Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy and Safety of Varenicline for Smoking Cessation in Patients With Cardiovascular Disease: A Randomized Trial

Background— Smoking cessation is a key component of secondary cardiovascular disease prevention. Varenicline, a partial &agr;4&bgr;2 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor agonist, is effective for smoking cessation in healthy smokers, but its efficacy and safety in smokers with cardiovascular disease are unknown. Methods and Results— A multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial compared the efficacy and safety of varenicline with placebo for smoking cessation in 714 smokers with stable cardiovascular disease. Participants received varenicline (1 mg twice daily) or placebo, along with smoking-cessation counseling, for 12 weeks. Follow-up lasted 52 weeks. The primary end point was carbon monoxide–confirmed continuous abstinence rate for weeks 9 through 12 (last 4 weeks of treatment). The continuous abstinence rate was higher for varenicline than placebo during weeks 9 through 12 (47.0% versus 13.9%; odds ratio, 6.11; 95% confidence interval [CI], 4.18 to 8.93) and weeks 9 through 52 (19.2% versus 7.2%; odds ratio, 3.14; 95% CI, 1.93 to 5.11). The varenicline and placebo groups did not differ significantly in cardiovascular mortality (0.3% versus 0.6%; difference, −0.3%; 95% CI, −1.3 to 0.7), all-cause mortality (0.6% versus 1.4%; difference, −0.8%; 95% CI, −2.3 to 0.6), cardiovascular events (7.1% versus 5.7%; difference, 1.4%; 95% CI, −2.3 to 5.0), or serious adverse events (6.5% and 6.0%; difference, 0.5%; 95% CI, −3.1 to 4.1). As a result of adverse events, 9.6% of varenicline and 4.3% of placebo participants discontinued study drug. Conclusions— Varenicline is effective for smoking cessation in smokers with cardiovascular disease. It was well tolerated and did not increase cardiovascular events or mortality; however, trial size and duration limit definitive conclusions about safety. Clinical Trial Registration Information— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov/ct2/show/NCT00282984. Unique identifier: NCT00282984.
Modulation of Cell Death in the Rat Thymus: Light and Electron Microscopic Investigations

Abstract: In mammals, the thymus is the primary central organ of the lymphoid system; after birth, it progressively diminishes in size, undergoing gradual atrophy. Physiological maturation and/or involution of the thymus may be accelerated by endogenous or exogenous factors. Exposure to extremely low frequency EMF seems to interfere with thymic cell death. Data suggest that, in the rat model, a prolonged exposure to 50 Hz electric and magnetic fields, independently from field strength, seems to affect thymic cell death and possibly thymic physiology, since alterations in the balance of cell death and other parameters such as mitoses might interfere with the positive and negative selection of thymocytes and with the immunosurveillance properties of the thymus.
Intestinal Epithelial Cell Apoptosis following Cryptosporidium parvum Infection

ABSTRACT Cryptosporidium parvum induces moderate levels of apoptosis of cultured human intestinal epithelial cells, which are maximal at 24 h after infection. Apoptosis is further increased inC. parvum-infected cells by inhibition of NF-κB. C. parvum infection also attenuates epithelial apoptosis induced by strongly proapoptotic agents. The data suggest C. parvumhas developed strategies to limit apoptosis in order to facilitate its growth and maturation in the early period after epithelial cell infection.
The Future of Sovereignty in Multilevel Governance Europe - a Constructivist Reading

Multilevel governance presents a depiction of contemporary structures in EU Europe as consisting of overlapping authorities and competing competencies. By focusing on emerging non-anarchical structures in the international system, hence moving beyond the conventional hierarchy/anarchy dichotomy to distinguish domestic and international arenas, this seems a radical transformation of the familiar Westphalian system and to undermine state sovereignty. Paradoxically, however, the principle of sovereignty proves to be resilient despite its alleged empirical decline. This article argues that social constructivism can explain the paradox, by considering sovereign statehood as a process-dependent institutional fact, and by showing that multilevel governance can feed into this process.
People’s attitude towards wild elephants, forest conservation and Human-Elephant conflict in Nilambur, southern Western Ghats of Kerala, India

