Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Do ultrasonographic semiquantitative indices predict histological changes in NASH irrespective of steatosis extent?

To the Editor: We thank Dr. Mancuso for the valuable comments on our manuscript regarding the long-term experience in patients receiving liver transplants for Budd-Chiari syndrome (BCS) associated with myeloproliferative neoplasms. In fact, the role of liver transplantation (OLT) in BCS has substantially changed over time. With increasing experience, transjugular intrahepatic porto-systemic shunt (TIPS) has replaced OLT as treatment of first choice in advanced disease stages. Even fulminant BCS may respond well to TIPS placement (1, 2). However, a recent prospective multicenter trial showed that approximately 15% of medium-term survivors with BCS have received liver transplants, despite broad experience with TIPS in the participating centers (3, 4). Taking into account the often young age of patients with BCS, it is reassuring that immunosuppressive agents do not appear to accelerate the natural course of myeloproliferative neoplasms. With regard to the pathophysiological mechanisms of liver damage, BCS resembles liver congestion in right heart failure or pericardial disease: hepatic venous and sinusoidal pressure increases and hepatic circulation is impeded. In contrast to BCS, the hepatic effects of circulatory changes in cardiac disease have been analysed in detail (5). However, it is indeed tempting to speculate whether TIPS might reverse some of the detrimental effects of congestion. Acknowledgements Financial support. No funding sources. Conflict of interest. The authors do not have any disclosures to report.
Perceptions of lesbian, gay and bisexual people of primary healthcare services.

AIM This paper reports a study exploring people's perceptions of disclosure about lesbian, gay and bisexual identity to their primary healthcare providers. BACKGROUND Disclosure of sexual identity to healthcare professionals is integral to attending to the health needs of lesbian, gay and bisexual populations, as non-disclosure has been shown to have a negative impact on the health of these people. For example, an increased incidence of suicide, depression and other mental health problems have been reported. METHOD From April to July 2004, a national survey of lesbian, gay and bisexual persons was carried out in New Zealand. Participants were recruited through mainstream and lesbian, gay and bisexual media and venues, and 2,269 people completed the questionnaire, either electronically or via hard copy. The 133-item instrument included a range of closed-response questions in a variety of domains of interest. RESULTS In this paper, we report results from the health and well-being domain. More women than men identified that the practitioner's attitude toward their non-heterosexual identity was important when choosing a primary healthcare provider. Statistically significantly more women than men reported that their healthcare provider usually or always presumed that they were heterosexual and in addition more women had disclosed their sexual identity to their healthcare provider. CONCLUSION Nurses need to reconsider their approach to all users of healthcare services by not assuming everyone is heterosexual, integrating questions about sexual identity into health interviews and ensuring that all other aspects of the assessment process are appropriate and safe for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
A methodical approach to establishing a process management infrastructure in an organization

This paper describes a practical, methodical and substantive approach to setting up the essentials of a process management infrastructure in an organization. The paper discusses the key elements of a process management infrastructure, as being implemented in an ongoing process improvement program at Ericsson. The catalysts for this improvement effort were: management need, customer demand, process capability assessments and competitive pressure.
Deterioration modelling of contact surfaces for a friction drive system

This article presents a novel model of surface deterioration for a friction drive. For this basic transmission system, the difference between tangential speeds is linked with the production of contact force and at the same time with an energy transfer that deteriorates the contact surfaces. Thus, an optimal management between health state of components and use of energy resources is required. In a first step, the physics of the system is modeled in a deterministic way. Then, considering either random system parameters or random system inputs and usage, a complete stochastic model for the system deterioration is proposed. The developed model allows to link the deterioration evolution to the inputs and operating modes of the system; to assess the behavior of deterioration in critical stages, such as sharp motion and smooth motion. The advantages to design and to analyze such a model are finally discussed in terms of reliability-adaptive systems
Theory of the Rydberg-atom two-photon micromaser.

A continuous-wave maser operating on a two-photon transition between Rydberg levels is expected to oscillate with about one atom and a few tens of microwave photons at any time in its superconducting cavity. We analyze in detail the characteristics of this new microscopic quantum electronics device presently under construction in our laboratory.
Analyzing the impact on consumer satisfaction, behavior and at-titudes by using eco-friendly practices and products in Surfers Paradise/Gold Coast city hotels, Australia.

