Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Tyranny of the Gift: Sacrificial Violence in Living Donor Transplants

Medical anthropology can bring to living donor transplant useful insights on the nature of gifting, family obligations, reciprocity and invisible sacrifice. Whereas, ethical reflections and debates on the marketing of tissues and organs, especially sales by living strangers, have proliferated to the point of saturation, the larger issue of the ethics of ‘altruistic’ donation by and among family members is more rarely the focus of bio‐ethical scrutiny and discussion today, though of course it was much debated in the early decades of kidney transplant. As the proportion of living over deceased donors (especially of kidneys) has increased markedly in the past decade, the time is ripe to revisit the topic, which I shall do via three vignettes, all of them informed by my 10 years as founding Director of Organs Watch, an independent, university‐based, anthropological and ethnographic field‐research and medical human rights project.
A note on ANOVA in an experimental design model based on an orthonormal system

Experiments usually aim to study how changes in various factors affect the response variable of interest. Since the model used most often at present in experimental design is expressed through the effect of each factor, it is easy to understand how each factor affects the response variable. However, since the model contains redundant parameters, a considerable amount of time is often necessary to implement the procedure for estimating the effects. On the other hand, it has recently been shown that the model in experimental design can also be expressed in terms of an orthonormal system. In this case, the model contains no redundant parameters. Moreover, the theorem with respect to the sum of squares for the 2-factor interaction, needed in the analysis of variance (ANOVA) has been obtained. However, 3-factor interaction is often to be considered in real cases, but the theorem with respect to the sum of squares for the 3-factor interaction has not been obtained up to now. In this paper, we present the theorem with respect to the sum of squares for the 3-factor interaction in a model based on an orthonormal system. Furthermore, we can also obtain the theorem for interactions with 4 or more factors by the similar proof. Hence, in any real case, we can execute ANOVA in the model based on an orthonormal system.
Some unpleasant arithmetics of regional unemployment in the EU. Are there any lessons for EMU

