Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protection of rabbit retina from ischemic injury by flupirtine.

PURPOSE The aim of this study was to determine wether flupirtine can slow down the changes seen in the rabbit retina after ischemia--reperfusion. METHODS A suction-cup procedure, which raises intraocular pressure, was used to give an ischemic insult to the rabbit retina. Electroretinograms were recorded before ischemia and at different periods after ischemia. In some instances, flupirtine was injected into the eye before ischemia. Immunohistochemistry was used to study the effect of ischemia-reperfusion on the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) immunoreactivity and uptake of serotonin by the retina. The effect of flupirtine and ischemia on retinal adenosine triphosphate (ATP) levels were determined in in vivo and in vitro experiments. RESULTS Ischemia for 75 minutes causes a change in the nature of normal GABA immunoreactivity and reduction in the b-wave of the electroretinogram. When flupirtine is injected into the vitreous humor at the onset of ischemic insult, the changes in GABA immunoreactivity are reduced and the recovery of the reduced b-wave of the electroretinogram after defined reperfusion times is enhanced significantly. Rat retinas incubated in vitro in physiological solution containing flupirtine caused a significant rise in the tissues' ATP content compared with control samples. However, incubation of the tissue in physiological solution saturated with nitrogen caused a drop in retinal ATP levels. Addition of flupirtine prevented this decrease from taking place. Serotonin injected into the vitreous humor of the rabbit eye is taken up by certain amacrine cells. The amount of serotonin taken up is reduced greatly in retinas, as judged by immunohistochemistry when tissues are subjected to ischemia. Because the ischemia was shown to cause a drop in the tissue ATP level, it is concluded that this is the cause of the reduced uptake of exogenous serotonin. Injection of flupirtine into the vitreous humor during ischemia enhanced the uptake of serotonin. CONCLUSIONS Combined data show that flupirtine is a neuroprotective agent in retinal ischemia and that one mode of its mechanism of action is to influence ATP levels. Flupirtine may lower the activity of NMDA receptors, thus causing ATP levels to be less affected in the presence of the drug as a secondary effect.
Improved sequential stopping rule for Monte Carlo simulation

This letter presents an improved result on the negative-binomial Monte Carlo technique analyzed in a previous paper (see IEEE Trans. Commun., vol.54, no.2,pp. 231-41, Feb. 2006) for the estimation of an unknown probability <i>p</i>. Specifically, the confidence level associated to a relative interval [p/<i>mu</i> <sub>2</sub>, p<i>mu</i> <sub>1</sub>], with <i>mu</i> <sub>1</sub>, <i>mu</i> <sub>2</sub> > 1, is proved to exceed its asymptotic value for a broader range of intervals than that given in the referred paper, and for any value of p. This extends the applicability of the estimator, relaxing the conditions that guarantee a given confidence level.
2016 Ieee International Conference on Big Data (big Data) Big Data Team Process Methodologies: a Literature Review and the Identification of Key Factors for a Project's Success

— This paper reports on our review of published research relating to how teams work together to execute Big Data projects. Our findings suggest that there is no agreed upon standard for executing these projects but that there is a growing research focus in this area and that an improved process methodology would be useful. In addition, our synthesis also provides useful suggestions to help practitioners execute their projects, specifically our identified list of 33 important success factors for executing Big Data efforts, which are grouped by our six identified characteristics of a mature Big Data organization.
Conceptual foundations of the UCSD Statin Study: a randomized controlled trial assessing the impact of statins on cognition, behavior, and biochemistry.

