Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The stability of the ADO score among UK COPD patients from The Health Improvement Network

The ADO (age, dyspnoea, airflow obstruction) score predicts 3-year overall mortality among chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. Information on the changes in COPD prognostic scores is sparse and it is unclear if the ADO score should be measured serially. We followed 4804 UK COPD patients with three or more ADO measurements from The Health Improvement Network (2005–2014) in a retrospective open cohort design. Patient's ADO scores were calculated once per year unless an obstruction or dyspnoea measurement was missing. Cox regression models assessed the independent role of serial ADO scores on mortality. The associations between baseline patient characteristics and long-term change in ADO scores were assessed using linear mixed effect models. Fewer than 7% of patients had worsened (i.e. increased) by ≥1 point per year after a median follow-up of 4.4 years. There was strong evidence that patients with more rapid worsening in ADO scores had increased mortality (hazard ratio 2.00 (95% CI 1.59–2.52) per 1 point increase in ADO per year). More rapid ADO score worsening was seen among current smokers (rate difference 0.059 (95% CI 0.031–0.087); p=0.001) and ex-smokers (0.028 (95% CI 0.003–0.054); p=0.032) and patients with depression (0.038 (95% CI 0.005–0.071); p=0.022), while overweight (−0.0347 (95% CI −0.0544– −0.0150); p=0.001) and obese (−0.0412 (95% CI −0.0625– −0.0198); p<0.001) patients had a less rapid ADO score worsening. Serial assessment of the ADO score can identify patients with worsening disease and update their prognosis, especially for patients who smoke, are depressed or have lower body mass index. It is unclear if the ADO score should be measured serially in COPD patients. Serial measurement of the ADO score provides additional information about prognosis in COPD, especially for patients who are smokers, depressed or have lower BMI. http://bit.ly/37A4GUX
Development of Potentiometric Sensor for Determination of Isoprenaline in Pharmaceutical Drug

In this study, a potentiometric ion-selective electrode (ISE) was developed for the determination of isoprenaline, a pharmaceutical active substance. For this purpose, initially, IP-PM, IP-TCA, IP-TPB, IP-REY, IP-PTA ion pairs were synthesized. The synthesized ion pairs were used as the ionophore in the structure of the electrode membrane. In order to ensure membrane optimization, PVC membrane ion selective electrodes were produced in various compositions using the synthesized ion pair and the potentiometric performance characteristics of these electrodes were investigated. It was determined that the best potentiometric performance characteristics were obtained with the PVC membrane electrode in the composition of 3.0% isoprenalinetetrafenylborate ion pair, %64.0 nitrophenyloctylether, 32.0% polyvinylchloride and %1.0 Tetrakis (4chlorophenyl) boron potassium compound. The linear operating range of this electrode is 5.0x 10 -6 M 1.0x 10 -1 M and the slope at the 10-fold concentration change is 45.3 mV; determination limit, 5.0x10 -6 M, pH working range, 2.6-3.6 and 5.7-7.9; response time < 5s. The electrode exhibited a reproducible potentiometric response. Isoprenaline content was determined in drug by using the isoprenaline selective electrode.
Development and Aging From trust in caregivers’ support to exploration: The role of openness to negative affect and self-regulation

Attachment theory assumes that trust in caregivers’ support and exploration are closely related. Little research tried to investigate this link, nor focuses on mechanisms that might explain this association. The present studies examined whether trust is related to exploration through a serial indirect effect of openness to negative affect and self-regulation. In Study 1, 212 children, aged 8–13, completed questionnaires assessing trust, openness to negative affect, self-regulation and exploration. The results showed that trust predicted exploration, but only to the extent to which openness to negative affect and selfregulation were involved too. Study 2 refined these findings (n = 59, aged 9–12) using a behavioral measure of openness to negative affect and exploration, and with mother-reported self-regulation. Replicating this serial indirect effect of openness to negative affect and self-regulation with multiple informants and methods, the present studies advance our understanding of how trust might foster exploration in preadolescence.
The Transmission of Sectoral Shocks Across the Innovation Network

