Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of Preeclampsia and Oxygen Environment on Endothelial Release of Matrix Metalloproteinase‐2

Background: There is evidence of altered vascular endothelial function in women with preeclampsia as well as in the endothelial cells from umbilical vessels of preeclamptic pregnancies. Matrix metalloproteinase (MMP)‐2 is elevated in the plasma of preeclamptic women and is a mediator of vascular reactivity; however, whether MMP‐2 release is altered in preeclamptic endothelial cells is unknown. We hypothesize that MMP‐2 release is enhanced in endothelial cells from preeclamptic compared with uncomplicated pregnancies and that this phenomenon may be mediated by an oxygen‐dependent mechanism. Our specific hypothesis is that cells from normal pregnancies will demonstrate enhanced MMP‐2 release at low oxygen (< 0.5%, 2%) compared to high oxygen (20%), thus mimicking the behavior of preeclamptic cells. Methods: Human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) from preeclamptic pregnancies (n = 4) and normal pregnancies (n = 4) were incubated for 12 hr in standard culture conditions (20% oxygen). In a separate series of experiments, HUVECs from normal pregnancies (n = 6) were incubated for 12 hr at < 0.5%, 2%, and 20% oxygen. Supernatants were analyzed for MMP‐2 and tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinases (TIMP)‐1 and ‐2. Results: The HUVECs from women with preeclampsia demonstrated significantly enhanced release of MMP‐2 (p < 0.05), TIMP‐1 (p < 0.001), and TIMP‐2 (p = 0.01) compared to normal cells. MMP‐2 release from HUVECs from uncomplicated pregnancies was significantly elevated at 2% oxygen compared to < 0.5% and 20% oxygen (p < 0.05). TIMP‐1 and ‐2 secretion was not altered with varying oxygen. Conclusions: Preeclamptic endothelial cells demonstrate significantly enhanced MMP‐2, TIMP‐1 and TIMP‐2 release compared to normal cells. Our data show that there are significant effects of oxygen tension on MMP‐2 release from normal cells; however, the magnitude of the enhanced release is small when compared to the differences in MMP‐2 release in cells from preeclamptic and normal pregnancies. Furthermore, TIMP‐1 and ‐2 release is not affected by changes in oxygen. It is unlikely that oxygen is a key mediator of the enhanced MMP‐2, TIMP‐1 and TIMP‐2 release observed in preeclamptic cells.
Selective Ligand-induced Stabilization of Active and Desensitized Parathyroid Hormone Type 1 Receptor Conformations*

For many G protein-coupled receptors, agonist-induced activation is followed by desensitization, internalization, and resensitization. In most cases, these processes are dependent upon interaction of agonist-occupied receptor with cytoplasmic β-arrestins. The ligand-induced intramolecular rearrangements of the receptor responsible for the desensitized versus active conformational states, which dictate both the pharmacological properties of ligands and the biological activity of G protein-coupled receptors, have not been fully elucidated. Here, we identify specific interactions between parathyroid hormone (PTH)-related protein and the human PTH type 1 receptor (PTH1Rc) and the related receptor conformational changes that lead to β-arrestin-2-mediated desensitization. PTH-related protein analogs modified at position 1 induced selective stabilization of the active G protein-coupled state of the receptor, resulting in lack of β-arrestin-2 recruitment to the cell membrane, sustained cAMP signaling, and absence of ligand-receptor complex internalization. Mechanistically, the ligands modified at position 1, interacting with the extracellular end of helix VI of PTH1Rc, produced a translocation of transmembrane helices V and VI that differed from that induced by the cognate agonist, resulting in significantly different conformations of the third intracellular loop. These results show how specific interactions between PTH1Rc and its ligands may stabilize distinct conformational states, representing either the active G protein-coupled or a desensitized β-arrestin-coupled receptor state. In addition, they establish that sustained biological activity of PTH1Rc may be induced by appropriately designed agonist ligands.
European Deposit Insurance and Resolution in the Banking Union

Since the European Council of June 2012, ‘banking union’ is a key item for the EU's policy agenda. This contribution outlines the state of the policy debate – identifying the elements that are missing but important from a theoretical viewpoint. Concrete proposals are made as to how the missing elements could be added in the form of a new European Deposit Insurance and Resolution Authority, which would work alongside the ‘single supervisory mechanism’ under which the European Central Bank assumes supervisory powers for the largest eurozone banks. The paper also illustrates how a gradual transition could align incentives and mitigate the political resistance to a full banking union. Finally, new estimates are provided for how much would be needed for a European Deposit Insurance and Resolution Fund.
Do Parents Buy Their Children‘s Attention?