13.4. 2012 Bachelor of Business Administration, Helsinki iii Author or authors Maria Chikita Group or year of entry 2008 The title of thesis Analyzing the impact on consumer satisfaction, behavior and attitudes by using eco-friendly practices and products in Surfers Paradise, Gold Coast city hotels, Australia. Number of pages and appendices 44 + 7 Supervisor or supervisors Minna-Maari Harmaala This study explores customer attitude towards environmentally friendly practices by hotels and the impact on customer satisfaction. The research investigates individual’s behavior, attitude, knowledge, satisfaction and willingness to support eco-friendly practices. The hotel industry contributes to the global environmental challenges. Consumers are becoming more aware of the environmental impacts by the hotels and a new market segment of eco-friendly customers has developed. In addition there is increasing demand from the government and other legal authorities for the adoption of environmentally friendly practices in the hotels. Hotels which claim to be environmentally friendly started implementing measures to reduce wastage of water, electricity and other natural resources. Hotels initiated informing customers the need for being environmentally friendly and the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling. The guests who pay for high quality hotel services expect to be pampered with luxurious life style. The hotels use water, energy and other natural sources in abudance to provide quality in their service to the customers. Environmentally responsible customers understand the value of utilising these natural resources sensibly and would support any activity intended to preserve them. This research also investigates the level of support by the customers, by willing to pay for environmentally friendly practices by the hotels. Previous research related to environmentally friendly practices indicate that certain characteristic features must be present in an individual to adopt environmentally friendly activities. They are individual behavior, attitude and knowledge. Hence this research evaluated environmentally friendly activities by hotels, its effects on customer satisfaction and also customer attitude towards these practices based on the above mentioned characteristics.
Sick leave and disability pension before and after diagnosis of multiple sclerosis

Background: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is associated with considerable morbidity and serious disability, but little is known of the long-term impact of the disease on work ability. Objectives: To assess sick leave (short-term absence) and disability pension (long-term absence) before and after diagnosis of MS. Methods: Patients with MS in Sweden were identified in a nationwide disease-specific register and matched with general population controls. Sick leave and disability pension were measured before and after index (i.e. the MS diagnosis date). Results: The final sample comprised 6092 patients and 60,345 controls (mean age 39 years; 70% female). The mean annual prevalence of sick leave ranged from 12% the first year after index to 23% after 11 years among patients and from 13% to 13% among controls. Corresponding estimates for disability pension were 12% and 55% for patients and 7% and 9% for controls. Significant differences in sick leave were observed up to 15 years before index and 3 years for disability pension. Conclusion: Patients with MS in Sweden have elevated levels of sick leave and disability pension up to 15 years before disease diagnosis. Our results highlight the burden of disease on affected patients and society and underscore the substantial unmet medical need.
Hilbert's program sixty years later

On June 4, 1925, Hilbert delivered an address to the Westphalian Mathematical Society in Miinster; that was, as a quick calculation will convince you, almost exactly sixty years ago. The address was published in 1926 under the title Über das Unendliche and is perhaps Hilbert's most comprehensive presentation of his ideas concerning the finitist justification of classical mathematics and the role his proof theory was to play in it. But what has become of the ambitious program for securing all of mathematics, once and for all? What of proof theory, the very subject Hilbert invented to carry out his program? The Hilbertian ambition reached out too far: in its original form, the program was refuted by Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems. And even allowing more than finitist means in metamathematics, the Hilbertian expectations for proof theory have not been realized: a constructive consistency proof for second-order arithmetic is still out of reach. (And since that theory provides a formal framework for analysis, it was considered by Hilbert and Bernays as decisive for proof theory.) Nevertheless, remarkable progress has been made. Two separate, but complementary directions of research have led to surprising insights: classical analysis can be formally developed in conservative extensions of elementary number theory; relative consistency proofs can be given by constructive means for impredicative parts of second order arithmetic. The mathematical and metamathematical developments have been accompanied by sustained philosophical reflections on the foundations of mathematics. This indicates briefly the main themes of the contributions to the symposium; in my introductory remarks I want to give a very schematic perspective, that is partly historical and partly systematic.
Model Adaptation via MAP for Speech Recognition in Noisy Environments

The accuracy of speech recognition systems degrades severely when operating in noisy environments, mainly due to the mismatch between training and testing environmental conditions. The use of noise corrupted training utterances is being used with success in many works. However, as the type and intensity of the noise at operation time is unpredictable, the present work proposes a step beyond: the use of the MAP method to use samples of the actual audio signal that is being processed to adapt such systems to the real noise condition. Experimental results show an increase of almost 2% on average in the recognition rates, when compared to systems trained with noisy utterances.
Enabling the next generation of cm-wavelength studies of high-redshift molecular gas with the SKA

