Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pollen-based biome reconstructions for Latin America at 0, 6000 and 18 000 radiocarbon years ago

Abstract. The biomisation method is used to reconstruct Latin American vegetation at 6000±500 and 18 000±1000 radiocarbon years before present (14C yr BP) from pollen data. Tests using modern pollen data from 381 samples derived from 287 locations broadly reproduce potential natural vegetation. The strong temperature gradient associated with the Andes is recorded by a transition from high altitude cool grass/shrubland and cool mixed forest to mid-altitude cool temperate rain forest, to tropical dry, seasonal and rain forest at low altitudes. Reconstructed biomes from a number of sites do not match the potential vegetation due to local factors such as human impact, methodological artefacts and mechanisms of pollen representivity of the parent vegetation. At 6000±500 14C yr BP 255 samples are analysed from 127 sites. Differences between the modern and the 6000±500 14C yr BP reconstruction are comparatively small; change relative to the modern reconstruction are mainly to biomes characteristic of drier climate in the north of the region with a slight more mesic shift in the south. Cool temperate rain forest remains dominant in western South America. In northwestern South America a number of sites record transitions from tropical seasonal forest to tropical dry forest and tropical rain forest to tropical seasonal forest. Sites in Central America show a change in biome assignment, but to more mesic vegetation, indicative of greater plant available moisture, e.g. on the Yucatan peninsula sites record warm evergreen forest, replacing tropical dry forest and warm mixed forest presently recorded. At 18 000±1000 14C yr BP 61 samples from 34 sites record vegetation reflecting a generally cool and dry environment. Cool grass/shrubland is prevalent in southeast Brazil whereas Amazonian sites record tropical dry forest, warm temperate rain forest and tropical seasonal forest. Southernmost South America is dominated by cool grass/shrubland, a single site retains cool temperate rain forest indicating that forest was present at some locations at the LGM. Some sites in Central Mexico and lowland Colombia remain unchanged in the biome assignments of warm mixed forest and tropical dry forest respectively, although the affinities that these sites have to different biomes do change between 18 000±1000 14C yr BP and present. The "unresponsive" nature of these sites results from their location and the impact of local edaphic influence.
An Evaluation of Communication Apprehension in Adolescents with Velopharyngeal Inadequacy

Objective This investigation evaluated the construct of communication apprehension (CA) in adolescents with velopharyngeal inadequacy (VPI). Design Prospective comparative study. Settings The investigation was conducted in a hospital-based clinic, voice laboratory, and the homes of participants. Participants Two groups of children participated in this study. The first group was composed of 14 children between the ages of 8 and 14 years who attended the velopharyngeal inadequacy (VPI) clinic at our institution, and the second group was composed of 14 age-matched children from the community with no history of speech or voice disorders. Interventions The study involved completion of the Measure of Elementary Communication Apprehension (MECA) by all 28 participants (14 experimental and 14 control subjects). Reliability of the subjects’ responses to the MECA was also evaluated. Outcome Measures Communication apprehension scores obtained from the MECA were the main focus of the study. Results Children with VPI experienced significantly higher levels of CA than did those in the control group. Moderate-to-good reliability of the MECA was found. Conclusions Based on these data, children with VPI may be experiencing increased levels of CA. Consequently, the experience of high CA has the potential to affect the communication performance and social functioning of children with VPI.
[Effect of estradiol valerate on the male reproductive organs and various semen parameters in rats].