Recent innovation literature has documented the benefits of cross-pollination of ideas across a wide set of industries and technology fields in an economy. Industrial and trade policies, by contrast, tend to favor economic specialization through the promotion of selected sectors. In this paper we use a firm-level panel of 13 European countries to assess whether an industry-specific policy propagates across the network of innovating firms through technological linkages. Following the competition shock to the European textile sector, triggered by the 2001 removal of import quotas on Chinese textiles, we find that patenting and knowledge sourcing behavior of non-textile firms are negatively affected. At the aggregate regional level, this indirect effect on non-textile firms can be around three to five times larger than the direct effect.
Atorvastatin promotes AMPK signaling to protect against high fat diet-induced non-alcoholic fatty liver in golden hamsters

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is characterized by diffuse fatty acid degeneration and excess fat accumulation in the liver. Notably, the currently available medications used to treat NAFLD remain limited. The aim of the present study was to investigate the protective role of atorvastatin (Ato) against NAFLD in golden hamsters fed a high fat diet (HFD) and in HepG2 cells treated with palmitate, and identify the underlying molecular mechanism. Ato (3 mg/kg) was administered orally every day for 8 weeks to the hamsters during HFD administration. Hamsters in the model group developed hepatic steatosis with high serum levels of triglyceride, cholesterol, insulin and C-reactive protein, which were effectively reduced by treatment with Ato. Additionally, the relative liver weight of hamsters treated with Ato was markedly lower compared with that of the model group. Hematoxylin and eosin, and oil red O staining indicated that the livers of the animals in the model group exhibited large and numerous lipid droplets, which were markedly decreased after Ato treatment. Western blot analysis indicated that Ato inhibited fat accumulation in the liver through the AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK)-dependent activation of peroxisome proliferator activated receptor α (PPARα), peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ coactivator 1 α and their target genes. Furthermore, in vitro, Ato inhibited PA-induced lipid accumulation in HepG2 cells. This inhibitory effect was attenuated following Compound C treatment, indicating that AMPK may be a potential target of Ato. In conclusion, the increase in AMPK-mediated PPARα and its target genes may represent a novel molecular mechanism by which Ato prevents NAFLD.
DETERMINANTS OF USERS’ INTENTION TO USE SMARTWATCH

The rapid advancement of information and communication technologies in recent years has enabled the design and production of compact mobile devices with robust computing power. These advances have resulted in a plethora of wearable devices, including smartwatches. In particular, smartwatches are highly hyped in the information and communications technology industry for multiple functions that appeal to a broad range of user interests, fitness, health monitoring, and connect to smartphones to extend their functionality with the goal of simplifying users’ lives, reducing distractions, and letting them experience the world without fussing with their phones. Despite these benefits and hypes, the smartwatch market has been declining continuously, and current sale estimates are still relatively low. Thus, this study aims to investigate the level of Malaysian individuals’ intention to use a smartwatch and to identify and assess their impacts. Therefore, the study will assess the impacts of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, cost, privacy, and health risk on user’s behavioural intention to use smartwatch. A total of 501 collected data was used to test the study hypotheses using structural equation modelling technique. The results revealed the high level of Malaysian individuals’ intention to use a smartwatch. Moreover, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a significant positive effect whereas cost, privacy, health risk did not negatively affect users’ intention to use a smartwatch. The extended technology acceptance model explains 34 per cent of the variance in the intention to use a smartwatch. The findings of the study will help future researches and smartwatch developers by providing a guideline for the development of the smartwatch devices.
DOES CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY LEAD TO SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE?

