Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Interleukin-1 Polymorphism, Smoking, and the Risk of Periodontal Disease in the Population-based SHIP Study

Several studies have shown a role for interleukin-1 gene cluster polymorphisms in the risk assessment for periodontal diseases. In the Study of Health in Pomerania (SHIP), 3148 subjects were randomly selected from the population and assessed for a broad range of diseases and environmental/behavioral risk factors. From the complete study group in the age 40 to 60 years, N = 1085 subjects were genotyped for the interleukin-1 genotype composite polymorphism in relation to periodontal parameters. The study objective was to elucidate the gene-environment interaction between the risk factors smoking and IL-1 polymorphism. An increased risk of periodontal disease was found for IL-1 genotype-positive smokers: odds ratio adjusted for age, sex, education, and plaque OR = 2.50 (95% C.I. 1.21 to 5.13; p = 0.013). This was not the case with subjects who never smoked: OR = 1.09 (0.73-1.62; p = 0.676). These results support the hypothesis of gene-environmental interaction in periodontitis.
Intrinsic motivation, perceived competence and classroom engagement as longitudinal predictors of adolescent reading achievement

This study investigated the effects of intrinsic motivation, perceived competence, classroom engagement and extrinsic motivation on reading development among youth. Using a nationally representative sample of students in the US, the researchers followed students longitudinally from fifth to eighth grade. Reading achievement was measured using composite tests of vocabulary, reading comprehension and sight-word identification. Hierarchical linear regression was used to examine the effect of students’ perceived intrinsic motivation and competence, as well as teacher rated classroom engagement in the 5th grade, on reading achievement in the 8th grade. Important control variables were utilised such as gender, family SES, race/ethnicity and prior reading achievement. The results showed that intrinsic motivation to read, perceived competence and engagement in 5th grade significantly predict reading achievement in 8th grade. The importance students placed upon grades also predicted reading development. Implications for promoting intrinsic motivation and strong engagement in schools are discussed.
Chinese Students' Knowledge and Thinking about America and China

The authors interviewed more than one hundred high school students in three regions of China about their knowledge and perceptions of the United States and China. The authors' findings suggest the following: (1) students possess extensive knowledge about the United States in terms of its history, geography, socioeconomic system, and education, and they obtain the knowledge from multiple media sources besides social studies curriculum; (2) students obtain knowledge about China mainly from news media, social studies class, and their personal experience; (3) students admire American socioeconomic and educational systems but resent America's interference with China's domestic issues and its hegemony in world affairs; (4) students take pride in China's economic development but resent the education system and are concerned about economic inequity existing in China today; and (5) students believe that mutual understanding and learning from each other will benefit the United States, China, and the whole world.
Bayesian Word Sense Induction

Sense induction seeks to automatically identify word senses directly from a corpus. A key assumption underlying previous work is that the context surrounding an ambiguous word is indicative of its meaning. Sense induction is thus typically viewed as an unsupervised clustering problem where the aim is to partition a word's contexts into different classes, each representing a word sense. Our work places sense induction in a Bayesian context by modeling the contexts of the ambiguous word as samples from a multinomial distribution over senses which are in turn characterized as distributions over words. The Bayesian framework provides a principled way to incorporate a wide range of features beyond lexical co-occurrences and to systematically assess their utility on the sense induction task. The proposed approach yields improvements over state-of-the-art systems on a benchmark dataset.
Association between palmoplantar pustulosis and cigarette smoking in Brazil: a case–control study

Background Palmoplantar pustulosis (PPP) discloses some differences compared to vulgar psoriasis (PV) in terms of age of onset, female predominance and low occurrence of psoriasis lesions elsewhere. Cigarette smoking has been associated to PPP in international studies; nevertheless, these studies were never performed among Brazilian.
Achievable delay performance in CSMA networks

