Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Thyroid Function Within the Reference Range and the Risk of Stroke: An Individual Participant Data Analysis.

CONTEXT The currently applied reference ranges for thyroid function are under debate. Despite evidence that thyroid function within the reference range is related with several cardiovascular disorders, its association with the risk of stroke has not been evaluated previously. DESIGN AND SETTING We identified studies through a systematic literature search and the Thyroid Studies Collaboration, a collaboration of prospective cohort studies. Studies measuring baseline TSH, free T4, and stroke outcomes were included, and we collected individual participant data from each study, including thyroid function measurements and incident all stroke (combined fatal and nonfatal) and fatal stroke. The applied reference range for TSH levels was between 0.45 and 4.49 mIU/L. RESULTS We collected individual participant data on 43 598 adults with TSH within the reference range from 17 cohorts, with a median follow-up of 11.6 years (interquartile range 5.1-13.9), including 449 908 person-years. Age- and sex-adjusted pooled hazard ratio for TSH was 0.78 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.65-0.95 across the reference range of TSH) for all stroke and 0.83 (95% CI 0.62-1.09) for fatal stroke. For the free T4 analyses, the hazard ratio was 1.08 (95% CI 0.99-1.15 per SD increase) for all stroke and 1.10 (95% CI 1.04-1.19) for fatal stroke. This was independent of cardiovascular risk factors including systolic blood pressure, total cholesterol, smoking, and prevalent diabetes. CONCLUSION Higher levels of TSH within the reference range may decrease the risk of stroke, highlighting the need for further research focusing on the clinical consequences associated with differences within the reference range of thyroid function.
Enhancement and obfuscation through the use of graphs in sustainability reports: An international comparison

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the use of graphs in corporate sustainability reports and attempt to determine, first, whether the use of graphs appears to be associated with attempts at impression management, and second, whether differences across three levels of reporting regulatory structure are associated with differences in the level of impression management.Design/methodology/approach – Based on a sample of 120 sustainability reports issued by firms from six different countries, the authors empirically test for differences in presentation of favourable, as opposed to unfavourable, items (enhancement) and for differences in the direction of materially distorted graphs (obfuscation). Findings – For the overall sample, substantial evidence was found of both enhancement and obfuscation in the graph displays. Also, more limited evidence was found that impression management differs across companies facing different regulatory structures.Research limitations/implications – The authors .
Unconditional demand for health care in Côte d'Ivoire : does selection on health status matter?

Health care demand price elasticities are often estimated from samples conditioned to include only sick people. This paper shows that not only may such estimates be statistically biased, but even when properly estimated they can only be interpreted as short-run price responses. In contrast, unconditional estimates take into account the long-run feedback of prices on health. The paper discusses simple strategies for estimating the long-run unconditional elasticities, which do not depend on controversial exclusion or functional form restrictions. Using the Cote d'Ivoire Living Standards Survey, a test based on the multinomial probit finds that the usual conditional estimates do not suffer from selection bias. However, short-run conditional estimates differ significantly from long-run unconditional ones for several covariates, with conditional price elasticities being about 25 percent larger than unconditional ones.
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: Application to Financial Markets in Pakistan

Recently there has been an increased interest in the theory of chaos by macroeconomists and financial economists. Originating in the natural sciences, applications of the theory have spread through various fields including brain research, optics, metereology, and economics. The attractiveness of chaotic dynamics is its ability to generate large movements which appear to be random, with greater frequency than linear models. Two of the most striking features of any macro-economic data are its random-like appearance and its seemingly cyclical character. Cycles in economic
Effects of verbal encouragement on force and electromyographic activations during exercise.

