Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Hospital utilization and expenditures in a Medicaid population

Determinants of hospital utilization and expenditures are analyzed for Medicaid enrollees in the State Medicaid household sample portion of the National Medical Care Utilization and Expenditure Survey who were continuously enrolled throughout 1980. Health status measures were the best predictors of both the probability of hospitalization and total hospitalizations. Children covered by Aid to Families with Dependent Children were the Medicaid enrollees least likely to be hospitalized. Number of hospital days, surgery, and California residence directly increased hospital expenditures. Conditions responsible for hospitalization increased hospital expenditures indirectly by increasing the number of hospital days and the probability of surgery.
Commentary: A Multilab Preregistered Replication of the Ego-Depletion Effect

The ego depletion effect has not been replicated by a recent project including 23 laboratories (N = 2141) in both English-speaking countries and non-English speaking countries (Hagger and Chatzisarantis, 2016). Although it provides seemingly robust evidence casting doubt on the existence of ego depletion, cautious attention should be paid to the effectiveness of the depleting task (i.e., e-crossing task) used in the replicating project.
Unemployment Insurance Under Moral Hazard and Limited Commitment: Public Versus Private Provision

This paper analyzes a model of private unemployment insurance under limited commitment and a model of public unemployment insurance subject to moral hazard in an economy with a continuum of agents and an infinite time horizon. The dynamic and steady-state properties of the optimum private unemployment insurance scheme are established. The interaction between public and private unemployment insurance schemes is examined. Examples are constructed to show that for some parameter values increased public insurance can reduce welfare by crowding out private insurance more than one-to-one and that for other parameter values a mix of both public and private insurance can be welfare maximizing.
The Effect of the Green Class Model on Environmental Knowledge and Its Retention.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of an applied environmental education project carried out using the green-class model on students’ environmental knowledge and its retention. 101 7 grade students attending Nazim Akcan Primary School in the Altindag Province of Ankara participated in the study. The study was carried out in the form of pre-test post-test monitoring design. The Environmental Knowledge Test was used as a data collection instrument. For the analysis of the data, a two-way ANOVA for mixed measures was used. The post-test and monitoring test means of both the experimental groups were found to Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume 10, Issue 2, Article 4, p.2 (Dec., 2009) Naim UZUN The effect of the green class model on environmental knowledge and its retention Copyright (C) 2009 HKIEd APFSLT. Volume 10, Issue 2, Article 4 (Dec., 2009). All Rights Reserved. be significantly higher than the control group. As a conclusion, the green-class model considerably enhanced the environmental knowledge of the students and its retention. It was able to make a great contribution to the environmental knowledge of the students residing in a low socio-economic neighbourhood. This project is an original study and can be implemented with different samplings.
Gaucher Disease: Transcriptome Analyses Using Microarray or mRNA Sequencing in a Gba1 Mutant Mouse Model Treated with Velaglucerase alfa or Imiglucerase

Gaucher disease type 1, an inherited lysosomal storage disorder, is caused by mutations in GBA1 leading to defective glucocerebrosidase (GCase) function and consequent excess accumulation of glucosylceramide/glucosylsphingosine in visceral organs. Enzyme replacement therapy (ERT) with the biosimilars, imiglucerase (imig) or velaglucerase alfa (vela) improves/reverses the visceral disease. Comparative transcriptomic effects (microarray and mRNA-Seq) of no ERT and ERT (imig or vela) were done with liver, lung, and spleen from mice having Gba1 mutant alleles, termed D409V/null. Disease-related molecular effects, dynamic ranges, and sensitivities were compared between mRNA-Seq and microarrays and their respective analytic tools, i.e. Mixed Model ANOVA (microarray), and DESeq and edgeR (mRNA-Seq). While similar gene expression patterns were observed with both platforms, mRNA-Seq identified more differentially expressed genes (DEGs) (∼3-fold) than the microarrays. Among the three analytic tools, DESeq identified the maximum number of DEGs for all tissues and treatments. DESeq and edgeR comparisons revealed differences in DEGs identified. In 9V/null liver, spleen and lung, post-therapy transcriptomes approximated WT, were partially reverted, and had little change, respectively, and were concordant with the corresponding histological and biochemical findings. DEG overlaps were only 8–20% between mRNA-Seq and microarray, but the biological pathways were similar. Cell growth and proliferation, cell cycle, heme metabolism, and mitochondrial dysfunction were most altered with the Gaucher disease process. Imig and vela differentially affected specific disease pathways. Differential molecular responses were observed in direct transcriptome comparisons from imig- and vela-treated tissues. These results provide cross-validation for the mRNA-Seq and microarray platforms, and show differences between the molecular effects of two highly structurally similar ERT biopharmaceuticals.
How Do Financial Constraints Relate to Financial Reporting Quality? Evidence from Seasoned Equity Offerings

