Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Orbital Solutions to the HD 160691 (μ Arae) Doppler Signal

We perform a dynamical analysis of the recently updated set of the radial velocity (RV) measurements of HD 160691 (μ Arae). The kinematic, double-Keplerian model of the measurements leads to a best-fit solution that is unstable and self-disrupting in less than 20,000 yr. In order to derive dynamically stable configurations that are simultaneously consistent with the RV data, we use the so-called GAMP (genetic algorithm with MEGNO penalty). Using this method, we derive meaningful limits on the parameters of the outer planet that also provide a stable behavior of the system. The best-fit solutions are located in a shallow valley of (χ)1/2 in the (ac, ec)-plane, extending over 2 AU (for the formal 1 σ confidence interval of the best fit). We find two equally good best-fit solutions leading to qualitatively different orbital configurations. One of them corresponds to the center of the 5 : 1 mean motion resonance (MMR), and the second one describes a configuration between the 11 : 2 and 17 : 3 MMRs. If the formal best-fit errors of the orbital parameters are taken into account, the HD 160691 system can likely be found in the zone of the phase space filled with low-order MMRs of the type p : 1, with 5 < p < 15. Our results support the classification of μ Ara as a hierarchical planetary system, dynamically similar to other known multiplanet systems around HD 12661 and HD 169830. The results of the GAMP analysis on the extended data set are fully consistent with our previous conclusions concerning a much shorter observational window. This constitutes a valuable confirmation that the applied method is well suited for the analysis of RV data series that only partially cover the longest orbital period.
Epidural anesthesia with bupivacaine , bupivacaine and fentanyl , or bupivacaine and sufentanil during intravenous administration of propofol for ovariohysterectomy in dogs

JAVMA, Vol 230, No. 1, January 1, 2007 Scientific Reports: Original Study 45 E anesthesia is considered an extremely safe procedure. When it is adequately performed, it can be used efficiently for a wide variety of surgical procedures. Although epidural anesthesia is widely used in veterinary medicine, it is usually performed with local anesthetics and a vasoconstrictor, and when additional analgesia is required, morphine is the agent of choice. The use of opioids in the epidural space in humans can be associated with many adverse effects such as respiratory depression, excessive sedation, vomiting, urinary retention, and pruritis. Nevertheless, because the combination of local anesthetics and opioids results in a synergistic effect, the dose and the dose-dependent effects of the agents can be reduced. Advantages of regional anesthetic techniques, compared with general anesthesia, include lower mortality and morbidity rates, no need for orotracheal intubation, better postoperative analgesia, and a decrease in surgical stress through the blockade of afferent nociceptive pathways and efferent sympathetic impulses to the pancreas and adrenal medulla. Epidural anesthesia with bupivacaine, bupivacaine and fentanyl, or bupivacaine and sufentanil during intravenous administration of propofol for ovariohysterectomy in dogs
Accounting for responsive movement in line transect estimates of abundance

A method is developed to account for effects of animal movement in response to sighting platforms in line transect density estimates using data on animal orientation. Models of expected distributions of animal orientation show that presence of responsive movement is determined by the ratio of animal sightings with angles of orientation in the third quadrant relative to the first quadrant. The distance at which response began is estimated using logistic generalized additive models of the relationship between radial distance and orientation. Density corrected for responsive movement is estimated by applying the Buckland and Turnock two-team analysis method to data poststratified into regions "close" to and "far" from (beyond the distance that responsive movement began) the observation platform instead of the original stratification by observation team. For data collected in the North Atlantic, white-sided dolphins, harbor porpoises, and minke whales responded by avoiding the survey ship, and white-beaked do.
The Effects of the Taxation of Dividends on the Allocation of Foreign Portfolio Investment around the World