The effect of the administration of estradiol valerate on the male reproductive organs, on their histological structure, and several semen parameters of Wistar rats was studied. In experiment A and B 140 micrograms estradiol valerate/kg b.w. were administered once a week for 4 weeks to 14 weeks old rats by s.c. injection. One week after the 4th injection the rats of experiment A were sacrificed, while the rats of experiment B lived 5 weeks without treatment for recovery. In both experiments, suppression of body weight, food consumption, decreases in absolute and relative weights of testes, epididymides, prostate and semen vesicles were observed along with testis, epididymis, seminal vesicle and prostate atrophy. The absolute and relative weights of adrenals and pituitary revealed a tendency for increase in both treated groups. The histopathological examination of the testes revealed degeneration of spermatozytes in experiment A, and degeneration of spermatozytes, spermatides, spermatozoa, Sertoli and Leydig cells in experiment B. In experiment A the motility, and number of sperms was significantly decreased, the sperm abnormalities were significantly increased. In experiment B the motility of sperms was slightly, the number significantly decreased and the abnormalities slightly increased.
Long-term local control achieved after hypofractionated stereotactic body radiotherapy for adrenal gland metastases: A retrospective analysis of 34 patients

Abstract Aims and background. To describe feasibility, tolerability and clinical outcomes of stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) in the treatment of adrenal metastases in 34 consecutive cancer patients. Material and methods. Between March 2004 and July 2010, a total of 34 consecutive patients, accounting for 36 adrenal metastatic lesions, were treated with SBRT. SBRT treatments were delivered by a Linac Varian 600 with microMLC (3DLine, Elekta, Stockholm, Sweden) and a Linac ELEKTA Precise (Elekta). All 34 patients were clinically and radiologically evaluated during and after completion of SBRT. Following outcomes were taken into account: best clinical response at any time, local control, time to systemic progression, time to local progression, overall survival and toxicity. Survival was estimated by the Kaplan-Meier method and factor potentially affecting outcomes were analyzed with Cox regression analysis. Results. Total RT doses ranged from 20 Gy in 4 fractions to 45 Gy in 18 fractions (median dose: 32 Gy; median number of fractions: 4). All doses were prescribed to the 95% isodose line. No cases of Grade ≥ 3 toxicity were recorded. At a median follow-up time of 41 months (range, 12–75) 22 patients were alive. Three of 28 lesions (11%) showed complete response, 13/28 (46%) partial response, 10/28 (36%) stable disease and 2/28 (7%) progressed in the treated area. Local failure was observed in 13 cases. Actuarial local control rates at one and two years were 66% and 32%, respectively. Median time to local progression was 19 months. Median survival was 22 months. Conclusion. SBRT in adrenal gland metastasis is feasible without significant acute and late toxicities, with a good rate of local control. New SBRT fractionation schemes and the possibility to combine new systemic approaches should be investigated in order to further increase local control and reduce systemic disease progression.
Maternal Depression and Dyadic Interaction: The role of Maternal Attachment Style

Maternal mental health and the contents of her representational world are important determinants of early parent‐child relationship. We examined, first, the role of prenatal and postnatal depressive symptoms and maternal attachment style in predicting the quality of mother‐child interaction. Second, we analysed whether the secure-autonomous attachment style can protect the dyadic interaction from the negative effects of maternal depression. The participants were 59 mother‐infant pairs examined during pregnancy (T1), 4‐5 months postpartum (T2) and when the children were approximately 14 months old (T3). Maternal attachment style was assessed with a modified Adult Attachment Interview -procedure, depressive symptoms with Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, and observed mother‐child interaction with Care Index. The results show that autonomous mothers were more sensitive and responsive and their children more cooperative than dyads with dismissing maternal attachment style. As hypothesized, mothers with the combination of both prenatal and postpartum depressive symptoms were highly unresponsive in their dyadic interaction. Further, prenatal depressive symptoms had a stronger impact on maternal unresponsiveness than postnatal symptoms. As hypothesized, mother’s autonomous attachment style protected the mother‐child interaction from the negative impact of maternal postnatal depressive symptoms, whereas dyads with preoccupied mothers were especially at risk for interaction problems when mothers had postpartum depressive symptoms. Copyright r 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
When More Poor Means Less Poverty: On Income Inequality and Purchasing Power

