Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Linear collider capabilities for supersymmetry in dark matter allowed region

Recent comparisons of minimal supergravity (mSUGRA) model predictions with WMAP measurements of the neutralino relic density point to preferred regions of model parameter space. We investigate the reach of linear colliders (LC) with (s)1/2 = 0.5 and 1 TeV for SUSY in the framework of the mSUGRA model. We find that LCs can cover the entire stau co-annihilation region provided tanβ30. In the hyperbolic branch/focus point (HB/FP) region of parameter space, specialized cuts are suggested to increase the reach in this important ``dark matter allowed'' area. In the case of the HB/FP region, the reach of a LC extends well past the reach of the CERN LHC. We examine a case study in the HB/FP region, and show that the MSSM parameters μ and M2 can be sufficiently well-measured to demonstrate that one would indeed be in the HB/FP region, where the lightest chargino and neutralino have a substantial higgsino component.
Microanalysis, Pharmacokinetics and Tissue Distribution of Polysaccharide-Protein Complexes from Longan Pulp in Mice

A high performance size exclusion-fluorescence detection (HPSEC-FD) method combined with fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) prelabeling was established for the microanalysis of polysaccharide–protein complexes from longan pulp (LPP). FITC-labeled LPP (LPPF) was fractionated by gel filtration chromatography. The weight-average molecular weight and FITC substitution degree of LPPF were 39.01 kDa and 0.20%, respectively. The HPSEC-FD calibration curves linear over the range of 1–200 µg/mL in mouse plasma, spleen and lung samples with correlation coefficients greater than 0.995. The inter-day and intra-day precisions of the method were not more than 6.9%, and the relative recovery ranged from 93.7% to 106.4%. The concentration–time curve of LPPF in plasma following intravenous (i.v.) administration at 40 mg/kg body weight well fitted to a two-compartment model. LPPF rapidly eliminated from plasma according to the short half-lives (t1/2α = 2.23 min, t1/2β = 39.11 min) and mean retention times (MRT0–t = 1.15 h, MRT0–∞ = 1.39 h). After administration over 5 to 360 min, the concentration of LPPF in spleen homogenate decreased from 7.41 to 3.68 µg/mL; the concentration in lung homogenate decreased from 9.08 to 3.40 µg/mL. On the other hand, the increasing concentration of LPPF fraction with low molecular weight in heart homogenate was observed.
Relationship between calcium decoding elements and plant abiotic-stress resistance

Serving as an important second messenger, calcium ion has unique properties and universal ability to transmit diverse signals that trigger primary physiological actions in cells in response to hormones, pathogens, light, gravity, and stress factors. Being a second messenger of paramount significance, calcium is required at almost all stages of plant growth and development, playing a fundamental role in regulating polar growth of cells and tissues and participating in plant adaptation to various stress factors. Many researches showed that calcium signals decoding elements are involved in ABA-induced stomatal closure and plant adaptation to drought, cold, salt and other abiotic stresses. Calcium channel proteins like AtTPC1 and TaTPC1 can regulate stomatal closure. Recently some new studies show that Ca2+ is dissolved in water in the apoplast and transported primarily from root to shoot through the transpiration stream. The oscillating amplitudes of [Ca2+]o and [Ca2+]i are controlled by soil Ca2+ concentrations and transpiration rates. Because leaf water use efficiency (WUE) is determined by stomatal closure and transpiration rate, so there may be a close relationship between Ca2+ transporters and stomatal closure as well as WUE, which needs to be studied. The selection of varieties with better drought resistance and high WUE plays an increasing role in bio-watersaving in arid and semi-arid areas on the globe. The current paper reviews the relationship between calcium signals decoding elements and plant drought resistance as well as other abiotic stresses for further study.
Doubts about the role of cannabis in causing lung cancer

