Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Videothoracoscopic lobectomy training in non-small cell lung cancer.

Background This study aims to evaluate the outcomes of video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery lobectomies performed by a training consultant or an experienced consultant. Methods The study included 103 patients (81 males, 22 females; mean age 59.6±9.5 years; range, 32 to 84 years) who underwent video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery lobectomy due to non-small cell lung cancer. The training consultant assisted on the same side with the experienced consultant during the operations of the experienced consultant. The experienced consultant observed in the operating room and provided advice from a distance during the first five operations of the training consultant. Comorbidities, postoperative complications, and mortality were evaluated. Results Patients" demographic characteristics, comorbidities, and postoperative complications were similar between the two surgeons (p>0.05). Operative time, incidence of prolonged air leak, and length of hospital stay were higher in procedures performed by the training consultant (p<0.05). There were no significant differences in rates of life-threatening complications or mortality. Conclusion Video-assisted thoracoscopic surgery lobectomy can be performed safely by surgeons in training. Effective training programs may produce outcomes comparable to those of experienced surgeons.
What Drives Electronic Commerce across Cultures? Across-Cultural Empirical Investigation of the Theory of Planned Behavior

Globalization and the ubiquitous nature of the Internet facilitate e-commerce activities across nations. These activities demand a new conceptualization of online consumer behavior that transcends national boundaries and takes into consideration cross-cultural effects. To better understand what drives e-commerce across cultures, we apply a theory of planned behavior (TPB) perspective to capture behavioral intentions to transact online in two dissimilar countries – China and the United States. We argue that adoption of e-commerce depends primarily on consumer behavioral intentions to engage in product purchases. The model first draws upon the TPB to interrelate online transaction intentions with attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control. Second, given the uncertainty present in e-commerce, trust in a Web retailer is hypothesized as a salient belief that indirectly influences transaction intentions through attitude and perceived behavioral control. The paper’s major contribution is to incorporate Hofstede’s (2001) cultural dimensions - individualism/collectivism, power distance, and long-term orientation - in studying cross-cultural e-commerce adoption. We argue that these cultural differences influence the proposed e-commerce adoption model and moderate its key relationships. An empirical study was conducted to test the proposed cross-cultural model using data from consumers in China and the United States. The results render support for most of the proposed hypotheses, emphasizing the role of cultural differences on consumer e-commerce adoption. The paper discusses several insights from this exploratory study that contribute to the cross-cultural ecommerce literature. Finally, we discuss the study’s implications for theory and practice, concluding with several suggestions for future research on cultural aspects of e-commerce.
Human Impact on Erodable Phosphorus and Eutrophication: A Global Perspective

Human actions—mining phosphorus (P) and transporting it in fertilizers, animal feeds, agricultural crops, and other products—are altering the global P cycle, causing P to accumulate in some of the world’s soil. Increasing P levels in the soil elevate the potential P runoff to aquatic ecosystems (Fluck et al. 1992, NRC 1993, USEPA 1996). Using a global budget approach, we estimate the increase in net P storage in terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems to be at least 75% greater than preindustrial levels of storage. We calculated an agricultural mass balance (budget), which indicated that a large portion of this P accumulation occurs in agricultural soils. Separate P budgets of the agricultural areas of developing and developed countries show that the rate of P accumulation is decreasing in developed nations but increasing in developing nations.
Does Financial Strain Lower Worker Productivity?∗

