Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk factors for hematological malignancy in polyneuropathy associated with monoclonal gammopathy

Polyneuropathy associated with monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) is a well‐known disease entity. Of the patients with monoclonal gammopathy without neuropathy, 25% develop a hematological malignancy during long‐term follow‐up. Whether the frequency of hematological malignancy is similar in patients with polyneuropathy associated with monoclonal gammopathy and whether hematological screening is necessary in these patients is unknown. To determine the frequency of and risk factors for a hematological malignancy, we investigated 104 patients with polyneuropathy and monoclonal gammopathy. Potential diagnostic variables were obtained from medical history, physical and neurological examination, and laboratory analysis. The associations between potential diagnostic variables and outcome, hematological malignancy, were evaluated by univariable and multivariable logistic‐regression analysis. Among our patients, 23 had a hematological malignancy (8 multiple myeloma, 10 low‐grade lymphoma, 3 plasmacytoma, 1 Castleman's disease and 1 POEMS syndrome [polyneuropathy, organomegaly, endocrinopathy, M‐protein, and skin changes]). Weight loss, progression of the neuropathy, and an M‐protein level > 1 g/L were independent risk factors for malignancy. Extensive screening is indicated in patients with these features. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Muscle Nerve 24: 1295–1302, 2001
Comprehensive cancer screening among unmarried women aged 40-75 years: results from the cancer screening project for women.

OBJECTIVES We explored self-reported rates of individual on-schedule breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer screenings, as well as an aggregate measure of comprehensive screenings, among unmarried women aged 40-75 years. We compared women who partner with women (WPW) or with women and men (WPWM) to women who partner exclusively with men (WPM). We also compared barriers to on-schedule cancer screenings between WPW/WPWM and WPM. METHODS Comparable targeted and respondent-driven sampling methods were used to enroll 213 WPW/WPWM and 417 WPM (n = 630). Logistic regression models were computed to determine if partner gender was associated with each measure of on-schedule screening after controlling for demographic characteristics, health behaviors, and cancer-related experiences. RESULTS Overall, 74.3% of women reported on-schedule breast screening, 78.3% reported on-schedule cervical screening, 66.5% reported on-schedule colorectal screening, and 56.7% reported being on-schedule for comprehensive screening. Partner gender was not associated with any of the measures of on-schedule screening in multivariable analyses. However, women who reported ever putting off, avoiding, or changing the place of screenings because of sexual orientation were less likely to be on-schedule for comprehensive screening. Women who reported barriers associated with taking time from work and body image concerns were also less likely to be on-schedule for comprehensive screening. CONCLUSIONS Barriers to cancer screening were comparable across types of examinations as well as between WPW/WPWM and WPM. Developing health promotion programs for unmarried women that address concomitant detection and prevention behaviors may improve the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare delivery and ultimately assist in reducing multiple disease risks.
Trend Employment Growth and the Bunching of Job Creation and Destruction

Research using U. S. manufacturing data finds that job destruction fluctuates more over time than job creation, but some new data indicate that this behavior is not shared in growing sectors, where job creation varies more. An explanation for this finding based on the interaction between (S,s)-type adjustment and trend employment growth delivers some tight predictions for the relationship between trend growth and the volatility of creation relative to destruction. Although it scores some notable successes, the simple (S,s)-based model augmented with a low-frequency trend cannot fully account for the strength of the empirical relationship between relative gross-flow volatility and trend growth across one-digit industries.
Managing Value Creation within the Firm: An Examination of Multiple Performance Measures

There has been an emphasis in recent years on understanding how value is created within the firm. To understand what drives value, managers must have in place performance measurement systems designed to capture information on all aspects of the business, not just the financial results. Many firms are implementing a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) performance measurement system that tracks measures across four hierarchical perspectives: learning and growth, internal business processes, customer, and financial perspectives. Although BSCs should ideally be tailored to each firm's unique strategy, evidence shows that managers tend to rely on generic measures, particularly as measures of the outcome of each perspective. We use cross‐sectional data on seven archival measures from 125 firms over a five‐year period to proxy for typical outcome measures of the four BSC perspectives. We find that a model that allows each outcome measure to be associated with outcome measures in all higherlevel BSC perspectives captures th.
How Low Is a Guaranteed-Lowest-Price?