BACKGROUND Statin cholesterol-lowering drugs are among the most prescribed drugs in the United States. Their cardiac benefits are substantial and well supported. However, there has been persistent controversy regarding possible favorable or adverse effects of statins or of cholesterol reduction on cognition, mood, and behavior (including aggressive or violent behavior). METHODS The literature pertaining to the relationship of cholesterol or statins to several noncardiac domains was reviewed, including the link between statins (or cholesterol) and cognition, aggression, and serotonin. RESULTS There are reasons to think both favorable and adverse effects of statins and low cholesterol on cognition may pertain; the balance of these factors requires further elucidation. A substantial body of literature links low cholesterol level to aggressive behavior; statin randomized trials have not supported a connection, but they have not been designed to address this issue. A limited number of reports suggest a connection between reduced cholesterol level and reduced serotonin level, but more information is needed with serotonin measures that are practical for clinical use. Whether lipophilic and hydrophilic statins differ in their impact should be assessed. CONCLUSION There is a strong need for randomized controlled trial data to more clearly establish the impact of hydrophilic and lipophilic statins on cognition, aggression, and serotonin, as well as on other measures relevant to risks and quality-of-life impact in noncardiac domains.
The effect of violent crime on FDI : the case of Mexico 1998-2006

Thesis (M.P.P.)--Georgetown University, 2009. ; Includes bibliographical references. Theory and research have revealed important elements of the structure and functioning of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in developing countries. The objective of this quantitative study is to shed light on the determinants of FDI in Mexico. Particularly, on the effect that violent crime has on FDI. ; The aim is to understand whether and to what extent FDI undertaken by multinational enterprises reacts to an increase on violence in the host country. In order to carry it out this research, I performed an econometric model analysis for the years 1998-2006 based in panel data, created specifically for this purpose. ; The idea of this study resides on the perception that violent crime in Mexico has reached a level that could have been affecting multinational enterprises decision on whether to invest or not in Mexico. Among the mayor conclusions I have that FDI is correlated to violent crime, GDP and minimum wages.
Sex and Proximity to Reproductive Maturity Influence the Survival, Final Maturation, and Blood Physiology of Pacific Salmon When Exposed to High Temperature during a Simulated Migration

Some Pacific salmon populations have been experiencing increasingly warmer river temperatures during their once-in-a-lifetime spawning migration, which has been associated with en route and prespawn mortality. The mechanisms underlying such temperature-mediated mortality are poorly understood. Wild adult pink (Oncorhynchus gorbuscha) and sockeye (Oncorhynchus nerka) salmon were used in this study. The objectives were to investigate the effects of elevated water temperature on mortality, final maturation, and blood properties under controlled conditions that simulated a “cool” (13°C) and “warm” (19°C) freshwater spawning migration. After 10 d at 13°C, observed mortality was 50%–80% in all groups, which suggested that there was likely some mortality associated with handling and confinement. Observed mortality after 10 d at 19°C was higher, reaching ≥98% in male pink salmon and female pink and sockeye salmon. Thus, male sockeye salmon were the most thermally tolerant (54% observed mortality). Model selection supported the temperature- and sex-specific mortality patterns. The pink salmon were closer to reproductive maturation and farther along the senescence trajectory than sockeye salmon, which likely influenced their survival and physiological responses throughout the experiment. Females of both species held at 19°C had reduced plasma sex steroids compared with those held at 13°C, and female pink salmon were less likely to become fully mature at 19° than at 13°C. Male and female sockeye salmon held at 19°C had higher plasma chloride and osmolality than those held at 13°C, indicative of a thermally related stress response. These findings suggest that sex differences and proximity to reproductive maturity must be considered when predicting thermal tolerance and the magnitude of en route and prespawn mortality for Pacific salmon.
Bmc Complementary and Alternative Medicine Homeopathy – What Are the Active Ingredients? an Exploratory Study Using the Uk Medical Research Council's Framework for the Evaluation of Complex Interventions

Background: Research in homeopathy has traditionally addressed itself to defining the effectiveness of homeopathic potencies in comparison to placebo medication. There is now increasing awareness that the homeopathic consultation is in itself a therapeutic intervention working independently or synergistically with the prescribed remedy. Our objective was to identify and evalute potential "active ingredients" of the homeopathic approach as a whole, in a prospective formal case series, which draws on actual consultation data, and is based on the MRC framework for the evaluation of complex interventions.
1 thumb, 4 buttons, 20 words per minute: design and evaluation of H4-writer

