Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Pathophysiological Role of Microglia in Dynamic Surveillance, Phagocytosis and Structural Remodeling of the Developing CNS

In vertebrates, during an early wave of hematopoiesis in the yolk sac between embryonic day E7.0 and E9.0, cells of mesodermal leaflet addressed to macrophage lineage enter in developing central nervous system (CNS) and originate the developing native microglial cells. Depending on the species, microglial cells represent 5–20% of glial cells resident in adult brain. Here, we briefly discuss some canonical functions of the microglia, i.e., cytokine secretion and functional transition from M1 to M2 phenotype. In addition, we review studies on the non-canonical functions of microglia such as regulation of phagocytosis, synaptic pruning, and sculpting postnatal neural circuits. In this latter context the contribution of microglia to some neurodevelopmental disorders is now well established. Nasu-Hakola (NHD) disease is considered a primary microgliopathy with alterations of the DNAX activation protein 12 (DAP12)-Triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM-2) signaling and removal of macromolecules and apoptotic cells followed by secondary microglia activation. In Rett syndrome Mecp2-/- microglia shows a substantial impairment of phagocytic ability, although the role of microglia is not yet clear. In a mouse model of Tourette syndrome (TS), microglia abnormalities have also been described, and deficient microglia-mediated neuroprotection is obvious. Here we review the role of microglial cells in neurodevelopmental disorders without inflammation and on the complex role of microglia in developing CNS.
Metagenomic sequencing of expressed prostate secretions

To investigate which microorganisms may be present in expressed prostate secretions (EPS) metagenomic sequencing (MGS) was applied to prostate secretion samples from five men with prostatitis and five matched control men as well as to combined expressed prostate secretion and urine from six patients with prostate cancer and six matched control men. The prostate secretion samples contained a variety of bacterial sequences, mostly belonging to the Proteobacteria phylum. The combined prostate secretion and urine samples were dominated by abundant presence of the JC polyomavirus, representing >20% of all detected metagenomic sequence reads. There were also other viruses detected, for example, human papillomavirus type 81. All combined prostate secretion and urine samples were also positive for Proteobacteria. In summary, MGS of expressed prostate secretion is informative for detecting a variety of bacteria and viruses, suggesting that a more large‐scale use of MGS of prostate secretions may be useful in medical and epidemiological studies of prostate infections. J. Med. Virol. 86:2042–2048, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Language spoken and differences in health status, access to care, and receipt of preventive services among US Hispanics.

OBJECTIVES We examined self-reported health status, health behaviors, access to care, and use of preventive services of the US Hispanic adult population to identify language-associated disparities. METHODS We analyzed 2003 to 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System data from 45 076 Hispanic adults in 23 states, who represented 90% of the US Hispanic population, and compared 25 health indicators between Spanish-speaking Hispanics and English-speaking Hispanics. RESULTS Physical activity and rates of chronic disease, obesity, and smoking were significantly lower among Spanish-speaking Hispanics than among English-speaking Hispanics. Spanish-speaking Hispanics reported far worse health status and access to care than did English-speaking Hispanics (39% vs 17% in fair or poor health, 55% vs 23% uninsured, and 58% vs 29% without a personal doctor) and received less preventive care. Adjustment for demographic and socioeconomic factors did not mitigate the influence of language on these health indicators. CONCLUSIONS Spanish-language preference marks a particularly vulnerable subpopulation of US Hispanics who have less access to care and use of preventive services. Priority areas for Spanish-speaking adults include maintenance of healthy behaviors, promotion of physical activity and preventive health care, and increased access to care.
Acute gastrointestinal illness and child care arrangements.

This study uses data from the 1981 National Health Interview and the 1981 Child Health Supplement to assess the extent to which family day care homes and child care centers pose a risk of acute gastrointestinal illness among preschool children. The study uses a nationally representative sample of children 0-5 years of age (n = 4,845). Acute gastrointestinal illness was identified from parental reports of acute illness in a 2-week period. Information on type and duration of child care, as well as a variety of sociodemographic and environmental factors (e.g., crowding, seasonality), were obtained. The authors hypothesize that risk of acute gastrointestinal illness would vary by group size. Center attendees were thought to have the greatest exposure to infectious agents, followed by children in day care homes, and lastly by those receiving care in their own homes. Risk models were estimated separately for children less than 3 years of age and for children aged 3-5 years. Our results show that an elevated risk of acute gastrointestinal illness associated with child care is confined to children less than 3 years of age who regularly attend centers/nursery schools (odds ratio = 3.49, 95% confidence interval 0.99-4.77), controlling for other confounding variables. For children aged 3-5 years, low socioeconomic status, poverty, and seasonality are stronger predictors of acute gastrointestinal illness than is center care. Family day care appears to be unrelated to the risk of illness for both age groups.
Capital Structure Convergence: Is it Real or Mechanical?

