Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Measuring the Propagation of Financial Distress with Granger-Causality Tail Risk Networks

Using the test of Granger-causality in tail of Hong et al. (2009), we define and construct Granger-causality tail risk networks between 33 systemically important banks (G-SIBs) and 36 sovereign bonds worldwide. Our purpose is to exploit the structure of the Granger-causality tail risk networks to identify periods of distress in financial markets and possible channels of systemic risk propagation. Combining measures of connectedness of these networks with the ratings of the sovereign bonds, we propose a flight-to-quality indicator to identify periods of turbulence in the market. Our measure clearly peaks at the onset of the European sovereign debt crisis, signaling the instability of the financial system. Finally, we use the connectedness measures of the networks to forecast the quality of sovereign bonds. We find that connectedness is a significant predictor of the cross-section of bond quality.
Correlation between hormonal receptor status and Her 2 neu expression with the age of breast cancer patients and its outcome : a single institutional study in Egypt

Background: Hormone receptors and Her2/ neu statuses are known to be very powerful and useful predictors of outcome. Assessment of the receptor status profile in correlation with the age of the patients allows for prediction of breast cancer outcome and hence better treatment optimization for different age groups. Objectives: To assess the correlation between hormone receptor and Her2/neu status and age, and its significance as a predictor of outcome in patients with breast cancer. Patients & methods This is a retrospective study conducted on 382 patients diagnosed with breast cancer at the national cancer institute, Cairo University. Clinicopathological data (age, tumor histology, lymph node status, stage, and hormone receptor status and her2/ neu expression, were retrieved from the files. A correlation between the age of the patients and the hormone receptor status and outcome was done statistically. Results: The patients age ranged from26 to 78 (mean 49.7). Significant relation between ER, PR statuses and HER 2 neu expression with the age of the patients was observed. ER positivity increased and HER2/neu expression decreased with rising age. ER and PR expression were significantly lower in HER-2/neu positive as compared with HER-2/neu negative tumors. In patients less than 40 years 72.2% were ER positive while in patients more than 40 years, 83.9% of cases are ER positive and the P value insignificant (0.017). While PR was positive in 74.7% of cases less than 40 years and in 84.9% of cases more than 40 years with significant p value (0.032). Her2/neu expression was positive in 34.2% of cases less than 40 years while it is positive in only 19.2% of cases more than 40 years. No relation of ER, PR, Her2neu expression with other variables(grade, tumor size, pathological type or surgery type were found. Conclusion: ER and PR and Her2 neu receptors statuses in the current study are significantly correlated with the patients age. Young breast cancer patients have more aggressive tumors with more negative hormone receptor status and more her2 /neu expression. Her-2/neu expression was increased in hormone receptor negative tumors. [Heba G.M. Mahmoud, Marwa Nabil Abdelhafez, Wafaa Yousif Abdel Wahed, Dalia Nabil Abdelhafez. Correlation between hormonal receptor status and Her 2 neu expression with the age of breast cancer patients and its outcome: a single institutional study in Egypt. Cancer Biology 2017;7(1):26-33]. ISSN: 21501041 (print); ISSN: 2150-105X (online). http://www.cancerbio. net. 4. doi:10.7537/marscbj070117.04.
Recognition of Tactile Facial Action Units by Individuals Who Are Blind and Sighted: A Comparative Study

Given that most cues exchanged during a social interaction are nonverbal (e.g., facial expressions, hand gestures, body language), individuals who are blind are at a social disadvantage compared to their sighted peers. Very little work has explored sensory augmentation in the context of social assistive aids for individuals who are blind. The purpose of this study is to explore the following questions related to visual-to-vibrotactile mapping of facial action units (the building blocks of facial expressions): (1) How well can individuals who are blind recognize tactile facial action units compared to those who are sighted? (2) How well can individuals who are blind recognize emotions from tactile facial action units compared to those who are sighted? These questions are explored in a preliminary pilot test using absolute identification tasks in which participants learn and recognize vibrotactile stimulations presented through the Haptic Chair, a custom vibrotactile display embedded on the back of a chair. Study results show that individuals who are blind are able to recognize tactile facial action units as well as those who are sighted. These results hint at the potential for tactile facial action units to augment and expand access to social interactions for individuals who are blind.
“Get drunk. Smoke weed. Have fun.”: A Content Analysis of Tweets About Marijuana and Alcohol