Conflict with elephants and subsequent economic losses negatively affect residents’ tolerance towards wild elephants. It is important to understand people’s attitude towards wildlife, especially Asian Elephants with an endangered status. A questionnaire survey was undertaken with 510 forest fringe residents of Nilambur North and South Forest Divisions, Kerala, to understand residents’ attitudes towards elephant conservation and Human-Elephant conflict. The majority of the villagers experienced psychological stress and fear associated with movement restriction and chances of encounters with elephants. Crop damage was perceived as the most serious issue, followed by injury or death by encounters with elephants. Elephants show a higher preference for raiding Jackfruit and Plantain than other crops. The conflict was caused more frequently by solitary elephants than by elephant herds. Elephants were mainly found near farm areas during late night (22:00–02:00 hr) and early night (20:00–22:00 hr). More than half of the residents were in favour of forest conservation owing to its ecological value. One-fourth of the respondents favoured forest conservation due to its extraction benefits such as collection of fuel wood and cattle grazing. Almost equal proportions of people have positive and negative attitudes towards elephants. In such instances, the possibility for a drastic shift towards negative attitudes following spontaneous elephant conflict events can be expected. Ecological awareness, interaction among stakeholders, and participatory maintenance of mitigation methods will possibly reduce conflict and contribute towards the coexistence of people and elephants in this human-dominated landscape.
Shock‐induced phase transformation of anorthitic plagioclase in the eucrite meteorite Northwest Africa 2650

Anorthite is an important constituent mineral in basaltic achondrites from small celestial bodies. Its high‐pressure phase transformation in shocked meteorites has not been systematically studied. In this study, we report the diverse phase transformation behaviors of anorthite in a shocked eucrite Northwest Africa (NWA) 2650, which also contains coesite, stishovite, vacancy‐rich clinopyroxene, super‐silicic garnet, and reidite. Anorthite in NWA 2650 has transformed into anorthite glass (anorthite glassy vein, maskelynite, and glass with a schlieren texture and vesicles), tissintite and dissociated into three‐phase assemblage grossular + kyanite + silica glass. Different occurrences of anorthite glass might have formed via the mechanism involving shear melting, solid‐state transformation, and postshock thermally melting, respectively. Tissintite could have crystallized from a high‐pressure plagioclase melt. The nucleation of tissintite might be facilitated by relict pyroxene fragments and the early formed vacancy‐rich clinopyroxene. The three‐phase assemblage grossular, kyanite, and silica glass should have formed from anorthitic melt at high‐pressure and high‐temperature conditions. The presence of maskelynite and reidite probably suggests a minimum peak shock pressure up to 20 GPa, while the other high‐pressure phases indicate that the shock pressure during the crystallization of shock melt veins might vary from >8 GPa to >2 GPa with a heterogeneous temperature distribution.
Predicting Participation in Social Media Sites by Analyzing User Participation Patterns

The success of social media websites—Web 2.0 platforms that enable users to communicate among themselves—hinges on users’ ability to generate content and respond to content supplied by others. Thus, understanding the current and expected patterns of participation among their users is a fundamental concern for the managers of social media websites. However, current prevailing prediction approaches use very simple benchmark models. We offer a novel approach for estimating the number of active users and predicting future participation. Using a unique data set from online forums, we demonstrate how probability models (specifically, the geometric/beta-Bernoulli model) traditionally used for customer loyalty analysis can be successfully used to assess participation patterns, and thus the future value of online communities. We further explore the factors that affect the usefulness of this approach. Compared with current methods, our approach generates better estimations of future visits as well as future contribution levels.
Convergence of Empirical Means with Alpha-Mixing Input Sequences, and an Application to PAC Learning

