Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of Congenital Abnormalities of Infants Conceived by Assisted Reproductive Techniques versus Infants with Natural Conception in Tehran

Background: In many countries, 1 to 3% of newborn infants are conceived by assisted reproductive techniques (ART). Despite the success of ART, there is concern about the risk of congenital malformations among these infants. We report our experience to determine whether use of ART is associated with an increase in major congenital malformations or adverse pregnancy outcomes. Materials and Methods: Historical cohort study of major congenital malformations (MCM) was performed in 978 births from January 2008 to December 2010. The data for this analysis were derived from a Tehran’s ART linked data file by simple sampling method. In our study, the risk of congenital malformations was compared in 326 ART infants and 652 naturally conceived (NC) infants. We also performed multiple logistic regression analyses to calculate the odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for the independent association of ART on each outcome. Results: We found 56 infants with major congenital malformations, these included 29 NC infants (4.4%) and 27 ART infants (8.3%). In comparison with NC infants, ART infants had a significant 1.94-fold increased risk of MCM.After adjustment for maternal age, infant’s sex stillbirth, abortion and type of delivery, we found a relatively small difference in risk (OR=2.04). In this study the majority (94.3%) of all infants were normal but 5.7% of infants had at least one MCM. The prevalence rate for the intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) was 6.5% for the In vitro fertilisation (IVF) group was 15.9% or 2.73-fold higher than ICSI group (P=0.018). Also we ignore the possible role of genotype and other unknown factors in causing more malformations in ART infants. Conclusion: Other studies have shown a slightly increased risk of major congenital malformations in pregnancies resulting from ART. Likewise, this study reports a greater risk of MCMs in ART infants than in naturally conceived infants. We also found evidence of a difference in risk of MCMs between IVF and ICSI. Musculoskeletal and urogenital malformations were the most reported MCMs in ART infants according to organs and systems classification.
Factors Affecting Microbial Load and Profile of Potential Pathogens and Food Spoilage Bacteria from Household Kitchen Tables

The aim was to study the bacterial load and isolate potential pathogens and food spoilage bacteria from kitchen tables, including preparation tables and dining tables. Methods. A total of 53 households gave their consent for participation. The samples were collected by swabbing over an area of 5 cm by 5 cm of the tables and processed for bacterial count which was read as colony forming units (CFU), followed by isolation and identification of potential pathogens and food spoilage bacteria. Result. Knowledge about hygiene was not always put into practice. Coliforms, Enterococcus spp. , Pseudomonas spp. , Proteus spp. , and S. aureus were detected from both dining and preparation tables. The mean CFU and presence of potential pathogens were significantly affected by the hygienic practices of the main food handler of the house, materials of kitchen tables, use of plastic covers, time of sample collection, use of multipurpose sponges/towels for cleaning, and the use of preparation tables as chopping boards (p < 0.05). Conclusion. Kitchen tables could be very important source of potential pathogens and food spoilage bacteria causing foodborne diseases. Lack of hygiene was confirmed by presence of coliforms, S. aureus, and Enterococcus spp. The use of plastic covers, multipurpose sponges, and towels should be discouraged.
Analysis of protein function and its prediction from amino acid sequence

Understanding protein function is one of the keys to understanding life at the molecular level. It is also important in the context of human disease because many conditions arise as a consequence of alterations of protein function. The recent availability of relatively inexpensive sequencing technology has resulted in thousands of complete or partially sequenced genomes with millions of functionally uncharacterized proteins. Such a large volume of data, combined with the lack of high‐throughput experimental assays to functionally annotate proteins, attributes to the growing importance of automated function prediction. Here, we study proteins annotated by Gene Ontology (GO) terms and estimate the accuracy of functional transfer from protein sequence only. We find that the transfer of GO terms by pairwise sequence alignments is only moderately accurate, showing a surprisingly small influence of sequence identity (SID) in a broad range (30–100%). We developed and evaluated a new predictor of protein function, functional annotator (FANN), from amino acid sequence. The predictor exploits a multioutput neural network framework which is well suited to simultaneously modeling dependencies between functional terms. Experiments provide evidence that FANN‐GO (predictor of GO terms; available from http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/predrag) outperforms standard methods such as transfer by global or local SID as well as GOtcha, a method that incorporates the structure ofGO. Proteins 2011; © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Political and Managerial Succession and the Performance of English Local Governments