A game based on the Bertrand duopoly model is constructed to study the effects of price guarantee policies. Before it chooses a list price, a firm can make a binding commitment to match or beat its competitor's price. The effectiveness of these price guarantee policies in facilitating price collusion depends on the solution concept used. Furthermore, there exists an equilibrium in which neither firm offers any price guarantees and each firm sets price equal to marginal cost.
Gender dynamics and redundancy in urban China

Abstract This paper focuses on employment narratives recounted in life history interviews with women workers in Nanjing, China. Drawing on feminist perspectives on gender and global economic changes, it examines the micro-processes that underpinned China's economic restructuring and, through a gender-based analysis, shows how working women lost out in this process. After an overview of the institutional context in which China's economic restructuring occurred, this paper examines women's experiences in the workplace and identifies factors that contributed to their disadvantageous position in the work unit and that increased their vulnerability in the changing labor market. The evidence of gender inequality, assumptions about women's labor capacities, and the gendered consequences of economic restructuring suggest that older, less educated women workers, mostly from the Cultural Revolution generation, are unlikely to gain any benefit from whatever advantages accrue from China's economic integration into the global economy.
Drosophila Dosage Compensation Involves Enhanced Pol II Recruitment to Male X-Linked Promoters

Promoting the Male X Chromosome In mammals and fruit flies, females have a double dose of the X chromosome compared to males, and to compensate for this imbalance, in fruit flies, transcription from across most of the male X chromosome is boosted by twofold. Conrad et al. (p. 742, published online 19 July) measured the binding of RNA polymerase II, responsible for the majority of the transcription on the X chromosome, and found a consistent increase at the promoters of genes on the male X chromosome. Thus, the increase in transcription on the male X chromosome is not driven by increased rates of transcriptional elongation, as has been suggested previously, but must involve up-regulation of transcription initiation. Boosting gene expression from the entire X chromosome in males happens mainly at the level of transcription initiation. Through hyperacetylation of histone H4 lysine 16 (H4K16), the male-specific lethal (MSL) complex in Drosophila approximately doubles transcription from the single male X chromosome in order to match X-linked expression in females and expression from diploid autosomes. By obtaining accurate measurements of RNA polymerase II (Pol II) occupancies and short promoter-proximal RNA production, we detected a consistent, genome-scale increase in Pol II activity at the promoters of male X-linked genes. Moreover, we found that enhanced Pol II recruitment to male X-linked promoters is largely dependent on the MSL complex. These observations provide insights into how global modulation of chromatin structure by histone acetylation contributes to the precise control of Pol II function.
Edinburgh Research Explorer Robust Stochastic Optimization For MISO Broadcasting Channel With Delayed CSIT and Limited Transmitting Antenna

—This work considers the K -user multiple-input-single-output (MISO) broadcast channel (BC) with delayed channel state information at transmitter (CSIT) where the base station (BS) has only two antennas. Based on the MAT 1 scheme, we propose a probabilistic-constraint optimization approach at the transmitter side to design the beamforming vectors by compromising between aligning interference and enhancing signal detectability. At the receiver side, minimal interference leakage method is proposed and the corresponding closed-form expressions for the interference suppression matrices are derived. For K = 2 case, the effective MIMO channel is derived and the closed-form expression of achievable data rate is obtained based on the proposed optimization method. Moreover, we show that the optimal scheme when K = 3 has the same number of effective channels as in the case of K = 2 , which can be optimized by the probabilistic-constraint optimization method. For the case K ≥ 3 , we propose a new suboptimal scheme which achieves 4 K 3 K − 1 degrees-of-freedom and show that the new scheme can also be decomposed into the same number of effective channels as in the case of K = 2 . Simulation result demonstrates interference leakage power versus the achievable data rate, where it can be seen that the achievable data rate increases slowly with the interference leakage until the optimal point and then decreases drastically. Simulation results also show that the proposed scheme outperforms the MAT scheme and dual signal-to-interference-noise ratio (SINR) scheme for various channel variances.
The Incidence of Government Expenditure and Redistribution in the United Kingdom