To the Editors: We read with interest the article by Aldington et al. 1 entitled “Cannabis use and risk of lung cancer: a case–control study”. However, we are concerned that the conclusion stating that “long-term cannabis use increases the risk of lung cancer in young adults” is inadequately supported by the data, given the study's several methodological flaws. First, Aldington et al. 1 argue that the risk of lung cancer increases linearly by 8% per pack-yr smoked, based on the assumption that cancer risk from cannabis smoking is similar to cancer risk from tobacco smoking, which also increases linearly with pack-yrs. …
Evaluation of Standing Vertical Jump by Ankles Acceleration Measurement

Quagliarella, L, Nicola Sasanelli, N, Belgiovine, G, Moretti, L, and Moretti, B. Evaluation of standing vertical jump by ankles acceleration measurement. J Strength Cond Res 24(5): 1229-1236, 2010-The use of accelerometers is discussed to evaluate standing vertical jump. Two accelerometers, mounted on each ankle and connected to a wearable system, were used for signal acquisition, and a piezoelectric platform was used to verify the results. Fifty-one subjects were enrolled, subdivided into a group of healthy subjects and 2 groups who had different surgery for Achilles tendon rupture. Each subject performed 5 countermovement and 5 squat jumps; 11 subjects also performed 5 countermovement jumps with voluntary leg rotations during the flight phase. A training set was used to assess signal processing, and a validation set was used to verify its accuracy. A peak detection algorithm was developed to quantify flight time from the acceleration modulus, and its results were compared with platform data. The Pearson correlation coefficient of ankle accelerations and the integral of each signal were adopted to describe, respectively, the movement coordination and the limbs rotation during the flight time. The flight times obtained from the accelerometers and force plate were highly correlated (Spearman's coefficient >0.95); they were compared, for each jump, and the maximum mean error, for subject, was 4.8%. The movement coordination was in good agreement with subjects' clinical features and with the different jump phases. The signal integral presented significant differences, among jumps, related to leg rotations (p < 0.0005). The method proposed allows the monitoring of standing vertical jump using the fight time and gives information on the legs coordination and on the motor strategies of the lower limbs. Therefore, it can be used to obtain performance reference also outside labs, both in clinical and sport settings.
Organizational commitment of a health profession faculty: dimensions, correlates and conditions

Health professions depend on their faculties to prepare new practitioners, conduct research and provide essential services. Organizational commitment is an important aspect of faculty effectiveness and job performance, and may impact on turnover, absenteeism and interpersonal trust. A survey of organizational commitment, including faculty demographics and workplace variables, was conducted. Respondents were full- and part-time chiropractic faculty working in the United States and Canada. More than 54% of the study population (n = 609) completed and returned the instrument. A large majority of the respondents were male (68.4%) and employed full-time (81.6%). Almost half (47.5%) of the respondents were assigned to the area of patient care at their institutions. This study provides an initial assessment of organizational commitment among chiropractic faculty. Tenure in higher education, gender and age were found to be the most important predictors of organizational commitment.
Host Genetic Factors Affecting Spontaneous HBsAg Seroclearance in Chronic Hepatitis B Patients

Spontaneous clearance of hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) in chronic hepatitis B (CHB) patients usually indicates a remission of hepatitis activity and a favorable outcome. Two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP), rs3077 near HLA-DPA1 region and rs9277535 near HLA-DPB1 region, have been shown to be associated with HBV persistence after acute HBV infection. However, little is known about the impact of these 2 SNPs on spontaneous HBsAg clearance in CHB patients. In this case-control study, a total of 100 male HBeAg-negative chronic HBV carriers who cleared HBsAg spontaneously (case group) and 100 age-matched HBeAg-negative male patients with persistent HBsAg positivity (control group) were enrolled. We investigated the relationship between these 2 SNPs and HBsAg clearance. There was a higher frequency of rs9277535 non-GG genotype in the case group (57% vs. 42%). Patients with rs9277535 non-GG genotype had a higher chance to clear HBsAg [Odds ratio (OR): 1.83, 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.04∼3.21, P = 0.034]. Compared to GG haplotype of rs3077 and rs9277535, GA haplotype had a higher chance of achieving spontaneous HBsAg loss (OR: 2.17, 95% CI: 1.14∼4.16, P = 0.030). In conclusion, rs9277535 non-GG genotype is associated with a higher likelihood of spontaneous HBsAg seroclearance in CHB patients.
Pricing Decisions during Inter-generational Product Transition November 2007 , revised November 2008

