Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Smoking-Related Renal Histologic Injury in IgA Nephropathy Patients

Purpose Smoking reportedly exerts deleterious effects on renal function; however, its effects on histology have not been clarified in patients with IgA nephropathy (IgAN). Materials and Methods Renal histology was evaluated in a cohort of 397 patients diagnosed with IgAN according to smoking status and dose in relation to renal function. Results Among the study cohort, which was predominantly male (88.5%), 52 patients (13%) were current smokers. These current smokers demonstrated more frequent hypertension and higher serum creatinine levels than non/ex-smokers at the time of diagnosis, which was apparent with increased smoking dose. The percentages of global glomerulosclerosis and arteriolar hyalinosis increased with increased smoking dose, whereas tubulointerstitial fibrosis or arterial intimal thickening did not. Glomerular mesangial alpha-smooth muscle actin expression were similar between current and non/ex-smokers matched for age, gender, hypertension, and histologic severity, although the number of glomerular CD68+ cells was significantly fewer in smokers. Initial serum creatinine level, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), and global glomerulosclerosis were found to be risk factors of serum creatinine doubling in both smokers and non/ex-smokers by univariate analysis during a mean follow-up of 3.8 years. Conclusion In addition to dose dependent renal functional decline and hypertension, smoking contributes to renal disease progression by eliciting microvascular injury in IgAN patients.
An Asynchronous Channel Assignment Scheme: Performance Evaluation

Due to its popularity, dense deployments of wireless local area networks (WLANs) are becoming a common feature of many cities around the world. However, with only a limited number of channels available, the problem of increased interference can severely degrade the performance of WLANs if an effective channel assignment scheme is not employed. In an earlier work, we proposed an improved asynchronous distributed and dynamic channel assignment scheme that (1) is simple to implement, (2) does not require any knowledge of the throughput function, and (3) allows asynchronous channel switching by each access point (AP). In this paper, we present extensive performance evaluation of the proposed scheme in practical scenarios found in densely populated WLAN deployments. Specifically, we investigate the convergence behaviour of the scheme and how its performance gains vary with different number of available channels and in different deployment densities. We also prove that our scheme is guaranteed to converge in a single iteration when the number of channels is greater than the number of neighbouring APs.
Densities, spectral densities and modality

This paper considers the problem of specifying a simple approximating density function for a given data set (x 1 ,.,x n ). Simplicity is measured by the number of modes but several different definitions of approximation are introduced. The taut string method is used to control the numbers of modes and to produce candidate approximating densities. Refinements are introduced that improve the local adaptivity of the procedures and the method is extended to spectral densities.
A Developmental Intervention Science (DIS) Outreach Research Approach to Promoting Youth Development

This paper describes work directed toward creating community-supported positive youth development interventions that draw on a developmental intervention science outreach research approach. With respect to developmental interventions, this approach focuses on creating evidence-based longitudinal change intervention strategies for promoting long-term developmental change. The paper describes three broad challenges (theoretical, methodological, and meta-theoretical) that the authors faced in their efforts to develop and implement community-supported intervention programs built on this approach. The authors describe first the theoretical challenges they addressed in developing the conceptual framework for their community-supported intervention; second, the challenge of developing and refining a methodological framework for evaluating positive youth development interventions in “real-world” settings; and third, the meta-theoretical challenges that arose in the context of implementing community-supported positive development programs.
Opposite Effects of Training in Rats With Stable and Progressive Pulmonary Hypertension

Background— Exercise training in pulmonary arterial hypertension (PH) is a promising adjunct to medical treatment. However, it is still unclear whether training is beneficial for all PH patients. We hypothesized that right ventricular adaptation plays a pivotal role in the response to training. Methods and Results— Two different dosages of monocrotaline were used in rats to model stable PH with preserved cardiac output and progressive PH developing right heart failure. Two weeks after injection, PH was confirmed by echocardiography, and treadmill training was initiated. Rats were trained for 4 weeks unless manifest right heart failure developed earlier. At the end of the study protocol, all rats were functionally assessed by endurance testing, echocardiography, and invasive pressure measurements. Lungs and hearts were further analyzed in quantitative histomorphologic analyses. In stable PH, exercise training was well tolerated and markedly increased exercise endurance (from 25±3.9 to 62±3.9 minutes; P<0.001). Moreover, capillary density increased significantly (from 1.21±0.12 to 1.51±0.07 capillaries per cardiomyocyte; P<0.05). However, in progressive PH, exercise training worsened survival (hazard ratio, 2.7; 95% confidence interval, 1.1 to 14.2) and increased pulmonary vascular remodeling. In addition, training induced widespread leukocyte infiltration into the right ventricle (from 135±14 to 276±18 leukocytes per 1 mm2; P<0.001). Conclusions— In our rat model, exercise training was found to be beneficial in stable PH but detrimental in progressive PH. Future studies are necessary to address the clinical implications of our findings.
A novel orally available inhibitor of focal adhesion signaling increases survival in a xenograft model of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma with central nervous system involvement