This paper investigates the association between for eign equity portfolio investments and dividend tax policies around the world. We hypothesize that investors will allocate more of their foreign equit y portfolios to countries that have favorable policie s governing the taxation of dividend income. Consi stent with our hypothesis, we find evidence that favorabl e tax policies on dividend income increase a countr y’s foreign portfolio investments. We also find that t he effect of dividend taxation on foreign portfolio investments is stronger for countries that have hig her dividend payouts. To examine our hypothesis, we utilize a new comprehensive database of worldwide t ax information that allows us to estimate the tax burden on foreign dividend income, which can vary f or each home-foreign country pairing. In additiona l analyses, we find evidence that investors allocate less of their foreign equity portfolios to countrie s with imputation systems that do not extend the benefits of imputation to foreign investors. This result is consistent with the European Court of Justice’s (EC J) recent rulings that the imputation systems employed by many countries discriminate against for eign investors. Overall, we interpret our results a s evidence that investors take into account dividend taxation when constructing their foreign equity portfolios.
A null mutation of the neuronal sodium channel NaV1.6 disrupts action potential propagation and excitation‐contraction coupling in the mouse heart

Evidence supports the expression of brain‐type sodium channels in the heart. Their functional role, however, remains controversial. We used global NaV1.6‐null mice to test the hypothesis that NaV1.6 contributes to the maintenance of propagation in the myocardium and to excitation‐contraction (EC) coupling. We demonstrated expression of transcripts encoding full‐length NaV1.6 in isolated ventricular myocytes and confirmed the striated pattern of NaV1.6 fluorescence in myocytes. On the ECG, the PR and QRS intervals were prolonged in the null mice, and the Ca2+ transients were longer in the null cells. Under patch clamping, at holding potential (HP) = –120 mV, the peak INa was similar in both phenotypes. However, at HP = –70 mV, the peak INa was smaller in the nulls. In optical mapping, at 4 mM [K+]o, 17 null hearts showed slight (7%) reduction of ventricular conduction velocity (CV) compared to 16 wild‐type hearts. At 12 mM [K+]o, CV was 25% slower in a subset of 9 null vs. 9 wild‐type hearts. These results highlight the importance of neuronal sodium channels in the heart, whereby NaV1.6 participates in EC coupling, and represents an intrinsic depolarizing reserve that contributes to excitation. —Noujaim, S. F. , Kaur, K. , Milstein, M. , Jones, J. M. , Furspan, P., Jiang, D. , Auerbach, D. S. , Herron, T. , Meisler, M. H. , Jalife, J. A null mutation of the neuronal sodium channel NaV1.6 disrupts action potential propagation and excitation‐contraction coupling in the mouse heart. FASEB J. 26, 63–72 (2012). www.fasebj. org
Subtleties concerning conformal tractor bundles

The realization of tractor bundles as associated bundles in conformal geometry is studied. It is shown that different natural choices of principal bundle with normal Cartan connection corresponding to a given conformal manifold can give rise to topologically distinct associated tractor bundles for the same inducing representation. Consequences for homogeneous models and conformal holonomy are described. A careful presentation is made of background material concerning standard tractor bundles and equivalence between parabolic geometries and underlying structures.
Data-Driven Morphological Analysis and Disambiguation for Morphologically Rich Languages and Universal Dependencies

Parsing texts into universal dependencies (UD) in realistic scenarios requires infrastructure for the morphological analysis and disambiguation (MA&D) of typologically different languages as a first tier. MA&D is particularly challenging in morphologically rich languages (MRLs), where the ambiguous space-delimited tokens ought to be disambiguated with respect to their constituent morphemes, each morpheme carrying its own tag and a rich set features. Here we present a novel, language-agnostic, framework for MA&D, based on a transition system with two variants — word-based and morpheme-based — and a dedicated transition to mitigate the biases of variable-length morpheme sequences. Our experiments on a Modern Hebrew case study show state of the art results, and we show that the morpheme-based MD consistently outperforms our word-based variant. We further illustrate the utility and multilingual coverage of our framework by morphologically analyzing and disambiguating the large set of languages in the UD treebanks.
Revenue Maximizing Head Starts in Contests