How should companies price products during an inter-generational transition? High uncertainty in a new product introduction often leads to extreme cases of demand and supply mismatches. Pricing is an effective tool to either prevent or alleviate these problems. We study the optimal pricing decisions in the context of a product transition in which a new generation product replaces an old one. We formulate the dynamic pricing problem and derive the optimal prices for both the old and new products. Our analysis identifies the key dynamics affecting the optimal prices: product replacement, scarcity, inventory, and internal and external competition. In addition, we propose a simple and pragmatic approach to incorporate demand learning into the pricing decisions during a product transition.
Continuous-time portfolio selection under ambiguity

In a financial market, the appreciation rates of stocks are statistically difficult to estimate, and typically only some confidence intervals in which the rates reside can be estimated. In this paper we study continuous-time portfolio selection under ambiguity, in the sense that the appreciation rates are only known to be in a certain convex closed set and the portfolios are allowed to be based on only the historical stocks prices. We formulate the problem in both the expected utility and the mean--variance frameworks, and derive robust portfolios explicitly for both models.
Sentiment Analysis of Short Informal Texts

We describe a state-of-the-art sentiment analysis system that detects (a) the sentiment of short informal textual messages such as tweets and SMS (message-level task) and (b) the sentiment of a word or a phrase within a message (term-level task). The system is based on a supervised statistical text classification approach leveraging a variety of surface-form, semantic, and sentiment features. The sentiment features are primarily derived from novel high-coverage tweet-specific sentiment lexicons. These lexicons are automatically generated from tweets with sentiment-word hashtags and from tweets with emoticons. To adequately capture the sentiment of words in negated contexts, a separate sentiment lexicon is generated for negated words. The system ranked first in the SemEval-2013 shared task 'Sentiment Analysis in Twitter' (Task 2), obtaining an F-score of 69.02 in the message-level task and 88.93 in the term-level task. Post-competition improvements boost the performance to an F-score of 70.45 (message-level task) and 89.50 (term-level task). The system also obtains state-of-the-art performance on two additional datasets: the SemEval-2013 SMS test set and a corpus of movie review excerpts. The ablation experiments demonstrate that the use of the automatically generated lexicons results in performance gains of up to 6.5 absolute percentage points.
Detecting and Explaining Vividness Effects in Attitudinal Judgments

A common belief among marketing practitioners is that increasing the vividness of a message enhances its persuasiveness. This belief has received support in experimental investigations, but vividness also has been found to undermine persuasion or to have no effect. The authors extend a current view of memory operation to predict when and how vividness will affect persuasion. According to this view, the favorableness of available information determines the persuasive effect of vividness. This assertion is tested and supported in a series of experiments. The findings are discussed in terms of strategies for controlling vividness effects.
Examining Charter School Policy and Public School District Resource Allocation in Ohio.

