Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES OPTIMAL MONETARY POLICY IN AN OPERATIONAL MEDIUM-SIZED DSGE MODEL

We show how to construct optimal policy projections in Ramses, the Riksbank’s open-economy medium-sized DSGE model for forecasting and policy analysis. Bayesian estimation of the parameters of the model indicates that they are relatively invariant to alternative policy assumptions and supports our view that the model parameters may be regarded as unaffected by the monetary policy specification. We discuss how monetary policy, and in particular the choice of output gap measure, affects the transmission of shocks. Finally, we use the model to assess the recent Great Recession in the world economy and how its impact on the economic development in Sweden depends on the conduct of monetary policy. This provides an illustration on how Rames incorporates large international spillover effects. Malin Adolfson Sveriges Riksbank SE-103 37 Stockholm Sweden malin.adolfson@riksbank.se Stefan Laséen Sveriges Riksbank SE-103 37 Stockholm Sweden stefan.laseen@riksbank.se Jesper Lindé International Finance Mail Stop 20 Federal Reserve Board 20th and C streets, NW Washington, D.C. 20551 Jesper.L. Linde@frb.gov Lars E.O. Svensson Sveriges Riksbank SE-103 37 Stockholm SWEDEN and Sveriges Riksbank and also NBER lars.svensson@iies.su. se
Profit maximization through process variation aware high level synthesis with speed binning

As integrated circuits continuously scale up, process variation plays an increasingly significant role in system design and semiconductor economic return. In this paper, we explore the potential of profit improvement under the inherent semiconductor variability based on the speed binning technique. We first accordingly propose a set of high level synthesis techniques, including allocation, scheduling and resource binding, thus essentially constructing designs that maximize the number of chips that can be sold at the most advantageous price, leading to the maximization of the overall profit. We explore subsequently the optimal bin placement strategy for further profit improvement. Experimental results confirm the superiority of the high level synthesis results and the associated improvement in profit margins.
A Class of Four-Group Quasi-Orthogonal STBC Achieving Full Rate and Full Diversity for Any Number of Antennas

We propose and construct a new class of full-rate full-diversity quasi-orthogonal space-time block code (QO-STBC), namely four-group QO-STBC (4Gp-QOSTBC), which can support any number of transmit antennas. 4Gp-QOSTBC can linearly separate the symbols into four independent groups, such that symbols within a group is orthogonal to all other symbols in another groups, and the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoder of the code only needs to jointly decode the symbols within the same group. The number of symbols required for joint detection of the newly proposed 4Gp-QOSTBC is half of that required by the existing QO-STBCs with the same code rate, and their full-diversity decoding performances are comparable. We also extend the proposed code construction to obtain 6Gp-QOSTBC and 8Gp-QOSTBC, which have even lower decoding complexity, albeit at a slight loss in code rate
Searching for a mobile intruder in a corridor: the open edge variant of the polygon search problem

The polygon search problem is the problem of searching for mobile intruders in a simple polygon by a single mobile searcher having various degrees of visibility. This paper considers the “open edge” variant of the problem in which the given polygon P must be searched without allowing undetected intruders to reach a given edge u, under an additional assumption that any number of intruders can leave and enter P through another edge v at any time. One may view P as representing a corridor with two open exits u and v, and the task of the searcher is to force all the intruders out of P through v (but not u). We present a simple necessary condition for a polygon to be searchable in this manner by the searcher having a light bulb, and then show that the same condition is sufficient for the polygon to be searchable by the searcher having two flashlights. The time complexity of generating a search schedule is also discussed.
Comparative Effects of Di(n-Butyl) Phthalate Exposure on Fetal Germ Cell Development in the Rat and in Human Fetal Testis Xenografts

