Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Utility of a novel risk score for prediction of ventricular tachycardia and cardiac death in chronic Chagas disease - the SEARCH-RIO study

The SEARCH-RIO study prospectively investigated electrocardiogram (ECG)-derived variables in chronic Chagas disease (CCD) as predictors of cardiac death and new onset ventricular tachycardia (VT). Cardiac arrhythmia is a major cause of death in CCD, and electrical markers may play a significant role in risk stratification. One hundred clinically stable outpatients with CCD were enrolled in this study. They initially underwent a 12-lead resting ECG, signal-averaged ECG, and 24-h ambulatory ECG. Abnormal Q-waves, filtered QRS duration, intraventricular electrical transients (IVET), 24-h standard deviation of normal RR intervals (SDNN), and VT were assessed. Echocardiograms assessed left ventricular ejection fraction. Predictors of cardiac death and new onset VT were identified in a Cox proportional hazard model. During a mean follow-up of 95.3 months, 36 patients had adverse events: 22 new onset VT (mean±SD, 18.4±4‰/year) and 20 deaths (26.4±1.8‰/year). In multivariate analysis, only Q-wave (hazard ratio, HR=6.7; P<0.001), VT (HR=5.3; P<0.001), SDNN<100 ms (HR=4.0; P=0.006), and IVET+ (HR=3.0; P=0.04) were independent predictors of the composite endpoint of cardiac death and new onset VT. A prognostic score was developed by weighting points proportional to beta coefficients and summing-up: Q-wave=2; VT=2; SDNN<100 ms=1; IVET+=1. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis optimized the cutoff value at >1. In 10,000 bootstraps, the C-statistic of this novel score was non-inferior to a previously validated (Rassi) score (0.89±0.03 and 0.80±0.05, respectively; test for non-inferiority: P<0.001). In CCD, surface ECG-derived variables are predictors of cardiac death and new onset VT.
Peer Pressure and Partnerships

Partnerships and profit sharing are often claimed to motivate workers by giving them a share of the pie. But in organizations of any significant size, the free-rider effects would seem to choke off any motivational forces. This analysis explores how peer pressure operates and how factors such as profit sharing, shame, guilt, norms, mutual monitoring, and empathy interact to create incentives in the firm. The argument that Japanese firms enjoy team spirit because compensation is linked to overall profitability is analyzed. An explanation for the prevalence of partnerships among individuals in similar occupations is provided.
Soft robot concept for autonomous propagation in confined and obstructed environments

This paper describes a soft robot concept which is conceived to propagate autonomously with respect to energy through confined or obstructed environments with a worm-like microactuator array of small size. As introduction, a short review of the various biomechanics of worms is presented that enabled the elaboration of the propagation concept. Discrete movement of the soft robot is achieved by traveling longitudinal deformation waves, so-called peristaltic waves. The movement and the differential anchoring mechanism are bionically inspired. This concept of a soft self-propelled robot is based on an array of fluid filled segments actuated by circumferentially and longitudinally arranged shape memory alloy (SMA) springs. The propagation is dynamically simulated as an array of adjacent fluid-filled hexahedral elements. Viscous interaction of the morphing soft body with its environment resulting in a propulsion force has been theoretically proved with a lubrication model based on thin film theory. Furthermore, a proof of concept of a passive differential anchoring mechanism based on varying properties of soft membranes is presented within this paper.
Factors affecting carrot consumption in the United States.

