Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gene Dose Effects of GSTM1, GSTT1 and GSTP1 Polymorphisms on Outcome in Childhood Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Children with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) react very differently to chemotherapy. One explanation for this is inherited genetic variation. The glutathione S-transferase (GST) enzymes inactivate a number of chemotherapeutic drugs administered in childhood ALL therapy. Two multiplexing methods were applied for genotyping the GSTM1 and GSTT1 genes (distinguishing between 0, 1, or 2 gene copies) and the GSTP1 313 A>G polymorphism, simultaneously. A total of 263 childhood ALL patients were genotyped. No gene dose effect on outcome was demonstrated with either GST polymorphisms. Grouping of GSTM1 and GSTT1 into poor (0 or 1 gene copy)—and good metabolizers (at least 2 gene copies)—showed that the poor metabolizers had a trend toward a better outcome (event-free survival =91.8%) compared with the good metabolizers (event-free survival =83.2%). Similarly, in the adjusted analysis the good metabolizers demonstrated a 2.2-fold higher risk trend of experiencing an event (resistant disease or relapse) compared with the poor metabolizers (P=0.066; hazard ratio =2.248; 95% confidence interval, 0.948-5.327). In conclusion, our results suggest that the combined gene dose of GSTM1 and GSTT1 may influence outcome in childhood ALL.
The nature of immunity to the Escherichia coli Shiga toxins (verocytotoxins) and options for toxoid immunization.

INTRODUCTION Shiga-toxin (stx)-producing Escherichia coil (STEC), also referred to as Verocytotoxin (VT)-producing E. coil (VTEC) (25) are causes of a major zoonotic food-borne illness (12, 20) whose spectrum includes non-specific diarrhea, hemorrhagic colitis (42), and the hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) (21, 24) which is the leading cause of acute renal failure in children. Not only do VTEC rival non-typhoidal Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter spp. as the commonest agents of sporadic bacterial diarrhea (12, 37), they have also been responsible for massive outbreaks of illness with significant morbidity and mortality. Examples include the lunch-foodassociated Japanese outbreak in Sakai in 1996 (9) which affected over 6,000 children with 102 cases of HUS and 3 deaths and the food-borne outbreak in the U.S. in 1993 (8) which affected 500 cases with 171 hospitalizations, 43 HUS cases, and 4 deaths. HUS, the most serious complication of VTEC infection, is associated with significant long-term morbidity, with renal dysfunction in up to 40% of the patients, and a mortality rate of 3%-5% (27, 50). The syndrome occurs most frequently in young children with an annual incidence, in North America, of about 2-3 cases per 100,000 children under 5 years of age (12) in contrast to a roughly 10-fold higher incidence in this age group in Argentina (29). Given that no specific treatment is currently available for HUS, immunization against VTEC infection may be the only practical option for limiting the serious morbidity and mortality associated with this condition. Unfortunately knowledge about the nature of protective immunity associated with VTEC infection is still in its infancy.
Justices as Representatives

This study demonstrates that state supreme court justices are influenced by their specific electoral backgrounds and experiences, as well as general electoral conditions, when voting to uphold or overturn death sentences in the capital murder cases before their courts. Although previous research has established that electoral forces affect justices' decisions not to dissent, this article suggests that electoral variables also influence justices' decisions about who actually wins or loses the cases. On the basis of a probit analysis of death penalty votes in four supreme courts (Kentucky, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Texas) from 1983 through 1988, this study finds that single-member districts, narrow vote margins, being at the end of a term, and experience with electoral politics are associated with support for the death penalty, the position favored by the voters in these states. In addition, the model reveals that prosecutorial experience, term length, and murder rates within states also affect support for the death penalty. Most basically, the goals of judicial actors include personal as well as policy considerations, and the pursuit of these goals is promoted or inhibited by particular types of institutional arrangements.
Community sports projects and effective community empowerment: a case study in Rochdale

How can community empowerment be most effectively achieved through the use of sport? In a case study of a bespoke voluntary sector project, an action research approach revealed insights into effective community empowerment. Although focused on a comparatively small project within a provincial UK town, the issues addressed and lessons learned can be generalised and transferred much more universally to community-based sports delivery. Detached from mainstream providers, and more agile and responsive to local needs, the project succeeded in achieving a very local degree of ownership and control. The study revealed the limitations of much mainstream provision and some of the sustainability vulnerabilities of small-scale projects, with funding dependencies in delivering broader structural change. The project challenged many of the values and approaches of its larger statutory neighbours and signified exemplary good practice. It demonstrated how to achieve sustainable community development despite its own funding being in jeopardy. And it further challenged its statutory neighbours to consider adopting its practices, investing in the project's long-term future or presiding over its eventual demise.
Constructing Indicators of Culinary Tourism Strategy: An Application of Resource-Based Theory

