Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparison of the short form (SF)-12 health status instrument with the SF-36 in patients with coronary heart disease

Objective: To investigate whether a shorter health status instrument, the short form (SF)-12, is comparable with its longer version, the SF-36, for measuring health related quality of life of patients with coronary heart disease. Design: Prospective cohort study with follow up at six and 12 months. Setting: 18 cardiac rehabilitation centres in Germany. Patients: Patients were enrolled at admission to the rehabilitation centres after myocardial infarction, coronary artery bypass grafting, and percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty. Analyses: Correlation coefficients were calculated between SF-12 and SF-36 physical component summary (PCS-12/-36) and mental component summary (MCS-12/-36) scores and the respective change scores. Responsiveness to change was determined with the standardised response mean. Main results: 2441 patients were enrolled (78% men, mean (SD) age 60 (10) years; 22% women, 65 (10) years). Baseline PCS-12 and PCS-36 scores were highly correlated (r = 0.96, p < 0.001), as were baseline MCS-12 and MCS-36 scores (r = 0.96, p < 0.001). Similarly, change scores between baseline and 12 months were highly correlated (PCS-12/-36: r = 0.94, p < 0.001; MCS-12/-36: r = 0.95, p < 0.001). There was no difference in standardised response means between the SF-12 and SF-36 scales. Conclusions: The SF-12 summary measures replicate well the SF-36 summary measures and show similar responsiveness to change. The SF-12 appears to be an efficient alternative to the SF-36 for the assessment of health related quality of life of patients with coronary heart disease.
Implementation of Credit Restructuring Provisions for Debtors of Non-Performing Loans in Bank Credits

Indonesia government’s effort made to overcome the high increase of nonperforming loan is issuing policy in the form of Bank Indonesia Regulation No. 2/15/PBI/2000 concerning Credit Restructuring in the form of a reduction in loan interest rates, extension of credit period, reduction of interest credit arrears, reduction of loan principal arrears, addition of credit facilities, and conversion of credit to temporary capital participation. Empirically, barriers to implementing this strategy still occur: obstacles in the process, obstacles to implementation, and obstacles to legal factors. With an Indonesian legal perspective approach, the study examines the application of strategies to find alternative solutions by applying empirical legal research methods. The results show that deviations in applying credit restructuring provisions are the leading factors that hinder their success, aside from amendments to the provisions that occur. Amendments must be reduced and prospective debtors should gain an in-depth understanding of the system in credit.
The Hide Trade and Wichita Social Organization: An Assessment of Ethnological Hypotheses Concerning Polygyny

Abstract Compared with late prehistoric archaeological sites attributed to the Wichita, protohistoric sites in Oklahoma contain artifact assemblages indicating that hide processing for trade with French voyageurs became a primary economic activity. Yet aside from assemblage changes, little is understood about how market demand for hides and other animal byproducts altered Wichita social organization, if at all. In this article we investigate polygyny. We examine the hypothesis that in household economies where production depends on women's contributions, market integration intensifies demand on female labor: Where polygyny is practiced, market integration increases the number of wives sought by males, leading to larger families. We compare ethnological data and Blackfoot accounts of polygyny with ethnohistorical and ethnographic information concerning the Wichita. We then review protohistoric Wichita documentary and archaeological data to discuss their strengths and weaknesses for. identifying these social and economic changes.
[1,2-Bis(diphenylphosphanyl)ethane-κ2 P,P′]dichloridopalladium(II) dimethyl sulfoxide monosolvate

In the title compound, [PdCl2(C26H24P2)]·C2H6OS, the PdII atom adopts a distorted cis-PdCl2P2 square-planar coordination geometry. The five-membered chelate ring adopts an envelope conformation with a methylene C atom in the flap position. The S and C atoms of the dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) solvent molecule are disordered over two sets of sites in a 0.8976 (18):0.1024 (18) ratio. The DMSO O atom accepts three C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds from an adjacent complex molecule.
The Ras Signaling Inhibitor LOX-PP Interacts with Hsp70 and c-Raf To Reduce Erk Activation and Transformed Phenotype of Breast Cancer Cells