not choose to produce, or will not produce in a socially efficient manner. The form of taxation adopted by a government may be influenced by a number of factors, but equity considerations are often important. Thus, tax systems frequently aim to alter the distribution of post-tax incomes (or some other measure of individuals' command over goods and services) from that of pre-tax incomes. Of course, redistribution brought about by taxation can alter individuals' command only over marketed goods and services. However, the effects of the fiscal system as a whole (tax and government expenditure) on redistribution may be very different from redistribution via taxation alone. Unfortunately, although there have been many attempts to measure the distributional impact of specific taxes or tax systems, the theoretical and empirical difficulties experienced when trying to measure the redistributional effect of publicly provided goods and services places severe limitations on attempts to measure fiscal redistribution. Recent British and US studies of fiscal incidence have tended to allocate the benefits of government expenditure across income groups in line with their estimated consumption of government services. Government services that cannot be allocated specifically have usually been allocated using various
A Tight Upper Bound on Bit Error Rate of Joint OFDM and Multi-Carrier Index Keying

This letter investigates performance enhancement by the concept of multi-carrier index keying in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. For the performance evaluation, a tight closed-form approximation of the bit error rate (BER) is derived introducing the expression for the number of bit errors occurring in both the index domain and the complex domain, in the presence of both imperfect and perfect detection of active multi-carrier indices. The accuracy of the derived BER results for various cases are validated using simulations, which can provide accuracy within 1 dB at favorable channels.
The Key Role of Managers’ Values in Exporting: Influence on Customer Responsiveness and Export Performance

Values are an essential element explaining a person's attitudes and behavior. Therefore, it is surprising that despite the number of studies that have examined the organizational and managerial factors affecting export performance, little research has investigated the possible impact of a manager's individual values on strategic choice and the export performance of the firm. To address this gap in the literature, the authors examine the impact of managers’ values on the firm's customer responsiveness and export performance. In addition, they examine the mediating role of customer responsiveness in the values–export performance linkage. The authors explore the empirical usefulness of the psychic distance construct by examining its direct link with export performance and the extent to which it moderates the relationship between individual values and export performance. Overall, the results suggest that managers’ values significantly influence strategic decisions and the export performance of the firm, highlighting the need for more research attention in this area.
Energy Harvesting Tests With Galfenol at Variable Magneto-Mechanical Conditions

This paper deals with the experimental characterization of Galfenol (iron-gallium alloy) and its energy harvesting capabilities. Two rods are considered, one with a stress annealing treatment. The impact on the harvesting performance of magnetic bias, mechanical prestress and termination resistor are considered. Moreover, the performed measurements allow to verify an important feature of the energy conversion of this magneto-mechanical material: the energy harvested loops, in the B-H plane, are confined within the magnetic characteristics at the extrema of the applied stress. This suggests the significance of the static characteristics in the energy conversion process.
Allelic loss at 1p34, 13q12, 17p13.3, and 17q21.1 correlates with poor postoperative prognosis in breast cancer