ABSTRACT A tourism destination that seeks to develop culinary tourism products must combine the featured culinary cultures with tourism resources to support the culinary tourism strategies. A concrete strategic framework will aid tourism destinations in identifying local culinary products and experiences and creating promotional strategies and tools for the development of local culinary tourism. The purpose of this study is to construct a strategy framework and indicators for culinary tourism in Taiwan based on resource-based theory (RBT). This study included a qualitative document analysis, a literature review, in-depth interviews, and application of the Fuzzy Delphi method. The results show a culinary tourism strategy framework consisting of four dimensions and 75 indicators. The four dimensions are resources, capabilities, strategy, and education. The four dimensions are comprised of 10 factors (strategies) with a total of 75 indicators. In addition to its practical implications, an important contribution of this study is its application of RBT to develop national culinary tourism resource and strategy planning. This research was funded by a research grant from the National Science Council in Taiwan conducted by the first author (NSC 96-2516-S-228-004-MY3).
MRI outcomes in a placebo-controlled trial of natalizumab in relapsing MS

Background: In a 2-year, placebo-controlled trial (the Natalizumab Safety and Efficacy in Relapsing Remitting Multiple Sclerosis [AFFIRM] study), involving 942 patients with relapsing multiple sclerosis (MS), natalizumab significantly reduced the relapse rate by 68% and progression of sustained disability by 42% vs placebo. We report the effect of natalizumab on MRI measures from the AFFIRM study. Methods: The number and volume of gadolinium (Gd)-enhancing, new or enlarging T2-hyperintense, and new T1-hypointense lesions and brain parenchymal fraction were measured from annual scans obtained at baseline, 1 year, and 2 years. Results: Compared with placebo, natalizumab produced a 92% decrease in Gd-enhancing lesions (means 2.4 vs 0.2; p < 0.001), an 83% decrease in new or enlarging T2-hyperintense lesions (means 11.0 vs 1.9; p < 0.001), and a 76% decrease in new T1-hypointense lesions (means 4.6 vs 1.1; p < 0.001) over 2 years. Median T2-hyperintense lesion volume increased by 8.8% in the placebo group and decreased by 9.4% in the natalizumab group (p < 0.001); median T1-hypointense lesion volume decreased by 1.5% in the placebo group and decreased by 23.5% in the natalizumab group (p < 0.001). Brain atrophy was greater in year 1 and less in year 2 in natalizumab-treated patients. Conclusion: Natalizumab has a sustained effect in preventing the formation of new lesions in patients with relapsing multiple sclerosis.
Trade Liberalization and Import-Demand Behavior in Bangladesh, 1974–2008

From the early 1980s onwards, Bangladesh has undertaken a series of trade-liberalization measures. In combination with the steady rise in real income over the past two-and a half decades, these measures have raised the country’s import-orientation and brought structural change in the composition of imports in favor of consumer goods and materials for consumption. This paper investigates import-demand behavior in Bangladesh within the Autoregressive-Distributed-Lag (ARDL) modeling framework using annual data for the period 1974–2008. The empirical results suggest the presence of a well-behaved import-demand function, in the senses that (1) Bangladesh’s imports are income-elastic and price-inelastic and (2) there is no evidence of instability in the Bangladesh import-demand relationship.
Self‐Reported Aggressive Behavior in Patients with Stroke

This study represents a first attempt to identify some of the clinical and pathoanatomical correlates of violent outbursts in patients with cerebrovascular accident. Subjects were selected from a population of patients hospitalized with acute stroke. Although we did not have behavioral measures of violent behavior, patients who reported having had violent outbursts were identified based on clinical ratings on a structured interview. Subjects were asked if they had experienced episodes of anger accompanied by behaviors ranging from shouting to violence during the time since their stroke. These patients were compared with controls matched for demographic variables. Violent patients had higher total Present State Exam and Hamilton-D scores. The percentage of patients with cognitive impairment in the angry outburst group (66%) was greater than the control group (22%). Outburst patients had a higher frequency of left-hemisphere lesions (46.7%) compared with controls (29.4%). When lesion volumes were statistically equated, proximity of lesion to the frontal pole was one of the factors related to the self-reported irritable/violent behavior. To determine whether depression explained our findings, we carried out two-way analyses of variance with angry outburst and major depression group membership as factors. Effects of left anterior lesion location and cognitive impairment on violence remained present. These findings suggest that the potential for anger and violence in patients with stroke has multiple clinical and neuropathological correlates, including greater cognitive impairment and left anterior hemisphere lesions.
THE DESIGN OF MULTI‐YEAR STOCK OPTION PLANS

Despite the explosion in the corporate use of stock options, the incentives created by stock options are not well understood by either the boards who grant them or the executives who are meant to be motivated by them. A major source of confusion stems from the corporate practice of using multi-year stock option plans. Such multi-year grants create subtle, potentially important links between current performance and future grants that can significantly dilute incentives for better performance. 1999 Morgan Stanley.
State Management in Apache Flink®: Consistent Stateful Distributed Stream Processing

