Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of laparoscopic surgery on health care utilization and costs in patients who undergo colectomy.

IMPORTANCE Laparoscopic colectomy is safe and effective in the treatment of many colorectal diseases. However, the effect of increasing use of laparoscopy on overall health care utilization and costs, especially in the long term, has not been thoroughly investigated. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of laparoscopic vs open colectomy on short- and long-term health care utilization and costs. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Retrospective multivariate regression analysis of national health insurance claims data was used to evaluate health care utilization and costs up to 1 year following elective colectomy. Data were obtained from the Truven Health Analytics MarketScan Commercial Claims and Encounters database. Patients aged 18 to 64 years who underwent elective laparoscopic or open colectomy from January 1, 2010, through December 31, 2010, were included. Patients with complex diagnoses that require increased non-surgery-related health care utilization, including malignant neoplasm, inflammatory bowel disease, human immunodeficiency virus, transplantation, and pregnancy, were excluded. Of 25 481 patients who underwent colectomy, 4160 were included in the study. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Healthcare utilization, including office, hospital outpatient, and emergency department visits and inpatient services 90 and 365 days after the index procedure; total health care costs; and estimated days off from work owing to health care utilization. RESULTS Of 25 481 patients who underwent colectomy, 4160 were included in the study (laparoscopic, 45.6%; open, 54.4%). The mean (SD) net and total payments were lower for laparoscopy ($23 064 [$14 558] and $24 196 [$14 507] vs $29 753 [$21 421] and $31 606 [$23 586]). In the first 90 days after surgery, an open approach was significantly associated with a 1.26-fold increase in health care costs (estimated, $1715; 95% CI, $338-$2853), increased use of heath care services, and more estimated days off from work (2.78 days; 95% CI, 1.93-3.59). Similar trends were found in the full postoperative year, with an estimated 1.18-fold increase (95% CI, 1.04-1.35) in health care expenditures and an increase of 1.15 times (95% CI, 1.08-1.23) the number of health care utilization days compared with laparoscopy. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Laparoscopic colectomy results in a significant reduction in health care costs and utilization in the short- and long-term postoperative periods.
Transforming Growth Factor β Signaling Overcomes Dasatinib Resistance in Lung Cancer

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths. Despite recent advances in the development of targeted therapies, patients with advanced disease remain incurable, mostly because metastatic non-small cell lung carcinomas (NSCLC) eventually become resistant to tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs). Kinase inhibitors have the potential for target promiscuity because the kinase super family is the largest family of druggable genes that binds to a common substrate (ATP). As a result, TKIs often developed for a specific purpose have been found to act on other targets. Drug affinity chromatography has been used to show that dasatinib interacts with the TGFβ type I receptor (TβR-I), a serine-threonine kinase. To determine the potential biological relevance of this association, we studied the combined effects of dasatinib and TGFβ on lung cancer cell lines. We found that dasatinib treatment alone had very little effect; however, when NSCLC cell lines were treated with a combination of TGFβ and dasatinib, apoptosis was induced. Combined TGFβ-1 + dasatinib treatment had no effect on the activity of Smad2 or other non-canonical TGFβ intracellular mediators. Interestingly, combined TGFβ and dasatinib treatment resulted in a transient increase in p-Smad3 (seen after 3 hours). In addition, when NSCLC cells were treated with this combination, the pro-apoptotic protein BIM was up-regulated. Knockdown of the expression of Smad3 using Smad3 siRNA also resulted in a decrease in BIM protein, suggesting that TGFβ-1 + dasatinib-induced apoptosis is mediated by Smad3 regulation of BIM. Dasatinib is only effective in killing EGFR mutant cells, which is shown in only 10% of NSCLCs. Therefore, the observation that wild-type EGFR lung cancers can be manipulated to render them sensitive to killing by dasatinib could have important implications for devising innovative and potentially more efficacious treatment strategies for this disease.
Evolutionary and Diagnostic Implications of Intragenomic Heterogeneity in the 16S rRNA Gene in Aeromonas Strains

ABSTRACT Sequencing 16S rRNA genes (SSU) cloned from Aeromonas strains revealed that strains contained up to six copies differing by ≤1.5%. The SSU copies from Aeromonas veronii LMG13695 clustered with sequences from four Aeromonas species. These results demonstrate intragenomic heterogeneity of SSU and suggest caution when using SSU to identify aeromonads.
The Growth of Executive Pay