ABSTRACT The lysyl oxidase gene (LOX) inhibits Ras signaling in transformed fibroblasts and breast cancer cells. Its activity was mapped to the 162-amino-acid propeptide domain (LOX-PP) of the lysyl oxidase precursor protein. LOX-PP inhibits Erk signaling, motility, and tumor formation in a breast cancer xenograft model; however, its mechanism of action is largely unknown. Here, a copurification-mass spectrometry approach was taken using ectopically expressed LOX-PP in HEK293T cells and the heat shock/chaperone protein Hsp70 identified. Hsp70 interaction with LOX-PP was confirmed using coimmunoprecipitation of intracellularly and bacterially expressed and endogenous proteins. The interaction was mapped to the Hsp70 peptide-binding domain and to LOX-PP amino acids 26 to 100. LOX-PP association reduced Hsp70 chaperone activities of protein refolding and survival after heat shock. LOX-PP interacted with the Hsp70 chaperoned protein c-Raf. With the use of ectopic expression of LOX-PP wild-type and deletion proteins, small interfering RNA (siRNA) knockdown, and Lox−/− mouse embryo fibroblasts, LOX-PP interaction with c-Raf was shown to decrease downstream activation of MEK and NF-κB, migration, and anchorage-independent growth and reduce its mitochondrial localization. Thus, the interaction of LOX-PP with Hsp70 and c-Raf inhibits a critical intermediate in Ras-induced MEK signaling and plays an important role in the function of this tumor suppressor.
Bipolar radiofrequency in the treatment of dermatologic imperfections: clinicopathological and immunohistochemical aspects.

BACKGROUND Rapid progress in the technology for skin rejuvenation has allowed for shorter post-treatment times than ever before. An example of such technology is the radiofrequency (RF) device, which offers nonablative skin rejuvenation, particularly for skin tightening and wrinkle reduction. OBJECTIVE Medical devices that emit RF energy produce a change in the electrical charges of the treated skin creating an electron movement, and the resistance of the tissue to the electron movement generates heat. This article examines the mechanism of action of a new bipolar RF device, which emits RF energy through a handpiece with a bipolar electrode configuration, and assesses the clinical histological and immunohistochemical results on a sample group of patients who underwent a cycle of sessions with this device. METHODS AND MATERIALS Thirty patients affected with periocular wrinkles, glabellar wrinkles, slackness of the cheeks with accentuation of the nasogenian furrow, striae distensae at the scapulohumeral joint, abdomen, and gluteal-trochanteric areas, or acne scars were included. These patients underwent a cycle of 6 to 8 sessions with 2-week intervals with the new bipolar RF device undergoing photographic monitoring before treatment and at the end of the cycle of sessions. In addition, 15 patients from the sample group were subjected to 2 biopsies, one at the start of treatment and the other 3 months after the last treatment. RESULTS All the patients showed improvement in treated imperfections from the second session onward, and they expressed their satisfaction at the end of the treatment cycle. The most notable clinical, histological, and immunohistochemical results were observed in the patients with abdominal striae distensae. In most cases, the temporary side effects observed consisted of rashes and ecchymosis. Two patients reported the formation of blisters on the treated area caused by excessively high RF settings. CONCLUSION The new bipolar RF device proved to be effective, noninvasive, and easy to use. The improvement in the treated areas is progressive and continues to be apparent several months after the last session. The duration of the results achieved still remains to be accurately determined.
Identifying test-critical dependencies

Regression testing is a major cost driver during software maintenance. An important approach to reduce maintenance costs is therefore to improve software testability The improvement efforts should concentrate on those parts of a software system that cause the most severe problems during testing and maintenance. This paper describes a new approach to testability improvement focusing on system structure. We identify dependencies that are critical for testing, i.e. test-critical dependencies, based on a set of testability metrics. The results of four case studies show that (1) a small subset of the dependencies within a system has an exceedingly high impact on particular testability metrics, (2) conventional coupling metrics are not good predictors of these test-critical dependencies, (3) dependencies automatically identified to be test-critical are good indicators of design that needs improvement.
Optimization of Secondary System Antenna Deployment in Shared Spectrum Access

This work focuses on the implementation of dynamic spectrum access in a scenario where the existing wireless infrastructure is shared by a secondary cellular system. We study the optimization of the physical antenna configuration of the secondary-system base stations, assuming that these antennas are deployed at the transmitter sites of a primary broadcast network. Specifically, we maximize the throughput of a secondary network (SN) operating within a primary network (PN) by finding the optimal antenna height and vertical tilt for the SN base stations. This optimization is constrained by the physical restrictions in the deployment site and by the maximum allowed interference to the PN. We show that this optimization provides significant gain in the cell throughput of the SN while reducing interference toward users of the primary system. As a case study, we design an optimized configuration for the SN antenna when the SN operates as a dedicated communication link for a regional transport system. To this end, field measurement data gathered in collaboration with a regional transport authority are used to calibrate the presented modeling method.
Reflex HMD to compensate lag and correction of derivative deformation

