Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Immediate effect of intravitreal injection of bevacizumab on intraocular pressure

Purpose To investigate the immediate effect of intravitreal injection of bevacizumab on intraocular pressure (IOP). Methods This was a prospective and nonrandomized study. A total of 291 eyes with macular edema or active choroidal neovascularization were submitted to a single 1.25 mg (0.05 mL) bevacizumab intravitreal injection. Intraocular pressure was measured with an Icare® tonometer immediately before and after injection in a seated position. The presence of subconjunctival reflux was recorded. The fellow eye served as the control. Results Mean preoperative IOP was 18.0±5.9 mmHg in the treated eye versus 16.9±6.0 mmHg in the fellow eye. Mean postoperative IOP was 42.1±14.5 mmHg in the treated eye versus 17.5±6.0 mmHg in the fellow eye. The IOP variation was statistically significant in both cases and controls (P<0.001 and P=0.003, respectively), and this increase was higher in cases than in controls (P<0.001). Postoperative IOPs higher than 50 mmHg were achieved in 32.0% of the eyes. Subconjunctival reflux was present in 21.3% and determined a lower IOP rise (P<0.001). Tested variables (glaucoma, phakic status, and sex) did not have a statistically significant effect on IOP rise or subconjunctival reflux. Conclusion IOP increases with intravitreal bevacizumab injection, reaching 50 mmHg or more in about one third of patients. A higher IOP is expected if no subconjunctival reflux occurs. The baseline IOP does not influence the incidence of subconjunctival reflux. The clinical relevance of these facts has yet to be clarified.
Gravitational Stirring in Planetary Debris Disks

We describe gravitational stirring models of planetary debris disks using a new multiannulus planetesimal evolution code. The current code includes gravitational stirring and dynamical friction; future studies will include coagulation, fragmentation, Poynting-Robertson drag, and other physical processes. We use the results of our calculations to investigate the physical conditions required for small bodies in a planetesimal disk to reach the shattering velocity and begin a collisional cascade. Our results demonstrate that disks composed primarily of bodies with a single size will not undergo a collisional cascade that produces small dust grains at 30–150 AU on timescales of 1 Gyr or smaller. Disks with a size distribution of bodies reach conditions necessary for a collisional cascade in 10 Myr to 1 Gyr if the disk is at least as massive as a minimum mass solar nebula and if the disk contains objects with radii of 500 km or larger. The estimated ∼500 Myr survival time for these disks is close to the median age of ∼400 Myr derived for nearby stars with dusty disks.
Examining cognitive risk and protective factors involved in liability to depression

Major depressive disorder is characterized by emotion dysregulation and an imbalance between negative and positive affect. Cognitive impairments may underlie the difficulties with emotion regulation shown in depression. However, additional studies are needed to explore cognitive risk and protective factors for depression, especially with regard to cognitive processes involved in information processing that are assessed using performance based measures. This thesis explored three areas of cognitive processes that have been highlighted as potential risk and protective factors: executive functions, specificity of autobiographical memory and reward processing. These were examined with a focus on individuals at familial risk for depression. First, the protective role of executive functioning was explored for adolescent offspring of depressed parents. This examination found that in the presence of a current depressive episode in the parent, adolescents with better executive functions had fewer depressive symptoms. Second, specificity in retrieval of autobiographical memory was examined as a predictor of mental health resilience and social functioning in the same high risk sample. This revealed that impairment in retrieving specific memories was associated with lower mood resilience and poorer social functioning over time. Third, associations between reward learning behavior in a social context and indices of familial risk, anhedonia, depressive symptoms and social functioning were examined in a sample of young adult offspring of parents with and without a history of depression. The findings suggested that familial risk, anhedonia and social functioning were associated with specific patterns of reward learning behavior. Finally, due to a lack of measures evaluating reward processing in adolescents, particularly in a social context, I developed and validated a novel measure to assess sensitivity to social rewards in adolescents. Altogether, the findings presented in the thesis advance understanding of cognitive risk and protective factors in depression, especially in the context of individuals at familial risk for depression.
Examining the Role of Privacy in Virtual Migration: The Case of WhatsApp and Threema

WhatsApp is a widely used instant messaging application on smartphones. However, owing to privacy deficiencies in WhatsApp, alternative services that emphasize privacy protection, such as Threema, have emerged. Thus, the question arises whether users would switch from WhatsApp to Threema for privacy reasons, and what the factors are that would affect their switching intention. To answer these questions, we develop a research model examining the role of privacy in virtual migration, using the push-pullmooring (PPM) migration framework as a theoretical lens. Based on the results of an online survey of 220 German-speaking smartphone users, we found that privacy protection is relevant to users’ switching intention in two ways: as a push effect encouraging users to leave WhatsApp, and as a pull effect attracting users to Threema. However, while our results suggest that peer influence facilitates WhatsApp users’ switching intention, switching costs appear to be a strong barrier.
The evolution of user mobility on the eduroam network