Suppose {Xi} is an alpha-mixing stochastic process assuming values in a set X, and that faX → R is bounded and measurable. It is shown in this note that the sequence of empirical means (1/m) ∑i=1mf(xi) converges in probability to the true expected value of the function f(.). Moreover, explicit estimates are constructed of the rate at which the empirical mean converges to the true expected value. These estimates generalize classical inequalities of Hoeffding, Bennett and Bernstein to the case of alpha-mixing inputs. In earlier work, similar results have been established when the alpha-mixing coefficient of the stochastic process converges to zero at a geometric rate. No such assumption is made in the present note. This result is then applied to the problem of PAC (probably approximately correct) learning under a fixed distribution.
Neural Text Categorizer for Exclusive Text Categorization

This research proposes a new neural network for text categorization which uses alternative representations of documents to numerical vectors. Since the proposed neural network is intended originally only for text categorization, it is called NTC (Neural Text Categorizer) in this research. Numerical vectors representing documents for tasks of text mining have inherently two main problems: huge dimensionality and sparse distribution. Although many various feature selection methods are developed to address the first problem, the reduced dimension remains still large. If the dimension is reduced excessively by a feature selection method, robustness of text categorization is degraded. Even if SVM (Support Vector Machine) is tolerable to huge dimensionality, it is not so to the second problem. The goal of this research is to address the two problems at same time by proposing a new representation of documents and a new neural network using the representation for its input vector.
Measurement of thermal parameters of skin-fabric environment

Background and Purpose: In combination with metabolic heat, the heat generated by human activities and worn garment produce 6 basic factors (sometimes called 6 basic parameters because they are in space and time, but fixed representative values are frequently used in analyses) which define thermal body environments. The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of one parameter – clothing insulation on the total transfer of heat and water vapor. Materials and Methods: The measurement was carried out on knitted fabrics commercially used for the production of underwear or different types of next-to-skin-wear. The transfer of heat and moisture trough fabrics was observed in two simulated climatic environments (moderate and hot) with the constant parameters metabolic energy and air velocity. Results: The results indicated that the heat resistance increases by laying a knitted fabric layer or under real conditions when the body is dressed in lightweight knitwear by 25%. The test results of the samples under different environment conditions indicated a reduction in heat resistance under moderate conditions. It also applies to the measurement results of the resistance to water vapor transfer, but the differences within the observed relationships are higher than it was in the case of heat transfer resistance. Conclusions: The study showed that both heat and moisture transfers are freely movable controlling elements of comfort perception. Therefore, the optimal design of clothing systems is important factor of comfort.
Understanding the Determinants of Consumers' Willingness to Pay for Eco-Labeled Products: An Empirical Analysis of the China Environmental Label

This study applies data from a web-based survey conducted in mainland China to examine the determinants of consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for seven different product categories awarded with China Environmental Label and com- pare the mean WTP estimates among these categories. The Interval Regression method is used for estimation. The results indicate that Chinese consumers who regard environmental conservation as being more important than life convenience, who believe purchasing the eco-labeled products is good for the environment, and who have the experience in purchasing eco-labeled products are willing to pay more for those products with environmental label or eco-label. In addition, socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, age, education and household income are found to be important factors to affect Chinese consumers’ WTP amounts. Finally, the results of pair-wise comparison among the mean WTP estimates of various eco-labeled products indicate that most of them are different, which implies that the degrees of Chinese consumers’ willingness to pay extra money for China Environmental Label are different based on the types of products.
Exploiting Social Relations and Sentiment for Stock Prediction

In this paper we first exploit cash-tags ("$" fol- lowed by stocks' ticker symbols) in Twitter to build a stock network, where nodes are stocks connected by edges when two stocks co-occur frequently in tweets. We then employ a labeled topic model to jointly model both the tweets and the network structure to assign each node and each edge a topic respectively. This Semantic Stock Network (SSN) summarizes discussion topics about stocks and stock relations. We fur- ther show that social sentiment about stock (node) topics and stock relationship (edge) topics are predictive of each stock's market. For predic- tion, we propose to regress the topic-sentiment time-series and the stock's price time series. Ex- perimental results demonstrate that topic senti- ments from close neighbors are able to help im- prove the prediction of a stock markedly.
Fertilizer Source and Soil Aeration Effects on Runoff Volume and Quality