Abstract This paper examines how constraints on firms’ financing capacity relate to managers’ discretionary accounting choices. Three hypotheses of earnings management – the opportunism hypothesis, the rational expectations hypothesis, and the signaling hypothesis – predict that constrained firms engage in greater upward earnings management than unconstrained firms when selling equity. Using a sample of seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) announced between 1983 and 2014, I find support for this prediction. The relation between financial constraints and earnings management is robust to including controls such as offer size, growth opportunities, analyst following, and chief executive officer equity holdings, as well as to using the instrumental variable approach. Investors’ reaction around and following the SEO announcement supports the rational expectations hypothesis. I find that aggressive earnings management by constrained issuers is associated with lower SEO announcement returns but is not followed by negative abnormal returns in the long run. The evidence suggests that constrained issuers’ aggressive use of income-increasing accruals is an outcome of managerial myopia caused by capital market pressure, not managerial opportunism intended to mislead investors.
Nonthermal Hard X-Ray Emission in Galaxy Clusters Observed with the BeppoSAX PDS

We study the X-ray emission in a sample of galaxy clusters using the BeppoSAX PDS instrument in the 20-80 keV energy band. We estimate the nonthermal hard X-ray (HXR) cluster emission by modeling the thermal contribution from the cluster gas and the nonthermal contamination from the unobscured active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in the clusters. We also evaluate the systematic uncertainties due to the background fluctuations. Assuming negligible contamination from the obscured AGNs, the resulting nonthermal component is detected at a 2 σ level in ~50% of the nonsignificantly AGN-contaminated clusters: A2142, A2199, A2256, A3376, Coma, Ophiuchus, and Virgo. The data are consistent with a scenario whereby relaxed clusters have no hard X-ray component of nonthermal origin, whereas merger clusters do, with a 20-80 keV luminosity of ~1043-1044 h ergs s-1. The co-added spectrum of the above clusters indicates a power-law spectrum for the HXR emission with a photon index of 2.8 in the 12-115 keV band, and we find indication that it has extended distribution. These indications argue against significant contamination from obscured AGNs, which have harder spectra and a centrally concentrated distribution. These results are supportive of the assumption of the merger shock acceleration of electrons in clusters, which has been proposed as a possible origin of the nonthermal hard X-ray emission models. Assuming that the cosmic microwave background photons experience inverse Compton scattering from the merger-accelerated relativistic electrons and thus produce the observed HXR, the measured hard X-ray slope corresponds to a differential momentum spectra of the relativistic electrons with a slope of μ = 3.8-5.0. In presence of cluster magnetic fields this relativistic electron population produces synchrotron emission with a spectral index of 1.4-2.1, consistent with radio halo observations of merger clusters. Thus both hard X-ray and radio observations of merger clusters are consistent with the inverse Compton model. The observed slope of the HXR emission is also consistent with that predicted by the nonthermal bremsstrahlung, which thus cannot be ruled out by the fit to the current data, even though this model requires an extreme, untenable cluster energetics. Assuming a centrally concentrated distribution of HXR emission, the data require a harder slope for the HXR spectrum, which is consistent with secondary electron models, but this model yields a worse fit to the PDS data and thus seems to be disfavored over the primary electron inverse Compton model.
Randomized trial to evaluate the efficacy of cognitive therapy for low-functioning patients with schizophrenia.

CONTEXT Low-functioning patients with chronic schizophrenia have high direct treatment costs and indirect costs incurred due to lost employment and productivity and have a low quality of life; antipsychotic medications and psychosocial interventions have shown limited efficacy to promote improved functional outcomes. OBJECTIVE To determine the efficacy of an 18-month recovery-oriented cognitive therapy program to improve psychosocial functioning and negative symptoms (avolition-apathy, anhedonia-asociality) in low-functioning patients with schizophrenia. Design, Setting, and PARTICIPANTS A single-center, 18-month, randomized, single-blind, parallel group trial enrolled 60 low-functioning, neurocognitively impaired patients with schizophrenia (mean age, 38.4 years; 33.3% female; 65.0% African American). INTERVENTIONS Cognitive therapy plus standard treatment vs standard treatment alone. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The primary outcome measure was the Global Assessment Scale score at 18 months after randomization. The secondary outcomes were scores on the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms and the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms at 18 months after randomization. RESULTS Patients treated with cognitive therapy showed a clinically significant mean improvement in global functioning from baseline to 18 months that was greater than the improvement seen with standard treatment (within-group Cohen d, 1.36 vs 0.06, respectively; adjusted mean [SE], 58.3 [3.30] vs 47.9 [3.60], respectively; P = .03; between-group d = 0.56). Patients receiving cognitive therapy as compared with those receiving standard treatment also showed a greater mean reduction in avolition-apathy (adjusted mean [SE], 1.66 [0.31] vs 2.81 [0.34], respectively; P = .01; between-group d = -0.66) and positive symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, disorganization) (adjusted mean [SE], 9.4 [3.3] vs 18.2 [3.8], respectively; P = .04; between-group d = -0.46) at 18 months. Age was controlled in the analyses, and there were no meaningful group differences in baseline antipsychotic medications (class or dosage) or in medication changes during the course of the trial. CONCLUSION Cognitive therapy can be successful in promoting clinically meaningful improvements in functional outcome, motivation, and positive symptoms in low-functioning patients with significant cognitive impairment. Trial Registration clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00350883.
Coupled Dictionaries for Exemplar-Based Speech Enhancement and Automatic Speech Recognition

