Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Life stress, mood disturbance, and elevated interleukin-6 in healthy older women.

BACKGROUND Although adverse effects of severe chronic stress on immunocompetence and physical well-being in older adults have been reported, the immune response to less severe life stress among healthy older adults, particularly among women, is not well understood. Interleukin-6 (IL-6) has been considered a good overall indicator of immune functioning in older adults because of its contribution to the pathogenesis of several age-related conditions such as osteoporosis. Regulation of IL-6 is impaired in elderly adults, and levels of IL-6 increase with stress and depression. This research cross-sectionally examined levels of IL-6 in three groups of healthy older women with varying levels of life stress and mood disturbance and a healthy group of young women. METHODS Subjects included 18 caregivers of Alzheimer's patients, 17 older women assessed one month before relocation of their residence, 15 nonmoving and noncaregiving older women, and 20 younger women. Subjects completed the Profile of Mood States (POMS) and had early morning blood draws. RESULTS Alzheimer's caregivers reported significantly greater distress than women of all other groups. IL-6 levels in caregivers were significantly higher than those of all other women. The older women had significantly higher IL-6 than young controls, but there were no significant differences in IL-6 between movers and older controls. Among all women, greater depression and distress were related to higher levels of IL-6. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that in older women, chronic stressors are associated with significant elevations in IL-6 over and above the elevations associated with normal aging, but that moderate stressors may not be related to appreciable elevations in IL-6.
Histopathologic Changes Related to Fibrotic Oviduct Occlusion After Genital Tract Infection of Mice With Chlamydia muridarum

Objectives: We sought to determine if intraluminal occluding fibrosis of the oviduct occurs after urogenital Chlamydia muridarum infection in mice. Study: Oviduct occlusion was assessed by infusing dye into the distal uterus and tracking the diffusion of the dye into the oviduct. We also conducted histologic assessment of the affected tissues using hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) and Masson trichrome stains. Results: All previously infected susceptible mice had occluded oviducts compared with 17.5% of previously uninfected mice. Oviduct occlusion correlated with hydrosalpinx formation and infertility. Intraluminal oviduct fibrosis was observed in several sections of tissue displaying hydrosalpinx but not in tissues without hydrosalpinx. Fibrosis was localized to the oviduct isthmus and oviduct proper, proximal to the uterus. Conclusion: Intralumenal occluding fibrosis of the oviduct is a sequela of infection with C. muridarum in this model. These observations support the use of the murine model to study pathogenesis of chlamydial upper genital tract infection.
Internet ticketing in a not‐for‐profit, service organization: Building customer loyalty

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to look at the ways in which the internet has changed the way in which many organizations now do business. The internet has made the transference of information easy but fulfilling online orders has proved to be a challenge.Design/methodology/approach – This study presents detailed analysis of 238 customers of a world‐renowned not‐for‐profit organization – the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO). Our sample of customers consists of patrons who ordered tickets online at least once during the 2001/2002 concert seasons. Factors influencing the development of an e‐loyal customer database were examined.Findings – The results indicate that customers realize significant benefits from using the internet to purchase concert tickets. Patrons also indicated that they were satisfied with their internet service experience.Originality/value – The role of the internet within organizations will change dramatically over the next decade. For organizations that are attempting to use the i.
Inhibition of Metalloproteinase Cleavage Enhances the Cytotoxicity of Fas Ligand1

The Fas ligand (FasL)/Fas receptor (CD95) pathway is an important mediator of apoptosis in the immune system and can also mediate cancer cell death. Soluble FasL (sFasL), shed from the membrane-bound form of the molecule by a putative metalloproteinase (MP), may function to locally regulate the activity of membrane-bound FasL. Using a replication-defective recombinant adenovirus-expressing FasL (RAdFasL), we identified a variable ability of different carcinoma cells to respond to FasL-induced cytotoxicity and to shed sFasL. Blockade of FasL cleavage with an MP inhibitor significantly enhanced RAdFasL-induced apoptosis suggesting that sFasL may antagonize the effect of membrane-bound FasL. In support of this concept, a recombinant adenovirus expressing a noncleavable form of FasL (RAdD4) was found to be a potent inducer of apoptosis even at very low virus doses. Our results highlight the therapeutic potential of noncleavable FasL as an antitumor agent and emphasize the important role of MP via the production of sFasL in regulating the response of the Fas pathway. Moreover, these findings have general implications for the therapeutic exploitation of TNF family ligands and for the possible impact of MP-based therapies on the normal physiology of Fas/TNF pathways.
The Relationship between Gas Content and Star Formation in Molecule-rich Spiral Galaxies