BACKGROUND The aim of the present study was to examine the effects of verbal encouragement on isometric force and associated electromyographic (EMG) parameters during a handgrip task. METHODS Twenty-three participants (12 women and 11 men) performed maximal voluntary isometric handgrip contractions following three conditions: 1) verbal encouragement (VE) condition: participants executed isometric contractions while being verbally encouraged; 2) non-verbal encouragement (nVE) condition: the same starting and stopping signal but without encouragement; 3) non-concentration and non-motivation (nCM) condition: self-initiated contractions without concentration and motivation. Start and stop of the contraction were self-initiated. The maximal voluntary force (MVF) and the maximal rate of force development (MRFD) were measured. Integrated EMG corresponding to MVF (iEMGMVF) and to MRFD (iEMGMRFD) were collected from flexor digitorum superficialis (FDS) and extensor digitorum communis (EDC) muscles. RESULTS MVF was higher during VE compared with nVE (+11.7%; P<0.05) and nCM (+23.2%; P<0.05) conditions. Likewise, MRFD was significantly higher during VE, compared with nVE (+21.7%; P<0.05) and nCM (+55.4%; P<0.05) conditions. iEMGMVF increased for FDS and EDC during VE, compared to nVE (+26.19%, +20.5%) and nCM conditions (+68.85%, +48.91%), respectively. iEMGMRFD increased for FDS and EDC during VE, compared to nVE (+21.2%, +46.07%) and nCM conditions (+23.79%, +42.32%). Furthermore, the reproducibility of all these indices was higher with VE condition. CONCLUSIONS Taken together, force production (MVF and MRFD) and EMG data supported the view that muscles activity is considerably influenced by the verbal encouragements during isometric force exercise.
How Well Do Economists Forecast Stock Market Prices? A Study of the Livingston Surveys

The desire to forecast stock prices appears to be eternal. Alfred Cowles (1933) was one of the first researchers to evaluate statistically how well professional forecasters predict stock prices. In this tradition, our paper will explore the statistical properties of the Livingston stock market forecasts. ' A number of recent studies, including those by Josef Lakonishok (1980), Bryan Brown and Shlomo Maital (1981), and Douglas Pearce (1984), finds that the Livingston stock market forecasts are statistically biased and/or do not utilize all available information (i.e., are informationally inefficient). In contrast to earlier studies, we find, using 61 semiannual Livingston surveys from June 1955 through June 1985, that stock market forecasts are statistically unbiased and minimum error variance estimators. In Section I, we show that earlier studies are likely to mask the true relationships between stock market forecasts and realized rates of return because of inappropriate computational algorithms. In Section II, we present our statistical results based upon the corrected data algorithm. We provide a brief summary of the paper in the last section. 1. Computing Livingston Stock Market Rate of Return Forecasts
PENGARUH PARTISIPASI DALAM ANGGARAN DAN KEJELASAN SASARAN ANGGARAN SERTA PERAN MANAJERIAL PENGELOLAAN KEUANGAN DAERAH TERHADAP KINERJA PEMERINTAH DAERAH (Studi Empiris pada Pemerintah Provinsi Bengkulu)

In order to achieve good governance, the government continues to make efforts to improve the administrative system as a whole and applying state budget goal clarity accordance with the purposes of the budget and to realize that a good managerial role. Thus, the influence of participation in budgeting and budget goal clarity and managerial leadership roles working unit is concerned in improving government performance. This research is quantitative research, which will examine the effect of budgetary participation and budget goal clarity and managerial roles of financial managers on the performance of the local government area of the province of Bengkulu. The population in this study were all SKPD in Bengkulu province consisting of 43 on education, in which questionnaire distributed in each of the 3 leaders representing every subdivision, in order to obtain 129 samples. Based on this research, it was found that, participation in the budget significantly affect the performance of the government with a significant value of less than 0.05, ie 0.000. Similarly, the budget goal clarity variables have a significant influence on the performance of the government with significant value of 0.007, while the role of managerial variables do not significantly affect the performance of the government, with a value significantly greater than 0.05, which is 0.624. Simultaneously, participation in the budget, the budget goal clarity and managerial roles have a significant influence on the performance of the government.
Foreign Direct Investment and Wages in Indonesian Manufacturing

