Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Incidence of Hypertension in Korea: 5-Year Follow-up Study

Limited data are available about the incidence of hypertension over the 5-yr in non-hypertensive subjects. The study subjects were 1,806 subjects enrolled in a rural area of Daegu, Korea for a cohort study from August to November 2003. Of them, 1,287 (71.3%) individuals had another examination 5 yr later. To estimate the incidence of hypertension, 730 non-hypertensive individuals (265 males; mean age = 56.6 ± 11.1 yr-old) at baseline examination were analyzed in this study. Hypertension was defined as either a new diagnosis of hypertension or self-reports of newly initiated antihypertensive treatment; prehypertension was if the systolic blood pressure was 120-139 mmHg and/or diastolic blood pressure was 80-89 mmHg. During the 5-yr follow-up, 195 (26.7%) non-hypertensive individuals developed incident hypertension. The age-adjusted 5-yr incidence rates of hypertension were 22.9% (95% confidence interval [CI] = 19.9-29.0) in overall subjects, 22.2% (95% CI = 17.2-27.2) in men, and 24.3% (95% CI = 20.4-28.2) in women. The incidence rates of hypertension significantly increased with age. In the multivariate analysis, prehypertension (Odds ratio [OR] 2.25; P < 0.001) and older age (OR 2.26; P = 0.010) were independent predictors for incident hypertension. In this rapidly aging society, population-based preventive approach to decrease blood pressure, particularly in subjects with prehypertension, is needed to reduce hypertension.
A Strategy of Win-stay, Lose-shift That Outperforms Tit-for-tat in the Prisoner's Counting the Cost of Disease Resistance

Phylogenies and the comparative method: a general approach to incorporating phylogenetic information into the analysis of interspecific data, Am. Sexual signalling in bladder grasshoppers: tactical design for maximizing calling range, J. Exp. Effects of interactions among genotypically diverse nestmates on task specialization by foraging honey bees Apis mellifera, Behav. Ecol. A well-known fictitious race of predatory alien would always admonish the species they intended to subjugate with the unforgettable phrase 'RESISTANCE IS USE-LESS'. A recent paper in Nature 1 shows that an animal's ability to mount a robust im-munological response to incoming pathogens , while being far from useless, may indeed be less than useful in certain circumstances. Evolutionary biologists have suspected this for some time. The central observation fuelling these suspicions is that genetic variation exists among con-specifics in the capacity to repel or control infection successfully. If resistance is useful , in the sense that it contributes positively towards an individual's fitness, then why are some genotypes refractory to disease and others congenitally defenceless? Why does natural selection not fix genes conferring resistance throughout animal populations? There are numerous explanations 2 : for example, large asymmetries between host and parasite generation times may leave hosts 'lagging' behind pathogens in coevo-lutionary arms races. Alternatively, substantial genetic variance, for instance due to the effects of dominance, can remain at the limits of artificial selection, and similar constraints might obtain in nature. Nonetheless , a major possibility is that resistance correlates negatively with other important fitness components (a so-called 'cost' of resistance). Consequently, so the idea goes, resistance genes are subject to antagonistic selective forces which conspire to impose an equilibrium frequency somewhere short of complete fixation. So far, so good. The great problem with the cost of resistance model, however , has been a continuing lack of direct evidence identifying the all-important costs themselves. Recent years have seen a quickening of interest in this problem, and now in an elegant experiment with an insect host–parasitoid system, Kraai-jeveld and Godfray 1 add convincingly to a small but expanding body of empirical data in support of the 'cost' hypothesis. Using the parasitoid wasp Asobara tab-ida, a common biological enemy of several European Drosophila species, the authors selected replicate lines of D. melanogaster for increased resistance to parasitoid attack. Ovipositing females of A. tabida lay their eggs in the body cavity of larval flies. The young wasp then develops within its host, ultimately …
Financial Stress and Depression Among African Refugees in the Southern United States: A Serial Multiple Mediation Analysis of Financial Self-Efficacy and Financial Anxiety

Abstract As part of a larger community-based participatory research project exploring the postresettlement challenges of African refugees in the southern United States, our study investigated the phenomenon of financial stress and its relationship to mental health through a mediating chain of factors—financial self-efficacy and financial anxiety. Results revealed the mediating role of financial self-efficacy and financial anxiety on the relationship between financial stress and depressive symptoms. Findings provide discourses around financial stress and mental health in the migration context, critical to recognizing the unique experiences of African refugees and informing culturally responsive programs for financial inclusion and economic integration.
Technology readiness and users satisfaction towards self-service technology at Malaysian Airport