Stream processors are emerging in industry as an apparatus that drives analytical but also mission critical services handling the core of persistent application logic. Thus, apart from scalability and low-latency, a rising system need is first-class support for application state together with strong consistency guarantees, and adaptivity to cluster reconfigurations, software patches and partial failures. Although prior systems research has addressed some of these specific problems, the practical challenge lies on how such guarantees can be materialized in a transparent, non-intrusive manner that relieves the user from unnecessary constraints. Such needs served as the main design principles of state management in Apache Flink, an open source, scalable stream processor. We present Flink's core pipelined, in-flight mechanism which guarantees the creation of lightweight, consistent, distributed snapshots of application state, progressively, without impacting continuous execution. Consistent snapshots cover all needs for system reconfiguration, fault tolerance and version management through coarse grained rollback recovery. Application state is declared explicitly to the system, allowing efficient partitioning and transparent commits to persistent storage. We further present Flink's backend implementations and mechanisms for high availability, external state queries and output commit. Finally, we demonstrate how these mechanisms behave in practice with metrics and large-deployment insights exhibiting the low performance trade-offs of our approach and the general benefits of exploiting asynchrony in continuous, yet sustainable system deployments.
An Insight into Factors Influencing Bank Selection Decisions of Indian Customers

Indian banking industry is undergoing metamorphosis in terms on adoption on technology and automation. New generation private sector banks which came into existence in the last ten years have gained a substantial market share and government owned banks are losing market share to these new banks. It is very important for the banks to understand the preferences of the customers to offer the services required both to attract new clients and protect existing client-base from migrating to other banks. A survey was conducted and results obtained from 292 clients were analysed to understand the factors that influence the bank selection decisions. The top 10 parameters based on importance are found as Safety of Funds, secured ATMs, ATMs availability, reputation, personal attention, pleasing manners, confidentiality, closeness to work, timely service and friendly staff willing to work.
Governance structures, director independence and corporate performance in the UK

A number of Committees have been set up in recent years to investigate the governance of UK quoted companies. The key one was the Cadbury Committee, which recommended a number of governance structures as examples of best practice. These included the separation of the posts of CEO and chairman, a significant representation of non‐executive directors, the importance of non‐executive director independence and the setting up of board subcommittees. This study finds that there has been widespread adoption of the recommended governance structures. However, there is no clear relationship between governance structures and corporate performance. This raises questions about the most effective type of governance mechanism and whether or not the prescriptive recommendations of Cadbury should be replaced with a more flexible approach.
Obesity and the risk of psoriatic arthritis: a population-based study

Background Obesity is associated with an increased risk of psoriasis; however, its potential impact on the risk of psoriatic arthritis (PsA) remains unclear. Objectives To evaluate the association between body mass index (BMI) and the risk of PsA among patients with psoriasis from the general population. Methods The authors conducted a cohort study using data from The Health Improvement Network, an electronic medical records database representative of the UK general population, collected between 1995 and 2010. The exposure of interest was the first BMI measured after psoriasis diagnosis and endpoints were incident cases of physician-diagnosed PsA. The authors estimated the RR of PsA after adjusting for age, sex, and histories of trauma, smoking and alcohol consumption. Results Among 75 395 individuals with psoriasis (43% male, mean follow-up of 5 years, and mean age of 52 years), 976 developed PsA (incidence rate, 26.5 per 10 000 person-years). The PsA incidence rates increased with increasing BMI. Compared with psoriasis patients with BMI <25 kg/m2, the RRs for developing PsA were 1.09 (0.93–1.28) for BMIs from 25.0 to 29.9, 1.22 (1.02–1.47) for BMIs from 30.0 to 34.9 and 1.48 (1.20–1.81) for BMIs ≥35.0. In our secondary analysis among all individuals, regardless of psoriasis (∼2 million), the corresponding multivariate RRs tended to be stronger (1.0, 1.17, 1.57, 1.96; p for trend <0.001). Conclusions This general population study suggests that obesity is associated with an increased risk of incident PsA and supports the importance of weight reduction among psoriasis patients who often suffer from the metabolic syndrome and obesity.
Is institutional trust related to pro-immigrant attitudes? A pan-European evidence

This paper examines the factors that are related to attitudes toward immigrants in Europe, with a particular focus on the role of institutional trust in shaping these attitudes. We go one step further compared to previous studies by investigating separately two different groups of people – members of the ethnic majority and ethnic minority populations in European countries. We use data from the European Social Survey fifth round database for 25 countries. The results of the paper show that trust in institutions is the variable that is most strongly associated with the attitudes toward immigrants implying on the importance of fair and supportive operation of political institutions to move toward more immigrant-tolerant environment and become an attractive destination country in the global competition of talents. The findings also indicate that not all of the main determinants of the attitudes toward immigrants drawn from the most common theoretical explanations seem to explain the variation of the attitudes toward immigrants among ethnic minority populations the same way as they explain it in the case of ethnic majority populations.
Toeholds, Bid Jumps, and Expected Payoffs in Takeovers