We present what we believe is the most efficient and quickest four-key text entry method available. H4-Writer uses Huffman coding to assign minimized key sequences to letters, with full access to error correction, punctuation, digits, modes, etc. The key sequences are learned quickly, and support eyes-free entry. With KSPC = 2.321, the effort to enter text is comparable to multitap on a mobile phone keypad; yet multitap requires nine keys. In a longitudinal study with six participants, an average text entry speed of 20.4 wpm was observed in the 10th session. Error rates were under 1%. To improve external validity, an extended session was included that required input of punctuation and other symbols. Entry speed dropped only by about 3 wpm, suggesting participants quickly leveraged their acquired skill with H4-Writer to access advanced features.
The Hazards of Changing Schools for California Latino Adolescents

Students in the United States are highly mobile. Previous research has shown that the majority of students in the United States change schools between grades 1 and 12 for reasons other than promotion from one level to another (e.g., elementary to middle school.). Research also has found that student mobility is generally detrimental to student achievement. Despite this evidence, the issue of student mobility has not received much attention from educational researchers, practitioners, or policy makers. In this report we examine student mobility among California Latino adolescents. Student mobility may be especially important in California because of its highly mobile population. Latinos are the largest and fastest growing segment of the state population. According to California Department of Finance estimates, the Latino public-school population is projected to triple in size between 1986 and 2006, while the non-Latino public-school population is projected to decrease (see Figure 1.1). Consequently, if student mobility can be problematic for both students and schools, as previous research suggest, it is especially important to understand the nature of mobility among the Latino population. Using longitudinal data on two samples of California students—the first a group of 8th grade students who were surveyed over a sex-year period from 1988 to 1994; and the second a group of low-income, urban Latino 7th grade students who were first studied over a six-year period from 1990 to 1996—this study examined the incidence, causes, and consequences of student mobility, particularly during high school. Throughout this study we examine differences between Latino and non-Latino white students, as well as differences among Latino students. Here we summarize some of the major findings of this study.
Bilingual Distributed Word Representations from Document-Aligned Comparable Data

We propose a new model for learning bilingual word representations from nonparallel document-aligned data. Following the recent advances in word representation learning, our model learns dense real-valued word vectors, that is, bilingual word embeddings (BWEs). Unlike prior work on inducing BWEs which heavily relied on parallel sentence-aligned corpora and/or readily available translation resources such as dictionaries, the article reveals that BWEs may be learned solely on the basis of document-aligned comparable data without any additional lexical resources nor syntactic information. We present a comparison of our approach with previous state-of-the-art models for learning bilingual word representations from comparable data that rely on the framework of multilingual probabilistic topic modeling (MuPTM), as well as with distributional local context-counting models. We demonstrate the utility of the induced BWEs in two semantic tasks: (1) bilingual lexicon extraction, (2) suggesting word translations in context for polysemous words. Our simple yet effective BWE-based models significantly outperform the MuPTM-based and context-counting representation models from comparable data as well as prior BWE-based models, and acquire the best reported results on both tasks for all three tested language pairs.
Cost-Efficient and Resilient Job Life-Cycle Management on Hybrid Clouds

