Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors and angiotensin II receptor antagonists on mortality and renal outcomes in diabetic nephropathy: systematic review

Abstract Objective To evaluate the effects of angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin II receptor antagonists (AIIRAs) on renal outcomes and all cause mortality in patients with diabetic nephropathy. Data sources Medline, Embase, the Cochrane controlled trials register, conference proceedings, and contact with investigators. Study selection Trials comparing ACE inhibitors or AIIRAs with placebo or with each other in patients with diabetic nephropathy. Data extraction Mortality, renal outcomes (end stage renal disease, doubling of serum creatinine concentration, prevention of progression of microalbuminuria to macroalbuminuria, remission of microalbuminuria), and quality of trials. Data synthesis 36 of 43 identified trials compared ACE inhibitors with placebo (4008 patients), four compared AIIRAs with placebo (3331 patients), and three compared ACE inhibitors with AIIRAs (206 patients). We obtained unpublished data for 11 trials. ACE inhibitors significantly reduced all cause mortality (relative risk 0.79, 95% confidence interval 0.63 to 0.99) compared with placebo but AIIRAs did not (0.99, 0.85 to 1.17), although baseline mortality was similar in the trials. Both agents had similar effects on renal outcomes. Reliable estimates of the unconfounded relative effects of ACE inhibitors compared with AIIRAs could not be obtained owing to small sample sizes. Conclusion Although the survival benefits of ACE inhibitors for patients with diabetic nephropathy are known, the relative effects of ACE inhibitors and AIIRAs on survival are unknown owing to the lack of adequate head to head trials.
A Few Prolific Liars

It has been commonplace in the deception literature to assert the pervasive nature of deception in communication practices. Previous studies of lie prevalence find that lying is unusual compared to honest communication. Recent research, and reanalysis of previous studies reporting the frequency of lies, shows that most people are honest most of the time and the majority of lies are told by a few prolific liars. The current article reports a statistical method for distinguishing prolific liars from everyday liars and provides a test of the few prolific liars finding by examining lying behavior in the United Kingdom. Participants (N = 2,980) were surveyed and asked to report on how often they told both little white lies and big important lies. Not surprisingly, white lies were more common than big lies. Results support and refine previous findings about the distinction between everyday and prolific liars, and implications for theory are discussed.
Berberine induces apoptosis via ROS generation in PANC-1 and MIA-PaCa2 pancreatic cell lines

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death. Gemcitabine is widely used as a chemotherapeutic agent for the treatment of pancreatic cancer, but the prognosis is still poor. Berberine, an isoquinoline alkaloid extracted from a variety of natural herbs, possesses a variety of pharmacological properties including anticancer effects. In this study, we investigated the anticancer effects of berberine and compared its use with that of gemcitabine in the pancreatic cancer cell lines PANC-1 and MIA-PaCa2. Berberine inhibited cell growth in a dose-dependent manner by inducing cell cycle arrest and apoptosis. After berberine treatment, the G1 phase of PANC-1 cells increased by 10% compared to control cells, and the G1 phase of MIA-PaCa2 cells was increased by 2%. Whereas gemcitabine exerts antiproliferation effects through S-phase arrest, our results showed that berberine inhibited proliferation by inducing G1-phase arrest. Berberine-induced apoptosis of PANC-1 and MIA-PaCa2 cells increased by 7 and 2% compared to control cells, respectively. Notably, berberine had a greater apoptotic effect in PANC-1 cells than gemcitabine. Upon treatment of PANC-1 and MIA-PaCa2 with berberine at a half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50), apoptosis was induced by a mechanism that involved the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) rather than caspase 3/7 activation. Our findings showed that berberine had anti-cancer effects and may be an effective drug for pancreatic cancer chemotherapy.
Is normalized mutual information a fair measure for comparing community detection methods?

Normalized mutual information (NMI) is a widely used measure to compare community detection methods. Recently, however, the need of adjustment for information theoretic based measures has been argued because of their tendency in choosing clustering solutions with more communities. In this paper an experimental evaluation is performed to investigate this problem, and an adjustment that scales the values of NMI is proposed. Experiments on synthetic generated networks highlight the unbiased behavior of scaled NMI.
Automatic segmentation of the secondary austenite-phase island precipitates in a superduplex stainless steel weld metal

Victor H. C. Albuquerque & Rodrigo Y. M. Nakamura & Joao P. Papa Cleiton C. Silva & Joao Manuel R. S. Tavares Universidade de Fortaleza, Centro de Ciencias Tecnologicas, Fortaleza, Brazil Departamento de Computacao, UNESP Univ Estadual Paulista, Bauru, Brazil Departamento de Engenharia Metalurgica e Materiais, Universidade Federal do Ceara, Fortaleza, Brazil Universidade do Porto, Faculdade de Engenharia, Porto, Portugal
Hankel hyperdeterminants and Selberg integrals