Central nervous system dissemination is a relatively uncommon but almost always fatal complication in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma patients. Optimal therapy for central nervous involvement in this malignancy has not been established. In this paper, we aimed to evaluate the therapeutic effect of E7123, a celecoxib derivative that inhibits focal adhesion signaling, in a novel xenograft model of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma with central nervous system involvement. Cells obtained after disaggregation of HT subcutaneous tumors (HT-SC cells) were intravenously injected in NOD/SCID mice. These mice received oral vehicle or 75 mg/kg of E7123 daily until they were euthanized for weight loss or signs of sickness. The antitumor effect of E7123 was validated in an independent experiment using a bioluminescent mouse model. Intravenously injected HT-SC cells showed higher take rate and higher central nervous system tropism (associated with increased expression of β1-integrin and p130Cas proteins) than HT cells. The oral administration of E7123 significantly increased survival time in 2 independent experiments using mice injected with unmodified or bioluminescent HT-SC cells. We have developed a new xenograft model of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma with central nervous system involvement that can be used in the pre-clinical evaluation of new drugs for this malignancy. E7123 is a new, well-tolerated and orally available therapeutic agent that merits further investigation since it may improve current management of diffuse large B-cell lymphoma patients with central nervous system involvement.
Management Working Papers School of Management Forecasting the weekly time-varying beta of UK firms : comparison between GARCH models vs Kalman filter method

This paper investigates the forecasting ability of four different GARCH models and the Kalman filter method. The four GARCH models applied are the bivariate GARCH, BEKK GARCH, GARCH-GJR and the GARCH-X model. The paper also compares the forecasting ability of the non-GARCH model the Kalman method. Forecast errors based on twenty UK company weekly stock return (based on timevary beta) forecasts are employed to evaluate out-of-sample forecasting ability of both GARCH models and Kalman method. Measures of forecast errors overwhelmingly support the Kalman filter approach. Among the GARCH models both GJR and GARCH-X models appear to provide somewhat more accurate forecasts than the bivariate GARCH model. Jel Classification: G1, G15
Foreign Languages Sound Fast: Evidence from Implicit Rate Normalization

Anecdotal evidence suggests that unfamiliar languages sound faster than one’s native language. Empirical evidence for this impression has, so far, come from explicit rate judgments. The aim of the present study was to test whether such perceived rate differences between native and foreign languages (FLs) have effects on implicit speech processing. Our measure of implicit rate perception was “normalization for speech rate”: an ambiguous vowel between short /a/ and long /a:/ is interpreted as /a:/ following a fast but as /a/ following a slow carrier sentence. That is, listeners did not judge speech rate itself; instead, they categorized ambiguous vowels whose perception was implicitly affected by the rate of the context. We asked whether a bias towards long /a:/ might be observed when the context is not actually faster but simply spoken in a FL. A fully symmetrical experimental design was used: Dutch and German participants listened to rate matched (fast and slow) sentences in both languages spoken by the same bilingual speaker. Sentences were followed by non-words that contained vowels from an /a-a:/ duration continuum. Results from Experiments 1 and 2 showed a consistent effect of rate normalization for both listener groups. Moreover, for German listeners, across the two experiments, foreign sentences triggered more /a:/ responses than (rate matched) native sentences, suggesting that foreign sentences were indeed perceived as faster. Moreover, this FL effect was modulated by participants’ ability to understand the FL: those participants that scored higher on a FL translation task showed less of a FL effect. However, opposite effects were found for the Dutch listeners. For them, their native rather than the FL induced more /a:/ responses. Nevertheless, this reversed effect could be reduced when additional spectral properties of the context were controlled for. Experiment 3, using explicit rate judgments, replicated the effect for German but not Dutch listeners. We therefore conclude that the subjective impression that FLs sound fast may have an effect on implicit speech processing, with implications for how language learners perceive spoken segments in a FL.
From Multimedia Retrieval to Knowledge Management Speech Technologies in Information Retrieval