We investigate the relationship between H I, H2, and the star formation rate (SFR) using azimuthally averaged data for seven CO-bright spiral galaxies. Contrary to some earlier studies based on global fluxes, we find that ΣSFR exhibits a much stronger correlation with Σ than with Σ, as Σ saturates at a value of ~ 10 M☉ pc-2 or even declines for large ΣSFR. Hence, the good correlation between ΣSFR and the total (H I+H2) gas surface density Σgas is driven by the molecular component in these galaxies, with the observed relation between ΣSFR and Σ following a Schmidt-type law of index nmol ≈ 0.8 if a uniform extinction correction is applied or nmol ≈ 1.4 for a radially varying correction dependent on gas density. The corresponding Schmidt law indices for Σgas versus ΣSFR are 1.1 and 1.7 for the two extinction models, in rough agreement with previous studies of the disk-averaged star formation law. An alternative to the Schmidt law, in which the gas depletion timescale is proportional to the orbital timescale, is also consistent with the data if radially varying extinction corrections are applied. We find no clear evidence for a link between the gravitational instability parameter for the gas disk (Qg) and the SFR, and we suggest that Qg be considered a measure of the gas fraction. This implies that for a state of marginal gravitational stability to exist in galaxies with low gas fractions, it must be enforced by the stellar component. In regions where we have both H I and CO measurements, the ratio of H I to H2 surface density scales with radius as roughly R1.5, and we suggest that the balance between H I and H2 is determined primarily by the midplane interstellar pressure. These results favor a "law" of star formation in quiescent disks in which the ambient pressure and metallicity control the formation of molecular clouds from H I, with star formation then occurring at a roughly constant rate per unit H2 mass.
Optical detection of gold nanoparticles in a prostate-shaped porcine phantom

Abstract. Gold nanoparticles can be used as molecular contrast agents binding specifically to cancer sites and thus delineating tumor regions. Imaging gold nanoparticles deeply embedded in tissues with optical techniques possesses significant challenges due to multiple scattering of optical photons that blur the obtained images. Both diagnostic and therapeutic applications can benefit from a minimally invasive technique that can identify, localize, and quantify the payloads of gold nanoparticles deeply embedded in biological tissues. An optical radiance technique is applied to map localized inclusions of gold nanorods in 650- to 900-nm spectral range in a porcine phantom that mimics prostate geometry. Optical radiance defines a variation in the angular density of photons impinging on a selected point in the tissue from various directions. The inclusions are formed by immersing a capillary filled with gold nanorods in the phantom at increasing distances from the detecting fiber. The technique allows the isolation of the spectroscopic signatures of the inclusions from the background and identification of inclusion locations in the angular domain. Detection of ∼4×1010 gold nanoparticles or 0.04 mg Au/mL (detector–inclusion separation 10 mm, source–detector separation 15 mm) in the porcine tissue is demonstrated. The encouraging results indicate a promising potential of radiance spectroscopy in early prostate cancer diagnostics with gold nanoparticles.
SDNPS: A Load-Balanced Topic-Based Publish/Subscribe System in Software-Defined Networking

Publish/subscribe systems on the traditional Internet suffer from poor scalability and high delay in the face of the Internet of Things (IoT) environment. Being customizable, the paradigm of software-defined networking (SDN) provides a chance to establish an IoT-specific network. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based publish/subscribe system named SDNPS, which can construct and fine-tune topic-connected overlays for the sake of disseminating events efficiently and non-redundantly based on a global topology overview. It organizes topics as a Huffman-like topic tree and codes them into binary strings so that filtering and forwarding events can be operated directly on SDN-configurable switches, which helps to reduce end-to-end latency. This hierarchical organization form of topic tree makes it possible to incrementally construct and store overlays, which contribute to reducing the time and space complexity of routing computation. More specifically, it achieves a better tradeoff between load-balancing of the overall optimization objective and the minimal forwarding cost of per-topic overlay.
Better lossless condensers through derandomized curve samplers

Lossless condensers are unbalanced expander graphs, with expansion close to optimal. Equivalently, they may be viewed as functions that use a short random seed to map a source on n bits to a source on many fewer bits while preserving all of the min-entropy. It is known how to build lossless condensers when the graphs are slightly unbalanced in the work of M. Capalbo et al. (2002). The highly unbalanced case is also important but the only known construction does not condense the source well. We give explicit constructions of lossless condensers with condensing close to optimal, and using near-optimal seed length. Our main technical contribution is a randomness-efficient method for sampling FD (where F is a field) with low-degree curves. This problem was addressed before in the works of E. Ben-Sasson et al. (2003) and D. Moshkovitz and R. Raz (2006) but the solutions apply only to degree one curves, i.e., lines. Our technique is new and elegant. We use sub-sampling and obtain our curve samplers by composing a sequence of low-degree manifolds, starting with high-dimension, low-degree manifolds and proceeding through lower and lower dimension manifolds with (moderately) growing degrees, until we finish with dimension-one, low-degree manifolds, i.e., curves. The technique may be of independent interest
The changing status of hospital libraries 1984 to 1989: characteristics and services in Region 7 of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine.

