Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The evolution of the stellar mass versus halo mass relationship

We present an analysis of the predictions made by the GALFORM semi-analytic galaxy formation model for the evolution of the relationship between stellar mass and halo mass. We show that for the standard implementations of supernova feedback and gas reincorporation used in semi-analytic models, this relationship is predicted to evolve weakly over the redshift range 0 < z < 4. Modest evolution in the median stellar mass versus halo mass (SHM) relationship implicitly requires that, at fixed halo mass, the efficiency of stellar mass assembly must be almost constant with cosmic time. We show that in our model, this behaviour can be understood in simple terms as a result of a constant efficiency of gas reincorporation, and an efficiency of SNe feedback that is, on average, constant at fixed halo mass. We present a simple explanation of how feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) acts in our model to introduce a break in the SHM relation whose location is predicted to evolve only modestly. Finally, we show that if modifications are introduced into the model such that, for example, the gas reincorporation efficiency is no longer constant, the median SHM relation is predicted to evolve significantly over 0 < z < 4. Specifically, we consider modifications that allow the model to better reproduce either the evolution of the stellar mass function or the evolution of average star formation rates inferred from observations.
Sensitivity of Strains of Gonococci to Penicillin, Sulphathiazole, and Streptomycin

Sulphonamides provided the first effective treatment for gonorrhoea. In a short time, however, strains of gonococci appeared which were resistant to sulphonamides, and by 1949 Dunlop was able to report that 86% of patients seen at the London Lock Hospital in 1946-7 were resistant to treatment. Sulphonamides have now been replaced by penicillin and a careful watch has been kept for the appearance of penicillin-resistant gonococci. Such strains can readily be formed in the laboratory by exposure of the organisms to the drug, and it is perhaps surprising that until very recently there has been no evidence that resistant strains have been produced under natural conditions. In this paper we report the sensitivity of strains of gonococci from 200 patients to penicillin, streptomycin, and sulphathiazole. We have observed the relation between the patient's clinical course and the in vitro sensitivity results. Patients. -Between October, 1957, and February, 1958, cultures were obtained from all male patients with gonorrhoea attending the venereal disease departments at St. Thomas's and St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Cultures were also collected from the female contacts when they attended. Satisfactory cultures for sensitivitytesting were obtained from 200 of 295 patients; in addition, a further 11 cultures were obtained from 10 of these 200 patients in whom the gonorrhoea recurred. Of these 200 patients, 190 were males and 10 were females: four of the female patients' contacts were among the 190 males.
Mitogenic effects of platelet‐derived growth factor, fibroblast growth factor, transforming growth factor‐β, and heparin‐binding serum factor for adult mouse Schwann cells

Mitogenic effects of fetal calf serum (FCS), platelet‐derived growth factor (PDGF), fibroblast growth factor (FGF), transforming growth factor‐β (TGF‐β), and forskolin to adult mouse Schwann cells were examined by bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) incorporation and double immunofluorescence for S100 and BrdU. PDGF‐BB, basic FGF, and TGF‐β1 and β2 were all mitogenic for Schwann cells in media containing FCS. Forskolin suppressed the mitogenic activity of these factors. In serum‐free media, PDGF‐BB and bFGF were also mitogenic, but TGF‐β1 and β2 were not. Heparin‐binding fractions of FCS obtained by heparin‐Sepharose chromatography synergized with TGF‐β1 and β2 to produce a mitogenic response. Since PDGF‐BB, acidic FGF, and basic FGF were not detected in these fractions by immunoabsorption and immunoblot assays, the presence of unidentified heparin‐binding molecules in FCS bioactive for adult mouse Schwann cells is suggested. © 1994 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Increase of B cell-activating factor of the TNF family (BAFF) after rituximab treatment: insights into a new regulating system of BAFF production

Background: The cytokine B cell-activating factor of the TNF family (BAFF) is involved in the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases. Objective: To access changes in serum protein and mRNA levels of BAFF after rituximab treatment. Methods: Serum and peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) were isolated from five patients (two with lupus, two with Sjögren’s syndrome, one with rheumatoid arthritis) before and 12 weeks (range 7–17) after a first course of rituximab infusion. Monocytes and B cells were selected from healthy controls and cocultured for 72 h. BAFF protein and mRNA levels were assessed by ELISA and real-time PCR, respectively. Results: After rituximab treatment, median serum BAFF protein level and BAFF to actin mRNA ratio in PBMCs significantly increased. In monocytes cocultured with autologous B cells, BAFF protein level decreased, whereas the mRNA level was stable. In one closely monitored patient, the mRNA ratio of BAFF to actin in PBMCs increased later than the BAFF serum level. Conclusions: Two distinct mechanisms are probably involved in the increase in BAFF level after B cell depletion: (1) the decrease in its receptors leading to a release of BAFF; (2) a delayed regulation of BAFF mRNA transcription. This could favour the re-emergence of autoreactive B cells.
Demographics and payment characteristics of nursing home residents in the United States: a 23-year trend.

