Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association between Chronic Kidney Disease and Carotid Intima-Media Thickening in Individuals with Hypertension and Impaired Glucose Metabolism

We investigated whether chronic kidney disease (CKD) was associated with carotid intima-media thickening in 1,351 male individuals undergoing general health screening. Glomerular filtration rate (GFR) was estimated by the Modification of Diet in Renal Disease equations using 0.881 as a coefficient for Japanese, and low estimated GFR (eGFR) was defined as an eGFR value of <60 mL/min/1.73 m2. Albuminuria was defined as a urine albumin–to−urine creatinine ratio of ≥30 mg/g, and CKD was defined when low eGFR and/or albuminuria was present. After adjusting for age, CKD was associated with carotid intima-media thickening with an odds ratio of 1.47 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.05–2.06, p=0.0024). After adjusting for age, fasting plasma glucose, and smoking status, both albuminuria and low eGFR were significantly associated with intima-media thickening in individuals with hypertension with an odds ratio of 1.85 (95% CI 1.13–3.03, p=0.015) and 1.79 (95% CI 1.09–2.94, p=0.022), respectively. On the other hand, neither of them was associated with carotid intima-media thickening in individuals without hypertension. Similarly, after adjusting for age, systolic blood pressure, and smoking status, both albuminuria and low eGFR were significantly associated with intima-media thickening in individuals with high fasting glucose (defined as fasting plasma glucose levels of ≥110 mg/dL or current use of anti-diabetic medication), but not in those without. Our data indicate that CKD or its components (low eGFR and albuminuria) may be associated with early carotid atherosclerosis in low-risk individuals, such as those undergoing general health screening, who have hypertension and/or impaired glucose metabolism.
Effects of Deforestation on Household Time Allocation among Rural Agricultural Activities: Evidence from Western Uganda

A non-separable (non-recursive) model was developed to test the participation of households in fuelwood collection and farming activities using data from rural areas of Western Uganda. The results of the quantitative analysis showed that traditional measures of economic conditions – shadow wages and prices, labour time, gender composition of the household, seasonality and agro-ecological differences – were important variables that affect household labour allocation decisions. The results provided no support to earlier studies that contended that as deforestation increases and fuelwood gets scarce, household members will divert time away from farming. The fact that there was no evidence of labour relocation away from agriculture to fuelwood collection implied that the former was a key activity and fuelwood products have not become costly enough to significantly tighten household labour constraints. Efforts were needed to alleviate the labour bottlenecks of subsistence farmers through agro-forestry programmes, efficient use of fuelwood and adoption of efficient cooking equipment, fuelwood substitutes which will relieve environmental good collection labour burdens or reduce collection time for fuelwood. Keywords : Forests, time allocation, agriculture, firewood households
Array thinning for antenna selection in millimeter wave MIMO systems

This paper addresses the problem of designing thinned arrays with minimized side lobe levels for antenna selection in millimeter wave MIMO systems. We propose a new optimization solution based on compressed sensing techniques and convex optimization relaxation which we show to be a heuristic that solves the original binary optimization problem of side lobe level minimization. We compare the proposed method with other approaches from the literature like simulated annealing and genetic algorithms showing the superiority of the method in terms of performance, running time and ease of parameter tuning. The simulation results cover a wide range of dimensions and situations.
A Unified Model for Topics, Events and Users on Twitter

With the rapid growth of social media, Twitter has become one of the most widely adopted platforms for people to post short and instant message. On the one hand, people tweets about their daily lives, and on the other hand, when major events happen, people also follow and tweet about them. Moreover, people’s posting behaviors on events are often closely tied to their personal interests. In this paper, we try to model topics, events and users on Twitter in a unified way. We propose a model which combines an LDA-like topic model and the Recurrent Chinese Restaurant Process to capture topics and events. We further propose a duration-based regularization component to find bursty events. We also propose to use event-topic affinity vectors to model the association between events and topics. Our experiments shows that our model can accurately identify meaningful events and the event-topic affinity vectors are effective for event recommendation and grouping events by topics.
Self-Specific Stimuli Interact Differently than Non-Self-Specific Stimuli with Eyes-Open Versus Eyes-Closed Spontaneous Activity in Auditory Cortex

