Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Instrumental Variable Estimation of Treatment Effects for Duration Outcomes

In this article we propose and implement an instrumental variable estimation procedure to obtain treatment effects on duration outcomes. The method can handle the typical complications that arise with duration data of time-varying treatment and censoring. The treatment effect we define is in terms of shifting the quantiles of the outcome distribution based on the Generalized Accelerated Failure Time (GAFT) model. The GAFT model encompasses two competing approaches to duration data; the (Mixed) Proportional Hazard (MPH) model and the Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model. We discuss the large sample properties of the proposed Instrumental Variable Linear Rank (IVLR), and show how we can, with one additional step, improve upon its efficiency. We discuss the empirical implementation of the estimator and apply it to the Illinois re-employment bonus experiment.
Implications of Foot Ulceration in Hemodialysis Patients: A 5-Year Observational Study

Foot ulceration (FU) remains a serious concern for patients worldwide. We analyzed the incidence, risk factors, and outcome of FU in hemodialysis (HD) patients. A retrospective cohort study was conducted for 252 HD patients who were followed up for 5 years. Patients were categorized according to whether they developed FU or not. The FU group (17%) was older and had significantly higher incidence of nephropathy, retinopathy, peripheral (PAD), coronary artery disease (CAD), and diabetes mellitus (DM) as compared to no-FU group. FU group had higher frequency of major amputation (P = 0.001) and HD vascular access (P = 0.01). Patients with combined DM and PAD had a 10-fold increased risk of FU in comparison to those who had DM alone. Presence of PAD was the main independent predictor for development of FU in HD with an adjusted odd ratio (aOR) of 16.0 (95% CI: 4.41–62.18; P = 0.001). After adjusting for age, sex, and CAD, predictors for mortality were PAD (aOR 4.3), FU (aOR 3.6), and DM (aOR 2.6). FU is common in HD patients regardless of DM. However, the presence of PAD is significantly associated with more FU and mortality in HD. HD patients need intensive foot care and warrant progressive modification of vascular risk factors.
The Effect of Physical and Chemical Cues on Hepatocellular Function and Morphology

Physical topographical features and/or chemical stimuli to the extracellular matrix (ECM) provide essential cues that manipulate cell functions. From the physical point of view, contoured nanostructures are very important for cell behavior in general, and for cellular functions. From the chemical point of view, ECM proteins containing an RGD sequence are known to alter cell functions. In this study, the influence of integrated physical and chemical cues on a liver cell line (HepG2) was investigated. To mimic the physical cues provided by the ECM, amorphous TiO2 nanogratings with specific dimensional and geometrical characteristics (nanogratings 90 nm wide and 150 nm apart) were fabricated. To mimic the chemical cues provided by the ECM, the TiO2 inorganic film was modified by immobilization of the RGD motif. The hepatic cell line morphological and functional changes induced by simultaneously combining these diversified cues were investigated, including cellular alignment and the expression of different functional proteins. The combination of nanopatterns and surface modification with RGD induced cellular alignment and expression of functional proteins, indicating that physical and chemical cues are important factors for optimizing hepatocyte function.
Assessment of the value of group-based counselling for career construction

Abstract This article reports on the change in the career adaptability of participants exposed to an intervention programme characterized by career and self-construction principles compared to the change in participants who participated in standard, traditional career counselling lessons. Convenience and purposive sampling were used to select two groups (experimental and comparison of Grade 11 learners). Intervention occurred in both experimental groups. A mixed methods, quasi-experimental, pre-test/post-test comparison group design was used to gather data. Pre- and post-test scores obtained on the Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS) were analysed. The quantitative results suggested that the intervention programme did not improve participants’ career adaptability compared to standard, traditional career counselling lessons as measured by the CAAS. Future research should include the use of measures of self-reflection and meaning-making to test the direct effects of experimental interventions.
Commonsense reasoning, commonsense knowledge, and the SP theory of intelligence

Commonsense reasoning (CSR) and commonsense knowledge (CSK) (together abbreviated as CSRK) are areas of study concerned with problems which are trivially easy for adults but which are challenging for artificial systems. This paper describes how the SP System -- meaning the "SP Theory of Intelligence" and its realisation in the "SP Computer Model" -- has strengths and potential in several aspects of CSRK. Some shortcomings of the system in that area may be overcome with planned future developments. A particular strength of the SP System is that it shows promise as an overarching theory for four areas of relative success with CSRK problems -- described by other authors -- which have been developed without any integrative theory. How the SP System may help to solve four other kinds of CSRK problem is described: 1) how the strength of evidence for a murder may be influenced by the level of lighting of the murder as it was witnessed; 2) how people may arrive at the commonly-accepted interpretation of phrases like "water bird"; 3) the interpretation of the horse's head scene in "The Godfather" film; and how the SP System may help to resolve the reference of an ambiguous pronoun in sentences in the format of a 'Winograd schema'. Also described is why a fifth CSRK problem -- modelling how a chef may crack an egg into a bowl -- is beyond the capabilities of the SP System as it is now and how those deficiencies may be overcome via planned developments of the system.
Recombinant gp 120 Subunit Vaccines Virus Type 1 while Participating in Trials of Persons Infected by Human Immunodeficiency Immunological and Virological Analyses of

