Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Valve repair in rheumatic mitral disease.

Emerging evidence indicates that etiology plays an essential role in the results of mitral valve repair. In an attempt to evaluate the possibilities and problems of repair in a rheumatic population, all consecutive patients treated between July 1988 and July 1990 were reviewed. Three hundred and four patients at risk of undergoing a repair were studied. The mean age was 31.3 years. In 78 patients (25.6%) the valve was considered beyond repair and immediately replaced (MVR). In 26 patients (8.5%) an unsuccessful attempt at repair was followed by replacement (attempts), and 200 (65.7%) underwent a successful repair (repair). The repair group was younger (p less than 0.001) and had less tricuspid involvement (p less than 0.005). The repair rate was highest in regurgitant lesions (79.4% repaired, p less than 0.005). The attempts group was very similar to the MVR group. The total hospital mortality was 3.2%. For MVR it was 3.8%, for attempts 19.2%, and for repairs 1.0%. The incidence of embolism was 3.34%/patient/yr for the mechanical, 3.06%/patient/yr for bioprosthesis, and 2.19%/patient/yr for repairs. Only 7.5% of repairs were anticoagulated. A reoperation was needed in 26 patients: one for bioprosthesis, one for aortic repair failure, and 24 for mitral repair dysfunction (12.1% of all surviving repairs). The reoperation incidence after repair was 26.8% in patients with an age under 20 years and 4.5% in those over 20. Eight patients had active carditis and 10 severe hemolysis. There were eight late deaths (six prosthesis and two repairs), with an actuarial total survival at 30 months of 72.46 +/- 8.45% for prosthesis and 94.41 +/- 3.74% for repairs (p less than 0.005). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Challenges and Opportunities for Water of the Rio Grande

The Rio Grande has headwaters in Colorado, flows through New Mexico, and serves as the United States-Mexico border in Texas, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. Snow melt in Colorado and northern New Mexico constitutes the water river supply for New Mexico and the El Paso region, whereas summer monsoonal flow from the Rio Conchos in Mexico and tributaries, including the Pecos River, provides the Rio Grande flow for southern Texas. The region is mostly semiarid with frequent long-term drought periods but is also characterized by a substantial irrigated agriculture sector and a rapidly growing population. International treaties and interstate compacts provide the rules for allocation of Rio Grande waters between the United States and Mexico and among Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Water rights in Texas have been adjudicated, but the adjudication process was based on a wet period; hence, contemporary Rio Grande water rights are overallocated. Issues related to the waters of the Rio Grande include frequent drought, increased municipal demand caused by a rapidly increasing population, supply variability, underdeliveries from Mexico, increasing salinity, inefficient delivery systems, health issues of the population, no economic/financial incentives for farmers to conserve, and water is not typically priced for efficiency. Stakeholders are interested in identifying solutions to limited water supplies while there is increasing demand. There are several activities in place addressing Rio Grande-related water needs, including enhancing delivery distribution efficiency of raw water, conversion of rights from agriculture to urban, improving both agricultural irrigation field distribution and urban use efficiency, developments in desalination, and litigation. None of the solutions are easy or inexpensive, but there are encouraging cooperative attitudes between stakeholders.
Strategic spillovers and incentives for research and development

This paper develops a model in which a monopolist supplier can contribute to downstream product improvements by creating knowledge spillovers which downstream firms use as a substitute for their own R&D efforts. Although a market for R&D information does not exist, the supplier may appropriate an indirect return on R&D for two reasons. Sufficiently high levels of spillover information lead to greater downstream product quality, and spillover information reduces the equilibrium sunk cost of R&D for downstream firms and thus facilitates entry. Both effects cause an expansion of downstream output and enhance the demand for the supplier's intermediate good. Given sufficiently strong incentives for supplier R&D, the locus of R&D shifts partially from the downstream to the upstream industry. R&D expenditures, technological opportunities, and downstream industry structure are determined endogenously. Weak appropriability conditions in the downstream industry enhance innovation incentives in the supply sector.
Decreased annexin I expression in prostatic adenocarcinoma and in high‐grade prostatic intraepithelial neoplasia

