Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Carbon dioxide washout during high flow nasal cannula versus nasal CPAP support: An in vitro study

Objective: To compare CO2 washout time at different levels of HFNC versus NCPAP in a premature infant lung model with simulated mouth‐closed and mouth‐open conditions using two sizes of nasal cannula and full‐ and half‐prong HFNC insertion depths. Design/Methods: A piston‐cylinder lung simulator, having a fixed volume of 30 ml and a 4.8 ml dead space, simulated spontaneous breathing (6.5 ml tidal volume, 50 br/min, Ti = 0.5 sec). Two Fisher & Paykel™ cannulas (Fisher & Paykel Healthcare Ltd., Auckland, New Zealand) (2.8 and 3.2 mm O.D.) and two Infant‐Flow™ (CareFusion, Yorba Linda, CA) NCPAP cannulas (3.4 and 4.1 mm O.D.) were applied to simulated airways having either 3.5 or 4.5 mm I.D. nares. Simulated mouth opening was a 5 mm I.D. side tap below the nasal interface. The lung was primed with 5% CO2. Washout times were determined at HFNC settings of 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 L/min and NCPAP at 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 cm H2O with simulated open and closed‐mouth conditions and full‐ and half‐inserted HFNC prongs. Results: Overall combined mean washout times for NCPAP with mouth‐closed were significantly longer than HFNC over all five pressure and flow device settings by 16.2% (P < 0.001). CO2 washout times decreased as flow or pressure device settings were increased. There were negligible differences in washout times between NCPAP and HFNC with mouth‐open. Mouth‐open washout times were significantly less than mouth‐closed for all conditions. Overall closed‐mouth washout times for HFNC half‐prong insertion were longer than for full‐prong insertion by 5.3% (P < 0.022). Conclusions: Significantly improved CO2 elimination using HFNC versus NCPAP should be a particularly important consideration in premature infants having very high dead space‐to‐tidal volume ratio compared to larger infants. Pediatr Pulmonol. 2017;52:792–798. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A HEDONIC MODEL OF INTERREGIONAL WAGES, RENTS, AND AMENITY VALUES*

This paper develops a general multimarket hedonic model appropriate for a national, interregional study of wages, housing prices, and location-specific amenities. The model encompasses the effects of interregional location, intraurban location, and city size. Typically, hedonic studies focus on a single market such as labor or housing and ignore interactions implicit in a more global compensation mechanism. Examination of the comparative statics of our model indicates that single-market differentials are partial prices and are unreliable measures of amenity values in an interregional context. Unbiased amenity values are estimated for a comprehensive set of amenities using data on housing prices for 34,414 households and wages for 46,004 workers from the 1980 Census of Population and Housing. Statistically significant differences in housing prices and wages are found due to amenities.
Analysts' Forecast Properties, Concentrated Ownership and Legal Institutions

Existing research indicates that firms with concentrated ownership structures are associated with poor financial reporting quality. This study investigates whether and how the divergence between control and cash-flow rights of controlling owners affects the effectiveness of analyst forecasting activities, and whether the effect varies with country-level legal institutions. Using a broad firm-level ownership data set for twenty-two economies, we find that control-cash flow divergence, on average, has no measurable effect on analysts' forecast properties across countries with varying legal institutions. We document rather weak detrimental effect of control divergence on forecast properties only in a small set of countries with weak legal institutions. Overall, our results indicate that the agency problems embedded in concentrated ownership structures do not always impede the private information production by analysts, which complements the previous evidence of the impact of concentrated ownership structures on corporate disclosures.
Optimal Program Partitioning for Predictable Performance