1998, 72(2):1552. J. Virol. and S. M. Wolinsky Kunstman, D. McDonald, N. McWilliams, A. Trkola, J. P. Moore Jackson, E. Fenamore, Y. Cao, F. Gao, S. Kalams, K. J. B. D. Walker, A. U. Neumann, S. H. Vermund, J. Mestecky, S. R. I. Connor, B. T. M. Korber, B. S. Graham, B. H. Hahn, D. D. Ho, Recombinant gp120 Subunit Vaccines Virus Type 1 while Participating in Trials of Persons Infected by Human Immunodeficiency Immunological and Virological Analyses of
Induction of vascular smooth muscle cell expression of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 by thrombin.

Local accumulation of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) in response to thrombosis has been implicated not only in inhibition of fibrinolysis but also in the pathogenesis of vascular disease. To determine whether thrombin, known to be released from thrombi, can induce expression of PAI-1 in vascular smooth muscle, bovine aortic smooth muscle cells were exposed to highly purified bovine thrombin. Thrombin, in the absence of serum, induced production of PAI-1 by bovine aortic smooth muscle cells in a dose-dependent manner. PAI-1 activity in the conditioned media reached a maximum with 12 nM thrombin. Metabolic labeling with [35S]methionine demonstrated that the elaborated PAI-1 was newly synthesized and that it comprised both a cleaved inactive 42-kd form and an uncleaved active 46-kd form. The increase of PAI-1 activity in the media paralleled the thrombin-induced increase in the concentration of the 46-kd form. Preincubation of thrombin with hirudin, a specific inhibitor of thrombin, or with D-phenylalanyl-L-prolyl-L-arginine chloromethyl ketone, an inhibitor of the active site of thrombin, prevented the induction of PAI-1 synthesis. The stimulatory effect of thrombin on PAI-1 synthesis was also evident at the level of expression of mRNA, with steady-state PAI-1 mRNA levels increasing by 100% in 4-8 hours. When the bovine aortic smooth muscle cells were exposed to transforming growth factor-beta 1, an agonist shown previously to increase PAI-1 synthesis in diverse cell types, synergy with thrombin was evident. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Evaluating the dynamics of fiscal policy in Spain: patterns of interdependence and consistency of public expenditure and revenues

Two issues are addressed in this paper. First, we attempt to ascertain whether the current fiscal policy in Spain satisfies the intertemporal borrowing constraint. For this purpose, we apply the traditional empirical tests of sustainability proposed in the literature, that pay special attention to integration orders of deficit and debt processes and the existence of cointegration relationships between revenues and expenditures. Under this approach, a sustainable fiscal policy would indicate that if fiscal variables follow the pattern of the past in the future, no problems in marketing public debt are expected to arise.
Class-based N-gram language difference models for data selection

We present a simple method for representing text that explicitly encodes differences between two corpora in a domain adaptation or data selection scenario. We do this by replacing every word in the corpora with its part-of-speech tag plus a suffix that indicates the relative bias of the word, or how much likelier it is to be in the task corpus versus the pool. By changing the representation of the text, we can use basic n-gram models to create language difference models that characterize the difference between the corpora. This process enables us to use common models with robust statistics that are tailored to computing the similarity score via cross-entropy difference. These improvements come despite using zero of the original words in the texts during our selection process. We replace the entire vocabulary during the selection process from 3.6M to under 200 automatically-derived tags, greatly reducing the model size for selection. When used to select data for machine translation systems, our language difference models lead to MT system improvements of up to +1.8 BLEU when used in isolation, and up to +1.3 BLEU when used in a multimodel translation system. Language models trained on data selected with our method have 35% fewer OOV’s on the task data than the most common approach. These LMs also have a lower perplexity on in-domain data than the baselines.
Safety and ef fi cacy outcomes with erythropoiesis-stimulating agents in patients with breast cancer : a meta-analysis