This study examines the relationship between four dimensions of Technology Readiness Index (TR) namely optimism, innovativeness, insecurity, discomfort, and the level of customer’s satisfaction towards the use of self-service technology (SSTs) at the airport. SSTs used by the airport operators or airlines at the terminal for check-in or when performing other transactions includes booking airline ticket online, kiosk check-in and mobile check-in. At the same time, this study also tries to look at whether there is any difference in technology readiness between different demographic groups of Malaysians. Survey questionnaires were distributed to passengers at Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and Low Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) in Sepang, Selangor, Malaysia. The result of the analysis shows that innovativeness and optimism have a positive relationship with customer satisfaction. There are also differences in technology readiness among different gender for innovativeness and insecurity index. The implication of the study suggests that Malaysia’s airport or airline providers should increase customer satisfaction especially by introducing new innovative technology at their premises. The findings may also help firms develop their strategy to further increase the customer’s satisfaction when using the selfservice technology (SST) at airports in Malaysia.
Dust release from surfaces exposed to plasma

Micrometer-sized particles adhered to a surface can be released when exposed to plasma. In an experiment with a glass surface coated with lunar-simulant dust, it was found that particle release requires exposure to both plasma and an electron beam. The dust release rate diminishes almost exponentially in time, which is consistent with a random process. As proposed here, charges of particles adhered to the surface fluctuate. These charges experience a fluctuating electric force that occasionally overcomes the adhesive van der Waals force, causing particle release. The release rate increases with plasma density, so that plasma cleaning is feasible at high plasma densities. Applications of this cleaning include controlling particulate contamination in semiconductor manufacturing, dust mitigation in the exploration of the moon and Mars, and dusty plasmas.
Versican in the Developing Brain: Lamina-Specific Expression in Interneuronal Subsets and Role in Presynaptic Maturation

Chondroitin sulfate proteoglycans (CSPGs) of the extracellular matrix help stabilize synaptic connections in the postnatal brain and impede regeneration after injury. Here, we show that a CSPG of the lectican family, versican, also promotes presynaptic maturation in the developing brain. In the embryonic chick optic tectum, versican is expressed selectively by subsets of interneurons confined to the retinorecipient laminae, in which retinal axons arborize and form synapses. It is a major receptor for the Vicia villosa B4 lectin (VVA), shown previously to inhibit invasion of the retinorecipient lamina by retinal axons (Inoue and Sanes, 1997). In vitro, versican promotes enlargement of presynaptic varicosities in retinal axons. Depletion of versican in ovo, by RNA interference, results in retinal arbors with smaller than normal varicosities. We propose that versican provides a lamina-specific cue for presynaptic maturation and discuss the related but distinct effects of versican depletion and VVA blockade.
Syntax at Age Two: Cross-Linguistic Differences

The 1990s witnessed a major expansion in research on children's morphosyntactic development, due largely to the availability of computer-searchable corpora of spontaneous speech in the CHILDES database. This led to a rapid emergence of parallel findings in different languages, with much attention devoted to the widely attested difficulties in inflectional morphology in the speech of two-year-olds. First written in 1995, and framed within the terms of contemporary syntactic theories, this article argues that cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of children's morphosyntactic errors provide important clues to the source of the errors, in particular whether they are morphological or syntactic in origin. The article takes as its starting point some striking previous findings that children's verb inflection errors are systematically correlated, on a sentence-by-sentence basis, with errors in the use of overt subjects, and with the use of syntactically complex constructions such as wh-questions. The article shows that these correlations are found in some languages but not in others, and argues that these differences are predictable, based on the verb movement and case licensing properties of individual languages. The article argues that children's errors reflect a combination of grammatical and speech production deficits.
A Gaussian process approximation for two-color randomly reinforced urns

The Polya urn has been extensively studied and is widely applied in many disciplines. An important application is to use urn models to develop randomized treatment allocation schemes in clinical studies. The randomly reinforced urn was recently proposed. In this paper, we prove a Gaussian process approximation for the sequence of random composotions of a two-color randomly reinforced urn for both the cases with the equal and unequal reinforcement means. The Gaussian process is a tail stochastic integral with respect to a Brownian motion. By using the Gaussian approximation, the law of the iterated logarithm and the functional central limit theorem in both the stable convergence sense and the almost-sure conditional convergence sense are established. Also as a consequence, we are able to prove that the limit distribution of the normalized urn composition has no points masses both when the reinforcements means are equal and unequal under the assumption of only finite $(2+\epsilon)$-th moments.
Automatic diagnosis of understanding of medical words

