Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modelling and Forecasting of Commodity Trading Price

This paper proposes and improves a model for China’s cotton reserves trading market, generates a more accurate price level table in contrast to the widely used China Cotton Association(CCA)’s table, and predicts the future trading price with this model. Data used is all 29895 trade records of cotton reserves from May, 2016 to Sept, 2016. In this paper, we firstly give a briefly introduction to the data as well as basic knowledge of cotton, especially the CCA’s price level table as the target to improve accuracy. We then present a multiple linear regression with dummy variable model, which can reduce the error on predicting the trading price of current month, but still remains some problems such as the result shows a batch of cotton with better quality may get a lower price. So we finally advance the model with multidimensional isotonic regression and more factors taken into consideration. Our last model could be used to predict the trade price of both current month and next month with approximately 4% mean absolute percentage error(MAPE).
Is Real Appreciation or more Government Debt Contractionary? The Case of Romania

Applying the aggregate demand and aggregate supply model, this paper finds that Romania’s real GDP is positively associated with real appreciation of the leu during 2005.Q2 – 2013.Q4, the real oil price and real wages and negatively influenced by real appreciation of the leu during 2014.Q1 – 2016.Q3, government debt as a percent of GDP, the real interest rate and the expected inflation rate. These results suggest that recent real depreciation of the leu would help raise real GDP, whereas recent rising government debt as a percent of GDP would be harmful to real GDP. Il deprezzamento del cambio reale o un maggior debito pubblico hanno effetti contrattivi? Il caso della Romania Applicando il modello della domanda e dell’offerta aggregate questo studio presenta evidenze che il PIL reale rumeno e positivamente associato all’apprezzamento reale del leu nel periodo 2° trimestre 2005 – 4° trimestre 2013, con il prezzo reale del petrolio e con i salari reali, mentre risulta negativamente influenzato dall’apprezzamento reale del leu nel periodo 1° trimestre 2014 – 3° trimestre 2016, dal debito pubblico come percentuale del PIL, dal tasso di interesse reale e dal tasso di inflazione attesa. Questi risultati suggeriscono che la recente svalutazione del leu potrebbe favorire il PIL reale, mentre l’aumento del debito pubblico in percentuale del PIL verificatosi recentemente potrebbe essere dannoso per il PIL reale.
Learning Collective Behavior in Multi-relational Networks

With the rapid expansion of the Internet and WWW, the problem of analyzing social media data has received an increasing amount of attention in the past decade. The boom in social media platforms offers many possibilities to study human collective behavior and interactions on an unprecedented scale. In the past, much work has been done on the problem of learning from networked data with homogeneous topologies, where instances are explicitly or implicitly interconnected by a single type of relationship. In contrast to traditional content-only classification methods, relational learning succeeds in improving classification performance by leveraging the correlation of the labels between linked instances. However, networked data extracted from social media, web pages, and bibliographic databases can contain entities of multiple classes and linked by various causal reasons, hence treating all links in a homogeneous way can limit the performance of relational classifiers. Learning the collective behavior and interactions in heterogeneous networks becomes much more complex. The contribution of this dissertation include 1) two classification frameworks for identifying human collective behavior in multi-relational social networks; 2) unsupervised and supervised learning models for relationship prediction in multi-relational collaborative networks. Our methods improve the performance of homogeneous predictive models by differentiating heterogeneous relations and capturing the prominent interaction patterns underlying the network structure. The work has been evaluated in various real-world social networks. We believe that this study will be useful for analyzing human collective behavior and interactions specifically in the scenario when the heterogeneous relationships in the network arise from various causal reasons.
Double blind test of magnetic field effects on neurite outgrowth.

Previous work reported that nerve growth factor-stimulated neurite outgrowth in PC-12 cells could be altered by exposure to parallel alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC) magnetic fields under a variety of exposure conditions, producing results that are consistent with the predictions of the ion parametric resonance (IPR) model. The credibility of these results, considered extraordinary by some scientists, could be strengthened if the cell response were found to persist under alternate assay conditions. We replaced part of our standard assay procedure with a double blind procedure. This new procedure obscured 1) whether a particular set of dishes of cells was exposed or not, and 2) which individual dish was in which exposure system. The goal was to determine whether the previously observed responses of PC-12 cells to magnetic fields would be sufficiently robust to decode the imposed blinding, thereby removing any question of experimenter bias in reported results. We placed three coded dishes of cells in each of two otherwise identical exposure systems, one not energized and one energized to produce exposure conditions predicted to maximally suppress neurite outgrowth (Bdc of 36.6 microT, parallel 45 Hz AC of 23.8 microT rms). Each of the six dishes were recoded before assay to further obscure the exposure identity of any individual dish. The combined results of four distinct runs of these double blind experiments unequivocally demonstrated that 1) there was a clear, distinctive, repeatable consistency with the actual energization of the exposure systems and location of each dish, and with the predictions of the IPR model; 2) only the explicitly stated experimental variables influenced the experiment; and 3) the reported response of the cells was very improbably due to chance (P = .000024).
Adolescent sexual attitudes and behavior: are they consistent?