We estimate sequentially outcome probabilities and expected payoffs associated with first, second, and final bids in a large sample of tender offer contests. Rival bids arrive quickly and produce large bid jumps. Greater bidder toeholds (prebid ownership of target shares) reduce the probability of competition and target resistance and are associated with both lower bid premiums and lower prebid target stock price runups. The expected payoff to target shareholders is increasing in the bid premium and in the probability of competition, but decreasing in the bidder's toehold. The initial bidder's expected payoff is significantly positive in the "rival-bidder-win" outcome, in part reflecting gains from the pending toehold sale. Despite these dramatic toehold effects, only half of the initial bidders acquire toeholds. Article published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Financial Studies in its journal, The Review of Financial Studies.
High-Performance Workplaces, Training, and the Distribution of Skills

Using a data set based on a nationally representative sample of British establishments, the analysis suggests that those exhibiting high-performance work practices have higher levels of training and those with a comprehensive set of these (or bundle) exhibit much higher levels than those which do not. This mainly reflects a greater intensity rather than a greater breadth of training. There is little evidence that the presence of these practices at a workplacepromotes a polarization of skills.
Job satisfaction of managers in Cyprus

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify job satisfaction issues for managers from large organizations in Cyprus. It aims at identifying Cypriot managers' areas and levels of job satisfaction and developing recommendations for ways Cypriot managers can improve job satisfaction.Design/methodology/approach – Primary data are collected from a questionnaire using closed ended questions. Data analysis methods used include frequency distributions, factor analysis and regression analysis.Findings – Results indicate that there are three areas that influence the job satisfaction levels for managers in Cyprus: self‐fulfillment, independence, and job environment. It appears that managers in the private sector experience higher levels of job satisfaction in issues regarding their self‐fulfillment. In addition, managers supervising large numbers of employees have higher job satisfaction levels for elements in their job environment than managers with smaller numbers of subordinates.Research limitations/implic.
Efficient Timing of Retirement

This study introduces a retirement decision into the class Merton model. A familiar result is that you should retire if and when the marginal utility of another year's wages is equal to the disutility of work.A new result is that at the point of retirement your exposure to risky assets should not jump. Under power utility and constant time preference, the retirement timing problem has a closed form solution; the nine inputs to the formula in question give rise to nine comparative-static results on retirement timing. Further specialization of preference, to log consumption utility and zero time preference, reduces the required number of inputs to four. (Copyright: Elsevier)
Correlations and agreement between delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in blood plasma and timeline follow-back (TLFB)-assisted self-reported use of cannabis of patients with cannabis use disorder and psychotic illness attending the CapOpus randomized clinical trial.

AIMS To assess correlations and agreement between timeline follow-back (TLFB)-assisted self-report and blood samples for cannabis use. DESIGN Secondary analysis of a randomized trial. SETTING Copenhagen, Denmark. PARTICIPANTS One hundred and three patients from the CapOpus trial with cannabis use disorder and psychosis, providing 239 self-reports of cannabis use and 88 valid blood samples. MEASUREMENTS Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), 11-hydroxy-delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (11-OH-THC) and 11-nor-delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol-9-carboxylic acid (THC-COOH) detected in plasma using high-performance liquid chromatography with tandem mass spectrometry detection. Self-report of cannabis-use last month by TLFB. Pearson's r, sensitivity and specificity calculated as measures of correlation or agreement. FINDINGS Correlations were strong; r = 0.75 for number of days and r = 0.83 for number of standard joints in the preceding month when excluding outliers. Including outliers, coefficients were moderate to strong (r = 0.49). There were differences in subgroups, mainly inconsistent, depending on inclusion or exclusion of outliers. Sensitivity and specificity for TLFB detecting the presence or absence of cannabis use were 95.7% [95% confidence interval (CI) 88.0-99.1%) and 72.2% (95% CI 46.5-90.3%), respectively. Using 19 days as cut-off on TLFB, they were 94.3% (95% CI 86.0-98.4%) and 94.4% (95% CI 72.2-99.9%), respectively. Area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was 0.96. CONCLUSIONS Timeline follow-back (TLFB)-assisted self-report of cannabis use correlates highly with plasma-delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol in patients with comorbid cannabis use disorder and psychosis. Sensitivity and specificity of timeline follow-back appear to be optimized with 19 days as the cut-off point. As such, timeline follow-back may be superior to analysis of blood when going beyond 19 days of recall.