Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Responsiveness of the National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire to progression to advanced age-related macular degeneration, vision loss, and lens opacity: AREDS Report no. 14.

OBJECTIVE To describe the ability of the National Eye Institute Visual Function Questionnaire (NEI-VFQ) to detect meaningful change over time (responsiveness) to the primary Age-Related Eye Disease Study outcomes. METHODS The 25-item NEI-VFQ plus appendix was administered at 2 visits at 1- to 4-year intervals to 4119 participants in the Age-Related Eye Disease Study. Events evaluated were progression to advanced age-related macular degeneration (AMD), visual acuity (VA) loss of at least 15 letters, and lens opacity progression. Responsiveness was measured by the t statistic, effect size (ES), responsiveness statistic, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. Variance components were used to estimate the contributions of events to variability of the NEI-VFQ score. RESULTS Overall NEI-VFQ score was responsive to AMD progression (t = 14.0; P< .001; ES = 0.81) and VA (t = 16.2; P< .001; ES = 0.74). Mean changes ranged from 11 to 25 points for the subscales of general vision, near and distance activities, social functioning, mental health, role difficulties, dependency, and driving. The NEI-VFQ was unresponsive to lens opacity progression, although when the event occurred in the eye with the best vision at the first administration, the lens opacity ES was moderate for the color vision (ES = 0.62) and driving subscales (ES = 0.66). Progression to advanced AMD and VA loss contributed significantly to the variation in the mean difference in overall VFQ score. CONCLUSIONS Changes in the NEI-VFQ overall and subscale scores of 10 points or more are associated with clinically significant changes in vision and AMD. This finding may assist the design of interventional studies of AMD and VA loss that include the NEI-VFQ as an outcome measure.
A Vietnamese Head Start Interpreter

This is a case study of a Vietnamese interpreter working for a Head Start center in a midwestern city in the United States. The data are from a larger ethnomethodological study involving nine Southeast Asian families, 10 Southeast Asian children, and three Euro-American Head Start staff. The interpreter was expected to play multiple roles as a Head Start interpreter/health service worker, but these roles were neither explicitly designated nor described by the participants. This article describes the different role expectations of the various participants and the conflict that occurred because of these differences. Interpretation of the data includes description of the following cultural constructs: interpreter roles, independence/interdependence, power/distance, and cultural perspectives about time. Implications drawn from this case study are discussed.
Características del consejo de administración e información en materia de Responsabilidad Social Corporativa

RESUMEN Determinados comportamientos medioambientales y sociales han incrementado la presión social sobre la actividad económica de las empresas. Para paliar sus efectos, éstas han generado una vía de legitimación: la divulgación de información sobre responsabilidad social corporativa. El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo establecer la relación existente entre ciertas características del Consejo de Administración y la divulgación de información social corporativa. Los resultados obtenidos evidencian un importante efecto positivo de la independencia y la diversidad del Consejo en las prácticas divulgativas, impulsado básicamente por los consejeros independientes; mientras que la diversidad de la organización influye negativamente en distintas fases de las mismas. Por el contrario, no se detecta incidencia alguna de su nivel de actividad y de la reputación de su Presidente.
Consuming identities: Alcohol marketing and the commodification of youth experience

Marketing has successfully used the postmodern turn in conceptualisations of the human subject and incorporated contemporary theorising of identities and self into its understanding of the key drivers of consumption. Such developments clearly converge in alcohol marketing practices that target young people, where commercialised youth identities available for consumption and engagement are a significant element. This article reports data from young people that reflect the uptake of such identities and considers the challenges that these developments represent for public health and the well-being of young people.
Path: a tool to facilitate pathway-based genetic association analysis

Summary: Traditional methods of genetic study design and analysis work well under the scenario that a handful of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) independently contribute to the risk of disease. For complex diseases, susceptibility may be determined not by a single SNP, but rather a complex interplay between SNPs. For large studies involving hundreds of thousands of SNPs, a brute force search of all possible combinations of SNPs associated with disease is not only inefficient, but also results in a multiple testing paradigm, whereby larger and larger sample sizes are needed to maintain statistical power. Pathway-based methods are an example of one of the many approaches in identifying a subset of SNPs to test for interaction. To help determine which SNP–SNP interactions to test, we developed Path, a software application designed to help researchers interface their data with biological information from several bioinformatics resources. To this end, our application brings together currently available information from nine online bioinformatics resources including the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), UCSC Genome Browser, Seattle SNPs, PharmGKB, Genetic Association Database, the Single Nucleotide Polymorphism database (dbSNP) and the Innate Immune Database (IIDB). Availability: The software, example datasets and tutorials are freely available from http://genapha.icapture. ubc.ca/PathTutorial. Contact: ddaley@mrl.ubc.ca
Francophone Immigrant Integration and Neoliberal Governance: The Paradoxical Role of Community Organizations