We explore the achievable delay performance in wireless CSMA networks. While relatively simple and inherently distributed in nature, suitably designed backlog-based CSMA schemes provide the striking capability to match the optimal throughput performance of centralized scheduling mechanisms in a wide range of scenarios. The specific type of activation rules for which throughput optimality has been established, may however yield excessive backlogs and delays. Motivated by that issue, we examine whether the poor delay performance is inherent to the basic CSMA operation of these schemes, or caused by the specific kind of activation rules. We first establish lower bounds for the delay in the case of fixed activation rates. The bounds indicate that the delay can dramatically grow with the load in certain topologies. We also discuss to what extent the bounds apply to backlog-based activation rules. Simulation experiments are conducted to illustrate and validate the analytical results.
TIMAP, a novel CAAX box protein regulated by TGF-beta1 and expressed in endothelial cells.

Representational difference analysis of the glomerular endothelial cell response to transforming growth factor-beta1 (TGF-beta1) revealed a novel gene, TIMAP (TGF-beta-inhibited membrane-associated protein), which contains 10 exons and maps to human chromosome 20.q11. 22. By Northern blot, TIMAP mRNA is highly expressed in all cultured endothelial and hematopoietic cells. The frequency of the TIMAP SAGE tag is much greater in endothelial cell SAGE databases than in nonendothelial cells. Immunofluorescence studies of rat tissues show that anti-TIMAP antibodies localize to vascular endothelium. TGF-beta1 represses TIMAP through a protein synthesis- and histone deacetylase-dependent process. The TIMAP protein contains five ankyrin repeats, a protein phosphatase-1 (PP1)-interacting domain, a COOH-terminal CAAX box, a domain arrangement similar to that of MYPT3, and a PP1 inhibitor. A green fluorescent protein-TIMAP fusion protein localized to the plasma membrane in a CAAX box-dependent fashion. Hence, TIMAP is a novel gene highly expressed in endothelial and hematopoietic cells and regulated by TGF-beta1. On the basis of its domain structure, TIMAP may serve a signaling function, potentially through interaction with PP1.
Low Thermal Resistances at GaN–SiC Interfaces for HEMT Technology

The temperature rise in AlGaN/GaN high-electron-mobility transistors depends strongly on the GaN-substrate thermal interface resistance (TIR). We apply picosecond time-domain thermoreflectance measurements to GaN-SiC composite substrates with varying GaN thickness to extract both the TIR and the intrinsic GaN thermal conductivity at room temperature. Two complementary data extraction methodologies yield 4-5 for the GaN-SiC TIR and 157-182 for the GaN conductivity. The GaN-SiC interface resistance values reported here, as well as the TIR experimental uncertainties documented in this letter, are substantially lower than those reported previously for this material combination.
Has economics become an elite subject for elite UK universities?

The decline in the number of UK universities offering undergraduate degree programmes in subjects such as sciences, mathematics, modern languages and humanities has been well documented and is now of real concern. It appears that economics may be going through a decline in new (post-1992) UK universities with many economics programmes having been withdrawn altogether. How market forces, government policy and other developments in UK higher education may have combined to stimulate the withdrawal of the undergraduate economics degree is explored in this paper. Data on the current level of provision and how this has changed over the last decade are presented. The study reveals how the economics degree, which until fairly recently was offered by old and new universities alike, appears to be expanding rapidly in the former but not in the latter. The withdrawal of economics undergraduate degree programmes from the UK’s new universities coupled with the fact that these institutions are the primary conduit through which under-represented groups are able to access the UK’s higher education system raises important questions about lack of equality of opportunity. The paper concludes by considering the implications of polarisation of access to economics degrees.
Analysis of Poincare plot of heart rate variability in the assessment of autonomic dysfunction in patients with polycystic ovary syndrome