We characterize revenue maximizing head starts for all-pay auctions and lottery contests with many heterogeneous players. We show that under optimal head starts all-pay auctions revenue-dominate lottery contests for any degree of heterogeneity among players. Moreover, all-pay auctions with optimal head starts induce higher revenue than any multiplicatively biased all-pay auction or lottery contest. While head starts are more effective than multiplicative biases in all-pay auctions, they are less effective than multiplicative biases in lottery contests.
Improving Suicide Prevention in Dutch Regions by Creating Local Suicide Prevention Action Networks (SUPRANET): A Study Protocol

The European Alliance against Depression (EAAD) program is to be introduced in The Netherlands from 2017 onwards. This program to combat suicide consists of interventions on four levels: (1) increasing the awareness of suicide by local media campaigns; (2) training local gatekeepers, such as teachers or police officers; (3) targeting high-risk persons in the community; and (4) training and support of professionals in primary care settings. The implementation starts in seven Dutch pilot regions. Each region is designated as a Suicide Prevention Action NETwork (SUPRANET). This paper describes the SUPRANET program components and the evaluation of its feasibility and impact. The findings will be used to facilitate the national implementation of EAAD in The Netherlands and to add new findings to the existing literature on EAAD.
Utilizing Recursive Storage in Sparse Matrix-Vector Multiplication - Preliminary Considerations

Computations with sparse matrices on “multicore cache-based” computers are affected by the irregularity of the problem at hand, and performance degrades easily. In this note we propose a recursive storage format for sparse matrices, and evaluate its usage for the Sparse Matrix-Vector (SpMV) operation on two multicore and one multiprocessor machines. We report benchmark results showing high performance and scalability comparable to current state of the art implementations.
A Robust Kalman Algorithm to Facilitate Human-Computer Interaction for People with Cerebral Palsy, Using a New Interface Based on Inertial Sensors

This work aims to create an advanced human-computer interface called ENLAZA for people with cerebral palsy (CP). Although there are computer-access solutions for disabled people in general, there are few evidences from motor disabled community (e.g., CP) using these alternative interfaces. The proposed interface is based on inertial sensors in order to characterize involuntary motion in terms of time, frequency and range of motion. This characterization is used to design a filtering technique that reduces the effect of involuntary motion on person-computer interaction. This paper presents a robust Kalman filter (RKF) design to facilitate fine motor control based on the previous characterization. The filter increases mouse pointer directivity and the target acquisition time is reduced by a factor of ten. The interface is validated with CP users who were unable to control the computer using other interfaces. The interface ENLAZA and the RKF enabled them to use the computer.
Elucidating Pharmacological Mechanisms of Natural Medicines by Biclustering Analysis of the Gene Expression Profile: A Case Study on Curcumin and Si-Wu-Tang

Natural medicines have attracted wide attention in recent years. It is of great significance to clarify the pharmacological mechanisms of natural medicines. In prior studies, we established a method for elucidating pharmacological mechanisms of natural products contained in connectivity map (cMap), in terms of module profiles of gene expression in chemical treatments. In this study, we explore whether this methodology is applicable to dissecting the pharmacological mechanisms of natural medicines beyond the agents contained in cMap. First, the gene expression profiles of curcumin (a typical isolated natural medicine) and Si-Wu-Tang (a classic traditional Chinese medicine formula) treatments were merged with those of cMap-derived 1309 agents, respectively. Then, a biclustering analysis was performed using FABIA method to identify gene modules. The biological functions of gene modules provide preliminary insights into pharmacological mechanisms of both natural medicines. The module profile can be characterized by a binary vector, which allowed us to compare the expression profiles of natural medicines with those of cMap-derived agents. Accordingly, we predicted a series of pharmacological effects for curcumin and Si-Wu-Tang by the indications of cMap-covered drugs. Most predictions were supported by experimental observations, suggesting the potential use of this method in natural medicine dissection.
In vivo mapping of corticospinal somatotopy 1 In vivo mapping of microstructural somatotopies 1 in the human corticospinal pathways 2 3