Purpose. To explore the sentiment and themes of Twitter chatter that mentions both alcohol and marijuana. Design. Cross-sectional analysis of tweets mentioning both alcohol and marijuana during 1 month was performed. Setting. The study setting was Twitter. Participants. Tweets sent from February 4 to March 5, 2014, were studied. Method. A random sample (n = 5000) of tweets that mentioned alcohol and marijuana were qualitatively coded as normalizing both substances, preferring one substance over the other, or discouraging both substances. Other common themes were identified. Results. More than half (54%) of the tweets normalized marijuana and alcohol (without preferring one substance over the other), and 24% preferred marijuana over alcohol. Only 2% expressed a preference for alcohol over marijuana, 7% discouraged the use of both substances, and the sentiment was unknown for 13% of the tweets. Common themes among tweets that normalized both substances included using the substances with friends (17%) and mentioning substance use in the context of sex or romance (14%). Common themes among tweets that preferred marijuana over alcohol were the beliefs that marijuana is safer than alcohol (46%) and preferences for effects of marijuana over alcohol (40%). Conclusion. Tweets normalizing polysubstance use or encouraging marijuana use over alcohol use are common. Both online and offline prevention efforts are needed to increase awareness of the risks associated with polysubstance use and marijuana use.
Organization of glycosphingolipids in bilayers and plasma membranes of mammalian cells.

The evidence presented in this review strongly suggests that, when present as a minor component in liquid crystalline phospholipid bilayers, neutral glycosphingolipids are segregated into compositional domains of small size dispersed in the matrix phospholipid. In many instances the glycosphingolipid in the dispersed domains is in the gel state. Because these domains are in the gel state, the individual molecules escape only very slowly from the surface of the bilayer, much more slowly than do the phospholipid components. There is as yet no direct evidence that this slow escape rate is a property of neutral glycolipids in biological membrane bilayers. If it is, however, then these molecules are well suited for their putative role as cell surface markers, a role that involves them in many important biological functions. There is evidence to suggest that molecules of this type are also present in a dispersed microdomain structure on the external surface of at least some mammalian cell plasma membranes. These small domains of glycolipids with their sugar residues projecting outward from the cell surface are much like a large membrane glycoprotein when viewed from the ambient medium near the cell surface. Thus, whether the sugar residues be of glycoprotein or glycolipid origin, they are localized in groups or patches on the external surface of the cell. One important consequence of this patch structure may be in the obvious effect on the free energy of binding a ligand to a patch. Whether the ligand is mono- or polyvalent, the roughly 2 M concentration of sugar in the surface patch will cause the apparent ligand binding free energy to be substantially larger than it would be for a single isolated sugar residue on the surface. In contrast to the neutral glycosphingolipids (and sulfatides, perhaps) the available information suggests that gangliosides are not localized in small domains in model systems and most probably not in biological membranes. Capping of this type of glycosphingolipid does appear to occur under certain circumstances. However, it is almost certain that capping is not an intrinsic property of ganglioside phospholipid-bilayer systems. Although at 37 degrees C gangliosides rapidly transfer from micelles to phospholipid vesicles and to cell membranes, nothing is known about the rates at which this class of molecules leave a phospholipid bilayer. Their known biological functions on the cell surface appear to require that they leave very slowly, if at all, as do the neutral glycosphingolipids. The glycosphingolipids are, by virtue of their polysaccharide moeity, a unique class of lipids and cell surface components. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Treatment of Epstein-Barr Virus-related Hemophagocytic Lymphohistiocytosis (EBV-HLH); Update 2010

The clinical features of Epstein-Barr virus-related hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (EBV-HLH) vary significantly, from mild to severe, at the time of the treatment decision. There are many reports of successful treatments, for example conservative treatment without etoposide, HLH-94/2004-type immunochemotherapy with etoposide, and hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. When considering the treatment of EBV-HLH, the most important factor is the finding that a survival benefit is obtained when etoposide-containing therapy is initiated within 4 weeks of diagnosis. This indicates that there may be a window for observation or conservative corticosteroid/cyclosporine A or intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) treatment; however, once the disease is defined as “high risk” and/or refractory to such therapy, prompt introduction of etoposide (ideally within 4 wk) is recommended. In deciding whether the disease is “high-risk,” evaluation of clinical staging, EBV genome copy numbers in the serum, cellular EBV tropism, chromosome analysis, and screening for hereditary immuno-deficient diseases such as familial HLH, are required.
5-Azacytidine up regulates the expression of Epstein-Barr virus nuclear antigen 2 (EBNA-2) through EBNA-6 and latent membrane protein in the Burkitt's lymphoma line rael