We show theoretically that the poor can benefit from price changes induced by higher income inequality. As the number of poor increases, the market for products aimed toward the poor grows, and such products become more profitable. As a result, there are circumstances where an increase in income inequality associates with higher purchasing power of the poor. Using cross-country data on the price of one kilogram of rice and the price of a Big Mac hamburger, we confirm a negative association between income inequality and the price of inferior goods, robust to the inclusion of a large set of control variables. Results are also robust to a first difference specification and to a two-stage instrumental variables approach. Examining economic well-being, it is thus important to analyze not only the incomes of households, but also the prices of the products and services that they buy.
Asymptotically Optimal Sum-Rate of Random Unitary Beamforming with Double Thresholds

The capacity of multiple-input multiple-output broadcast channel (MIMO-BC) is known to be achieved by dirty paper coding (DPC). In multi-user environment, the sum-rate of DPC scales like M log log K for a large number of K users and fixed M antennas at the base station. Unfortunately, due to the limited feedback channel, the random unitary beamforming (RUB) has been presented as a simple and practical technique capable of supporting spatial division multiple access (SDMA) instead of DPC. Moreover, the multi-beam transmission with selective binary feedback (MBTSB) has been proposed to schedule the users simply as well as to reduce the amount of feedback per user by exploiting threshold. In this paper, we propose the RUB scheme with two different predetermined thresholds to extend the MBTSB. We first show that our proposed scheme can outperform the MBTSB without changing the amount of feedback per user. From our analysis, we show that the scaling law of our proposed scheme approaches to M log log K asymptotically for a large number of K users and the fixed M antennas.
Assessment of diabetic retinopathy in newly diagnosed black Kenyan type 2 diabetics.

OBJECTIVE To determine the prevalence and pattern of diabetic retinopathy in newly diagnosed black African patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and the associated risk factors. DESIGN Cross-sectional hospital-based study. SETTING Eye clinic of Kenyatta National Hospital, Nairobi, Kenya. SUBJECTS Africans aged 20 years and above with newly diagnosed type 2 diabetes mellitus of up to 12 months duration. RESULTS One hundred and forty one eyes of 71 patients were included in this study, while slides of 92 eyes of 65 patients were of good enough quality for evaluation. The mean duration of diabetes was 11.7 weeks (SD 16.6) and 11.3 (SD 10.1) in men and women respectively. Overall, the prevalence of diabetic retinopathy and clinically significant macula oedema was 30.4% and 8.7% respectively. There was a positive association between diabetic retinopathy and systolic blood pressure. CONCLUSION The prevalence of diabetic retinopathy in newly diagnosed Africans with type 2 diabetes in Kenya is very high. This suggests longstanding undiagnosed diabetes.
Lyme borreliosis reinfection: might it be explained by a gender difference in immune response?

Lyme borreliosis is a tick‐borne disease often manifesting as a circular skin lesion. This cutaneous form of the disease is known as erythema migrans. In a 5‐year follow‐up study in southern Sweden, 31 of 708 individuals initially diagnosed with erythema migrans and treated with antibiotics were found to be reinfected with Borrelia burgdorferi. Although men and women were tick‐bitten to the same extent, 27 of the 31 reinfected individuals were women, all of whom were over 44 years of age. The aim of this study was to determine whether this discrepancy in gender distribution could be a result of differences in immunological response. Twenty single‐infected and 21 reinfected women and 18 single‐infected and three reinfected men were included in the study. None of the participants showed any sign of an ongoing B. burgdorferi infection, and thus the habitual response was captured. Lymphocytes were separated from blood and stimulated with antigens. The secretion of interleukin (IL)‐4, IL‐6, IL‐10, interferon (IFN)‐γ and tumour necrosis factor (TNF)‐α was measured by enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), enzyme‐linked immunosorbent spot‐forming cell assay (ELISPOT) or Immulite. No difference was detected in cytokine secretion between single‐infected and reinfected individuals. We also compared the immunological response in men and women, regardless of the number of B. burgdorferi infections. Women displayed a significantly higher spontaneous secretion of all cytokines measured. The ratios of IL‐4:IFN‐γ and IL‐10:TNF‐α were significantly higher in women. Gender differences in immune reactivity might in part explain the higher incidence of reinfection in women. The higher IL‐4:IFN‐γ and IL‐10:TNF‐α ratios seen in women indicate that postmenopausal women have T helper type 2 (Th2)‐directed reactivity with impaired inflammatory responses which might inhibit the elimination of spirochetes.
Increase of Oxygen Consumption during a Progressive Decrease of Ventilatory Support Is Lower in Patients Failing the Trial in Comparison with Those Who Succeed