Background Phthalate exposure induces germ cell effects in the fetal rat testis. Although experimental models have shown that the human fetal testis is insensitive to the steroidogenic effects of phthalates, the effects on germ cells have been less explored. Objectives We sought to identify the effects of phthalate exposure on human fetal germ cells in a dynamic model and to establish whether the rat is an appropriate model for investigating such effects. Methods We used immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence, and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction to examine Sertoli and germ cell markers on rat testes and human fetal testis xenografts after exposure to vehicle or di(n-butyl) phthalate (DBP). Our study included analysis of germ cell differentiation markers, proliferation markers, and cell adhesion proteins. Results In both rat and human fetal testes, DBP exposure induced similar germ cell effects, namely, germ cell loss (predominantly undifferentiated), induction of multinucleated gonocytes (MNGs), and aggregation of differentiated germ cells, although the latter occurred rarely in the human testes. The mechanism for germ cell aggregation and MNG induction appears to be loss of Sertoli cell–germ cell membrane adhesion, probably due to Sertoli cell microfilament redistribution. Conclusions Our findings provide the first comparison of DBP effects on germ cell number, differentiation, and aggregation in human testis xenografts and in vivo in rats. We observed comparable effects on germ cells in both species, but the effects in the human were muted compared with those in the rat. Nevertheless, phthalate effects on germ cells have potential implications for the next generation, which merits further study. Our results indicate that the rat is a human-relevant model in which to explore the mechanisms for germ cell effects. Citation van den Driesche S, McKinnell C, Calarrão A, Kennedy L, Hutchison GR, Hrabalkova L, Jobling MS, Macpherson S, Anderson RA, Sharpe RM, Mitchell RT. 2015. Comparative effects of di(n-butyl) phthalate exposure on fetal germ cell development in the rat and in human fetal testis xenografts. Environ Health Perspect 123:223–230; http://dx.doi. org/10.1289/ehp.1408248
Angiotensin II AT1 Receptor Blockade Reverses Pathological Hypertrophy and Inflammation in Brain Microvessels of Spontaneously Hypertensive Rats

Background and Purpose— The spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR) is vulnerable to brain ischemia and stress and exhibits a chronically stimulated brain angiotensin II system, cerebrovascular hypertrophy, and inflammation. Pretreatment with angiotensin II type 1 (AT1) receptor antagonists protects from brain ischemia and from stress and prevents the development of stress-induced gastric ulcers in part by reducing inflammation in the gastric mucosa. We studied whether AT1 receptor antagonists could exert antiinflammatory effects in the brain vasculature as a mechanism for their protective effects against ischemia. Methods— Ten-week-old SHR and normotensive Wistar-Kyoto male rats received the AT1 receptor antagonist candesartan (0.3 mg/kg per day) or vehicle for 28 days via osmotic minipumps. We studied AT1 receptors, intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1), endothelial nitric oxide synthase (eNOS), and number of macrophages by immunohistochemistry and Western blots. Results— We found increased endothelial AT1 receptor expression of brain microvessels and middle cerebral artery of SHR. Brain AT1 receptor inhibition reversed the pathological vascular hypertrophy, increased and normalized eNOS expression, and decreased ICAM-1 expression and the number of adherent and infiltrating macrophages in cerebral vessels of SHR. Conclusions— The antiinflammatory effects of AT1 receptor antagonists may be an important mechanism in protecting against ischemia.
Urinary Retention After Hysterectomy and Postoperative Analgesic Use