Economic and political factors have had far-reaching effects on hospital libraries in the last decade, but quantitative evidence of these changes is not readily available. Through periodic evaluation surveys within its multistate region, the Pacific Southwest Regional Medical Library Service, the Regional Medical Library for Region 7 of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (formerly the Regional Medical Library Network) has monitored hospital library changes over the years. This paper compares data from a 1989 survey with similar information gathered in 1984. Longitudinal analysis was performed on responses from 188 hospitals that responded to both the 1984 and the 1989 survey, as was cross-sectional analysis of all responses from both surveys. Results showed a small decrease in the number of hospitals with separate library collections. Staffing patterns had changed considerably, with a drop of approximately one entire full-time salaried equivalent per library and a decrease in libraries managed by a librarian with an M.L. S. The libraries that provide all of a set of predefined core services and resources decreased from 61% in 1984 to 44% in 1989. Libraries with M.L. S. staff were more likely to have core services than those without professional staff.
Distributed Nesterov-like gradient algorithms

In classical, centralized optimization, the Nesterov gradient algorithm reduces the number of iterations to produce an ε-accurate solution (in terms of the cost function) with respect to ordinary gradient from O(1/ε) to equation. This improvement is achieved on a class of convex functions with Lipschitz continuous first derivative, and it comes at a very small additional computational cost per iteration. In this paper, we consider distributed optimization, where nodes in the network cooperatively minimize the sum of their private costs subject to a global constraint. To solve this problem, recent literature proposes distributed (sub)gradient algorithms, that are attractive due to computationally inexpensive iterations, but that converge slowly-the ε error is achieved in O(1/ε2) iterations. Here, building from the Nesterov gradient algorithm, we present a distributed, constant step size, Nesterov-like gradient algorithm that converges much faster than existing distributed (sub)gradient methods, with zero additional communications and very small additional computations per iteration k. We show that our algorithm converges to a solution neighborhood, such that, for a convex compact constraint set and optimized stepsize, the convergence time is O(1/ε). We achieve this on a class of convex, coercive, continuously differentiable private costs with Lipschitz first derivative. We derive our algorithm through a useful penalty, network's Laplacian matrix-based reformulation of the original problem (referred to as the clone problem) - the proposed method is precisely the Nesterov-gradient applied on the clone problem. Finally, we illustrate the performance of our algorithm on distributed learning of a classifier via logistic loss.
A process for costs-selection and mismatches handling

Organizations facing the difficulties and costs associated with the development of their information systems from scratch turn to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products to build their systems. A crucial factor in the success of such project is to perform a good COTS decision-making process, a process that aims at defining the organizations’ requirements, evaluating existing products and selecting the one that best fits requirements. However, even the best-fitting product would not perfectly match requirements, this is referred to as COTS mismatches. These mismatches occur as a result of an excess or shortage of COTS capabilities. Many of these mismatches are resolved after the COTS selection. This paper presents a goal-driven agent-oriented approach for proceeding the COTS decision-making and analysing mismatches during and after the COTS selection. The methodology is overviewed and illustrated on a case study.
Evaluating a surrogate endpoint at three levels, with application to vaccine development

Identification of an immune response to vaccination that reliably predicts protection from clinically significant infection, i.e. an immunological surrogate endpoint, is a primary goal of vaccine research. Using this problem of evaluating an immunological surrogate as an illustration, we describe a hierarchy of three criteria for a valid surrogate endpoint and statistical analysis frameworks for evaluating them. Based on a placebo‐controlled vaccine efficacy trial, the first level entails assessing the correlation of an immune response with a study endpoint in the study groups, and the second level entails evaluating an immune response as a surrogate for the study endpoint that can be used for predicting vaccine efficacy for a setting similar to that of the vaccine trial. We show that baseline covariates, innovative study design, and a potential outcomes formulation can be helpful for this assessment. The third level entails validation of a surrogate endpoint via meta‐analysis, where the goal is to evaluate how well the immune response can be used to predict vaccine efficacy for new settings (building bridges). A simulated vaccine trial and two example vaccine trials are presented, one supporting that certain anti‐influenza antibody levels are an excellent surrogate for influenza illness and another supporting that certain anti‐HIV antibody levels are not useful as a surrogate for HIV infection. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Benefit Congruency Framework of Sales Promotion Effectiveness

