Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Venous thromboembolism in the Chinese population--experience in a regional hospital in Hong Kong.

OBJECTIVE To estimate the incidence and determine the characteristic features of venous thromboembolism in the Hong Kong Chinese population. DESIGN Retrospective study. SETTING Regional hospital, Hong Kong. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Data were collected during a period of four years (1997-2000). Patients with duplex doppler ultrasonography or venography-documented venous thromboembolism and new episodes of deep vein thrombosis were identified from Department of Diagnostic Radiology records. Patients with high-probability ventilation-perfusion scans were identified from Department of Nuclear Medicine records and these scans were taken as evidence of pulmonary embolism. Patients with intermediate-probability ventilation-perfusion scans, with pulmonary embolism documented by either pulmonary angiography or spiral computed tomography scan, were also included in the study. Patients with autopsy-verified fatal pulmonary embolism were identified from Department of Pathology records. Patients with deep vein thrombosis at other sites were sought from patient discharge diagnostic coding data. Medical records were reviewed for patient characteristics and conditions associated with the development of venous thromboembolism. RESULTS Three hundred and seventy-six Chinese patients had venous thromboembolism during the study period. Of these, 352 had peripheral deep vein thrombosis, five had deep vein thrombosis at other sites (cerebral sinus and portal vein thrombosis), 40 had pulmonary embolism (26 had concomitant deep vein thrombosis), and six had fatal pulmonary embolism shown at autopsy. CONCLUSION The calculated annual incidence of venous thromboembolism in Hong Kong Chinese people was estimated at 16.6 events per 100,000 population, which is lower than incidence rates reported in Caucasians. The four conditions most commonly associated with venous thromboembolism were medical illness, malignancy, orthopaedic surgery, and intravenous drug use. Conditions associated with venous thromboembolism in patients younger than 45 years included intravenous drug use, thrombophilia, pregnancy, and the use of oral contraceptives.
Rheological Properties of Cemented Tailing Backfill and the Construction of a Prediction Model

Workability is a key performance criterion for mining cemented tailing backfill, which should be defined in terms of rheological parameters such as yield stress and plastic viscosity. Cemented tailing backfill is basically composed of mill tailings, Portland cement, or blended cement with supplementary cement material (fly ash and blast furnace slag) and water, among others, and it is important to characterize relationships between paste components and rheological properties to optimize the workability of cemented tailing backfill. This study proposes a combined model for predicting rheological parameters of cemented tailing backfill based on a principal component analysis (PCA) and a back-propagation (BP) neural network. By analyzing experimental data on mix proportions and rheological parameters of cemented tailing backfill to determine the nonlinear relationships between rheological parameters (i.e., yield stress and viscosity) and mix proportions (i.e., solid concentrations, the tailing/cement ratio, the specific weight, and the slump), the study constructs a prediction model. The advantages of the combined model were as follows: First, through the PCA, original multiple variables were represented by two principal components (PCs), thereby leading to a 50% decrease in input parameters in the BP neural network model, which covered 98.634% of the original data. Second, in comparison to conventional BP neural network models, the proposed model featured a simpler network architecture, a faster training speed, and more satisfactory prediction performance. According to the test results, any error between estimated and expected output values from the combined prediction model based on the PCA and the BP neural network was within 5%, reflecting a remarkable improvement over results for BP neural network models with no PCA.
Document Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimation

We present an approach based on feed-forward neural networks for learning the distribution of textual documents. This approach is inspired by the Neural Autoregressive Distribution Estimator(NADE) model, which has been shown to be a good estimator of the distribution of discrete-valued igh-dimensional vectors. In this paper, we present how NADE can successfully be adapted to the case of textual data, retaining from NADE the property that sampling or computing the probability of observations can be done exactly and efficiently. The approach can also be used to learn deep representations of documents that are competitive to those learned by the alternative topic modeling approaches. Finally, we describe how the approach can be combined with a regular neural network N-gram model and substantially improve its performance, by making its learned representation sensitive to the larger, document-specific context.
Projected Shifts in Coffea arabica Suitability among Major Global Producing Regions Due to Climate Change