Corporate capacity is arguably a key determinant of the success or failure of public sector organizations. However, while there is growing evidence on the extent of corporate capacity, few researchers have systematically examined whether it is linked to public service performance. Does a larger corporate centre lead to better or worse performance for the organization as a whole? To answer this question we apply seemingly unrelated regression to measures of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and equity in English local government. We find that the effect of corporate capacity on performance is nonlinear, following an inverted u-shaped pattern, and that its positive effect turns negative around the mean for effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, and above the mean for equity. The study therefore suggests that senior managers face important trade-offs between organizational goals when deciding on the appropriate level of corporate capacity.
Multiple Missions and Academic Entrepreneurship

Commercialization of university-developed technologieshas increased in recent years among U.S. universities due to policies promotingacademic technology transfer. These provisions have been influential in thecreation of similar policies in Europe and Japan. Recent researchregarding the success and accessibility of university research has beencontradictory. This research investigates the differences between academic and industrialentrepreneurs when deciding to commercialize inventions.The researcherproposes an economic model specifically focused on the decision tocommercialize and on the timing of entry. A review of past literature regarding academic and industrialentrepreneurship is presented, and current issues regarding this topic areevaluated.Then, the basic theoretical premise of the model is described,with the examined features including the key aspect of the research process, acomparison of academic entrepreneurs to other entrepreneurs, and an analysis ofthe commercial returns and costs. A description of the actual model is given, including descriptions of theacademic team and measures of the model.The model identifies situationsthat are commercially advantageous to academics, as well as situations that areunfavorable.In unfavorable situations, the outcomes are either anabandonment of, or a rapid move toward, commercialization. (AKP)
Nonlinear Schrödinger equations with strongly singular potentials

We look for standing waves for nonlinear Schrödinger equations $$\mathrm{i}\frac{\partial\psi}{\partial t}+\Delta\psi-g(|y|)\psi -W^{\prime}(|\psi|)\frac{\psi}{|\psi|}=0 $$ with cylindrically symmetric potentials g vanishing at infinity and non-increasing, and a C1 nonlinear term satisfying weak assumptions. In particular, we show the existence of standing waves with non-vanishing angular momentum with prescribed L2 norm. The solutions are obtained via a minimization argument, and the proof is given for an abstract functional which presents a lack of compactness. As a specific case, we prove the existence of standing waves with non-vanishing angular momentum for the nonlinear hydrogen atom equation.
Buddhism and the State: The New Relationship. Increasing numbers of believers bring great changes to the monastic economy in China

In the early 1980s, Buddhism in China entered a period of revival and prosperity, yet it retained a sense of public disgrace inherited from nearly three decades of persecution. In order to survive and to conform to the ethical system imposed by the government, the monks were forced to engage in “productive labour”. However, Buddhism’s growing influence among lay people, and the increasing number of exchanges between monasteries and believers promoted a steady growth in the value of Buddhism’s cultural and religious capital. From the 1990s onwards, local authorities sought to co-operate with Buddhism, hoping to profit by its cultural capital through attracting investors and promoting tourism. The state did not cease to control and to oppress the Buddhists although, guided by economic interests, it contributed in some cases to promoting and reconstructing Buddhism: the monasteries thus found new legitimacy and new space for development.
Combined EEG and EMG fatigue measurement framework with application to hybrid brain-computer interface

In recent years, the EEG-based brain-computer interface (BCI) has become one of the most promising areas of research in computer science and robotics. Many internationally renewned research teams combining engineers and doctors, experts in neuroscience are trying to develop useful applications and devices offering disabled people to lead a normal life. Useful BCIs for disabled people suffering from Cerebral palsy, Parkinson's disease, Brain injury, Spinal cord injuries, Multiple sclerosis, Stroke, Post-polio syndrome should allow them to use all their existing brain and muscle abilities as control possibilities. In this paper we present a framework based on the mutimodal fusion approach of the user's electromyographic (EMG) and electroencephalographic (EEG) activities in a so called “Hybrid-BCI” (hBCI). Although EEG BCI alone yields good performance as already proved in many research papers, it is outperformed by the fusion of EEG and EMG. We investigate the influence of muscular fatigue on the EMG performance. Such a framework will allow a more reliable control and adaptation of the hBCI if the user get exhausted and loses concentration during the rehabilitation process. We focus our research in aims of improving the lives of many upper limb disabled individuals through a combination of current BCI technologies with existing assistive medical systems.
Corporate Sustainable Development: is ‘Integrated Reporting’ a Legitimation Strategy?