Within the medical field, very specialized terms are commonly used, while their understanding by laymen is not always successful. We propose to study the understandability of medical words by laymen. Three annotators are involved in the creation of the reference data used for training and testing. The features of the words may be linguistic (i.e., number of characters, syllables, number of morphological bases and affixes) and extra-linguistic (i.e., their presence in a reference lexicon, frequency on a search engine). The automatic categorization results show between 0.806 and 0.947 F-measure values. It appears that several features and their combinations are relevant for the analysis of understandability (i.e., syntactic categories, presence in reference lexica, frequency on the general search engine, final substring).
Accuracy of Cardiac Output by Nine Different Pulse Contour Algorithms in Cardiac Surgery Patients: A Comparison with Transpulmonary Thermodilution

Objective. Today, there exist several different pulse contour algorithms for calculation of cardiac output (CO). The aim of the present study was to compare the accuracy of nine different pulse contour algorithms with transpulmonary thermodilution before and after cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB). Methods. Thirty patients scheduled for elective coronary surgery were studied before and after CPB. A passive leg raising maneuver was also performed. Measurements included CO obtained by transpulmonary thermodilution (COTPTD) and by nine pulse contour algorithms (COX1–9). Calibration of pulse contour algorithms was performed by esophageal Doppler ultrasound after induction of anesthesia and 15 min after CPB. Correlations, Bland-Altman analysis, four-quadrant, and polar analysis were also calculated. Results. There was only a poor correlation between COTPTD and COX1–9 during passive leg raising and in the period before and after CPB. Percentage error exceeded the required 30% limit. Four-quadrant and polar analysis revealed poor trending ability for most algorithms before and after CPB. The Liljestrand-Zander algorithm revealed the best reliability. Conclusions. Estimation of CO by nine different pulse contour algorithms revealed poor accuracy compared with transpulmonary thermodilution. Furthermore, the less-invasive algorithms showed an insufficient capability for trending hemodynamic changes before and after CPB. The Liljestrand-Zander algorithm demonstrated the highest reliability. This trial is registered with NCT02438228 (ClinicalTrials.gov).
Beginning of Stock Option-Based Compensation in Japan: A Test of Alternative Theories

Japanese companies are increasingly adopting stock option based compensation for executives and employees as a part of their efforts to regain profitability and capital market orientation after the burst of bubble economy. To analyze the economic justifications of option grants in Japanese companies, we use the framework of three different theories i.e., agency theory, retention and sorting model, and the financial and ownership structure of a firm. We use a cross sectional data of 12,896 firm-year observations of 1,612 listed companies of Tokyo Stock Exchange from the year 1997 to 2004. While, the agency theory fairly succeeds in defining the executive stock options, the employees’ stock options are most consistent with the explanation of the retention and sorting motives. Determinants of the financial and ownership structure show mix results.
Sparse stabilization of dynamical systems driven by attraction and avoidance forces

Conditional self-organization and pattern-formation are relevant phenomena arising in biological, social, and economical contexts, and received a growing attention in recent years in mathematical modeling. An important issue related to optimal government strategies is how to design external parsimonious interventions, aiming at enforcing systems to converge to specific patterns. This is in contrast to other models where the players of the systems are allowed to interact freely and are supposed autonomously, either by game rules or by embedded decentralized feedback control rules, to converge to patterns. In this paper we tackle the problem of designing optimal centralized feedback controls for systems of moving particles, subject to mutual attraction and repulsion forces, and friction. Under certain conditions on the attraction and repulsion forces, if the total energy of the system, composed of the sum of its kinetic and potential parts, is below a certain critical threshold, then such systems are known to converge autonomously to the stable configuration of keeping confined and collision avoiding in space, uniformly in time. If the energy is above such a critical level, then the space coherence can be lost. We show that in the latter situation of lost self-organization, one can nevertheless steer the system to return to stable energy levels by feedback controls defined as the minimizers of a certain functional with $l_1$-norm penalty and constraints. Additionally we show that the optimal strategy in this class of controls is necessarily sparse, i.e., the control acts on at most one agent at each time. This is another remarkable example of how homophilious systems, i.e., systems where agents tend to be strongly more influenced by near agents than far ones, are naturally prone to sparse stabilization, explaining the effectiveness of parsimonious interventions of governments in societies.
Role of claudin species–specific dynamics in reconstitution and remodeling of the zonula occludens

Due to a new reconstitution system of zonula occludens (zTJ) by expressing specific claudin species, this study found that each of claudin-7, -14, and -19 could singly reconstitute zTJ, but with distinct characteristics in morphology. The molecular dynamics is one important factor for this reconstitution, as revealed by FRAP analysis.
Embedded robustness IPs