This paper asks two types of questions. One is about the behavior of foreign-owned firms in Indonesian labor markets and the other is about the effect of the presence of foreign-owned firms on Indonesian wages. We ask first whether foreign-owned plants pay a higher price for labor, that is, more than locally-owned plants for workers of a given quality, as we can measure it. We then ask whether foreign-owned plants pay a higher price for labor given the characteristics of the plants such as their size, industry, and location. The answer is that foreign firms do pay a higher price, and even a higher price given their plant characteristics. The second set of questions is whether a larger presence of foreign-owned plants results in higher wages in locally-owned plants and overall. Higher foreign presence leads to higher wages in locally-owned plants. Since the foreign plants also pay higher wages than locally-owned ones, the two factors together mean that higher foreign presence raises the general wage level in a province and industry.
Sex differences in the onset of seasonal reproductive quiescence in hamsters

Day length is the primary cue used by many mammals to restrict reproduction to favourable spring and summer months, but it is unknown for any mammal whether the seasonal loss of fertility begins at the same time and occurs at the same rate in females and males; nor it established whether the termination of mating behaviour in males and females coincides with the loss of fertility. We speculated that females, owing to their greater energetic investment in reproduction, are the limiting sex in terminating offspring production in short days (SDs). Oestrous cycles and production of young were monitored in Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) transferred from long days (LDs) to SDs. Females were mated to LD males after three to eight weeks of SD treatment; in a parallel experiment, males housed in SDs were mated to LD females. After five and eight weeks in SDs, at least twice as many males as females were fertile. Both males and females continued to copulate for several weeks after becoming infertile. The onset of seasonal infertility occurs earlier in females than males and the decline in fertility precedes the seasonal loss of mating behaviour in both sexes.
User Control for Adjusting Conflicting Objectives in Parameter-dependent Visualization of Data

Dealing with high-dimensional data becomes very common nowadays; visualization is a natural preprocessing to have an overview of such data. A lot of dimensionality reduction methods exist; many of them require to tune a parameter implementing a trade-off between conflicting objectives. Automatically choosing the appropriate trade-off is usually a difficult task because in most cases the exact final goal of the visualization is ill-defined. The approach developed here aims at taking advantage of the user’s capacities and feedback by allowing him to control parameters in real-time and to see the resulting visualization. In order to have fast transitions between visualizations resulting from different values of the parameter, interpolation on a grid is used as an approximation. The accuracy of this approximation is estimated using Procrustes analysis and can be adjusted through a threshold. Simulations provide an interpretation of this threshold and are validated on a real dataset.
Re-thinking abortion : psychology, gender, power, and the law

Acknowledgements. Introduction: Psychology and Abortion. Abortion Legislation. The Abortion Debates: Mothrhood, Morality and the Sanctity of Life. The Abortion Debates: The Medical Profession and Abortion. Contraception and Abortion. The Experience of Abortion. Psychology, Abortion and Social Policy.
Evaluating the impact of criminalizing drunk driving on years of life lost due to road traffic deaths in one megacity, China

Abstract Objective: Road safety is an important public health issue worldwide. However, few studies have analyzed the association between criminalizing drunk driving and years of life lost (YLL) due to road traffic deaths (RTDs). Our study can provide useful information about this policy. Methods: We used interrupted time-series analysis to find the changes in monthly YLL and RTD before and after law enforcement began using RTD data from 2008 to 2014 in Tianjin. Results: After adjustment for seasonality, months, holidays, and the number of people in each district, criminalizing drunk driving was followed by a 11.1% (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.1–21.1%) reduction in risk of RTDs and a corresponding 778.1-year (95% CI, 200–1,355.1) reduction in monthly YLL. The reduction in YLL was especially significant among males, those aged 16–64 years old, and suburban residents. Conclusions: This study highlights that the law can lead to a reduction in YLL due to RTDs in Tianjin, China. Large immediate public health benefits resulted from the new road traffic law in China. YLL provides a complementary measure for examining the effect of criminalization on drunk driving RTDs.
Evidence for an association between Chlamydia trachomatis and cervical intraepithelial neoplasia