Regional studies have shown that climate change will affect climatic suitability for Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica) within current regions of production. Increases in temperature and changes in precipitation patterns will decrease yield, reduce quality and increase pest and disease pressure. This is the first global study on the impact of climate change on suitability to grow Arabica coffee. We modeled the global distribution of Arabica coffee under changes in climatic suitability by 2050s as projected by 21 global circulation models. The results suggest decreased areas suitable for Arabica coffee in Mesoamerica at lower altitudes. In South America close to the equator higher elevations could benefit, but higher latitudes lose suitability. Coffee regions in Ethiopia and Kenya are projected to become more suitable but those in India and Vietnam to become less suitable. Globally, we predict decreases in climatic suitability at lower altitudes and high latitudes, which may shift production among the major regions that produce Arabica coffee.
Synergistic Antitumor Activity of ZD6474, An Inhibitor of Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor Receptor and Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Signaling, with Gemcitabine and Ionizing Radiation against Pancreatic Cancer

Purpose: Standard treatments have modest effect against pancreatic cancer, and current research focuses on agents targeting molecular pathways involved in tumor growth and angiogenesis. This study investigated the interactions between ZD6474, an inhibitor of tyrosine kinase activities of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2 and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), gemcitabine, and ionizing radiation in human pancreatic cancer cells and analyzed the molecular mechanisms underlying this combination. Experimental Design: ZD6474, ionizing radiation, and gemcitabine, alone or in combination, were given in vitro to MIA PaCa-2, PANC-1, and Capan-1 cells and in vivo to MIA PaCa-2 tumor xenografts. The effects of treatments were studied by the evaluation of cytotoxicity, apoptosis, cell cycle, EGFR and Akt phosphorylation, modulation of gene expression of enzymes related to gemcitabine activity (deoxycytidine kinase and ribonucleotide reductase), as well as vascular endothelial growth factor immunohistochemistry and microvessel count. Results:In vitro, ZD6474 dose dependently inhibited cell growth, induced apoptosis, and synergistically enhanced the cytotoxic activity of gemcitabine and ionizing radiation. Moreover, ZD6474 inhibited phosphorylation of EGFR and Akt and triggered cell apoptosis. PCR analysis showed that ZD6474 increased the ratio between gene expression of deoxycytidine kinase and ribonucleotide reductase. In vivo, ZD6474 showed significant antitumor activity alone and in combination with radiotherapy and gemcitabine, and the combination of all three modalities enhanced MIA PaCA-2 tumor growth inhibition compared with gemcitabine alone. Conclusions: ZD6474 decreases EGFR and Akt phosphorylation, enhances apoptosis, favorably modulates gene expression in cancer cells, and acts synergistically with gemcitabine and radiotherapy to inhibit tumor growth. These findings support the investigation of this combination in the clinical setting.
Vector Quantization Approach for Speaker Recognition

Speaker recognition is the process of automatically recognizing who is speaking on the basis of individual information included in speech waves. This technique makes it possible to use the speaker's voice to verify their identity and control access to services such as voice dialing, banking by telephone, telephone shopping, database access services, information services, voice mail, security control for confidential information areas, and remote access to computers. Speaker-specific characteristics exist in speech signals due to different speakers having different resonances of the vocal tract. These differences can be exploited by extracting feature vectors such as Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) from the speech signal. The Vector Quantization (VQ) approach is used for mapping vectors from a large vector space to a finite number of regions in that space. Each region is called a cluster and can be represented by its center called a codeword. The collection of all code words is called a codebook. After the enrollment session, the acoustic vectors extracted from input speech of a speaker provide a set of training vectors. LBG algorithm due to Linde, Buzo and Gray is used for clustering a set of L training vectors into a set of M codebook vectors.
Comparison of Multi Criteria Decision Making Algorithms for Ranking Cloud Renderfarm Services