Scratchpad memory (SPM) provides a predictable and energy efficient way to store program instructions and data. It would be ideal for embedded real-time systems if not for the practical difficulty that most programs have to be modified in source or binary form in order to use it effectively. This modification process is called partitioning, and it splits a large program into sub-units called regions that are small enough to be stored in SPM. Earlier papers on this subject have only considered regions formed around program structures, such as loops, methods and even entire tasks. Region formation and SPM allocation are performed in two separate steps. This is an approximation that does not make best use of SPM. In this paper, we propose a k-partitioning algorithm as a new way to solve the problem. This allows us to carry out region formation and SPM allocation simultaneously. We can generate optimal partitions for programs expressed either as call trees or by a restricted form of control-flow graph (CFG). We show that this approach obtains superior results to the previous two-step approach. We apply our algorithm to various programs and SPM sizes and show that it reduces the execution time cost for executing those programs relative to execution with cache.
Reserve Prices in Auctions as Reference Points

We consider second-price and first-price auctions in the symmetric independent private values framework. We modify the standard model by the assumption that the bidders have reference-based utility, where a publicly announced reserve price has some influence on the reference point. It turns out that the seller's optimal reserve price is increasing in the number of bidders. Also in contrast to the standard model, we find that secret reserve prices can outperform public reserve prices, and that setting the optimal reserve price can be more valuable for the seller than attracting additional bidders.
Cold‐regulated genes under control of the cold sensor Hik33 in Synechocystis

A histidine kinase, Hik33, appears to sense decreases in temperature and to regulate the expression of certain cold‐inducible genes in the cyanobacterium Synechocystis sp. PCC6803. To examine the role of Hik33 in the regulation of gene expression, we analysed a ΔHik33 mutant using the DNA microarray technique. In wild‐type cells, genes that were strongly induced at low temperature encoded proteins that were predominantly subunits of the transcriptional and translational machinery. Most cold‐repressible genes encoded components of the photosynthetic machinery. Mutation of the hik33 gene suppressed the expression of some of these cold‐regulated genes, which could be divided into three groups according to the effect of the mutation of hik33. In the first group, regulation of gene expression by low temperature was totally abolished; in the second group, the extent of such regulation was reduced by half; and, in the third group, such regulation was totally unaffected. These results suggest that expression of the genes in the first group is regulated solely by Hik33, expression of genes in the third group is regulated by an as yet unidentified cold sensor, and expression of genes in the second group is regulated by both these cold sensors.
TARGET2 Imbalances and the ECB as Lender of Last Resort

This paper analyses the issue of the dynamics of the TARGET2 system balances during the sovereign debt crisis, when some countries registered a decisive inflow of the central bank liquidity and others showed an outflow. The dynamics in the TARGET2 are here explained as being due to a fall in the level of confidence in the capacity of the Economic and Monetary Union to survive, rather than to disparities in the level of competitiveness among countries of the Eurozone. This crisis of confidence has to be considered as the consequence of the implicit refusal of the European institutions to create a mechanism working as lender of last resort for the euro area member States; indeed, only when the ECB took this responsibility by launching the Outright Monetary Transactions clear signs of improvement were observed in the sovereign debt crisis.
A survey on the relationships between customer satisfaction, image, trust and customer advocacy behavior