Minimizing runoff losses from grasslands may benefit the producer and abate potential eutrophication of aquatic systems. This study was conducted to evaluate the effects of fertilizer source and soil aeration on the volume and quality of runoff from grassed plots. Sixteen tall fescue [Festuca arundinacea Schreb. ]-bermudagrass [Cynodon dactylon L. ] plots were established on Altavista sandy-loam soil (fine loamy, mixed, semiactive, thermic Aquic Hapludults) in Georgia, USA. Two fertilizer sources (inorganic fertilizer [IF] and broiler litter [BL]) and two aeration treatments (aerated and nonaerated) were factorially combined to generate four experimental treatments. Broiler litter was applied at 1765 kg dry matter ha - 1 and IF was applied to match nutrient rates applied with BL (36 kg available N ha - 1 , 39 kg P ha - 1 , 60 kg K ha - 1 ). Simulated rainfall was applied immediately after fertilizer application and 1 mo later. Runoff samples were analyzed for dissolved reactive phosphorus (DRP), total Kjeldahl phosphorus (TKP), and ammonium (NH 4 -N). In the first runoff event, plots fertilized with IF lost more TKP than plots fertilized with BL (3.4 vs. 1.1 kg P ha - 1 ). In contrast, plots fertilized with BL lost more NH 4 -N than plots fertilized with IF (1.4 vs. 0.6 kg N ha - 1 ). These results support the use of different weighting factors for BL and IF when assessing their potential for contaminating surface runoff. Aeration numerically reduced runoff volume by 27%, though not significantly, in the first runoff event (P = 0.16), but did not affect runoff volume 1 mo later. Aeration did not affect the mass losses of DRP, TKN, and NH 4 -N. These results indicate that aeration of hayed grasslands on these soils would not be expected to significantly affect the volume and quality of surface runoff.
Effects of Coronary Arterial Pressure on Left Ventricular End‐Systolic Pressure‐Volume Relation of Isolated Canine Heart

In the excised canine left ventricle, the end-systolic pressure-volume relationship (ESPVR) has been shown to be approximately linear over the working range of loading conditions when coronary arterial pressure (CAP) is maintained constant, independent of loading conditions. To investigate the ESPVR under the more intact physiological condition in which the CAP varies with loading on the left ventricle, we studied the effect of changes in CAP on the ESPVR in 10 excised cross-circulated canine ventricles which were contracting isovolumically. The ESPVR, determined from isovolumic contractions at four different volumes, was reasonably independent of CAP as long as CAP remained above a critical pressure (67.0 ± 22.1 mm Hg). Below this pressure, the slope of ESPVR decreased although the volume axis intercept (Vo) remained unaltered. These findings indicate that under physiological conditions, where there is a close coupling of CAP to systolic left ventricular pressure, the ESPVR should become nonlinear in the low preload or afterload regions. When CAP was varied with the left ventricular pressure in five ventricles, the ESPVR indeed became nonlinear in the low-load region. We conclude that the ESPVR in intact conditions is reasonably linear in the physiological load range, but it can be nonlinear in the low-load range.
The Association Between Serum Leptin Levels and Post-Stroke Depression: A Retrospective Clinical Study

