Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of gender on health related quality of life in sarcoidosis.

BACKGROUND Sarcoidosis has different phenotypic manifestations which may have a diverse effect on functional status and quality of life. There are few studies in sarcoidosis addressing gender disparity and its effect on Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQL) and functional status. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of gender on HRQL and to identify associations between poor HRQL and the results of common clinical tests. DESIGN We assessed HRQL for 221 patients with sarcoidosis in a prospective, cross-sectional study using the Short Form-36 Health Survey and Sarcoidosis Health Questionnaire. We evaluated the association between the scores of these measures with patient characteristics, pulmonary function test (PFT) and 6-minute walk test (6MWT) data. RESULTS Women had lower scores than men on every measure of HRQL and weaker associations to findings from PFT and 6MWT. Multivariate linear regression analyses demonstrated that reduced 6MWT distance and DLCO were significantly associated with poor HRQL in both genders but the sensation of dyspnea played a significant role in women only. CONCLUSIONS Our results indicate that women with sarcoidosis have a lower HRQL score and a greater degree of functional impairment than men. The factors that are associated with poor HRQL differ by gender. Predictors of poor HRQL include reduction in DLCO and 6MWT distance and an increased sensation of dyspnea.
A New Spread Spectrum Clock Generator for SATA Using Double Modulation Schemes

A new spread spectrum clock generator (SSCG) using double modulation is presented in this paper. Not only the divider is varied, but also the voltage controlled oscillator is modulated. This technique can enhance the modulation bandwidth so that the effect of EMI suppression is improved and can optimize the jitter caused by the SigmaDelta modulator. In addition, the method of two-path is applied to reduce the capacitance value such that the total integration can be achieved. The proposed SSCG has been fabricated in a 0.18 mum CMOS process. The clock of 1.5 GHz with down spread ratio of 0.5% is realized for applications to serial ATA. The 19.63dB EMI reduction (RBW=10 KHz) and 35 ps-pp period jitter are achieved in this study. The size of chip area is 0.44times0. 48 mm2. The power consumption is 27 mW.
Effect of doping concentration and substrate temperature on the physical properties of Indium-doped zinc oxide thin films

Conductive and transparent Indium-doped zinc oxide (ZnO:In) thin films were deposited on glass substrates by the ultrasonic spray pyrolysis technique. Films were prepared from 0.2 M starting solutions of zinc acetate dissolved in a mixture of water, acetic acid and methanol. Indium acetate was used as In source at three different atomic concentrations, namely, 1, 2, and 3 at %. The effect of the Indium concentration in the starting solution on the electrical, structural, morphological, and optical characteristics of the films was studied. Electrical resistivity as low as 2×10-3Ωcm, electron mobility around 12 cm2/(V-s), carrier concentration in the range 2.19-3.4 ×1020cm-3, and an optical transmittance in the range 65-75 % were achieved for 3 at % ZnO:In thin films. All films were polycrystalline, growing preferentially along the (002) and (101) directions, depending on the indium concentration in the starting solution. Shape and grain size, were dependent on the [In/Zn] ratio in the starting solutions as well.
Sperm-shaped magnetic microrobots: Fabrication using electrospinning, modeling, and characterization

We use electrospinning to fabricate sperm-shaped magnetic microrobots with a range of diameters from 50 μm to 500 μm. The variables of the electrospinning operation (voltage, concentration of the solution, dynamic viscosity, and distance between the syringe needle and collector) to achieve beading effect are determined. This beading effect allows us to fabricate microrobots with similar morphology to that of sperm cells. The bead and the ultra-fine fiber resemble the morphology of the head and tail of the sperm cell, respectively. We incorporate iron oxide nanoparticles to the head of the sperm-shaped microrobot to provide a magnetic dipole moment. This dipole enables directional control under the influence of external magnetic fields. We also apply weak (less than 2 mT) oscillating magnetic fields to exert a magnetic torque on the magnetic head, and generate planar flagellar waves and flagellated swim. The average speed of the sperm-shaped microrobot is calculated to be 0.5 body lengths per second and 1 body lengths per second at frequencies of 5 Hz and 10 Hz, respectively. We also develop a model of the microrobot using elastohydrodynamics approach and Timoshenko-Rayleigh beam theory, and find good agreement with the experimental results.
Anti-phospholipase A2 receptor antibody in idiopathic membranous nephropathy: A report from Iranian population.