Objective This study aimed to determine risk factors, including postoperative analgesic use, for the development of postoperative urinary retention (PUR) after hysterectomy for routine gynecologic indications using a case-control study design. Methods Cases of PUR after hysterectomy were identified from billing data. Cases were those patients requiring recatheterization for inability to void. Controls were similarly identified and matched by age and date of surgery in a 3:1 control-to-case ratio. Chart review was performed to obtain demographic, medical, surgical, anesthetic, and medication data. Cumulative and interval doses of postoperative narcotic were recorded and converted into morphine equivalents. Crude odds ratios (ORs) were determined for potential risk factors for PUR using standard statistical analysis. Conditional logistic regression was used on multivariate models, including cumulative postoperative narcotic use, to determine adjusted ORs for risk factors. Results Twenty-six cases of PUR were matched with 78 controls. The cases had a higher body mass index (32 vs 28 kg/m2, P = 0.02), had a higher preoperative use of tricyclic antidepressants (TCA; 19.2% vs 1.3%, P = 0.004), were more likely to present preoperative urinary retention associated with fibroids (19.2% vs 0%, P < 0.01), and received a higher cumulative narcotic dose in the postoperative period (109 vs 73.6 mg, P < 0.001). In a multivariate model, preoperative TCA use (OR, 30.1; 95% confidence interval, 1.99–456; P = 0.01) and cumulative narcotic dose (OR, 2.54; 95% confidence interval, 1.44–4.56; P < 0.01) were significantly associated with PUR. Conclusions Postoperative urinary retention after hysterectomy is associated with higher postoperative narcotic dose, preoperative TCA use, and preoperative urinary retention.
Integration of noninvasive DNA testing for aneuploidy into prenatal care: what has happened since the rubber met the road?

BACKGROUND Over the past 2 years, noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT), which uses massively parallel sequencing to align and count DNA fragments floating in the plasma of pregnant women, has become integrated into prenatal care. Professional societies currently recommend offering NIPT as an advanced screen to pregnant women at high risk for fetal aneuploidy, reserving invasive diagnostic procedures for those at the very highest risk. CONTENT In this review, we summarize the available information on autosomal and sex chromosome aneuploidy detection. Clinical performance in CLIA-certified, College of American Pathology-accredited laboratories appears to be equivalent to prior clinical validation studies, with high sensitivities and specificities and very high negative predictive values. The main impact on clinical care has been a reduction in invasive procedures. Test accuracy is affected by the fetal fraction, the percentage of fetal DNA in the total amount of circulating cell-free DNA. Fetal fraction is in turn affected by maternal body mass index, gestational age, type of aneuploidy, singleton vs multiples, and mosaicism. Three studies comparing NIPT to serum or combined screening for autosomal aneuploidy all show that NIPT has significantly lower false-positive rates (approximately 0.1%), even in all-risk populations. A significant number of the discordant positive cases have underlying biological reasons, including confined placental mosaicism, maternal mosaicism, cotwin demise, or maternal malignancy. SUMMARY NIPT performs well as an advanced screen for whole chromosome aneuploidy. Economic considerations will likely dictate whether its use can be expanded to all risk populations and whether it can be applied routinely for the detection of subchromosome abnormalities.
[Saccharomyces boulardii activates expression of peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma in HT-29 cells].

BACKGROUND/AIMS Saccharomyces boulardii (S. boulardii) has been reported to be beneficial in the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, however, little is known about its mechanism of action. Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma (PPAR-gamma) is recently found to regulate inflammation in intestinal epithelial cells. We hypothesized that the anti-inflammatory effects of S. boulardii are mediated, in part, through PPAR-gamma. To test this hypothesis, we examined the ability of S. boulardii to modulate the expression of PPAR-gamma in human colon cells. METHODS Effects of S. boulardii on survival and proliferation of HT-29 human colon cells were assessed by MTT and [3H]thymidine incorporation assays. PPAR-gamma expression was assessed by Western blot and RT-PCR. Induction of interleukin-8 (IL-8) expression by tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-alpha), interleukin-1beta (IL-1beta), or lipopolysaccharide (LPS) was assessed by RT-PCR. RESULTS S. boulardii did not affect viability and proliferation of HT-29 cells. S. boulardii up-regulated PPAR-gamma expression at both mRNA and protein levels. Pretreatment of HT-29 cells with S. boulardii blocked PPAR-gamma down-regulation by TNF-alpha, IL-1beta, or LPS, whereas it ameliorated IL-8 response to these proinflammatory factors. CONCLUSIONS S. boulardii stimulates PPAR-gamma expression and reduces response of human colon cells to proinflammatory cytokines.
ANN-based appliance recognition from low-frequency energy monitoring data