This project focuses on the competitive pressure, or the threat of competitive pressure, generated by charter school policy. This paper uses longitudinal district-level data and multiple quasi-experimental designs to examine the relationship between two Ohio charter school policies and changes in public school district instructional resource allocation. Some believe that the competitive pressure created by charter schools will improve efficiency in district-run public schools; however, the findings from this study do not reliably demonstrate that charter school policy will induce a public school district to increase the level of instructional resource allocation. The findings do provide evidence that some charter policies are linked to changes in resource allocation at certain school districts. This study suggests that additional, multiple method investigations are needed to study how public school districts respond to competition and policies designed to change the levels of competition in the public school system.
First Outbreak Response Using an Oral Cholera Vaccine in Africa: Vaccine Coverage, Acceptability and Surveillance of Adverse Events, Guinea, 2012

Background Despite World Health Organization (WHO) prequalification of two safe and effective oral cholera vaccines (OCV), concerns about the acceptability, potential diversion of resources, cost and feasibility of implementing timely campaigns has discouraged their use. In 2012, the Ministry of Health of Guinea, with the support of Médecins Sans Frontières organized the first mass vaccination campaign using a two-dose OCV (Shanchol) as an additional control measure to respond to the on-going nationwide epidemic. Overall, 316,250 vaccines were delivered. Here, we present the results of vaccination coverage, acceptability and surveillance of adverse events. Methodology/Principal Findings We performed a cross-sectional cluster survey and implemented adverse event surveillance. The study population included individuals older than 12 months, eligible for vaccination, and residing in the areas targeted for vaccination (Forécariah and Boffa, Guinea). Data sources were household interviews with verification by vaccination card and notifications of adverse events from surveillance at vaccination posts and health centres. In total 5,248 people were included in the survey, 3,993 in Boffa and 1,255 in Forécariah. Overall, 89.4% [95%CI:86.4–91.8%] and 87.7% [95%CI:84.2–90.6%] were vaccinated during the first round and 79.8% [95%CI:75.6–83.4%] and 82.9% [95%CI:76.6–87.7%] during the second round in Boffa and Forécariah respectively. The two dose vaccine coverage (including card and oral reporting) was 75.8% [95%CI: 71.2–75.9%] in Boffa and 75.9% [95%CI: 69.8–80.9%] in Forécariah respectively. Vaccination coverage was higher in children. The main reason for non-vaccination was absence. No severe adverse events were notified. Conclusions/Significance The well-accepted mass vaccination campaign reached high coverage in a remote area with a mobile population. Although OCV should not be foreseen as the long-term solution for global cholera control, they should be integrated as an additional tool into the response.
Classification of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder by EEG Complexity and Hemispheric Dependency Measurements

In the present study, both single channel electroencephalography (EEG) complexity and two channel interhemispheric dependency measurements have newly been examined for classification of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and controls by using support vector machine classifiers. Three embedding entropy measurements (approximate entropy, sample entropy, permutation entropy (PermEn)) are used to estimate single channel EEG complexity for 19-channel eyes closed cortical measurements. Mean coherence and mutual information are examined to measure the level of interhemispheric dependency in frequency and statistical domain, respectively for eight distinct electrode pairs placed on the scalp with respect to the international 10-20 electrode placement system. All methods are applied to short EEG segments of 2 s. The classification performance is measured 20 times with different 2-fold cross-validation data for both single channel complexity features (19 features) and interhemispheric dependency features (eight features). The highest classification accuracy of 85 ±5.2% is provided by PermEn at prefrontal regions of the brain. Even if the classification success do not provided by other methods as high as PermEn, the clear differences between patients and controls at prefrontal regions can also be obtained by using other methods except coherence. In conclusion, OCD, defined as illness of orbitofronto-striatal structures [Beucke et al., JAMA Psychiatry70 (2013) 619-629; Cavedini et al., Psychiatry Res.78 (1998) 21-28; Menzies et al., Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev.32(3) (2008) 525-549], is caused by functional abnormalities in the pre-frontal regions. Particularly, patients are characterized by lower EEG complexity at both pre-frontal regions and right fronto-temporal locations. Our results are compatible with imaging studies that define OCD as a sub group of anxiety disorders exhibited a decreased complexity (such as anorexia nervosa [Toth et al., Int. J. Psychophysiol.51(3) (2004) 253-260] and panic disorder [Bob et al., Physiol. Res.55 (2006) S113-S119]).
Origin of sex chromosome aneuploidy