Background and Aim: Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) due to its constant association with obesity poses a significant cardiovascular (CV) risk. Heart rate variability (HRV) has been a noninvasive marker of autonomic dysfunction and CV risk. This study was designed to assess the nonlinear dynamics of HRV using Poincare plot in patients with PCOS and elucidate its importance in predicting the CV risk. Methods: A total of 45 women with newly diagnosed PCOS and 45 controls were recruited for the study. Waist-hip ratio, body mass index (BMI), basal CV parameters such as basal heart rate (BHR), systolic blood pressure (SBP), diastolic blood pressure (DBP), mean arterial pressure (MAP) and rate pressure product (RPP) were recorded. HRV analysis was done using both linear (time domain and frequency domain) and nonlinear measures (Poincare plot). Results: The cases had increased basal heart rate, BMI, SBP, DBP, MAP, and RPP. In linear measures of HRV, the total power (TP), which depicts overall HRV was reduced, and the ratio of low-frequency to high-frequency (LF-HF) was significantly increased in cases. In nonlinear measures, the standard descriptors (SD1 and SD2) and area of the ellipse (S) were decreased, which signifies decreased HRV. There was a significant correlation of linear measures (TP, LF-HF ratio) and nonlinear measures (SD1, SD2, S) with elevated RPP. Both linear and nonlinear measures had independent contribution to elevated RPP, observed from regression analysis. Conclusion: Decreased HRV and autonomic dysfunctions in the form of increased sympathetic drive and decreased vagal activity were observed in PCOS patients that may herald CV risks. Poincare plot analysis can independently quantify the magnitude of autonomic dysfunction in PCOS.
A Major Role for Perifornical Orexin Neurons in the Control of Glucose Metabolism in Rats

OBJECTIVE The hypothalamic neuropeptide orexin influences (feeding) behavior as well as energy metabolism. Administration of exogenous orexin-A into the brain has been shown to increase both food intake and blood glucose levels. In the present study, we investigated the role of endogenous hypothalamic orexin release in glucose homeostasis in rats. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We investigated the effects of the hypothalamic orexin system on basal endogenous glucose production (EGP) as well as on hepatic and peripheral insulin sensitivity by changing orexinergic activity in the hypothalamus combined with hepatic sympathetic or parasympathetic denervation, two-step hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamps, immunohistochemistry, and RT-PCR studies. RESULTS Hypothalamic disinhibition of neuronal activity by the γ-aminobutyric acid receptor antagonist bicuculline (BIC) increased basal EGP, especially when BIC was administered in the perifornical area where orexin-containing neurons but not melanocortin-concentrating hormone–containing neurons were activated. The increased BIC-induced EGP was largely prevented by intracerebroventricular pretreatment with the orexin-1 receptor antagonist. Intracerebroventricular administration of orexin-A itself caused an increase in plasma glucose and prevented the daytime decrease of EGP. The stimulatory effect of intracerebroventricular orexin-A on EGP was prevented by hepatic sympathetic denervation. Plasma insulin clamped at two or six times the basal levels did not counteract the stimulatory effect of perifornical BIC on EGP, indicating hepatic insulin resistance. RT-PCR showed that stimulation of orexin neurons increased the expression of hepatic glucoregulatory enzymes. CONCLUSIONS Hypothalamic orexin plays an important role in EGP, most likely by changing the hypothalamic output to the autonomic nervous system. Disturbance of this pathway may result in unbalanced glucose homeostasis.
As if nature doesn't matter: Ecology, regime theory and international relations

International Relations (IR) has approached environmental issues primarily through a regime theoretical framework. It has been argued that this leads to a situation where IR provides little, if any, critical analysis of environmental issues. It treats environmental issues much like any other question of international governance, and does not consider the possibility that the study of environmental issues may require a reconsideration of the its theoretical frameworks. There are fundamental theoretical differences between the intellectual branch of radical environmentalism (ecological thought), and regime theory, and these can to a significant degree help to explain the lack of critical analysis of environmental issues in IR. The possibility of regime theory adopting a more critical approach to environmental issues is virtually excluded by the fact that it relies on a positivist‐inspired approach to social science. The notion of a value‐free science, dominated by instrumental rationality and an uncritical .
Structural Compression of Convolutional Neural Networks Based on Greedy Filter Pruning