Lemmon et al. (2008) show two features of the data on capital structure: convergence and persistence. I replicate their results and then explore the source of the convergence feature. I show that capital structure convergence is likely to be mechanical rather than real. It sources from a statistical fallacy called the “regression fallacy”. The stationarity of the leverage ratio series and the misclassification problem in portfolio construction give rise to the apparent convergence. Last, I test an implication of the misclassification argument and propose a method that is able to mitigate the mechanical convergence.
Therapeutic potential of octreotide in the treatment of liver metastases

Octreotide is a synthetic analogue of somatostatin that has clear inhibitory effects on the growth of many animal and human cell lines, including colorectal cell lines both in vitro and in vivo. Colorectal cancer metastatic to the liver is clinically important, both in terms of the number of patients affected and the lack of any effective treatment for the majority of patients. Octreotide inhibits the growth of colorectal liver tumour in a number of experimental models and, in at least three tumour types, inhibits the growth of established micro-metastases. The precise mechanism of action is not known. However, the drug is likely to be most beneficial in the treatment of liver metastases when the tumour burden is relatively small. The available evidence, although experimental, suggests that octreotide may also have a beneficial effect on the development of liver metastases when used as an adjuvant to surgery in colorectal cancer and this area warrants urgent clinical investigation. The cytotoxics which are currently used as an adjuvant to surgery for colorectal cancer have unpleasant side effects which can be life-threatening. There will also be a proportion of patients who have undergone a truly curative resection of their tumour and will thus be treated unnecessarily. The potential benefits of octreotide in the adjuvant setting, although promising, remain speculative, but octreotide has an acceptably low incidence of side effects and can be administered safely for a prolonged period of time.
POPULATION SEX STRUCTURE AND REPRODUCTIVE FITNESS IN GYNODIOECIOUS SIDALCEA MALVIFLORA MALVIFLORA (MALVACEAE)

The spatial distribution of females and hermaphrodites within gynodioecious populations is expected to exert considerable selective pressure on gender fitness through pollen limitation of seed set. If pollen flow is predominantly local, seed set in individual plants may be sensitive to the proximity of pollen donors; pollen limitation of seed set may occur if hermaphrodites are locally rare. Under such circumstances, female fitness will be negatively frequency dependent and hermaphrodite fitness will be positively frequency dependent. Given local seed dispersal, a nonrandom clumped distribution of the genders is expected in gynodioecious populations due to the heritability of gender in gynodioecious species. If gender fitness is frequency dependent, such structure should favor hermaphrodites and select against females. To test this hypothesis, I quantified the distribution of the genders in terms of nearest neighbors and neighborhood sex ratio in two populations of gynodioecious Sidalcea malviflora malviflora. I then measured the effect of neighborhood sex ratio on open‐pollinated seed set and pollen limitation in both manipulated and unmanipulated neighborhoods. Results indicate that the genders have a patchy distribution and that both genders are pollen limited and show an increase in seed set with an increase in neighborhood hermaphrodite frequency. The observed population sex structure favors hermaphrodites and disadvantages females. These results highlight the importance that population‐level traits can have in determining individual fitness and the evolution of sex ratios in gynodioecious species.
A longitudinal study of electrical stimulation levels and electrode impedance in children using the Clarion cochlear implant

Conclusions. Electrical stimulation levels and electrode impedance values (EIVs) in children using the Clarion cochlear implant (CI) programmed with CIS strategy stabilized after 3 months of implant use. The data presented here may be useful as a general guideline for the programming of infants and young children and may further be of help for the identification of patients who fall outside the “average” range. Objectives. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate changes in electrical stimulation levels, i.e. threshold (T) levels, comfortable (M) levels, dynamic range (DR), and EIVs during the first 18 months of implant use, in children using the Clarion CI. Materials and methods. The maps of 18 pre-lingual children (mean age at implantation 4.2 years; range 1–8), using the Enhanced Bipolar 1.2 or Bipolar standard electrode with the S-Series speech processor programmed with CIS strategy, were examined at five time points: connection, and 3, 6, 12, and 18 months post-initial stimulation. T levels, M levels, DR and EIVs were analyzed according to four cochlear segments: apical, apical-medial, medial-basal, and basal. Results. During the first 3 months of implant use T levels increased to some extent, whereas M levels and DR increased significantly. From 3 months and through the entire follow-up, T and M levels as well as DR were stable. EIVs of current carrying electrodes decreased significantly from connection to the 3-month visit; thereafter a stabilization of values was evident. Electrical stimulation levels and EIVs did not differ among the cochlear segments during the entire follow-up.
Tests of the correlation between portfolio performance measures