The Square Kilometre Array will be a revolutionary instrument for the study of gas in the distant Universe. SKA1 will have sufficient sensitivity to detect and image atomic 21 cm HI in individual galaxies at significant cosmological distances, complementing ongoing ALMA imaging of redshifted high-J CO line emission and far-infrared interstellar medium lines such as [CII] 157.7mm. At frequencies below ∼50 GHz, observations of redshifted emission from low-J transitions of CO, HCN, HCO^+, HNC, H_2O and CS provide insight into the kinematics and mass budget of the cold, dense star-forming gas in galaxies. In advance of ALMA band 1 deployment (35 to 52 GHz), the most sensitive facility for high-redshift studies of molecular gas operating below 50 GHz is the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). Here, we present an overview of the role that the SKA could play in molecular emission line studies during SKA1 and SKA2, with an emphasis on studies of the dense gas tracers directly probing regions of active star-formation.
Inhibition of Influenza Virus Replication by Constrained Peptides Targeting Nucleoprotein

Background: Because of high mutation rates, new drug-resistant viruses are rapidly evolving, thus making the necessary control of influenza virus infection difficult. Methods: We screened a constrained cysteine-rich peptide library mimicking μ-conotoxins from Conus geographus and a proline-rich peptide library mimicking lebocin 1 and 2 from Bombyx mori by using influenza virus RNA polymerase (PB1, PB2 and PA) and nucleoprotein (NP) as baits. Results: Among the 22 peptides selected from the libraries, we found that the NP-binding proline-rich peptide, PPWCCCSPMKRASPPPAQSDLPATPKCPP, inhibited influenza replicon activity to mean ±SD 40.7% ±15.8% when expressed as a GFP fusion peptide in replicon cells. Moreover, when the GFP fusion peptide was transduced into cells by an HIV-TAT protein transduction domain sequence, the replication of influenza virus A/WSN/33 (WSN) at a multiplicity of infection of 0.01 was inhibited to 20% and 69% at 12 and 24 h post-infection, respectively. In addition, the TAT-GFP fusion peptide was able to slightly protect Balb/c mice from WSN infection when administrated prior to the infection. Conclusions: These results suggest the potential of this peptide as the seed of an anti-influenza drug and reveal the usefulness of the constrained peptide strategy for generating inhibitors of influenza infection. The results also suggest that influenza NP, which is conserved among the influenza A viruses, is a good target for influenza inhibition, despite being the most abundant protein in infected cells.
RACE: Reliability and adaptive cooperation for efficient underwater sensor networks

For the design of a network layer routing scheme for Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN), physical layer cooperation is used in this paper which ensures energy efficiency. For achieving major goal of efficient data routing, a key factor is reliability for application-oriented UWSNs. All the nodes of network fortified by a unidirectional antenna cooperatively perform their propagation of data that lead to major saving of nodes energy. At network layer, hop to hop routing and at physical layer diverse cooperation, minimize the routing energy due to combined optimization. Simulation results depict that as compared to AMCTD and ACE, RACE routing scheme achieves better packet delivery ratio, high stability period, less consumption of energy and minimum end-to-end delay.
Kanji recognition in scene images without detection of text fields - robust against variation of viewpoint, contrast, and background texture

With the goal of indexing scene images, we propose a novel recognition method for Kanji characters captured in scene images. Our method scans multi-resolution images and classifies clipped regions with recognition dictionaries generated by learning a large amount of partial patterns of characters with large geometric transformation. The problem of scanning time, which tends to be unpractically long, is solved by using multi-compression coarse-to-fine scanning, and by detecting peak points after coarse searching. Despite the wrong results generated in the background, our method well supports image retrieval since it uses the regular spacing of characters. Experimental results show that this recognition method recognized characters at the rate of 82%. Precision was 84% and recall was 64% for image retrieval.
From Digital camera to Computational Photography

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. From Digital camera to Computational Photography Henri Maître
Estimation of probability of failure using bootstrap methods

For modelling under uncertainty, Monte-Carlo Simulations is the most popular way of propagating the uncertainty from input parameters to outputs. However, any reliability index, such as probability of failure, based on sampling methods is subject to variability. This variability can lead to underestimations/overestimations, so it is always beneficial to find methods that can provide estimates with confidence levels. Bootstrap methods can address these two issues and allow us to evaluate the uncertainty of our estimates and to use this information to generate conservative estimators of reliability. A simple numerical example is used to illustrate the method and target probability on the accuracy of such estimates.
Small Business Borrowing and Peer‐To‐Peer Lending: Evidence from Lending Club

This study is interested in the ability of borrowers and lenders to signal to each other in the peer-to-peer lending market. We focus on small business loans and investigate the relationship between the loan description that a borrower provides and the impact of this description on the potential funding of the loan by investors. We find that the loan descriptions in the data can be used to predict the probability that the entire loan will be funded. In addition, we also find that an index created from a textual analysis of the loan description can be used to forecast the performance of the loan; a 1 standard deviation increase in the index will decrease the odds of default by 14%. Thus, it appears as if investors are not making investment decisions based on improper signals.
Phenotypic rescue by a bovine transgene in a Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase-null mutant of Drosophila melanogaster