BACKGROUND Idiopathic Membranous Nephropathy (iMN) is the most common cause of nephrotic syndrome in adults. Approximately one third of patients with iMN progress to end-stage renal disease. Anti-phospholipase A2-receptor (anti-PLA2R) antibodies are present in patients with iMN and appear to play a role in the pathogenesis of iMN. OBJECTIVES In this study, we explored the prevalence of anti-PLA2R antibodies in a cohort of patients with iMN in Iran. We also sought to determine circulating levels of anti-secretory PLA2 (anti-sPLA2) antibodies in those with anti-PLA2R antibodies. PATIENTS AND METHODS Using an indirect immunofluorescence assay, we measured anti-PLA2R antibodies in a group of patients with iMN in Iran. The serum levels of anti-sPLA2 antibodies were also measured in those with positive results for anti-PLA2R antibodies. RESULTS We studied 23 patients with iMN (M/F 12/11, 34±9.8 year), two patients with secondary MN and five patients with the nephrotic syndrome of other causes.Anti-PLA2R antibodies were detected in 17/23 (74%) of patients with iMN, but not in those with secondary MN or other forms of primary glomerular diseases. We found no correlation between anti-PLA2R antibody titer and the degree of proteinuria. We found high titers of anti-sPLA2 antibodies in a subset of patients with high levels of anti-PLA2R antibodies. CONCLUSIONS Anti-PLA2R antibodies are specific for iMN. Proteinuria may also reflect glomerular structural damage rather than immunological activity of the disease. The preliminary idea of any presumptive role of anti-sPLA2antibodies in iMN needs further investigation.
Classification for Breast MRI Using Support Vector Machine

Magnetic resonance image (MRI) was harmless to the human body and used on the clinical trial extensively in recent years. In this study, we want to detect the tissues of breast form the multi-spectral MR image. Because multi-spectral MR image are scanning the same slice with various frequencies and parameters and it can obtain intact information. In the image classification, we apply support vector machine (SVM) on breast multi-spectral magnetic resonance image to classify the tissues of breast separately. The classification results would assist doctor to judge and sift the breast tumor. In order to further evaluate its performance, the C-means (CM) classification method is compared with SVM. By some experiments, the result of SVM is better than C-mean.
Solid layer thermal-conductivity measurement techniques

Behr GmbH& Co, Postfach 300920, 70449 Stuttgart, Germany The thermal conductivities of solid layers of thicknesses from 0.01 to 100 urn affect the performance and reliability of electronic circuits, laser systems, and microfabricated sensors. This work reviews techniques that measure the effective thermal conductivity along and normal to these layers. Recent measurements using microfabricated experimental structures show the importance of measuring the conductivities of layers that closely resemble those in the application. Several promising non-contact techniques use laser light for heating and infrared detectors for temperature measurements. For transparent layers these methods require optical coatings whose impact on the measurements has not been determined. There is a need for uncertainty analysis in many cases, particularly for those techniques which apply to very thin layers or to layers with very high conductivities.
How good (or bad) are country projections

World Bank economists routinely undertake projections of national accounts and balance of payments for their countries. These appear as part of the Bank's Country Strategy Papers. This note examines projections done during the 1983 - 85 period, and compares the projected levels of GDP, imports, exports, terms of trade, savings and investment with the actual outcome for the same period. The principal conclusions are as follows : 1) gross domestic product (GDP) projections tended to be optimistic; 2) projected export volumes tended to be slightly lower than the actual outcome; 3) the actual terms of trade deterioration was somewhat worse than expected (with extremely wide variations among countries); 4) investment and savings rates were both slightly overestimated (with significant variation among countries); 5) on a regional basis, projections of GDP growth in African countries had the greatest overestimation; 6) resource gaps, or capital inflows were about what was expected; and 7) investment efficiency was much worse than expected. The liklihood of wide variations between projections and actual events suggests that the use of these projections for judgements about creditworthiness and country risk could be misleading. Not only are improvements needed in country modeling, but equally important are improvements in the forecasts of external environment facing developing countries.
The tax-spend nexus in Nigeria: Evidence from Nonlinear Causality

The study investigates the linear and nonlinear causal linkages between the tax-spend nexus in Nigeria for the periods 1961-1992, 1993-2012 and1961-2012. Employing a nonparametric causality test of Diks and Panchenko (2006) as well as the parametric causality test using the VAR model, results show that there is evidence of uni-directional linear causality from government revenue to government expenditure in the first period and uni-directional nonlinear causality from government revenue to government expenditure in the second and third periods. However, the nonlinear causal relation evidence that government revenue Granger cause government expenditure disappears after the VAR filtering. The policy implication of this result is that government should intensify efforts to improve her revenue accompanied with appropriate fiscal expenditure reforms.
Oligomeric Coiled-Coil Adhesin YadA Is a Double-Edged Sword