Allelic losses of tumor suppressor genes (TSGs), or the chromosomal regions harboring them, in tumor DNA may become useful postoperative prognostic indicators. To examine whether specific allelic losses might correlate with postoperative survival in a 5‐year prospective follow‐up, we tested tumors from a cohort of 264 breast cancer patients for allelic losses of 18 microsatellite markers representing either a known TSG or a region where genetic alterations are frequent in breast tumors. Patients whose tumors had lost an allele at 1p34, 13q12, 17p13.3, or 17q21.1 had significantly higher risks of postoperative mortality than those whose tumors retained both alleles at those loci (at 1p34, a 5‐year mortality rate of 29% among patients with losses vs. 7% with retentions, P = 0.0008; at 13q12, 31% vs. 10%, P = 0.0062; at 17p13.3, 24% vs. 13%, P = 0.026; and at 17q21.1, 31% vs. 13%, P = 0.0047). Furthermore, combined losses at 13q12 and 17p13.3 increased the predicted postoperative mortality risks by a factor of 9.6 (5‐year mortality rate of 42% vs. 5% with retentions, P = 0.0001), and combined losses at 1p34 and 17p13.3 raised the predicted postoperative mortality risks by a factor of 8.6 (27% vs. 3%, P = 0.0064). We conclude that allelic losses at these loci can serve as negative prognostic indicators to guide postoperative management of patients. Genes Chromosomes Cancer 26:134–141, 1999. © 1999 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Cardiac performance and creatine kinase flux during inhibition of ATP synthesis in the perfused rat heart

Mateo, P., V. Stepanov, B. Gillet, J.-C. Beloeil and J. A. Hoerter. Cardiac performance and creatine kinase flux during inhibition of ATP synthesis in the perfused rat heart. Am. J. Physiol. 277 (Heart Circ. Physiol. 46): H308–H317, 1999. —To study the relation among mitochondrial energy supply, cardiac performance, and energy transfer through creatine kinase (CK), two acute models of inhibition of ATP synthesis were compared in the isovolumic acetate-perfused rat heart. Similar impairments of mechanical performance (rate-pressure product, RPP) were achieved by various stepwise decreases in O2 supply (PO2 down to 20% of control) or by infusing CN (0.15–0.25 mM). The forward CK flux measured by saturation-transfer 31P NMR spectroscopy was 6.1 6 0.4 mM/s in control hearts. Only after severe hypoxia (PO2 , 40% of control) did CK flux drop (to 1.9 6 0.2 mM/s at PO2 5 25% of control) together with impaired systolic activity and a rise in end-diastolic pressure. In contrast, in mild hypoxia CK flux remained constant and similar to control (5.3 6 0.5 mM/s, not significant) despite a twofold reduction in systolic activity. Similarly in all CN groups, constant CK flux was maintained for a threefold reduction in RPP, showing the absence of a relation between cardiac performance and global NMRmeasured CK flux during mild ATP synthesis inhibition.
Evidence for post‐transcriptional regulation of cyclin B1 mRNA in the cell cycle and following irradiation in HeLa cells.

Cyclin B1 mRNA expression varies markedly through the cell cycle with its peak in G2/M and lowest level in G1. Cyclin B1 mRNA levels are also transiently reduced in HeLa cells after gamma‐irradiation, coincident with the radiation‐induced G2 block. In order to understand the mechanisms underlying these variations, we have measured cyclin B1 mRNA stability in HeLa cells during different phases of the cell cycle. The half‐life of the mRNA measured after actinomycin D administration is 1.1‐1.8 h in both early and late G1, 8 h in S and 13 h in G2/M. We therefore conclude that altered RNA stability is important in modulating cyclin B1 mRNA levels through the HeLa cell cycle. Furthermore, 3 h after irradiation of HeLa cells in S phase with 10 Gy, the half‐life of cyclin B1 mRNA is reduced to 5 h; it is further reduced to 2‐3 h at 14 h after irradiation. Thus, decreased stability contributes to the reduction in cyclin B1 mRNA following irradiation.
Maternal Serum CA125 and CA15-3 Antigen Levels in Normal and Pathological Pregnancy