This paper examines both empirically and theoretically the growth of U.S. executive pay during the period 1993-2003. During this period, pay has grown much beyond the increase that could be explained by changes in firm size, performance and industry classification. Had the relationship of compensation to size, performance and industry classification remained the same in 2003 as it was in 1993, mean compensation in 2003 would have been only about half of its actual size. During the 1993-2003 period, equity-based compensation has increased considerably in both new economy and old economy firms, but this growth has not been accompanied by a substitution effect, i.e., a reduction in non-equity compensation. The aggregate compensation paid by public companies to their top-five executives during the considered period added up to about $350 billion, and the ratio of this aggregate top-five compensation to the aggregate earnings of these firms increased from 5% in 1993-1995 to about 10% in 2001-2003. After presenting evidence about the growth of pay, we discuss alternative explanations for it. We examine how this growth could be explained under either the arm's length bargaining model of executive compensation or the managerial power model. Among other things, we discuss the relevance of the parallel rise in market capitalizations and in the use of equity-based compensation.
Induction of Mixed Chimerism With MHC-Mismatched but Not Matched Bone Marrow Transplants Results in Thymic Deletion of Host-Type Autoreactive T-Cells in NOD Mice

OBJECTIVE Induction of mixed or complete chimerism via hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) from nonautoimmune donors could prevent or reverse type 1 diabetes (T1D). In clinical settings, HLA-matched HCT is preferred to facilitate engraftment and reduce the risk for graft versus host disease (GVHD). Yet autoimmune T1D susceptibility is associated with certain HLA types. Therefore, we tested whether induction of mixed chimerism with major histocompatibility complex (MHC)-matched donors could reverse autoimmunity in the NOD mouse model of T1D. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Prediabetic wild-type or transgenic BDC2.5 NOD mice were conditioned with a radiation-free GVHD preventative anti-CD3/CD8 conditioning regimen and transplanted with bone marrow (BM) from MHC-matched or mismatched donors to induce mixed or complete chimerism. T1D development and thymic deletion of host-type autoreactive T-cells in the chimeric recipients were evaluated. RESULTS Induction of mixed chimerism with MHC-matched nonautoimmune donor BM transplants did not prevent T1D in wild-type NOD mice, although induction of complete chimerism did prevent the disease. However, induction of either mixed or complete chimerism with MHC-mismatched BM transplants prevented T1D in such mice. Furthermore, induction of mixed chimerism in transgenic BDC2.5-NOD mice with MHC-matched or -mismatched MHC II−/− BM transplants failed to induce thymic deletion of de novo developed host-type autoreactive T-cells, whereas induction of mixed chimerism with mismatched BM transplants did. CONCLUSIONS Induction of mixed chimerism with MHC-mismatched, but not matched, donor BM transplants re-establishes thymic deletion of host-type autoreactive T-cells and prevents T1D, with donor antigen-presenting cell expression of mismatched MHC II molecules being required.
Regional institutions, ownership transformation, and migration of industrial leadership in China: the case of the Chinese synthetic dye industry, 1978–2008

Scholars have emphasized the gradual ownership transformation of enterprises as a key driver of the Chinese economy's unprecedented growth. However, little work has been done on the issue of whether this transformation process takes place evenly across the various regions in China. This article describes the important role of regional institutions in shaping the ownership-based competitiveness of local enterprises and the migration of industries across regions. In the case of the Chinese synthetic dye industry, the passing of leadership from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to collectively owned enterprises (COEs) and then to private enterprises (PEs) was accompanied by a concurrent leadership migration from one region to another. The article contends that this simultaneous occurrence was not accidental. Four institutional constraints--the degree of central supervision, the local labor arrangements, the local social welfare provision, and the degree of ambiguity in property rights--retarded the rise of new ownership forms in the previously dominant regions. This gave other regions the opening to take over leadership positions by providing a more favorable institutional context for new ownership forms. These findings are likely to apply to all of the Chinese manufacturing industries that existed prior to 1978 and that subsequently did not experience significant technological changes and were not highly protected by the government. Copyright 2012 The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Associazione ICC. All rights reserved. , Oxford University Press.
Europe in modern Greek history

'Europe', 'Europeanness' and 'European' have been important themes in the history of modern Greece, from the establishment of the new state in 1832 to the sovereign debt crisis of 2010. 'Europe' has served as key reference points in questions of identity, progress, capability, legitimation and strategic interest. Indeed, few nations have experienced 'Europe' with such intensity, reacted with so much angst, and witnessed effects of such consequence. Now, in the context of two financial bail- outs and the imposition of tough austerity measures, it is the 'euro-zone' that is shaking the Greek economy, state and society to its roots. This turmoil needs to be understood in the context of a sequence of questions and doubts that encompass arts and politics, social integration and economic development. This volume addresses the complexity of Greece's relationship with 'Europe' - examining its manifestations in culture, politics, society, foreign policy and the economy. It deepens our knowledge not only of how modern Greece has reached this point, but also of what Europe is, what it represents, how it may impact domestically, and why it may be viewed differently.
Changes in concentration and fractions of blood serum proteins of chickens during fattening