This paper empirically tests for a direct causal impact of financial strain on worker productivity. We randomize the timing of income receipt among Indian workers who earn piece rates for manufacturing tasks: some workers receive their wages on earlier dates, altering when cash constraints are eased while holding overall wealth constant. Workers increase productivity by 5.3% on average in the days after cash receipt. The impacts are concentrated among poorer workers in the sample, who increase output by over 10%. This effect of cash on hand on productivity is not explained by mechanisms such as gift exchange, trust in the employer, or nutrition. We present positive evidence that productivity increases are mediated through lower attentional errors in production, indicating a role for improved cognition after cash receipt. Finally, directing workers’ attention to their finances via a salience intervention produced mixed results. Such primes do not appear to work effectively as a way to test the impact of worries as they also induce effort responses. Taken together, our results indicate a direct relationship between financial constraints and worker productivity and suggest that psychological channels mediated through attention play a role in this relationship. ∗We gratefully acknowledge generous funding and support from the Weiss Family Program for Research in Development Economics, the Pershing Square Venture Fund for Research on the Foundations of Human Behavior, and the National Science Foundation. Arnesh Chowdhury, Sneha Subramanian, Medha Aurora, Manvi Govil, and Piyush Tank provided excellent research assistance. We thank seminar audiences at Harvard/MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, San Diego, Santa Barbara, HBS NOM, and Stanford for extremely helpful feedback and discussions. †Kaur: UC Berkeley and NBER (supreet@berkeley.edu); Mullainathan: U Chicago and NBER (Sendhil.Mullainathan@chicagobooth.edu); Oh: Columbia U (sso2118@columbia.edu); Schilbach: MIT and NBER (fschilb@mit.edu)
Sticky Prices and Costly Credit

We develop a theory of money and credit as competing payment instruments, then put it to work in applications. Agents use cash and credit because the former (latter) is subject to the inflation tax (transaction costs). Frictions that make the choice of payment method interesting also imply equilibrium price dispersion. We derive closed- form solutions for money demand, and show how to simultaneously account for the price-change facts, cash-credit shares in micro data, and money-interest correlations in macro data. The effects of inflation on welfare, price dispersion and markups are discussed, as are nonstationary equilibria with dynamics in the price distribution.
Order Backlog Disclosure before Seasoned Equity Offerings

Prior studies suggest that firms issue more disclosures prior to the SEO to reduce the cost of capital. In contrast to the findings in prior studies, we find that firms on average stop disclosing order backlog, a leading indicator of market demand change, prior to primary seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) and then resume the disclosure after the SEO. As primary SEOs may signal an increase in the issuer’s growth prospect, we posit that the increasing proprietary cost accompanying the growth prospect is associated with this change in order backlog disclosures. We find that firms that face more intensive competition are more inclined to reduce order backlog disclosures prior to the offering. Moreover, although firms that disclose order backlog prior to the offering experience smaller underpricing than those who do not disclose order backlog, they also experience increasing competition as their disclosures are followed by greater investments in rival firms. Our findings show that the tradeoff between capital market benefits and proprietary costs lead to different adjustments of corporate disclosures.
Scalable Learning of Entity and Predicate Embeddings for Knowledge Graph Completion

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are a widely used formalism for representing knowledge in the Web of Data. We focus on the problem of link prediction, i.e. predicting missing links in large knowledge graphs, so to discover new facts about the world. Representation learning models that embed entities and relation types in continuous vector spaces recently were used to achieve new state-of-the-art link prediction results. A limiting factor in these models is that the process of learning the optimal embedding vectors can be really time-consuming, and might even require days of computations for large KGs. In this work, we propose a principled method for sensibly reducing the learning time, while converging to more accurate link prediction models. Furthermore, we employ the proposed method for training and evaluating a set of novel and scalable models. Our extensive evaluations show significant improvements over state-of-the-art link prediction methods on several datasets.
Physical Conditions in the Inner Narrow-Line Region of the Seyfert 2 Galaxy NGC 1068