Objective: To evaluate the value of maternal serum CA125 and CA15-3 concentrations for discriminating pathological from normal pregnancies. Methods: Serum samples from 120 women, in whom pregnancy outcome was pathological, i.e. spontaneous abortion, fetal death, intrauterine growth retardation, chromosomal and structural abnormalities, and (pre)eclampsia, were assessed for CA125 and CA15-3 and compared with levels found in 350 women with a normal pregnancy outcome matched for age and duration of pregnancy. Results: Maternal CA125 serum values were significantly higher in the first and the third trimester of pregnancy (median 23.0 and 21.0 U/ml; p < 0.00001 and p < 0.001, respectively), compared to those in the second trimester (median 14.0 U/ml), but not significantly different from those obtained in pathological pregnancies. Maternal serum CA15-3 values were significantly higher during the third trimester (median 26.0 U/ml) compared to the first and second trimester of pregnancy (median 14.0 and 15.0 U/ml; p < 0.0001); CA15-3 serum levels in normal and pathological pregnancies showed no significant difference. Conclusion: Maternal serum levels of CA125 are higher during the first and third trimester of pregnancy. CA15-3 maternal serum levels are higher during the third trimester compared to the first and second trimester. Maternal CA125 and CA15-3 serum levels showed no relation with a pathological outcome of pregnancy.
Long‐lasting synaptic modification in the rat hippocampus resulting from NMDA receptor blockade during development

Recent reports have suggested that proper maturation of synapses in the hippocampus requires activation of NMDA receptors. We previously demonstrated that neonatal ethanol exposure results in a lasting reduction in synaptic strength in the hippocampus. To determine if this reduction was due to ethanol's effects on NMDA receptors, we investigated long‐term changes in synaptic properties resulting from administration of NMDA receptor antagonists to neonatal animals. Rats were injected daily from PND 4–9 with either the noncompetitive NMDA receptor antagonist MK‐801, the competitive NMDA receptor antagonist CPP, or the AMPA receptor antagonist NBQX. Control rats were either injected daily with physiological saline during the same period or left to develop normally. Hippocampal slices were prepared from nembutal‐anesthetized animals between PND 35 and PND 40. The maximum pEPSP and PS values were not significantly different between controls and NMDA antagonist‐treated animals. However, slices from animals injected with NMDA receptor antagonists required higher stimulus currents to attain comparable pEPSPs. The ratio of the slope of the pEPSP to the amplitude of the presynaptic volley was also reduced, as were pEPSP responses to specific stimulus currents. None of these effects were observed in slices prepared from animals treated with the AMPA receptor antagonist NBQX. Glutamate receptor antagonism did not produce lasting changes in long‐term potentiation or paired‐pulse facilitation. These results indicate activation of NMDA receptors during development is necessary for proper development of synapses. Synapse 43:95–101, 2002. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Characterization of airway nitric oxide in allergic rhinitis: The effect of intranasal administration of l‐NAME

Background: Several studies have attempted to assess nasal nitric oxide (NO) levels in allergic rhinitis (AR). However, there seem to be differences in the results obtained. We therefore wanted to investigate this further by studying airway NO in AR and controls at several modalities, and also the effect of intranasal administration of the nitric oxide synthase (NOS) inhibitorNG‐nitro‐l‐arginine‐methyl ester·HCl (l‐NAME).
Stock Market Efficiency in China: Evidence from the Split-Share Reform

We perform an event study to investigate the efficiency of the Chinese stock market. We study the reaction of stock returns and trading volumes to the 2005-2006 structural reform which allowed the transformation of non-tradable shares (NTS) into tradable shares (TS) through payment of a compensation to holders of TS. We find evidence of positive abnormal returns in the few days before the announcement of which companies will undergo the reform process and in the ten days after the readmission to trading of participating companies following the determination of the compensation, but no abnormal returns after the payment itself. From a methodological viewpoint, our contribution is the introduction of a bootstrap procedure that is designed to replicate the actual degree of covariance across firms.
What's Not There: Odd Lots and Market Data

We investigate odd-lot trades in equity markets. Odd lots are increasingly used in algorithmic and high-frequency trading, but are not reported to the consolidated tape or in databases such as TAQ. In our sample, the median number of odd-lot trades is 24% but in some stocks odd lots are 60% or more of trading. Odd-lot trades contribute 35% of price discovery, consistent with informed traders using odd lots to avoid detection. Omitting odd-lot trades leads to inaccuracies in order imbalance measures and makes sentiment measures unreliable. Excluding odd lots from the consolidated tape raises important regulatory issues.