Carrots are one of the most popular vegetables in the United States and fresh-market carrot consumption has been increasing over the past few decades. Basic knowledge of the distribution of carrot consumption across different market channels, geographic regions, and population groups is very limited. Using a combination of ACNielsen Homescan panel data and USDA’s Continuing Survey of Food Intakes by Individuals, this article examines where and how much fresh and processed carrots are eaten and links this consumption to various economic, social, and demographic characteristics of consumers. The analysis indicates that per capita carrot consumption is greatest in the East and Central regions of the country. About 80 percent of fresh-market carrots are purchased at retail and consumed at home, with the majority consisting of fresh-cut (including baby) carrots. Per capita use of fresh carrots is strongest among Asians, with per capita use of both fresh and freezing carrots greatest among upper income households.
Predictive driving strategies under urban conditions for reducing fuel consumption based on vehicle environment information

This brief deals with the improvement of a vehicle's pass-through of predictively known urban driving situations concerning its fuel consumption. Today's technology enables the prediction of information about traffic events. This information can be used to identify efficient driving strategies. The main aim is to reduce the dynamics in the velocity profiles of driving situations and with it the corresponding fuel consumption in urban traffic. An algorithm has been built to calculate fuel consumption optimized driving trajectories. Input parameters are temporal and spatial depending constraints of the driving situation as well as other restrictions like a speed-limit. The main objective of the function was to enable a situation adaptive reaction to every predictively known forthcoming traffic event. Thus an optimized driving trajectory can be steadily calculated for the next route section of the vehicle provided that predictive information about the traffic events are available. The higher the availability of information the better an optimization of the driving strategies will be possible. Fuel characteristics and other energetically relevant data for a real-world vehicle have been created by detailed simulation to evaluate the fuel consumption of the driving strategies. For demonstration purposes the common driving situation ”traffic light” was chosen. The fuel consumption calculated for the predictive driving strategies is compared to the consumption of a simulated average driver without predictive information. The calculated potentials have been verified by measuring the fuel consumption of an experimental vehicle for the simulated driving strategies.
Effects of certain i.v. anaesthetics on liver blood flow and hepatic oxygen consumption in the greyhound.

The effects of increasing concentrations of thiopentone, Althesin and etomidate on liver blood flow and hepatic oxygen consumption were investigated in the anaesthetized greyhound. All three agents studied produced dose-related decreases in general cardiovascular indices such as mean arterial pressure, cardiac output and systemic vascular resistance; all three anaesthetics produced decreases in liver blood flow. During the low rates of infusion with Althesin and etomidate, significant decreases in hepatic arterial blood flow were recorded at a time when the systemic circulation was not significantly affected. Indeed, during the low rates of infusion with each of the three agents, hepatic arterial resistance and mesenteric vascular resistance increased by up to 40% above baseline values. During the high rates of infusion, hepatic arterial and mesenteric vascular resistances either returned to or decreased below control values and the decreases in liver blood flow were a consequence of generalized cardiovascular depression. Despite relatively unchanged hepatic oxygen consumption, all the anaesthetics produced significant decreases in the hepatic oxygen supply.
Crystal: Software-Defined Storage for Multi-Tenant Object Stores

Object stores are becoming pervasive due to their scalability and simplicity. Their broad adoption, however, contrasts with their rigidity for handling heterogeneous workloads and applications with evolving requirements, which prevents the adaptation of the system to such varied needs. In this work, we present Crystal, the first Software-Defined Storage (SDS) architecture whose core objective is to efficiently support multi-tenancy in object stores. Crystal adds a filtering abstraction at the data plane and exposes it to the control plane to enable high-level policies at the tenant, container and object granularities. Crystal translates these policies into a set of distributed controllers that can orchestrate filters at the data plane based on real-time workload information. We demonstrate Crystal through two use cases on top of OpenStack Swift: One that proves its storage automation capabilities, and another that differentiates IO bandwidth in a multi-tenant scenario. We show that Crystal is an extensible platform to deploy new SDS services for object stores with small overhead.
Deliverable 5 . 1 ( Updated Year 2 ) A Road Map paper for the development of new theoretical concepts and methods for the study and design of linguistic communication and action language integration in robots

