Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predicting 12-month mortality for persons with dementia.

OBJECTIVES We develop and test a model of 12-month mortality among persons (N=3858) with organic dementia. METHODS Data are from caregiver interviews and claims records for persons enrolled in the Medicare Alzheimer's Disease Demonstration Evaluation. Information covers the year prior to enrollment through 36 months. We used Proportional hazards models to predict time to death. We estimated two starting points: first, the date of randomization, and second, the date of maximum difficulty in performing two or more activities of daily living (ADLs). RESULTS The final model includes age, gender, ADL difficulty, medical conditions, prior year hospitalizations, and whether a daughter was the primary caregiver. We combined hazard ratios to produce a cumulative mortality risk score. Model discrimination is reasonable for both models (c statistics of.72 and.69, respectively), and calibration tests were nonsignificant. DISCUSSION The model's efficiency, as measured by the ratio of false positives (those predicted to die, but who lived) to true positives (those predicted to die and who did die) ranged from fewer than 1:1 to more than 4:1 as the model's sensitivity increased. This ratio was lower in the two or more ADL difficulty model. A validation test of the prediction model found comparable sensitivity and specificity (c statistic of.69) to the reference model.
Comparative study of GRNS inference methods based on feature selection by mutual information

Feature selection is a crucial topic in pattern recognition applications, especially in the genetic regulatory networks (GRNs) inference problem which usually involves data with a large number of variables and small number of observations. In this context, the application of dimensionality reduction approaches such as those based on feature selection becomes a mandatory step in order to select the most important predictor genes that can explain some phenomena associated with the target genes. Given its importance in GRN inference, many feature selection methods (algorithms and criterion functions) have been proposed. However, it is decisive to validate such results in order to better understand its significance. The present work proposes a comparative study of feature selection techniques involving information theory concepts, applied to the estimation of GRNs from simulated temporal expression data generated by an artificial gene network (AGN) model. Four GRN inference methods are compared in terms of global network measures. Some interesting conclusions can be drawn from the experimental results.
levels: a cross-sectional study.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and inhaled steroids alter surfactant protein D (SP-D) Abstract Background: Surfactant protein D (SP-D), an innate immune molecule, plays an important protective role during airway inflammation. Deficiency of this molecule induces emphysematous changes in murine lungs, but its significance in human COPD remains unclear. Methods: We collected bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from 20 subjects with varying degrees of COPD (8 former smokers and 12 current smokers) and 15 asymptomatic healthy control subjects (5 never smokers, 3 remote former smokers, and 7 current smokers). All subjects underwent a complete medical history and pulmonary function testing. SP-D was measured by Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay. Statistical analysis was performed using nonparametric methods and multivariable linear regression for control of confounding. The effect of corticosteroid treatment on SP-D synthesis was studied in vitro using an established model of isolated type II alveolar epithelial cell culture. Results: Among former smokers, those with COPD
Equity Market Linkage and Multinational Trade Accords: The Case of NAFTA

This paper examines the impact of multinational trade accords on the degree of stock market linkage using NAFTA as a case study. Besides liberalizing trade among the U.S., Canada and Mexico, NAFTA has also sought to strengthen linkage among stock markets of these countries. If successful, this could lessen the appeal of asset diversification across the North American region and promote a higher degree of market efficiency. We assess the possible impact of NAFTA on market linkage using cross correlations, multivariate price cointegrating systems, speed of convergence, and generalized variance decompositions of unexpected stock returns. The evidence proves robust and consistently indicates intensified equity market linkage since the NAFTA accord. The results also suggest that interdependent goods markets in the region are a primary reason behind the stronger equity market linkage observed in the post-NAFTA period.
BoHV-4-Based Vector Single Heterologous Antigen Delivery Protects STAT1(-/-) Mice from Monkeypoxvirus Lethal Challenge