The main purpose of this paper is to develop a new model to investigate the effects of customer satisfaction, image and trust on customer commitment and explore the impacts of customer commitment on customer advocacy behaviors, including word-of-mouth referrals, increasing repurchase intentions, sharing information and marketing research support. In this new model, an online survey was used with a sample of 466 students of Shiraz Engineering University (IRAN) using SAMSUNG cell phone. The male/female ratio of the sample was 58.7 and 41.3%, respectively. In the sample, 72.4% were in their 20s and 27.6% were in their 27s. The questions used in this study were taken from the relevant literature, contained 53 questions addressing all the variables: customer satisfaction (4 items), image (5 items), trust (9 items), customer commitment (5 items), word-of-mouth referrals (10 items), repurchase intentions (8 items), information sharing (7 items) and marketing research support (5 items). The data were screened using the SPSS program (Version 11). Finally, descriptive-correlative methodology was used in this study. The research found significant positive relationships between customer satisfaction, image, trust and customer commitment. The findings suggest that customer commitment most influenced by customer satisfaction (45%), image (37%) and trust (18%). Beside, the findings illustrate that customers with stronger levels of commitment are indeed more willing to contribute as customer advocates. This study shows that the most impacts of customer commitment are on word-of-mouth referrals (35%), repurchase intentions (29%), information sharing (23%) and marketing research support (13%). Of course all of the eight hypotheses were supported. Further research is encouraged on the relative importance of the customer satisfaction, image, trust' influence on customer commitment in global markets and expanded view of customer advocacy. Researchers are also advised to regard this work as a starting-point for expanded hypotheses development of future customer advocacy models. The study considers the potential for how business customers can be further engaged to serve as advocates and thereby help improve the firm’s marketing performance. This study implies the major influence of customer satisfaction and the minor influence of trust on customer commitment and also implies the major impact of customer commitment on word-of-mouth and the minor influence of customer commitment on marketing research support. The paper introduces new context relevant concepts and advances the relationship marketing literature by providing empirical evidence for the multi-dimensional view of customer advocacy behaviors. Key words: Customer satisfaction, image, trust, customer commitment, word-of-mouth referrals, repurchase intentions, information sharing, marketing research support.
Simulating health expenditures under alternative insurance plans

A simulation model that estimates individual health care spending as a function of the structure of indemnity-type insurance plans is presented. The behavioral models that form the basis for this work were developed as part of RAND's Health Insurance Experiment, HIE, a randomized clinical trial. The randomized design and statistical methods provided estimates of the effects of insurance on use, uncontaminated by sickness or selection effects. The demand for medical care was modelled using episodes of treatment. Within the simulation, episodes occur independently and randomly through time according to a Poisson process with rates depending on individual characteristics and insurance. Empirical results from the HIE indicate that insurance primarily affects individual decisions to seek treatment episode frequency, but has only minimal effects on episode costs. The response to changes in price insurance is modelled as a Bernoulli censoring process on episode frequency. The model is used to address issues on the effective design of insurance plans.
Consumer prices in Denmark 1502–2007

Abstract The article presents a consumer price index for Denmark 1502–2007 and discusses some of the more conceptual issues relating to compilation of historical price indices and measurement of inflation. For the post-1815 period, the consumer prices index (CPI) is based on existing figures whereas new data have been constructed for the pre-1815 period. Due to limited data availability the CPI is based on ‘silver prices’ for the period 1502–1640. Since the Danish currency depreciated vis-à-vis silver during this period, the pre-1640 CPI figures clearly underestimate the actual level of inflation. Disregarding periods with actual war inflation and the deflation during the first two decades or so after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there seems only to have been one major exception from the overall picture of price stability in the post-1640 period: the first four decades following the end of the Second World War where inflation expectations lost their anchor.
A system for enhancing genome-wide coexpression dynamics study.

Statistical similarity analysis has been instrumental in elucidation of the voluminous microarray data. Genes with correlated expression profiles tend to be functionally associated. However, the majority of functionally associated genes turn out to be uncorrelated. One conceivable reason is that the expression of a gene can be sensitively dependent on the often-varying cellular state. The intrinsic state change has to be plastically accommodated by gene-regulatory mechanisms. To capture such dynamic coexpression between genes, a concept termed "liquid association" (LA) has been introduced recently. LA offers a scoring system to guide a genome-wide search for critical cellular players that may interfere with the coexpression of a pair of genes, thereby weakening their overall correlation. Although the LA method works in many cases, a direct extension to more than two genes is hindered by the "curse of dimensionality. " Here we introduce a strategy of finding an informative 2D projection to generalize LA for multiple genes. A web site is constructed that performs on-line LA computation for any user-specified group of genes. We apply this scoring system to study yeast protein complexes by using the Saccharomyces cerevisiae protein complexes database of the Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences. Human genes are also investigated by profiling of 60 cancer cell lines of the National Cancer Institute. In particular, our system links the expression of the Alzheimer's disease hallmark gene APP (amyloid-beta precursor protein) to the beta-site-cleaving enzymes BACE and BACE2, the gamma-site-cleaving enzymes presenilin 1 and 2, apolipoprotein E, and other Alzheimer's disease-related genes.
The Severity of Injury in Children Resulting From Acts Against Civilian Populations