Aims : To analyse annexin I expression in prostatic carcinoma. Annexin I belongs to a family of structurally related calcium and phospholipid‐binding proteins implicated in signal transduction, DNA replication, cell proliferation and apoptosis. The decreased expression of annexin I, II and VII proteins has been reported in different types of cancer.
Structural properties and a heuristic for kanban-controlled serial lines

Kanban-controlled serial manufacturing systems have been popular in Japan for many years. The analytical intractibility of such systems makes simulation and heuristics essential in studying them. In this paper we develop some theoretical results---reversibility and dominance---that characterize the dynamics of these systems, provide insight into their behavior and help greatly reduce the simulation effort needed to study them. These structural results also provide the basis for developing heuristics to deal effectively with particular cases. Reversibility deals with certain permutations of the machines; dominance deals with the allocation of kanbans to cells. In addition, we show that if our goal is to maximize the throughput with a given total fixed number of cards, all of the machines should be placed in a single cell. These structural results hold in general because no assumptions are made on the processing time distribution of the machines, the number of cells, the total number of kanbans, or whether or not the machines are identical. Based on the structural results, we also develop a heuristic for the allocation of kanbans to a balanced line. We briefly describe an implementation of this model at a laminate manufacturing plant.
Comparison of the Ontogeny of Hunting Behavior in Pharaoh Cuttlefish (Sepia pharaonis) and Oval Squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana)

Animals adopt various forms of hunting according to their ecological, morphological, and cognitive features, and their specific hunting skills are acquired ontogenetically in relation to these features. It is noted that cuttlefish and squid hunt prey through the elongation of tentacles used specifically to capture prey. However, these two cephalopods have different lifestyles, leading to questions such as whether hunting skill is acquired similarly after birth and whether tentacle elongation is behaviorally identical. To address these questions, we observed and compared how captive pharaoh cuttlefish (Sepia pharaonis) and oval squid (Sepioteuthis lessoniana) attack prey during their early life stages. Like the adults, S. pharaonis hatchlings used the tentacular lunge attack, whereas S. lessoniana hatchlings used the arm-opening attack. S. lessoniana began to exhibit the tentacular strike attack after 30 days of age. In addition to timing of the emergence of a specific hunting mode, some differences were observed in the physical aspect of hunting behavior. For cuttlefish, maximum tentacle length and maximum speed of tentacle elongation increased from hatching to 30 days of age and then decreased. In contrast, for squid, maximum tentacle length increased from hatching to 30 days of age and then became constant. The distance to prey was positively correlated with maximum length and speed of tentacle elongation in S. pharaonis and with maximum swimming speed in S. lessoniana. These results show that cuttlefish mainly use an ambush strategy and that squid use a pursuit strategy. Possible causes for the ontogenetic differences in hunting behavior are discussed.
Absorptive Capacity, Coauthoring Behavior, and the Organization of Research in Drug Discovery

The authors examine the interface between for-profit and publicly funded pharmaceuticals. Firms access upstream basic research through investments in absorptive capacity in the form of in-house basic research and 'propublication' internal incentives. Some firms also maintain extensive connections to the wider scientific community, which they measure using data on coauthorship of scientific papers between pharmaceutical company scientists and publicly funded researchers. 'Connectedness' is significantly correlated with firms' internal organization, as well as their performance in drug discovery. The estimated impact of connectedness on private research productivity implies a substantial return to public investments in basic research. Copyright 1998 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Creative destruction? After the crisis: Neo-liberal ‘remodeling’ in east Asia