Monkeypox virus (MPXV) is the etiological agent of human (MPX). It is an emerging orthopoxvirus zoonosis in the tropical rain forest of Africa and is endemic in the Congo-basin and sporadic in West Africa; it remains a tropical neglected disease of persons in impoverished rural areas. Interaction of the human population with wildlife increases human infection with MPX virus (MPXV), and infection from human to human is possible. Smallpox vaccination provides good cross-protection against MPX; however, the vaccination campaign ended in Africa in 1980, meaning that a large proportion of the population is currently unprotected against MPXV infection. Disease control hinges on deterring zoonotic exposure to the virus and, barring that, interrupting person-to-person spread. However, there are no FDA-approved therapies against MPX, and current vaccines are limited due to safety concerns. For this reason, new studies on pathogenesis, prophylaxis and therapeutics are still of great interest, not only for the scientific community but also for the governments concerned that MPXV could be used as a bioterror agent. In the present study, a new vaccination strategy approach based on three recombinant bovine herpesvirus 4 (BoHV-4) vectors, each expressing different MPXV glycoproteins, A29L, M1R and B6R were investigated in terms of protection from a lethal MPXV challenge in STAT1 knockout mice. BoHV-4-A-CMV-A29LgD106ΔTK, BoHV-4-A-EF1α-M1RgD106ΔTK and BoHV-4-A-EF1α-B6RgD106ΔTK were successfully constructed by recombineering, and their capacity to express their transgene was demonstrated. A small challenge study was performed, and all three recombinant BoHV-4 appeared safe (no weight-loss or obvious adverse events) following intraperitoneal administration. Further, BoHV-4-A-EF1α-M1RgD106ΔTK alone or in combination with BoHV-4-A-CMV-A29LgD106ΔTK and BoHV-4-A-EF1α-B6RgD106ΔTK, was shown to be able to protect, 100% alone and 80% in combination, STAT1(-/-) mice against mortality and morbidity. This work demonstrated the efficacy of BoHV-4 based vectors and the use of BoHV-4 as a vaccine-vector platform.
Levels of selection in positive‐strand virus dynamics

Conflicting selection pressures occurring over the life cycle of an organism constitute serious challenges to the robustness of replication. Viruses present a credible model system for analysing problems that arise through evolutionary conflicts of interest. We present a multi‐level selection model for the life cycle of positive‐strand RNA viruses. The model combines within‐cell replication kinetics and protein synthesis, and between‐cell population dynamics of virion production and transmission. We show how these two levels of within‐host selection interact to produce tradeoffs in the life history strategy of a virus without consideration of host mortality. We find that viruses evolve towards intermediate rather than maximum encapsidation rates. This can be interpreted as selection for intermediate virulence through cellular persistence. We characterize a theoretical persistence threshold arising from the trade‐off between genome replication and genetic translation within the cell. We present counter‐intuitive relationships whereby increasing genome decay rates and rates of encapsidation lead to increases in the abundance of virus‐encoded proteins. Data from poliovirus suggest that viruses might be unable to resolve the vertical conflicts of interests among different levels of selection.
News Coverage of Foreign Sex Workers in Malaysia: A Critical Analysis

The growing concern over the influx of foreign women in Malaysia as sex workers, has continually gained the attention of the local media particularly the mainstream newspapers. The media, despite playing an instrumental role in bringing about social transformation, has the ability to portray the foreign women in a positive way or to discriminate against them. This study, based on qualitative analysis, represents an attempt to study a social problem particularly in the way that foreign women in sex work have been represented in Malaysia by the mainstream English-language newspapers. The analytical tools of the discourse-historical approach (DHA) are employed in the analysis of the news articles. In particular, the argumentation strategy in the DHA demonstrates that a number of topoi (i.e., the topoi of control, number, threat, and victimisation) have been employed to represent foreign sex workers in the media. Investigation of the newspaper extracts from New Straits Times and The Star generally revealed that the media have portrayed foreign women in sex work in the offender orientation frame more so than as victims. Furthermore, foreign sex workers are also positioned negatively because of their illegal migrant status, making them doubly discriminated against. Such representations directly impact the women’s lives, leading to further discrimination on the basis of their trade and illegal migrant status, denying them a voice and depriving them of their legal rights. The paper concludes by discussing the contributions of the research and emphasises the need for social justice for these marginalised women.
Serum Retinol Concentrations in Mothers and Newborns at Delivery in a Public Maternity Hospital in Recife, Northeast Brazil

Serum retinol concentrations were compared in a consecutive series of 65 mother-newborn pairs at delivery in a public maternity hospital in Recife, Brazil, from January to August 2008 and examined their association with biological, socioeconomic, environmental and obstetrical characteristics. Serum retinol concentrations of the newborns (umbilical cord) and mothers (brachial venipuncture) were analyzed by high-performance liquid chromatography. Prevalence of low (<0.70 µmol/L) and inadequate (<1.05 µmol/L) serum retinol concentrations were observed in 23.1% (95% CI 13.9-35.5) and 23.0% (95% CI 13.5-35.8) among newborns and mothers respectively. The serum retinol distribution was lower in male than female infants (-0.4 µmol/L, p=0.01) and, across both sexes, concentrations in paired newborn and mother were correlated (r=0.27, p=0.04). Further, maternal status explains only 7% of the variance in retinol concentrations in newborn's cord plasma. Among mothers delivering in public facilities in Recife, hypovitaminosis may exist.
Indecomposable parabolic bundles and the existence of matrices in prescribed conjugacy class closures with product equal to the identity

We study the possible dimension vectors of indecomposable parabolic bundles on the projective line, and use our answer to solve the problem of characterizing those collections of conjugacy classes of n by n matrices for which one can find matrices in their closures whose product is equal to the identity matrix. Both answers depend on the root system of a Kac-Moody Lie algebra. Our proofs use Ringel's theory of tubular algebras, work of Mihai on the existence of logarithmic connections, the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence and an algebraic version, due to Dettweiler and Reiter, of Katz's middle convolution operation.
Specialization of a polyphenism switch gene following serial duplications in Pristionchus nematodes