Signal integrity has been pointed out as a major challenge. More and more causes can affect signal integrity as geometries are shrinking. One of the growing effects is the so-called "transient errors" which are due to temporary condition of use and environment. Cross-coupling, ground bounce, external terrestrial radiations create more and more unpredictable transient and soft errors which affect system reliability in unacceptable ways. In addition, reliability in devices like memories become a critical issue: the MTBF (mean time before failure) level decreasing the global system FIT (Failure in Time) rate approaching the critical border line for the end user. Hence, for memories and for logic blocks as well using high-end process technologies, self-correcting intelligence embedded in SoC is needed to enable electronic systems to react against unpredictable and insidious errors.
Social representations of climate change and pro-environmental behavior intentions in Taiwan

To explore how people attribute meanings to climate change in Taiwan, this study applied social representations theory (SRT) to develop a self-report semi-structured questionnaire that was used to collect data. To fill a research gap, structural equation modeling (SEM) was adopted to examine the determinants of social representation factors that may affect the public’s intentions to engage in pro-environmental behaviors (PEBs). Exploratory factor analysis results obtained from 180 valid online responses indicated four factors for social representations of climate change, namely Emerging Climate Change Risk, Media Coverage and Influence, Psychological Distance, and Pro-environmental Behavior Intentions. The results of SEM analysis obtained from the total of 245 valid online and paper-and-pencil responses revealed that Emerging Climate Change Risk and Media Coverage and Influence helped explain the public’s PEBs intentions, but Psychological Distance did not. This exploratory study provides preliminary knowledge of public understanding of and response toward climate change in the Taiwanese society and demonstrates a novel application of SEM analysis to test the direct effects of social representations of climate change on PEB intentions.
All differences are not created equal: A structural alignment view of similarity

An emerging view in cognitive psychology is that the determination of similarity involves a comparison of structured representations. On this view, some differences are related to the commonalities of a pair (alignable differences) and others are unrelated to the commonalities of a pair (nonalignable differences). Previous evidence suggests that pairs of similar items have more commonalities and alignable differences than do pairs of dissimilar items. Structural alignment further predicts that alignable differences should be easier to find than nonalignable differences. Taken together, these assertions lead to the counterintuitive prediction that it should be easier to find differences for similar pairs than for dissimilar pairs. This prediction is tested in two studies in which subjects are asked to list differences for as many word pairs as possible in a short period of time. In both studies, more differences are listed for similar pairs than for dissimilar pairs. Further, similar and dissimilar pairs differ in the number of alignable differences listed for them, but not in the number of nonalignable differences listed for them. These studies provide additional support for the structural alignment view of similarity.
Paired box 5 is a frequently methylated lung cancer tumour suppressor gene interfering β‐catenin signalling and GADD45G expression

Recent studies suggest that paired box 5 (PAX5) is down‐regulated in multiple tumours through its promoter methylation. However, the role of PAX5 in non‐small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) pathogenesis remains unclear. The aim of this study is to examine PAX5 expression, its methylation status, biological functions and related molecular mechanism in NSCLC. We found that PAX5 was widely expressed in normal adult tissues but silenced or down‐regulated in 88% (7/8) of NSCLC cell lines. PAX5 expression level was significantly lower in NSCLC than that in adjacent non‐cancerous tissues (P = 0.0201). PAX5 down‐regulation was closely associated with its promoter hypermethylation status and PAX5 expression could be restored by demethylation treatment. Frequent PAX5 promoter methylation in primary tumours (70%) was correlated with lung tumour histological types (P = 0.006). Ectopic expression of PAX5 in silenced lung cancer cell lines (A549 and H1975) inhibited their colony formation and cell viability, arrested cell cycle at G2 phase and suppressed cell migration/invasion as well as tumorigenicity in nude mice. Restoration of PAX5 expression resulted in the down‐regulation of β‐catenin and up‐regulation of tissue inhibitors of metalloproteinase 2, GADD45G in lung tumour cells. In summary, PAX5 was found to be an epigenetically inactivated tumour suppressor that inhibits NSCLC cell proliferation and metastasis, through down‐regulating the β‐catenin pathway and up‐regulating GADD45G expression.
TGN1412: From Discovery to Disaster

After a drug is confirmed as safe and efficacious in preclinical studies, it is tested in healthy human volunteers for first in man trials. In 2006, a phase I clinical study was conducted for a CD28 superagonist antibody TGN1412 in six human volunteers. After very first infusion of a dose 500 times smaller than that found safe in animal studies, all six human volunteers faced life-threatening conditions involving multiorgan failure for which they were moved to intensive care unit. After this particular incident, a lot was changed over how first in man trials are approved by regulatory authorities and the way clinical trials are conducted. This review primarily deals with preclinical studies conducted by TeGenero, results of which encouraged them to test the antibody on human subjects, reasons why this drug failed in human trial and aftermath of this drug trial. In addition, another drug—Fialuridine which failed in phase 2 clinical trial leading to death of five human subjects is briefly reviewed.