Summary. Attempts were made to isolate Chlamydia trachomatis, Mycoplasma hominis and Ureaplasma urealyticum from women with cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN), from those with microinvasive or invasive cervical cancer, and from a control group of similar women with other gynaecological problems. C. trachomatis was found in a significantly greater proportion of women with CIN (8%) or cervical cancer (18%) than in the control group (1%), whereas M. hominis and U. urealyticum were approximately as common in each group. Histological examination of the cervix in cone biopsies or hysterectomy specimens from 26 women with CIN and from 39 women of similar age with no evidence of CIN showed lymphoid follicles, previously reported to be associated with chlamydial infection, in nine of the specimens with CIN, but in none of the specimens without CIN.
Frontal eye field efferents in the macaque monkey: I. Subcortical pathways and topography of striatal and thalamic terminal fields

Anterograde tracers (tritiated leucine, proline, fucose; WGA‐HRP) were injected into sites within the frontal eye fields (FEF) of nine macaque monkeys. Low thresholds (≤50 μA) for electrically evoking saccadic eye movements were used to locate injection sites in four monkeys. Cases were grouped according to the amplitude of saccades evoked or predicted at the injection site. Dorsomedial prearcuate injection sites where large saccades were elicited were classified as lFEF cases, whereas ventrolateral prearcuate sites where small saccades were evoked were designated sFEF cases. One control case was injected in the medial postarcuate area 6.
Kernel design techniques for alias-free time-frequency distributions

This paper presents a modification of the alias-free generalized discrete time-frequency distribution (AF-GDTFD) which reduces the computations necessary to implement the algorithm from O(N/sup 3/) to O(N/sup 2/log N). With this new implementation, we examine the problem of designing/modifying kernels defined in the ambiguity plane for use with the AF-GDTFD. We present three different methods to allow the use of these kernels and demonstrate them using the Butterworth kernel. <<ETX>>
A Multi-component CNN-RNN Approach for Dimensional Emotion Recognition in-the-wild

This paper presents our approach to the One-Minute Gradual-Emotion Recognition (OMG-Emotion) Challenge, focusing on dimensional emotion recognition through visual analysis of the provided emotion videos. The approach is based on a Convolutional and Recurrent (CNN-RNN) deep neural architecture we have developed for the relevant large AffWild Emotion Database. We extended and adapted this architecture, by letting a combination of multiple features generated in the CNN component be explored by RNN subnets. Our target has been to obtain best performance on the OMG-Emotion visual validation data set, while learning the respective visual training data set. Extended experimentation has led to best architectures for the estimation of the values of the valence and arousal emotion dimensions over these data sets.
My wound and I: patients’ perspective

Abstract Clinical photography is beneficial to clinicians and healthcare teams in the care of patients and wound management. The aim of this study was to investigate patients’ perspective of wound photography in an NHS hospital outpatient clinic, assessing its personal benefits and wider applications. Patients were asked to participate in a questionnaire, to identify information about their wound(s), investigate their perspective of the benefits and uses of wound photography, as well as their preference regarding imaging operators and devices. Results showed that all participants thought that clinical images offer a more comprehensive record of their wound when used in conjunction with measurements and written descriptions. The majority of patients considered wound photography of benefit to them, to monitor their healing and they also appreciated the wider uses of these images. Clinical photographers were the preferred choice as the image operator, whereas the preference for the imaging device used was not as significant. In conclusion, participants considered wound photography to be beneficial for personal and broader purposes, with the current clinical photography service being rated highly. These findings give an insight into the patients’ perspective of wound photography, which can be useful when developing and delivering services within the NHS.
Effect of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 antagonism on adiposity in obese mice.

