Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Consequences of Price Instability on Search Markets

Real price variability depreciates the information about future prices contained in current ones. Repeat-purchase customers have, then, less incentive to acquire price information. The fact that consumers are less well informed allows firms to increase their markups and permits inefficient producers to increase their sales. Production gets reallocated toward higher-cost firms. Given the well-documented correlation between inflation and relative price variability, these results help explain some of the costs of inflation. Copyright 1994 by American Economic Association.
Effect of high flow oxygen on mortality in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients in prehospital setting: randomised controlled trial

Objectives To compare standard high flow oxygen treatment with titrated oxygen treatment for patients with an acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the prehospital setting. Design Cluster randomised controlled parallel group trial. Setting Ambulance service in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Participants 405 patients with a presumed acute exacerbation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who were treated by paramedics, transported, and admitted to the Royal Hobart Hospital during the trial period; 214 had a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease confirmed by lung function tests in the previous five years. Interventions High flow oxygen treatment compared with titrated oxygen treatment in the prehospital (ambulance/paramedic) setting. Main outcome measure Prehospital or in-hospital mortality. Results In an intention to treat analysis, the risk of death was significantly lower in the titrated oxygen arm compared with the high flow oxygen arm for all patients (high flow oxygen n=226; titrated oxygen n=179) and for the subgroup of patients with confirmed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (high flow n=117; titrated n=97). Overall mortality was 9% (21 deaths) in the high flow oxygen arm compared with 4% (7 deaths) in the titrated oxygen arm; mortality in the subgroup with confirmed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease was 9% (11 deaths) in the high flow arm compared with 2% (2 deaths) in the titrated oxygen arm. Titrated oxygen treatment reduced mortality compared with high flow oxygen by 58% for all patients (relative risk 0.42, 95% confidence interval 0.20 to 0.89; P=0.02) and by 78% for the patients with confirmed chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (0.22, 0.05 to 0.91; P=0.04). Patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who received titrated oxygen according to the protocol were significantly less likely to have respiratory acidosis (mean difference in pH 0.12 (SE 0.05); P=0.01; n=28) or hypercapnia (mean difference in arterial carbon dioxide pressure −33.6 (16.3) mm Hg; P=0.02; n=29) than were patients who received high flow oxygen. Conclusions Titrated oxygen treatment significantly reduced mortality, hypercapnia, and respiratory acidosis compared with high flow oxygen in acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. These results provide strong evidence to recommend the routine use of titrated oxygen treatment in patients with breathlessness and a history or clinical likelihood of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the prehospital setting. Trial registration Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Register ACTRN12609000236291.
Spitzer Space Telescope spectral observations of AGB stars in the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy

We have observed five carbon-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in the Fornax dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy, using the Infrared Spectrometer on board the Spitzer Space Telescope. The stars were selected from a near-infrared survey of Fornax and include the three reddest stars, with presumably the highest mass-loss rates, in that galaxy. Such carbon stars probably belong to the intermediate-age population (2-8 Gyr old and metallicity of [Fe/H] similar to -1) of Fornax. The primary aim of this paper is to investigate mass-loss rate, as a function of luminosity and metallicity, by comparing AGB stars in several galaxies with different metallicities. The spectra of three stars are fitted with a radiative transfer model. We find that mass-loss rates of these three stars are 4-7 x 10(-6) M-circle dot yr(-1). The other two stars have mass-loss rates below 1.3 x 10(-6) M-circle dot yr(-1). We find no evidence that these rates depend on metallicity, although we do suggest that the gas-to-dust ratio could be higher than at solar metallicity, in the range 240 to 800. The C2H2 bands are stronger at lower metallicity because of the higher C/O ratio. In contrast, the SiC fraction is reduced at low metallicity due to low silicon abundance. The total mass-loss rate from all known carbon-rich AGB stars into the interstellar medium (ISM) of this galaxy is of the order of 2 x 10(-5) M-circle dot yr(-1). This is much lower than that of the dwarf irregular galaxy Wolf Lundmark Melotte (WLM), which has a similar visual luminosity and metallicity. The difference is attributed to the younger stellar population of WLM. The suppressed gas-return rate to the ISM accentuates the difference between the relatively gas-rich dwarf irregular and the gas-poor dSph galaxies. Our study will be useful to constrain gas and dust recycling processes in low-metallicity galaxies.
Cross-Lingual News Group Recommendation Using Cluster-Based Cross-Training