Relationships between sexual attitudes and behavior among adolescents were studied in data collected by self-administered questionnaires from approximately 3,500 junior and senior high school students attending four inner-city schools during 1981-1982. An analysis of the results by sex, race and age found that 83 percent of sexually experienced adolescents cite a best age for first intercourse that is older than the age at which they themselves experienced that event, and 43 percent of them report a best age for first coitus older than their current age. In addition, 88 percent of young women who have had a baby say the best age at which to have a first birth is older than the age at which they first became mothers. Thirty-nine percent of the women and 32 percent of the men say that they believe premarital sex is wrong. Among those who are virgins, the proportions are much higher. However, even among those who have had intercourse, approximately 25 percent of both sexes say they believe sex before marriage is wrong. Women desire stronger relationships before having intercourse than do men, and women claim to have had a stronger relationship with their last sexual partner. Very few teenagers believe neither partner is responsible for pregnancy prevention, which tends to be viewed as a joint responsibility. Those who see it as a shared responsibility are slightly more likely than those who assign the responsibility to one or the other partner to have used a method at last intercourse, and they are considerably more likely to have used a method than are those who believe contraception is neither partner's responsibility. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Comparison of HIV-specific CD8 T-cell responses among uninfected individuals exposed to HIV parenterally and mucosally

Objective:To assess the influence of route of HIV exposure on the development of HIV-specific CD8 T-cell responses in exposed, uninfected (EU) individuals. Design:Two groups of EU exposed to virus through either sexual or intravenous contact were studied. Group I included subjects (n = 20) who had unprotected sexual contact with known HIV-infected partners and no intravenous HIV exposure; Group II included individuals (n = 27) who had shared needles with HIV-infected partners and had no sexual exposure to this virus. Between-group comparisons were made for the proportion of responders, breadth, magnitude, and specificity of HIV-specific responses. Methods:The interferon-γ ELISPOT assay was used to detect HIV-specific effector activity. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from each subject were stimulated with a panel of HIV peptides restricted to the MHC class I alleles expressed by the individual. Results:A similar proportion of EU tested from each group (35.0% Group I versus 22.2% Group II) recognized at least one HIV peptide. Group I and II subjects recognized HIV peptides with a similar cumulative intensity of 130 ± 67.5 and 182.9 ± 184.2 spot forming cells/1 × 106 PBMC, respectively, and similar magnitude per stimulatory peptide of 82.7 and 78.4 SFC/1 × 106 PBMC, respectively. The proportion of stimulatory peptides derived from HIV Gag, reverse transcriptase, Env, and Nef was not significantly different between the two EU groups. HLA-A*0201 restricted HIV epitopes immunodominant in infected individuals are rarely stimulatory in EU subjects. Conclusions:Both mucosal and parenteral exposure to HIV can elicit HIV-specific CD8 T-cell responses with similar characteristics.
Meta-analysis of pylorus-preserving gastrectomy for middle-third early gastric cancer.

BACKGROUND Pylorus-preserving gastrectomy (PPG) has been performed to reduce postprandial symptoms for some early gastric cancer (EGC) cases. The aim of this study was to evaluate the possible advantages after PPG for middle-third EGC in comparison with distal gastrectomy. MATERIALS AND METHODS We searched Medline, Embase, and Science Citation Index Expanded for relevant studies. Statistical analyses were conducted to calculate the summary weighted mean differences (WMDs) and odds ratios (ORs) with corresponding 95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) using random-effects models. RESULTS We identified 15 nonrandomized controlled trials (16 studies) with 1774 patients, which consisted of 11 studies for conventional PPG (CPPG) versus conventional distal gastrectomy (CDG) and 5 studies for laparoscopy-assisted PPG (LAPPG) versus laparoscopy-assisted distal gastrectomy (LADG). Meta-analysis of CPPG versus CDG revealed that CPPG had the advantage of prevention of early dumping syndrome (OR=0.18; 95% CI 0.12, 0.27), gastritis (OR=0.19; 95% CI 0.07, 0.53), duodenal juice reflux (OR=0.20; 95% CI 0.06, 0.66), and regaining of weight (WMD=3.53; 95% CI 2.34, 4.72). However, the incidence of gastric stasis was higher in the CPPG group than in the CDG group (OR=1.70; 95% CI 1.13, 2.57). Meta-analysis of LAPPG versus LADG revealed that LAPPG shortened the operation time (WMD=-21.12; 95% CI -31.33, -10.90) and did not increase the occurrence of postoperative complication (OR=0.72; 95% CI 0.41, 1.27). CONCLUSIONS With the benefits of prevention of early dumping syndrome, duodenal juice reflux, gastritis, and regaining of weight, PPG can be an excellent option for middle-third EGC.
Governance by algorithms