Several studies have documented the weak response of regional wage differentials and labour mobility following region-specific (â€œidiosyncraticâ€ ) shocks in the average of the EU countries. This has been often taken as evidence of the rigidity of labour markets in European countries, as opposed to the flexibility of the USA. However, as such shocks by definition average to zero, one cannot make an explicit link between the (lack of) adjustment at regional level and aggregate unemployment. Moreover, the emphasis on the reaction to short-run idiosyncratic shocks is unlikely to explain the permanent differentials across regions, which characterise the regional distribution of unemployment in many EU countries. This paper tries to provide a better understanding of the regional distribution of unemployment and why region-specific shocks can matter for aggregate unemployment. It does so by explicitly considering the possibility of asymmetric reactions, so that unemployment rises more in poorer areas suffering an adverse shock than it declines in richer regions experiencing a favourable shock. The reason behind such asymmetries is the presence of a wage floor in the poorer regions resulting from policy centralisation, as for instance in the case of a national unemployment compensation system, which provides benefits that are uniform across regions. If such a mechanism is at work, aggregate unemployment tends to be â€œinflatedâ€ by region-specific shocks that are inequality- increasing. After presenting an illustrative model of the mechanism, the paper proposes a simple measure of the resulting â€œexcess unemploymentâ€ , based on the difference between the average (national) unemployment rate and the unemployment rate of the median region. It also examines the relationship between regional asymmetries in unemployment and the dispersion of productivity across regions, taken as proxy of the inequality-increasing shocks. The evidence, while not entirely conclusive, justifies two tentative policy conclusions, which are particularly relevant in the context of EMU: a) to avoid centralisation of labour market institutions at the EU level that may end up inflating aggregate unemployment; b) to effectively deploy regional policies to combat inequality- increasing shocks.
An exploration of undergraduate nursing and physiotherapy students' views regarding education for patient handling.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To ascertain the views of undergraduate student nurses and physiotherapists regarding their education in patient handling. BACKGROUND Musculo-skeletal injuries are an important cause of staff sickness absence and attrition from the nursing profession and are a recognised problem within the physiotherapy profession. Nurses and physiotherapists are at risk of musculo-skeletal injuries as a result of their role in assisting patients with movement. METHODS A questionnaire survey was undertaken of undergraduate nursing and physiotherapy students (n = 371) at one university. RESULTS Most students agreed that university teaching about moving and handling prepared them for clinical practice (64%). Over a third reported that they had never undertaken a written moving and handling risk assessment in clinical practice (38%). Almost half of the sample (40%) admitted undertaking unsafe moving and handling activities. Half (50%) also stated that they would rather 'fit' into the team than challenge unsafe practice. Almost a third (29%) stated that they had begun to experience pain since becoming a student. There were significant differences between nursing and physiotherapy students. Physiotherapy students were more likely to report being supervised when moving and handling and reported being more assertive about adhering to safe practice. CONCLUSIONS The well-being of both nursing and physiotherapy undergraduate students is threatened when students undertake work placements in clinical settings. University-based education in safe patient handling, though important, can be undermined by workplace settings where unsafe practices occur. Collaboration is needed between university educators, managers and practice-based mentors to support students to maintain safe approaches to moving and handling patients. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE A third of students reported developing pain since becoming a healthcare student. Students entering their professions already injured may leave the workforce owing to poor physical well-being. It is vital that the clinical workplace supports safe systems of working.
The influence of mean blood pressure on arterial stiffening and endothelial dysfunction in women with rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the carotid-radial pulse wave velocity, augmentation index, and flow-mediated dilation of the brachial artery and factors possibly influencing them in women with rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. MATERIAL AND METHODS A total of 63 women with rheumatoid arthritis, 31 with systemic lupus erythematosus, and 72 controls, aged 18-55 years, were examined. Parameters of arterial stiffness, augmentation index and carotid-radial pulse wave velocity, were obtained by applanation tonometry (Sphygmocor (v.7.01) AtCor Medical). Flow-mediated dilatation of the brachial artery, reflecting endothelial function was determined by ultrasound system (Logiq 7, General Electric). RESULTS The groups of women with rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus lupus differed from controls regarding augmentation index (P<0.001; P=0.008) and did not differ between each other. Women with systemic lupus erythematosus differed from controls regarding pulse wave velocity (P=0.018), while women with rheumatoid arthritis - did not. Flow-mediated dilatation in both the groups of diseases was not different from controls. In rheumatoid arthritis patients, mean blood pressure was the main explanatory factor for augmentation index and pulse wave velocity; vessel diameter and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol - for flow-mediated dilatation. In women with systemic lupus erythematosus, pulse wave velocity was not related to any of the pending parameters; augmentation index was dependent on organ damage index, age, and mean blood pressure, and flow-mediated dilatation on vessel diameter, body mass index, and disease duration. CONCLUSIONS The mean blood pressure was the major and the only one risk factor of arterial stiffening in rheumatoid arthritis, while the disease damage index played the most important role in the systemic lupus erythematosus group. The mean blood pressure in the systemic lupus erythematosus group was not as important as in the rheumatoid arthritis group, though may have a partial influence.
Strategic delay and information exchange in endogenous social networks

Abstract : This thesis studies optimal stopping problems for strategic agents in the context of two economic applications: experimentation in a competitive market and information exchange in social networks. The economic agents (firms in the first application, individuals in the second) take actions, whose payoffs depend on an unknown underlying state. Our framework is characterized by the following key feature: agents time their actions to take advantage of either the outcome of the actions of others (experimentation model) or information obtained over time by their peers (information exchange model). Equilibria in both environments are typically inefficient, since information is imperfect and, thus, there is a benefit in being a late mover, but delaying is costly. More specifically, in the first part of the thesis, we develop a model of experimentation and innovation in a competitive multi-firm environment. Each firm receives a private signal on the success probability of a research project and decides when and which project to implement. A successful innovation can be copied by other firms. We start the analysis by considering the symmetric environment, where the signal quality is the same for all firms. Symmetric equilibria (where actions do not depend on the identity of the firm) always involve delayed and staggered experimentation, whereas the optimal allocation never involves delays and may involve simultaneous rather than staggered experimentation. The social cost of insufficient experimentation can be arbitrarily large. Then we study the role of simple instruments in improving over equilibrium outcomes. We show that appropriately-designed patents can implement the socially optimal allocation (in all equilibria) by encouraging rapid experimentation and efficient ex post transfer of knowledge across firms.
Antioxidant intake and bone status in a cross-sectional study of Brazilian women with osteoporosis