This document sets up a vision and research roadmap for the study of how embodied cognitive agents, such as humanoid robots, can advance our understanding of the cognitive development of complex sensorimotor, linguistic and social learning skills. This in turn will benefit the design of cognitive robots capable of learning to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Four key areas of research challenges are discussed, specifically for the issues related to the understanding of: (i) how agents learn and represent compositional actions; (ii) how agents learn and represent compositional lexicons; (iii) the dynamics of social interaction and learning; and (iv) how compositional action and language representations are integrated to bootstrap the cognitive system. The review of specific issues and progress in these areas is then translated into a practical roadmap based on a series of milestones. These milestones provide a possible set of cognitive robotics goals and test-scenarios, thus acting as a research roadmap for future work on cognitive developmental robotics. Moreover, the proposal of a set of integrating experimental scenario, within the shorter time scale of the ITALK project, will propose practical experimental settings for the demonstration of some of the key issues in the year 2 and 4 roadmap milestones.
A 50-MS/s (35 mW) to 1-kS/s (15 /spl mu/W) power scaleable 10-bit pipelined ADC using rapid power-on opamps and minimal bias current variation

A novel rapid power-on operational amplifier and a current modulation technique are used in a 10-bit 1.5-bit/stage pipelined ADC in 0.18-/spl mu/m CMOS to realize power scalability between 1 kS/s (15 /spl mu/W) and 50 MS/s (35 mW), while maintaining an SNDR of 54-56 dB for all sampling rates. The current modulated power scaling (CMPS) technique is shown to enhance the power scaleable range of current scaling by 50 times, allowing ADC power to be varied by a factor of 2500 while only varying bias currents by a factor of 50. Furthermore, the nominal power is reduced by 20%-30% by completely powering off the rapid power-on opamps during the sampling phase in the pipeline's sample-and-holds.
Neural Antecedents of Financial Decisions

To explain investing decisions, financial theorists invoke two opposing metrics: expected reward and risk. Recent advances in the spatial and temporal resolution of brain imaging techniques enable investigators to visualize changes in neural activation before financial decisions. Research using these methods indicates that although the ventral striatum plays a role in representation of expected reward, the insula may play a more prominent role in the representation of expected risk. Accumulating evidence also suggests that antecedent neural activation in these regions can be used to predict upcoming financial decisions. These findings have implications for predicting choices and for building a physiologically constrained theory of decision-making.
WAVE-CURRENT INTERACTIONS IN THE SHALLOW WATER WAVE LIMIT AND SHORE-CONNECTED RIDGES

We present a theory for the interactions of waves and currents which results from depth-averaging the wave-driven circulation model proposed by McWilliams and Restrepo. This circulation model couples the gravity wave eld to oceanic scale ows. It speciically identiies the the drift velocity due to the gravity waves as the primary eeect of waves on the long-time dynamics of the currents. The formalism presented here is applicable to a variety of barotropic ows, and, in the shallow-water wave limit, to a variety of problems particular to the inner shelf and the near-shore zone, such as the dynamics of tracers in which storm-driven and tidal-driven ows interact, and at time scales relevant to the dynamics of large-scale erodible beds. One such problem is the origin and evolution of certain shore-oblique sand ridges. A hypothesis is that they are generated by instabilities in the erodible bed due to the passage of currents. Here we show how such a hypothesis is modiied when waves and currents are both present.
Measuring and assessing the impact of basic skills on labour market outcomes

Although there has been a considerable amount of research relating measures of schooling years, qualifications, or training spells to workers' labour market success, there has been very little assessment of the role of more basic literacy and numeracy skills, largely due to problems with measurement and data availability. Yet it is obviously crucial, in an era of apparently rising demand for skills, that we have evidence on the labour market value of the full range of worker skills, including basic literacy and numeracy. This paper therefore uses data from the National Child Development Study and the International Adult Literacy Survey to fill this gap. Specifically, we use test scores achieved by respondents in both surveys to measure their basic literacy and numeracy skills. We then evaluate the impact of these skills on workers' labour market outcomes, and find clear evidence of a substantial wage return to such basic skills. Copyright 2001 by Oxford University Press. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Development of an Automatic Pollen Classification System Using Shape, Texture and Aperture Features