Previous studies suggest that there may be a distinct relationship between spontaneous neural activity and subsequent or concurrent self-specific stimulus-induced activity. This study aims to test the impact of spontaneous activity as recorded in an eyes-open (EO) resting state as opposed to eyes-closed (EC) on self-specific versus non-self-specific auditory stimulus-induced activity in fMRI. In our first experiment we used self-specific stimuli comprised of the subject’s own name and non-self-specific stimuli comprised of a friend’s name and an unknown name, presented during EO versus EC baselines in a 3 name condition × 2 baseline design. In Experiment 2 we directly measured spontaneous activity in the absence of stimuli during EO versus EC to confirm a modulatory effect of the two baseline conditions in the regions found to show an interaction effect in Experiment 1. Spontaneous activity during EO was significantly higher than during EC in bilateral auditory cortex and non-self-specific names yielded stronger signal changes relative to EO baseline than to EC. In contrast, there was no difference in response to self-specific names relative to EO baseline than to EC despite the difference between spontaneous activity levels. These results support an impact of spontaneous activity on stimulus-induced activity, moreover an impact that depends on the high-level stimulus characteristic of self-specificity.
Learning user interests for a session-based personalized search

It is now widely assumed in personalized information retrieval (IR) area that user interests can provide substantial clues for document relevance estimation. User interests reflect generally the user background and topics of interests. However most of the proposed personalized retrieval models and strategies do not distinguish between short term and long term user interests and make use of the whole search history to improve the search accuracy. In this paper, we study how to learn long term user interests by aggregating concept-based short term ones identified within related search activities. For this purpose, we tackle the problem of session boundary recognition using context-sensitive similarity measures that are able to gauge the changes in the user interest topics with regard to reference ontology. Finally, the search personalization is achieved by re-ranking the search results for a given query using the short term user interest. Our experimental evaluation is carried out using TREC collection and shows that personalization brings significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness. Moreover, we observe that our context-sensitive session boundary recognition method can, to some extent, find a semantic correlation between the query and the user context across the search sessions.
Excitatory Synaptic Transmission in the Inner Retina: Paired Recordings of Bipolar Cells and Neurons of the Ganglion Cell Layer

Properties of glutamatergic synaptic transmission were investigated by simultaneously voltage-clamping a pair of connected bipolar cells and cells in the ganglion cell layer (GLCs) in the newt retinal slice preparation. Activation of the Ca2+ current in a single bipolar cell was essential for evoking the glutamatergic postsynaptic current in the GLC. Depolarization for as short as 15 msec activated both NMDA and non-NMDA receptors. On the other hand, analysis of the spontaneous glutamatergic synaptic currents of GLCs revealed that these currents consisted of mainly non-NMDA receptor activation with little contribution from NMDA receptors. This suggests that non-NMDA receptors of GLCs are clustered in postsynaptic membrane regions immediately beneath the release sites of bipolar cells and that NMDA receptors have lower accessibility to the released transmitter than non-NMDA receptors. Glutamate that is spilled over from the release sites may activate the NMDA receptors. When a prolonged depolarizing pulse was applied to a bipolar cell, the response induced by non-NMDA receptors was limited greatly by their fast desensitization, whereas NMDA receptors were able to produce a maintained response. The relationship between the pulse duration applied to the bipolar cell and the integrated charge of the response evoked in the GLC was almost linear. Therefore, we propose that both non-NMDA and NMDA receptors cooperate to transfer the graded photoresponses of bipolar cells proportionally to GLCs.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Health Care Professionals: Results From a Randomized Trial

The literature is replete with evidence that the stress inherent in health care negatively impacts health care professionals, leading to increased depression, decreased job satisfaction, and psychological distress. In an attempt to address this, the current study examined the effects of a short-term stress management program, mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), on health care professionals. Results from this prospective randomized controlled pilot study suggest that an 8-week MBSR intervention may be effective for reducing stress and increasing quality of life and self-compassion in health care professionals. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.
Stereotypes and the Familiar-Stranger: The Role of Previous Contact and Gender Stereotypes on Eyewitness Recall and Recognition Accuracy

The present study examined the influence of prior familiarity with a perpetrator and gender stereotypes on eyewitness recall and identification accuracy. Participants (N = 257) watched a crime video where the perpetrator was either someone they had never met before (unfamiliar/stranger condition), or was someone with whom they had a 1 minute exposure to prior to the crime (familiar condition). In the familiar conditions the 1 minute exposure included the target talking about their occupation; this occupation was either consistent or inconsistent with gender role stereotypes. There were no significant differences in recall or identification accuracy between the familiar or stereotypes conditions. However, when participants were asked to rate the degree to which they viewed the target as stereotype consistent versus inconsistent, higher stereotype consistency ratings were associated with reporting more total descriptors and higher proportions of correct descriptors. Conversely, lower stereotype consistency ratings predicted more correct identification decisions.
A new series of compact minitwistor spaces and Moishezon twistor spaces over them