BACKGROUND With the aging of our population, an increased number of older Americans are expected to reside in nursing homes. Our objective is to determine the national trend in nursing home residence for older Americans. METHODS Using the Beyond 20/20 software, we analyzed publicly available data from National Nursing Home Surveys 1977-1999 to determine the trend in the demographics, marital status, and source of payments for older Americans residing in nursing homes. RESULTS The absolute number of persons aged 65 years and older residing in nursing homes increased from 1,126,000 to 1,469,500 during the 23-year study period, with those aged 85 years and older, women, and African Americans being at a higher risk for nursing home placement. The rate of residence per 1000 civilian population actually declined from 58 to 43. Decline was most notable for persons aged 85 years and older, female, and white residents. The proportion of widowed persons among residents declined during the study period as well. Overall, Medicaid and private sources were the most common sources of payment. In 1999, Medicaid use was particularly prevalent among residents who were aged 65-74 years old, women, and/or African Americans. CONCLUSIONS Older Americans at high risk for placement in nursing home facilities are aged 85 years and older, women, and African Americans, who are also more likely to rely on Medicaid as their primary source of payment. Preventive programs to keep older adults in the community should focus on this group of high-risk older adults.
IMGT/HLA Database - a sequence database for the human major histocompatibility complex

The IMGT/HLA Database is a specialist database for sequences of the human major histocompatibility (MHC) system. It includes all the HLA sequences officially recognised and named by the WHO Nomenclature Committee for Factors of the HLA System. The database provides users with online tools and facilities for the retrieval and analysis of these sequences. These include allele reports, alignment tools and a detailed database of all source cells. The online IMGT/HLA submission tool allows the submission of both new and confirmatory allele sequences directly to the WHO Nomenclature Committee for Factors of the HLA System. The latest version (release 1.4.1, November 1999) contains 1,015 HLA alleles from over 2,270 component sequences derived from the EMBL/GenBank/DDBJ databases. From its release in December 1998 until December 1999 the IMGT/HLA website received approximately 100,000 hits. The database currently focuses on the human major histocompatibility complex but will be used as a model system to provide specialist databases for the MHC sequences of other species.
Alcohol consumption and pancreatic cancer: a pooled analysis in the International Pancreatic Cancer Case-Control Consortium (PanC4).

BACKGROUND Heavy alcohol drinking has been related to pancreatic cancer, but the issue is still unsolved. METHODS To evaluate the role of alcohol consumption in relation to pancreatic cancer, we conducted a pooled analysis of 10 case-control studies (5585 cases and 11,827 controls) participating in the International Pancreatic Cancer Case-Control Consortium. We computed pooled odds ratios (ORs) by estimating study-specific ORs adjusted for selected covariates and pooling them using random effects models. RESULTS Compared with abstainers and occasional drinkers (< 1 drink per day), we observed no association for light-to-moderate alcohol consumption (≤ 4 drinks per day) and pancreatic cancer risk; however, associations were above unity for higher consumption levels (OR = 1.6, 95% confidence interval 1.2-2.2 for subjects drinking ≥ 9 drinks per day). Results did not change substantially when we evaluated associations by tobacco smoking status, or when we excluded participants who reported a history of pancreatitis, or participants whose data were based upon proxy responses. Further, no notable differences in pooled risk estimates emerged across strata of sex, age, race, study type, and study area. CONCLUSION This collaborative-pooled analysis provides additional evidence for a positive association between heavy alcohol consumption and the risk of pancreatic cancer.
Toward an Understanding of Satisfaction with the Process and Outcomes of Teamwork

Collaborative technologies such as group support systems (GSS) are of ten developed to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of teams; however, the satisfaction users have with the processes and outcomes of the teamwork itself often determines the ultimate adoption and sustained use of collaborative technologies. Much of the research on teamwork has focused on meetings in particular and, consequently, satisfaction with the process and outcomes of meetings, referred to collectively as meeting satisfaction. Research on meeting satisfaction in GSS-supported groups has been equivocal, indicating the need for advancement in our theoretical understanding of the construct. To that end, this paper presents a causal model of meeting satisfaction derived from goal setting theory. The model is tested with an empirical study consisting of 15 GSS groups and 11 face-to-face (FTF) groups engaged in the "lost at sea" task. The results of analysis using structural equation modeling indicate support for the model's integrity across both GSS and FTF groups. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed, including how the model can be used to improve future research on the use of collaborative technology to support teamwork.
Magnetic resonance brain classification by a novel binary particle swarm optimization with mutation and time-varying acceleration coefficients

