Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improving Risk Prediction of Clostridium Difficile Infection Using Temporal Event-Pairs

Clostridium Difficile Infection (CDI) is a contagious healthcare-associated infection that imposes a significant burden on the healthcare system. In 2011 alone, half a million patients suffered from CDI in the United States, 29,000 dying within 30 days of diagnosis. Determining which hospital patients are at risk for developing CDI is critical to helping healthcare workers take timely measures to prevent or detect and treat this infection. We improve the state of the art of CDI risk prediction by designing an ensemble logistic regression classifier that given partial patient visit histories, outputs the risk of patients acquiring CDI during their current hospital visit. The novelty of our approach lies in the representation of each patient visit as a collection of co-occurring and chronologically ordered pairs of events. This choice is motivated by our hypothesis that CDI risk is influenced not just by individual events (e.g., Being prescribed a first generation cephalosporin antibiotic), but by the temporal ordering of individual events (e.g., Antibiotic prescription followed by transfer to a certain hospital unit). While this choice explodes the number of features, we use a randomized greedy feature selection algorithm followed by BIC minimization to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space, while retaining the most relevant features. We apply our approach to a rich dataset from the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics (UIHC), curated from diverse sources, consisting of 200,000 visits (30,000 per year, 2006-2011) involving 125,000 unique patients, 2 million diagnoses, 8 million prescriptions, 400,000 room transfers spanning a hospital with 700 patient rooms and 200 units. Our approach to classification produces better risk predictions (AUC) than existing risk estimators for CDI, even when trained just on data available at patient admission. It also identifies novel risk factors for CDI that are combinations of co-occurring and chronologically ordered events.
Use of granulocyte-colony stimulating factor during acute myocardial infarction to enhance bone marrow stem cell mobilization in humans: clinical and angiographic safety profile.

AIMS There is increasing evidence that stem cell (SC) mobilization to the heart and their differentiation into cardiac cells is a naturally occurring process. We sought to assess the safety and feasibility of granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) administration in humans to enhance SC mobilization and left ventricle (LV) injury repair during myocardial infarction (MI). METHODS AND RESULTS Twenty patients with STEMI (mean age, 61+/-10 years), of whom 14 were submitted to primary percutaneous coronary intervention, were randomized to G-CSF (5 microg/kg/day s.c. for 4 consecutive days) or placebo. At entry and then at months 3 and 6, (99m)Tc-sestamibi gated-SPECT was performed to estimate extension of perfusion defect (PD) and LV function. The study drug was well tolerated and induced a significant increase of white blood count, CD34(+) cells, and CD34(+) cells coexpressing AC133 and VEGFR-2. At follow-up, treated and placebo groups did not differ for the angiographic coronary late loss and showed a similar pattern of PD recovery, whereas in the former at 6 months LVEF and especially LVEDV tended to be relatively higher (P=0.068) and lower (P=0.054), respectively. CONCLUSION G-CSF administration in acute MI patients was feasible and did not lead to any clinical or angiographic adverse events and resulted in CD34(+) and CD34(+)AC133(+)VEGFR2(+) cell mobilization.
Attribution of extreme weather and climate‐related events

Extreme weather and climate‐related events occur in a particular place, by definition, infrequently. It is therefore challenging to detect systematic changes in their occurrence given the relative shortness of observational records. However, there is a clear interest from outside the climate science community in the extent to which recent damaging extreme events can be linked to human‐induced climate change or natural climate variability. Event attribution studies seek to determine to what extent anthropogenic climate change has altered the probability or magnitude of particular events. They have shown clear evidence for human influence having increased the probability of many extremely warm seasonal temperatures and reduced the probability of extremely cold seasonal temperatures in many parts of the world. The evidence for human influence on the probability of extreme precipitation events, droughts, and storms is more mixed. Although the science of event attribution has developed rapidly in recent years, geographical coverage of events remains patchy and based on the interests and capabilities of individual research groups. The development of operational event attribution would allow a more timely and methodical production of attribution assessments than currently obtained on an ad hoc basis. For event attribution assessments to be most useful, remaining scientific uncertainties need to be robustly assessed and the results clearly communicated. This requires the continuing development of methodologies to assess the reliability of event attribution results and further work to understand the potential utility of event attribution for stakeholder groups and decision makers. WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:23–41. doi: 10.1002/wcc.380
The Phosphoinositol 3,4-Bisphosphate-binding Protein TAPP1 Interacts with Syntrophins and Regulates Actin Cytoskeletal Organization*