Abstract In recent papers [Honda, J. Diff. Geom 82: 411–444, 2009], [Honda, Invent. Math 174, 463–504, 2008], we gave explicit description of some new Moishezon twistor spaces. In this paper, developing the method in the papers much further, we explicitly give projective models of a number of new Moishezon twistor spaces, as conic bundles over some rational surfaces (called minitwistor spaces). These include the twistor spaces studied in the papers as very special cases.
Policymaker's Guide to Feed-in Tariff Policy Design

Feed-in tariffs (FITs) are the most widely used renewable energy policy in the world for driving accelerating renewable energy (RE) deployment, accounting for a greater share of RE development than either tax incentives or renewable portfolio standard (RPS) policies. FITs have generated significant RE deployment, helping bring the countries that have implemented them successfully to the forefront of the global RE industry. In the European Union (EU), FIT policies have led to the deployment of more than 15,000 MW of solar photovoltaic (PV) power and more than 55,000 MW of wind power between 2000 and the end of 2009. In total, FITs are responsible for approximately 75% of global PV and 45% of global wind deployment. Countries such as Germany, in particular, have demonstrated that FITs can be used as a powerful policy tool to drive RE deployment and help meet combined energy security and emissions reductions objectives. This policymaker's guide provides a detailed analysis of FIT policy design and implementation and identifies a set of best practices that have been effective at quickly stimulating the deployment of large amounts of RE generation. Although the discussion is aimed primarily at decision makers who have decided that a FIT policy best more » suits their needs, exploration of FIT policies can also help inform a choice among alternative renewable energy policies. « less
A new methodology for the transient analysis of lossy and dispersive multiconductor transmission lines

This paper presents a new technique for the transient analysis of multiconductor transmission lines (MTLs). The proposed model is derived from the analytical characterization of half-T ladder networks (HTLNs), which approximate the MTLs. Using closed-form polynomials (named D'Amico-Faccio-Ferri (DFF) and DFFz), poles and residues of the two-port representation of MTLs are extracted analytically, thus leading to a time-domain macromodel, which can be incorporated in a circuit simulator. Furthermore, the knowledge of poles allows one to develop an efficient model order reduction technique by selecting only the dominant poles of the system within a fixed bandwidth. Stability and passivity properties of the proposed model are intrinsically enforced as a consequence of stability and passivity of HTLNs and rational approximation procedure.
Inhibitory Effects of Protein Kinase C on Inwardly Rectifying K+- and ATP-Sensitive K+ Channel-Mediated Responses of the Basilar Artery

Background and Purpose— The structurally related, inwardly rectifying K+ (KIR) channel and the ATP-sensitive K+ (KATP) channel are important modulators of cerebral artery tone. Although protein kinase C (PKC) activators have been shown to inhibit these channels with the use of patch-clamp electrophysiology, effects of PKC on K+ channel function in intact cerebral blood vessels are unknown. We therefore tested whether pharmacological alteration of PKC activity affects cerebral vasodilator responses to KIR and/or KATP channel activators in vivo. Methods— We measured changes in basilar artery diameter using a cranial window preparation in anesthetized rats. In addition, intracellular recordings of smooth muscle membrane potential were made in isolated basilar arteries. Results— K+ (5 to 15 mmol/L) and aprikalim (1 to 10 &mgr;mol/L) each elicited reproducible vasodilatation. The PKC activator phorbol-12,13-dibutyrate (PdBu) (50 nmol/L) inhibited responses to K+ (by 40% to 55%) and aprikalim (by 40% to 70%), whereas responses to papaverine were unaffected. The PKC inhibitor calphostin C (0.1 &mgr;mol/L) augmented responses to K+ (by 2- to 3-fold) and aprikalim (2-fold) but not papaverine. In addition, K+ (5 mmol/L) and aprikalim (3 &mgr;mol/L) each hyperpolarized the basilar artery. PdBu inhibited these responses to aprikalim by 45% but had no effect on K+-induced hyperpolarization. Conclusions— These data suggest that both basal and stimulated PKC activity inhibit KIR and KATP channel–mediated cerebral vasodilatation in vivo. The inhibitory effect on KATP channel–mediated vasodilatation occurs at least partly by inhibition of hyperpolarization mediated by KATP channels. PKC inhibits K+-induced vasodilatation without affecting hyperpolarization, suggesting that the inhibitory effect of PKC on vasodilator responses to K+ does not involve altered KIR channel function.
Decision Under Ambiguity: Effects of Sign and Magnitude