Nonproductive infection of B lymphocytes by Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) is associated with a highly restricted expression of viral genes. In growth-transformed lymphoblastoid cell lines, the products of these genes include a complex of at least six EBV nuclear antigens (EBNAs) (EBNA-1 through EBNA-6) and one membrane protein (latent membrane protein [LMP]). EBV-carrying Burkitt's lymphoma (BL) biopsies and derived cell lines that have retained a representative phenotype (group I BL lines) express only EBNA-1 (M. Rowe, D. T. Rowe, C. D. Gregory, L. S. Young, P. J. Farrell, H. Rupani, and A. B. Rickinson, EMBO J. 6:2743-2751, 1987). We have found that EBNA-2 through EBNA-6 and LMP can be up regulated by treating the group I BL line Rael with the DNA-demethylating agent 5-azacytidine (5-AzaC). The drug acted in a time- and dose-dependent manner. EBNA-2-positive cells were detected by anti-complement immunofluorescence staining just 12 h after addition of 4 microM 5-AzaC and reached a maximum number at 72 h, when up to 75% of the population was positive. EBNA-2, EBNA-3, EBNA-4, EBNA-4, EBNA-6, and LMP were demonstrated immunoblots starting at 48 h. The EBV-encoded early antigens and viral capsid antigens were also induced but at a lower level. EBNA-2 and the lytic cycle-associated antigens appeared with a different time course and in largely nonoverlapping cell subpopulations, as demonstrated by double fluorescence staining. Thus, EBNA-2 expression was not restricted to lytically infected cells, nor was EBNA-2 required for entry into the lytic cycle. The coding and regulatory sequences of EBNA-2 and LMP were found to be highly methylated in Rael cells and were, as expected, demethylated after 5-AzaC treatment. These findings suggest that DNA methylation may participate in the regulation of growth transformation-associated viral genes in BL cells.
De-biasing Weakly Supervised Learning by Regularizing Prediction Entropy

We explore the effect of regularizing prediction entropy in a weakly supervised setting with inexact class labels. When underlying data distributions are biased toward a specific subclass, we hypothesize that entropy regularization can be used to bootstrap a training set that mitigates this bias. We conduct experiments over multiple datasets under supervision of an oracle and in a semi-supervised setting finding substantial reductions in training set bias capable of decreasing test error rate. These findings suggest entropy regularization as a promising approach to de-biasing weakly supervised learning systems.
A Linked Open Data Approach for Sentiment Lexicon Adaptation Conference or Workshop Item

Social media platforms have recently become a gold mine for organisations to monitor their reputation by extracting and analysing the sentiment of the posts generated about them, their markets, and competitors. Among the approaches to analyse sentiment from social media, approaches based on sentiment lexicons (sets of words with associated sentiment scores) have gained popularity since they do not rely on training data, as opposed to Machine Learning approaches. However, sentiment lexicons consider a static sentiment score for each word without taking into consideration the different contexts in which the word is used (e.g, great problem vs. great smile). Additionally, new words constantly emerge from dynamic and rapidly changing social media environments that may not be covered by the lexicons. In this paper we propose a lexicon adaptation approach that makes use of semantic relations extracted from DBpedia to better understand the various contextual scenarios in which words are used. We evaluate our approach on three different Twitter datasets and show that using semantic information to adapt the lexicon improves sentiment computation by 3.7% in average accuracy, and by 2.6% in average F1 measure.
Morphometric identification of Varroa destructor and its plasticity by the exposure to thymol.

Currently, there are four Varroa species identified worldwide, which present a high interspecific and intraspecific variability. The objective of this investigation was to identify the predominant species of Varroa and the effect of thymol on the plasticity of the mite. To determine the species and effect of thymol on the plasticity of the mite, 150 specimens from 65 hives and 54 from 17 beehives exposed to thymol for 28 days were morphometrically tested. According to the morphometric measurements, the mites were identified as Varroa destructor, there being no morphometric evidence of the infestation by other Varroa species. Mite populations differed among apiaries (P≤ 0.05), so that variables genital shield width (P=0.013), genital shield length (P=0.002) and genital shield width (P=0.026) were plus variants. We found 8 morphotypes, observing differences between the means of the genital shield length for thymol effect (P≤ 0.05). It is concluded that Varroa destructor exposed to thymol presents intraspecific morphometric variability for adaptation to the selection pressure imposed by the acaricide.
Baroreflex and oscillation of heart period at 0.1 Hz studied by α‐blockade and cross‐spectral analysis in healthy humans