Many Web news portals have provided clustered news categories for readers to browse many related news articles. However, to the best of our knowledge, they only provide monolingual services. For readers who want to find related news articles in different languages, the search process is very cumbersome. In this paper, we propose a cross-lingual news group recommendation framework using the cross-training technique to help readers find related cross-lingual news groups. The framework is studied with different implementations of SVM and Maximum Entropy models. We have conducted several experiments with news articles from Google News as the experimental data sets. From the experimental results, we find that the proposed cross-training framework can achieve accuracy improvement in most cases.
The Effect of Elevated Triglycerides on the Onset and Progression of Coronary Artery Disease: A Retrospective Chart Review

Background. The American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association did not indicate a correlation between treating hypertriglyceridemia and reducing cardiovascular events. Objective. This study investigated whether patients with hypertriglyceridemia were more prone to worse outcomes during cardiac catheterization. Methods. Data collected over a one-year period analyzed lipid panels obtained at the time of cardiac catheterization. Triglyceride levels were categorized into three groups: <150 mg/dL, 150 mg/dL–300 mg/dL, and >300 mg/dL. Controlled variables included age, gender, the presence of hypertension, diabetes, hyperlipidemia, and history of coronary artery disease. Results. Subjects with a triglyceride level <150 mg/dL have a 54% likelihood of being treated medically compared to 38% and 41% in the 150 mg/dL–300 mg/dL and >300 mg/dL groups, respectively (p < 0.01). Subjects with a triglyceride level >300 mg/dL have a 20% percent chance of being treated with a coronary artery bypass graft compared to 12% and 15% in the <150 mg/dL and 150 mg/dL–300 mg/dL groups, respectively (p < 0.01). Subjects with a triglyceride level between 150 and 300 mg/dL have a 44% percent of being treated with a percutaneous coronary intervention compared to 34% and 43% in the <150 mg/dL and >300 mg/dL groups, respectively (p < 0.01). Conclusion. Hypertriglyceridemia was associated with worse outcomes in percutaneous coronary intervention or surgery.
ERK5 Knockdown Generates Mouse Leukemia Cells with Low MHC Class I Levels That Activate NK Cells and Block Tumorigenesis1

Tumor cell-based vaccines are currently used in clinical trails, but they are in general poorly immunogenic because they are composed of cell extracts or apoptotic cells. Live tumor cells should be much better Ags provided that they are properly processed by the host immune system. We show herein that stable expression of a small hairpin RNA for ERK5 (shERK5) decreases ERK5 levels in human and mouse leukemic cells and leads to their elimination by NK cells in vivo. The shERK5 cells show down-regulation of MHC class I expression at the plasma membrane. Accordingly, ectopic activation of the ERK5 pathway induces MHC class I gene expression. Coinjection of shERK5-expressing cells into the peritoneum diminishes survival of engrafted wild-type tumor cells. Moreover, s.c. injection of shERK5-expressing cells strongly diminishes tumor development by wild-type cells. Our results show that shERK5 expression in leukemia cells effectively attenuates their tumor activity and allows their use as a tumor cell-based vaccine.
Reduction in Serum Aquaporin-4 Antibody Titers During Development of a Tumor-Like Brain Lesion in a Patient With Neuromyelitis Optica: A Serum Antibody–Consuming Effect?