M. Aapro1*, V. Moebus2, U. Nitz3, J. O’Shaughnessy4, P. Pronzato5, M. Untch6, D. Tomita7, C. Bohac7 & B. Leyland-Jones8 Clinique de Genolier, Multidisciplinary Oncology Institute, Genolier, Switzerland; Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, Höchst Frankfurt Clinic, Academic Hospital of the Goethe University, Frankfurt; Geriatric Breast Center, Evangelina Bethesda Hospital for Breast Diseases, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany; Texas Oncology Baylor Sammons Cancer Center, US Oncology, Dallas, USA; Department of Medical Oncology, National Institute for Cancer Research, IRCCS University Hospital San Martino – IST, Genova, Italy; Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Helios Clinic Berlin-Buch, Berlin, Germany; Global Biostatistical Sciences, Amgen Inc., Thousand Oaks; Edith Sanford Breast Cancer Research, Sioux Falls, USA
Observing coseismic gravity change from the Japan Tohoku‐Oki 2011 earthquake with GOCE gravity gradiometry

The Japan Tohoku‐Oki earthquake (9.0 Mw) of 11 March 2011 has left signatures in the Earth's gravity field that are detectable by data of the Gravity field Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission. Because the European Space Agency's (ESA) satellite gravity mission Gravity field and steady‐state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE)—launched in 2009—aims at high spatial resolution, its measurements could complement the GRACE information on coseismic gravity changes, although time‐variable gravity was not foreseen as goal of the GOCE mission. We modeled the coseismic earthquake geoid signal and converted this signal to vertical gravity gradients at GOCE satellite altitude. We combined the single gradient observations in a novel way reducing the noise level, required to detect the coseismic gravity change, subtracted a global gravity model, and applied tailored outlier detection to the resulting gradient residuals. Furthermore, the measured gradients were along‐track filtered using different gradient bandwidths where in the space domain Gaussian smoothing has been applied. One‐year periods before and after earthquake occurrence have been compared with the modeled gradients. The comparison reveals that the earthquake signal is well above the accuracy of the vertical gravity gradients at orbital height. Moreover, the obtained signal from GOCE shows a 1.3 times higher amplitude compared with the modeled signal. Besides the statistical significance of the obtained signal, it has a high spatial correlation of ~0.7 with the forward modeled signal. We conclude therefore that the coseismic gravity change of the Japan Tohoku‐Oki earthquake left a statistically significant signal in the GOCE measured gravity gradients.
CA153 in Breast Secretions as a Potential Molecular Marker for Diagnosing Breast Cancer: A Meta Analysis

Purpose Many studies have reported that carbohydrate antigen 153 (CA153) in breast secretions (BS) can discriminate breast cancer (BC) patients from healthy individuals, indicating CA153 in BS as a potential index for BC. This meta-analysis aimed to evaluate the actual diagnostic value of CA153 in BS. Methods Related papers were obtained from Pubmed, Embase, Scopus, Ovid, Sciverse, the Cochrane library, Chinese Biomedical literature Database (CBM), Technology of Chongqing (VIP), Wan Fang Data, and Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). Pooled sensitivity, specificity, and diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) of CA153 in BS for BC diagnosis were analyzed with the random effect model. SROC and the area under the curve (AUC) were applied to assess overall diagnostic efficiency. Results This meta-analysis included five studies with a total of 329 BC patients and 381 healthy subjects. For CA153 in BS, the summary sensitivity, specificity, and DOR to diagnose BC were 0.63 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.57∼0.68), 0.82 (95% CI: 0.78∼0.86), and 9.18 (95% CI: 4.22∼19.95), respectively. Furthermore, the AUC of BS CA153 in the diagnosis of BC was 0.8614. Conclusions CA153 in BS is a valuable molecular marker in diagnosing BC and should be applied in standard clinical practices of BC screening upon confirmation of our findings in a larger prospective study.
Missing: A Serious Game for the Mitigation of Cognitive Biases

The current study was designed to address the following research question: Can a computer game provide an effective mechanism for training adults to identify and mitigate their cognitive biases? Human decision making relies on a variety of simple heuristic decision rules that can be quick and effective mental shortcuts when making judgments. However, these heuristics can also lead to irrational thinking and problem-solving in ways that produce errors or illogicality, known as cognitive biases. Though knowledge of cognitive biases and bias mitigation strategies can help to reduce the potential impact of cognitive biases on human reasoning, such deeply ingrained cognitive strategies are difficult to alter. The current study was designed to leverage the virtual learning environment of a serious game to take on this training challenge. To that end, a training game – Missing: The Pursuit of Terry Hughes (Missing) – was developed. Missing was created for an audience of educated adults, and the described instructional design is based on current research on effective andragogical learning theory. The Missing game design immerses the user into bias-invoking situations which provide direct experience with cognitive bias identification and mitigation strategies. In this paper, details of the game instructional design are presented, including a cognitive framework based on dual-process systems of reasoning which relates multiple biases, their causes, and mitigation techniques. An external test campaign was conducted to determine whether the game had a positive transfer of ingame experiential learning about biases to real world skills and behavior change. Results are presented that suggest this novel serious game both engages and trains players, resulting in measurable reductions in cognitive biases.
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Participates in Determination of Neuronal Laminar Fate in the Developing Mouse Cerebral Cortex