: Algorithms are increasingly often cited as one of the fundamental shaping devices of our daily, immersed-in-information existence. Their importance is acknowledged, their performance scrutinised in numerous contexts. Yet, a lot of what constitutes 'algorithms' beyond their broad definition as “encoded procedures for transforming input data into a desired output, based on specified calculations” (Gillespie, 2013) is often taken for granted. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion about 'what algorithms do' and in which ways they are artefacts of governance, providing two examples drawing from the internet and ICT realm: search engine queries and e-commerce websites’ recommendations to customers. The question of the relationship between algorithms and rules is likely to occupy an increasingly central role in the study and the practice of internet governance, in terms of both institutions’ regulation of algorithms, and algorithms’ regulation of our society.
The aging musician.

OBJECTIVE Older musicians may develop occupational performance problems resulting from age-related changes and features unique to their occupation. The purpose of this study was to describe the impact of the aging process on an older professional musician. METHOD A phenomenological approach was used to study the effects of the aging process on a 71 year old, semi-retired, part-time paid jazz musician. Data were gathered through interviews and observations of performance environments, and analyzed using a grounded hermeneutic approach. An expert panel facilitated theme development. RESULTS The musician's experiences related to changes in an ability to perform his daily occupations, including music; his response to the external changes in the playing environment and in his relationships with others; and the way in which he has coped with these changes. CONCLUSION Occupational therapists who provide intervention for older musicians must implement a client centered approach to care, which provides strategies the musician can use to overcome the challenges related to aging in order to continue professional performance.
Redox properties of Abarema cochliacarpos (Gomes) Barneby & Grime (Fabaceae) stem bark ethanol extract and fractions

The redox properties of the hydroethanol extract (EE) and its ethyl acetate (EAF) and hydromethanol (HMF) fractions obtained from Abarema cochliacarpos (Gomes) Barneby & Grimes stem bark were evaluated. EAF had the highest total phenol content (848.62 ± 78.18 mg g−1), while EE showed the highest content of catechin (71.2 µg g−1). EE, EAF and HMF exhibited the highest levels of antioxidant activity at 100 and 1000 µg mL−1 when the non-enzymatic antioxidant potential was evaluated by the total reactive antioxidant potential, total antioxidant reactivity and nitric oxide scavenging assays. In addition, EAF and HMF showed SOD-like activity. The results for EE, EAF and HMF in this study showed that A. cochliacarpos (Gomes) Barneby & Grimes stem bark have redox properties and may be able to help the endogenous enzymatic and non-enzymatic systems to keep the redox balance.
Uterine Artery Embolization for Leiomyomata

OBJECTIVE To determine whether uterine artery embolization is safe and effective for treating uterine leiomyomata. METHODS We analyzed 200 consecutive patients (61 reported previously) undergoing uterine artery embolization for the treatment of uterine leiomyomata at a single institution. After treatment, follow‐up data were obtained by written questionnaire mailed to the patients at intervals of 2 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, and 12 months after treatment. Follow‐up imaging was obtained at 3 months and 12 months after therapy. All complications and subsequent gynecologic interventions were recorded prospectively, obtained using the patient questionnaires and physician contact. The percentages and their 95% confidence intervals (CI) were calculated to compare the symptoms at follow‐up. Proportional odds models for repeated ordinal responses were used to assess the stability of symptom improvement over time. RESULTS The mean follow‐up was 21 months (minimum 12). Heavy menstrual bleeding improved in 87% (95% CI 82%, 92%) of patients at 3 months and in 90% (95% CI 86%, 95%) at 1 year after therapy. Bulk symptoms improved in 93% of patients (95% CI 88%, 96%) at 3 months and in 91% (95% CI 86%, 95%) at 1 year after treatment. Only one major periprocedural complication occurred (pulmonary embolus), which resolved with anticoagulant therapy. Subsequent gynecologic interventions occurred in 10.5% of the patients (95% CI 7.0%, 15.0%) during the follow‐up period. CONCLUSION Uterine artery embolization is safe and controls the symptoms caused by leiomyomata in most patients.
CT colonography and colonoscopy: assessment of patient preference in a 5-week follow-up study.