The emergence of smartphones with Wireless LAN (WiFi) network interfaces brought new challenges to application developers. The expected increase of users connectivity will impact their expectations for example on the performance of background applications. Unfortunately, the number and breadth of the studies on the new patterns of user mobility and connectivity that result from the emergence of smartphones is still insufficient to support this claim. This paper contributes with preliminary results on a large scale study of the usage pattern of about 49000 devices and 31000 users who accessed at least one access point of the eduroam WiFi network on the campuses of the Lisbon Polytechnic Institute. Results confirm that the increasing number of smartphones resulted in significant changes to the pattern of use, with impact on the amount of traffic and users connection time.
Constraint and opportunity : women ’ s employment in Britain

Paid employment is important in its own right as one form of productive activity, and is also a principal source of income, self-esteem and social interaction. It features in Nussbaum’s list of central human capabilities and the denial of opportunity for employment is discussed extensively by Sen. Empirical identification of employment as a functioning is straightforward, but identification of employment capability is not, and it is the capability which is a demand of social justice. Standard measures of unemployment fail to take account of many types of constraints on employment and often misclassify individuals, especially women, as economically inactive – a status which is implicitly assumed to be voluntary. This paper develops and illustrates two complementary ways to identify employment capability for women in 1990s Britain. One analysis is based on describing constraints on employment, the second analysis is based on subjective assessments of women themselves. Methodological difficulties created by unobservable constraints (for the first approach) and by adaptive preferences (for the second approach) are discussed. Data are drawn from the British Household Panel Study for 1998/9, a nationally representative survey of approximately 5,000 households. The results suggest that nearly three-quarters of women who were not in paid work lacked employment capability, of whom only one-third would be picked up in official unemployment statistics. The paper concludes that it is possible to identify employment capability empirically, although normative judgements about the significance of preferences and constraints have to be made. Especially for women, a measure of employment capability provides a better guide for policy than standard measures of unemployment.
A Recombinant Multiepitope Protein for Hepatitis B Diagnosis

Hepatitis B is a liver inflammation caused by hepatitis B virus (HBV) and can be diagnosed in clinical stage by hepatitis B core antibody from IgM class (anti-HBcIgM). Hepatitis B core antibody from IgG class (Anti-HBcIgG) appears quickly after IgM, reaching high titers in chronic hepatitis, and remains even after cure. Since hepatitis B core antibody (anti-HBc) is the first antibody identified and sometimes the only marker detected during the course of infection, it can be used both to indicate HBV acute infection (anti-HBc-IgM) and to identify individuals who have come into contact with the virus (anti-HBc-IgG). In this work we propose a recombinant hepatitis B core multiepitope antigen (rMEHB) to be used for diagnosis of hepatitis B. For this purpose, a synthetic gene coding for rMEHB was designed and cloned into vector pET21a with a 6xHis tag at the C-terminal. Time course induction in E. coli showed an induced protein with an apparent molecular mass of ~21 kDa. Protein purification was performed by a single step with affinity chromatography Ni-NTA. Circular dichroism spectroscopy indicated rMEHB as a thermal stable protein at pH 7.0 and 8.0. In these conditions rMEHB was successfully used to perform an enzyme linked immuno sorbent assay (ELISA) with positive and negative sera.
Parcellating connectivity in spatial maps

A common goal in biological sciences is to model a complex web of connections using a small number of interacting units. We present a general approach for dividing up elements in a spatial map based on their connectivity properties, allowing for the discovery of local regions underlying large-scale connectivity matrices. Our method is specifically designed to respect spatial layout and identify locally-connected clusters, corresponding to plausible coherent units such as strings of adjacent DNA base pairs, subregions of the brain, animal communities, or geographic ecosystems. Instead of using approximate greedy clustering, our nonparametric Bayesian model infers a precise parcellation using collapsed Gibbs sampling. We utilize an infinite clustering prior that intrinsically incorporates spatial constraints, allowing the model to search directly in the space of spatially-coherent parcellations. After showing results on synthetic datasets, we apply our method to both functional and structural connectivity data from the human brain. We find that our parcellation is substantially more effective than previous approaches at summarizing the brain’s connectivity structure using a small number of clusters, produces better generalization to individual subject data, and reveals functional parcels related to known retinotopic maps in visual cortex. Additionally, we demonstrate the generality of our method by applying the same model to human migration data within the United States. This analysis reveals that migration behavior is generally influenced by state borders, but also identifies regional communities which cut across state lines. Our parcellation approach has a wide range of potential applications in understanding the spatial structure of complex biological networks.
Toxicopathological Evaluation of Hydroethanol Extract of Dianthus basuticus in Wistar Rats