Background:The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that, during weaning from mechanical ventilation, when the pressure support level is reduced, oxygen consumption increases more in patients unable to sustain the decrease in ventilatory assistance (weaning failure). Methods:Patients judged eligible for weaning were enrolled. Starting from 20 cm H2O, pressure support was decreased in 4-cm H2O steps, lasting 10 min each, until 0 cm H2O; this level was kept for 1 h. The average oxygen consumption from the last 3 min of each step, along with other ventilatory variables, was measured by indirect calorimetry (M-CAiOVX “metabolic module,” Engstrom Carestation; GE Healthcare, Madison, WI) and recorded. Patients were defined as belonging to the failure group if, at any moment, they developed signs of respiratory distress according to standard criteria, or to the success group otherwise. Results:Twenty-eight patients were studied. In most patients, the minimum oxygen consumption was not recorded at the highest pressure support applied. Sixteen patients were able to complete the weaning trial successfully, whereas 12 failed it; the success group had a minimum oxygen consumption lower than failure group (mean ± SD: 174 ± 44 vs. 215 ± 53 ml/min, P < 0.05). Moreover, although respiratory drive (assessed by P0.1) increased more in the failure group, this group had a lower increase in oxygen consumption, contradicting our hypothesis. Conclusions:Patients failing a decremental pressure support trial, in comparison with those who succeed, had an higher baseline oxygen consumption and were not able to increase their oxygen consumption in response to an increased demand.
There’s no ‘Count or Predict’ but task-based selection for distributional models

In this paper, we investigate the differences between prediction-based (word2vec), dense count-based (GloVe) and sparse count-based (JoBimText) semantic models. We evaluate the models, which were selected because they can all be computed efﬁciently on large data, based on word similarity tasks and a semantic ranking task both for verbs and nouns. We demonstrate that prediction-based models yield higher scores than the other two models at determining a similarity score between two words. To the contrary, sparse count-based methods perform best in the ranking task. Further, sparse count-based methods beneﬁt more from linguistically informed contexts, such as dependency relations. In summary, we highlight differences of popular distributional semantic representations and derive recommendations for their usage
Dynamic properties for the induced maps on n-fold symmetric product suspensions

Let X be a continuum. For any positive integer n we consider the hyperspace Fn(X) and if n is greater than or equal to two, we consider the quotient space SFn(X) defined in [3]. For a given map f : X → X, we consider the induced maps Fn(f) : Fn(X) → Fn(X) and SFn(f) : SFn(X) → SFn(X) defined in [4]. Let M be one of the following classes of maps: exact, mixing, weakly mixing, transitive, totally transitive, strongly transitive, chaotic, minimal, irreducible, feebly open and turbulent. In this paper we study the relationships between the following statements: f ∈ M, Fn(f) ∈ M and SFn(f) ∈ M.
Democratizing Candidate Selection