In the field of sustainability reporting (SR), the so-called ‘integrated report’ (IR) is gaining momentum. In spite of its voluntary nature, a growing number of firms are adopting IR by participating in the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC) Pilot Programme. Stimulated by concerns on the use of SR as a legitimation strategy, the paper investigates whether the decision to adopt an IR stems from the need to repair legitimacy threats. By showing that IR adopters have significantly higher Bloomberg ESG disclosure ratings relative to non-adopters, we reject the hypothesis of firms adopting IR as a response to a poor rating. Additionally, we show that other proxies of legitimacy pressures (size, leverage, profitability, industry) do not play a role in explaining IR adoption. Overall, our evidence suggests that corporate engagement in IR is not a matter of strategic legitimation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment
Detecting Shifts in News Stories for Paragraph Extraction

For multi-document summarization where documents are collected over an extended period of time, the subject in a document changes over time. This paper focuses on subject shift and presents a method for extracting key paragraphs from documents that discuss the same event. Our extraction method uses the results of event tracking which starts from a few sample documents and finds all subsequent documents that discuss the same event. The method was tested on the TDT1 corpus, and the result shows the effectiveness of the method.
Development and Validation of a Perceptual Instrument to Measure E-Commerce Performance

This paper develops and validates an attitudinal scale that can measure the performance of e-commerce operations both in "pure play" Internet firms and in on-line components of multichannel firms. The measurement instrument is grounded in a resource-based view of the firm. The final instrument contains a 14-item perceptual measurement scale. It was tested with data collected from a sample of 595 managers responsible for e-commerce operations. Psychometric testing of the instrument showed adequate construct validity.
Third Way Reforms: Social Democracy after the Golden Age

1. Introduction 2. Theorizing the third way 3. Constraints on action: institutions and ideas 4. Prelude to the third way 5. Expansion in active protection 6. Restructuring passive protection 7. Economic and corporatist contexts for the third way 8. Theories of possibilities.
Improved Theoretical and Practical Guarantees for Chromatic Correlation Clustering

We study a natural generalization of the correlation clustering problem to graphs in which the pairwise relations between objects are categorical instead of binary. This problem was recently introduced by Bonchi et al. under the name of chromatic correlation clustering, and is motivated by many real-world applications in data-mining and social networks, including community detection, link classification, and entity de-duplication. Our main contribution is a fast and easy-to-implement constant approximation framework for the problem, which builds on a novel reduction of the problem to that of correlation clustering. This result significantly progresses the current state of knowledge for the problem, improving on a previous result that only guaranteed linear approximation in the input size. We complement the above result by developing a linear programming-based algorithm that achieves an improved approximation ratio of 4. Although this algorithm cannot be considered to be practical, it further extends our theoretical understanding of chromatic correlation clustering. We also present a fast heuristic algorithm that is motivated by real-life scenarios in which there is a ground-truth clustering that is obscured by noisy observations. We test our algorithms on both synthetic and real datasets, like social networks data. Our experiments reinforce the theoretical findings by demonstrating that our algorithms generally outperform previous approaches, both in terms of solution cost and reconstruction of an underlying ground-truth clustering.
Time trends of surgical treatment and the prognosis for Japanese patients with gastric cancer

The incidence of gastric cancer is much higher in Japan than in other countries even though diagnostics and treatments of such patients have improved. The objective of this study was to present an overview of the past, present and future of surgical treatment for our patients with gastric cancer. We analysed data on 2152 Japanese men and women with gastric cancer who underwent surgical resection from 1965 to 1995 at Kyushu University in Fukuoka, Japan, based on a univariate and the multivariate analysis. We focused on time trends of surgical treatment and the postoperative outcome. Over the years, there have been favourable changes in the numbers of patients with early gastric cancer. In all cases of gastric cancer, the rate of 18% in the first six year period (group 1) was 57% in the last 5 year period (group 6). Size of the tumour was smaller, well-differentiated tumour tissue was more common, and lymphatic involvement was less frequent. Lymph node metastasis, liver metastasis and peritoneal dissemination all decreased. Extensive lymph node dissection was more frequently done and the rate of curative resection (curability A and B) increased. With increases in identifying the early stage of cancer and better perioperative care, mortality rates 30 days after the surgery greatly decreased. Multivariate analysis revealed that the 10 factors of depth of invasion, lymph node metastasis, lymph node dissection, tumour size, liver metastasis, peritoneal dissemination, lymphatic invasion, vascular invasion, lesion in the whole stomach and lesion in the middle stomach were independent factors for determining the prognosis. Detection of the tumour in an early stage, standardized surgical treatment, including routine lymph node dissection, close follow-up schedules and better perioperative management are expected to increase survival time for patients with this malignancy. © 2000 Cancer Research Campaign
Bacteriology and antimicrobial susceptibility of adult chronic dacryocystitis.