Yersinia adhesin A (YadA) is an essential virulence factor for the food-borne pathogens Yersinia enterocolitica and Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. Suprisingly, it is a pseudogene in Yersinia pestis. Even more intriguing, the introduction of a functional yadA gene in Y. pestis EV76 was shown to correlate with a decrease in virulence in a mouse model. Here, we report that wild type (wt) Y. enterocolitica E40, as well as YadA-deprived E40 induced the synthesis of neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) upon contact with neutrophils, but only YadA-expressing Y. enterocolitica adhered to NETs and were killed. As binding seemed to be a prerequisite for killing, we searched for YadA-binding substrates and detected the presence of collagen within NETs. E40 bacteria expressing V98D,N99A mutant YadA with a severely reduced ability to bind collagen were found to be more resistant to killing, suggesting that collagen binding contributes significantly to sensitivity to NETs. Wt Y. pestis EV76 were resistant to killing by NETs, while recombinant EV76 expressing YadA from either Y. pseudotuberculosis or Y. enterocolitica were sensitive to killing by NETs, outlining the importance of YadA for susceptibility to NET-dependent killing. Recombinant EV76 endowed with YadA from Y. enterocolitica were also less virulent for the mouse than wt EV76, as shown before. In addition, EV76 carrying wt YadA were less virulent for the mouse than EV76 expressing YadAV98D,N99A. The observation that YadA makes Yersinia sensitive to NETs provides an explanation as for why evolution selected for the inactivation of yadA in the flea-borne Y. pestis and clarifies an old enigma. Since YadA imposes the same cost to the food-borne Yersinia but was nevertheless conserved by evolution, this observation also illustrates the duality of some virulence functions.
Strategic Asset Allocation: Portfolio Choice for Long-Term Investors

Academic finance has had a remarkable impact on many financial services. Yet long-term investors have received curiously little guidance from academic financial economists. Mean-variance analysis, developed almost fifty years ago, has provided a basic paradigm for portfolio choice. This approach usefully emphasizes the ability of diversification to reduce risk, but it ignores several critically important factors. Most notably, the analysis is static; it assumes that investors care only about risks to wealth one period ahead. However, many investors---both individuals and institutions such as charitable foundations or universities---seek to finance a stream of consumption over a long lifetime. In addition, mean-variance analysis treats financial wealth in isolation from income. Long-term investors typically receive a stream of income and use it, along with financial wealth, to support their consumption. At the theoretical level, it is well understood that the solution to a long-term portfolio choice problem can be very different from the solution to a short-term problem. Long-term investors care about intertemporal shocks to investment opportunities and labor income as well as shocks to wealth itself, and they may use financial assets to hedge their intertemporal risks. This should be important in practice because there is a great deal of empirical evidence that investment opportunities---both interest rates and risk premia on bonds and stocks---vary through time. Yet this insight has had little influence on investment practice because it is hard to solve for optimal portfolios in intertemporal models. This book seeks to develop the intertemporal approach into an empirical paradigm that can compete with the standard mean-variance analysis. The book shows that long-term inflation-indexed bonds are the riskless asset for long-term investors, it explains the conditions under which stocks are safer assets for long-term than for short-term investors, and it shows how labor income influences portfolio choice. These results shed new light on the rules of thumb used by financial planners. The book explains recent advances in both analytical and numerical methods, and shows how they can be used to understand the portfolio choice problems of long-term investors. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship. com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0198296940/toc.html
Design of fast fourier transform using processing element for real valued signal

This brief presents an architecture for in-place fast Fourier transform (IFFT) computation for real valued signals. The proposed computation is based on modified radix-2 algorithm, which removes the redundant operations from the flow graph. The modified flow graph contains only real data paths as opposed to complex data paths in a regular flow graph. A new processing element (PE) is proposed which consists of two radix-2 butterflies that can process four inputs signals in parallel. A new conflict-free memory-addressing scheme is proposed to ensure the continuous operation of the FFT processor. The addressing scheme is also used to support multiple parallel PEs. As the proposed PE processes the four parallel inputs that reduce computation cycles and increase the speed compared to prior work. The number of computation cycles is reduced with increase in the number of PEs. As redundant operations are removed, that reduces hardware cost.
Re-Examining the Risk-Return Relationship: The Influence of Financial Crisis (2007-2009)

This paper compares the risk-return trade-off using different approaches to obtain the conditional variances and analyzes the effect of the recent global financial crisis. Generally, these models fail to estimate a significant relationship between return and risk, and only if we consider the case of nonlinearities in the variance process we obtain a positive and significant relationship. The risk premiums obtained present higher values than previous studies, due to the impact of the global financial crisis as we demonstrated.
Glucose tolerance and cardiovascular mortality: comparison of fasting and 2-hour diagnostic criteria.