The physical conditions in the inner narrow-line region (NLR) of the Seyfert 2 galaxy NGC 1068 are examined using ultraviolet and optical spectra and photoionization models. The spectra are Hubble Space Telescope archive data obtained with the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS). We selected spectra of four regions, taken through the 0. ″3 FOS aperture covering the full FOS 1200-6800 Å wave band. Each region is approximately 20 pc in extent, and all are within 100 pc of the apparent nucleus of NGC 1068. The spectra show similar emission-line ratios from a wide range of ionization states for the most abundant elements. After extensive photoionization modeling, we interpret this result as an indication that each region includes a range of gas densities, which we included in the models as separate components. Supersolar abundances were required for several elements to fit the observed emission-line ratios. Dust was included in the models, but apparently dust-to-gas fraction varies within these regions. The low-ionization lines in these spectra can be best explained as arising in gas that is partially shielded from the ionizing continuum. Although the predicted line ratios from the photoionization models provide a good fit to the observed ratios, it is apparent that the model predictions of electron temperatures in the ionized gas are too low. We interpret this as an indication of additional collisional heating due to shocks and/or energetic particles associated with the radio jet that traverses the NLR of NGC 1068. The density structure within each region may also be the result of compression by the jet.
The muscle-specific microRNAs miR-1 and miR-133 produce opposing effects on apoptosis by targeting HSP60, HSP70 and caspase-9 in cardiomyocytes

The microRNAs miR-1 and miR-133 are preferentially expressed in cardiac and skeletal muscles and have been shown to regulate differentiation and proliferation of these cells. We report here a novel aspect of cellular function of miR-1 and miR-133 regulation of cardiomyocyte apoptosis. miR-1 and miR-133 produced opposing effects on apoptosis, induced by oxidative stress in H9c2 rat ventricular cells, with miR-1 being pro-apoptotic and miR-133 being anti-apoptotic. miR-1 level was significantly increased in response to oxidative stress. We identified single target sites for miR-1 only, in the 3′-untranslated regions of the HSP60 and HSP70 genes, and multiple putative target sites for miR-133 throughout the sequence of the caspase-9 gene. miR-1 reduced the levels of HSP60 and HSP70 proteins without changing their transcript levels, whereas miR-133 did not affect HSP60 and HSP70 expression at all. By contrast, miR-133 repressed caspase-9 expression at both the protein and mRNA levels. The post-transcriptional repression of HSP60 and HSP70 and caspase-9 was further confirmed by luciferase reporter experiments. Our results indicate that miR-1 and miR-133 are involved in regulating cell fate with increased miR-1 and/or decreased miR-133 levels favoring apoptosis and decreased miR-1 and/or miR-133 levels favoring survival. Post-transcriptional repression of HSP60 and HSP70 by miR-1 and of caspase-9 by miR-133 contributes significantly to their opposing actions.
Serum Metabonomic Analysis of Protective Effects of Curcuma aromatica Oil on Renal Fibrosis Rats

Background Curcuma aromatica oil is a traditional herbal medicine demonstrating protective and anti-fibrosis activities in renal fibrosis patients. However, study of its mechanism of action is challenged by its multiple components and multiple targets that its active agent acts on. Methodology/Principal Findings Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-based metabonomics combined with clinical chemistry and histopathology examination were performed to evaluate intervening effects of Curcuma aromatica oil on renal interstitial fibrosis rats induced by unilateral ureteral obstruction. The metabolite levels were compared based on integral values of serum 1H NMR spectra from rats on 3, 7, 14, and 28 days after the medicine administration. Time trajectory analysis demonstrated that metabolic profiles of the agent-treated rats were restored to control levels after 7 days of dosage. The results confirmed that the agent would be an effective anti-fibrosis medicine in a time-dependent manner, especially in early renal fibrosis stage. Targeted metabolite analysis showed that the medicine could lower levels of lipid, acetoacetate, glucose, phosphorylcholine/choline, trimethylamine oxide and raise levels of pyruvate, glycine in the serum of the rats. Serum clinical chemistry and kidney histopathology examination dovetailed well with the metabonomics data. Conclusions/Significances The results substantiated that Curcuma aromatica oil administration can ameliorate renal fibrosis symptoms by inhibiting some metabolic pathways, including lipids metabolism, glycolysis and methylamine metabolism, which are dominating targets of the agent working in vivo. This study further strengthens the novel analytical approach for evaluating the effect of traditional herbal medicine and elucidating its molecular mechanism.
Design control of DC/AC converter for a grid connected PV systems using Matlab/Simulink