Polyphenism is an extreme manifestation of developmental plasticity, requiring distinct developmental programs and the addition of a switch mechanism. Because the genetic basis of polyphenism switches has only begun to be understood, how their mechanisms arise is unclear. In the nematode Pristionchus pacificus, which has a mouthpart polyphenism specialized for alternative diets, a gene (eud-1) executing the polyphenism switch was recently identified as the product of lineage-specific duplications. Here we infer the role of gene duplications in producing a switch gene. Using reverse genetics and population genetic analyses, we examine evidence for competing scenarios of degeneration and complementation, neutral evolution, and functional specialization. Of the daughter genes, eud-1 alone has assumed switch-like regulation of the mouth polyphenism. Measurements of life-history traits in single, double, and triple sulfatase mutants did not, given modest sample sizes and a benign environment, identify alternative or complementary roles for eud-1 paralogs. Although possible roles are still unknown, selection analyses of the sister species and 104 natural isolates of P. pacificus detected purifying selection on the genes, suggesting their functionality by their fixation and evolutionary maintenance. Our approach shows the tractability of reverse genetics in a non-traditional model system to study evolution by gene duplication.
Forecasting SMI Volatility: The Information Content of Daily Returns, High Frequency Returns and Implied Volatilities

Measures of volatility implied in option prices are widely believed to be the best available volatility forecasts. In this paper, we examine the information content and predictive power of implied standard deviations derived from EUREX options on the Swiss market index (SMI). Implied volatilities are computed from the Black and Scholes (1973) model as well as the Duan (1995) GARCH option pricing model, a more flexible method to price options. The statistical analysis shows that a combination of implied volatilities from the GARCH option pricing model and daily returns delivers the best results. We find no incremental information in using the model of Black and Scholes or intraday returns. In the medium term, two to three weeks, the implied volatility according to Duan is the single most informative source.
CAMR at SemEval-2016 Task 8: An Extended Transition-based AMR Parser

This paper describes CAMR, the transition-based parser that we use in the SemEval-2016 Meaning Representation Parsing task. The main contribution of this paper is a description of the additional sources of information that we use as features in the parsing model to further boost its performance. We start with our existing AMR parser and experiment with three sets of new features: 1) rich named entities, 2) a verbalization list, 3) semantic role labels. We also use the RPI Wikiﬁer to wikify the concepts in the AMR graph. Our parser achieves a Smatch F-score of 62% on the ofﬁ-cial blind test set.
Lowering of LDL cholesterol rather than moderate weight loss improves endothelium-dependent vasodilatation in obese women with previous gestational diabetes.

OBJECTIVE Effects of weight loss on vascular function are unknown. We compared, in the face of similar weight loss over 3-6 months, effects of orlistat (120 mg t.i.d., n = 23) and placebo (n = 24) on in vivo endothelial function in a high-risk group of obese (BMI 32.1 +/- 0.4 kg/m(2)) premenopausal nondiabetic women with a history of gestational diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Forearm blood flow responses to intra-arterial infusions of acetylcholine (ACh) and sodium nitroprusside (SNP), body composition, and serum lipids were determined before and after weight loss. RESULTS Weight loss averaged 7.3 +/- 0.2 kg (8.3 +/- 0.1%) and 7.4 +/- 0.2 kg (8.2 +/- 0.1%) of initial body weight in the orlistat and placebo groups, respectively. Forearm and body compositions changed similarly in both groups. Responses to ACh increased by 41% to the low dose (5.9 +/- 0.6 vs. 8.3 +/- 0.3 for flow in the experimental/control arm, P < 0.01) and by 33% to the high dose (7.6 +/- 0.8 vs. 10.1 +/- 0.6, P < 0.001) in the orlistat group, but they remained unchanged in the placebo group. The blood flow responses to SNP did not differ significantly between the groups. LDL cholesterol decreased significantly in the orlistat group from 3.5 +/- 0.2 to 3.0 +/- 0.1 mmol/l (P < 0.01) but remained unchanged in the placebo group. Within the orlistat group, the decrease in LDL cholesterol correlated significantly with the improvement in the blood flow response to ACh (r = -0.44, P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Orlistat but not moderate (8%) weight loss per se improves endothelial function in women with previous gestational diabetes. This improvement is associated with a lowering of LDL cholesterol by orlistat.
Computing multistatic passive radar CFAR thresholds from surveillance-only data