This paper reports an investigation into measures of portfolio performance. The Sharpe ratio is the natural performance measure when asset returns come from any elliptically symmetric distribution, regardless of the investor utility function and subject only to regularity conditions. Under such distributions, the measures of portfolio performance which are in common use are monotonic functions of the Sharpe ratio. It is shown that for large sample sizes the correlation between measures of performance which are functions of the Sharpe ratio is asymptotically equal to unity. The correct specification for tests of the correlation between portfolio performance measures is therefore the null hypothesis ρ = 1. A multivariate test of the correlations between several measures of performance is presented. This may be used in either a multivariate or bivariate setting. The paper presents a detailed example based on a number of FTSE indices. Performance measures are computed both parametrically using the normal distribution and using sample estimates. The new test does not lead to the rejection of the null hypothesis that all correlations are equal to unity. This suggests that despite the evidence of non-normality in returns there seems to be little gained in abandoning the Sharpe ratio.
Sobolev Training for Neural Networks

At the heart of deep learning we aim to use neural networks as function approximators - training them to produce outputs from inputs in emulation of a ground truth function or data creation process. In many cases we only have access to input-output pairs from the ground truth, however it is becoming more common to have access to derivatives of the target output with respect to the input - for example when the ground truth function is itself a neural network such as in network compression or distillation. Generally these target derivatives are not computed, or are ignored. This paper introduces Sobolev Training for neural networks, which is a method for incorporating these target derivatives in addition the to target values while training. By optimising neural networks to not only approximate the function's outputs but also the function's derivatives we encode additional information about the target function within the parameters of the neural network. Thereby we can improve the quality of our predictors, as well as the data-efficiency and generalization capabilities of our learned function approximation. We provide theoretical justifications for such an approach as well as examples of empirical evidence on three distinct domains: regression on classical optimisation datasets, distilling policies of an agent playing Atari, and on large-scale applications of synthetic gradients. In all three domains the use of Sobolev Training, employing target derivatives in addition to target values, results in models with higher accuracy and stronger generalisation.
Visual pigment composition in zebrafish: Evidence for a rhodopsin–porphyropsin interchange system

Numerous reports have concluded that zebrafish (Danio rerio) possesses A1-based visual pigments in their rod and cone photoreceptors. In the present study, we investigated the possibility that zebrafish have a paired visual pigment system. We measured the spectral absorption characteristics of photoreceptors from zebrafish maintained in different temperature regimes and those treated with exogenous thyroid hormone using CCD-based microspectrophotometry. Rods from fish housed at 15°C and 28°C were not significantly different, having λmax values of 503 ± 5 nm (n = 106) and 504 ± 6 nm (n = 88), respectively. Thyroid hormone treatment (held at 28°C), however, significantly shifted the λmax of rods from 503 ± 5 nm (n = 194) to 527 ± 8 nm (n = 212). Cone photoreceptors in fish housed at 28°C (without thyroid hormone treatment) had λmax values of 361 ± 3 nm (n = 2) for ultraviolet-, 411 ± 5 nm (n = 18) for short-, 482 ± 6 nm (n = 9) for medium-, and 565 ± 10 nm (n = 14) for long-wavelength sensitive cones. Thyroid hormone treatment of fish held at 28°C significantly shifted the λmax of long-wavelength sensitive cones to 613 ± 11 nm (n = 20), substantially beyond that of the λmax of the longest possible A1-based visual pigment (∼580 nm). Thyroid hormone treatment produced smaller shifts of λmax in other cone types and increased the half-band width. All shifts in photoreceptor λmax values resulting from thyroid hormone treatment matched predictions for an A1- to A2-based visual pigment system. We therefore conclude that zebrafish possess a rhodopsin–porphyropsin interchange system that functions to spectrally tune rod and cone photoreceptors. We believe that these observations should be carefully considered during analysis of zebrafish spectral sensitivity.
Biodiversity inhibits parasites: Broad evidence for the dilution effect