Cloud infrastructure offers democratized access to on-demand computing resources for scaling applications beyond captive local servers. While on-demand, fixed-price Virtual Machines (VMs) are popular, the availability of cheaper, but less reliable, spot VMs from cloud providers presents an opportunity to reduce the cost of hosting cloud applications. Our work addresses the issue of effective and economic use of hybrid cloud resources for planning job executions with deadline constraints. We propose strategies to manage a job's life-cycle on spot and on on-demand VMs to minimize the total dollar cost while assuring completion. With the foundation of stochastic optimization, our reusable table-based algorithm (RTBA) decides when to instantiate VMs, at what bid prices, when to use local machines, and when to checkpoint and migrate the job between these resources, with the goal of completing the job on time and with the minimum cost. In addition, three simpler heuristics are proposed as comparison. Our evaluation using historical spot prices for the Amazon EC2 market shows that RTBA on an average reduces the cost by 72%, compared to running on only on-demand VMs. It is also robust to fluctuations in spot prices. The heuristic, H3, often approaches RTBA in performance and may prove adequate for ad hoc jobs due to its simplicity.
A nonparametric HMM for genetic imputation and coalescent inference

Genetic sequence data are well described by hidden Markov models (HMMs) in which latent states correspond to clusters of similar mutation patterns. Theory from statistical genetics suggests that these HMMs are nonhomogeneous (their transition probabilities vary along the chromosome) and have large support for self transitions. We develop a new nonparametric model of genetic sequence data, based on the hierarchical Dirichlet process, which supports these self transitions and nonhomogeneity. Our model provides a parameterization of the genetic process that is more parsimonious than other more general nonparametric models which have previously been applied to population genetics. We provide truncation-free MCMC inference for our model using a new auxiliary sampling scheme for Bayesian nonparametric HMMs. In a series of experiments on male X chromosome data from the Thousand Genomes Project and also on data simulated from a population bottleneck we show the benefits of our model over the popular finite model fastPHASE, which can itself be seen as a parametric truncation of our model. We find that the number of HMM states found by our model is correlated with the time to the most recent common ancestor in population bottlenecks. This work demonstrates the flexibility of Bayesian nonparametrics applied to large and complex genetic data.
Consequences of Fragmentation of Tropical Moist Forest for Birds and Their Role in Predation of Herbivorous Insects

The consequences of habitat alteration on the role of understory insectivorous birds as predators of herbivorous insects in tropical forests are poorly understood. To examine whether fragmentation may affect the top–down controls of herbivory, we compared the number of species, individuals, and the community structure of insectivorous birds between fragments and continuous tropical moist forest in Mexico. We also registered insect herbivore abundances and conducted a larvae predation experiment to evaluate the potential role of insectivorous birds as predators of herbivorous insects. We recorded 63 bird species from 22 families, 43 percent of which were insectivorous birds. Species richness, abundance, and diversity of the avian community were higher in continuous forest compared with forest fragments. For insectivorous birds in particular, there was low similarity in avian insectivore communities between forest types, and forest fragments had more heavily dominated communities of avian insectivores. During the dry season, forest fragments presented significantly higher predation rates on artificial caterpillars, and lower abundance of herbivorous Lepidoptera larvae, compared with continuous forest. Furthermore, there was a significant negative correlation between artificial caterpillar predation rate and larval Lepidoptera abundance, with higher rates of predation in sample sites of low Lepidoptera abundance. Hence, the potentially greater light in the dry season combined with a more dominated avian insectivore community in forest fragments may facilitate increased predation by avian insectivores, resulting in a decline in abundance of larval Lepidoptera, with implications for the process of insect‐driven herbivory in forest fragments.
Tough on Criminal Wealth: Exploring the Practice of Proceeds from Crime Confiscation in the EU

The Revival of Confiscation in the Fight Against Criminal Organisations: The International/Eu Agenda and the Evolution of the Measure in the Original Fifteen Eu Member States. - Why an Exploratory Study into the Practice of Proceeds of Crime Confiscation Across the Original Fifteen Eu Member States? - How to Explore the Practice of Proceeds of Crime Confiscation Across the Original Fifteen Eu Member States? - Law in the Books, Law in Action. - Mapping the Main Problems and Highlighting the Best Practices: A Horizontal Analysis.
The effect of disk magnetic fields on the truncation of geometrically thin disks in AGN