A method inspired by Generalised Canonical Correlation (GCC) has been proposed as a detection statistic for multistatic passive radar when a noise-free reference signal is unavailable [1]. The GCC statistic can be expressed as the largest eigenvalue of the Gram matrix of the received signals. It is derived from a suitably formulated generalised likelihood ratio test (GLRT). The Gram matrix is drawn from a Wishart distribution: a central Wishart distribution in the target-absent case and a non-central Wishart distribution when the target is present. Numerical computation using the eigenvalue distribution is fraught with difficulties [2]. Exact theoretical expressions involve ratios of products of factorials which soon defeat attempts at straightforward implementation in double-precision floating point. On the other hand, standard approximations, such as the Tracy-Widom distribution [3], are inaccurate when a low false-alarm rate is required. In this paper, we present a new method to accurately compute probabilities using standard double-precision floating-point arithmetic. This allows practical application of the GCC statistic to CFAR detection in passive radar scenarios where the number of samples is large (104-107), and the number of receivers is small (2-5).
Constraints on the depth and variability of the lunar regolith

Abstract— Knowledge of regolith depth structure is important for a variety of studies of the Moon and other bodies such as Mercury and asteroids. Lunar regolith depths have been estimated using morphological techniques (i.e., Quaide and Oberbeck 1968; Shoemaker and Morris 1969), crater counting techniques (Shoemaker et al. 1969), and seismic studies (i.e., Watkins and Kovach 1973; Cooper et al. 1974). These diverse methods provide good first order estimates of regolith depths across large distances (tens to hundreds of kilometers), but may not clearly elucidate the variability of regolith depth locally (100 m to km scale). In order to better constrain the regional average depth and local variability of the regolith, we investigate several techniques. First, we find that the apparent equilibrium diameter of a crater population increases with an increasing solar incidence angle, and this affects the inferred regolith depth by increasing the range of predicted depths (from ∼7–15 m depth at 100 m equilibrium diameter to ∼8–40 m at 300 m equilibrium diameter). Second, we examine the frequency and distribution of blocky craters in selected lunar mare areas and find a range of regolith depths (8–31 m) that compares favorably with results from the equilibrium diameter method (8–33 m) for areas of similar age (∼2.5 billion years). Finally, we examine the utility of using Clementine optical maturity parameter images (Lucey et al. 2000) to determine regolith depth. The resolution of Clementine images (100 m/pixel) prohibits determination of absolute depths, but this method has the potential to give relative depths, and if higher resolution spectral data were available could yield absolute depths.
The Culture Of Parenting Indonesian Tribes In The Habituation Of Children's Character

Indonesia is a rich country, both in natural and cultural resources. Indonesia has many ethnic groups. One of the ethnic groups in Indonesia is the Samin society in Bojonegoro. The purpose of this study is to describe the pattern of parenting applied by the Samin society. The second objective of this study is to describe the way Samin society maintains the culture. The third shapes to explain character in children from childhood. This study uses a research approach with qualitative ethnographic methods. The type of data analysis technique used in this study is Spradley. The stages of this study are first descriptive observation, second dynamic analysis, three focused observations, four taxonomic analyzes, the five theme analysis Findings in this study are 1) Samin society has democratic parenting upbringing that upholds local cultural values, 2) Samin society educating children not only with care provided by parents but also the surrounding environment that supports the formation of children's character, 3) prominent character in the Samin society is honest and responsible. Keywords—parenting culture, character.
Geographical Distribution of Pyrethroid Resistance Allele Frequency in Head Lice (Phthiraptera: Pediculidae) from Argentina

ABSTRACT The human head louse, Pediculus humanus capitis De Geer (Phthiraptera: Pediculidae), is an obligate ectoparasite that causes pediculosis capitis and has parasitized humans since the beginning of humankind. Head louse infestations are widespread throughout the world and have been increasing since the early 1990s partially because of ineffective pediculicides. In Argentina, the overuse of products containing pyrethroids has led to the development of resistant louse populations. Pyrethroid insecticides act on the nervous system affecting voltage-sensitive sodium channels. Three point mutations at the corresponding amino acid sequence positions M815I, T917I, and L920F in the voltage-gated sodium channel gene are responsible for contributing to knockdown resistance (kdr). The management of pyrethroid resistance requires either early detection or the characterization of the mechanisms involved in head louse populations. In the current study, we estimated the distribution of kdr alleles in 154 head lice from six geographical regions of Argentina. Pyrethroid resistance kdr alleles were found in high frequencies ranging from 67 to 100%. Of these, 131 (85.1%) were homozygous resistant, 13 (8.4%) were homozygous susceptible, and 10 (6.5%) were heterozygous. Exact tests for the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium for each location showed that genotype frequencies differed significantly from expectation in four of the six sites studied. These results show that pyrethroid resistance is well established reaching an overall frequency of 88%, thus close to fixation. With 30 yr of pyrethroid-based pediculicides use in Argentina, kdr resistance has evolved rapidly among these head louse populations.