1 In vivo mapping of microstructural somatotopies 1 in the human corticospinal pathways 2 3 Timothy Verstynen, Kevin Jarbo, Sudhir Pathak, and Walter Schneider 4 5 1. Learning Research and Development Center 6 2. Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition 7 3. Department of Psychology 8 University of Pittsburgh, 9 Pittsburgh, PA 10 11 12 Running Title: In vivo mapping of corticospinal somatotopy 13 14 Contact Information: 15 Timothy Verstynen, Ph.D. 16 Learning Research and Development Center 17 University of Pittsburgh 18 3939 O'Hara St., Room 631 19 Pittsburgh, PA 15260 20 21 22
Serological based monitoring of a cohort of patients with chronic Chagas disease treated with benznidazole in a highly endemic area of northern Argentina

This study aimed to evaluate well-documented diagnostic antigens, named B13, 1F8 and JL7 recombinant proteins, as potential markers of seroconversion in treated chagasic patients. Prospective study, involving 203 patients treated with benznidazole, was conducted from endemic areas of northern Argentina. Follow-up was possible in 107 out of them and blood samples were taken for serology and PCR assays before and 2, 3, 6, 12, 24 and 36 months after treatment initiation. Reactivity against Trypanosoma cruzi lysate and recombinant antigens was measured by ELISA. The rate of decrease of antibody titers showed nonlinear kinetics with an abrupt drop within the first three months after initiation of treatment for all studied antigens, followed by a plateau displaying a low decay until the end of follow-up. At this point, anti-B13, anti-1F8 and anti-JL7 titers were relatively close to the cut-off line, while anti-T. cruzi antibodies still remained positive. At baseline, 60.8% (45/74) of analysed patients tested positive for parasite DNA by PCR and during the follow-up period in 34 out of 45 positive samples (75.5%) could not be detected T. cruzi DNA. Our results suggest that these antigens might be useful as early markers for monitoring antiparasitic treatment in chronic Chagas disease.
Application of DEA method in efficiency evaluation of public higher education institutions

AbstractPublic higher education sector is under a growing pressure worldwide to increase efficiency and improve the quality of its activities. Limited financial resources as well as detailed regulations and supervision of their spending are the important features of the public higher education sector. Another important and debated issue is the division of public money among higher education institutions (HEI). It is therefore crucial to create stimuli for the rational management of public funds by HEI and for the quality improvement of HEI services. One of the proposed ways to achieve the desired result is the comparative efficiency assessment of HEI activities. Setting clear reference points for HEI, such assessment may be treated as a substitute for market competition.This paper describes a comparative efficiency study of 19 Polish universities of technology. Detailed analysis of potential input, output and environmental variables describing the HEI efficiency model was carried out. The study used the C.
The Evolution of Network Structure : Where Do Structural Holes Come From ?

We develop and test a theory of the origins and consequences of structural holes, using a theoretical framework that argues that network structures emerge from the interplay of two complementary forces: structural constraints and network opportunities. Our data comprises a co-membership network among 501 production teams in the Italian TV industry tracked over a period of 12 years. Using analysis that explicitly accounts for endogeneity, we find that structural holes spanned by teams originate from the past status and past centrality, in addition to past structural holes, but are reduced by past team cohesion and past alter content homogeneity, supporting both opportunity exploitation and structural constraint explanations. We also find independent and positive effects of both structural holes and alter content homogeneity on performance.
Neural Representations of the Self and the Mother for Chinese Individuals