The rational use and management of energy is a key objective for the evolution towards the smart grid. In particular in the private home domain the adoption of wide-scale energy consumption monitoring techniques can help end users in optimizing energy consumption behaviors. While most existing approaches for load disaggregation and classification requires high-frequency monitoring data, in this paper we propose an approach for detecting and identifying the appliances in use by analysing low-frequency monitoring data gathered by meters (i.e. smart plugs) distributed in the home. Our approach implements a supervised classification algorithm with artificial neural networks and has been tested with a dataset of power traces collected in real-world home settings.
Paradoxical Growth of Candida albicans in the Presence of Caspofungin Is Associated with Multiple Cell Wall Rearrangements and Decreased Virulence

ABSTRACT In the last decade, echinocandins have emerged as an important family of antifungal drugs because of their fungicidal activity against Candida spp. Echinocandins inhibit the enzyme β-1,3-d-glucan synthase, encoded by the FKS genes, and resistance to echinocandins is associated with mutations in this gene. In addition, echinocandin exposure can produce paradoxical growth, defined as the ability to grow at high antifungal concentrations but not at intermediate concentrations. In this work, we have demonstrated that paradoxical growth of Candida albicans in the presence of caspofungin is not due to antifungal degradation or instability. Media with high caspofungin concentrations recovered from wells where C. albicans showed paradoxical growth inhibited the growth of a Candida krusei reference strain. Cells exhibiting paradoxical growth at high caspofungin concentrations showed morphological changes such as enlarged size, abnormal septa, and absence of filamentation. Chitin content increased from the MIC to high caspofungin concentrations. Despite the high chitin levels, around 23% of cells died after treatment with caspofungin, indicating that chitin is required but not sufficient to protect the cells from the fungicidal effect of caspofungin. Moreover, we found that after paradoxical growth, β-1,3-glucan was exposed at the cell wall surface. Cells grown at high caspofungin concentrations had decreased virulence in the invertebrate host Galleria mellonella. Cells grown at high caspofungin concentrations also induced a proinflammatory response in murine macrophages compared to control cells. Our work highlights important aspects about fungal adaptation to caspofungin, and although this adaptation is associated with reduced virulence, the clinical implications remain to be elucidated.
Polynomials and computing functions of correlated sources

We consider the source coding problem of computing functions of correlated sources, which is an extension of the Slepian-Wolf coding problem. We observe that all the discrete functions are in fact restrictions of polynomial functions over some finite field. Based on this observation, we demonstrate how to use Elias' Lemma to enlarge the coding rate region (compared to the Slepian-Wolf region) for a certain class of polynomial functions. We present a classification result about polynomial functions regarding this coding problem. The result is conclusive in the two-sources scenario and, in fact, gives another interpretation of a result by Han and Kobayashi [1, Theorem 1].
Interference mitigation in two-tier LTE networks: Does power control pay off for femtocells?

Femtocell networks have emerged as an important means of offloading traffic from today's LTE cellular networks. However, deploying LTE femtocells increases the interference in the network, as they share licensed spectrum with the macro-cellular network. Consequently, a wide range of interference mitigation techniques have been proposed to enable coexistence of femtocells and macrocells. Techniques of various implementation and signaling complexity have been considered, but the majority of existing work evaluates their performance solely based on how well they mitigate interference for macrocell users. However, it is important that both macrocell and femtocell users achieve good performance. In this paper we present a comparative system-level study on the performance of several LTE femtocell frequency and power allocation schemes. We investigate whether more complex and dynamic resource allocation schemes, i.e. power control, are worthwhile from the point of view of femtocell networks compared to lower complexity static resource allocation schemes. We evaluate the performance in terms of the users' downlink throughput and achieved signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), and we consider different interference environments for a wide range of network densities (urban, suburban, and rural scenarios). Our results show that power control algorithms only yield a marginal increase in throughput for the LTE femtocell users. This suggests that increasing the complexity of static frequency allocation schemes by implementing power control algorithms is not justified.
M2-branes, 3-Lie algebras and Plucker relations