PURPOSE To prospectively evaluate short- and midterm patient preference of computed tomographic (CT) colonography relative to colonoscopy in patients at increased risk for colorectal cancer and to elucidate determinants of preference. MATERIALS AND METHODS Consecutive patients at increased risk for colorectal cancer underwent CT colonography prior to scheduled colonoscopy. Patient experience and preference were assessed both directly after the examinations and 5 weeks after the examinations. Differences in pain, embarrassment, discomfort, and preference were assessed with the Wilcoxon signed rank sum test or a binomial test. Potential determinants of preference were investigated with logistic regression analyses. RESULTS Data for 249 patients were included. Fewer patients experienced severe or extreme pain during CT colonography (seven [3%] of 245) than during colonoscopy (81 [34%] of 241) (P < .001). Directly after both examinations, 168 (71%) of 236 patients preferred CT colonography; 5 weeks later, 141 (61%) of 233 patients preferred CT colonography (P < .001). Initially, a painful colonoscopy examination (odds ratio, 0.17; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.08, 0.38) was a determinant of CT colonography preference. Similarly, a painful (odds ratio, 3.70; 95% CI: 1.54, 8.92) or an embarrassing (odds ratio, 4.46; 95% CI: 1.18, 16.88) CT colonography examination was a determinant of colonoscopy preference. After 5 weeks, the presence of polyps emerged as a determinant of colonoscopy preference (odds ratio, 1.94; 95% CI: 1.02, 3.70), while the role of experiences waned. CONCLUSION Patients preferred CT colonography to colonoscopy; however, this preference decreased in time, while outcome considerations gradually replaced temporary experiences of inconvenience.
Does SADC constitute an optimum currency area? Evidence from generalised purchasing power parity

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has ambitious plans of economic integration for the region. It is planning to introduce a common currency and a regional central bank by the year 2018. As advocated by the optimal currency area (OCA) theory, lower transaction costs, stable prices, efficient resource allocation and improved access to goods, labour and financial markets are some of the benefits accrued from monetary unions. Relinquishing monetary and exchange rate policies are cited as the main costs of joining such a union. It is argued that sufficient and sound economic bases should be in place for a monetary union to be effective and yield the desired result. The primary objective of this paper was to determine whether SADC constitute an OCA. The study employs the generalised purchasing power parity (GPPP) framework consistent with OCA theory on price (inflation rate) and exchange rate. The method included Johansen cointegration test, vector error correction model and Pedron`s panel cointegration test. The findings of the study suggest that GPPP holds in SADC. This can be interpreted as existence of similarities of fundamental macroeconomic factors that drive real exchange rates in the region. This evidence suggests that bilateral real exchange rates in the SADC region share a common stochastic trend in the long-run. However, the differences in the size of coefficients of normalised long-run cointegrating equation suggest that the aggregate demand patterns in the region are dissimilar and indicate asymmetries in exchange rate adjustment process to disequilibrium in the region. Other economic concerns such as business cycle synchronisation, and convergence of key macroeconomic variables including budget deficit, government debt and foreign reserves cover should be thoroughly investigated before the said economic union is implemented.
The Attributable Burden of Clostridium difficile Infection to Long‐Term Care Facilities Stay: A Clinical Study

Advanced age, history of hospitalization, and antibiotic consumption are associated with the pathogenesis of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). Long‐term care facilities (LTCFs) represent a setting where CDI has been increasingly reported. We aimed to estimate the actual attributable burden of CDI to LTCF stay and determine the characteristics of the disease epidemiology in this setting.
Exchange Rate Volatility and Export Volume: The Case of Indonesia and Its Main Trading Partners

This paper examines the impact of exchange rate volatility on Indonesia's export to-United States, Japan and China using both aggregate and disaggregate data. We first estimated each pair country with export demand equations based on data from 1996 to 2014. A set of export demand equations is estimated by using Seemingly Unrelated Regression to characterized the correlation of the disturbances across equations. In general, the estimation result shows that exchange rate volatility has negative impact on export. Estimations based on disaggregate data indicate that the impact of the exchange rate volatility on exports remains negative however it varies among industries in the countries under investigation.
Impulse Buying: A Consumer Trait Prospective in Context of Central India

Impulse buying occurs when a consumer perceives an impulsive and persuasive stimulus to buy something immediately. The main objective of this study is to figure out the relationship between consumer trait and impulse buying. The studied constructs were refined and validated by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Using SmartPLS 2.0 statistical software, responses from 267 consumers of central India in the proposed research framework were analysed and measured. Resulted findings for the constructs, impulse buying tendency, interpersonal influence, emotional attachment and materialism show significant positive relationship with impulsive buying, whereas, the construct shopping enjoyment tendency having significant relationship, showed negative effects. The study findings also support the past research efforts in this field by validating through the results, especially by considering the significant relationship between consumer traits and impulse buying for the first time in central India. Thus, the study presents useful insights to marketers and academicians regarding the buying behaviour of Indian consumers in a still developing retail sector.