Null mutants for Cu/Zn superoxide dismutase (CuZnSOD) in Drosophila melanogaster are male sterile, have a greatly reduced adult life span, and are hypersensitive to paraquat. We have introduced a synthetic bovine CuZnSOD transgene under the transcriptional control of the D. melanogaster 5C actin promoter into a CuZnSOD-null mutant of D. melanogaster. This was carried out by P-element-mediated transformation of the Drosophila-bovine CuZnSOD transgene into a CuZnSOD+ recipient strain followed by genetic crossing of the transgene into a strain carrying the CuZnSOD-null mutation, cSODn108. The resulting transformants express bovine CuZnSOD exclusively to about 30% of normal Drosophila CuZnSOD levels. Expression of the Drosophila-bovine CuZnSOD transgene in the CuZnSOD-null mutant rescues male fertility and resistance to paraquat to apparently normal levels. However, adult life span is restored to only 30% of normal, and resistance to hyperoxia is 90% of that found in control flies. This striking differential restoration of pleiotropic phenotypes could be the result of a threshhold of CuZnSOD expression necessary for normal male fertility and resistance to the toxicity of paraquat or hyperoxia which is lower than the threshold required to sustain a normal adult life span. Alternatively, the differential rescue of fertility, resistance to active oxygen, and life span might indicate different cell-specific transcriptional requirements for these functions which are normally provided by the control elements of the native CuZnSOD gene but are only partly compensated for by the transcriptional control elements of the actin 5C promoter.
Market inefficiencies and the adoption of agricultural technologies in developing countries 1

Introduction . 2 Meeting the expected profitability condition . 4 Conceptual framework: Market inefficiencies and technology adoption . 6 1. Externality related inefficiencies . 9 2. Input and output market inefficiencies . 16 3. Land market inefficiencies. 26 4. Labor market inefficiencies . 31 5. Credit market inefficiencies. 37 6. Risk market inefficiencies . 42 7. Informational inefficiencies . 50 References . 58
The Application of An Improved Camera Calibration Algorithm to The Video-Based Traffic Information Detection

In this paper an improved camera calibration algorithm is applied to the video-based traffic information detection. The geometric camera model is set up based on the pin-hole model and direct linear transformation (DLT). Adopting the coplanar condition, we estimate parameters of the model and realize the transform from image coordinates to world coordinates in the end. In our experiment, the algorithm has the advantage of high-accuracy and its parameters can be easily estimated. It is proved that the algorithm could meet the requirement of calibration accuracy in the application of the video-based traffic information detection
Genistein, a natural phytoestrogen from soy, relieves neuropathic pain following chronic constriction sciatic nerve injury in mice: anti‐inflammatory and antioxidant activity

There is great interest in soy isoflavones as alternatives to endogenous estrogens not only in hormonal pathologies, but also in inflammatory, neurodegenerative diseases, and pain. We investigated the effect of the isoflavone genistein on neuropathic pain. Genistein binds estrogen receptors (ER) with higher affinity for the ERβ particularly expressed in neuronal and immune cells. Neuropathy was induced in mice by means of chronic sciatic nerve constriction, and the subcutaneous administration of genistein from the third day after the lesion reversed pain hypersensitivity in a time‐ and dose‐dependent manner. This effect may have been due to the activation of classical nuclear receptor and/or anti‐oxidant, anti‐inflammatory, and immunomodulating properties of genistein. The fact that a specific ERβ antagonist prevented both its anti‐allodynic and anti‐hyperalgesic action, whereas a specific ERα antagonist was ineffective and a non‐selective ER antagonist only reversed the anti‐allodynic effect, suggests the involvement of ERβ. Antioxidant effects are also involved as the anti‐nociceptive dose reversed the increase in reactive oxygen species and malondialdehyde in injured paw tissues, and increased the activity of anti‐oxidant enzymes. The phytoestrogen had immunomodulatory and anti‐inflammatory activities as it reduced peripheral and central nuclear factor‐κB, nitric oxide system and pro‐inflammatory cytokine over‐activation. Taken together, our results suggest that genistein could ameliorate painful neuropathy by multiple mechanisms.
Analyst Herding and Short-Term Reversals

This paper shows that analysts’ herding forecasts are accompanied by significant return reversals of 116 basis points per month, while anti-herding forecasts render reversals insignificant. These results are magnified among illiquid stocks and during high VIX months. Since analyst herding is specific to covered firms, we are also able to examine information spillover from covered to uncovered firms. Among uncovered firms, herding forecasts are accompanied by reversals of 118 basis points, but anti-herding forecasts render reversals insignificant. Our findings suggest that herding forecasts do not contain any private information, while anti-herding forecasts have a much higher informational content that can help reduce the information asymmetry between informed and uninformed investors.