Francophone immigration is prioritized within Canadian immigration policy, with community organizations receiving government funding to support the integration of French-speaking immigrants. These organizations serve as intermediaries between governmental social policies and individual immigrants, brokering immigrants' occupational possibilities by offering specific services and emphasizing some occupations over others. As part of a critical ethnography, government documents were critically reviewed and in-depth interviews were conducted with six representatives from governmental and community organizations operating within the London, Ontario Francophone minority community. Findings highlight how characteristics of neoliberal governance shape the provision of government services through third party service providers, including community-based non-profit organizations. These organizations currently face neoliberal pressures of decentralization, decreased funding, and increased accountability. Findings specifically address how immigrant integration is constructed in government documents and how respondents viewed the role of their organizations, the particularities organizations face by being embedded within a minority setting, and the challenges this context creates for immigrants. The ways government policies are enacted via organizations have implications for immigrants' occupations. Examining the role of organizations adds an important scale of analysis to considerations of international migration within occupational science, which to date have largely attended to the experiences of individual migrants.
From great men to ordinary citizens? the biographical approach to narrating European integration in museums

The history of European integration is not easy to tell – in books or, for that matter, in museums. Most importantly, it appears to lack drama. This lack of drama creates a dilemma for museum practitioners who wish to tell stories about the contemporary history of Europe as shared history. In these circumstances, one prominent way of telling stories about European integration history in museums, and the focus of this article, is the biographical approach. Drawing upon research in all of the museums mentioned in this article and many more, and some 60 interviews with museum practitioners from across Europe, this article first discusses three biographical approaches to narrating European integration history in museums. It proceeds to draw out general conclusions about the prospects of mainstreaming European integration in history museums, and about the particular opportunities and pitfalls of the biographical approach and its different varieties.
Template-based Isocontouring

Different isocontour extraction methods use different cell types (tetrahedral, hexahedral, etc.) depending on the nature of the acquisition grids (structured, unstructured, etc.). The existing isocontouring methods have the following pre-steps for the actual extraction process: (a) identification of cell types, (b) identification of topologically independent instances for each cell type, (c) determination of surface primitives contained in the topologically independent instances and (d) generation of a lookup table such that the name of the entry is an instance of a cell and the entry is the triangle set for that instance. The extraction process outputs the triangles from the lookup table. In this paper we present a novel generic method that enables us to list topologically independent surface primitives called "templates" within any n-polytope cell namely tetrahedra, hexahedra etc. We have also modified the traditional lookup table such that name is the cell instance and the entry is face index representations of all template instances contained in that cell. To show an example, we have applied this approach on a hexahedron and listed the templates and subsequently we have showed how to construct a lookup table. Most modern graphics hardware render triangles faster if they are rendered collectively as triangle strips as opposed to individual triangles. With our modified lookup table approach we can identify triangles in the neighboring cell in a linear time and hence we are able to connect two triangle strips into a longer triangle strip on the fly during the extraction process. We have compared our approach with some existing methods. The following are some of the important features of the method: (1) Simplicity, (2) procedural triangulation and (3) face-index representation.
Tonic GABAA receptor‐mediated currents in human brain

GABAA receptors can mediate both phasic (synaptic) and tonic (extrasynaptic) forms of inhibition. It has been proposed that tonic inhibition plays a critical part in controlling neuronal and network excitability. Although tonic GABAA receptor‐mediated currents have been well characterized in rodents, their existence in human tissue has yet to be demonstrated. Here we show that tonic currents can be recorded from human tissue obtained from patients undergoing temporal lobectomies. Tonic GABAA receptor‐mediated currents were present in pyramidal cells and interneurons in layer V‐VI of temporal neocortex and granule cells in the dentate gyrus. These tonic currents have cell type‐specific pharmacologies, opening up the possibility of targeted therapeutics.
Randomization Techniques for Graphs

Mining graph data is an active research area. Several data mining methods and algorithms have been proposed to identify structures from graphs; still, the evaluation of those results is lacking. Within the framework of statistical hypothesis testing, we focus in this paper on randomization techniques for unweighted undirected graphs. Randomization is an important approach to assess the statistical significance of data mining results. Given an input graph, our randomization method will sample data from the class of graphs that share certain structural properties with the input graph. Here we describe three alternative algorithms based on local edge swapping and Metropolis sampling. We test our framework with various graph data sets and mining algorithms for two applications, namely graph clustering and frequent subgraph mining.
A Bio-inspired Approach for Dynamic Product Bundling in Enterprise Networks