Cloud services that provide a complete environment for the animators to render their files using the resources in the cloud are called Cloud Renderfarm Services. The objective of this work is to rank and compare the performance of these services using two popular Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Algorithms namely the Analytical Hierarchical Processing (AHP) and SAW (Simple Additive Weighting) methods. The performance of three real time cloud renderfarm services are ranked and compared based on five Quality of Service (QoS) attributes that are important to these services namely the Render Node Cost, File Upload Time, Availability, Elasticity and Service Response Time. The performance of these cloud renderfarm services are ranked in four different simulations by varying the weights assigned for each QoS attribute and the ranking obtained are compared. The results show that AHP and SAW assigned similar ranks to all three cloud renderfarm services for all simulations.
Refined Balloon Pulmonary Angioplasty for Inoperable Patients with Chronic Thromboembolic Pulmonary Hypertension

Background—Although balloon pulmonary angioplasty (BPA) for inoperable patients with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension was first reported over a decade ago, its clinical application has been restricted because of limited efficacy and complications. We have refined the procedure of BPA to maximize its clinical efficacy. Methods and Results—Sixty-eight consecutive patients with inoperable chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension underwent BPA. We evaluated pulmonary artery diameters and determined the appropriate balloon size by using intravascular ultrasound. We performed BPA in a staged fashion over multiple, separate procedures to maximize efficacy and reduce the risk of reperfusion pulmonary injury. A total of 4 (2–8) sessions were performed in each patient, and the number of vessels dilated per session was 3 (1–14). The World Health Organization functional class improved from 3 to 2 (P<0.01), and mean pulmonary arterial pressure was decreased from 45.4±9.6 to 24.0±6.4 mm Hg (P<0.01). One patient died because of right heart failure 28 days after BPA. During follow-up for 2.2±1.4 years after the final BPA, another patient died of pneumonia, and the remaining 66 patients are alive. In 57 patients who underwent right heart catheterization at follow-up, improvement of mean pulmonary arterial pressure was maintained (24.0±5.8 mm Hg at 1.0±0.9 years). Forty-one patients (60%) developed reperfusion pulmonary injury after BPA, but mechanical ventilation was required in only 4 patients. Conclusions—Our refined BPA procedure improves clinical status and hemodynamics of inoperable patients with chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension, with a low mortality. A refined BPA procedure could be considered as a therapeutic approach for patients with inoperable chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension.
Customer aggression, felt anger and emotional deviance: the moderating role of job autonomy

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine whether emotional deviance in response to customer aggression and employees’ feelings of anger is likely to be influenced by perceived job autonomy. To date, studies on emotional labor have focused primarily on emotional regulation strategies. Little is known about the factors that may serve to increase emotional deviance (i.e. situations in which felt and expressed emotions match but are at odds with organizational display rules). Design/methodology/approach – Three samples of service workers were recruited from northern Israel, and data were collected using self-reported questionnaires. Research hypotheses were tested using hierarchical regression analyses. Findings – Study 1 revealed that under conditions of frequent exposure to customer aggression, more perceived job autonomy was associated with more frequent instances of emotional deviance. The results of Study 2 and Study 3 demonstrated that the relationship between anger and emotional deviance was s.
Online parts-based feature discovery using competitive activation neural networks

The family of competitive activation models has recently attracted some interest. These models are a variation upon competitive neural networks where a local feedback process drives the competitive interaction rather than some form of lateral inhibition. However, this process can be viewed in terms of a generative model that reduces the generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence between the input distribution and the reconstruction distribution. From this insight we construct an online training method based on a stochastic gradient descent that reduces this measure while retaining the constraint of non-negativity inherent in the competitive neural network. We compare our results to non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), and show how the method results in a highly orthogonal, localized and parts-based representation of the data set, even when NMF does not, without the use of any explicit orthogonality or localization regularizers. Additionally, we show how the method leads to a basis better suited for discriminative tasks.
Simvastatin Prevents Dopaminergic Neurodegeneration in Experimental Parkinsonian Models: The Association with Anti-Inflammatory Responses