Exemplar-based speech enhancement systems work by decomposing the noisy speech as a weighted sum of speech and noise exemplars stored in a dictionary and use the resulting speech and noise estimates to obtain a time-varying filter in the full-resolution frequency domain to enhance the noisy speech. To obtain the decomposition, exemplars sampled in lower dimensional spaces are preferred over the full-resolution frequency domain for their reduced computational complexity and the ability to better generalize to unseen cases. But the resulting filter may be sub-optimal as the mapping of the obtained speech and noise estimates to the full-resolution frequency domain yields a low-rank approximation. This paper proposes an efficient way to directly compute the full-resolution frequency estimates of speech and noise using coupled dictionaries: an input dictionary containing atoms from the desired exemplar space to obtain the decomposition and a coupled output dictionary containing exemplars from the full-resolution frequency domain. We also introduce modulation spectrogram features for the exemplar-based tasks using this approach. The proposed system was evaluated for various choices of input exemplars and yielded improved speech enhancement performances on the AURORA-2 and AURORA-4 databases. We further show that the proposed approach also results in improved word error rates (WERs) for the speech recognition tasks using HMM-GMM and deep-neural network (DNN) based systems.
Neuropsin Inactivation Has Protective Effects against Depressive-Like Behaviours and Memory Impairment Induced by Chronic Stress

Mounting evidence suggests the interaction between stress and genetics contribute to the development of depressive symptoms. Currently, the molecular mechanisms mediating this process are poorly understood, hindering the development of new clinical interventions. Here, we investigate the interaction between neuropsin, a serine protease, and chronic stress on the development of depressive-like behaviours in mice. We found no difference in baseline behaviour between neuropsin knockout and wild-type mice. However, our results show that neuropsin knockout mice are protected against the development of depressive-like behaviours and memory impairment following chronic stress. We hypothesised that this difference in behaviour may be due to an interaction between neuropsin and elevated plasma corticosterone. To test this, we subjected mice to chronic corticosterone injections. These injections resulted in changes to hippocampal structure similar to that observed following chronic stress. We found that inactivation of neuropsin limits the extent of these anatomical changes in both the chronic stress and the corticosterone injection exposed cohorts. We next used viral vectors to knockdown or overexpress neuropsin in the hippocampus to confirm the results of the KO study. Additionally, we found that inactivation of neuropsin limited glutamate dysregulation, associated with increased generation of reactive oxygen species, resulting from prolonged elevated plasma corticosterone. In this study, we demonstrate that neuropsin inactivation protects against the impairment of hippocampal functions and the depressive-like behaviour induced by chronic stress or high levels of corticosterone. Consequently, we suggest neuropsin is a potential target for clinical interventions for the management of stress disorders.
Online Social Networking Has a Greater Effect on Others than on Me: A Third-Person Effect Perspective

To date, much research has been conducted on the positive and negative effects of online social networking (OSN). However, how users perceive others and themselves being subject to these effects and the consequences of users' perceptions are understudied. Drawing from the third-person effect theory, this study examines the self-other perceptual gap for positive and negative effects of OSN and the consequences of perceptions for negative effects. Findings from our online survey (N=187) and interviews (N=8) suggested a significant difference between the perceived positive and negative effects on self and on others. Furthermore, the link between the third-person perception for usage risks of OSN and support for taking privacy protection actions was confirmed. We also found that the self-other discrepant perceptions were not influenced by age, time spent on OSN, number of OSN friends. However, gender emerged as a key difference in the third-person effects gap for privacy risks.
New Perspectives on the Use of Phytochemicals as an Emergent Strategy to Control Bacterial Infections Including Biofilms