Syntrophins are scaffold proteins of the dystrophin glycoprotein complex (DGC), which target ion channels, receptors, and signaling proteins to specialized subcellular domains. A yeast two-hybrid screen of a human brain cDNA library with the PSD-95, Discs-large, ZO-1 (PDZ) domain of γ1-syntrophin yielded overlapping clones encoding the C terminus of TAPP1, a pleckstrin homology (PH) domain-containing adapter protein that interacts specifically with phosphatidylinositol 3,4-bisphosphate (PI(3,4)P2). In biochemical assays, the C terminus of TAPP1 bound specifically to the PDZ domains of γ1-, α1-, and β2-syntrophin and was required for syntrophin binding and for the correct subcellular localization of TAPP1. TAPP1 is recruited to the plasma membrane of cells stimulated with platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), a motogen that produces PI(3,4)P2. Cell migration in response to PDGF stimulation is characterized by a rapid reorganization of the actin cytoskeleton, which gives rise to plasma membrane specializations including peripheral and dorsal circular ruffles. Both TAPP1 and syntrophins were localized to PDGF-induced circular membrane ruffles in NIH-3T3 cells. Ectopic expression of TAPP1 potently blocked PDGF-induced formation of dorsal circular ruffles, but did not affect peripheral ruffling. Interestingly, coexpression of α1- or γ1-syntrophin with TAPP1 prevented the blockade of circular ruffling. In addition to syntrophins, several other proteins of the DGC were enriched in circular ruffles. Collectively, our results suggest syntrophins regulate the localization of TAPP1, which may be important for remodeling the actin cytoskeleton in response to growth factor stimulation.
Managing Large Graphs on Multi-Cores with Graph Awareness

Grace is a graph-aware, in-memory, transactional graph management system, specifically built for real-time queries and fast iterative computations. It is designed to run on large multi-cores, taking advantage of the inherent parallelism to improve its performance. Grace contains a number of graph-specific and multi-core-specific optimizations including graph partitioning, careful in-memory vertex ordering, updates batching, and load-balancing. It supports queries, searches, iterative computations, and transactional updates. Grace scales to large graphs (e.g., a Hotmail graph with 320 million vertices) and performs up to two orders of magnitude faster than commercial key-value stores and graph databases.
Temporal stability of insular avian malarial parasite communities

Avian malaria is caused by a diverse community of genetically differentiated parasites of the genera Plasmodium and Haemoproteus. Rapid seasonal and annual antigenic allele turnover resulting from selection by host immune systems, as observed in some parasite populations infecting humans, may extend analogously to dynamic species compositions within communities of avian malarial parasites. To address this issue, we examined the stability of avian malarial parasite lineages across multiple time–scales within two insular host communities. Parasite communities in Puerto Rico and St Lucia included 20 and 14 genetically distinct parasite lineages, respectively. Lineage composition of the parasite community in Puerto Rico did not vary seasonally or over a 1 year interval. However, over intervals approaching a decade, the avian communities of both islands experienced an apparent loss or gain of one malarial parasite lineage, indicating the potential for relatively frequent lineage turnover. Patterns of temporal variation of parasite lineages in this study suggest periodic colonization and extinction events driven by a combination of host–specific immune responses, competition between lineages and drift. However, the occasional and ecologically dynamic lineage turnover exhibited by insular avian parasite communities is not as rapid as antigenic allele turnover within populations of human malaria.
The gender gap in sport event attendance in Europe: The impact of macro-level gender equality

This paper studies the gender gap in sport event attendance – characterized by higher male and lower female participation – using a macro-sociological and cross-national comparative approach. We argue that because gender is produced and justified in the realm of sport, gender gaps in sport event attendance may be more pronounced in some societies than others, depending on the position women and men have in the particular context in which someone ‘does’ his/her gender. So, in addition to individual attributes, one has to consider the societal, macro-level gender equality in order to understand the individual-level gender inequalities in sport event attendance. Using multilevel analyses on Eurobarometer data (2007), we evaluate whether the size of the gender gap in sport event attendance varies across European Union (EU) countries and how this variation relates to societal gender equality, as measured by the Gender Equality Index of the European Institute for Gender Equality. We find higher male than female attendance in all EU countries, but also conclude that higher levels of macro-level gender equality are associated with smaller gender gaps in sport event attendance.
Income Taxes, Compensating Differentials, and Occupational Choice: How Taxes Distort the Wage-Amenity Decision

The link between taxes and occupational choices is central for understanding the welfare impacts of income taxes. Just as taxes distort the labor-leisure decision, they also distort the wage-amenity decision. Yet, there have been few studies on the full response along this margin. When tax rates increase, workers favor jobs with lower wages and more amenities. The authors introduce a two-step methodology which uses compensating differentials to characterize the tax elasticity of occupational choice. They estimate a significant compensated elasticity of 0.03, implying that a 10% increase in the net-of-tax rate causes workers to change to a 0.3% higher wage job.
Environmental communications in New Zealand’s skiing industry: building social legitimacy without addressing non-local transport