We investigate the simplest class of hyperdeterminants defined by Cayley in the case of Hankel hypermatrices (tensors of the form Ai1i2.ik = f(i1 + i2 + . + ik)). It is found that many classical properties of Hankel determinants can be generalized, and a connection with Selberg type integrals is established. In particular, Selberg's original formula amounts to the evaluation of all Hankel hyperdeterminants built from the moments of the Jacobi polynomials. Many higher dimensional analogues of classical Hankel determinants are evaluated in closed form. The Toeplitz case is also briefly discussed. In physical terms, both cases are related to the partition functions of one-dimensional Coulomb systems with logarithmic potential.
We’re Just Ordinary People: Messianic Master Narratives and Black Youths’ Civic Agency

Abstract Critical race scholars have argued that curricular portrayals of the Civil Rights Movement are undermined by master narratives that legitimate the racial status quo. Although many scholars have critiqued Movement master narratives in social studies and society, few studies have examined Black students’ interpretations of such representations and the effects of these representations on their sense of civic agency. In this article, I present ethnographic data that illustrate the function of a specific type of master narrative, messianic master narratives, in 9 Black urban youths’ understandings of historical and contemporary civil rights leadership. Messianic master narratives position an individual as the messiah, savior, or deliverer of an oppressed group. Data provide evidence that messianic master narratives constrain Black youths’ civic agency, specifically by associating civil rights leadership with immense risk, uncritically invoking Judeo–Christian values, and undermining participants’ understandings of historical agency and historical collective action. I conclude by explicating curricular risks associated with messianic master narratives and offering recommendations toward disrupting these narratives in social studies classrooms.
The effect of external safeguards on human-information system trust in an information warfare environment

The modern military command and control (C2) center collects a massive amount of information that is both complex and contradictory. The amount of collected information is often more than can be effectively and efficiently understood by humans. Therefore, today's decision-makers have become reliant upon information systems to filter through the information and fuse that information into a computer representation of the battle space. The degree of reliance placed in these systems by the decision-makers suggests a significant level of trust. Trust theories and models are rich in the literature, but few have been developed for the human-computer trust relationship. A recent model of trust was found that was both broad in scope and supportive of human-computer trust theories. This model was used to explore the decision-maker's trust in information systems in a C2 environment. Given the vulnerability of information systems to information security incidents such as hacking and data manipulation, this study set out to examine if the presence of such incidents would effect the decision-makers trusting behavior. This study also examined if the use of such external safeguards, such as the computer emergency response teams (CERT) and the network risk assessment certifications, would affect the decision-maker. Two laboratory experiments were conducted with military personnel using a high-fidelity C2. The findings from both experiments suggest that the presence of information security incidents in a fast-paced C2 environment have no effect on the decision-makers trusting behavior. Decision-makers continued to trust information systems even though information security incidents occurred.
Application driven Policy Based Resource Management for IP multimedia subsystems

Policy Based Resource Management will form the cornerstone of service differentiation that will drive IMS service deployment. While the IMS specifications are largely finalized, the policy based QoS provisioning architecture still faces many deployment challenges including flexible, application driven policy control, end to end policy provisioning and policy refinement. To accelerate the maturity of this technology open test-beds are necessary to expose the complex systems to an open set of developers. This paper proposes a Multilayered Policy Control architecture that extends the general resource management function being standardized; this extended architecture gives application developers greater control over the way their services are treated in the transport layer. Furthermore the architecture is implemented in the form of a 3GPP compliant, open source and freely distributed test-bed architecture - the open areas of policy representation, application-policy interaction, policy profiling and policy refinement are addressed. This open test-bed will serve to foster innovation in the field, increase collaborative co-operation and accelerate the maturity of these technologies. The framework is subjected to vigorous validation and evaluation tests - while the effects the architecture has on session setup delay and signaling overhead are not insignificant they are found to be acceptable.
Slowing work down by teleworking periodically in rural settings

Purpose – The rise of knowledge work has entailed controversial characteristics for well-being at work. Increased intensification, discontinuities and interruptions at work have been reported. However, knowledge workers have the opportunity to flexibly adjust their work arrangements to support their concentration, inspiration or recuperation. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the experienced well-being of 46 knowledge workers was subject to changes during and after a retreat type telework period in rural archipelago environment. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a longitudinal survey among the participants at three points in time: one to three weeks before, during, and two to eight weeks after the period. The authors analyzed the experienced changes in psychosocial work environment and well-being at work by the measurement period by means of repeated measures variance analysis. In the next step the authors included the group variable of occupational position to the model. F.
Photo-responsive and electrically switchable mesophases in a novel class of achiral bent-core azo compounds