Maximization of power from a solar photovoltaic module is of special interest as the efficiency of the solar PV module is very low. A peak power tracker is used for extracting the maximum power from the solar PV module. In the present work we analyze the design and the simulation of the maximum power point tracker (MPPT) for the solar PV array connected to three phase grid. In our studies, we conceived a PV system where the PV generator is the panel NA-901(WQ). The MPPT system has been tested on Solar PV Module (Micro-amorphous silicon thin-film) rated 90Wpeak at 49.3V, 1.83A at 25 degree Celsius and 1000W/m2 (STC). The simulation studies are carried out in MATLAB /SIMULINK.
Detecting and isolating inconsistently behaving agents using an intelligent control loop

Desktop Computing Grids provide a framework for joining in and sharing resources with others. The result is a self-organised system that typically consists of numerous distributed autonomous entities. Openness and heterogeneity postulate severe challenges to the overall system's stability and efficiency since uncooperative and even malicious participants are free to join. In this paper, we present a concept for identifying agents with exploitation strategies that works on a system-wide analysis of trust and work relationships. Afterwards, we introduce a system-wide control loop to isolate these malicious elements using a norm-based approach - due to the agents' autonomy, we have to build on indirect control actions. Within simulations of a Desktop Computing Grid scenario, we show that the intelligent control loop works highly successful: these malicious elements are identified and isolated with a low error rate. We further demonstrate that the approach results in a significant increase of utility for all participating benevolent agents.
A Geoarchaeological Reading of the City-Overlap-City Phenomenon in the Lower Yellow River Floodplain: A Case Study of Kaifeng City, China

The unique urban form on the ground and the “city overlap city” phenomenon occurring underground at Kaifeng city, on the Yellow River floodplain, is investigated. Archaeological data and historical geographical analysis were used to study the form of surface remains. Primary data were collected from four 25 m long drill cores which were obtained from different locations at Kaifeng city and the sedimentary cycles were quantitatively divided-out and dated. The results show that the evolution of Kaifeng’s surface urban form mainly occurred over four periods, the first of which was before 225 BC; the second took place between 225 BC and 956 AD; the third between 956 AD and 1219 AD; and the fourth between 1219 AD and 1907 AD. The results support the view that the city wall of today has undergone continuous reconstruction on the basis of previous city walls and thus forming the special landscape sequence of overlapped walls as a result of the 1642 AD and 1841 AD floods. The results also substantiate the “city overlap city” phenomenon at Kaifeng city where there are at least “three and a half ancient cities” located underground today, and suggests the “city overlap city” landscape is a harmonious production comprising both natural and human heritages that are of worldwide significance in terms of authenticity and integrity. Our results contribute to understanding the effects of Yellow River flooding on shaping adaptive landscapes and human beings, and suggest that Kaifeng city as well as other lower Yellow River sites become World Heritage sites.
Investigation of the Weld Properties of Dissimilar S32205 Duplex Stainless Steel with AISI 304 Steel Joints Produced by Arc Stud Welding

UNS S32205 duplex stainless steel plates with a thickness of 3 mm are arc stud welded by M8 × 40 mm AISI 304 austenitic stainless steel studs with constant stud lifts in order to investigate the effects of welding arc voltages on mechanical and microstructural behaviors of the joints. As the welding arc voltage increases starting from 140 V, the tensile strength of the weldment also increases but the higher arc values results in more spatters around the weld seam up to 180 V. Conversely, the lower arc voltages causes poor tensile strength values to weldments. Tensile tests proved that all of the samples are split from each other in the welding zone but deformation occurs in duplex plates during the tensile testing of weldments so that the elongation values are not practically notable. The satisfactory tensile strength and bending values are determined by applying 180 volts of welding arc voltage according to ISO 14555 standard. Peak values of micro hardness occurred in weld metal most probably as a consequence of increasing heat input decreasing the delta ferrite ratios. As the arc voltage increases, the width of the heat affected zone increases. Coarsening of delta-ferrite and austenite grains was observed in the weld metal peak temperature zone but it especially becomes visible closer to the duplex side in all samples. The large voids and unwelded zones up to approximately 1 mm by length are observed by macro-structure inspections. Besides visual tests and micro-structural surveys; bending and microhardness tests with radiographic inspection were applied to samples for maintaining the correct welding parameters in obtaining well-qualified weldments of these two distinct groups of stainless steel materials.
Gully development, evolution and erosion using a landscape evolution model