Objective:To characterize the injuries to children by acts against civilian populations (AACP). Summary Background Data:Only 2 articles have focused on the spectrum and severity of injuries to children by AACP. Methods:A retrospective case study of children 0 to 18 years old who were entered into the Israel National Trauma Registry as a result of AACP between September 29, 2000, and June 30, 2002. Results:A total of 158 children were hospitalized for injuries caused by AACP, accounting for 1.4% of all hospitalized injured children but for 10.9% of all in-hospital deaths for trauma. Explosions injured 114 (72.2%); shootings, 34 (21.5%); and other mechanisms such as stoning or stabbing, 10 (6.3%). Older children were injured by explosions more frequently than younger children (86.1% of 15- to 18-year-olds, 73.7% of 10- to 14-year-olds, 63.2% of 0- to 9-year-olds, P = 0.02). A higher percentage of children injured by explosions rather than by shootings were severely or critically injured (33.9% versus 18.8%, P = 0.10). The most frequently injured body regions were extremities (62.8%), head/face (47.3%), chest and abdomen (37.2%), and brain (18.2%). More than 1 body region was injured in 63.0%. Children injured by explosions as compared with shootings had a lower incidence of abdominal trauma (14.9% versus 20.6%), a similar incidence of chest trauma (16.7% versus 14.7%), but a higher incidence of extremity trauma (65.8% versus 53.0%). There were 7 in-hospital deaths, 6 due to severe head injury and 1 due to severe abdominal trauma; 6 of the 7 deaths were caused by explosions, and all but 1 occurred in children 15 to 18 years old. Conclusions:AACP cause significant morbidity and mortality in children, especially adolescents. Injury severity is significantly higher among children who are injured by explosions rather than by shootings.
Students' Approaches to Learning

This paper provides an overview of the students' approaches to learning (SAL) literature, including a review of the models, theories, and research instruments. SAL research has developed largely in the United Kingdom and Australasia, where its concepts are widely understood by academics. Yet little research using these ideas has been done in North America. To encourage American accounting educators to redress this imbalance, the paper describes the motivations for undertaking SAL research, describes conceptions of learning, and reviews a number of inventories developed by SAL scholars for applied research in the field. In addition, this paper traces the development of SAL research in the discipline of accounting education. Finally, the paper reviews 19 extant articles to offer suggestions for future research.
Family Policies and the Western European Fertility Divide: Insights from a Natural Experiment in Belgium

Countries in Northwestern Europe, including Belgium, report cohort fertility levels of close to two children per woman; whereas Central European countries, such as Germany, have levels of around 1.6 children. In seeking to explain these differences, some scholars have stressed the role of the social policy context, while others have pointed to variation in fertility-related social norms. But because these influences are interdependent, it is difficult to isolate their effects on fertility trends. This study attempts to disentangle these two factors by drawing on a quasi-natural experiment. After World War I Germany was compelled to cede the Eupen–Malmedy territory to Belgium. The population of this region has retained its German linguistic identity, but has been subject to Belgian social policies. We examine whether the fertility trends in this German-speaking region of Belgium follow the Belgian or the German pattern. Our findings indicate that they generally resemble the Belgian pattern. This suggests that institutional factors are important for understanding the current fertility differences in Western Europe.
The Measurement of Harmonisation and the Comparability of Financial Statement Items: Within-Country and Between-Country Effects