This study aimed to investigate the association between antioxidant intake and bone mineral density (BMD) in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. We conducted a cross-sectional study with 150 women, mean age 68.7 (SD 9.1) years. BMD and body composition were obtained using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). We assessed anthropometric measures and dietary intake and applied an adapted Dietary Antioxidant Quality Score (a-DAQS) to evaluate the antioxidant consumption. 65.3% of women had higher scores on the a-DAQS. We found no relationship between the a-DAQS and BMD; however, we observed an inverse correlation between vitamin A and lumbar spine (LS) BMD in g/cm2 (r = – 0.201; p = 0.013). An analysis of variance (ANOVA) test also showed that vitamin A was negatively associated with the LS BMD (F = 6.143; p = 0.013, but without significance when a multivariate analysis was applied. The a-DAQS did not have an association with BMD; however, Vitamin A showed a negative correlation with BMD, but such an association disappeared when the other antioxidants were taken together. Our findings encourage an antioxidant-based dietary approach to osteoporosis prevention and treatment, since the negative effect of vitamin A was neutralized by the intake of such nutrients.
Analysis of Communication Network Performance From a Complex Network Perspective

In this paper we study the performance of communication networks from a network science perspective. Our analysis and simulation results reveal the effects of network structure, resource allocation and routing algorithm on the communication performance. Performance parameters, including packet drop rate, time delay, and critical generation rate, are considered. For efficient data transmission, the traffic load should be as uniformly distributed as possible in the network and the average distance of it should be short. We propose to use the node usage probability, which depends on both the network topology and routing algorithm, to characterize the traffic load distribution, and show that resource allocation based on the node usage probability outperforms the uniform and degree-based allocation scheme. On the basis of the proposal analysis and routing algorithms, we compare the performances of regular networks, scale-free networks, random networks, and the Internet constructed at the autonomous system (AS) level. Results from this study provide important insights into the relationship between the structural properties of communication networks and their performances.
Sub-millisecond Stateful Stream Querying over Fast-evolving Linked Data

Applications like social networking, urban monitoring and market feed processing require stateful stream query: a query consults not only streaming data but also stored data to extract timely information; useful information from streaming data also needs to be continuously and consistently integrated into stored data to serve inflight and future queries. However, prior streaming systems either focus on stream computation, or are not stateful, or cannot provide low latency and high throughput to handle the fast-evolving linked data and increasing concurrency of queries. This paper presents Wukong+S, a distributed stream querying engine that provides sub-millisecond stateful query at millions of queries per-second over fast-evolving linked data. Wukong+S uses an integrated design that combines the stream processor and the persistent store with efficient state sharing, which avoids the cross-system cost and sub-optimal query plan in conventional composite designs (e.g., Storm/Heron+Wukong). Wukong+S uses a hybrid store to differentially manage timeless data and timing data accordingly and provides an efficient stream index with locality-aware partitioning to facilitate fast access to streaming data. Wukong+S further provides decentralized vector timestamps with bounded snapshot scalarization to scale with nodes and massive queries at efficient memory usage. We have designed Wukong+S conforming to the RDF data model and Continuous SPARQL (C-SPARQL) query interface and have implemented Wukong+S by extending a state-of-the-art static RDF store (namely Wukong). Evaluation on an 8-node RDMA-capable cluster using LSBench and CityBench shows that Wukong+S significantly outperforms existing system designs (e.g., CSPARQL-engine, Storm/Heron+Wukong, and Spark Streaming/Structured Streaming) for both latency and throughput, usually at the scale of orders of magnitude.
Public sector accountability, NEPAD and Africa's transition : a scorecard approach