K nowledge management (KM) is generally defined as the capture of an organization’s collective know-how and making that expertise easily accessible. This knowledge is typically available in computerreadable form—most often in a structured form such as a relational database, but also in semistructured form such as formatted textual sources. Standard KM approaches typically organize knowledge in portals, use text search and analysis tools, and rely heavily on text as the medium for transferring knowledge. Although recent technological advances in multimedia production, storage, and distribution have created new information sources, multimedia use in KM is largely limited to retrieval systems: Users typically follow a search engine paradigm in which a query returns ostensibly relevant multimedia documents but without any attempt to extract knowledge from them. Using multimedia in KM systems presents many challenges. First, KM systems cannot use multimedia objects in their native form—they must use media-processing algorithms to transform the objects into metadata. The metadata serves as an intermediate representation of the multimedia data that is easier to manipulate and process using standard information retrieval methods. Second, this transformation of multimedia data introduces uncertainty because no analysis system—such as speech recognizers or face recognizers—is error free, and these tools must extract the knowledge this inherently unstructured data contains and store it in formats that allow easy access and manipulation. Finally, the volume of data introduces problems of scalability, organization, and user interface. For example, systems that analyze thousands of hours of audio must process such volumes of data quickly and effectively and display it in an intuitive way. Technologies for indexing audio and video can be an integral component of these more sophisticated knowledge extraction systems. Possible avenues for improvement in these systems include more advanced text information retrieval methods and more sophisticated speech technologies.
StEP ( 3 D ) : A PORTABLE DISCOUNT USABILITY EVALUATION PLAN FOR 3 D INTERACTION

Few interfaces of 3D systems have been evaluated empirically . Designers frequently claim that their technique is ‘better’ than other techniques but with little evidence to support their claim. StEP(3D), a standardized evaluation plan for the usability of 3D interaction techniques, uses discount methods for performance-based evaluation. It is simple enough that anyone can compare interfaces without special equipment or experience. This paper describes the development and empirical evaluation of StEP(3D). Eighteen recommendations are made for developing future StEPs based on our results and experiences.
Reappraising Poverty of Stimulus Argument : A Corpus Analysis Approach

The debate between empiricism and nativism goes back to the very beginning of philosophy. More recently, the nature of linguistic structure has been the focus of discussion in the field of psycholinguistics. The poverty of stimulus argument for innateness of syntactic knowledge (Chomsky, 1980; Crain & Pietroski, 2001) is one of the most famous and controversial arguments in the study of language and mind. Although it has guided the vast majority of theorizing in linguistics for decades, claims about innate linguistic structure have provoked controversy and the argument is embroiled in dispute. The poverty of stimulus argument is based on the assumption that the information in the environment is not rich enough to allow a human learner to attain adult competence. This assumption has been previously questioned in that it is based on premature conclusions about the information present on primary linguistic input (e.g., Pullum and Scholz; 2002). Nativists have tended to dismiss a priori the idea that distributional information could play an important role in syntactic language acquisition. Nevertheless, recent studies show that distributional evidence is a potentially important source of information for word segmentation and syntactic bootstrapping (e.g., Christiansen, Allen and Seidenberg, 1998; Christiansen and Curtin, 1999; Lewis and Elman, 2001; Redington, Chater and Finch, 1999; Seidenberg and MacDonald, 2001). Moreover, infants are very sensitive to the statistical structure of the input (Saffran, Aslin and Newport, 1996), suggesting that they are able to pick up on distributional cues with a high level of accuracy. This growing body of work has provided support for the hypothesis that distributional properties of linguistic input could have a significant role on the acquisition of syntactic structure. The validity of the poverty of stimulus argument strongly relies on the premise of absence of sufficient information in the primary linguistic input for learning the grammar. A possible approach to address this assumption is to look for statistical evidence that allows a learner to decide between grammatical and ungrammatical hypotheses. In the present study we focus on one of the most used examples to support the argument, the claim concerning auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives. Using a corpus analysis approach, we estimated the distributional information present in the primary linguistic input, and used it to decide between grammatical and ungrammatical examples of auxiliary fronting in polar interrogatives. We found that there is enough statistical information in the corpus to correctly decide between the grammatical and ungrammatical forms of aux-questions with a high level of accuracy.
Rock–scissors–paper and the survival of the weakest

In the children's game of rock–scissors–paper, players each choose one of three strategies. A rock beats a pair of scissors, scissors beat a sheet of paper and paper beats a rock, so the strategies form a competitive cycle. Although cycles in competitive ability appear to be reasonably rare among terrestrial plants, they are common among marine sessile organisms and have been reported in other contexts. Here we consider a system with three species in a competitive loop and show that this simple ecology exhibits two counter–intuitive phenomena. First, the species that is least competitive is expected to have the largest population and, where there are oscillations in a finite population, to be the least likely to die out. As a consequence an apparent weakening of a species leads to an increase in its population. Second, evolution favours the most competitive individuals within a species, which leads to a decline in its population. This is analogous to the tragedy of the commons, but here, rather than leading to a collapse, the ‘tragedy’ acts to maintain diversity.
Self-Disclosure in Everyday Life

