wages. Integration increases the employment cost of wage demands, thereby decreasing bargained wages and the share of rents accruing to workers. This effect is amplified because of the existence of strategic complementarities which bring about a race to the bottom. Wage discipline induced by trade liberalization reduces the negative impact of increased competition on firm rents, and may even raise profits.
Performance of the PrimEx Electromagnetic Calorimeter

We report the design and performance of the hybrid electromagnetic calorimeter consisting of 1152 PbWO4 crystals and 576 lead glass blocks for the PrimEx experiment at the Jefferson Laboratory. The detector was built for high precision measurement of the neutral pion lifetime via the Primakoff effect. Calorimeter installation and commissioning was completed with the first physics run in fall of 2004. We present the energy and position resolution of the calorimeter. Obtained π0 mass resolution of 1.3MeV/c2 and its production angle resolution of 0.34mrad demonstrate the ability of the experiment to extract the π0 lifetime on one percent level.
Circulating Cell-Free DNA in Plasma of Locally Advanced Rectal Cancer Patients Undergoing Preoperative Chemoradiation: A Potential Diagnostic Tool for Therapy Monitoring

Circulating cell-free DNA opens up an interesting field for therapy monitoring, in particular during multimodal therapy protocols. The objective of this proof of principle study was to evaluate whether the amount of circulating plasma DNA has the potential to serve as a marker for therapy monitoring during the treatment course of locally advanced rectal cancer patients. We especially focused on kinetics of circulating DNA to assess whether variances in kinetics have the potential to discriminate between therapy responders and nonresponders. The amount of circulating DNA in plasma of rectal cancer patients undergoing preoperative chemoradiation was determined using real-time PCR before chemoradiation, after the end of chemoradiation and at the end of treatment. The study population was divided into responders (ypT0-T2 stage) and nonresponders (ypT3-T4 stage). Both groups showed comparable median plasma DNA values before and after the end of chemoradiation. At the end of treatment responders showed a further decrease in circulating DNA, whereas in nonresponders the circulating DNA manifestly increased (P = 0.006). This study demonstrates that circulating DNA in plasma of rectal cancer patients undergoing preoperative chemoradiation might serve as a surrogate marker to discriminate between responders and nonresponders. Therefore, we hypothesize that quantification of plasma DNA could be of use as an easily accessible tool for therapy monitoring in these patients.