In view of the inconsistent empirical findings in the literature and the limitations of least squares regressions, this paper employs a quantile regression method to investigate the impact that engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities has on corporate performance in China. An important finding of this work is that a significant, negative relationship across all quantiles exists between engagement in CSR activities and corporate performance in China when using return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), and earnings per share (EPS) as performance measures. However, a significant, negative relationship between engagement in CSR activities and corporate performance only exists at low quantiles when using gross profit to net sales (GP) as a performance measure.
Justice-Based Health Care Service and Repatronage Intention of Poor Patient

The purpose of this research is to develop a model of justice-based health care for poor people and examine its effect on patient satisfaction and repatronage intention. There were 234 participants, namely hospital patients from poor families, in the final sample for this study. The results found that interactional justice and information have significant effect on patient satisfaction. Lack of good communication and knowledge of poor patients were the two main reasons cited by patients in this study for their dissatisfaction with the hospital service. All dimensions related to justice-based health care and patient satisfaction have no effect on repatronage intention. Hospitals need to create a standard operating procedure (SOP) as part of their work culture to improve interaction between doctors, nurses and non-medical personnel with patients, especially the poor ones.
Optimal Monopoly Mechanisms with Demand Uncertainty

This paper analyzes a monopoly firm’s profit-maximizing mechanism in the following context. There is a continuum of consumers with a unit demand for a good. The distribution of the consumers’ valuations is given by one of two possible demand distributions/states. The consumers are uncertain about the demand state, and they update their beliefs after observing their own valuation for the good. The firm is uncertain about the demand state but infers it from the consumers’ reported valuations. The firm’s problem is to maximize profits by choosing an optimal mechanism among the class of anonymous, deterministic, direct revelation mechanisms that satisfy interim incentive compatibility and ex post individual rationality. We show that, under certain sufficient conditions, the firm’s optimal mechanism is to set the monopoly price in each demand state. Under these conditions, Segal’s optimal ex post mechanism is robust to relaxing ex post incentive compatibility to interim incentive compatibility.
Soleus H-reflex to S1 nerve root stimulation

H-reflexes in normals were elicited by percutaneous electrical and magnetic stimulation of proximal nerve roots at the cauda equina. H-M interval to S1 nerve root stimulation at the level of the S1 foramen was 6.8 ± 0.33 ms, with side to side difference of 0.16 ± 0.13 ms. Compression/ischemia of the sciatic nerve in the mid-thigh abolished the H-reflex to stimulation of the tibial nerve at the popliteal fossa when the H-reflex to S1 nerve root stimulation was preserved. The length of the S1 nerve root in human cadavers was measured to be 17.5± 03 cm, providing an estimated dorsal root conduction velocity of 67.3 m/s and a ventral root conduction velocity of 54 m/s. We conclude that the H-M interval to S1 root stimulation can provide reliable measures of conduction within the spinal canal including proximal afferents, anterior horn cells and ventral roots.  1998 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd.
The changes in some inflammatory markers and biochemical aspects during smoking in males

Background: Smoking is one of a risk factor which can alter normal processes inside human and form disease. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate the changes in some immunological markers and biochemical aspects during the smoking process. The immunological parameters; include (Tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), interferon-gamma (IFN-γ), interleukin-17A (IL-17A)) as well as erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR). The physiological parameter; included lipid profile (Cholesterol, triglycerides, low density lipoprotein (LDL), very low density lipoprotein (VLDL), high density lipoprotein (HDL)). Methods: The sera were collected from 30 samples. The samples were separated into three groups. The first group includes smokers during 5 years and the second group includes smokers during 10 years as well as, one control (non-smokers) group. These tests were done on sample of thirty healthy males and their ages were 20-30 years. Enzyme-linked immune sorbent assay (ELISA) technique was used to measure cytokines levels while Westergren method was used to measure erythrocyte sedimentation rate. The lipid profile was estimated by using enzymatic colorimetric method. Results: There was an increase in levels of inflammatory cytokines and erythrocyte sedimentation rate. The differences were significant (P<0.05) in the case of TNF-α, IFN-γ, however, it was not significant in the case of IL-17A. The current study showed that the ESR level increased significantly (P<0.05) in comparing with non-smokers during the smoking process. The concentration of the cholesterol, triglycerides, (LDL) and very low density lipoprotein (VLDL) were increased while the level of (HDL) was decreased. Conclusion: Smoking also attracts the inflammatory cells which lead to the release of inflammatory cytokines. Smoking affects the levels of inflammatory markers and lipid profile where the concentrations of them were changed.
Design and Cryptanalysis of Lightweight Symmetric Key Primitives