Decision under ambiguity (uncertainty with unknown probabilities) has been attracting attention in behavioral and neuroeconomics. However, recent neuroimaging studies have mainly focused on gain domains while little attention has been paid to the magnitudes of outcomes. In this study, we examined the effects of the sign (i.e., gain and loss) and magnitude of outcomes on ambiguity aversion and the additivity of subjective probabilities in Ellsberg's urn problem. We observed that (i) ambiguity aversion was observed in both signs, and (ii) subadditivity of subjective probability was not observed in negative outcomes.
Beyond Microskills

Heeding the call to the profession, the authors present both a definition and model of counseling competence. Undergirding the model are 15 foundational principles. The authors conceptualize counseling competence as more complex and nuanced than do traditional microskills models and include cognitive, affective, and behavioral components. The model consists of 4 superordinate competencies—determining therapeutic outcomes, facilitating therapeutic outcomes, evaluating therapeutic outcomes, and sustaining therapeutic outcomes—and 12 subordinate competencies: self-appraisal/self-evaluating, structuring the therapy, building a therapeutic alliance, applying a conceptual map of therapeutic change, using therapeutic techniques, self-correcting, surmounting obstacles, leveraging opportunities, managing special situations, working with other systems of care, consulting other sources, and terminating therapy. Integral to the model is the integrated deep structure, which consists of 5 metacognitions: purposefulness, motivation, selection, sequencing, and timing.
Financial Accounting Information, Organizational Complexity and Corporate Governance Systems

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how governance systems of large public U.S. corporations vary with information properties of numbers produced by their financial accounting systems. We argue that in firms whose current accounting numbers do a relatively poor job of capturing the effects of the firm's current activities and outcomes on shareholder value, the accounting numbers are less effective in the governance setting. We predict that such firms will substitute costly governance mechanisms to compensate for their less useful accounting numbers. We explore whether governance systems vary with the timeliness of earnings by examining the cross-sectional relation between proxies for earnings timeliness and subsequent corporate governance systems of 784 firms in the Fortune 1000. The governance systems we consider include board composition, stockholdings of inside and outside directors, ownership concentration and the structure of executive compensation. Our results support a significant negative relation between our timeliness metrics and subsequent costly corporate governance mechanisms after controlling for other firm characteristics.
Contemporary police stress: the impact of the evolving socio-political context

We interviewed representatives from 110 law enforcement agencies to examine how occupational stressors have changed in recent years. The most frequently cited stressors involved day-to-day enforcement activities that put officers in potentially dangerous situations, the administrative burden and shift work associated with the profession, family and relationship challenges that accompany the job, and the state of police community relations and negative portrayal of the police by the media. Respondents reported that officers experience increased fear and stress due to recent changes in the socio-political environment, which is characterized by strained police-community relations, increased scrutiny associated with the 24-hr news cycle, and the ubiquity of personal recording devices and sharing videos on social media. However, generational shifts in the workforce and efforts to destigmatize mental health care has also changed the landscape of police stress for the better.
Income Comparisons Among Neighbours and Life Satisfaction in East and West Germany

A series of studies have suggested that changes in others' income may be perceived differently in post-transition and capitalist societies. This paper draws on the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics in very tightly drawn neighbourhoods to investigate whether reactions to changes in their neighbours' income divide the German nation. We find that the neighbourhood income effect for West Germany is negative (which is in line with the "relative income" hypothesis) and slightly more marked in neighbourhoods that may be assumed to be places where social interactions between neighbours take place. In contrast, the coefficients on neighbourhood income in East Germany are positive (which is consistent with the 'signalling' hypothesis), but statistically not significant. This suggests not only that there is a divide between East and West Germany, but also that neighbours may not be a relevant comparison group in societies that have comparatively low levels of neighbouring.
Understanding Uncertainty in School League Tables *

In England, contextual value added (CVA) school performance tables are published annually by the government. These tables present statisticalmodel-based estimates of the educational effectiveness of schools, together with 95 per cent confidence intervals to communicate their statistical uncertainty. However, this information, particularly the notion of statistical uncertainty, is hard for users to understand. There is a real need to make school performance tables clearer. The media attempt to do this for the public by ranking schools in so-called ̳school league tables‘; however, they invariably discard the 95 per cent confidence intervals and, in doing so, encourage the public to over-interpret differences in schools‘ ranks. In this paper, we explore a simulation method to produce simple graphical summaries of schools‘ ranks that clearly communicate their associated uncertainty. *Submitted February 2011. The authors are grateful for the helpful comments provided by the Guest Editors and also for those provided by the referees. This research was funded under the UK Economic and Social Research Council‘s National Centre for Research Methods programme.