ABSTRACT This qualitative study investigates how skiers’ transport is addressed in environmental communications (ECs) produced by ski areas on New Zealand’s South Island. Ski areas can build social legitimacy by positioning themselves as pro-environmental. Skiers’ transport, which accounts for more CO2 emissions than the daily operations of ski areas in New Zealand, is one of the most pressing issues facing the industry. The topic of skiers’ transport was explored via an analysis of the ski areas’ ECs in addition to semi-structured, in-depth interviews with managers from the ski areas and with skiers. The research found that the impacts of skiers’ non-local transport are largely ignored by both ski area managers and skiers. Ski areas are viewed as detached from transport networks, they do not face pressures from skiers to mitigate those impacts, and they are thus able to build social legitimacy by engaging in and communicating relatively simple pro-environmental initiatives (such as recycling). These findings demonstrate a need to reconceptualise what constitutes a sustainable sport tourism organisation in order to account for the salience of transport-related impacts and to consider the extent to which ski areas are responsible for mitigating emissions stemming from tourists’ transport.
A Framework for the Initiation of Networked Improvement Communities

Background/Context Educators around the country are working individually and collectively to improve teaching and learning. Despite marked progress in some places driven by these improvement efforts, overall progress in the education field has been slow and outcomes remain highly variable. This is partly because the field is not organized to learn systematically, accumulate, and disseminate the practical knowledge needed for the improvement of teaching and learning. Purpose/Objective This paper explores the initiation of a social structure to organize collaborative improvement work: the networked improvement community (or NIC). NICs are highly structured, intentionally formed collaborations among education professionals, researchers, and designers that aim to address a high leverage practical problem. We focus on NIC initiation, because of the challenges associated with launching improvement networks. Research Design Drawing on analysis of case studies of network initiation and theory on network initiation and the NIC concept, we posit an organizing framework for describing the process of NIC initiation. Findings/Results The NIC initiation framework specifies five domains of activity that we hypothesize are critical to launching a NIC. These domains attend to: developing a theory of practice improvement; building a measurement and analytics infrastructure; learning and using improvement research methods; leading, organizing, and operating the network; and fostering the emergence of culture, norms, and identity consistent with network aims. We illustrate these five domains with examples from a set of case studies of network initiation that we utilized as a way to test and further elaborate the framework. Conclusions/Recommendations A firm foundation for network initiation is laid through the strategic actions of a network initiation team. By attending to the five domains of activity specified in our framework, initiation teams can catalyze the development of an organizational structure that allows educators to accelerate learning from practice and building a professional knowledge base that enables the field to tackle complex educational problems.
Changes in mammography use: economic, need, and service factors.

OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to document changes in mammography use between 1987 and 1990 and assess the relationship of use to selected economic, need, and health system factors. METHODS Independent random-digit-dialed telephone surveys of women between 52 and 75 years of age were conducted. RESULTS Between 1987 and 1990, the proportion of women who had had a mammogram in the past year increased from 31% to 51%. Though income was significantly related to overall patterns of use, it was not associated with recent mammogram use in 1990. Women with a family history of breast cancer reported greater use at both times, as did women who reported having a regular physician (particularly a gynecologist or internist). When all other variables were controlled for, women were over nine times more likely to have had multiple and recent mammograms in 1990 than in 1987. CONCLUSIONS Mammography use dramatically increased between 1987 and 1990. There were strong relationships between the type of regular physician and mammography screening and between economic and personal history and repeated and recent mammography use.
Adhesion-Dependent Signals Synergistic Effects of Cytokines and Plasma Cell Survival Is Mediated by

Recent results suggest that plasma cell longevity is not an intrinsic capacity, but depends on yet unknown factors produced in their environment. In this study, we show that the cytokines IL-5, IL-6, TNF- (cid:1) , and stromal cell-derived factor-1 (cid:1) as well as signaling via CD44 support the survival of isolated bone marrow plasma cells. The cytokines IL-7 and stem cell factor, crucially important for early B cell development, do not mediate plasma cell survival, indicating that plasma cells and early B cells have different survival requirements. As shown in IL-6-deﬁcient mice, IL-6 is required for a normal induction, but not for the maintenance of plasma cell responses in vivo, indicating that the effects of individual survival factors are redundant. Optimal survival of isolated plasma cells requires stimulation by a combination of factors acting synergistically. These results strongly support the concept that plasma cell survival depends on niches in which a combination of speciﬁc signals, including IL-5, IL-6, stromal cell-derived factor-1 (cid:1) , TNF- (cid:1) , and ligands for CD44, provides an environment required to mediate plasma cell longevity. The Journal of Immunology, 2003, 171: 1684–1690. Valencia, CA), according to the producer’s instruc-tions. The PCR protocol consisted of 35 cycles (30 cycles for (cid:3) -actin) of 94°C for 45 s, 58°C for 45 s, and 72°C for 1 min using Master Cycler Personal (Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany). The PCR ampliﬁcation prod- ucts were separated in 1.5% agarose gel and visualized by ethidium bro-mide staining. Bcl-2, Bcl-x L , Mcl-1, Bax, CD95, and (cid:3) -actin primers were as reported (21, 22).
The global textile and clothing industry post the agreement on textiles and clothing