We find that the structure constants 4-form of a metric 3-Lie algebra is the sum of the volume forms of orthogonal 4-planes proving a conjecture in math/0211170. In particular, there is no metric 3-Lie algebra associated to a (N) Lie algebra for N>2. We examine the implication of this result on the existence of a multiple M2-brane theory based on metric 3-Lie algebras.
Statin induced diabetes and its clinical implications

Statins are one of the most commonly used drugs in the world based on their potential to prevent adverse cardiovascular events. These cholesterol-lowering drugs received a US Food and Drug Administration warning, in February 2012, regarding increased risk of incident diabetes and impaired glycemic control in patients who already have diabetes. The possible association of diabetes with statin therapy has started a wave of discussion in the medical community. A number of meta-analyses conducted in recent years have demonstrated that the association is real although causality has not been proved yet. Individual statins differ with respect to their diabetogenic property; women and elderly persons appear to be at increased risk. Various aspects of statin's adverse effect on glycemic control remain to be explored. As further research in this area continues, physicians might still take some precautions to make risk benefit ratio more favorable for the patients.
Development of Knowledge Management Learning System for Supporting Computer Courses in Junior High School

This paper presents the knowledge management learning system (KMLS) that allows students to capture, store, share, apply and create knowledge based on the learning requirements of junior high school students' computer courses. By using the system in an actual teaching environment and comparing the results with traditional lectures, we explore its impact on learning achievement at junior high school computer courses in Taiwan; once a questionnaire survey was carried out among the students to collect valuable suggestions and find out their level of acceptance for the computer course's KMLS.
Embedding Long Paths in k-Ary n-Cubes with Faulty Nodes and Links

Let k ges 4 be even and let n ges 2. Consider a faulty k-ary n-cube Q<sup>k</sup> <sub>n</sub> in which the number of node faults fv and the number of link faults f<sub>e</sub> are such that f<sub>v</sub> + f<sub>e</sub> les 2n-2. We prove that given any two healthy nodes s and e of Q<sup>k</sup> <sub>n</sub>, there is a path from s to e of length at least k<sup>n</sup> - 2 f<sub>v</sub> -1 (respectively, k<sup>n</sup> - 2 f<sub>v</sub> -2) if the nodes s and e have different (respectively the same) parities (the parity of a node in Q<sup>k</sup> <sub>n</sub> is the sum modulo 2 of the elements in the n-tuple over {0,1,.,k 1} representing the node). Our result is optimal in the sense that there are pairs of nodes and fault configurations for which these bounds cannot be improved, and it answers questions recently posed by Yang, Tan et al. (2007) and by Fu (2006). Furthermore, we extend known results, obtained by Kim and Park (2000), for the case when n=2.
Hypothesis: the bradyphrenia of parkinsonism is a nosological entity

Reaction time was studied in 103 subjects with idiopathic parkinsonism and 144 without. Central processing time, as measured by the response to a warning, had a component which could be explained by the presence or absence of parkinsonism, but not by the ageing process, a mental test score, or consumption of exogenous substances. Depression did not influence the efficiency of response. Cigarette smoking and anti‐parkinsonian medication were associated with greater efficiency.
Evaluating system-based strategies for managing conflict in collaborative concept mapping

This study examined the influence of various conflict management mechanisms embedded into computer-supported collaborative concept mapping systems on the behaviour and learning of elementary students. Four conflict management mechanisms were compared: an assign design, in which the mapping control was designated to a particular group member; a rotate design, in which the mapping control was rotated among the group members; a give design, in which the child with mapping control could relinquish control to another group member; and an open design, in which every group member simultaneously had mapping control. Ninety-six fifth and sixth grade Taiwanese students participated in this study. They were arranged into assign, rotate, give, or open three-member groups to generate collaboratively shared concept maps. Student interactions, attitudes, and achievement were analysed. The results suggest that each conflict management mechanism has a different effect on the elementary students.