The need for lightweight cryptographic primitives to replace the traditional standardized primitives such as AES, SHA-2 and SHA-3, which are unrealistic in constrained environments, has been anticipated by the cryptographic community for over a decade and half. Such an anticipation came to reality by the apparent proliferation of Radio Frequency Identifiers (RFIDs), Internet of Things (IoT), smart devices and sensor networks in our daily lives. All these devices operate in constrained environments and require reasonable efficiency with low implementation costs and sufficient security. Accordingly, designing lightweight symmetric key cryptographic primitives and analyzing the state-of-the-art algorithms is an active area of research for both academia and industry, which is directly followed by the ongoing National Institute of Standards and Technology’s lightweight cryptography (NIST LWC) standardization project. In this thesis, we focus on the design and security analysis of such primitives. First, we present the design of four lightweight cryptographic permutations, namely sLiSCP, sLiSCP-light, ACE and WAGE. At a high level, these permutations adopt a Nonlinear Feedback Shift Register (NLFSR) based design paradigm. sLiSCP, sLiSCP-light and ACE use reduced-round Simeck block cipher, while WAGE employs Welch-Gong (WG) permutation and two 7-bit sboxes over the finite field F27 as their underlying nonlinear components. We discuss their design rationale and analyze the security with respect to differential and linear, integral and symmetry based distinguishers using automated tools such as Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and SAT/SMT solvers. Second, we show the applications of these permutations to achieve Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), Message Authentication Code (MAC), Pseudorandom Bit Generator (PRBG) and Hash functionalities. We introduce the idea of the unified round function, which, when combined in a sponge mode can provide all the aforementioned functionalities with the same circuitry. We give concrete instantiations of several AEAD and hash schemes with varying security levels, e.g., 80, 96, 112 and 128 bits. Next, we present Spoc, a new AEAD mode of operation which offers higher security guarantees compared to traditional sponge-based AEAD schemes with smaller states. We instantiate Spoc with sLiSCP-light permutation and propose another two lightweight AEAD algorithms. Notably, 4 of our proposed schemes, namely ACE, Spix, Spoc and WAGE are round 2 candidates of NIST’s LWC
Spatial Price Adjustment for Poverty and Inequality Measurement: A Case Study of Ghana

This paper examines spatial price adjustment methodology for welfare and poverty measurement. To measure and compare the levels of household welfare and poverty in a country, costs of living need to be appropriately taken into account. This is particularly important when analyzing sub-national poverty, such as the comparison of poverty between urban and rural areas, large cities and small towns, etc. Despite the importance of spatial price adjustment, the theory and practice have various unclear issues. Taking advantage of the price data availability for Ghana, this case study investigates several spatial price adjustment approaches, thereby suggesting which is promising based on the pros and cons of each method. While this study is in line with recent studies that stress the importance of detailed information about product specification in the price data, the findings shed light on the potential use of consumer price index (CPI) price data for spatial price adjustment for poverty measurement. The results also demonstrate the tendency to underestimate urban poverty. JEL Classification: D12, E31, O15
Visual Question Answering and Beyond