ABSTRACT Why in the wake of the Asian financial crisis have certain emerging market states (EMs) proved more proficient in the implementation of advanced economic reforms than others, despite similar crisis experiences, similar stages of economic development, similar pressure from external actors (both political and market-based), and – most significantly – similar interests in preventing recurrence? The article seeks to account for this paradoxical divergence in state responses to financial crisis conditions and in so doing help compensate for the paucity of crisis response studies in the literature; it seeks to explain why states with numerous similarities are nonetheless responding differently. The evidence appears to confirm that EMs are more likely to implement a significant range of reforms where the ‘antecedents of good governance’ are positive (see below); conversely, where the antecedents of EM governance are negative, attempts to implement the requisite regulatory changes have foundered. In either case, an interaction effect with degree of democracy is discernable with respect to each of the antecedents of good governance. Without the domestic forms called for here, not to mention necessary reforms of the international financial architecture, a contagion of even global proportions is not only possible but probable.
Growth and Convergence in the Asia-Pacific Region: On the Role of Openness, Trade and Migration

This paper examines the relationship between openness, trade, and migration in the Asia-Pacific region during the post-1970 period. Conventional reduced-form empirical-growth specifications are augmented by an appeal to structural modelling, an extension that reveals a rich set of interactions between policy, distortions, factor accumulation and growth. A broad array of openness measures play a major role in the successful growth performance of the Asia-Pacific region, a key channel being the distortion-investment nexus. In contrast, the results suggest little role for migration as a quantitatively significant growth determinant, at least at the macro level, which is no surprise in this area of historically low net migration rates. However, I find that within-sample prediction for the Asia-Pacific region is harder to achieve -- 'good luck' as well as 'good policy' played a part.
High-speed hardware architectures of the Whirlpool hash function

High-speed hardware architectures of the Whirlpool hash function are presented in this paper. A full look-up table (LUT) based design is shown to be the fastest method by which to implement the non-linear layer of the algorithm in terms of logic. An iterative Whirlpool architecture implemented on the Virtex X4VLX100 device runs at 4.79 Gbps, while an unrolled architecture achieves a throughput of 4.9 Gbps. This is faster than a SHA-512 design implemented on the same device and other previously reported hash function architectures
The hypocholesterolemic and hormone modulation effects of isoflavones alone or co-fermented with probiotic bacteria in hypercholesterolemic rats model

Abstract This study aimed to investigate the beneficial effect of isoflavones alone or probiotics-co-fermented isoflavones on serum and hepatic lipid profile, serum steroid (SHs) and thyroid hormones (THs) of hypercholesterolemic rats (N = 48). Animals were fed for 8 weeks with probiotics-co-fermented isoflavones or isoflavones alone, beside high-fat-high-cholesterol diet. Serum was analyzed for cholesterols, triglycerides (TG), SHs and THs. Results demonstrated that the given treatments significantly decreased serum total-cholesterol (TC), low-density-lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C), high-density-lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C), LDL/HDL ratio, and increased TG, compared to controls. The probiotics-co-fermented isoflavones decreased TC, LDL-C and LDL/HDL ratio more effectively than isoflavones alone. Also, both isoflavones treatments induced a hyperthyroidism state, as the levels of T-T4, T-T3 and fT3 significantly increased. In addition, these treatments decreased testosterone and increased cortisol levels. Thus, isoflavones-containing-treatments, particularly probiotics-co-fermented isoflavones, could reduce CVD incidence by controlling lipid profile; and this control could in part be due to modulation of SHs and THs.
Evidence on the Volunteer Labor Supply of Married Women

I estimate a significant, positive wage elasticity of married women’s volunteer labor supply from 1975 to 1976 U.S. time diary data. Increases in the number of children in the household significantly raise participation rates but reduce volunteer hours. I find weak support for a sequential time allocation model of volunteering where the wage as the opportunity cost of time has only a second-order effect on volunteer hours. Increased hours of market work for married women decrease their volunteering. Cash and time donations are complements at the volunteer participation level but substitutes in terms of married women’s volunteer hours.
Temperature Sensing Using Colloidal-Core Photonic Crystal Fiber