A head-mounted display (HMD) system suffers largely from the time lag between human motion and the display output. The concept of a reflex HMD to compensate for the time lag is proposed and discussed. Based on this notion, a prototype reflex HMD is constructed. The rotational movement of the user's head is measured by a gyroscope, modulating the driving signal for the LCD panel, and this shifts the viewport within the image supplied from the computer. The derivative distortion was investigated, and the dynamic deformation of the watched world was picked up as the essential demerit. Cylinderical rendering is introduced to solve this problem and is proved to cancel this dynamic deformation, and also to decrease the static distortion.
Norms for healthy adults aged 18–87 years for the Cognitive Drug Research System: An automated set of tests of attention, information processing and memory for use in clinical trials

The Cognitive Drug Research (CDR) System is a set of nine computerized tests of attention, information processing, working memory, executive control and episodic memory which was designed for repeated assessments in research projects. The CDR System has been used extensively in clinical trials involving healthy volunteers for over 30 years, and a database of 7751 individuals aged 18–87 years has been accumulated for pre-treatment data from these studies. This database has been analysed, and the relationships between the various scores with factors, including age, gender and years of full-time education, have been identified. These analyses are reported in this paper, along with tables of norms for the various key measures from the core tasks stratified by age and gender. These norms can be used for a variety of purposes, including the determination of eligibility for participation in clinical trials and the everyday relevance of research findings from the system. In addition, these norms provide valuable information on gender differences and the effects of normal ageing on major aspects of human cognitive function.
Combination Calls in Olive Colobus Monkeys (Procolobus Verus) in Tai National Park, Cote D‘ivoire

In many primate species, individuals produce a finite number of acoustically distinct calls as part of a species-specific vocal repertoire. The calls usually have context-specific functions, such as defending a home range, avoiding predators, or alerting conspecifics to a food source, etc. In some primates, call systems are structurally more complex because calls are assembled into higher-order level of sequences that sometimes carry specific meanings. Here, we describe a specific vocal acoustical structure which revealed a high level of combination of finite vocal unit in sequences. We conducted focal animal samples method in three habituated groups of Olive colobus monkeys (Procolobus verus). Three call combination types in sequence were found composed from two to five call units. Some of these call combinations were linked to specific contexts. Our study thus provides further evidence that the propensity to combine acoustic units into higher order sequences is not an exclusively human trait but a behavioural feature that may be widespread in the primate communication.
Automatic Generation and Detection of Visually Faultless Facial Morphs

This paper introduces an approach to automatic generation of visually faultless facial morphs along with a proposal on how such morphs can be automatically detected. It is endeavored that the created morphs cannot be recognized as such with the naked eye and a reference automatic face recognition (AFR) system produces high similarity scores while matching a morph against faces of persons who participated in morphing. Automatic generation of morphs allows for creating abundant experimental data, which is essential (i) for evaluating the performance of AFR systems to reject morphs and (ii) for training forensic systems to detect morphs. Our first experiment shows that human performance to distinguish between morphed and genuine face images is close to random guessing. In our second experiment, the reference AFR system has verified 11.78% of morphs against any of genuine images at the decision threshold of 1% false acceptance rate. These results indicate that facial morphing is a serious threat to access control systems aided by AFR and establish the need for morph detection approaches. Our third experiment shows that the distribution of Benford features extracted from quantized DCT coefficients of JPEG-compressed morphs is substantially different from that of genuine images enabling the automatic detection of morphs.
PPARγ agonist pioglitazone rescues neuronal cell damage after transient global cerebral ischemia through matrix metalloproteinase inhibition

Previous studies have demonstrated that pioglitazone, a peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor gamma (PPARγ) agonist, inhibits ischemia‐induced injury in various tissues including neural tissue. Pioglitazone has also been shown to reduce matrix metalloproteinase (MMP) activity. Because MMP is known to play a major role in the pathophysiology of brain ischemia, the present study was undertaken to test whether pioglitazone attenuates ischemic neuronal damage through MMP inhibition. C57BL/6 mice were subjected to global brain ischemia for 20 min. Animals were killed 72 h after ischemia. Oral pioglitazone (40 mg/kg/day, as a suspension in 0.5% carboxymethylcellulose) was administered to mice twice daily for 3 days before ischemia and twice daily after ischemia until the animals were killed. We investigated gelatinase activity by zymography and laminin immunohistochemistry. Histological analysis was also performed to test the protective effect of pioglitazone on neuronal damage. Mice treated with pioglitazone had attenuated gelatinase activity. Gelatin gel and in situ zymography showed up‐regulation of gelatinase activity after ischemia. Pioglitazone significantly inhibited ischemia‐induced elevation of the active form of MMP‐9. Pioglitazone also reduced up‐regulation of in situ gelatinase activity and laminin breakdown induced by ischemia in the hippocampus. There was marked neuronal damage in the CA1 and CA2 areas after ischemia. Neuronal damage in mice was significantly decreased by pioglitazone treatment, compared with vehicle‐treated mice. Pioglitazone also inhibited TdT‐mediated dUTP nick end labeling staining in CA1 and CA2 areas. Pioglitazone, a PPARγ agonist, reduces delayed neuronal damage induced by global ischemia through inhibition of MMP‐9 activity.
The effects of workforce diversity towards organizational creativity and the moderating role of knowledge sharing