We suggest that magnetic fields in the accretion disks of AGN reach into the coronae above and have a profound effect on the mass flow rate in the corona. This strongly affects the location where the accretion flow changes from a geometrically thin disk to a pure vertically extended coronal or advection-dominated accretion flow (ADAF). We show that this can explain the different disk truncation radii in elliptical galaxies and low luminosity AGN with about the same mass flow rate, a discrepancy pointed out by Quataert et al. ([CITE]). Without disk magnetic activity the disk truncation is expected to be uniquely related to the mass flow rate (Meyer et al. [CITE]). Whether dynamo action occurs depends on whether the electrical conductivity measured by a magnetic Reynolds number surpasses a critical value (Gammie & Menou [CITE]). In elliptical galaxies the disk is self-gravitating at the radii where the truncation should occur. It is plausible that instead of a cool disk a “layer of clouds” may form (Shlosman et al. [CITE]; Gammie [CITE]) for which no dynamo action is expected. For low luminosity AGN the magnetic Reynolds number is well above critical. Simple model calculations show that magnetic fields in the underlying disks reduce the strength of the coronal flow and shift the truncation radius significantly inward.
A study of the interlanguage of apology by Taiwanese English-Language learners

This thesis will present a study of the interlanguage of the speech act of apology by Taiwanese learners of English. Specifically, I will compare the way Taiwanese learners apologize in English and how they apologize in mandarin Chinese, as well as how native speakers of American English apologize. If Taiwanese speakers apologize differently in ■ English from the way native English speakers do, I may be able to explain why these differences exist in relation to the way they apologize in their native Chinese. The data for this study are collected from participant apology response on a Discourse Completion Test (DCT), which are used in Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP). My subjects include a group of twenty native speakers of English and twenty Taiwanese ESL learners. My instrument contains four situations of apology, which represent different degree of offence, different social distances and power differentials between the speakers and the hearer. The data is analyzed for the kinds of semantic formulae and intensifying and mitigation
Effects of structural flexibility of wings in flapping flight of butterfly

The objective of this paper is to clarify the effects of structural flexibility of wings of a butterfly in flapping flight. For this purpose, a dynamics model of a butterfly is derived by Lagrange’s method, where the butterfly is considered as a rigid multi-body system. The panel method is employed to simulate the flow field and the aerodynamic forces acting on the wings. The mathematical model is validated by the agreement of the numerical result with the experimentally measured data. Then, periodic orbits of flapping-of-wings flights are parametrically searched in order to fly the butterfly models. Almost periodic orbits are found, but they are unstable. Deformation of the wings is modeled in two ways. One is bending and its effect on the aerodynamic forces is discussed. The other is passive wing torsion caused by structural flexibility. Numerical simulations demonstrate that flexible torsion reduces the flight instability.
Moving Closer to the Action: Examining Compensation Design Effects on Strategic Risk

We examine the influence of CEO equity-based compensation on strategic risk taking by the firm. Building off the Behavioral Agency Model, Agency Theory, and Prospect Theory, we develop arguments about when equity-based compensation elements will increase or decrease executive risk propensity and, in turn, strategic risk taking. Incorporating a behavioral perspective into our models of incentive alignment provides us with new and potentially more accurate predictions about how individual elements of CEO pay will influence risk selection, as well as how equity compensation interacts with cash compensation and with other factors to influence risk preferences. In general, this study provides evidence that CEO equity-based compensation significantly influences strategic risk, but that this influence is more nuanced and complex than conventional treatments of executive compensation assume. In particular, we find that different forms of equity-based pay exhibit dissimilar influences on strategic risk and that their influence changes as their value and vesting status change. Second, we find that cash-based forms of pay moderate the incentive properties of equity-based pay, indicating that cash-based pay may affect how executives perceive risks associated with equity pay. Finally, we find that stock price volatility and board actions each also moderate the incentive effects of equity-based pay. In sum, our results argue for increased recognition of a behavioral perspective on executive compensation and greater precision in how we measure and model the incentive alignment properties of CEO compensation.