We report on a temperature sensor based on the monitoring of the luminescence spectrum of CdSe/ZnS nanocrystals, dispersed in mineral oil and inserted into the core of a photonic crystal fiber. The high overlap between the pump light and the nanocrystals as well as the luminescence guiding provided by the fiber geometry resulted in relatively high luminescence powers and improved optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). Also, both core end interfaces were sealed so as to generate a more stable and robust waveguide structure. Temperature sensitivity experiments indicated a 70 pm/°C spectral shift over the 5°C to 90°C range.
The Impact of the Sec's Regulation of Non-Gaap Disclosures

Rules implemented by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 2003 impose additional disclosure and filing requirements on firms publicly disclosing non-GAAP earnings. We find the regulations produced (1) modest declines in the frequency of special- and other-item exclusions, (2) a decline in exclusion magnitude, (3) a modest decline in the probability disclosed earnings meet or beat forecasts, and (4) a decline in the association between returns and forecast errors. Our results suggest that, while the regulations reduced firms' use of non-GAAP disclosures to improve performance perceptions, they also reduced firms' willingness to use non-GAAP earnings to convey permanent earnings.
Immunosuppressive activity of alpinetin on activation and cytokines secretion of murine T lymphocytes

Abstract Alpinetin, a flavonoid compound extracted from the seeds of Alpinia katsumadai Hayata, has been known to possess antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and other important therapeutic activities. In the current study, we investigated alpinetin for its immunosuppressive effect on activation and cytokines secretion of murine T lymphocytes. The data showed that alpinetin markedly suppressed ConA-induced murine splenocyte proliferation, Th1/Th2 cytokines production, CD4+ T-cell populations and ratio of CD4+/CD8+. This inspired us to further study the effects of alpinetin in vivo. The results showed that administration of alpinetin suppressed T-cell-mediated delayed-type hypersensitivity reaction in mice. In addition, we studied signal transduction pathways about T-cell activation on puried murine T lymphocytes by Western-blot assay. The data revealed that alpinetin could shock the activation of NF-κB, NFAT2 signal transduction pathways. These observations indicated that alpinetin have potential effects in downregulating the immune system and might be developed as a useful immunosuppressive agent in treating undesired immune responses.
Agency and Corporate Investment: The Role of Executive Compensation and Corporate Governance

The agency theory of the firm implies that executive incentive compensation and corporate investment policies are endogenously determined. We estimate jointly the relationship between long-term corporate investment and CEO incentive compensation structure, while considering the strength of corporate governance mechanisms. The analysis indicates that long-term business investment is positively related to the weight placed on equity-based incentive compensation, after controlling for internal financing constraints and the quality of the investment opportunity set. We also confirm that CEO compensation structure is influenced by factors that represent the strength of the firm's internal governance mechanisms.
The effect of knowledge types on consumer-perceived risk and adoption of genetically modified foods

Scientists have asserted that genetically modified (GM) food offers financial, environmental, health, and quality benefits to society, but the realization of such benefits depends on consumer acceptance of this new technology. Consumer concerns about GM food raise questions about what consumers know about GM food and to what extent this knowledge translates into their evaluations of GM products. The present research empirically examines the effect of both objective and subjective knowledge on perceived risk and, in turn, key consumer behaviors associated with GM food. The results reveal that objective knowledge about GM food significantly reduces performance and psychological risks, whereas subjective knowledge influences only physical risk, and the valence of that impact depends on the level of the consumer's objective knowledge. Furthermore, different risk types enhance consumers' information search and reduce their propensity to buy GM food. The overall findings thus suggest the need for cooperation among government, scientific institutions, and the food industry to foster effective communication strategies that increase consumers' objective knowledge, reduce their risk perceptions, and encourage consumer adoptions of GM technology. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Exploratory Analysis of Time from HIV Diagnosis to ART Start, Factors and effect on survival: A longitudinal follow up study at seven teaching hospitals in Ethiopia