Descriptions of naturally occurring episodes of self-disclosure were obtained from a sample of thirty-one subjects, all college students, aged 20-23 years. Subjects were asked to describe a recent situation in which they told their best female or male friend something personal about themselves. Content analysis of the episodes revealed that the majority of the self-disclosures involved the subject describing some aspect of his or her relationships with an intimate, a friend or a family member. Although most of the subjects reported that they revealed this information in order to share their feelings with their friend, to release their feelings or to seek advice and reassurance, several subjects described their self-disclosure as an attempt to strengthen and improve their relationship with their friend. Subjects, on the average, reported that their self-disclosure was very helpful in bringing about the kind of relationship that they would ideally like to have with the person with whom they shared their personal information. Subjects also saw the act of self-disclosure as helping them become the kind of person they would like to become.
Genetic and Environmental Covariation Between Autistic Traits and Behavioral Problems

Abstract Our objective was to examine the overlap between autistic traits and other behavioral problems in a general population sample, and explore the extent to which this overlap is due to genetic or environmental factors. Youth Self Report (YSR) data were collected in a general population sample of 424 twin pairs at 18 years of age, and their nontwin siblings. In 197 of these twin families, self-report ratings on the Autism-spectrum Quotient (AQ) were collected. Stepwise backward regression analyses revealed that of all 8 YSR syndrome scales, the Withdrawn Behavior (WB) and Social Problems (SOC) scale were the most important predictors of AQ scores, and together with sex, explained 23% of the variance in AQ scores. Genetic structural equation modeling showed that the overlap between AQ and WB and SOC was mainly due to genetic effects. About half of the genetic variance in AQ scores was specific to the AQ, with the remaining half shared with genetic variance in WB and SOC. Endorsement of autistic traits in a general population sample is associated with social and withdrawn behavioral problems and these problems partly share a common genetic etiology with autistic traits. However, most of the variance in AQ scores remains unexplained by YSR scores, and half of the genetic variance in AQ is unshared with WB and SOC. These results indicate that autistic traits have specific characteristics that are substantially genetically independent from other common but related behavioral domains such as social problems and withdrawn behavior.
Background estimation and removal based on range and color

Background estimation and removal based on the joint use of range and color data produces superior results than can be achieved with either data source alone. This is increasingly relevant as inexpensive, real-time, passive range systems become more accessible through novel hardware and increased CPU processing speeds. Range is a powerful signal for segmentation which is largely independent of color and hence not effected by the classic color segmentation problems of shadows and objects with color similar to the background. However range alone is also not sufficient for the good segmentation: depth measurements are rarely available at all pixels in the scene, and foreground objects may be indistinguishable in depth when they are close to the background. Color segmentation is complementary in these cases. Surprisingly, little work has been done to date on joint range and color segmentation. We describe and demonstrate a background estimation method based on a multidimensional (range and color) clustering at each image pixel. Segmentation of the foreground in a given frame is performed via comparison with background statistics in range and normalized color. Important implementation issues such as treatment of shadows and low confidence measurements are discussed in detail.
The Relations Between Parents' Smoking, General Parenting, Parental Smoking Communication, and Adolescents' Smoking

The present study examined whether the associations between general parenting practices (i.e., support, behavioral control, and psychological control) and parental smoking on the one hand and older and younger siblings' smoking on the other were mediated by parental smoking communication (i.e., frequency and quality of parent-adolescent communication concerning smoking-related issues). The focus of this paper was on examining whether these associations of parental actions and adolescents' smoking were different in older and younger siblings within the family. Participants were 428 Dutch families (mother, father, and their 2 adolescent siblings aged 13-17). The results of parent and adolescent reports indicated that general parenting practices and parental smoking were associated with parental smoking communication, which, in turn, was related with adolescent smoking. The magnitude of the associations between parenting and adolescent smoking did not differ between older and younger siblings. Supportive parents were generally more likely to engage in a high quality communication about smoking with their adolescent children; this was related to a lower likelihood to smoke. Parents who exerted psychological control were more likely to talk more frequently with their adolescents on smoking matters, which in turn, relates to a higher likelihood to smoke. Also, smoking parents were less likely to have high-quality parent-adolescent communication that relates to higher likelihoods to smoke. In general, the findings were similar across reporters. Implications for prevention are addressed.