Disclaimer and citation guideline Discussion Papers are presented by the authors in their personal capacity and opinions expressed in these papers should be attributed to the authors. They are not meant to represent the positions or opinions of the WTO Secretariat or of its Members and are without prejudice to Members' rights and obligations under the WTO. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors.
The Centrality of Theory in Modern Day Crime Prevention: Developments, Challenges, and Opportunities

Theory matters in crime prevention. Indeed, but this is hardly the full story. Crime prevention is oftentimes viewed as atheoretical—not grounded in the etiology of crime and offending. Reasons abound for this view, and the recent interest in an evidence-based approach to policy-making has been at the forefront. This article reviews the role that theory plays in modern day crime prevention, with a special focus on the three main crime prevention strategies: developmental, community, and situational. The review identifies a number of key challenges and opportunities for making theory more central to crime prevention. It suggests that the classification system employed in situational crime prevention has allowed for a more explicit connection between sound theory and prevention techniques, and may provide important lessons for developmental and community crime prevention.
Payday Loans and Credit Cards: New Liquidity and Credit Scoring Puzzles?

Using a unique dataset matched at the individual level from two administrative sources, we examine household choices between liabilities and assess the informational content of prime and subprime credit scores in the consumer credit market. First, more specifically, we assess consumers' effectiveness at prioritizing use of their lowest-cost credit option. We find that most borrowers from one payday lender who also have a credit card from a major credit card issuer have substantial credit card liquidity on the days they take out their payday loans. This is costly because payday loans have annualized interest rates of at least several hundred percent, though perhaps partly explained by the fact that borrowers have experienced substantial declines in credit card liquidity in the year leading up to the payday loan. Second, we show that FICO scores and Teletrack scores have independent information and are specialized for the types of lending where they are used. Teletrack scores have eight times the predictive power for payday loan default as FICO scores. We also show that prime lenders should value information about their borrowers' subprime activity. Taking out a payday loan predicts nearly a doubling in the probability of serious credit card delinquency over the next year.
Disrupting the carceral state through education journey mapping

Abstract The School-to-Prison Pipeline is an alarming trend of funneling children of color out of schools and into incarceration. Yet the focus on the Pipeline neglects the ways society is imbued with a commitment to criminalizing unwanted bodies. In this empirical article I foreground a spatial analysis, making connections to the socio-spatial dialectic, exploring the nature of the Pipeline within a carceral state, and establishing who is vulnerable to state violence. Next I frame the work through Disability Critical Race Theory and the methodological tool of Education Journey Mapping, investigating both the social and spatial processes through the dimensions of mapping. Finally I document findings, making visible the socio-spatial education trajectories of incarcerated young women of color. The purpose of this article then, is to explore the social and spatial mechanisms that funneled girls of color with disabilities into the carceral state, and ways the girls resisted the state violence.
Territorial designs and international politics: the diverging constitution of space and boundaries

ABSTRACT Territorial designs and international politics: the diverging constitution of space and boundaries. Territory, Politics, Governance. The debate about the role and direction of territory and territoriality – especially with respect to the politically and socially constructed nature of territory – has been evident within political geography and political science, as well as in other disciplines, for some time. Interdisciplinary interaction over the study of territory, however, has so far been less than impressive. Aiming to enhance our understanding of the place of territory in international relations, broadly defined, and to bridge disciplinary divides, this paper introduces the concept of ‘territorial designs’. Territorial designs pertain to the delineation of the external boundaries, to the constitution of the society within these boundaries, and to the interaction between delineation and constitution. It is a process by which elites, in interaction with their own society and their external environment, intentionally and systematically constitute and institutionalize territoriality, and hence also territory. Territorial designs framework, as the papers in this volume collectively highlight, sheds a light on four key areas: the strategic logic and interaction behind different territorial systems; the unintended consequences of such designs; the tensions between regional/local territorial arrangements and global ones; and the roles that technology and knowledge play in the emergence of different forms of territoriality.