This paper describes research into concentration of total proteins and individual protein fractions in the blood serum of Ross broiler chickens during fattening period. Blood for analysis was taken at the 14th, 28th and 42 nd days of age by wing vein puncture. Concentration of total serum proteins was detected by spectrophotometry. Electrophoresis on gelled cellulose-acetate tapes determined the shares of individual fractions: albumins, alpha 1-, alpha 2-, beta 1-, beta 2- and gamma globulins, and their absolute concentrations were calculated from the concentration of total proteins. A statistically significant growth of total proteins concentration was established during the experiment (P<0.0001). Changes of concentration of individual fractions did not always follow the quantity of total proteins in the blood serum. Concentration of albumins in blood did not show oscillations during fattening, unlike alpha 1-globulins, whose concentration showed a statistically significant increase by the 28 th day of fattening (P<0.0001), and which then decreased considerably by the 42 nd day compared to the 28 th day (P<0.05). Concentration of alpha 2-globulins did not show significant growth until the 42 nd day in comparison to the 14th day (P<0.01). Fractions of beta 1-, beta 2- and gamma globulins showed a significant increase during all trial periods (from P<0.05 to P<0.0001). The ratio of albumins to globulins showed a statistically significant decrease on the 28 th and the 42 nd days, compared to the 14 th day of the experiment (P<0.0001). The given results are related to the role of protein metabolism in the rapid growth of chickens during fattening, and may serve as part of metabolic profile in evaluation of production patterns and health condition of chickens during fattening.
SHORT COMMUNICATION STRUCTURAL VARIABILITY OF AN IDENTIFIED INTERNEURONE IN LOCUSTS FROM A WILD POPULATION

One property of invertebrate nervous systems used to great experimental advantage is the 'identifiability' of individual neurones. A principal tenet of the 'identified neurone' concept is that a certain degree of structural regularity can be expected when investigating an identified cell in individual members of a single species. Yet in organisms that reproduce sexually some degree of structural variability should be expected over and above that attributed to developmental noise. Genotypic lineage appears to be a strong determinant of neurone structure. Recent studies using controlled lineages through selective and parthenogenetic breeding have indicated a fairly strong genetic influence on neurone number, structure and interconnections (Macagno, Lopresti & Levinthal, 1973; Goodman, 1977, 1978; Steeves & Pearson, 1983). In wild populations, however, some genetic variability may be selectively eliminated through environmental factors as well as intraand interspecific biological interactions. In the locusts, Schistocerca gregaria and Locusta migratoria, the metathoracic branching pattern of a single visual interneurone, the descending contralateral movement detector (DCMD), has been found to be highly variable (Pearson & Goodman, 1979). The specimens used in this investigation came from a longstanding and presumably highly inbred laboratory colony. Moreover, DCMD structure and synaptic connectivity in individuals of isogenic clones are less variable than in sexually reproduced individuals, and show clone-specific structural differences, but still with significant variability within clones (Steeves & Pearson, 1983). In this paper, the description of DCMD branching structure in individuals of a related species, Schistocerca albolineata, collected from a wild population, indicates that metathoracic branching variability, particularly in contralateral ventral and abdominal branches, is less than in laboratory-reared sexually reproduced Schistocerca and Locusta species (Pearson & Goodman, 1979). Male and female 5. albolineata were collected in Millsite Canyon, Superstition Mountains, just east of Apache Junction, Arizona in August and September. They were maintained in laboratory cages containing fresh water, lettuce and wheat germ. For intracellular recording and dye injection, animals were opened dorsally, and the metathoracic ganglion was prepared according to the methods of Pearson & Goodman (1979). Microelectrodes (10-30 MQ when filled with 3 mol I" KC1) were
Predicting the Category and Attributes of Mental Pictures Using Deep Gaze Pooling

Previous work focused on predicting visual search targets from human fixations but, in the real world, a specific target is often not known, e.g. when searching for a present for a friend. In this work we instead study the problem of predicting the mental picture, i.e. only an abstract idea instead of a specific target. This task is significantly more challenging given that mental pictures of the same target category can vary widely depending on personal biases, and given that characteristic target attributes can often not be verbalised explicitly. We instead propose to use gaze information as implicit information on users' mental picture and present a novel gaze pooling layer to seamlessly integrate semantic and localized fixation information into a deep image representation. We show that we can robustly predict both the mental picture's category as well as attributes on a novel dataset containing fixation data of 14 users searching for targets on a subset of the DeepFahion dataset. Our results have important implications for future search interfaces and suggest deep gaze pooling as a general-purpose approach for gaze-supported computer vision systems.
An Analysis of Higher Order Boundary Conditions for the Wave Equation

Thanks to the use of the Cagniard–De Hoop method, we derive an analytic solution in the time domain for the half-space problem associated with the wave equation with Engquist– Majda higher order boundary conditions. This permits us to derive new convergence results when the order of the boundary condition tends to infinity, as well as error estimates. The theory is illustrated by numerical results.
Short-course raltegravir intensification does not reduce persistent low-level viremia in patients with HIV-1 suppression during receipt of combination antiretroviral therapy.