Background. Dianthus basuticus is a commonly used medicinal plant in Basotho traditional medicine for the treatment of diabetes, but there is no report on its safety or toxicity. Therefore, we evaluated the toxicity profile of the hydroethanol whole plant extract of Dianthus basuticus in Wistar rats. Methods. Acute toxicity test was performed with single oral administration of 100–3200 mg/kg body weight of D. basuticus extract to rats and the animals were observed for 14 days for signs of toxicity. The subacute toxicity experiment was conducted by oral administration of graded doses (200, 400, and 800 mg/kg) of D. basuticus extract daily for 28 days. Behavioural changes as well as haematological, biochemical, and histological parameters were then evaluated. Results. There was no observable sign of toxicity in the acute toxicity test. There were significant decreases (P < 0.05) in the feed and water intake as well as total cholesterol and triglycerides of the D. basuticus extract-treated rats in subacute toxicity study. There were no treatment related differences in the haematological, biochemical, and histopathological evaluations. Conclusions. Administration of hydroethanol extract of D. basuticus may be safe at the dosages tested in this study but its continuous usage can cause anorexia.
Exposure to hydrogen fluoride: an experimental study in humans of concentrations of fluoride in plasma, symptoms, and lung function.

OBJECTIVES: To study the absorption of inhaled hydrogen fluoride (HF) by measuring plasma fluorides and HF concentrations in the breathing zone during exposure to HF. A possible dose-effect relation was investigated by following airway symptoms and lung function-that is, forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) and forced vital capacity (FVC)-during and after exposure to HF. METHODS: 20 healthy, male volunteers were exposed for one hour to constant HF concentrations that ranged from 0.2 to 5.2 mg/m3; these concentrations are known to occur among potroom workers in the primary aluminium industry. Plasma fluorides were analysed before, during, and after exposure. Symptoms from the eyes and the upper and lower airways were registered and graded from 1 to 5 with a standardised questionnaire. RESULTS: The total symptom score was significantly increased at the end of exposure for all the subjects as a group (P < 0.01) and for the group exposed to HF below the present Norwegian standard for total fluorides 0.6 mg/m3 (P = 0.05). No change was detected in FEV15 although a significant decrease was found in FVC in the group exposed to fluorides below the hygienic standard (n = 9) and for the entire group (n = 23). Almost all the symptoms had disappeared four hours after the end of exposure. Symptom scores from the upper airways were significantly correlated with the HF concentration (r = 0.62, P = 0.002), the change in plasma fluoride concentration (delta C) (r = 0.51, P = 0.01), and the maximum plasma fluoride concentration (Cmax) (r = 0.42, P = 0.05). A significant correlation was also found between the total symptom score for airways and the HF concentration. CONCLUSIONS: The present study showed a strong relation between inhaled HF and concentrations of fluoride in plasma. Upper airway and eye symptoms occurred after one hour of exposure to HF even when below the Norwegian hygienic standard for fluorides.
Voluntary Non-financial Disclosure, Corporate Governance, and Investment Efficiency Voluntary Non-financial Disclosure, Corporate Governance, and Investment Efficiency

Different from prior studies that typically use rough proxies for accounting information quality, we construct a direct measure of voluntary disclosure of non-financial information pertaining specifically to firm’s current and planned investments. We then study the effects of voluntary non-financial disclosure (NF) on investment efficiency. Based on a sample of 1029 China-listed firms during 2007-2011, we find that NF is not associated with investment efficiency for weak corporate governance firms. However, for strong corporate governance firms we find that NF can mitigate overand under-investment. Cross-sectional analysis indicates that while the impact of NF on investment efficiency is higher for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than non-SOEs, corporate governance has a stronger moderating effect on the association between NF and investment efficiency for non-SOEs than SOEs. The moderating role of corporate governance in the association between NF and investment efficiency is similar between firms headquartered in high-marketization regions and those in low-marketization regions. These results are robust to controls for potential endogeneity and alternative measurement of the key variables. Our evidence suggests that good corporate governance enhances the credibility of voluntary non-financial disclosure, and, by doing so, contributes to investment efficiency.
Learning with a Strong Adversary

The robustness of neural networks to intended perturbations has recently attracted significant attention. In this paper, we propose a new method, \emph{learning with a strong adversary}, that learns robust classifiers from supervised data. The proposed method takes finding adversarial examples as an intermediate step. A new and simple way of finding adversarial examples is presented and experimentally shown to be efficient. Experimental results demonstrate that resulting learning method greatly improves the robustness of the classification models produced.
Do Stock Prices Underreact to Seo Announcements? Evidence from Seo Valuation