Abstract Aim: To develop an automatic magnetic resonance (MR) brain classification that can assist physicians to make a diagnosis and reduce wrong decisions. Method: This article investigated the binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) approach and proposed its three new variants: BPSO with mutation and time-varying acceleration coefficients (BPSO-MT), BPSO with mutation (BPSO-M), and BPSO with time-varying acceleration coefficients (BPSO-T). We first extracted wavelet entropy (WE) features from both approximation and detail sub-bands of eight-level decomposition. Afterwards, we used the proposed BPSO-M, BPSO-T, and BPSO-MT to select features. Finally, the selected features were fed into a probabilistic neural network (PNN). Results: The proposed BPSO-MT performed better than BPSO-T and BPSO-M. It finally selected two features of entropies of the following two sub-bands (V1, D1). The proposed system “WE + BPSO-MT + PNN” yielded perfect classification on Data160 and Data66. In addition, it yielded 99.53% average accuracy for the Data255, over 10 repetitions of k-fold stratified cross validation (SCV), higher than state-of-the-art approaches. Conclusions: The proposed method is effective for MR brain classification.
REPURCHASE INTENTION TOWARDS IN VIETNAM : THE EXTENSION OF THE THEORY OF PLANNED BEHAVIOR

The purpose of this study is to apply the extensive framework of theory of planned behavior (TPB) to explain repurchase intention towards fish of Vietnamese families. Specifically, we seek to understand the role of past behavior and habit in explaining repurchase intention besides satisfaction, social norm, and perceived behavioral control (PBC), and explore further the moderator effects of these variables on the satisfaction-repurchase intention relationship. The data is formed by a survey sample of 466 consumers in Khanhhoa, a coastal province in Central of Vietnam. A model development strategy in structural equation modeling with six nested models is used to test hypotheses. The estimating results indicate that satisfaction, social norm, PBC have a positive effect on repurchase intention, which supports the reasons of the original TPB model. Especially, both past behavior and habit have significant influences on repurchase intention and increase considerably in the explained variance of the criterion. More interestingly, the results also indicate that except for PBC, habit, past behavior, and social norm moderate negatively the effect of satisfaction on repurchase intention. These findings emphasize the importance of past behavior and habit as well as moderators within the TPB framework, which increase over twice in predictive ability of repurchase intention towards fish in Vietnam.
Cognitive bias induced by visuo‐motor adaptation to prisms: a simulation of unilateral neglect in normal individuals?

Unilateral neglect has been recently shown to be improved following a short period of adaptation to wedge prisms. The present study investigates whether visuo-motor adaptation can generate a bias in normals on line bisection tasks classically used to assess unilateral neglect. Our results show that adaptation to left-deviating prisms induces a stronger rightward bias for the perceptual than the motor line bisection task. This bias is in the same direction as the one observed in unilateral neglect. No significant effect is produced by adaptation to right-deviating prisms. Our data confirm that the plasticity of inter-sensory and sensori-motor coordinations affects higher levels of space representation. These asymmetric results may reflect the inherent bias of the brain's structural organisation and provide an empirical explanation for the left-sided predominance of unilateral neglect.
Generalized Adaptive Network Coding Aided Successive Relaying for Noncoherent Cooperation

A generalized adaptive network coding (GANC) scheme is conceived for a multi-user, multi-relay scenario, where the multiple users transmit independent information streams to a common destination with the aid of multiple relays. The proposed GANC scheme is developed from adaptive network coded cooperation (ANCC), which aims for a high flexibility in order to: 1) allow arbitrary channel coding schemes to serve as the cross-layer network coding regime; 2) provide any arbitrary trade-off between the throughput and reliability by adjusting the ratio of the source nodes and the cooperating relay nodes. Furthermore, we incorporate the proposed GANC scheme in a novel successive relaying aided network (SRAN) in order to recover the typical 50% half-duplex relaying-induced throughput loss. However, in support of the coherent detection, in addition to carrying out all the relaying functions, the relays have to estimate the Source-to-Relay channels, which imposes a substantial extra energy consumption and bit rate reduction owing to the inclusion of pilots. Hence noncoherent detection is employed for eliminating the power-hungry channel estimation. Finally, we intrinsically amalgamate our GANC scheme with the joint network-channel coding (JNCC) concept into a powerful three-stage concatenated architecture relying on iterative detection, which is specifically designed for the destination node (DN). The proposed scheme is also capable of adapting to rapidly time-varying network topologies, while relying on energy-efficient detection.
Psychiatric comorbidity in a population of Parkinson's disease patients