Abstract This paper reports on an analysis of accounting policy choices made by European companies with an international shareholding. The accounting policies analysed in depth in this paper comprise the treatment of goodwill and accounting for deferred taxation. In the paper, the van der Tas comparability index is developed by separating the index into two components relating to the within-country (intra-national) effects of domestic standardisation and the between-country (inter-national) effects of harmonisation. It is shown in this paper that the value of the index may be interpreted as the probability that two companies selected at random will report financial information that is comparable, and that the lowest level of comparability exists when the accounting methods are assumed to be distributed equiprobably over the companies, the outcome of a random selection of accounting policies. The paper also considers the problems of non-disclosure, and a comprehensive ‘disclosure-adjusted’ comparability in.
The incidence of ovarian activity, pregnancy and bovine genital abnormalities shown by an abattoir survey

All female genital tracts removed during the slaughtering process in a West Country abattoir were collected on two days a week from February 1974 to May 1974 inclusive and thereafter collections were made on one day each week from June 1974 until September 1975 inclusive. A total of 8071 tracts was examined; 1885 (23-36 per cent) of these were pregnant. The stage of pregnancy and the number and location of the fetuses is recorded. Cyclic activity in the non-pregnant tracts was assessed by the presence of a current corpus luteum on one or both ovaries and the number and location of these are reported. Any macroscopic abnormalities of ovaries, Fallopian tubes and uteri were recorded, 804 (9-96 per cent) of the tracts were affected. The most commonly encountered abnormality was cystic ovaries and 307 (3-80 per cent) of the genitalia showed this condition.
On the Assessment of Default Risk in Commercial Mortgage Lending

This paper takes an initial step toward the development of an empirically-based model of default risk assessment in the commercial mortgage market. A review of existing empirical studies of residential mortgage and commercial loan default provides evidence for appropriate model specification and estimation. A simple default risk model for commercial mortgages is then developed based upon the generalized default risk models of Jackson and Kaserman [1980] and Vandell [1981]. The model is then examined for its ability to successfully handle a variety of situations and used to test the validity of traditional ratio analysis "rules-of-thumb" employed in commercial lending. Ratio tests are found generally to be inconsistent with an objective of constraining default risk below some maximum. Finally, a modified ratio analysis consistent with the model and with a constrained default risk strategy is introduced. Copyright American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.
Modulatory effects of Epstein-Barr, herpes simplex, and human herpes-6 viral infections and coinfections on cytokine synthesis. A comparative study.

Herpesviruses such as EBV, HSV, and human herpes virus-6 (HHV-6) have a marked tropism for cells of the immune system and therefore infection by these viruses may result in alterations of immune functions, leading at times to a state of immunosuppression. We report the results of a comparative study in which we found that EBV, HSV-1, and HHV-6 act differentially on the immune system with regard to their effect on the synthesis of IL-1 beta, IL-6, and TNF-alpha, i.e., three immunoregulatory cytokines mainly secreted by activated monocytes/macrophages. Using the polymerase chain reaction technique, analyses of the mRNA levels for each of the three monokines after viral infection indicated that the effect exerted by each of these herpesviruses on cytokine synthesis by human PBMC was detectable at the transcriptional level. Different amounts of IL-1 beta protein were detected in infected PBMC cultures, HHV-6 being the strongest IL-1 beta up-regulatory among these three herpesviruses. Spontaneous releases of IL-6 and TNF-alpha were found reduced after infection by HHV-6 and EBV, respectively. In comparison to EBV and HHV-6, HSV-1 proved to be a weak monokine enhancer. Results of coinfection studies indicated that virus-induced suppressive effects on cytokine synthesis are dominant. In fact, EBV inhibited TNF-alpha synthesis even in the presence of HHV-6, a strong up-regulator of TNF-alpha synthesis. Similarly, EBV was unable to stimulate IL-6 production in the presence of HHV-6. Viral structural component(s) appeared to be responsible for the up-regulation of IL-6 by both EBV and HSV-1, and of TNF-alpha by HSV-1. Taken together, our observations illustrate that herpesviruses can selectively regulate cytokine synthesis thereby disturbing immune homeostasis; this effect may favor pathogenic events, including the reactivation and/or spread of other infectious agents within the host.