Significance The dilution effect hypothesis suggests that diverse ecological communities limit disease spread via several mechanisms. Therefore, biodiversity losses could worsen epidemics that harm humans and wildlife. However, there is contentious debate over whether the hypothesis applies broadly, especially for parasites that infect humans. We address this fundamental question with a formal meta-analysis of >200 assessments relating biodiversity to disease in >60 host–parasite systems. We find overwhelming evidence of dilution, which is independent of host density, study design, and type and specialization of parasites. A second analysis identified similar effects of diversity in plant–herbivore systems. Thus, biodiversity generally decreases parasitism and herbivory. Consequently, human-induced declines in biodiversity could increase human and wildlife diseases and decrease crop and forest production. Infectious diseases of humans, wildlife, and domesticated species are increasing worldwide, driving the need to understand the mechanisms that shape outbreaks. Simultaneously, human activities are drastically reducing biodiversity. These concurrent patterns have prompted repeated suggestions that biodiversity and disease are linked. For example, the dilution effect hypothesis posits that these patterns are causally related; diverse host communities inhibit the spread of parasites via several mechanisms, such as by regulating populations of susceptible hosts or interfering with parasite transmission. However, the generality of the dilution effect hypothesis remains controversial, especially for zoonotic diseases of humans. Here we provide broad evidence that host diversity inhibits parasite abundance using a meta-analysis of 202 effect sizes on 61 parasite species. The magnitude of these effects was independent of host density, study design, and type and specialization of parasites, indicating that dilution was robust across all ecological contexts examined. However, the magnitude of dilution was more closely related to the frequency, rather than density, of focal host species. Importantly, observational studies overwhelmingly documented dilution effects, and there was also significant evidence for dilution effects of zoonotic parasites of humans. Thus, dilution effects occur commonly in nature, and they may modulate human disease risk. A second analysis identified similar effects of diversity in plant–herbivore systems. Thus, although there can be exceptions, our results indicate that biodiversity generally decreases parasitism and herbivory. Consequently, anthropogenic declines in biodiversity could increase human and wildlife diseases and decrease crop and forest production.
Women Entrepreneurship Promotion in Developing Countries: What explains the gender gap in entrepreneurship and how to close it?

Despite the growing number of women-led business and a significant increase of initiatives, policies and resources designed to promote and develop women’s entrepreneurship, the gender gap in entrepreneurship persist. This paper addresses two questions: Why does the gender gap in entrepreneurship persist? And, what does the literature suggest to us about the best ways to promote women’s entrepreneurship? Based on a feminist perspective this paper argues that current women entrepreneurship promotion policies undoubtedly benefit individual women but when the gender bias in the context in which entrepreneurship is embedded, is left intact, efforts may remain in vain and without any significant macroeconomic or social impact.
The use of exogenous melatonin in delayed sleep phase disorder: a meta-analysis.

STUDY OBJECTIVES To perform a meta-analysis of the efficacy and safety of exogenous melatonin in advancing sleep-wake rhythm in patients with delayed sleep phase disorder. DESIGN Meta analysis of papers indexed for PubMed, Embase, and the abstracts of sleep and chronobiologic societies (1990-2009). PATIENTS Individuals with delayed sleep phase disorder. INTERVENTIONS Administration of melatonin. MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS A meta-analysis of data of randomized controlled trials involving individuals with delayed sleep phase disorder that were published in English, compared melatonin with placebo, and reported 1 or more of the following: endogenous melatonin onset, clock hour of sleep onset, wake-up time, sleep-onset latency, and total sleep time. The 5 trials including 91 adults and 4 trials including 226 children showed that melatonin treatment advanced mean endogenous melatonin onset by 1.18 hours (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.89-1.48 h) and clock hour of sleep onset by 0.67 hours (95% CI: 0.45-0.89 h). Melatonin decreased sleep-onset latency by 23.27 minutes (95% CI: 4.83 -41.72 min). The wake-up time and total sleep time did not change significantly. CONCLUSIONS Melatonin is effective in advancing sleep-wake rhythm and endogenous melatonin rhythm in delayed sleep phase disorder.
Perioperative Morbidity in Bilateral One-Stage Total Knee Replacements

A retrospective review was done on 501 patients who had bilateral sequential one-stage total knee replacements from September 1995 to April 2000 to evaluate perioperative (inhospital) morbidity. One thousand two knee replacements were done with the patients receiving regional anesthesia, on 286 women and 215 men with an average age of 66 years. The average transfusion requirement was 2.8 units of blood per patient. There were no deaths, myocardial infarctions, or cerebrovascular accidents. The mean length of hospital stay was 7.2 days. One hundred forty-four perioperative complications were observed in 109 patients (21.8%). These complications included 27 arrythmias (5%), one congestive heart failure (0.2%), 65 lower extremity deep venous thromboses (13%), 14 fat emboli (3%), and two pulmonary emboli (0.4%). Other major complications were pneumonia (1%), acute renal failure (0.4%), ileus (2%), and mental status changes (2%). Wound complications included two deep infections (0.4%), three hematomas (0.6%), and five delayed wound healings (0.9%). According to the current study the perioperative morbidity and mortality is acceptable if the procedure is used for selected patients. Patients with significant comorbidities should have a staged bilateral total knee replacement.
How Close is Asia to an Optimal Currency Area in Terms of Business Cycle Co-Movement?

The paper assesses how close Asian countries are to an Optimal Currency Area in terms of business cycle synchronization, with a focus on supply shock asymmetry. Based on a Structural VAR model, the importance of symmetric and asymmetric supply shocks is teasted for all ASEAN+3 countries. In addition, a spatial approach is used to analyze its impact on the whole Asian region and on pairs of Asian countries. The conclusion is that there is evidence of increasing symmetry of supply shocks although the situation differs largely on a country by country basis. Such finding would support a multi-speed process of monetary integration in the region.