Background In addition to their original applications to lowering cholesterol, statins display multiple neuroprotective effects. N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors interact closely with the dopaminergic system and are strongly implicated in therapeutic paradigms of Parkinson's disease (PD). This study aims to investigate how simvastatin impacts on experimental parkinsonian models via regulating NMDA receptors. Methodology/Principal Findings Regional changes in NMDA receptors in the rat brain and anxiolytic-like activity were examined after unilateral medial forebrain bundle lesion by 6-hydroxydopamine via a 3-week administration of simvastatin. NMDA receptor alterations in the post-mortem rat brain were detected by [3H]MK-801(Dizocilpine) binding autoradiography. 6-hydroxydopamine treated PC12 was applied to investigate the neuroprotection of simvastatin, the association with NMDA receptors, and the anti-inflammation. 6-hydroxydopamine induced anxiety and the downregulation of NMDA receptors in the hippocampus, CA1(Cornu Ammonis 1 Area), amygdala and caudate putamen was observed in 6-OHDA(6-hydroxydopamine) lesioned rats whereas simvastatin significantly ameliorated the anxiety-like activity and restored the expression of NMDA receptors in examined brain regions. Significant positive correlations were identified between anxiolytic-like activity and the restoration of expression of NMDA receptors in the hippocampus, amygdala and CA1 following simvastatin administration. Simvastatin exerted neuroprotection in 6-hydroxydopamine-lesioned rat brain and 6-hydroxydopamine treated PC12, partially by regulating NMDA receptors, MMP9 (matrix metalloproteinase-9), and TNF-a (tumour necrosis factor-alpha). Conclusions/Significance Our results provide strong evidence that NMDA receptor modulation after simvastatin treatment could partially explain its anxiolytic-like activity and anti-inflammatory mechanisms in experimental parkinsonian models. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the critical roles of simvastatin in treating PD via NMDA receptors.
Where Do We Go from Here? New Perspectives on the Black Box in Strategic Human Resource Management Research

The main objective of the present research is to briefly review the strategic human resource management (HRM) literature from multilevel theoretical perspectives to summarize what we know about mediating mechanisms in the HR�performance relationship. By doing so, we highlight future research needs to advance theoretical understanding of the �black box� in strategic HRM research. Furthermore, by offering additional theoretical perspectives that can be used to understand the mediating mechanisms at different levels, we suggest future research directions that capture the complexities associated with strategic HRM through a multilevel theoretical lens. Implications of the model are discussed.
RESEARCH IN THE ETIOLOGY OF DOWN'S SYNDROME. INTRICACIES AND PITFALLS.

Cytological studies have shown that Down's syndrome (" mongolism ") is the result of a chromosomal anomaly which occurs either in one of the parent's germ cells or at a very early stage in (embryonic) development of the affected individual. The chromosomal anomaly involves the occurrence of a third number 21 chromo some, in addition to the normal complement of two, either separately (i. e., trisomy-21) or attached to one of the other acrocentric chromosomes (i. e., translocation to one of the chromosomes numbered 13-15 or 22 — Denver Report, i960). Epidemio logical studies have indicated that numerous factors are related to, and may affect, incidence of the chromosomal anomalies resulting in Down's syndrome. Studies by Collmann and Stoller (1962 a, b) imply fluctuations of annual incidence with a 5-6 year periodicity, a higher incidence in urban compared to rural areas and a cluster ing of affected births in certain geographic regions. Collmann and Stoller postula ted an " infectious agent, probably a virus ", to account for their data. No connec tion, however, can yet be drawn between such a hypothesis and the established cyto genetic anomaly. Periodic fluctuations which are characteristic of recurrent been reported for congenital ano malies syndrome,
Association of adrenocorticotrophin and cortisol concentrations with peripheral blood leukocyte cytokine gene expression in septic and nonseptic neonatal foals.