An important question in social neuroscience is the similarities and differences in the neural representations between the self and close others. Most studies examining this topic have identified the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) region as the primary area involved in this process. However, several studies have reported conflicting data, making further investigation of this topic very important. In this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated the brain activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) when Chinese participants passively listened to their self-name (SN), their mother’s name (MN), and unknown names (UN). The results showed that compared with UN recognition, SN perception was associated with a robust activation in a widely distributed bilateral network, including the cortical midline structure (the MPFC and ACC), the inferior frontal gyrus, and the middle temporal gyrus. The SN invoked the bilateral superior temporal gyrus in contrast to the MN; the MN recognition provoked a stronger activation in the central and posterior brain regions in contrast to the SN recognition. The SN and MN caused an activation of overlapping areas, namely, the ACC, MPFC, and superior frontal gyrus. These results suggest that Chinese individuals utilize certain common brain region in processing both the SN and the MN. The present findings provide evidence for the neural basis of the self and close others for Chinese individuals.
Outcomes after implantation of 139 full-support continuous-flow left ventricular assist devices as a bridge to transplantation.

OBJECTIVES Left ventricular assist devices (LVADs) are a routine treatment for patients with advanced heart failure as a bridge to transplantation. The aim of this study was to present our institutional experience and mid-term outcomes after implantation of 139 continuous-flow (cf) LVADs as a bridge to transplantation. METHODS One hundred and thirty-nine consecutive LVAD implantations were performed in our institution between July 2007 and August 2013. The mean age of the population was 44.0 ± 13.7 years and 24 (17%) of the patients were female. A substantial number of the patients were on preoperative mechanical support: 35 (25%) with an intra-aortic balloon pump, 9 (6.5%) with an extracorporeal membrane oxygenator and 25 (18%) with previous LVAD, for LVAD exchange. RESULTS The mean support duration was 514 ± 481 days, whereas the longest support duration was 2493 days (>6 years). The overall cumulative survival rate following cfLVAD implantation was 89% at 30 days, 76% at 1 year and 66% at 2 years (Fig. 1). There was a statistically significant difference in survival in favour of first LVAD implantation compared with VAD exchange: 91 vs 80% at 30 days, 79 vs 57% at 1 year and 70 vs 43% at 2 years (log-rank P = 0.010). Postoperatively, patients had a significant improvement in end-organ function 1 month after LVAD implantation. In addition, comparison of two different devices [HeartMate II (HM II) and HeartWare] using propensity score matching showed no significant differences in survival and most postoperative adverse events. However, patients supported with HM II required significantly more units of fresh frozen plasma (P = 0.020) with a trend towards a higher use of red blood cells (P = 0.094), and were also more likely to develop percutaneous site infections (P = 0.022). CONCLUSIONS HM II and HeartWare cfLVADs have excellent early postoperative outcomes and good mid-term survival, despite a considerable number of patients needing VAD exchange.
Geographic Differentials in Mortality of Children in Mozambique: Their Implications for Achievement of Millennium Development Goal 4

In the light of Mozambique's progress towards the achievement of Millennium Development Goal 4 of reducing mortality of children aged less than five years (under-five mortality) by two-thirds within 2015, this study investigated the relationship between the province of mother's residence and under-five mortality in Mozambique, using data from the 2003 Mozambican Demographic and Health Survey. The analyses included 10,326 children born within 10 years before the survey. Results of univariate and multivariate analyses showed a significant association between under-five mortality and province (region) of mother's residence. Children of mothers living in the North provinces (Niassa, Cabo Delgado, and Nampula) and the Central provinces (Zambezia, Sofala, Manica, and Tete) had higher risks of mortality than children whose mothers lived in the South provinces, especially Maputo province and Maputo city. However, controlling for the demographic, socioeconomic and environmental variables, the significance found between the place of mother's residence and under-five mortality reduced slightly. This suggests that other variables (income distribution and trade, density of population, distribution of the basic infrastructure, including healthcare services, climatic and ecologic factors), which were not included in the study, may have confounding effects. This study supports the thought that interventions aimed at reducing under-five mortality should be tailored to take into account the subnational/regional variation in economic development. However, research is warranted to further investigate the potential determinants behind the observed differences in under-five mortality.