Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
In vivo elasticity measurements of extremity skeletal muscle with MR elastography

MR elastography (MRE) has been shown to be capable of non‐invasively measuring tissue elasticity even in deep‐lying regions. Although limited studies have already been published examining in vivo muscle elasticity, it is still not clear over what range the in vivo elasticity values vary. The present study intends to produce further information by examining four different skeletal muscles in a group of 12 healthy volunteers in the age range of 27–38 years. The examinations were performed in the biceps brachii, the flexor digitorum profundus, the soleus and the gastrocnemius. The average shear modulus was determined to be 17.9 ( ± 5.5), 8.7 ( ± 2.8), 12.5 ( ± 7.3) and 9.9 ( ± 6.8) kPa for each muscle, respectively. To ascertain the reproducibility of the examination, the stiffness measurements in two volunteers were repeated seven times for the biceps brachii. These examinations yielded a mean shear modulus of 11.3 ± . 7 and 13.3 ± 4.7 kPa for the two subjects. For elasticity reconstruction, an automated reconstruction algorithm is introduced which eliminates variation due to subjective manual image analysis. This study yields new information regarding the expected variation in muscle elasticity in a healthy population, and also reveals the expected variability of the MRE technique in skeletal muscle. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute Real Exchange Rates and Sectoral Productivity in the Eurozone

We investigate the link between real exchange rates and sectoral total factor productivity measures for countries in the Eurozone. Real exchange rate patterns closely accord with an amended Balassa-Samuelson interpretation, both in cross-section and time series. We construct a sticky price dynamic general equilibrium model to generate a cross-section and time series of real exchange rates that can be directly compared to the data. Under the assumption of a common currency, estimates from simulated regressions are very similar to the empirical estimates for the Eurozone. Our findings contrast with previous studies that have found little relationship between productivity levels and the real exchange rate among high-income countries, but those studies have included country pairs which have a floating nominal exchange rate. The views in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System.
K-Band Galaxy Counts

We present new counts of eld galaxies from more than 20 square arcminutes to a limiting magnitude of K=20 and from 2 square arcminutes to K=21.5. At the faintest magnitudes the counts are slightly higher than those reported previously, though still consistent given the small numbers of galaxies in the two samples.
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INTEGRATION AND ENTREPRENEURIAL FIRM ACTIVITY

We explore the relation between international financial integration and the level of entrepreneurial activity in a country. We use a unique firm level data set of approximately 24 million firms in nearly 100 countries in 2004 and 1999, which enables us to present both cross-country and industry level evidence. We establish robust cross-country correlations between increased international financial integration and the activity of entrepreneurs using various proxies for entrepreneurial activity such as entry, size, and skewness of the firm-size distribution and de jure and de facto measures of international capital integration. We then explore causal channels through which foreign capital may encourage entrepreneurship. We find evidence that entrepreneurial activity in industries which are more reliant on external finance is disproportionately affected by international financial integration, suggesting that foreign capital may improve access to capital either directly or through improved domestic financial intermediation. Second we find that entrepreneurial activity is higher in industries which have a large share of foreign firms or in vertically linked industries. Laura Alfaro Harvard Business School Morgan Hall 263 Soldiers Field Boston, MA 02163 and NBER lalfaro@hbs.edu Andrew Charlton London School of Economics Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE, U.K a.charlton@lse.ac. uk
Web browser workload characterization for power management on HMP platforms

The volume of mobile web browsing traffic has significantly increased as well as the complexity of the mobile websites mandating high-performance web page rendering engines to be used on mobile devices. Although there has been a significant improvement in performance of web page rendering on mobile phones in recent years, the power consumption reduction has not been addressed much. A main contribution of this work is a thread level analysis of the workload generated by Google's Chrome browser on a heterogeneous multiprocessing (HMP) platform found in many smartphones. We analyze the detailed traces of the thread workload generated by the web browser, especially the rendering engine, and discuss the power saving potentials in relation to power management policies in Android. Moreover, we propose power management strategies based on the results. All trace data and measurement results have been collected on a real HMP platform integrating the Samsung Exynos5422 SoC, also used in the Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone. Our work shows that there is a considerable scope for power savings and outlines directions for future research. We believe that it will lead to development of practical power management techniques considering thread allocation, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) and power gating.
Peripapillary Retinal Nerve Fiber Layer Thickness Change After Panretinal Photocoagulation in Patients With Diabetic Retinopathy