INTRODUCTION Chronic dacryocystitis results in chronic infection and inflammation of the lacrimal sac. OBJECTIVE To identify the aetiology of chronic dacryocystitis and to determine their antimicrobial susceptibility pattern. MATERIALS AND METHODS A cross - sectional study was undertaken including 120 lacrimal swab materials collected from patients aged above 15 years suffering from chronic dacryocystitis. STATISTICS Data analysis was done by using software "Win pepi'' ver 7.9. RESULTS The bacteria of eight different species were isolated from 76.66 % (92/120) culture positive samples. 85.86 % showed a single and 14.13 % showed a mixed growth pattern. Coagulase negative staphylococci were the most common bacteria (P= 0.018) accounting for 33.96 % followed by Staphylococcus aureus (25.46 %), Streptococcus pneumoniae ( 19.81 % ), Streptococci viridans (5.66 %), Escherichia coli (5.66 %), Haemophilus spp ( 4.71 % ), Streptococcus pyogenes (3.77 %) and Bacillus spp (0.94 % ). Staphylococcus aureus were the most predominant bacteria in mixed growth. Rate of infection was higher in males 81.39 % than in females 74.02 %. Infection was higher in the age group of above 31 years. In the antimicrobial susceptibility test, except staphylococcus aureus, all the Gram positive isolates were 100 % sensitive to chloramphenicol and were least sensitive to tobramycin, but Gram negative isolates were equally sensitive to Chloramphenicol and Nalidixic acid. CONCLUSION Coagulase negative staphylococci are the most frequently isolated bacteria. Staphylococcus aureus is predominantly found in mixed growth. Chloramphenicol is the most effective drug of choice for chronic dacryocystitis.
High-significance Sunyaev–Zel'dovich measurement: Abell 1914 seen with the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager

We report the first detection of a Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (S-Z) decrement with the Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI). We have made commissioning observations towards the cluster A1914 and have measured an integrated flux density of -8.61 mJy in a uv-tapered map with noise level 0.19 mJy/beam. We find that the spectrum of the decrement, measured in the six channels between 13.5-18 GHz, is consistent with that expected for a S-Z effect. The sensitivity of the telescope is consistent with the figures used in our simulations of cluster surveys with AMI.
Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis.

The purpose of this article is to determine whether the positive association between social support and well-being is attributable more to an overall beneficial effect of support (main- or direct-effect model) or to a process of support protecting persons from potentially adverse effects of stressful events (buffering model). The review of studies is organized according to (a) whether a measure assesses support structure or function, and (b) the degree of specificity (vs. globality) of the scale. By structure we mean simply the existence of relationships, and by function we mean the extent to which one's interpersonal relationships provide particular resources. Special attention is paid to methodologica l characteristic s that are requisite for a fair comparison of the models. The review concludes that there is evidence consistent with both models. Evidence for a buffering model is found when the social support measure assesses the perceived availability of interpersonal resources that are responsive to the needs elicited by stressful events. Evidence for a main effect model is found when the support measure assesses a person's degree of integration in a large social network. Both conceptualizations of social support are correct in some respects, but each represents a different process through which social support may affect well-being. Implications of these conclusions for theories of social support processes and for the design of preventive interventions are discussed.
Recognizing handwritten single digits and digit strings using deep architecture of neural networks

Automatic handwriting recognition of digits and digit strings, are of real interest commercially and as an academic research topic. Recent advances using neural networks and especially deep learning algorithms such as convolutional neural nets present impressive results for single digit recognition. Such results enable developing efficient tools for automatic mail sorting and reading amounts and dates on personal checks. Artificial- Neural-Networks is a powerful technology for classification of visual inputs in many fields due to their ability to approximate complex nonlinear mappings directly from input samples. In this paper we present an approach compromising between the full connectivity of traditional Multi Layer Neural Network trained by Back Propagation and deep architecture. This enables, reasonable training time using a four hidden layers Neural Network and keeps high recognition rates. Pre-trained layers using sparse auto encoders with predefined sequences of training process and rounds, are used to train the net to attain high recognition rates. We have extended the training set to include CVL, MNIST and manually crafted images of single digits from the ORAND-CAR and a private collection of bank checks. Sliding windows technique is used to handle digit strings recognition and obtain encouraging results on CVL and ORAND-CAR benchmarks and our private collection of local bank checks.