Product bundling is a marketing strategy that concerns offering several products for sale as one combined product. Current bundling technology mainly focuses on the creation of static bundles, which involves pre-computing product bundles and associated discounts. However, due to the inherent dynamism and constant change of current and potential customer information, as is particularly the case in enterprise networks, static product bundles often prove to be inefficient. In this paper, we propose a bio-inspired approach for dynamic generation of personalized product bundles. The approach is based on the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm aiming to optimize the match between the available products and individual customer preferences. The applicability of the proposed approach is discussed through an exemplar application scenario.
Multivoicedness and univocality in classroom discourse: an example from theory of matter

The analyses of talk amongst students in three episodes, video recorded from a teaching sequence on the particle model for Brazilian students (age 14‐15) is presented. The analysis has two dimensions: the discoursive dimension is an attempt to understand how meanings are constructed in the classroom as a result of discoursive interactions; the conceptual dimension comprises the description of the patterns of evolution of ideas of matter based on the notion of a conceptual profile of matter, in which conceptual and historical features of the atom concept are profiled with pupils’ and adolescents’ ideas on atomism. From the students talk we can hear the interaction among different ‘voices’, representing different zones of a conceptual profile of matter. In this interaction, the students resort to both ‘authoritative’ and ‘internally persuasive’ discourses. The analysis emphasizes the role of these two types of discourse and of epistemological and ontological obstacles in the construction of scientific meani.
Experimental investigation of particle heating in a strongly coupled dusty plasma

Highly chargeddust particles in a plasma can be strongly coupled when their kinetic temperature is low. This temperature is determined by a balance of heating and gas cooling. The heating is believed to be electrostatic, although its exact nature is still under investigation. Experiments in a multiple-layer plasma crystal were conducted to test proposed heating mechanisms. A method for measuring small-amplitude, low-frequency fluctuations in ion density was developed and, using this, very low-frequency electrostaticfluctuations were found upstream of the particles. These fluctuations should propagate with the ions towards the particles and heat them. However, the fluctuations were uncorrelated with, and too weak to account for, the observed particle temperatures. In the experiment, the temperature increased and then decreased with gas pressure; this result is only partly consistent with an ion wake heating mechanism. These negative findings help narrow the range of possible explanations for the observed temperatures.
Cholesterol efflux capacity, high-density lipoprotein function, and atherosclerosis.

BACKGROUND High-density lipoprotein (HDL) may provide cardiovascular protection by promoting reverse cholesterol transport from macrophages. We hypothesized that the capacity of HDL to accept cholesterol from macrophages would serve as a predictor of atherosclerotic burden. METHODS We measured cholesterol efflux capacity in 203 healthy volunteers who underwent assessment of carotid artery intima-media thickness, 442 patients with angiographically confirmed coronary artery disease, and 351 patients without such angiographically confirmed disease. We quantified efflux capacity by using a validated ex vivo system that involved incubation of macrophages with apolipoprotein B-depleted serum from the study participants. RESULTS The levels of HDL cholesterol and apolipoprotein A-I were significant determinants of cholesterol efflux capacity but accounted for less than 40% of the observed variation. An inverse relationship was noted between efflux capacity and carotid intima-media thickness both before and after adjustment for the HDL cholesterol level. Furthermore, efflux capacity was a strong inverse predictor of coronary disease status (adjusted odds ratio for coronary disease per 1-SD increase in efflux capacity, 0.70; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.59 to 0.83; P<0.001). This relationship was attenuated, but remained significant, after additional adjustment for the HDL cholesterol level (odds ratio per 1-SD increase, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.63 to 0.90; P=0.002) or apolipoprotein A-I level (odds ratio per 1-SD increase, 0.74; 95% CI, 0.61 to 0.89; P=0.002). Additional studies showed enhanced efflux capacity in patients with the metabolic syndrome and low HDL cholesterol levels who were treated with pioglitazone, but not in patients with hypercholesterolemia who were treated with statins. CONCLUSIONS Cholesterol efflux capacity from macrophages, a metric of HDL function, has a strong inverse association with both carotid intima-media thickness and the likelihood of angiographic coronary artery disease, independently of the HDL cholesterol level. (Funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and others.).
Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor-Mediated Transcription: Ligand-Dependent Recruitment of Estrogen Receptor α to 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo- p-Dioxin-Responsive Promoters