Development and maintenance of fat depots require angiogenesis, in which vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and its receptors play a crucial role. We have evaluated the effect of blocking VEGF receptor 2 (VEGF-R2) with a MAB (DC101) on adipose tissue of mice with established obesity. Therefore, obese male wild-type C57B1/6 mice were treated with i.p. injection of DC101 (40 mg/kg body weight, twice weekly during 13 weeks) or of the control antibody 1C8. Treatment with DC101 resulted in a slightly lower body weight but had no effect on subcutaneous (SC) or gonadal (GON) white adipose tissue mass, as monitored by MRI. Histochemical analysis of isolated SC and GON fat pads did not reveal significant effects of DC101 treatment on adipocyte or blood vessel size or density. Plasma levels of the liver enzymes aspartate aminotransferase and alanine aminotransferase as well as liver triglyceride levels were significantly decreased following DC101 treatment. Plasma glucose levels were markedly lower upon DC101 treatment, whereas insulin and adiponectin levels were not affected. Furthermore, Akt phosphorylation in adipose tissues was not affected. Thus, in vivo VEGF-R2 blockade in mice with established nutritionally induced obesity did not significantly affect insulin signaling in adipose tissue or adiposity.
Mature Larval Dispersal and Adult Emergence of the Economically Significant Pest, Scirtothrips aurantii Faure (Thysanoptera: Thripidae), in Commercial Citrus

Abstract Scirtothrips aurantii Faure (Thysanoptera: Thripidae) is a major pest of citrus fruit in subtropical southern Africa. Population monitoring is an important aspect of S. aurantii control, but additional information is required on its phenology. Dispersal of mature larvae onto the soil surface from the tree canopy, and emergence of adults, were assessed using dispersal/emergence (D/E) traps in an untreated citrus orchard in South Africa. Overall, 90.7% of adult Thysanoptera emerging from soil / leaf litter beneath the citrus trees were S. aurantii, of which 35.7% were males, and 64.3% were females. Female S. aurantii having survived winter as adults oviposited on the early spring flush. This resulted in the first population peak of larvae dropping to the ground to pupate and adults emerging in spring, September to early October, as the first vegetative flush of the citrus-growing season hardened, and fruit was set as blossoming ended. Initial infestation of young fruit occurred after a build-up of larval numbers on the soft citrus flush late July to early August. The second generation larval and adult peak occurred late November to early December, whether there was new flush or not, as young fruit could support the S. aurantii population. A third peak occurred mid-December to late January, depending on year. Thus, there were three generations of S. aurantii during the period of citrus fruit susceptibility to thrips damage (September–January). After the autumn flush in April, another peak of larvae and adults occurred before the population declined to a minimum from May to July.
Optical coherence microscopy. A technology for rapid, in vivo, non-destructive visualization of plants and plant cells.

We describe the development and utilization of a new imaging technology for plant biology, optical coherence microscopy (OCM), which allows true in vivo visualization of plants and plant cells. This novel technology allows the direct, in situ (e.g. plants in soil), three-dimensional visualization of cells and events in shoot tissues without causing damage. With OCM we can image cells or groups of cells that are up to 1 mm deep in living tissues, resolving structures less than 5 microm in size, with a typical collection time of 5 to 6 min. OCM measures the inherent light-scattering properties of biological tissues and cells. These optical properties vary and provide endogenous developmental markers. Singly scattered photons from small (e.g. 5 x 5 x 10 microm) volume elements (voxels) are collected, assembled, and quantitatively false-colored to form a three-dimensional image. These images can be cropped or sliced in any plane. Adjusting the colors and opacities assigned to voxels allows us to enhance different features within the tissues and cells. We show that light-scattering properties are the greatest in regions of the Arabidopsis shoot undergoing developmental processes. In large cells, high light scattering is produced from nuclei, intermediate light scatter is produced from cytoplasm, and little if any light scattering originates from the vacuole and cell wall. OCM allows the rapid, repetitive, non-destructive collection of quantitative data about inherent properties of cells, so it provides a means of continuously monitoring plants and plant cells during development and in response to exogenous stimuli.