Past empirical studies on the strategic bequest motive have found evidence for the existence of a positive causation of wealth on receiving attention from on's children. This paper illustrates that these results from the past should be interpreted with some care as the relationship between wealth and children's attention is sensitive to the type of financial variable used in the analysis. Only family characteristics are significant determinants of contact behavior. Turning to more serious types of physical needs, care behavioral regressions illustrate that mobility constraints like house ownership for parents or job and location restrictions for children hamper informal care provision by one's children.
Whole grain food intake and cancer risk

The relationship between frequency of consumption of whole grain food and risk of selected neoplasms has been analysed using data from an integrated series of case‐control studies conducted in northern Italy between 1983 and 1996. The overall dataset included the following incident, histologically confirmed neoplasms: oral cavity and pharynx 181, oesophagus 316, stomach 745, colon 828, rectum 498, liver 428, gallbladder 60, pancreas 362, larynx 242, breast 3,412, endometrium 750, ovary 971, prostate 127, bladder 431, kidney 190, thyroid 208, Hodgkin's disease 80, non‐Hodgkin's lymphomas 200, multiple myelomas 120. Controls were 7,990 patients admitted to hospital for acute, non‐neoplastic conditions, unrelated to long‐term modifications in diet and not likely to have been caused by tobacco or alcohol use. Odds ratios (OR) for subsequent scores (never/occasional/frequent) of whole grain food consumption were derived after allowance for age, sex, education, smoking, alcohol intake and body mass index. High intake of whole grain foods consistently reduced risk of neoplasm at all sites, except thyroid. The ORs for the highest category of consumption were 0.2–0.3 for upper digestive and respiratory tract neoplasms, 0.5 for stomach, colon and gallbladder, 0.7 for rectum, 0.6 for liver, 0.8 for pancreas and prostate, 0.9 for breast and endometrium, 0.6 for ovary, 0.4 for bladder and kidney, 1.3 for thyroid and around 0.5 for lymphomas and myeloma. The tests for trend in risks were significant for all neoplasms, except pancreas, endometrium, Hodgkin's disease and multiple myeloma. No significant heterogeneity was found across strata of age at diagnosis, sex, education, smoking habit, alcohol intake and body mass index. Thus, even in the absence of a univocal and satisfactory biological interpretation, the consistency of the patterns observed indicate that, in this population, higher frequency of whole grain food intake is an indicator of reduced risk of several neoplasms. Int. J. Cancer 77:24–28, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Variation Across Household in the Rate of Inflation

This paper reports on an empirical investigation of the distribution of inflation rates across households. The study uses a large cross-sectional survey of households to obtain information on the composition of the market bundles of goods and services purchased by each of several thousand households in the U.S. It also uses published data for the U.S. on monthly changes in the separate indices of prices of some fifty expenditure items which comprise consumers' market bundles. With information on price changes for these fifty items and the composition of households' consumption bundles, a price index is computed for each of some 11,000 households separately for several recent periods of time. The distributions of these price indices are studied and the relationships between household characteristics and these price indices are investigated.
Deep Control - a simple automatic gain control for memory efficient and high performance training of deep convolutional neural networks

Training a deep convolutional neural net typically starts with a random initialisation of all filters in all layers which severely reduces the forward signal and back-propagated error and leads to slow and sub-optimal training. Techniques that counter that focus on either increasing the signal or increasing the gradients adaptively but the model behaves very differently at the beginning of training compared to later when stable pathways through the net have been established. To compound this problem the effective minibatch size varies greatly between layers at different depths and between individual filters as activation sparsity typically increases with depth leading to a reduction in effective learning rate since gradients may superpose rather than add and this further compounds the covariate shift problem as deeper neurons are less able to adapt to upstream shift. Proposed here is a method of automatic gain control of the signal built into each convolutional neuron that achieves equivalent or superior performance than batch normalisation and is compatible with single sample or minibatch gradient descent. The same model is used both for training and inference. The technique comprises a scaled per sample map mean subtraction from the raw convolutional filter output followed by scaling of the difference.
Cohort Study of Intraventricular Thrombolysis with Recombinant Tissue Plasminogen Activator for Aneurysmal Intraventricular Hemorrhage