Purpose To examine the effect of panretinal photocoagulation (PRP) on the retinal nerve fiber layer (RNFL) thickness in patients with diabetic retinopathy. Methods Subjects included 118 eyes for a treatment group and 164 eyes for a control group. The peripapillary RNFL thickness was measured before and 6 months after PRP in treatment group. In control group, the peripapillary RNFL thickness was measured at baseline and 6 months later. The relationships between changes in RNFL thickness and the number of laser burns, duration of diabetes, HbA1c level, and vision change were analyzed. Results After 6 months, the RNFL thickness decreased an average of 2.12 µm and 0.93 µm in the treatment and control groups. However, the changes between the two groups were not statistically significant. The relationship between the number of laser burns and changes in RNFL thickness was not significant. No differences were found between changes in the RNFL thickness and the duration of diabetes in either group. However, in the treatment group a higher HbA1c level was correlated with a greater decrease in post-PRP RNFL thickness. This relationship was not observed in the control group. The difference in the change of the RNFL thickness between the two groups was statistically significant. Vision increased an average of 0.02 and 0.01 after 6 months in the treatment and control groups, respectively. However, this difference was not statistically significant. Conclusions Although a decrease in peripapillary RNFL thickness was observed in the treatment group after 6 months, it was not statistically significant compared to control group. However, the decrease was greater when the blood HbA1c level was higher.
Re-Thinking Anxiety: Using Inoculation Messages to Reduce and Reinterpret Public Speaking Fears

Inoculation theory offers a framework for protecting individuals against challenges to an existing attitude, belief, or state. Despite the prevalence and damaging effects of public speaking anxiety, inoculation strategies have yet to be used to help individuals remain calm before and during public speaking. We aimed to test the effectiveness of an inoculation message for reducing the onset of public speaking anxiety, and helping presenters interpret their speech-related anxiety more positively. Participants (Mage = 20.14, SD = 2.72) received either an inoculation (n = 102) or control (n = 128) message prior to engaging a public speaking task and reported a range of anxiety-related perceptions. Accounting for personality characteristics and perceptions of task importance, and relative to control participants, those who received the inoculation message reported significantly lower pre-task anxiety, and following the task, reported that they had experienced lower somatic anxiety, and that the inoculation message had caused them to view their nerves in a less debilitating light. Inoculation messages may be an effective strategy for helping participants reframe and reduce their apprehension about public speaking, and investigating their efficacy in other stress-inducing contexts may be worthwhile.
Bank Discrimination in Transition Economies: Ideology, Information or Incentives?

We study bank discrimination against private firms in transition countries. Theoretically, we show that banks may discriminate for non-profit reasons, but this discrimination diminishes with a bank? s incentives and human capital. Employing matching bank-firm data from China, we empirically examine the extent, sources and consequences of discrimination. Our unique survey design allows us to disentangle sample truncation, omitted variable bias, and endogeneity issues. Our empirical findings confirm the theoretical predictions. We also find that as a result of discrimination, private firms resort to more expensive trade credits.
Electromagnetic Wave Propagation in Nonlocal Media: Negative Group Velocity and Beyond

We study theoretically the propagation of electromagnetic waves in an infinite and homogenous medium with both temporal and spatial dispersion included. We derive a partial differential equation connecting temporal and spatial dispersion to achieve negative group velocity. Exact solutions of the equation are found and shown to lead to the possibility of exciting constant negative group velocity waves. We then investigate the effect of spatial dispersion on the power flow and derive the first-, second-, and third-order corrections of power flow due to the nonlocality in the medium. This derivation suggests a path beyond the group velocity concept.
Incidence, risk factors and clinical outcomes for acute kidney injury after aortic arch repair in paediatric patients.

OBJECTIVES Acute kidney injury (AKI) is common after paediatric cardiac surgery and associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Aortic arch surgery may be an independent risk factor for AKI because of circulatory arrest below the descending thoracic artery during anastomosis. We investigated the surgical outcomes associated with AKI after aortic arch repair in paediatric patients. METHODS We retrospectively analysed 120 paediatric patients who underwent aortic arch repair between 2003 and 2012. AKI was defined according to the paediatric-modified risk, injury, failure, loss and end-stage kidney disease criteria. The incidence, clinical outcomes and risk factors for AKI were analysed. RESULTS Aortic arch repair was performed for coarctation of aorta in 97 patients and interrupted aortic arch in 23 patients. The median age and body weight at the time of surgery were 16.5 days and 3.3 kg, respectively. The mean duration of the follow-up was 3.9 years. AKI developed in 42 patients (36.8%) and peritoneal dialysis (PD) was applied in 20 patients (16.7%). The recovery of renal function began a mean of 3.8 days after conservative management, and full recovery occurred a mean of 6.7 days after conservative management. A lower body weight (<3.0 kg) (odds ratio [OR]: 7.569, P = 0.009) and the absence of prerenal impairment (OR: 9.876, P = 0.041) were shown to be independent risk factors. Patients who required PD had prolonged intensive care unit and hospital stays (P = 0.002 and P = 0.003). CONCLUSIONS AKI is common in low-birth-weight patients after aortic arch repair surgery. However, patients recover from AKI after conservative management. Requiring PD increases the morbidity associated with AKI.
Variability of bed mobility in natural, gravel‐bed channels and adjustments to sediment load at local and reach scales