1 Parameters derived from frequency‐domain analysis of heart period and blood pressure variability are gaining increasing importance in clinical practice. However, the underlying physiological mechanisms in human subjects are not fully understood. Here we address the question as to whether the low frequency variability (∼0.1 Hz) of the heart period may depend on a baroreflex‐mediated response to blood pressure oscillations, induced by the α‐sympathetic drive on the peripheral resistance. 2 Heart period (ECG), finger arterial pressure (Finapres) and respiratory airflow were recorded in eight healthy volunteers in the supine position with metronome respiration at 0.25 Hz. We inhibited the vascular response to the sympathetic vasomotor activity with a peripheral α‐blocker (urapidil) and maintained mean blood pressure at control levels with angiotensin II. 3 We performed spectral and cross‐spectral analysis of heart period (RR) and systolic pressure to quantify the power of low‐ and high‐frequency oscillations, phase shift, coherence and transfer function gain. 4 In control conditions, spectral analysis yielded typical results. In the low‐frequency range, cross‐spectral analysis showed high coherence (> 0.5) and a negative phase shift (‐65.1 ± 18 deg) between RR and systolic pressure, which indicates a 1‐2 s lag in heart period changes in relation to pressure. In the high‐frequency region, the phase shift was close to zero, indicating simultaneous fluctuations of RR and systolic pressure. During urapidil + angiotensin II infusion the low‐frequency oscillations of both blood pressure and heart period were abolished in five cases. In the remaining three cases they were substantially reduced and lost their typical cross‐spectral characteristics. 5 We conclude that in supine rest conditions, the oscillation of RR at low frequency is almost entirely accounted for by a baroreflex mechanism, since it is not produced in the absence of a 0.1 Hz pressure oscillation. 6 The results provide physiological support for the use of non‐invasive estimates of the closed‐loop baroreflex gain from cross‐spectral analysis of blood pressure and heart period variability in the 0.1 Hz range.
Impact of land-use change on flower-visiting insect communities on an oceanic island ANA PICANC ! O , 1 FRANC !

1. Land-use change has profoundly impacted pollinator communities throughout the world. However, the processes through which it acts on pollinator diversity and composition are still poorly understood, especially in highly vulnerable island ecosystems. 2. In this study, we investigated the distribution, abundance, richness and composition of flower-visiting insects to assess their response to land-use change in Terceira Island (Azores). 3. Flower-visiting insects were sampled over 2 years using a standardised protocol along 50 transects across five different habitats corresponding to a landuse gradient. Insect species were classified as indigenous or exotics. We assessed changes across habitats using multiple diversity indices, species abundance distribution models (SAD) and species composition metrics (b-diversity), along with plant species composition. 4. We observed that indigenous flower-visiting insects were dominant, both in abundance and species richness, across the entire land-use gradient. Species diversity varied only slightly across the gradient. SADs were lognormal in all habitats, with very few truly common and rare flower-visiting insects and a prevalence of species of intermediate abundance. Species replacement was significantly higher mainly between the two most contrasting habitats (i.e. natural forests and intensive pastures) but was significantly correlated with species replacement of host plant species across the gradient. 5. Our results revealed that the Azorean flower-visiting insect communities were highly simplified across the entire gradient with little difference between habitats. In the absence of strong exotic competitors, indigenous flower-visiting insects expand their range and occupy new anthropogenic habitats, also facilitating the expansion of a large number of exotic plant species.
Description and clinical treatment of an early outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Guangzhou, PR China.

Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), now known to be caused by a coronavirus, probably originated in Guangdong province in southern China in late 2002. The first major outbreak occurred in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, between January and March 2003. This study reviews the clinical presentation, laboratory findings and response to four different treatment protocols. Case notes and laboratory findings were analysed and outcome measures were collected prospectively. The SARS outbreak in Guangdong province and the outbreak in Guangzhou associated with hospitals in the city are described, documenting clinical and laboratory features in a cohort of 190 patients randomly allocated to four treatment regimens. Patients were infected by close contact in either family or health-care settings, particularly following procedures likely to generate aerosols of respiratory secretions (e.g. administration of nebulized drugs and bronchoscopy). The earliest symptom was a high fever followed, in most patients, by dyspnoea, cough and myalgia, with 24 % of patients complaining of diarrhoea. The most frequent chest X-ray changes were patchy consolidation with progression to bilateral bronchopneumonia over 5-10 days. Thirty-six cases developed adult respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), of whom 11 died. There was no response to antibiotics. The best response (no deaths) was seen in the group of 60 patients receiving early high-dose steroids and nasal CPAP (continuous airway positive pressure) ventilation; the other three treatment groups had significant mortality. Cross-infection to medical and nursing staff was completely prevented in one hospital by rigid adherence to barrier precautions during contact with infected patients. The use of rapid case identification and quarantine has controlled the outbreak in Guangzhou, in which more than 350 patients have been infected. Early administration of high-dose steroids and CPAP ventilation appears to offer the best supportive treatment with a reduced mortality compared with other treatment regimens.