OBJECTIVE:Thrombolytic agents have been administered through external ventricular drains to treat intraventricular hemorrhage, the goals being to accelerate clot clearance, prevent catheter obstruction, and help control intracranial pressure. We compared these variables in a group of aneurysm patients treated by one surgeon who routinely used intraventricular recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (rt-PA) for obstructive hematocephalus with those in a group of similar patients treated by other surgeons who did not. METHODS:Patients included in this analysis were those with repaired cerebral aneurysms causing hemorrhage into at least three ventricles with ventriculomegaly requiring external ventricular drainage. The ventricular system was considered “opened” when all ventricles were patent and reduced in size on computed tomographic scans. Those treated with rt-PA received 4 mg/d through a ventricular drain until ventricular opening. RESULTS:The mean number of days to ventricular opening was 3.9 (standard deviation [SD], 1.0) for the 21 patients treated with rt-PA and 7.1 (SD, 3.7) for the 9 who were not (P = 0.001), and the mean intracranial pressure (mm Hg) 24 hours after treatment with rt-PA was 10.4 (SD, 6.1) compared with 14.1 (SD, 5.9) during the same interval for the group that did not receive rt-PA (P = 0.13). Ventricular catheter replacement was required in 1 rt-PA patient (for a misplaced catheter, before rt-PA treatment) and 3 patients who did not receive rt-PA (all for catheter obstructions with blood clot) (P = 0.07), and ventriculoperitoneal shunts were placed in 4 rt-PA patients and 3 patients who did not receive rt-PA (P = 0.4). CONCLUSION:Intraventricular thrombolysis with rt-PA seems to assist in the acute management of patients with large aneurysmal intraventricular hemorrhages, speeding clearance of aneurysmal intraventricular hemorrhage, normalizing intracranial pressure, and reducing ventricular catheter obstruction. A randomized trial is needed to confirm these findings, establish treatment safety, and determine whether treatment affects outcome.
Prenatal Ultrasound Diagnosis, Follow-Up, and Outcome of Congenital Varicella Syndrome

Objectives: To report on a case of fetal varicella infection following the diagnosis of maternal infection at 16 weeks of gestation. Methods: Diagnosis was based on serology testing and prenatal ultrasound, confirmed by DNA detection in amniotic fluid (Lightcycler-PCR). Serial ultrasound examinations were performed. Results: Sonographic anomalies included borderline ventriculomegaly, intracerebral, intrahepatic and myocardial calcifications, limb deformities, articular effusions, and intrauterine growth retardation (confirmed postpartally). The newborn showed a severe encephalopathy and could not be stabilized sufficiently. The child died 23 days after birth. Conclusion: The outcome of an affected fetus may be very serious and prenatal ultrasound is a helpful tool to recognize the severity of the infection.
Profits, supply and HYV adoption in Bangladesh

The adoption of HYVs (High Yielding Varieties), for increased farm profitability, and the accelerated supply of cereals are important objectives for Bangladesh agriculture. In this paper, we have investigated the manner in which price and non-price factor affect these three criteria, based upon a model of rational variety choice. The model is empirically implemented using translog profit functions and a switching regression framework, and applied to a cross-sectional farm-level dataset of Bangladeshi farms for the 1996 crop year. Results indicate that rice prices, land availability, irrigation, rural infrastructure, labour wages and prices of animal power services are important factors, while fertilizer price plays a marginal role. Given these results, the policy of liberalization of agricultural inputs (particularly fertilizers) and reforms to maintain high rice prices during harvest seasons appear sound since these allow producers to receive rice prices close to world levels without burdening the government with input subsidies. Result also shows that educated Bangladeshi farmers substitute their time inputs away from agriculture, resulting in lower HYV adoption, farm profitability and rice supply.
A leap for touch: proximity sensitive touch targets in cars

Combining touch screen technology with mid-air gestures into a unified input modality has potential to improve interaction with touch interfaces in cars. Moreover, target objects on a touch screen can be adapted to the proximity of a users' finger in mid-air. In this paper, we present an exploration of this design space based on two studies and various prototypical systems. First, results of a driving simulator study are reported, indicating that a driver's performance in acquiring a target object on a touch screen in a central console position increases with expanding targets, while altering the position of a target object on the screen leads to a decrease of performance. In a follow-up workshop with automotive experts, prototypes with multiple expanding targets were utilized to foster in-depth discussions on potential challenges and benefits with expanding targets in cars. Results of both studies indicate a high potential of expanding targets for in-car interaction scenarios.
Why sexual harassment complaints fall on deaf ears

Executive Overview Several high profile sexual harassment cases have been reported in the news media recently. It appears that many organizations are slow to respond to internal complaints of sexual harassment, forcing victims to go outside the organization to seek redress through the court system. These failures to respond to complaints—what we have come to identify as the “deaf ear” syndrome—is surprising in light of the well-publicized costs to human resources, organizational reputation, and the bottom line. This paper investigates some of the factors and dynamics that contribute to organizational inaction. Based on interviews with EEOC attorneys who specialize in sexual harassment litigation, a review of relevant literature, and recent media examples, we identify three themes that are associated with deaf ear syndrome: (1) inadequate organizational policies and procedures, (2) managerial rationalizations, and (3) inertial tendencies. Fortunately, a few responsive organizations provide examples of best.
The inverse problem of elasticity: a reconstruction procedure to determine the shear modulus of tissue