Local variations in boundary shear stress acting on bed‐surface particles control patterns of bed load transport and channel evolution during varying stream discharges. At the reach scale a channel adjusts to imposed water and sediment supply through mutual interactions among channel form, local grain size, and local flow dynamics that govern bed mobility. In order to explore these adjustments, we used a numerical flow model to examine relations between model‐predicted local boundary shear stress (тj( and measured surface particle size (D50) at bank‐full discharge in six gravel‐bed, alternate‐bar channels with widely differing annual sediment yields. Values of тj and D50 were poorly correlated such that small areas conveyed large proportions of the total bed load, especially in sediment‐poor channels with low mobility. Sediment‐rich channels had greater areas of full mobility; sediment‐poor channels had greater areas of partial mobility; and both types had significant areas that were essentially immobile. Two reach‐mean mobility parameters (Shields stress and Q*) correlated reasonably well with sediment supply. Values which can be practicably obtained from carefully measured mean hydraulic variables and particle size would provide first‐order assessments of bed mobility that would broadly distinguish the channels in this study according to their sediment yield and bed mobility.
Search mode and purchase intention in online shopping behaviour

This study focuses on the effect of website visitors' degree of goal-oriented search mode on purchase intention in online environments. In a study of 874 respondents recruited from 13 online shops representing a diversity of product categories and customer segments, the effect of visitors' degree of goal-oriented search mode on purchase intention is found to be moderated by product risk. Furthermore, product involvement, product risk and internet experience are found to have positive effects on the degree of goal-oriented search mode of the visitors. Also, product knowledge, product risk and internet experience are reported to have direct effects on purchase intention. The results point to the importance of understanding the characteristics of website visitors, and to customise the support and search services offered on the website to the characteristics and preferences of the individual visitor to increase purchase intention, and eventually online sales.
Innovative biomagnetic imaging sensors for breast cancer : A model-based study

Breast cancer is a serious potential health problem for all women and is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. The current screening procedures and imaging techniques, including x-ray mammography, clinical biopsy, ultrasound imaging, and magnetic resonance imaging, provide only 73% accuracy in detecting breast cancer. This gives the impetus to explore alternate techniques for imaging the breast and detecting early stage tumors. Among the complementary methods, the noninvasive biomagnetic breast imaging is attractive and promising, because both ionizing radiation and breast compressions that the prevalent x-ray mammography suffers from are avoided. It furthermore offers very high contrast because of the significant electromagnetic properties’ differences between the cancerous, benign, and normal breast tissues. In this paper, a hybrid and accurate modeling tool for biomagnetic breast imaging is developed, which couples the electromagnetic and ultrasonic energies, and initial validations between the model predication and experimental findings are conducted. VC 2012 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3676430]
The Effect of Letter Transposition on Reading Is Attracting Significant Attention in Visual Word Recognition Research. the Impact of Letter Transposition on Reading English and Hebrew