Objective To investigate the question of whether serum leptin levels might be associated with post-stroke depression. Methods We studied 130 patients who experienced a first episode of stroke of more than three months' duration, without any previous history of depression or speech disorders. Data were collected regarding the patient demographics, depressive mood (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th edition [DSM-IV] criteria and Beck Depression Inventory) and serum leptin levels measured by an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). In addition, the Korean version of Modified Barthel Index (K-MBI) and Korean version of Mini-Mental State Examination (K-MMSE) were used to assess the subjects' independence, in regard to the activities of daily living and cognition. A statistical analysis was performed to determine differences the serum leptin levels between patients with depression and those without depression, and to determine the difference in the MBI and K-MMSE scores between the groups separated according to the serum leptin levels. Results Higher serum leptin levels were observed in patients with depression, compared with those without depression (38.5 ng/mL [range, 25.1-59.2 ng/mL] vs. 8.2 ng/mL [range, 4.9-17.8 ng/mL]; p<0.01. The serum leptin level showed an association with depression (odds ratio, 1.21; 95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.45; p=0.021). The K-MMSE and K-MBI improvement scores were lower, with statistical significance, in the group with the highest leptin level (>30 mg/dL), compared to the other two groups. Conclusion High serum leptin levels are associated with depression after stroke, and patients with elevated serum leptin levels were disadvantaged in regard to functional and cognitive outcomes.
An MRI study of basal ganglia volumes in first-episode schizophrenia patients treated with risperidone.

OBJECTIVE The basal ganglia may contribute to extrapyramidal movement disorders, affective disturbances, and cognitive deficits in schizophrenia. Basal ganglia volumes are putatively affected by antipsychotic medications. The purpose of this study was to determine the long-term effects of risperidone treatment in a cohort of first-episode patients with schizophrenia. METHOD The subjects were 30 patients with first-episode schizophrenia, 12 patients chronically treated with typical antipsychotics, and 23 healthy comparison subjects. They were scanned by magnetic resonance imaging at baseline. The first-episode patients received 1 year of continuous risperidone treatment, after which they and the comparison subjects were rescanned. Caudate, putamen, and globus pallidus volumes were determined from coronal images. RESULTS The baseline caudate, putamen, and globus pallidus volumes were significantly larger in the chronically treated patients than in the untreated first-episode subjects and comparison subjects. These volumes did not differ between the first-episode patients and healthy comparison subjects. Basal ganglia volumes were unchanged after 1 year of exposure to risperidone in the first-episode subjects. Extrapyramidal movement disorders were present in the majority of chronically treated patients and more than one-third of the never-medicated first-episode patients at baseline. CONCLUSIONS This group of first-episode patients did not exhibit abnormalities of basal ganglia volumes, nor were basal ganglia volumes affected by exposure to risperidone. Movement disorders were observed in both first-episode and chronically treated patients, suggesting effects of both illness and medications.
Compressible boundary layer transition induced by isolated roughness elements

The laminar-to-turbulent transition of boundary layers induced by isolated threedimensional roughness elements is analyzed by mining a direct numerical simulation database, which covers the variation of many physical parameters, including Mach and Reynolds numbers, and obstacle shape and size. We find that the transition process is approximately controlled by a Reynolds number based on the momentum deficit past the obstacle, which is proportional to the classical roughness Reynolds number, and that approximately incorporates the effects of the roughness element shape. The analysis of the perturbation energy past the obstacle shows that the varicose mode of instability is always dominant in the close proximity of the obstacle, and it promotes transition in super-critical flow cases. On the other hand, the sinuous mode appears to dominate the evolution of marginally sub-critical cases, which feature quasi-steady momentum streaks.
Regret Lower Bound and Optimal Algorithm in Dueling Bandit Problem

We study the $K$-armed dueling bandit problem, a variation of the standard stochastic bandit problem where the feedback is limited to relative comparisons of a pair of arms. We introduce a tight asymptotic regret lower bound that is based on the information divergence. An algorithm that is inspired by the Deterministic Minimum Empirical Divergence algorithm (Honda and Takemura, 2010) is proposed, and its regret is analyzed. The proposed algorithm is found to be the first one with a regret upper bound that matches the lower bound. Experimental comparisons of dueling bandit algorithms show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms existing ones.