Behavioural disturbances are frequently observed in Parkinson's disease (PD), including mood and anxiety disorders. The existence of a comorbidity between such psychiatric disorders in PD patients has been suggested only in a few studies. To assess the prevalence of mood and anxiety disturbances, and the rate of comorbidity of such disorders in PD. Secondary aim was to correlate the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in PD with age, sex, laterality of motor symptomatology, clinical features, severity of disease, age of onset and PD duration, and anti‐parkinsonian therapy. Ninety consecutive PD outpatients, and 90 age‐ and sex‐matched controls were included. All PD patients enrolled were non‐fluctuating (21 de novo, 69 treated with levodopa or dopamine agonists). PD patients and controls with Mini Mental State Examination score <23 were excluded. Psychiatric diagnosis was performed by semistructured interview according with DSM‐IV criteria and the severity of depressive and anxious symptoms was rated with clinical rating scales. Major depression was found in 21.1% PD patients vs. 3.3% controls (P < 0.01, chi‐square analysis), dystimia in 18.8% PD patients vs. 4.4% controls (P < 0.05), panic disorders in 30% PD patients vs. 5.5% controls (P < 0.01). No difference in the prevalence of other anxiety disorders was observed between the two groups. The comorbidity of mood and anxiety disorders was found in 19.3% PD patients vs. 8.6% controls (P < 0.01). No correlation was reported between the prevalence of behavioural disturbances and any of the demographic, clinical or pharmacological data taken into account. Our findings might suggest the existence of a wide spectrum of psychiatric disorders in PD ranging from pure depressive disorders, comorbid depressive and anxiety disorders, and pure anxiety disorders, presumably linked to the same neurobiological substrate.
Personal exposures and microenvironmental concentrations of particles and bioaerosols.

The aim of this study was to compare the personal exposure to particles and bioaerosols with that measured by stationary samplers in the main microenvironments, i.e., the home and the workplace. A random sample of 81 elementary school teachers was selected from the 823 teachers working for two councils in eastern Finland for the winter time measurement period. Bioaerosol and other particles were collected on filters by button samplers using personal sampling and microenvironmental measurements in homes and workplaces. The 24-hour sampling period was repeated twice for each teacher. Particle mass, absorption coefficient of the filter and the concentration of viable and total microorganisms were analyzed from each filter. In this paper, the study design, quality assurance principles and results of particle and bioaerosol exposure are described. The results show that particle mass concentrations, absorption coefficient and fungi were higher in personal exposure samples than in home and workplace samples. Furthermore, these concentrations were usually lower in the home than in the workplace. Bacterial concentrations were highest in heavily populated workplaces, while the viable fungi concentrations were lowest in workplaces. The fungi and bacteria results showed high variation, which emphasises the importance of quality assurance (duplicates and field blanks) in the microbial field measurements. Our results indicate that personal exposure measurements of bioaerosols in indoor environments are feasible and supplement the information obtained by stationary samplers.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Pancreatic Islets Transplanted Into the Liver in Humans

Background. In vitro labeling of pancreatic islets by iron nanoparticles enables their detection as hypoitnense spots on serial magnetic resonance (MR) images. We report the first results of a pilot trial aiming to test the feasibility and safety of this technique in humans. Methods. Islets were labeled in culture with 5 &mgr;L/mL ferucarbotran for 6 to 48 hr and transplanted into the portal vein (12 infusions) in 8 C-peptide negative recipients. The liver area was examined the next day and 1, 4, and 24 weeks posttransplant using a 3T MR scanner. Results. In all recipients, significant C-peptide levels and near-normal HbA1c values were achieved with 50% to 80% insulin dose reduction. No side effects related to the labeling procedure were documented. Typically, a significant islet spot number decrease (on average 60%) was detected at week 1 with subsequent only slight decrease for up to 24 weeks. In two subjects with labeling period of less than 6 and 10 hr, only few islet spots were detected corresponding to poor islet visualization in phantoms labeled for the same period of time. Conclusion. Pancreatic islets (PI) visualization was safe and successful in all recipients but was less efficient if labeling period was less than 16 hr. Significant decrease of islet spots occurred at week 1, suggesting early islet destruction or impaired engraftment. Afterward, the islet spot numbers remained stable for up to 24 weeks. Data show that MR detection of ferucarbotran-labeled islets enables their long-term noninvasive visualization and correlates with sustained C-peptide production.
The Two Cultures and Big Data Research

The ongoing struggle in the integration of Big Data methodology into the social science “toolkit” is due, in no small part, to the gulf between the “two cultures” of research. Those that produce and work with explanatory models (the first culture) criticize the primarily predictive models (the second) produced as part of Big Data research. While often the debate does not acknowledge the role of models as a fundamental point of contention, it nonetheless underlies much of the discourse. By better appreciating this difference and finding ways in which to integrate models, Big Data social science will become better integrated in the general social science research practice. The goal of this work is to critically examine the existing gap, the consequences of its existence, and possible resolutions.