BACKGROUND Combination antiretroviral therapy suppresses but does not eradicate human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) in infected persons, and low-level viremia can be detected despite years of suppressive antiretroviral therapy. Short-course (28-day) intensification of standard antiretroviral combination therapy is a useful approach to determine whether complete rounds of HIV-1 replication in rapidly cycling cells contribute to persistent viremia. We investigated whether intensification with the integrase inhibitor raltegravir decreases plasma HIV-1 RNA levels in patients receiving suppressive antiretroviral therapy. METHODS Subjects (n = 10) with long-term HIV-1 suppression receiving combination antiretroviral regimens had their regimens intensified for 4 weeks with raltegravir. Plasma HIV-1 RNA level was determined before, during, and after the 4-week intensification period, using a sensitive assay (limit of detection, 0.2 copies of HIV-1 RNA/mL of plasma). A 4-week intensification course was chosen to investigate potential HIV-1 replication in cells with relatively short (approximately 1-14-day) half-lives. RESULTS There was no evidence in any subject of a decline in HIV-1 RNA level during the period of raltegravir intensification or of rebound after discontinuation. Median levels of HIV-1 RNA before (0.17 log10 copies/mL), during (0.04 log10 copies/mL), and after (0.04 log10 copies/mL) raltegravir intensification were not significantly different (P > .1 for all comparisons in parametric analyses). High-performance liquid chromatography and mass spectroscopy experiments confirmed that therapeutic levels of raltegravir were achieved in plasma during intensification. CONCLUSIONS Intensification of antiretroviral therapy with a potent HIV-1 integrase inhibitor did not decrease persistent viremia in subjects receiving suppressive regimens, indicating that rapidly cycling cells infected with HIV-1 were not present. Eradication of HIV-1 from infected persons will require new therapeutic approaches. TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00618371.
Inexact Alternating Optimization for Phase Retrieval in the Presence of Outliers

Phase retrieval has been mainly considered in the presence of Gaussian noise. However, the performance of the algorithms proposed under the Gaussian noise model severely degrades when grossly corrupted data, i.e., outliers, exist. This paper investigates techniques for phase retrieval in the presence of heavy-tailed noise, which is considered a better model for situations where outliers exist. An <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\ell _p$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-norm (<inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0<p<2$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) based estimator is proposed for fending against such noise, and two-block inexact alternating optimization is proposed as the algorithmic framework to tackle the resulting optimization problem. Two specific algorithms are devised by exploring different local approximations within this framework. Interestingly, the core conditional minimization steps can be interpreted as iteratively reweighted least squares and gradient descent. Convergence properties of the algorithms are discussed, and the Cramér–Rao bound (CRB) is derived. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms approach the CRB and outperform state-of-the-art algorithms in heavy-tailed noise.
Constructing merger trees that mimic N-body simulations

We present a simple and efficient empirical algorithm for constructing dark matter halo merger trees that reproduce the distribution of trees in the Millennium cosmological N-body simulation. The generated trees are significantly better than EPS trees. The algorithm is Markovian, and it therefore fails to reproduce the non-Markov features of trees across short time-steps, except for an accurate fit to the evolution of the average main progenitor. However, it properly recovers the full main-progenitor distribution and the joint distributions of all the progenitors over long-enough time-steps, Δω ≃ Δ z > 0.5, where ω ≃ 1.69/D(t) is the self-similar time variable and D(t) refers to the linear growth of density fluctuations. We find that the main-progenitor distribution is lognormal in the variable σ 2 (M), the variance of linear density fluctuations in a sphere encompassing mass M. The secondary progenitors are successfully drawn one by one from the remaining mass using a similar distribution function. These empirical findings may be clues to the underlying physics of merger-tree statistics. As a byproduct, we provide useful, accurate analytic time-invariant approximations for the main-progenitor accretion history and for halo merger rates.
Debt and Financial Expectations: An Individual- and Household-Level Analysis

In this article we show that optimistic financial expectations impact positively on both the quantity of debt and the growth in debt at the individual and household levels. Our theoretical model shows that this association is predicted under a variety of plausible scenarios. In the empirical analysis we explore the determinants of debt and of growth in debt using British data. We find convincing support for our theoretical priors and show that it is optimistic financial expectations per se that are important in influencing debt, rather than the accuracy of individuals' predictions regarding their future financial situation. (JEL D18, D84, D91) Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.