Background The HIV care in Ethiopia has reached 79% coverage. The timeliness of the care provided at the different levels in the course of the disease starting from knowing HIV positive status to ART initiation is not well known. This study intends to explore the timing of the care seeking, the care provision and associated factors. Methods This is a longitudinal follow-up study at seven university hospitals. Patients enrolled in HIV care from September 2005 to December 2013 and aged ≥14 years were studied. Different times in the cascade of HIV care were examined including the duration from date HIV diagnosed to enrollment in HIV care, duration from enrollment to eligibility for ART and time from eligibility to initiation of ART. Ordinal logistic regression was used to investigate their determinants while the effect of these periods on survival of patients was determined using cox-proportional hazards regression. Results 4159 clients were studied. Time to enrollment after HIV test decreased from 39 days in 2005 to 1 day after 2008. It took longer if baseline CD4 was higher, and eligibility for ART was assessed late. Young adults, lower baseline CD4, HIV diagnosis<2008, late enrollment, and early eligibility assessment were associated with early ART initiation. Male gender, advanced disease stage and lower baseline CD4 were consistent risk factors for mortality. Conclusion and recommendation Time to enrollment and duration of ART eligibility assessment as well as ART initiation time after eligibility is improving. Further study is required to identify why mortality is slightly increasing after 2010.
SECULAR FERTILITY DECLINES, BABY BOOMS, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH: INTERNATIONAL EVIDENCE

We present a model capable of explaining 200 years of declining fertility, 200 years of rising educational achievement, and a significant baby boom for the United States and twenty other industrialized market countries. We highlight the importance of secularly declining young adult mortality risk for producing secularly declining fertility and a sudden decline in housing costs after the end of the Second World War, but ending by 1970. In addition, we introduce a new puzzle for the profession: Given the magnitude of the Baby Boom, roughly equal to fertility in 1900 for many of these countries, why did schooling of the Baby Boom cohorts not fall to the 1900 level of their predecessors? In fact, not only did it not fall, but the schooling levels of these cohorts are higher than for previous cohorts. Using a quantitative model, we are able to identify the magnitude of the reduction in costs of education necessary to explain this paradoxical increase in schooling. We produce a novel data set on historical education expenditures with over 1,500 observations. We find empirical support for these cost reductions.
Prostanoids in cortical subarachnoid cerebrospinal fluid and pial arterial diameter in newborn pigs.

These studies were designed to investigate the relationship between cerebral prostanoid synthesis and pial arterial caliber in chloralose-anesthetized newborn pigs with normal blood gases and pH and during combined arterial hypoxia and hypercapnia. Piglets less than 5 days old were equipped with closed cranial windows to allow direct observation of pial vessels, application of prostaglandin E2, and sampling of cortical subarachnoid cerebrospinal fluid. We found that prostanoids accumulate in cerebrospinal fluid on the cortical surface. The only prostanoid detected in arterial blood was 6-keto-prostaglandin F1 alpha [442 +/- 74 pg/ml (radioimmunoassay)]. Only small quantities of 6-keto-prostaglandin F1 alpha (214 +/- 53 pg/ml) and thromboxane B2 (122 +/- 18 pg/ml) were found in cerebrospinal fluid from the cisterna magna. Higher concentrations of 6-keto-prostaglandin F1 alpha (1056 +/- 159 pg/ml), thromboxane B2 (229 +/- 64 pg/ml), and prostaglandin E2 (4235 +/- 269 pg/ml) were found in cortical subarachnoid fluid. In contrast to arterial and cisternal concentrations, the concentrations of 6-keto-prostaglandin F1 alpha, thromboxane B2, and prostaglandin E2 in cortical subarachnoid fluid were increased reversibly by ventilation with 9% carbon dioxide, 10% oxygen, (6-keto-prostaglandin F1 alpha, 5436 +/- 1576 pg/ml; thromboxane B2, 694 +/- 122 pg/ml; and, prostaglandin E2, 12,455 +/- 3688 pg/ml). Further, pial arteries dilated in response to topical application of prostaglandin E2 at the concentration that was found in cortical subarachnoid fluid during combined hypoxia and hypercapnia. Systemic administration of indomethacin trihydrate (5 mg/kg) markedly reduced cortical subarachnoid fluid prostanoid concentrations and attenuated the pial artery vasodilation induced by combined hypoxia and hypercapnia. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)