BACKGROUND New diagnostic criteria for diabetes based on fasting blood glucose (FBG) level were approved by the American Diabetes Association. The impact of using FBG only has not been evaluated thoroughly. The fasting and the 2-hour glucose (2h-BG) criteria were compared with regard to the prediction of mortality. METHODS Existing baseline data on glucose level at fasting and 2 hours after a 75-g oral glucose tolerance test from 10 prospective European cohort studies including 15 388 men and 7126 women aged 30 to 89 years, with a median follow-up of 8.8 years, were analyzed. Hazards ratios for death from all causes, cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, and stroke were estimated. RESULTS Multivariate Cox regression analyses showed that the inclusion of FBG did not add significant information on the prediction of 2h-BG alone (P>.10 for various causes), whereas the addition of 2h-BG to FBG criteria significantly improved the prediction (P<.001 for all causes and P<.005 for cardiovascular disease). In a model including FBG and 2h-BG simultaneously, hazards ratios (95% confidence intervals) in subjects with diabetes on 2h-BG were 1.73 (1.45-2.06) for all causes, 1.40 (1.02-1.92) for cardiovascular disease, 1.56 (1.03-2.36) for coronary heart disease, and 1.29 (0.66-2.54) for stroke mortality, compared with the normal 2h-BG group. Compared with the normal FBG group, the corresponding hazards ratios in subjects with diabetes on FBG were 1.21 (1.01-1.44), 1.20 (0.88-1.64), 1.09 (0.71-1.67), and 1.64 (0.88-3.07), respectively. The largest number of excess deaths was observed in subjects who had impaired glucose tolerance but normal FBG levels. CONCLUSION The 2h-BG is a better predictor of deaths from all causes and cardiovascular disease than is FBG.
Exploring Career Plateau as a Multi-Faceted Phenomenon: Understanding the Types of Career Plateaux Experienced by Accounting Professionals

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the types of career plateaux experienced by a sample of 52 men and women employed in the accounting profession in Australia. The aim is to explore whether current definitions of a plateau, which tend to focus only on a lack of progression, are broad enough. The results are based on semi-structured interviews with 52 participants employed in a range of positions and organizational types in the accounting profession. The qualitative design enabled participants to provide a highly personalized and richly detailed description of their career experiences. There were both positive and negative views of a plateau. With regard to the former, some participants used the plateau as an opportunity to redirect their career paths, whilst for the latter, some participants reported feeling disillusioned, dissatisfied and unsure of their future career direction. The research demonstrates that career plateau is a multi-faceted phenomenon, i.e. it is strongly influenced by how an individual defines career and success. For example, it can relate to objective definitions of success (i.e. a lack of hierarchical progression) or an individual's desire for ongoing skills development and mentally stimulating work (subjective career success). The message for organizations is that, just because an individual may have reached a senior position in their organization, it does not mean that they are no longer interested in further challenges or development. In fact, the participants in the research were interested in prolonging their careers and wanted their organizations to provide greater support in the area of continuous learning and career development.
The Variance Composition of Firm Growth Rates

Firms exhibit a wide variability in growth rates. This can be seen as another manifestation of the fact that firms are different from one another in several respects. This study investigated this variability using the variance components technique previously used to decompose the variance of financial performance. The main source of variation in growth rates, responsible for more than 40% of total variance, corresponds to individual, idiosyncratic firm aspects and not to industry, country, or macroeconomic conditions prevailing in specific years. Firm growth, similar to financial performance, is mostly unique to specific firms and not an industry or country related phenomenon. This finding also justifies using growth as an alternative outcome of superior firm resources and as a complementary dimension of competitive advantage. This also links this research with the resource-based view of strategy. Country was the second source of variation with around 10% of total variance. The analysis was done using the Compustat Global database with 80,320 observations, comprising 13,221 companies in 47 countries, covering the years of 1994 to 2002. It also compared the variance structure of growth to the variance structure of financial performance in the same sample
Maximum entropy methods for generating simulated rainfall

We desire to generate monthly rainfall totals for a particular location in such a way that the statistics for the simulated data match the statistics for the observed data. We are especially interested in the accumulated rainfall totals over several months. We propose two different ways to construct a joint rainfall probability distribution that matches the observed grade correlation coefficients and preserves the prescribed marginal distributions. Both methods use multi-dimensional checkerboard copulas. In the first case we use the theory of Fenchel duality to construct a copula of maximum entropy and in the second case we use a copula derived from a multi-variate normal distribution. Finally we simulate monthly rainfall totals at a particular location using each method and analyse the statistical behaviour of the corresponding quarterly accumulations.
Ascites as the Presenting Symptom of Multiple Myeloma in a Scleroderma Patient

Several reports have demonstrated associations between scleroderma and cancer and between multiple myeloma and autoimmune diseases. Few papers have also reported the concurrence of scleroderma and multiple myeloma. We report a case of multiple myeloma that developed in a male patient after 28 years of fulfilling a diagnosis of scleroderma. The main presenting feature of multiple myeloma was ascites, solely explained by the increased vascular permeability that occurs in this disease.