ABSTRACT Using chromatin immunoprecipitation assays, we studied the 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD)-mediated recruitment of the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) and several coregulators to the CYP1A1 promoter. AhR displayed a time-dependent recruitment, reaching a peak at 75 min and maintaining promoter occupancy for the remainder of the time course. Recruitment of AhR was followed by TIF2/SRC2, which preceded CBP, histone H3 acetylation, and RNA polymerase II (RNAPII). Simultaneous recruitment to the enhancer and the TATA box region suggests the formation of a large multiprotein complex bridging the two promoter regions. Interestingly, estrogen receptor α (ERα) displayed a TCDD- and time-dependent recruitment to the CYP1A1 promoter, which was increased by cotreatment with estradiol. Transfection in HuH7 human liver cells confirmed previously reported ERα enhancement of AhR activity. In contrast, TCDD did not induce the recruitment of ERα to the estrogen-responsive pS2 promoter, and after 120 min of cotreatment with estradiol, ERα is still present on the CYP1A1 promoter but no longer at pS2. RNA interference studies with T47D cells support a role for ERα in TCDD-dependent CYP1A1 expression. Our data suggest that ERα acts as a coregulator of AhR-mediated transcriptional activation and that the recruitment of ERα by AhR represents a novel mechanism AhR-ERα cross talk.
New Corporate Strategies A Comparative Social Cybernetics Analysis of Nokia and British Telecom

In the theoretical discussions on various new global strategies, cultural, networked and innovative ones are complementing or substituting the traditional strategies often focusing on best practice, differentiation, core businesses, economics of scale . In the traditional methodologies for doing strategic analysis the head problem was to make a constructive alignment between resources, businesses and organization, thereby gaining competitive advantage, control and coordination for the corporation in question. By analyzing and comparing the character of management processes used by two different well known global players within the teleindustry, British Telecom and Nokia, the article tries to find out, if other methodological points of departure could be more convenient and constructive. In conclusion, social cybernetics analysis, with its focus on causes for entropy, selfsustaining and reinforcing mental models in use, and systems dynamics . nowadays is often a better guide in the global oriented strategic work than more traditional structural oriented analyses.
From Elements to Perception: Local and Global Processing in Visual Neurons

Gestalt psychologists in the early part of the century challenged psychophysical notions that perceptual phenomena can be understood from a punctate (atomistic) analysis of the elements present in the stimulus. Their ideas slowed later attempts to explain vision in terms of single-cell recordings from individual neurons. A rapprochement between Gestalt phenomenology and neurophysiology seemed unlikely when the first ECVP was held in Marburg, Germany, in 1978. Since that time, response properties of neurons have been discovered that invite an interpretation of visual phenomena (including illusions) in terms of neuronal processing by long-range interactions, as first proposed by Mach and Hering in the last century. This article traces a personal journey into the early days of neurophysiological vision research to illustrate the progress that has taken place from the first attempts to correlate single-cell responses with visual perceptions. Whereas initially the receptive-field properties of individual classes of cells—eg contrast, wavelength, orientation, motion, disparity, and spatial-frequency detectors—were used to account for relatively simple visual phenomena, nowadays complex perceptions are interpreted in terms of long-range interactions, involving many neurons. This change in paradigm from local to global processing was made possible by recent findings, in the cortex, on horizontal interactions and backward propagation (feedback loops) in addition to classical feedforward processing. These mechanisms are exemplified by studies of the tilt effect and tilt aftereffect, direction-specific motion adaptation, illusory contours, filling-in and fading, figure – ground segregation by orientation and motion contrast, and pop-out in dynamic visual-noise patterns. Major questions for future research and a discussion of their epistemological implications conclude the article.
A local learning based Image-To-Class distance for image classification

Image-To-Class distance is first proposed in Naive-Bayes Nearest-Neighbor. NBNN is a feature-based image classifier, and can achieve impressive classification accuracy. However, the performance of NBNN relies heavily on the large number of training samples. If using small number of training samples, the performance will degrade. The goal of this paper is to address this issue. The main contribution of this paper is that we propose a robust Image-to-Class distance by local learning. We define the patch-to-class distance as the distance between the input patch to its nearest neighbor in one class, which is reconstructed in the local manifold space; and then our image-to-class distance is the sum of patch-to-class distance. Furthermore, we take advantage of large-margin metric learning framework to obtain a proper Mahalanobis metric for each class. We evaluate the proposed method on four benchmark datasets: Caltech, Corel, Scene13, and Graz. The results show that our defined Image-To-Class Distance is more robust than NBNN and Optimal-NBNN, and by combining with the learned metric for each class, our method can achieve significant improvement over previous reported results on these datasets.