: Gullies are a recognised driver of landscape evolution. They are common features not just in natural landscape systems but also in agricultural and post-mining landforms. It is therefore necessary that gully initiation, development and evolution be thoroughly understood for both improved land surface process understandings but also for improved landscape management. Computer based landscape evolution models that use a mesh of grid cells to represent a catchment have the potential to model the evolution of transient features such as gullies. Landscape evolution models use a DEM and have the designed so that they adjust elevation to both erosion and deposition. Therefore they are able to better represent the effect of changing hillslope and catchment morphology on erosion. This process is dynamic. In this study the SIBERIA model is used to evaluate gully evolution. SIBERIA has been extensively used and has been shown to be able to model long-term whole-landscape evolution as well as predict hillslope and catchment scale erosion rates. This is the first evaluation of the model for its ability to predict erosion features such as gullies at the catchment scale. The results show that the model is able to largely predict gully formation as well as morphology. This is the first time that a landscape evolution model has been used to examine gully development in an undisturbed catchment.
Racial Disparity in A1C Independent of Mean Blood Glucose in Children With Type 1 Diabetes

OBJECTIVE Mean blood glucose (MBG) and MBG-independent factors both influence A1C levels. Race was related to A1C independent of MBG in adults. The goal of this study was to determine if racial disparity exists in A1C independent of MBG in children with diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Participants included 276 children with type 1 diabetes. A1C and MBG were obtained from multiple clinic visits, and a hemoglobin glycation index (HGI) (an assessment of A1C levels independent of MBG) was calculated. A1C and HGI were analyzed controlling for age, diabetes duration, and MBG. RESULTS African Americans had statistically significantly higher A1C (9.1 ± 0.1) and HGI (0.64 ± 0.11) than Caucasians (A1C 8.3 ± 0.1, HGI −0.15 ± 0.07) independent of covariates. CONCLUSIONS Because of racial disparity in A1C, which is independent of MBG, we recommend that A1C and MBG be used together to make therapeutic decisions for children with diabetes.
DINOSAUR MODELS : THE GOOD , THE BAD , AND USING THEM TO ESTIMATE THE MASS OF DINOSAURS

The methods for accurately restoring model dinosaurs in all dimensions are outlined. It is shown that most errors in the volume of dinosaur models are not due to differing interpretations of muscle bulk and fat deposits, but to gross errors in proportions, especially of the trunk. Comparison of commercial dinosaur models with technical, multiview skeletal restorations show that with few exceptions the former are marred by serious errors in proportions and volumes. It is concluded that the models are toy caricatures, should not be used in scientific studies, and that they often mislead the public as to the body forms of dinosaurs. A series of technical skeletal restorations and mass estimates of herbivorous dinosaurs is presented. The status of the largest predatory and herbivorous dinosaurs is assessed, and it is concluded that the former approached 10 tonnes in mass, with the latter exceeding 100 tonnes and approaching the mass of blue whales.
China Incorporated

Argentina is a federal country and hence, although laws are national and the central bank has national jurisdiction as a regulator of the financial system, the 24 Argentine provinces have independent judicial authority. In this paper we analyze how variations in the effectiveness of the legal system across the different provinces have affected the development of credit markets. We find strong results. Provinces with poor legal enforcement have less credit available to borrowers and banks’ non-performing loans are higher. We conclude that the effectiveness of the legal system remains a highly significant variable in determining the development of the Argentine credit market and that improvements in the legal system would result in a significant increase in the availability of credit.