Lamina formation in the developing cerebral cortex requires precisely regulated generation and migration of the cortical progenitor cells. To test the possible involvement of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the formation of the cortical lamina, we investigated the effects of BDNF protein and anti-BDNF antibody separately administered into the telencephalic ventricular space of 13.5-d-old mouse embryos. BDNF altered the position, gene-expression properties, and projections of neurons otherwise destined for layer IV to those of neurons for the deeper layers, V and VI, of the cerebral cortex, whereas anti-BDNF antibody changed some of those of neurons of upper layers II/III. Additional analysis revealed that BDNF altered the laminar fate of neurons only if their parent progenitor cells were exposed to it at approximately S-phase and that it hastened the timing of the withdrawal of their daughter neurons from the ventricular proliferating pool by accelerating the completion of S-phase, downregulation of the Pax6 (paired box gene 6) expression, an essential transcription factor for generation of the upper layer neurons, and interkinetic nuclear migration of cortical progenitors in the ventricular zone. These observations suggest that BDNF participates in the processes forming the neuronal laminas in the developing cerebral cortex. BDNF can therefore be counted as one of the key extrinsic factors that regulate the laminar fate of cortical neurons.
It's time to talk about sex and social work : why human sexuality education matters for social work practice

This researched investigated human sexuality training received in social work programs and its impact on clinical practice. Specifically, it examined clinicians’ comfort and competency addressing sex and sexuality related topics with clients. 67 participants were recruited via a nonprobability snowball sampling technique, and data was gathered anonymously through a secure web-based survey instrument. The findings supported the author’s hypothesis that there is a substantial lack of human sexuality training in social work programs despite the finding that sexuality is highly relevant to clinical work. Barriers to social workers effectively addressing these topics with clients were identified as inadequate education and clinician discomfort. By highlighting this gap between training and practice, the study hoped to demonstrate the critical importance of comprehensive human sexuality education in social work programs. IT’S TIME TO TALK ABOUT SEX AND SOCIAL WORK: WHY HUMAN SEXUALITY EDUCATION MATTERS FOR SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE A project based upon an independent investigation, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Social Work.
ONE TIME ENUMERATION OF MAXIMAL BICLIQUE PATTERNS FROM 3 D SYMMETRIC MATRIX

We propose an algorithm Cubeminer-MBC*, to extract maximal biclique patterns from a 3D symmetric adjacency matrix only once. In this paper, we introduce (i) a novel enumeration strategy and (ii) a new pruning strategy, which results 50% reduction in search space and maximal biclique patterns are generated only once, i.e., zero duplicates are generated. On the basis of experiments conducted, we observed Cubeminer-MBC* outperforms Cubeminer in terms of running time. Key-Words: Data Mining – Maximal Bicliques – Algorithms – Symmetric matrix – Duplicate pattern
1 EX / P 5-30 Multi-scale physics during shear flow development in the TJ-II stellarator

The long distance coupling of plasma fluctuations and the non-linear properties of fluctuations have been investigated during transitions to improved confinement regimes in the TJII stellarator. Results show evidence of long distance correlation in plasma potential signals and much weaker in density fluctuations. Cross-correlation of fluctuations shows a maximum value when plasma density is close to the threshold for the development of spontaneous edge sheared flows and increase in plasma regimes with edge biasing induced enhanced confinement. Furthermore, experimental evidence of the dual role of electric fields as a stabilizing mechanism of plasma turbulence and as an agent affecting the momentum balance via turbulence (Reynolds stress) modification has been observed. These findings show the importance of multi-scale mechanisms in the transition to improved confinement regimes and the key role of electric fields to amplify them.
General discussion : Openings for humanization

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STUDENTS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS ACHIEVEMENT IN MATHEMATICS: A CROSS SECTIONAL STUDY OF YEAR SIX STUDENTS IN SONGKLHA PROVINCE, THAILAND

Thailand government noted that mathematics is one of the basic subjects needed in all sphere of endeavor. With this, it is necessary to investigate the relationship between students’ attitude towards mathematics and their achievements. This study fulfills that by experimenting 100 students from Songkla province in Thailand using correlation analysis. It was found that there is positive relationship between students’ attitude towards learning mathematics and their achievement. In addition to this, further analysis using t-test presents that there is no difference between gender attitude and their achievement in mathematics. The result of this study implies that both male and female students has almost the same achievement in statistics because there is no significant difference in their achievement grade. Article visualizations: