Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acculturation Predicts Negative Affect and Shortened Telomere Length

Chronic stress may accelerate cellular aging. Telomeres, protective “caps” at the end of chromosomes, modulate cellular aging and may be good biomarkers for the effects of chronic stress, including that associated with acculturation. The purpose of this analysis was to examine telomere length (TL) in acculturating Hispanic Mexican American women and to determine the associations among TL, acculturation, and psychological factors. As part of a larger cross-sectional study of 516 pregnant Hispanic Mexican American women, we analyzed DNA in blood samples (N = 56) collected at 22–24 weeks gestation for TL as an exploratory measure using monochrome multiplex quantitative telomere polymerase chain reaction (PCR). We measured acculturation with the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans, depression with the Beck Depression Inventory, discrimination with the Experiences of Discrimination Scale, and stress with the Perceived Stress Scale. TL was negatively moderately correlated with two variables of acculturation: Anglo orientation and greater acculturation-level scores. We combined these scores for a latent variable, acculturation, and we combined depression, stress, and discrimination scores in another latent variable, “negative affectivity. ” Acculturation and negative affectivity were bidirectionally correlated. Acculturation significantly negatively predicted TL. Using structural equation modeling, we found the model had an excellent fit with the root mean square error of approximation estimate = . 0001, comparative fit index = 1.0, Tucker–Lewis index = 1.0, and standardized root mean square residual = . 05. The negative effects of acculturation on the health of Hispanic women have been previously demonstrated. Findings from this analysis suggest a link between acculturation and TL, which may indicate accelerated cellular aging associated with overall poor health outcomes.
Evidence of biphonation and source–filter interactions in the bugles of male North American wapiti (Cervus canadensis)

ABSTRACT With an average male body mass of 320 kg, the wapiti, Cervus canadensis, is the largest extant species of Old World deer (Cervinae). Despite this large body size, male wapiti produce whistle-like sexual calls called bugles characterised by an extremely high fundamental frequency. Investigations of the biometry and physiology of the male wapiti's relatively large larynx have so far failed to account for the production of such a high fundamental frequency. Our examination of spectrograms of male bugles suggested that the complex harmonic structure is best explained by a dual-source model (biphonation), with one source oscillating at a mean of 145 Hz (F0) and the other oscillating independently at an average of 1426 Hz (G0). A combination of anatomical investigations and acoustical modelling indicated that the F0 of male bugles is consistent with the vocal fold dimensions reported in this species, whereas the secondary, much higher source at G0 is more consistent with an aerodynamic whistle produced as air flows rapidly through a narrow supraglottic constriction. We also report a possible interaction between the higher frequency G0 and vocal tract resonances, as G0 transiently locks onto individual formants as the vocal tract is extended. We speculate that male wapiti have evolved such a dual-source phonation to advertise body size at close range (with a relatively low-frequency F0 providing a dense spectrum to highlight size-related information contained in formants) while simultaneously advertising their presence over greater distances using the very high-amplitude G0 whistle component. Highlighted Article: North American wapitis produce extremely high-pitched bugles that are incompatible with the dimensions of their vocal folds. Anatomical and acoustic investigations suggest plausible mechanisms responsible for the production of this extraordinary vocalisation.
Effect of cooking methods on the stability of thiamin and folic acid in fortified rice

Abstract Rice fortification offers great potential to deliver essential micronutrients to a large part of the world population. However, high temperatures required for cooking rice are deleterious to thermally labile micronutrients. This study evaluated the content and stability of thiamin and folic acid in fortified rice after different cooking methods (stir-frying, boiling, cooking in a microwave oven and boiling in a Food Service). The analyses were performed by High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). The fortified rice showed the highest thiamin content (0.97 mg/kg) and retention (65.4%) when cooked in microwave oven, and for folic acid the lowest content (0.17 mg/kg) and the highest retention (96.11%) when cooked in a Food Service and stir-fried, respectively. In conclusion, the stability of thiamin and folic acid varied according to the cooking method and the stability of folic acid presented higher percentages in relation to thiamin in the different methods.
Understanding The Role of Managerial Optimism and Uncertainty in the Price Formation Process: Evidence from the Textual Content of Earnings Announcements

We examine the optimism and uncertainty of managerial communications about their firm’s quarterly earnings results. Consistent with earlier work, we find that unexpected managerial textual net optimism is priced by the market, however we also show that the market impact of this soft information is higher when the simultaneously released earnings are less informative signals of the firm’s value (e.g., for high-tech or high P/E multiple firms) and when the text is made more credible by the numerical terms included in the announcement, through the scrutiny of more analysts, or through a history of more informative communications. Furthermore, we document that textual uncertainty is incrementally informative about the first and second moment of abnormal returns, and that it’s a predictor of future firm-specific volatility. Our results suggest that, far from being “cheap talk,” managerial textual content is informative about firm fundamentals and is priced by the market. Importantly, the documented relations between earnings and textual content variables suggest that theoretical models may need to relax their assumptions regarding the independence of simultaneously released signals.
The Entrepreneur's Investor Choice: The Impact on Later-Stage Firm Development

This article analyzes how early-stage financing decisions may affect how entrepreneurial firms ultimately grow. This theoretical study considers an entrepreneur seeking early-stage financing from either a specialist or a generalist investor in the context of stage financing. It is assumed that an early-stage specialist is less efficient in assisting a venture beyond the early-stage round than a generalist. This leads to the following tradeoff: by initially selecting an early-stage specialist, the entrepreneur benefits from increased investor incentives in the first round. Such incentives generate additional value for the entrepreneurial venture, improving valuation in the interim round and thereby mitigating the risk of dilution against follow-up investors and potentially even of premature discontinuation of the project. However, early-stage specialists are more reluctant to finance later rounds. Conversely, using a generalist secures efficient follow-up funding but also leads to weaker investor incentives in the early stage. With this tradeoff, the presence of asymmetric information about the quality of entrepreneurial projects particularly affects generalists; entrepreneurs with strong projects more often choose specialists, while entrepreneurs with weak projects select generalists to secure efficient continuation. The use of convertible securities or adjustment warrants in contracts cannot always eliminate the effect of asymmetric information. Several empirical implications derived from this tradeoff are provided for optimal investor choice.
Gubernatorial Reputation and Vertical Tax Externalities: All Smoke, No Fire?

This paper investigates whether reputation-building strategies guide U.S. governors’ responses to changes in federal cigarette taxes (i.e. vertical tax interactions). Using 1975-2000 state cigarette tax data, we find that reputation-building strategies affect the nature of vertical tax externalities. Lame duck governors exhibit a more negative response to changes in the federal cigarette tax. Thus, by reducing the state tax base and by causing a decline in the state tax, an increase in the federal tax rate reduces state tax revenues in states headed by lame ducks.
The impact of outcome quality, interaction quality, and peer‐to‐peer quality on customer satisfaction with a hospital service

Purpose – Creating superior customer satisfaction has been considered one of the keys to the firm's success and hence, the antecedents of customer satisfaction have been examined numerous times. However, the link between customer satisfaction and peer‐to‐peer quality, which is deemed a critical component of customer experience quality, has not been spotlighted despite its importance. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a theoretical model of the relationship among outcome quality, interaction quality, peer‐to‐peer quality, and customer satisfaction as well as these variables’ impacts on customer loyalty.Design/methodology/approach – To test the model, the authors conducted a survey and collected self‐administered data for data analysis. The proposed relationships were then tested using structural equation modeling.Findings – The findings indicate that outcome quality, interaction quality, and peer‐to‐peer quality perceptions significantly influence customer satisfaction, which, in turn, great.
Risk-Sensitive Reinforcement Learning Via Entropic- VaR Optimization

In the existing work on risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problems, in order to take uncertainty into consideration, risk measure such as conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) has been widely used to design robust RL algorithms. However, the uncertainty set in the dual representation of CVaR is defined by distributions whose Radon-Nikodym derivative is constrained to a certain range. This is a less common way to de-fine distribution neighborhood in machine learning applications. This paper applies a recently developed risk measure named entropic value-at-risk (EVaR) to risk-sensitive RL problems. One appealing feature of EVaR is that the uncertainty set in its dual representation is defined by distributions whose Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance to the nominal distribution is less or equal to a certain level. In this paper, we address the EVaR optimization problem based on Markov decision process (MDP) by proposing a value iteration algorithm. Numerical examples are also provided to illustrate the practicality of our approach.
Emergency department observation of poisoned patients: how long is necessary?

OBJECTIVE To compare the emergency physician disposition decisions after observation periods of two, four, and six hours in a single cohort of ED patients with acute intentional ingestion to determine the accuracy of disposition decisions at two and four hours relative to the six-hour period of observation. METHODS This was a prospective observational study at two university hospital EDs. Study participants were patients with potentially toxic oral ingestions occurring less than six hours prior to ED presentation. Patients with isolated recreational drug or ethanol use were excluded. Structured data forms were completed at presentation, and two, four, and six hours later. Data included signs and symptoms consistent with toxic ingestion, physical examination, laboratory determinations, medications ingested, treatment, and suicide risk. At two and four hours, physicians were asked to determine whether they thought the patient was safe for medical clearance. These patients continued to be observed for six hours. The main outcome was whether patients initially thought to be appropriate for early medical clearance were ultimately cleared at six hours. RESULTS There were 260 patients enrolled: 28 were immediately admitted to the hospital and 17 were immediately discharged; 215 entered ED observation. Patients had a mean age of 24 years; 55% were female; 50% were suicidal; 17% had toxidromes. Of the 215 observed patients, 106 (49%) were deemed safe for early medical clearance at two hours. All 106 were ultimately cleared at six hours (100%, 95% CI = 97% to 100%). Of the 109 not safe for early medical clearance at two hours, 61 (56%) were deemed safe for early medical clearance at four hours; all 61 were subsequently discharged at six hours (100%; 95% CI = 95% to 100%). Overall, 167 of 215 (77%) observed overdose patients were deemed safe for early medical clearance after two or four hours of observation. All 167 were ultimately cleared at six hours (100%; 95% CI = 98.2% to 100%). CONCLUSIONS A large subset of overdose patients who are medically cleared after six hours of observation can be identified within two to four hours of presentation. No patient who was believed to be safe for medical clearance at either two or four hours had a complication within the six-hour time period (95% CI = 0% to 1.8%). These data suggest that asymptomatic patients with selected acute intentional ingestions can be released from medical observation in less than six hours.
Mail myopia: or examining financial services marketing from a brand commitment perspective

This paper is part of a doctoral study of how direct marketing affects brand commitment in the financial services sector. The research explores how to build consumer‐brand commitment within a UK personal finance context, focusing on retail banking. This paper reviews brand loyalty and brand commitment literature and assesses their relevance to personal finance, and their potential contribution as models and measuring instruments for a proposed study of direct mail relationship marketing programmes. Additionally the paper looks at aspects of the commitment construct itself from a review of literature including: relationship and interfirm marketing, organisational behaviour (employee‐employer commitment) and social psychology. The paper touches on the shortcomings of some of the brand commitment definitions available. The paper ends with a draft conceptual framework for use in marketing to develop brand commitment. It includes dimensions taken not only from brand loyalty/commitment literature but also from social psychology and interfirm marketing.
Corporate Governance and Risk Reporting: Evidence from Operational Risk Disclosures in European Banks

In this paper, we examine the impact of corporate governance mechanisms on the quality of operational risk disclosures provided in the annual reports and risk reports in a representative sample of 63 publicly listed European banks for the fiscal years 2008 and 2009. We find that banks having a higher proportion of outside board directors are associated with higher operational risk disclosure quality. Additionally, our results make it clear that the agency theory outweighs the management entrenchment theory in banks as implied by a consistent positive association between the proportion of outstanding shares held by executive directors and operational risk disclosure quality. Interestingly, we find that more stringent legal system could enforce, or motivate, senior management to provide their bank’s stakeholders with operational risk information of higher quality. Our results coincide with the findings of previous studies and confirm the positive impact of effective corporate governance mechanisms on disclosure quality in public firms and the importance of considering the effects of the legal setting in which various disclosure practices take place.
Improving lip-reading performance for robust audiovisual speech recognition using DNNs

This paper presents preliminary experiments using the Kaldi toolkit to investigate audiovisual speech recognition (AVSR) in noisy environments using deep neural networks (DNNs). In particular we use a single-speaker large vocabulary, continuous audiovisual speech corpus to compare the performance of visual-only, audio-only and audiovisual speech recognition. The models trained using the Kaldi toolkit are compared with the performance of models trained using conventional hidden Markov models (HMMs). In addition, we compare the performance of a speech recognizer both with and without visual features over nine different SNR levels of babble noise ranging from 20dB down to -20dB. The results show that the DNN outperforms conventional HMMs in all experimental conditions, especially for the lip-reading only system, which achieves a gain of 37.19% accuracy (84.67% absolute word accuracy). Moreover, the DNN provides an effective improvement of 10 and 12dB SNR respectively for both the single modal and bimodal speech recognition systems. However, integrating the visual features using simple feature fusion is only effective in SNRs at 5dB and above. Below this the degradion in accuracy of an audiovisual system is similar to the audio only recognizer. Index Terms: lip-reading, speech reading, audiovisual speech recognition
Empiric Treatment of Uncomplicated Urinary Tract Infection with Fluoroquinolones in Older Women in Israel: Another Lost Treatment Option?

Background: Current guidelines for the treatment of uncomplicated urinary tract infection (UTI) in women recommend empiric therapy with antibiotics for which local resistance rates do not exceed 10–20%. We hypothesized that resistance rates of Escherichia coli to fluoroquinolones may have surpassed this level in older women in the Israeli community setting. Objectives: To identify age groups of women in which fluoroquinolones may no longer be appropriate for empiric treatment of UTI. Methods: Resistance rates for ofloxacin were calculated for all cases of uncomplicated UTI diagnosed during the first 5 months of 2005 in a managed care organization (MCO) in Israel, in community-dwelling women aged 41–75 years. The women were without risk factors for fluoroquinolone resistance. Uncomplicated UTI was diagnosed with a urine culture positive for E. coli. The data set was stratified for age, using 5 year intervals, and stratum-specific resistance rates (% and 95% CI) were calculated. These data were analyzed to identify age groups in which resistance rates have surpassed 10%. Results: The data from 1291 urine cultures were included. The crude resistance rate to ofloxacin was 8.7% (95% CI 7.4 to 10.2). Resistance was lowest among the youngest (aged 41–50 y) women (3.2%; 95% CI 1.11 to 5.18), approached 10% in women aged 51–55 years (7.1%; 95% CI 3.4 to 10.9), and reached 19.86% (95% CI 13.2 to 26.5) among the oldest women (aged 56–75 y). Conclusions: Physicians who opt to treat UTI in postmenopausal women empirically should consider prescribing drugs other than fluoroquinolones. Concomitant longitudinal surveillance of both antibiotic utilization patterns and uropathogen resistance rates should become routine practice in this managed-care organization.
Impact Properties of Glass Fiber Composites with respect to Surface Treatment and Fiber Volume Fraction

The impact energy absorption characteristics of glass epoxy composites and glass polyester composites with respect to fiber volume fraction were investigated by the instrumented Charpy impact test method. Also, the glass polyester composites both with and without silane treatment were tested. The interlaminar shear properties were measured by the short beam shear test to investigate the correlation between the interlaminar shear properties and the impact energy absorption characteristics. Additionally, the glass epoxy hybrid composites embedded with glass fibers without silane treatment were tested. From the tests, the optimum fiber volume fraction for impact energy absorption was obtained and the progressive impact fracture model was proposed to predict the impact absorption characteristics of composites.
Should we monitor vitamin B12 and folate levels in Crohn's disease patients?