Workforce diversity is one of valuable asset for every business that seeks competitive advantage globally.Prior research found that advancement in workforce diversity enhance besides hindrance to organization performance.Deterioration to handle workforce diversity leads to organization collapse.In order to be successful, organization needs to effectively manage workforce diversity. This study, develops theoretical framework that extend prior research by explore how workforce diversity (functional background diversity, educational background diversity, organizational tenure diversity) and knowledge sharing influences organizational creativity.Main objective of the study advances by examining how workforce diversity affects organizational creativity.The specific objective of study analyze the effects of functional background diversity, educational level diversity, organizational tenure diversity) towards organizational creativity and the moderating role of knowledge sharing.Current study conducted to propose new theoretical framework on workforce diversity and organizational creativity. Findings of the study will propose a theoretical framework on the effects of workforce diversity towards organizational creativity and the moderating role of knowledge sharing.Again, findings of this study will help organizations and practitioners to effectively manage workforce diversity to gain organizational creativity as well as a basis for future research.This study addresses several research gaps by capture the complexity of dimension that lead to deep level diversity in group such as functional background diversity, educational background diversity, and organizational tenure diversity on organizational creativity.Also, the knowledge sharing moderates the relationship between workforce diversity and organizational creativity.This study makes contribution by highlighting the effective collaborated diversity variable in predicting expected result.
Global Optimization by Searching Multiple Equilibrium Points of Gradient Dynamical System

This paper proposes a global optimization method based on searching for multiple equilibrium points of gradient-based dynamical systems. We are motivated to construct the method with significant mathematical properties of gradient systems from the viewpoint of optimization and nonlinear science. As the essence of this study, we propose a computational procedure for finding equilibrium points of nonlinear dynamical system with ascending or descending trajectories. The computation requires to generate trajectories from known equilibrium points to various directions. In this paper, we further discuss the simplification of the procedure to reduce calculation by using a certain set of vectors. We also show the effectiveness of our method through numerical simulations
Reliability analysis of logic circuits using probabilistic techniques

The low reliability of advanced CMOS devices has become a critical issue that can potentially supersede the benefits of the technology shrinking process. This is making the design time reliability assessment and optimization a mandatory step in the IC design flow. As part of our ongoing research, we describe an algorithm based on probability analysis and logic principles for computing the impact of gate failures on the circuit output. We also propose a Bound and Propagate based methodology to handle the reconvergent fanout issue. A reliability evaluator has been developed around the open source logic synthesis tool `abc' to allow integration and evaluation of our method in the context of an IC design flow. This approach had tremendously reduced the computation time while maintaining adequate precision. Simulation results for several benchmark circuits demonstrate the accuracy and the simulation time advantages when compared to MonteCarlo simulations.
The effect of customer relationship tactics toward customer loyalty in banking industry

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of how Customer Relationship Marketing Tactics (CRMTs) on customer loyalty in banking industry specifically the credit card users. Through data from credit card users of MBB and CIMB, we discuss five elements of CRMTs which are direct mail, preferential treatment, interpersonal communication, tangible rewards and membership and their influence on credit card users’ loyalty towards their main banks. The credit card industry in Malaysia has been shrinking since the intervention from Bank Negara Malaysia in 2009 which has led to greater competition among credit card issuers. One reason being, customers nowadays are not loyal to their providers as they tend to switch to other substitute services and to other banks. Therefore, to retain the customers, successful Relationship Marketing can be achieved by considering customers’ attitude towards their service provider through CRMTs. This will encourage both parties to appreciate the involvement in the relationship. This research findings’ support that all CRMTs have significant relationship with credit card users’ loyalty. Through multiple regressions, it was found that the most significance in contributing to credit card users’ loyalty was membership and direct mail. Therefore, the outcome of this research provides a guide for MBB and CIMB and also other financial institutions in charting strategic actions to maintain and retain their existing customers.