In recent years, several studies have consistently reported robust form–orthographic priming effects when primes and targets shared the identity of individual letters but in a different order (e.g., gadren priming garden). Masked priming with transposed letters was reported in several Indo-European languages such as English (e. The finding that robust form–orthographic priming can be obtained even with changes in letter order has revolutionized the mod-eling of visual word recognition. It presented immense difficulties for slot-based coding computational models, which encode letter position in absolute terms—for example , the interactive activation (IA) model by McClel-land and Rumelhart (1981) or the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model by Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, and Ziegler (2001). Consequently, a new generation of computational models that focus on context-sensitive coding of relative letter position has emerged (e. for a discussion). Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of how reading is resilient to letter transposition is the following paragraph that has been circulating via the Internet, especially in the reading research community: Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. We should note upfront that the original text does not refer to any true research project that was ever conducted at the University of Cambridge. We cannot know precisely why the author who drafted the above paragraph chose the name " Cambridge University effect " for this phenomenon that effectively demonstrates the impact of jumbled letters, or lack of such impact, and the name has stuck. Since its first appearance in 2003, the Cambridge Univesity effect has become somewhat of an urban legend. Apparently the original demonstration of the effect of letter randomization on skilled reading (or rather lack of it) belongs to Rawlinson, 1976 (and see Rawlinson, 1999, for a reference to it). In an unpublished dissertation, he showed that letter randomization in the middle of the word had little effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the printed text (see Davis, 2003, for a web page devoted to the effect). A recent study monitoring eye movements showed that, indeed, some transpositions are easy to read, …
The Physiological Costs of Discrimination: Review of the Literature and Empirical Study of the Relationship Between the HPA Axis and Past Experiences of Discrimination

Author(s): Busse, David | Advisor(s): Yim, Ilona S; Campos, Belinda | Abstract: Discrimination is a common social problem that that been associated with a variety of negative health consequences. Stress from discrimination experiences and resulting physiological changes have been implicated in the pathway to disease. The role of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in this process remains understudied. This dissertation addresses the deficiencies in the literature in two parts. First, a systematic review of the literature was conducted. Ten experimental and 17 observational studies met inclusion criteria. Studies suggest that discrimination is associated with alterations in HPA axis activity, and that the direction of this association depends on the timing and chronicity of the discrimination experience. There is also evidence of important modulating variables (race, socioeconomic status) and contextual confounders (emotional, situational) that warrant further study. The second study tested associations between Latino ethnicity, experiences of discrimination, and cortisol responses to an acute laboratory stressor. One hundred and fifty eight individuals (92 female, 66 male) between the ages of 18 and 29 years participated in the study. Salivary cortisol was measured before and repeatedly after the laboratory stressor, and prior discrimination experiences was measured with the Experiences of Discrimination Scale. A moderated mediation emerged, such that Latino ethnicity predicted heightened cortisol reactivity through discrimination experiences (mediator), and this effect was further moderated by sex, with a significant indirect effect only among males. Of note, the direct path from Latino ethnicity to cortisol reactivity did not emerge as significant. Findings suggest that Latino ethnicity and discrimination interact to predict cortisol dysregulation, which implies that an appropriate model for understanding the sociocultural problem of minority health discrepancies cannot simply rely on the effects of ethnicity or discrimination alone.This research adds to the evidence that discrimination is not merely a social injustice; it is also a public health problem.
Load Balancing in Quorum Systems

This paper introduces and studies the question of balancing the load on processors participating in a given quorum system. Our proposed measure for the degree of balancing is the ratio between the load on the least frequently referenced element and on the most frequently used one. We give some simple sufficient and necessary conditions for perfect balancing. We then look at the balancing properties of the common class of voting systems and prove that every voting system with odd total weight is perfectly balanced. (This holds, in fact, for the more general class of ordered systems.) We also give some characterizations for the balancing ratio in the worst case. It is shown that for any quorum system with a universe of size $n$, the balancing ratio is no smaller than $1/(n-1)$, and this bound is the best possible. When restricting attention to nondominated coteries (NDCs), the bound becomes $2/\bigl(n-\log_2 n+o(\log n)\bigr)$, and there exists an NDC with ratio $2/\bigl(n-\log_2 n-o(\log n)\bigr)$. Next, we study the interrelations between the two basic parameters of load balancing and quorum size. It turns out that the two size parameters suitable for our investigation are the size of the largest quorum and the optimally weighted average quorum size(OWAQS) of the system. For the class of ordered NDCs (for which perfect balancing is guaranteed), it is shown that over a universe of size $n$, some quorums of size $\lceil(n+1)/2\rceil$ or more must exist (and this bound is the best possible). A similar lower bound holds for the OWAQS measure if we restrict attention to voting systems. For nonordered systems, perfect balancing can sometimes be achieved with much smaller quorums. A lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ is established for the maximal quorum size and the OWAQS of any perfectly balanced quorum system over $n$ elements, and this bound is the best possible. Finally, we turn to quorum systems that cannot be perfectly balanced, but have some balancing ratio $0<\rho<1$. For such systems we study the trade-offs between the required balancing ratio $\rho$ and the quorum size it admits in the best case. It is easy to get an analogue of the result for perfect balancing, yielding a lower bound of $\sqrt{n\rho}$. We actually get a better estimate by a refinement of the argument.