Probabilities applicable to RFLPs are derived for the genotypes of XXY, XXX, and XO children, conditional on their mode of origin and the parental mating type, and the theory is applied to family data on the XG locus. The proportion of XXY males arising in spermatogenesis is shown to be 0.41 ± 0.09. The large distance of XG from the centromere makes distinction between maternal meiosis I and II unreliable, but if man is like Drosophila, most of the maternal non‐disjunctions arise in meiosis I, among tetrads that have undergone one or more exchanges. Data from XG show that 0.78 ± 0.05 of XO females arise from an error involving the paternal sex chromosomes. The XG locus is virtually uninformative about the origin of XXX. Application of the theory to selected RFLPs will be much more incisive because of their large number, lack of dominance, greater heterozygosity, and distribution along the chromosome. Study of RFLPs will facilitate diagnosis of the parental origin of sex chromosome abnormalities and the comparison of recombination rates in regular and trisomic progeny of maternal mei I and mei II origin.
Secular changes in body size and body composition in schoolchildren from La Plata City (Argentina).

AIM To analyze the secular changes in body size and composition of two cohorts of children from La Plata City, Argentina, with a 35-year follow-up. subjects and methods: Cohort 1 (C1) was measured in 1969-1970 and included 1772 children (889 boys, 883 girls), and Cohort 2 (C2), measured in 2004-2005, included 1059 children (542 boys, 517 girls). Both cohorts were obtained from matching geographical areas and comprised children from 4 to 12 years. Body weight (W); Height (H); Upper arm circumference (UAC); Tricipital (TS) and Subscapular skinfolds (SS) were measured, and Body Mass Index (BMI) and muscle (UMA) and fat (AFA) brachial areas were calculated. Prevalence of overweight and obesity was estimated by IOTF. To compare C1-C2 we used a generalized linear model with log-transformed variables, and chi square test. RESULTS There were significant and positive differences between C2-C1 in W, UAC, SS, TS, and AFA. In contrast, H was not significantly different and UMA was significantly different but with negative values. The prevalence of overweight and obesity was 14.5% and 3.8% in C1, and 17.0% and 6.8% in C2. Differences between cohorts were significant for obesity. CONCLUSION The shifts observed for soft tissues--positive trend for fat and negative for muscle area--occurring without changes in height lead us to suppose that in these three decades, La Plata's population has experienced deterioration in living conditions and important changes in their lifestyle, such as an increased consumption of energy-dense foods and sedentary habits.
A framework for optimal adaptive DCT watermarks

In this paper we address the problem of robustly embedding 64 bits into an image while taking into account the H VS. The proposed method is general in that any mask can be adopted. The main advantage of the framework we present is that we demonstrate how to optimally embed a watermark given the constraints imposed by the mask in the spatial domain. This is in sharp contrast with the bulk of publications which embed a watermark in the DCT domain and then truncate or modulate in the spatial domain in order to satisfy masking constraints. The problem with these approaches is that spatial domain truncation or modulation leads inevitably to the degradation of the watermark in the DCT domain. Results indicate that our proposed approach is robust against JPEG compression at a quality factor of 30im-ages of size 64 by 64.
Analysis of Post-Wall Waveguides and Circuits Using a Model of Two-Dimensional Photonic Crystals

A semi-analytical method to analyze post-wall waveguides and circuits based on the model of two-dimensional photonic crystals formed by layered periodic arrays of circular cylinders is presented. The propagation constant of the fundamental TE mode, the attenuation constant due to the leakage loss and the effective width of an equivalent rectangular waveguide are calculated. Using the concept of the effective width, the original structure is replaced by an equivalent rectangular structure. When additional metallic posts are loaded in the rectangular waveguide, functional post-wall waveguide-based passive circuits are formed. The S-parameters of the post-wall circuits, which act as bandpass filters, are calculated using the image theory combined with the lattice sums technique.