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have state-of-the-art performance on many problems in machine vision. However, networks with superior performance often have millions of weights so that it is difficult or impossible to use CNNs on computationally limited devices or to humanly interpret them. A myriad of CNN compression approaches have been proposed and they involve pruning and compressing the weights and filters. In this article, we introduce a greedy structural compression scheme that prunes filters in a trained CNN. We define a filter importance index equal to the classification accuracy reduction (CAR) of the network after pruning that filter (similarly defined as RAR for regression). We then iteratively prune filters based on the CAR index. This algorithm achieves substantially higher classification accuracy in AlexNet compared to other structural compression schemes that prune filters. Pruning half of the filters in the first or second layer of AlexNet, our CAR algorithm achieves 26% and 20% higher classification accuracies respectively, compared to the best benchmark filter pruning scheme. Our CAR algorithm, combined with further weight pruning and compressing, reduces the size of first or second convolutional layer in AlexNet by a factor of 42, while achieving close to original classification accuracy through retraining (or fine-tuning) network. Finally, we demonstrate the interpretability of CAR-compressed CNNs by showing that our algorithm prunes filters with visually redundant functionalities. In fact, out of top 20 CAR-pruned filters in AlexNet, 17 of them in the first layer and 14 of them in the second layer are color-selective filters as opposed to shape-selective filters. To our knowledge, this is the first reported result on the connection between compression and interpretability of CNNs.
Study of exponential stability of equilibrium neural networks

In this article, we consider the generalized Hopfield neural networks and some sufficient criteria are derived for study exponential stability of the equilibrium of Hopfield neural networks of the form {C_i}{\frac{du_i}{dt}}=\sum^n_{j=1}T_{ij}v_j-{\frac{u_i}{R_i}}+I_i\quad i=1,2,\ldots,n. by means of Lyapunov method and some analysis techniques, in which v_i=g_i(\lambda_lu_i), and T=[T_{ij}]_{n\times n} is a connection matrix, not requiring symmetric and all output responses g_i(\cdot) are the same. C_i > 0, R_i > 0 and I_i are called the capacitance, the resistance and the network external current input constants respectively of the ith neuron. The criteria are easy to check and apply in practice.
Two field studies examining the association between positive psychological capital and employee performance

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between psychological capital (comprised of hope, optimism, efficacy and resilience) and employee performance through multiple studies and methods of data.Design/methodology/approach – The study included two samples in a large financial firm headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. The employees' level of psychological capital were measured with the psychological capital questionnaire. Via regression, this was related to individual level financial performance data from the firm and manager rated performance.Findings – As hypothesized, psychological capital was found to be related to employees' level of financial performance, referrals within the firm and manager rated performance. The findings are relevant to advancing previous studies on psychological capital and employee performance in that multiple sources and types of data were used to test hypotheses overcoming past concerns of common method and source variance and adding validity to th.
Objectification Theory and Psychology of Women: A Decade of Advances and Future Directions

Fredrickson and Roberts (1997) proposed objectification theory as an integrative framework for understanding how women's socialization and experiences of sexual objectification are translated into mental health problems. This article reviews the past decade of research grounded in objectification theory and highlights needed directions for future scholarship in this area. Specifically, this article reviews research organized according to the following themes: (a) self-objectification and its proposed consequences, (b) sexual objectification experiences as a proposed precursor, and (c) disconnections from bodily functions. An overview of emerging objectification theory research with men is also provided. The review concludes with needed directions for future theoretical and research efforts aimed to advance the psychology of women.
Race/Ethnicity as a Predictor for Location of Death in Patients With Acute Neurovascular Events