Abstract Objective. Crohn's disease commonly involves the small intestine, which is the site of vitamin B12 and folate absorption. Our aim was to define the prevalence of vitamin B12 and folate deficiency in patients with Crohn's disease and to identify predictive factors associated with such abnormalities. Methods. Two years prospective study of 180 consecutive Crohn's disease patients. Vitamin B12 and folate deficiency was defined as serum levels below 200 pg/ml and 3 ng/ml, respectively. We analysed prevalence of these deficiencies and possible predictive factors including small intestine resection, disease location, activity and duration of disease. Controls were ulcerative colitis patients (n = 70). Results. The prevalence of B12 deficiency in Crohn's disease was 15.6% (95%CI 9.7–20%) compared with 2.8% (95%CI 0.8–9.8%) in ulcerative colitis (p = 0.007). With regard to folate deficiency, the prevalence in patients with Crohn's disease was 22.2% (95%CI 16–28%) compared with 4.3% (95%CI 1.4–12%) in ulcerative colitis (p = 0.001); 7.8% of Crohn's disease patients had macrocytic anemia. Ileal resection was found to be a risk factor for B12 deficiency (OR 2.7; 1.2–6.7; p = 0.02), and disease activity a risk factor for folate deficiency (OR 2.4; 1.2–5.1; p = 0.01). Conclusion. A significant proportion of patients with Crohn's disease suffer from vitamin B12 and/or folate deficiency, suggesting that regular screening should be performed, with closer monitoring in patients with ileal resection or active disease.
Determinants of Intellectual Capital Disclosures in Nigeria

The future drivers of any corporate economy can no longer be capital, land or equipment; but the people and their knowledge base. Several Nigerian firms have started disclosing information on Intellectual Capital. In the setting of our research, we study the determinants of the disclosure of Intellectual Capital information in annual reports of firms listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. A content analysis of annual reports complemented with archival data from sample firms was used to ascertain the determinants of the extent of Intellectual Capital information disclosure. The results highlight that the size of a firm and the industry type play significant roles as determinants for the disclosure of Intellectual Capital information in annual reports. However, in contrast with earlier studies and theoretical arguments of voluntary disclosure, this study does not document any relationship between the Intellectual Capital disclosure level and firm profitability. The paper contributes to literature by providing a better understanding in general to what kind of firms that actually disclose information on intellectual capital in Nigeria and also provides awareness that profitability as crucial as it might seem is not a driving determinant of the decision of Nigerian firms to disclose intellectual capital information.
Interaction of influenza virus haemagglutinin with sphingolipid–cholesterol membrane domains via its transmembrane domain

Sphingolipid–cholesterol rafts are microdomains in biological membranes with liquid‐ordered phase properties which are implicated in membrane traffic and signalling events. We have used influenza virus haemagglutinin (HA) as a model protein to analyse the interaction of transmembrane proteins with these microdomains. Here we demonstrate that raft association is an intrinsic property encoded in the protein. Mutant HA molecules with foreign transmembrane domain (TMD) sequences lose their ability to associate with the lipid microdomains, and mutations in the HA TMD reveal a requirement for hydrophobic residues in contact with the exoplasmic leaflet of the membrane. We also provide experimental evidence that cholesterol is critically required for association of proteins with lipid rafts. Our data suggest that the binding to specific membrane domains can be encoded in transmembrane proteins and that this information will be used for polarized sorting and signal transduction processes.