Automatic detection and classification of pollen species has value for use inside of palynologic allergen studies. Traditional labeling of different pollen species requires an expert biologist to classify particles by sight, and is therefore time-consuming and expensive. Here, an automatic process is developed which segments the particle contour and uses the extracted features for the classification process. We consider shape features, texture features and aperture features and analyze which are useful. The texture features analyzed include: Gabor Filters, Fast Fourier Transform, Local Binary Patterns, Histogram of Oriented Gradients, and Haralick features. We have streamlined the process into one code base, and developed multithreading functionality to decrease the processing time for large datasets.
THE ANTITRUST ECONOMICS OF CREDIT CARD NETWORKS

It is easy to think of many instances where cooperative behavior among rivals is both necessary and desirable to achieve efficiencies. For example, in a sports league it is necessary for the proper functioning of the league that competing teams be permitted to have collective agreements on what rules to follow and when to schedule games.1 Similarly, in industries in which products require standardization it is often necessary for rivals to come to a consensus in order to decide what standards to adopt for the products.2 Finally, where firms engage in standardized transactions, such as financial exchanges, it is often necessary to construct rules by which such transactions can be efficiently communicated and settled.3
Fetal liver organ cultures allow the proliferative expansion of pre-B receptor-expressing pre-B-II cells and the differentiation of immature and mature B cells in vitro.

We describe the phenotypic and functional properties of B lineage cells developing in fetal liver organ cultures (FLOC) of mouse embryos at day 14 or 15 of gestation which contain pro/pre-B-I cells. FLOC B cell development proceeds to mature IgM+, IgD+ and CD23+ lipopolysaccharide-reactive B cells within a culture period of 5-6 days. The phenotypes and relative proportions of pro/pre-B-I, pre-B-II, immature and mature B cells from FLOC were similar to that seen in livers freshly isolated from age-matched, i.e. newborn, mice. More importantly, the numbers of cells recovered in the different B lineage subpopulations from FLOC were close to those developed in vivo. Hence, in contrast to single-cell suspension cultures of fetal liver, FLOC allow the proliferative expansion of pre-B cell receptor-expressing pre-B-II cells. FLOC from embryos of mice with targeted mutations in the RAG-2 and lambda5 genes, which cannot expand by proliferative expansion of their pre-B-II compartment in vivo because they cannot express a pre-B cell receptor on their surface, show this same defect in vitro. FLOC are accessible to the action of mAb and cytokines. Thus, addition of anti-IL-7 receptor mAb to FLOC of normal mice inhibits B cell development at the transition of pro/pre-B-I to pre-B-II cells. This inhibition is reversed by addition of excess rIL-7. Addition of IL-7 alone stimulates the proliferation of pro/pre-B-I cells and inhibits their differentiation to pre-B-II and immature B cells, as it does in single-cell suspension cultures. FLOC should be useful to study the effects of other mAb, cytokines, ligands and other molecules on early B cell development.
Size Clustering in European Carbon Markets

This paper documents empirical evidence of size clustering behavior in the European Carbon Futures Market and analyzes the circumstances under which it happens. Our findings show that carbon trades are concentrated in sizes of one to five contracts and in multiples of five. We have observed the existence of price clustering of prices ending in digits 0 or 5, and we have also proved that more clustered prices have more clustered sizes. Finally, the analysis of the key factors of the size clustering reveals that carbon traders use a reduced number of different trade sizes to simplify their trading process when uncertainty is high, market liquidity is poor, and the desire for opening new positions is very strong.
Direct evidence for SIR2 modulation of chromatin structure in yeast rDNA