This paper examines whether the market underreacts to the negative information implicit in the SEO (seasoned equity offerings) announcements. While rational and mispricing theories both predict SEO's, in the aggregate, should earn low returns in the long run, they offer sharply different predictions for the cross-sectional relationship between pre-SEO valuation and long-run returns. We find that SEOs that are more overvalued (relative to their non-issuing industry peers) prior to the announcement day experience the same rate of decline in market value as SEOs that are less overvalued but experience a significantly larger decline over the subsequent five years. These results are consistent with the underreaction hypothesis and inconsistent with solely risk-based explanations. Our cross-sectional findings are robust to controlling for capital investments, expected growth rates, accruals, leverage, percentage shares issued in the SEO, pre-SEO price run-up, and B/M ratios. Additional tests indicate that overvalued SEOs earn lower returns around future quarterly earnings announcements and do not exhibit superior ex-post operating performance. We argue that both risk and mispricing theories are needed to fully understand the evolution of SEO fundamentals and stock prices over time.
Achievable sum rates of MIMO SC-FDMA systems with different receivers

This paper investigates the achievable sum rates of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems with different receivers in spatially uncorrelated frequency selective Rayleigh fading channels. Zero forcing (ZF), linear minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) and the proposed per subcarrier maximum likelihood (PSML) receivers are considered. Closed form expressions for the upper and lower bounds on the achievable sum rates of ZF, MMSE and PSML receivers are derived. Through these expressions, we characterize the behavior of the receivers in various scenarios of different channel lengths and subcarrier numbers. It is found that compared with the optimal receiver, the PSML receiver can obtain the optimal sum rate with significantly reduced computational complexity in flat fading channels. In addition, for ZF or MMSE receivers, either the upper or lower bound can be an accurate approximation of the achievable sum rate under certain conditions and can also provide a theoretical reference to practical systems.
Bureau of the Census Statistical Research Division Report Series Alternative Approaches to the Analysis of Time Series Components

This series contains research reports, written by or in cooperation with staff members of the Statistical Research Division, whose content may be of interest to the general statistical research community. The views refIected in these reports are not necessarily those of the Census Bureau nor do they necessarily represent Census Bureau statistical policy or practice. ABSTRACT In the time series literature of recent years one finds different approaches to the analysis of time series postulated to follow some type of component structure. There are alternatives to the now familiar ARIMA (autoregressive-integrated-moving average) modeling w approach, perhaps the most popular being the " structural modeling " approach of Harvey and others, which uses an explicit components structure. Despite the considerable research on t$ese models, remarkably little work has appeared comparing results from the alternative,approaches. Questions arise regarding the comparative fit of alternative models, and the effect of model choice on applications such as model-based seasonal adjustment and use of time series methods in repeated survey estimation. As these are empirical questions, we attempt to address them here through comparing results from applying such alternative models to some Census Bureau time series. A condensed version of this paper is to appear in the proceedings of the symposium.
Pedagogies of Engagement: Classroom‐Based Practices

Educators, researchers, and policy makers have advocated student involvement for some time as an essential aspect of meaningful learning. In the past twenty years engineering educators have implemented several means of better engaging their undergraduate students, including active and cooperative learning, learning communities, service learning, cooperative education, inquiry and problem‐based learning, and team projects. This paper focuses on classroom‐based pedagogies of engagement, particularly cooperative and problem‐based learning. It includes a brief history, theoretical roots, research support, summary of practices, and suggestions for redesigning engineering classes and programs to include more student engagement. The paper also lays out the research ahead for advancing pedagogies aimed at more fully enhancing students' involvement in their learning.
Developing a Multi-Sectoral Dynamic Applied General Equilibrium Model to Simulate the Emission Reduction of Nitrogen and Phosphorus at a Catchment Extent

Lake Eutrophication due to the accumulation of nitrogen and phosphorus has recently been identified as one of the great threats to water quality in lakes. In this paper, we developed a Multi-sectoral Dynamic Applied General Equilibrium Model (MDAGEM) to explore the strategies to reduce the emission of nitrogen and phosphorus at the catchment extent. A case study was conducted in the Lake Wuliangsuhai Catchment (LWC) of Inner Mongolia by using MADGEM. According to the simulation results, we conclude that although reduction of nitrogen and phosphorus might play a negative effect on economy at a short term, the measures currently taken to control the emission of nitrogen and phosphorus will do well for the long-term effects. What we need to do now is to seek an equilibrium point between the emission reduction and economic development. Keywords-MDAGEM; emission reduction module; regional economic module; LWC; equilibrium point component
Determinants of the Europeans’ Retirement Savings

We analyze the determinants of Europeans' retirement savings' for a sample of 4,526 individuals in 8 European countries. Our results show that the driving forces of the decision of saving for retirement are quite similar. This decision is positively related to the individuals' age, financial literacy, household income, employment status and saving habit. In addition, the results suggest that country-level institutional factors also play a crucial role on the individual’s retirement attitudes.