Abstract Neuromyelitis optica (NMO) is an inflammatory demyelinating disease of the CNS with severe involvement of the optic nerve and spinal cord. Highly specific serum IgG autoantibodies (NMO-IgG) that react with aquaporin-4 (AQP4), the most abundant CNS water channel protein, are found in patients with NMO. However, in vivo evidence combining the results of AQP4 antibody serum levels and brain pathology is lacking. We report a patient with NMO whose AQP4 antibody levels decreased simultaneously with clinical deterioration caused by the development of a tumor-like brain lesion. In the seminecrotic biopsied brain lesion, there was activated complement complex, whereas only very scattered immunoreactivity to AQP4 protein was detectable. The decrease in serum AQP4 antibody levels and the loss of AQP4 in the tumor-like lesion could represent a “serum antibody–consuming effect” during lesion formation.
Comparative Analysis of Dutch House Price Indices

"Several house price indices exist for the Netherlands. These different indices come from different sources. In this paper we analyze indices from the Dutch Association of Real Estate Agents (NVM), the Land Registry Office (Kadaster), ORTAX and ABF. First we discuss the index construction methodologies used. Then we analyze and compare the statistical characteristics of these indices on a national and regional level and per house type. And finally we test for statistical differences between the indices. Large differences are found in reliability, sample representativeness and statistical characteristics. We conclude by drawing a number of conclusions regarding the most appropriate index and level of specification (by region and type) to be used in risk analyses by property investors like housing corporations. ""
Accurate, localized quantification of white matter perfusion with single‐voxel ASL

Quantification of perfusion in white matter is still difficult due to its low level, causing an often insufficiently low signal‐to‐noise ratio, and its long and inhomogeneous transit delays. Here, a technique is presented that accurately measures white matter perfusion by combining a spectroscopic single‐voxel localization technique (point‐resolved spectroscopy) with a pulsed arterial spin labeling encoding scheme (flow‐sensitive alternating inversion recovery) to specifically address the properties of white matter. The transit delay was measured by shifting the position of a slice‐selective saturation pulse between inversion and acquisition. Perfusion measurements resulted in values of 15.6 ± 3.2 mL/100 g/min in the left and 15.2 ± 4.8 mL/100 g/min in the right hemispheric white matter and 83.2 ± 15.2 mL/100 g/min in cortical gray matter. Taking dispersion of the transit times into account does not cause a significant change in the measured values. Magn Reson Med, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Positive Impact on Physical Activity and Health Behaviour Changes of a 15-Week Family Focused Intervention Program: “Juniors for Seniors”

The promotion of physical activity (PA) in children and their parents requires effective planning and sometimes even interventions. This study shows the effect of PA during a 15-week intervention program “Junior for Seniors” by applying a socioecological model to the interpretation of the data. This comprehensive approach emphasizes the fact that health promotion should focus not only on intrapersonal factors but also on the multilevel factors that might be determinants and modulators of increased PA. In 2015, 24 children (“juniors,” 14 girls and 10 boys, aged M = 7.96 ± 0.69) and 22 parents (“seniors,” 14 mothers aged M = 38.86 ± 2.96 and 8 fathers aged M = 37.38 ± 2.97) were voluntarily enrolled in a study spread across three primary schools in the city of Poznań, Poland. The effectiveness of the intervention was determined according to postintervention behavioural changes in PA in comparison to preintervention levels, as reported by the parents and children. Overall, the study found increases in PA levels and reductions in sedentary time. Although the changes are modest, there are some unrecognized benefits of the intervention which may have occurred, such as improved sport and motor skills, more frequent family social behaviours (walks, meals, and visiting relatives), or simply improved quality of “do-together” leisure time PA.
Parallel Multi-Source View Maintenance