The majority of current infectious diseases are almost untreatable by conventional antibiotic therapy given the advent of multidrug-resistant bacteria. The degree of severity and the persistence of infections are worsened when microorganisms form biofilms. Therefore, efforts are being applied to develop new drugs not as vulnerable as the current ones to bacterial resistance mechanisms, and also able to target bacteria in biofilms. Natural products, especially those obtained from plants, have proven to be outstanding compounds with unique properties, making them perfect candidates for these much-needed therapeutics. This review presents the current knowledge on the potentialities of plant products as antibiotic adjuvants to restore the therapeutic activity of drugs. Further, the difficulties associated with the use of the existing antibiotics in the treatment of biofilm-related infections are described. To counteract the biofilm resistance problems, innovative strategies are suggested based on literature data. Among the proposed strategies, the use of phytochemicals to inhibit or eradicate biofilms is highlighted. An overview on the use of phytochemicals to interfere with bacterial quorum sensing (QS) signaling pathways and underlying phenotypes is provided. The use of phytochemicals as chelating agents and efflux pump inhibitors is also reviewed.
Educational practitioners’ perceptions of ADHD: a qualitative study of views of the home lives of children with ADHD in the UK

There is little research exploring educational practitioners' experiences of working with children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The current study aimed to understand educational practitioners' beliefs concerning the home lives of children with ADHD, and how they perceive that home lives affect children's behaviour in school. Forty‐two practitioners from primary, secondary and pupil referral schools participated in focus groups or interviews. Thematic analysis was used to identify themes arising from the data. Three themes emerged as relevant to beliefs about the home lives of children with ADHD: inconsistency, psychosocial adversity and isolation. Educational practitioners relate their experiences of working with children to what they believe occurs at home. On the basis of these findings, we make recommendations for strategies that school practitioners can use when working with children with ADHD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Depth Enhanced Saliency Detection Method

Human vision system understands the environment from 3D perception. However, most existing saliency detection algorithms detect the salient foreground based on 2D image information. In this paper, we propose a saliency detection method using the additional depth information. In our method, saliency cues are provided to follow the laws of the visually salient stimuli in both color and depth spaces. Simultaneously, the 'center bias' is also extended to 'spatial' bias to represent the nature advantage in 3D image. In addition, We build a dataset to test our method and the experiments demonstrate that the depth information is useful for extracting the salient object from the complex scenes.
Wild Relatives of the Eggplant (Solanum melongena L.: Solanaceae): New Understanding of Species Names in a Complex Group

Background The common or brinjal eggplant (Solanum melongena L.) belongs to the Leptostemonum Clade (the “spiny” solanums) of the species-rich genus Solanum (Solanaceae). Unlike most of the genus, the eggplant and its relatives are from the Old World; most eggplant wild relatives are from Africa. An informal system for naming eggplant wild relatives largely based on crossing and other biosystematics data has been in use for approximately a decade. This system recognises several forms of two broadly conceived species, S. incanum L. and S. melongena. Recent morphological and molecular work has shown that species-level differences exist between these entities, and a new species-level nomenclature has been identified as necessary for plant breeders and for the maintenance of accurately named germplasm. Methodology/Principal Findings We examined herbarium specimens from throughout the wild species ranges as part of a larger revision of the spiny solanums of Africa. Based on these morphological and molecular studies, we delimited species in the group to which the common eggplant belongs and constructed identification keys for the group. We also examined the monophyly of the group considered as the eggplant relatives by previous authors. Conclusions/Significance We recognise ten species in this group: S. aureitomentosum Bitter, S. campylacanthum A.Rich. , S. cerasiferum Dunal, S. incanum L. , S. insanum L. , S. lichtensteinii Willd. , S. linnaeanum Hepper & P.-M.L. Jaeger, S. melongena L. , S. rigidum Lam. and S. umtuma Voronts. & S.Knapp. We review the history of naming and provide keys and character lists for all species. Ploidy level differences have not been investigated in the eggplant wild relatives; we identify this as a priority for improvement of crop wild relative use in breeding. The application of species-level names to these entities will help focus new collecting efforts for brinjal eggplant improvement and help facilitate information exchange.
Understanding the Mechanism of Action of Triazine-Phosphonate Derivatives as Flame Retardants for Cotton Fabric

Countless hours of research and studies on triazine, phosphonate, and their combination have provided insightful information into their flame retardant properties on polymeric systems. However, a limited number of studies shed light on the mechanism of flame retardancy of their combination on cotton fabrics. The purpose of this research is to gain an understanding of the thermal degradation process of two triazine-phosphonate derivatives on cotton fabric. The investigation included the preparation of diethyl 4,6-dichloro-1,3,5-triazin-2-ylphosphonate (TPN1) and dimethyl (4,6-dichloro-1,3,5-triazin-2-yloxy) methyl phosphonate (TPN3), their application on fabric materials, and the studies of their thermal degradation mechanism. The studies examined chemical components in both solid and gas phases by using attenuated total reflection infrared (ATR-IR) spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis coupled with Fourier transform infrared (TGA-FTIR) spectroscopy, and 31P solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (31P solid state NMR), in addition to the computational studies of bond dissociation energy (BDE). Despite a few differences in their decomposition, TPN1 and TPN3 produce one common major product that is believed to help reduce the flammability of the fabric.