Are monetary savings the only explanation for consumer response to a sales promotion? If not, how do the different consumer benefits of a sales promotion influence its effectiveness? To address the first question, this research builds a framework of the multiple consumer benefits of a sales promotion. Through a series of measurement studies, the authors find that monetary and nonmonetary promotions provide consumers with different levels of three hedonic benefits (opportunities for value expression, entertainment, and exploration) and three utilitarian benefits (savings, higher product quality, and improved shopping convenience). To address the second question, the authors develop a benefit congruency framework, which argues that a sales promotion's effectiveness is determined by the utilitarian or hedonic nature of the benefits it delivers and the congruence these benefits have with the promoted product. Among other results, two choice experiments show that, as predicted for high-equity brands, monetary promotions are more effective for utilitarian products than for hedonic products. The authors then discuss the implications of the multibenefit and the benefit congruency frameworks for understanding consumer responses to sales promotions, reexamining the value of everyday-low-price policies, and designing more effective sales promotions.
Facial Age Estimation by Adaptive Label Distribution Learning

Lack of sufficient and complete training data is one of the most prominent challenges in the problem of facial age estimation. Due to appearance similarity of the faces at close ages, the face images at the neighboring ages may be utilized while learning a particular age. As a result, the training images for each age are boosted without actually increase the total number of training images. This is achieved by assigning a label distribution instead of a single label of the chronological age to each face image. The label distribution should accord with the tendency of facial aging, which might be significantly different at different ages, e.g., the facial appearance during childhood and senior age generally changes faster than that during middle age. In this paper, two adaptive label distribution learning (ALDL) algorithms, IIS-ALDL and BFGS-ALDL, are proposed to automatically learn the label distributions adapted to different ages. Experimental results show that the ALDL algorithms perform remarkably better than the compared state-of-the-art algorithms.
Comorbidities and Burden of COPD: A Population Based Case-Control Study

COPD is associated with a relevant burden of disease and a high mortality worldwide. Only recently, the importance of comorbidities of COPD has been recognized. Studies postulated an association with inflammatory conditions potentially sharing pathogenic pathways and worsening overall prognosis. More evidence is required to estimate the role of comorbidities of COPD. Our aim was to investigate the prevalence and clustering of comorbidities associated with COPD, and to estimate their impact on clinically relevant outcomes. In this population-based case-control study, a nation-wide database provided by the Swiss Federal Office for Statistics enclosing every hospital entry covering the years 2002–2010 (n = 12′888′075) was analyzed using MySQL and R statistical software. Statistical methods included non-parametric hypothesis testing by means of Fisher’s exact test and Wilcoxon rank sum test, as well as linear models with generalized estimating equation to account for intra-patient variability. Exploratory multivariate approaches were also used for the identification of clusters of comorbidities in COPD patients. In 2.6% (6.3% in patients aged >70 years) of all hospitalization cases an active diagnosis of COPD was recorded. In 21% of these cases, COPD was the main reason for hospitalization. Patients with a diagnosis of COPD had more comorbidities (7 [IQR 4–9] vs. 3 [IQR 1–6]; ), were more frequently rehospitalized (annual hospitalization rate 0.33 [IQR 0.20–0.67] vs. 0.25 [IQR 0.14–0.43]/year; ), had a longer hospital stay (9 [IQR 4–15] vs. 5 [IQR 2–11] days; ), and had higher in-hospital mortality (5.9% [95% CI 5.8%–5.9%] vs. 3.4% [95% CI 3.3%–3.5%]; ) compared to matched controls. A set of comorbidities was associated with worse outcome. We could identify COPD-related clusters of COPD-comorbidities.
No Evidence of Neandertal mtDNA Contribution to Early Modern Humans

The retrieval of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from four Neandertal fossils from Germany, Russia, and Croatia has demonstrated that these individuals carried closely related mtDNAs that are not found among current humans. However, these results do not definitively resolve the question of a possible Neandertal contribution to the gene pool of modern humans since such a contribution might have been erased by genetic drift or by the continuous influx of modern human DNA into the Neandertal gene pool. A further concern is that if some Neandertals carried mtDNA sequences similar to contemporaneous humans, such sequences may be erroneously regarded as modern contaminations when retrieved from fossils. Here we address these issues by the analysis of 24 Neandertal and 40 early modern human remains. The biomolecular preservation of four Neandertals and of five early modern humans was good enough to suggest the preservation of DNA. All four Neandertals yielded mtDNA sequences similar to those previously determined from Neandertal individuals, whereas none of the five early modern humans contained such mtDNA sequences. In combination with current mtDNA data, this excludes any large genetic contribution by Neandertals to early modern humans, but does not rule out the possibility of a smaller contribution.