Background: Site of death is an important quality indicator for patients with terminal illness. Racial and ethnic disparities exist in the quality of end-of-life care. This study explores the site of death of patients admitted for and dying of complications of acute neurovascular events in a hospital network in an urban, low-income, predominantly minority community. Methods: This is a retrospective cohort study of patients admitted to 1 of 3 general hospitals that are part of an academic medical center in Bronx, New York, with the diagnosis of acute ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, or subarachnoid hemorrhage who died during the index admission or were discharged with hospice services. The main outcome was location of death (palliative care inpatient unit [IPU] at the medical center or hospice services at discharge vs death on any other IPU). Results: A total of 655 patients admitted with acute neurovascular events from January 1, 2009, to March 1, 2015, died or were discharged with hospice services and were included in the analysis. Of those patients, 238 (36.3%) were black, 233 (35.5%) were Hispanic, and 184 (28.1%) were white. A total of 178 (24.4%) died on the palliative care unit or were discharged with hospice services, including 55 black patients (23.1%), 52 (28.3%) white patients, and 53 (22.7%) Hispanic patients. These differences were not statistically significant, even when controlling for confounders. Conclusion: This study did not show a difference in site of death in our institution by race or ethnicity, which is considered an important quality end-of-life care metric.
Voltage-operated calcium channels in fresh and cultured rat retinal pigment epithelial cells.

PURPOSE There is little known about the membrane properties of retinal pigment epithelial (RPE) cells with respect to calcium. The authors attempted to characterize membrane calcium channels from solitary fresh and cultured RPE cells from normal and dystrophic rat retinas. METHODS RPE cells were enzymatically dissociated from eyes of neonatal rats of several strains, including dystrophic RCS strains. Membrane currents were recorded using the whole-cell version of the patch-clamp technique from either fresh or cultured cells. RESULTS The authors observed sustained high-voltage-activated calcium channels that were dihydropyridine sensitive and closely resembled neuronal L-type calcium channels. The RCS-rdy+p+ strain was mainly investigated, but high-voltage-activated calcium channels were also recorded from fresh RPE cells of other rats regardless of age or strain, including RCS p+, RCS rdy+, Long Evans, Sprague Dawley, and also cultured RPE cells taken from a neonatal Long Evans strain. Low-voltage-activated calcium channels were not observed in any of these cells. CONCLUSION Voltage-operated calcium channels of the L-type are the main calcium channels present in rat RPE cells. Cultured cells retained the identical channels. The dystrophic RCS strains (studied until 17 days postnatal) also exhibited these channels.
Severe potential drug-drug interactions in older adults with dementia and associated factors

OBJECTIVE: To identify the main severe potential drug-drug interactions in older adults with dementia and to examine the factors associated with these interactions. METHOD: This was a cross-sectional study. The enrolled patients were selected from six geriatrics clinics of tertiary care hospitals across Mexico City. The patients had received a clinical diagnosis of dementia based on the current standards and were further divided into the following two groups: those with severe drug-drug interactions (contraindicated/severe) (n=64) and those with non-severe drug-drug interactions (moderate/minor/absent) (n=117). Additional socio-demographic, clinical and caregiver data were included. Potential drug-drug interactions were identified using Micromedex Drug Reax 2.0® database. RESULTS: A total of 181 patients were enrolled, including 57 men (31.5%) and 124 women (68.5%) with a mean age of 80.11±8.28 years. One hundred and seven (59.1%) patients in our population had potential drug-drug interactions, of which 64 (59.81%) were severe/contraindicated. The main severe potential drug-drug interactions were caused by the combinations citalopram/anti-platelet (11.6%), clopidogrel/omeprazole (6.1%), and clopidogrel/aspirin (5.5%). Depression, the use of a higher number of medications, dementia severity and caregiver burden were the most significant factors associated with severe potential drug-drug interactions. CONCLUSIONS: Older people with dementia experience many severe potential drug-drug interactions. Anti-depressants, antiplatelets, anti-psychotics and omeprazole were the drugs most commonly involved in these interactions. Despite their frequent use, anti-dementia drugs were not involved in severe potential drug-drug interactions. The number and type of medications taken, dementia severity and depression in patients in addition to caregiver burden should be considered to avoid possible drug interactions in this population.