In a distributed environment, materialized views are used to integrate data from different information sources and then store it in some centralized location. In order to maintain such materialized views, maintenance queries need to be sent to information sources by the data warehouse management system. Due to the independence between the information sources and the data warehouse, concurrency issues raise between the maintenance queries and the local update transactions at each information source. Recent solutions such as ECA and Strobe tackle such concurrent maintenance, however with the requirement of quiescence of the information sources. SWEEP and POSSE overcome this limitation by decomposing the global maintenance query into smaller subqueries to be send to every information source and then performing conflict correction locally at the data warehouse. Note that all these previous approaches are handling the data updates This work was supported in part by the NSF NYI grant IIS-979624 and NSF CISE Instrumentation grant IRIS 97-29878 and NSF grant IIS-9988776.
TED-LIUM: an Automatic Speech Recognition dedicated corpus

This paper presents the corpus developed by the LIUM for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), based on the TED Talks. This corpus was built during the IWSLT 2011 Evaluation Campaign, and is composed of 118 hours of speech with its accompanying automatically aligned transcripts. We describe the content of the corpus, how the data was collected and processed, how it will be publicly available and how we built an ASR system using this data leading to a WER score of 17.4 %. The official results we obtained at the IWSLT 2011 evaluation campaign are also discussed.
A high-efficiency wind-flow energy harvester using micro turbine

There are emerging applications for standalone embedded systems where devices are required to operate for very long time with the minimum battery maintenance after the deployment. Examples include wireless sensor networks, environmental monitoring, surveillance, civil infrastructure and industrial control. Energy harvesting has emerged as an innovative way to keep small stationary hardware platforms running unattended for years or even decades. This paper analyzes wind flow as feasible energy source to meet the energy needs of a wireless sensor network node. We provide a detailed model and characterization of the micro wind turbine and an effective power-saving architecture to control the harvesting circuit. The optimized design of the wind flow harvester outperforms the ones proposed in literature within an overall volume below 300 cm3. A highly efficient buck-boost converter is the core of the optimal power point tracking circuit and experimental results show that the wind generator works at its maximum efficiency over a wide range of operating conditions.
Trading Democracy for Justice: Criminal Convictions and the Decline of Neighborhood Political Participation

The United States imprisons far more people, total and per capita, than any other country in the world. Among the more than 1.5 million Americans currently incarcerated, minorities and the poor are disproportionately represented. What's more, they tend to come from just a few of the most disadvantaged neighborhoods in the country. While the political costs of this phenomenon remain poorly understood, it's become increasingly clear that the effects of this mass incarceration are much more pervasive than previously thought, extending beyond those imprisoned to the neighbors, family, and friends left behind. For Trading Democracy for Justice, Traci Burch has drawn on data from neighborhoods with imprisonment rates up to fourteen times the national average to chart demographic features that include information about imprisonment, probation, and parole, as well as voter turnout and volunteerism. She presents powerful evidence that living in a high-imprisonment neighborhood significantly decreases political participation. Similarly, people living in these neighborhoods are less likely to engage with their communities through volunteer work. What results is the demobilization of entire neighborhoods and the creation of vast inequalities-even among those not directly affected by the criminal justice system. The first book to demonstrate the ways in which the institutional effects of imprisonment undermine already disadvantaged communities, Trading Democracy for Justice speaks to issues at the heart of democracy.
Alzheimer’s Disease Risk Polymorphisms Regulate Gene Expression in the ZCWPW1 and the CELF1 Loci

Late onset Alzheimer’s disease (LOAD) is a genetically complex and clinically heterogeneous disease. Recent large-scale genome wide association studies (GWAS) have identified more than twenty loci that modify risk for AD. Despite the identification of these loci, little progress has been made in identifying the functional variants that explain the association with AD risk. Thus, we sought to determine whether the novel LOAD GWAS single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) alter expression of LOAD GWAS genes and whether expression of these genes is altered in AD brains. The majority of LOAD GWAS SNPs occur in gene dense regions under large linkage disequilibrium (LD) blocks, making it unclear which gene(s) are modified by the SNP. Thus, we tested for brain expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs) between LOAD GWAS SNPs and SNPs in high LD with the LOAD GWAS SNPs in all of the genes within the GWAS loci. We found a significant eQTL between rs1476679 and PILRB and GATS, which occurs within the ZCWPW1 locus. PILRB and GATS expression levels, within the ZCWPW1 locus, were also associated with AD status. Rs7120548 was associated with MTCH2 expression, which occurs within the CELF1 locus. Additionally, expression of several genes within the CELF1 locus, including MTCH2, were highly correlated with one another and were associated with AD status. We further demonstrate that PILRB, as well as other genes within the GWAS loci, are most highly expressed in microglia. These findings together with the function of PILRB as a DAP12 receptor supports the critical role of microglia and neuroinflammation in AD risk.
Healthcare-Related Regret among Nurses and Physicians Is Associated with Self-Rated Insomnia Severity: A Cross-Sectional Study