This special issue offers an up-to-date overview of the democratization of candidate selection, while giving attention to causes and cases from both past and present. The focus is on the consequences of internal democratization for the overall functioning of political parties. The contributions show that there are many forms of democratizing candidate selection. These differences mainly concern the inclusiveness of the selectorate that controls the candidate selection process and the degree of centralization of the selection methods, of which the role and composition of the selectorate are the most vital and defining criteria. The types of consequences and their impact on the functioning of parties are not univocal because there are different degrees of democratization. The empirical evidence presented by the contributions shows that moderate forms of democratization can have beneficial effects on party organizations - such as higher levels of membership participation - but that this effect is not certain. Radical forms, on the other hand, are more likely to distort party cohesiveness, and consequently weaken the quality of representative democracy.
An Ultra-Low Power 1.7-2.7 GHz Fractional-N Sub-Sampling Digital Frequency Synthesizer and Modulator for IoT Applications in 40 nm CMOS

This paper introduces an ultra-low power 1.7-2.7-GHz fractional-N sub-sampling digital PLL (SS-DPLL) for Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications targeting compliance with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and IEEE802.15. 4 standards. A snapshot time-to-digital converter (TDC) acts as a digital sub-sampler featuring an increased out-of-range gain and without any assistance from the traditional counting of DCO edges, thus further reducing power consumption. With a proposed DCO-divider phase rotation in the feedback path, the impact of the digital-to-time converter’s (DTC’s) non-linearity on the PLL is reduced and improves fractional spurs by at least 8 dB across BLE channels. Moreover, a “variable-preconditioned LMS” calibration algorithm is introduced to dynamically correct the DTC gain error with fractional frequency control word (FCW) down to 1/16384. Fabricated in 40 nm CMOS, the SS-DPLL achieves phase noise performance of −109 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, while consuming a record-low power of 1.19 mW.
Is Brazil the Land of Happiness? A Comparative Study Using a Sample with Economics Students from UFPE and Purdue

In this article we study the level of happiness using a sample of American and Brazilian college students. We applied about 187 questionnaires among economics students at Purdue University and also at Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE). We found that American college students have a higher probability of self-reporting as happier than Brazilian students. We also found interesting differences: (i) women are happier than men at Purdue, but men are happier than women at UFPE; (ii) family background does not seem to have a clear impact on happiness among Purdue students, but it certainly has a direct impact on happiness among UFPE students; (iii) “extra money” is an important factor for happiness in the two groups, but it is definitely more important for male students at UFPE; (iv) leisure is the key factor for happiness among Purdue students; and (v) policy towards improvements in public safety would have a stronger effect on happiness among economics UFPE students than among those who attend the Purdue University
Loxapine delivered as a thermally generated aerosol does not prolong QTc in a thorough QT/QTc study in healthy subjects

The objective of this study was to establish effects of inhaled loxapine on the QTc interval in this randomized, placebo‐controlled, double‐blind crossover study. Forty‐eight healthy volunteers received a single inhaled placebo or 10 mg loxapine. Plasma concentrations of loxapine increased with a median Tmax of 1 minute and a mean Cmax of 312 ng/mL. After an initial rapid distribution phase, plasma concentrations of loxapine declined with a terminal half‐life of 8 hours. Exposure to the active metabolite 7‐OH‐loxapine was 15% of the parent compound based on mean AUCinf and its terminal half‐life was 12 hours. Inhaled loxapine did not increase QT intervals, as demonstrated by the upper bound of the 1‐sided 95% CIs placed on the point estimate of the placebo‐subtracted change of QTcI (ΔΔQTcI) being less than 10 milliseconds at all 11 post‐dose times. The maximum ΔΔQTcI occurred at 1 hour post‐dose (LSmean 5.42 milliseconds, upper confidence bound 7.75 milliseconds). The study outcome was validated by the demonstrated assay sensitivity using the positive control moxifloxacin maximum ΔΔQTcI occurred at 3 hour post‐dose (LSmean 8.36 milliseconds, lower confidence bound 5.82 milliseconds). The analyses of QTc outliers, and the lack of emergent diagnostic findings for QTcI, QTcB, and QTcF; and simple mean placebo‐subtracted changes of QTcI and QTcF supported the primary QT analysis conclusion that this is a negative finding and there is no apparent QT prolongation associated with the therapeutic dose of inhaled loxapine.