BACKGROUND The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) is influenced by the proinflammatory cytokines IL-6, IL-1β, and TNF-α in critically ill humans. Information about the association of cytokines with the HPA axis in neonatal foals is lacking. HYPOTHESIS/OBJECTIVES The objectives were to describe for hospitalized septic and nonseptic foals (1) temporal changes in blood concentrations of ACTH, and cortisol, and leukocyte cytokine gene expression, and (2) coassociation of these HPA axis hormones with blood leukocyte cytokine gene expression. ANIMALS Hospitalized septic foals (N = 15) and hospitalized nonseptic foals (N = 11). METHODS Blood samples, obtained from study foals at admission (T = 0), and 24 (T = 1), 48 (T = 2), 72 (T = 3), and 96 (T = 4) hours after admission, were processed to isolate RNA from leukocytes and to harvest plasma and serum for hormone assays. Plasma ACTH and serum cortisol concentrations were determined by radioimmunoassay. Leukocyte mRNA expression of IL-1β IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, and TNF-α was determined using RT-PCR. RESULTS Cortisol concentrations were greater (P < .05) in foals at admission than at other time points. The expressions of IL-8 and IL-10 mRNA were lower (P < .05) at each time point in septic than in nonseptic foals. Among septic foals, ACTH was positively associated (P = .0026) with IL-6 mRNA expression. CONCLUSIONS Sepsis influences secretion of the HPA axis hormones and expression of cytokines in foals. A positive association with the HPA axis and IL-6 expression was detected. The clinical importance of these findings requires additional study.
The ecology of the reentry process: A gendered analysis of community influences

Title of Document: THE ECOLOGY OF THE REENTRY PROCESS: A GENDERED ANALYSIS OF COMMUNITY INFLUENCES Mariel Alper, Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Directed By: Professors Sally Simpson and Kiminori Nakamura Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice Utilizing original data on a large sample of male and female first-time parolees in Pennsylvania (N=10,579), this dissertation examines parole violations and police arrest recidivism outcomes to assess how community characteristics influence men and women’s recidivism during parole. It adds to the literature by examining specific types of technical violations and arrests, including those that do not result in revocation, as they can serve as indicators of the difficulties parolees encounter after prison such as substance abuse and employment difficulties. Additionally, this dissertation adds to the literature by examining whether community effects vary by gender and by race/gender. The findings support the importance of several community characteristics that have been implicated in prior research and uncover previously unexamined gender and gender/race differences. Additionally, the effect of community characteristics varies by the type of recidivism that is examined, suggesting that the way recidivism is conceptualized and measured matters. Disadvantage in the community was associated with higher odds of arrests for men, but lower odds of technical violations. While the availability of service providers increased the odds of monetary violations for both men and women, they were associated with higher odds of employment violations for women and lower odds for men. Offender concentration in the community was associated with higher odds of several types of technical violations for men, including treatment violations, and lower odds of treatment violations for women. On the other hand, offender concentration was also associated with lower odds of drug violations and police arrests for men. For both men and women, lower informal social ties were associated with higher odds of most types of technical violations. Several race-specific effects for men and women were also found. Policy and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. For example, community effects may be more nuanced than previous theories have suggested and theoretical explanations should incorporate gendered experiences and intersectionality. Additionally, investing in parolees’ communities can aid offender reintegration and reduce recidivism and risk assessments should more systematically incorporate community characteristics. Further, findings from this project suggest the need to avoid practices that unintentionally increase recidivism and punitiveness for parolees. THE ECOLOGY OF THE REENTRY PROCESS: A GENDERED ANALYSIS OF COMMUNITY INFLUENCES