The yeast SIR2 gene maintains inactive chromatin domains required for transcriptional repression at the silent mating‐type loci and telomeres. We previously demonstrated that SIR2 also acts to repress mitotic and meiotic recombination between the tandem ribosomal RNA gene array (rDNA). Here we address whether rDNA chromatin structure is altered by loss of SIR2 function by in vitro and in vivo assays of sensitivity to micrococcal nuclease and dam methyltransferase, respectively, and present the first chromatin study that maps sites of SIR2 action within the rDNA locus. Control studies at the MATα locus also revealed a previously undetected MNase‐sensitive site at the a1‐α2 divergent promoter which is protected in sir2 mutant cells by the derepressed a1‐α2 regulator. In rDNA, SIR2 is required for a more closed chromatin structure in two regions: SRR1, the major SIR‐Responsive Region in the non‐transcribed spacer, and SRR2, in the 18S rRNA coding region. None of the changes in rDNA detected in sir2 mutants are due to the presence of the a1‐α2 repressor. Reduced recombination in the rDNA correlates with a small, reproducible transcriptional silencing position effect. Deletion and overexpression studies demonstrate that SIR2, but not SIR1, SIR3 or SIR4, is required for this rDNA position effect. Significantly, rDNA transcriptional silencing and rDNA chromatin accessibility respond to SIR2 dosage, indicating that SIR2 is a limiting component required for chromatin modeling in rDNA.
Successful Treatment of Recurrent Triple-Negative Breast Cancer with Combination of Targeted Therapies

We present an interesting case of a 56-year-old female diagnosed with invasive high-grade triple-negative breast cancer, who developed diffuse liver metastases following lumpectomy and combination chemotherapy with docetaxel, doxorubicin and cyclophosphamide, re-excision and radiation therapy. Restaging CT and PET scans revealed massive involvement of the liver. She was treated with a combination of gene targeted and cytotoxic chemotherapy including capecitabine, erlotinib, bevacizumab and phenylbutyrate. She tested weakly positive for HER-2 despite prior negative FISH, which prompted us to add trastuzumab to her regimen. Baseline CT revealed five liver tumors—the sum of the products of the two largest perpendicular diameters was 110 cm2. Follow-up CT after three months of treatment revealed 62% decrease in total tumor load. More than 50% decrease in tumor size persisted on two follow-up CT scans, confirming partial response. She developed progressive disease after 15 months of treatment. A group of 16 women, including this patient, diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer with distant metastases were treated by our team with a combination of gene targeted therapy and chemotherapy. Six percent of patients obtained partial response, 25% minor response, 31% stable disease, and 38% progressive disease. The median duration of treatment in patients who relapsed after the second-, third- and fourth- to seventh-lines of chemotherapy was 59 weeks, 22 weeks and 17 weeks, respectively. Comparison of results obtained with cytotoxic chemotherapy revealed that MDT in the second- and third-lines was only nine and four weeks, respectively. In conclusion, this case report indicates that it is possible to obtain durable objective response of recurrent TNBC with a combination of gene targeted agents.
Couples Communication Skills and Anxiety of Pregnancy: A Narrative Review

Background: physical problems during pregnancy including Anxiety disorders form a large share of health problems. On the other hand, healthy relationship and communication skills are vital to raise a family. For couples who enjoy communication skills, parenthood will be the best and most pleasant experiences in their lives. High levels of positive communication will lead to couples and their children’s mental health and couples’ good relationship can have a protective effect against stressors including anxiety of pregnancy. The current study reviewed the studies on the relationship between communication skills and the anxiety of pregnancy. Methods: The current study is a review where the researcher browsed the available databases like Google Scholar, Pubmed, Magiran, SID, and Science Direct and using key words of Communication skills, marital satisfaction, and the anxiety of pregnancy, & the researcher has searched the articles of 2000-2014 & read 150 abstracts & 93 full papers and ultimately, chose 50 to write this study. Results: By reviewing the findings literature in three general categories as Communication Skills as the Significant Component to Get Marital Satisfaction, Improving Marital Satisfaction as Pregnancy Anxiety Reducing Factor, and Communication Skills Quality as Component Influencing Pregnancy Anxiety. Conclusions: Having communication skills will lead to promotion of marital satisfaction and increased mental health in life. It is, therefore, recommended that communication skills be trained in routine programs for pre-marriage counseling, pre-pregnancy cares and pregnancy so that the mental health of community can be improved.