In the field of medical diagnosis, there is a strong need to determine mechanical properties of biological tissue, which are of histological and pathological relevance. In order to obtain noninvasively quantitative mechanical properties of tissue, we propose in this work an inverse approach by which the spatial distribution of the relative shear modulus of tissue can be estimated from the measured axial deformation only. First, during the solution of the mechanical forward problem the biological tissue was modeled as a linear isotropic incompressible elastic medium and a 2-D plane strain state model was used. Furthermore, to develop an inverse elastography reconstruction procedure, finite element simulations were performed for a number of biological tissue object models. The results obtained from finite element analysis were confirmed in the ultrasonic experiments on a set of tissue-like phantoms with known acoustical and mechanical properties. These phantoms were produced using PVA-Materials with different thaw and freeze cycles. Finally, using numerical solution models and solving the inverse problem using two different methods we deduce the relative shear modulus of the sample. The first method is a modified direct method based on solving the equations of equilibrium. The second method is an iterative method for solving the inverse elasticity problem and is based on recasting the problem as a non-linear optimization problem. The proposed methods were compared with respect to the stability of algorithms using numerical simulations and ultrasound measurements. Based on this comparison, an approach is introduced, which is capable of taking into account large deformations, whereas other existing methods are generally based on the theory of linear elasticity. KeywordsReal time Ultrasound Elastography; Reconstruction of Elasticity; Inverse Problem
CLEAN INDOOR AIR LAWS AND THE DEMAND FOR CIGARETTES

This paper empirically tests the effect of clean indoor air laws on smoking. Public place clean indoor air laws restrict cigarette smoking in public places such as restaurants. Private place clean air laws regulate smoking in private work places as well as in public places. This study uses a time series of cross sections of the 50 states of the United States and Washington, D.C., from 1975 through 1985, to estimate single equation and simultaneous equation models of cigarette demand. The single equation results indicate that both the public place law and the private work place law have a negative effect on cigarette demand. However, a test for endogeneity shows that the enactment of clean indoor air laws is a function of cigarette demand. Results from a simultaneous equations model indicate that the public place law has a significant negative impact on cigarette demand, while the work place law has no effect on cigarette demand. Although these results demonstrate that only states with low levels of smoking have passed work place clean air laws, the results do not imply that the level of smoking would not decrease if such a law were imposed in all states.
Influence of cationic lipids on the stability and membrane properties of paclitaxel-containing liposomes.

Paclitaxel (taxol) is a poorly soluble anticancer agent that is in widespread clinical use. Liposomes provide a less toxic vehicle for solubilizing the drug and increasing the therapeutic index of paclitaxel in model tumor systems. The role of liposome membrane composition in the stability of paclitaxel-containing formulations is understood partially for neutral and anionic liposomes, but poorly for other compositions. We investigated the effect of dialkyl cationic lipids on the stability and physical properties of paclitaxel-containing liposomes, using circular dichroism (CD), fluorescence spectroscopy, and differential interference contrast microscopy (DIC). DOTAP (1,2-dioleoyl-3-trimethylammonium propane), a cationic lipid used frequently for gene delivery, was combined at various ratios with dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine (DMPC), dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC), or distearoylphosphatidylcholine (DSPC). In the absence of DOTAP, the stability of liposomes containing > or =3 mol% paclitaxel was observed to follow the following rank order: DPPC >DSPC > DMPC. Increasing concentrations of DOTAP increased the physical stability of all compositions, and maximal stabilization was achieved at 30-50 mol% DOTAP, depending on the paclitaxel concentration and the acyl chain length of the phosphatidylcholine. The relationship between stability and mole fraction of DOTAP was complex for some compositions. DOTAP exerted a major fluidizing effect on DMPC, DPPC, and DSPC membranes, and the addition of paclitaxel at 3-8 mol% did not increase fluidity further. Studies of membrane phase domain behavior using the probe Laurdan (6-dodecanoyl-2-dimethylaminonaphthalene) indicated that both paclitaxel and DOTAP were miscible with the phosphatidylcholine phase. The physical events leading to destabilization of formulations are hypothesized to arise from concentration-dependent paclitaxel self-association rather than immiscibility of the membrane lipids. Given the increased incorporation and stability of paclitaxel in DOTAP-containing membranes and the potential for enhanced interaction with cells, cationic liposomes may provide a therapeutic advantage over previously described liposome formulations.
Are There Exploitable Trends in Commodity Future Prices?

We provide evidence that a simple moving average timing strategy, when applied to portfolios of commodity futures, can generate superior performance to the buy-and-hold strategy. The outperformance is very robust. It can survive the transaction costs in the futures markets, it is not concentrated in a particular subperiod, and is robust to short-sale constraints, alternative specifications of the moving average lag length, alternative construction of the continuous time-series of futures prices, and impact from data mining. The outperformance of the timing strategy is not driven by the backwardation and contango. It is stronger during recession and can not be explained by macroeconomic variables. Finally, we confirm that the outperformance of the moving average timing strategy in the commodity futures comes from the successful market timing.