The first examples of electrically switchable and photo-responsive mesophases in a novel class of bent-core azo compounds, consisting of only five aromatic rings and no imino functionality (–CHN–), are reported. The mesophases have been identified as B1, B2 and a new mesophase, Bx, on the basis of the results of polarizing optical microscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, X-ray diffraction, and electro-optical response. Preliminary but profound photo-induced effects on the transition temperature from isotropic to the B2 mesophase of one of the azo compounds are also presented.
Witten's open string field theory in constant B field background

In this paper we consider Witten's bosonic open string field theory in the presence of a constant background of the second-rank antisymmetric tensor field Bij. We extend the operator formulation of Gross and Jevicki in this situation and construct the overlap vertices explicitly. As a result we find a noncommutative structure of the Moyal type only in the zero-mode sector, which is consistent with the result of the correlation functions among vertex operators in the world sheet formulation. Furthermore we find out a certain unitary transformation of the string field which absorbs the Moyal type noncommutative structure. It can be regarded as a microscopic origin of the transformation between the gauge fields in commutative and noncommutative gauge theories discussed by Seiberg and Witten.
Patterns of Individual Variation in Visual Pathway Structure and Function in the Sighted and Blind

Many structural and functional brain alterations accompany blindness, with substantial individual variation in these effects. In normally sighted people, there is correlated individual variation in some visual pathway structures. Here we examined if the changes in brain anatomy produced by blindness alter the patterns of anatomical variation found in the sighted. We derived eight measures of central visual pathway anatomy from a structural image of the brain from 59 sighted and 53 blind people. These measures showed highly significant differences in mean size between the sighted and blind cohorts. When we examined the measurements across individuals within each group we found three clusters of correlated variation, with V1 surface area and pericalcarine volume linked, and independent of the thickness of V1 cortex. These two clusters were in turn relatively independent of the volumes of the optic chiasm and lateral geniculate nucleus. This same pattern of variation in visual pathway anatomy was found in the sighted and the blind. Anatomical changes within these clusters were graded by the timing of onset of blindness, with those subjects with a post-natal onset of blindness having alterations in brain anatomy that were intermediate to those seen in the sighted and congenitally blind. Many of the blind and sighted subjects also contributed functional MRI measures of cross-modal responses within visual cortex, and a diffusion tensor imaging measure of fractional anisotropy within the optic radiations and the splenium of the corpus callosum. We again found group differences between the blind and sighted in these measures. The previously identified clusters of anatomical variation were also found to be differentially related to these additional measures: across subjects, V1 cortical thickness was related to cross-modal activation, and the volume of the optic chiasm and lateral geniculate was related to fractional anisotropy in the visual pathway. Our findings show that several of the structural and functional effects of blindness may be reduced to a smaller set of dimensions. It also seems that the changes in the brain that accompany blindness are on a continuum with normal variation found in the sighted.
Taming Android fragmentation: Characterizing and detecting compatibility issues for Android apps

Android ecosystem is heavily fragmented. The numerous combinations of different device models and operating system versions make it impossible for Android app developers to exhaustively test their apps. As a result, various compatibility issues arise, causing poor user experience. However, little is known on the characteristics of such fragmentation-induced compatibility issues and no mature tools exist to help developers quickly diagnose and fix these issues. To bridge the gap, we conducted an empirical study on 191 real-world compatibility issues collected from popular open-source Android apps. Our study characterized the symptoms and root causes of compatibility issues, and disclosed that the patches of these issues exhibit common patterns. With these findings, we propose a technique named FicFinder to automatically detect compatibility issues in Android apps. FicFinder performs static code analysis based on a model that captures Android APIs as well as their associated context by which compatibility issues are triggered. FicFinder reports actionable debugging information to developers when it detects potential issues. We evaluated FicFinder with 27 large-scale open-source Android apps. The results show that FicFinder can precisely detect compatibility issues in these apps and uncover previously-unknown issues.
Supporting Situation Awareness in FLOSS Projects by Semantical Aggregation of Tools Feeds

It is rather difficult to monitor or visualize what can be the contribution of a member in a collaboration project, especially when the project uses multiple tools to produce its results. This is the case for collaborative development of FLOSS software, that uses Wiki, bug tracker, mailing lists and source code management tools. This paper presents an approach to data collection by using aggregation of feeds published by the different tools of a software forge. To allow this aggregation, collected data is semantically reformatted into Semantic Web standards: RDF, DC, DOAP, FOAF and EvoOnt. Resulting data can then be processed, re-published or displayed to project members. This approach was used to implement a supervision module that is integrated into the PicoForge platform. This module is able to draw a live graph of the social community out of the different sources of data, and in turn exports semantic feeds for other uses.
Accelerometer-based hand gesture recognition using feature weighted naïve bayesian classifiers and dynamic time warping