Scenes. The VQA task with real images requires the use of complex and often noisy visual recognizers. To attract researchers interested in exploring the high-level reasoning required for VQA, but not the low-level vision tasks, we create a new abstract scenes dataset [29, 516, 517, 518] containing 50K scenes. The dataset contains 20 “paperdoll” human models [29] spanning genders, races, and ages with 8 different expressions. The limbs are adjustable to allow for continuous pose variations. The clipart may be used to depict both indoor and outdoor scenes. The set contains over 100 objects and 31 animals in various poses. The use of this clipart enables the creation of more realistic scenes (see bottom row of Fig. 4) that more closely mirror real images than previous papers [516, 517, 518]. See the appendix for the user interface, additional details, and examples. Splits. For real images, we follow the same train/val/test split strategy as the MC COCO dataset [269] (including test-dev, test-standard, test-challenge, test-reserve). For the VQA challenge (see section ? ), test-dev is used for debugging and validation experiments and allows for unlimited submission to the evaluation server. Test-standard is the ‘default’ test data for the VQA competition. When comparing to the state of the art (e.g., in papers), results should be reported on test-standard. Test-standard is also used to maintain a public leaderboard that is updated upon submission. Test-reserve is used to protect against possible overfitting. If there are substantial differences between a method’s scores on test-standard and test-reserve, this raises a red-flag and prompts further investigation. Results on test-reserve are not publicly revealed. Finally, test-challenge is used to determine the winners of the challenge. For abstract scenes, we created splits for standardization, separating the scenes
Variation of the least principal stress with depth and its effect on vertical hydraulic fracture propagation during multi-stage hydraulic fracturing

Knowledge of the least principal stress within, above and below producing intervals is essential for determining fracturing procedures that limit vertical propagation of hydraulic fractures to the intended range of depths. To better understand the cause of varying stress magnitudes in formations adjacent to unconventional reservoirs, we have combined laboratory studies of viscoplastic creep with numerical modeling utilizing in an attempt to match a profile of least principal stress measurement with depth in an actual case study. Creep experiments were conducted on core samples from different depths of a shale play in which Diagnostic Fracture Injection Tests (DFITs) were performed to determine the least principal stress. A power law creep model was used to fit the experimental data. The least principal stress was calculated from numerical modeling with a power law creep law using Abaqus. The calculated least principal stresses were found able to match the relative change of the observed stress magnitudes indicating that the variation of the least principal stress is controlled by varying amounts of viscoplastic stress relaxation. We demonstrate how the observed variations of the least principal stress with depth have an important influence on vertical hydraulic fracture propagation. Fig. 1. The least principal stress determined from DFITs at six different depths where core samples are also available for laboratory testing.
Colonialism or supersanctions: Managing sovereign risk in Sierra Leone and Liberia, 1871-1914

Financial globalization before 1914 saw the rise of a number of institutions, which, to varying degrees, helped resolve information asymmetries and protect creditors from the costs of sovereign default. This paper compares two such institutions and argues that even if the implications for lenders were similar, the impact on borrowers could differ substantially. Using a case study of two African countries, it contrasts two third-party enforcement mechanisms: colonialism and supersanctions. As a British colony, Sierra Leone was able to borrow more and, initially, on better terms than Liberia, primarily using the funds to build infrastructure. Following a long default, Liberia borrowed again by conceding financial sovereignty to foreign agents. While supersanctions largely prevented future default, they did not guarantee the effective use of the proceeds, which were largely used to repay earlier debts, a cycle which continued until an influx of American aid after World War II. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Jutta Bolt, Stephen Broadberry, Ann Carlos, Rui Esteves, Kim Oosterlink, and Paul Sharp for helpful discussions of this paper. I am also grateful for feedback from seminar audiences at Wageningen University, Groningen University, Stellenbosch University and the University of Southern Denmark and attendees at the MacroHist meeting at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. This research has been supported by a Francesca Carnevali Small Research Grant from the Economic History Society and the Economic History Department at the London School of Economics. Archivists at the Indiana University Library, the United Nations Archive, Cambridge University Library, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, and the UK National Archives provided valuable guidance. All remaining errors are my own.