To examine the association between healthcare-related regrets and sleep difficulties among nurses and physicians, we surveyed 240 nurses and 220 physicians at the University Hospitals of Geneva. Regret intensity and regret coping were measured using validated scales. Sleep difficulties were measured using the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI), and an additional question assessed the frequency of sleeping pill use. After controlling for sex, profession, years of experience, rate of employment, and depression as well as for all other regret-related variables, the following variables remained significantly associated with self-rated severity of insomnia: regret intensity (slope = 1.32, p = 0.007, 95%CI: [0.36; 2.29], std. coefficient = 0.16) and maladaptive (e.g., rumination) emotion-focused coping (slope = 1.57, p = 0.002, 95%CI: [0.60; 2.55], std. coefficient = 0.17) remained significant predictors of self-rated insomnia severity. If these cross-sectional associations represent causal effects, the development of regret-management programs may represent a promising approach to mitigating sleep difficulties of healthcare professionals.
The impact of downward nominal wage rigidity on the unemployment rate : quantitative evidence from Japan

To what extent does downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) raise the unemployment rate during periods of low inflation or deflation? To answer this question, we simulate the impact on the male unemployment rate in Japan, by incorporating the DNWR of full-time male employees as estimated by Kuroda and Yamamoto into the general equilibrium model of Akerlof et al. The simulation results show the following. First, the DNWR estimated by Kuroda and Yamamoto with Japanese longitudinal data from 1993-98 has a minor impact on the unemployment rate compared with the case of perfect DNWR. Nevertheless, this impact is not trivial in the sense that it raises the unemployment rate by as much as 1.8 percentage points under the baseline parameters adopted in this paper. Second regarding the relationship with the rate of inflation, DNWR does not cause unemployment as long as the inflation rate is approximately 2.4 percent or higher whereas its effects tend to increase gradually as the inflation rate falls below 2.4 percent. When inflation is below approximately 1 percent, however, the marginal increase in unemployment attributable to DNWR is small since DNWR is moderated by the adjustments to bonuses and extensive wage cuts observed in our Japanese data sets. Instead, under these conditions, it is the additional unemployment brought by labor market distortions that becomes the issue.
Throughput of Q-Ary Splitting Algorithms for Contention Resolution in Communication Networks

The throughput characteristics of contention-based random access channels which use Q-ary splitting algorithms (where Q is the number of groups into which colliding users are split) are analyzed. The algorithms considered are of the Capetanakis-Tsybakov-Mikhailov-Vvedenskaya (CTMV) type and are studied for infinite populations of identical users generating packets according to a discrete time batch Markovian arrival process (D-BMAP). D-BMAPs are a class of tractable Markovian arrival processes, which, in general, are non-renewal. Free channel-access is assumed in combination with Q-ary collision resolution algorithms that exploit either binary or ternary feedback. For the resulting schemes, tree structured Quasi-Birth-Death (QBD) Markov chains are constructed and their stability is determined. The maximum achievable throughput is determined for a variety of arrival processes and splitting factors Q. It is concluded that binary (Q = 2) and ternary (Q = 3) algorithms should be preferred above other splitting factors Q as the throughput for Q > 3 quickly degrades when subject to bursty arrival streams. If packets arrivals are correlated and bursty, higher throughput rates can be achieved by making use of biased coins.