Accelerometer-based gesture recognition is a major area of interest in human-computer interaction. In this paper, we compare two approaches: naïve Bayesian classification with feature separability weighting [1] and dynamic time warping [2]. Algorithms based on these two approaches are introduced and the results are compared. We evaluate both algorithms with four gesture types and five samples from five different people. The gesture identification accuracy for Bayesian classification and dynamic time warping are 97% and 95%, respectively.
Sampling zeros and the Euler-Frobenius polynomials

In this paper, we show that the zeros of sampled-data systems resulting from rapid sampling of continuous-time systems preceded by a zero-order hold (ZOH) are the roots of the Euler-Frobenius polynomials, the properties of which have been studied in the context of cardinal spline interpolation and, more recently, wavelets. Using known properties of the Euler-Frobenius polynomials, we prove two conjectures of Hagiwara et al. (1993), the first of which concerns the simplicity, negative realness and interlacing properties of the sampling zeros of ZOH- and first-order hold (FOH)- sampled systems. To prove the second conjecture, we show that in the fast sampling limit, and as the continuous-time relative degree increases, the largest sampling zero for FOH-sampled systems approaches 1/e, where e is the base of the natural logarithm.
A distributed block coordinate descent method for training $l_1$ regularized linear classifiers

Distributed training of $l_1$ regularized classifiers has received great attention recently. Most existing methods approach this problem by taking steps obtained from approximating the objective by a quadratic approximation that is decoupled at the individual variable level. These methods are designed for multicore and MPI platforms where communication costs are low. They are inefficient on systems such as Hadoop running on a cluster of commodity machines where communication costs are substantial. In this paper we design a distributed algorithm for $l_1$ regularization that is much better suited for such systems than existing algorithms. A careful cost analysis is used to support these points and motivate our method. The main idea of our algorithm is to do block optimization of many variables on the actual objective function within each computing node; this increases the computational cost per step that is matched with the communication cost, and decreases the number of outer iterations, thus yielding a faster overall method. Distributed Gauss-Seidel and Gauss-Southwell greedy schemes are used for choosing variables to update in each step. We establish global convergence theory for our algorithm, including Q-linear rate of convergence. Experiments on two benchmark problems show our method to be much faster than existing methods.
NF-κ B controls functional circuit formation and tissue homeostasis in the adult dentate gyrus

Cognitive decline during aging is correlated with a continuous loss of cells within the brain and especially within the hippocampus, which could be regenerated by adult neurogenesis. Here we show that genetic ablation of NF-κB resulted in severe defects in the neurogenic region (dentate gyrus) of the hippocampus. Despite increased stem cell proliferation, axogenesis, synaptogenesis and neuroprotection were hampered, leading to disruption of the mossy fiber pathway and to atrophy of the dentate gyrus during aging. Here, NF-κB controls the transcription of FOXO1 and PKA, regulating axogenesis. Structural defects culminated in behavioral impairments in pattern separation. Re-activation of NF-κB resulted in integration of newborn neurons, finally to regeneration of the dentate gyrus, accompanied by a complete recovery of structural and behavioral defects. These data identify NF-κB as a crucial regulator of dentate gyrus tissue homeostasis suggesting NF-κB to be a therapeutic target for treating cognitive and mood disorders.
Who Benefits from a Bull Market ?

Grants of employee stock options have risen dramatically in recent years to both top executives and employees below the senior ranks. This paper examines the growth in stock option grants at S&P 1500 companies from 1996-1999, and estimates the pay-for-performance sensitivities of the value of new option grants for top executives and, separately, for employees below the top executive levels. We find substantial sensitivities for both sets of employees, but contrary to agency models that would predict lower sensitivities for employees whose actions have less effect on stock price, we find that the sensitivities are larger for employees below the top executive levels. We examine several hypotheses consistent within the agency framework to explain this result, and find that sensitivities for top executives depend on existing stock holdings, and by whether stock prices increase or decrease. We also find that new grants at larger firms are related to industry performance, consistent with more competitive markets for top executive talent to manage large organizations as industry conditions improve. However, some of the higher sensitivity for lower-level employees likely owes to excessive extrapolation of past stock returns, similar to findings of purchases of company stock in 401(k) plans by Benartzi (2001). JEL Classification: G30, G32, J30, J32