The 1990s witnessed a worldwide trend of 'democratizing' governance systems. The emergence of 'new generation' of African leaders brought both hope and despair. The continental and regional institutions were reconfigured to become instruments of reform. Hence, the New Economic Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) dominated the debate in Africa. Central to this debate is the concept of accountability. This paper uses a microeconomic (agency) framework and managerial accounting innovations to (better) understand issues of accountability in Africa's public sector institutions. Noteworthy are the identification of the two-stage agency problem in public sector institutions and the development of a multidimensional scorecard for APRM.
Effects of cardiotrophin-1 on differentiation and maturation of rat bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells induced with 5-azacytidine in vitro

Background Cardiotrophin-1 (CT-1) is a cytokine involved in the growth and survival of cardiac cells that stimulates cardiomyogenesis in pluripotent murine embryonic stem (ES) cells. But it is not known whether CT-1 is responsible for the fate of differentiated bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMMSCs). Methods We investigated the effects of CT-1 on differentiation and maturation of BMMSCs in vitro induced with 5-azacytidine. After 4 weeks of induced culturing, we observed the levels of α-cardiac actin and troponin-I by immunohistochemical staining, the ultrastructure of induce-cultured BMMSCs, and the expression of GATA-4, NKx2.5, beta-myosin heavy chain (beta-MHC) and α-cardiac actin mRNA by real time RT-PCR analysis. Results Differentiated BMMSCs cultured with CT-1 distinctly showed formations of myofilaments-morphological characteristics of myocyte like cells. The protein levels of α-cardiac actin and troponin-T were significantly higher than control. Furthermore, mRNA expression of GATA-4, NKx2.5, α-cardiac actin and beta-MHC was increased remarkably. Conclusions This study suggests that induced culturing of BMMSCs in the presence of 5-azacytidine combined with CT-1 can enhance cardiomyocytic characteristics. CT-1 upregulates the expression of GATA-4, NKx2-5, α-cardiac actin and beta-MHC mRNA, and rapidly promotes the differentiation and maturation of cardiomyocyte-like cells differentiated from BMMSCs induced with 5-azacytidine.
A robust tracking controller for dynamically positioned surface vessels with added mass

This work concentrates on tracking control of dynamically positioned surface vessels with asymmetric added mass terms affecting the system model at the acceleration level. Specifically, we propose a novel continuous robust controller for surface vessels that, in addition to asymmetric added mass in its inertia matrix, contains unstructured uncertainties in all its system matrices. The proposed controller compensates the overall system uncertainties and ensures asymptotic tracking, while requiring only the knowledge of the sign of the leading principle minors of the input gain matrix. Lyapunov based approaches are applied in order to prove the stability of the closed-loop system and asymptotic convergence of the tracking error signal.
Innovation, Foreign Direct Investment and Growth

Direct foreign investment is incorporated in a dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous technological change. In contrast to recent endogenous growth approaches, the author allows for geographical separation of the innovation and production of newly developed goods. Firms acquire specific knowledge through R&D investment in the more developed country and use their specific asset to establish a production plant in the low-cost country. Foreign direct investment is accompanied by interregional spillovers of knowledge from the more to the less advanced country. The author derives a steady-state equilibrium with active innovation and production activities in the high-technology sector in both countries. Furthermore, the implications of factor flow liberalization as well as of industrial policies are investigated. Copyright 1997 by The London School of Economics and Political Science
Outcome evaluation on cochlear implant users with residual hearing

Objectives: The performance outcome with Freedom™ Hybrid™ versus the CP900 series sound processor with Hybrid Hearing was investigated. In addition, a preliminary evaluation was conducted to consider the feasibility of upgrading experienced electric-only cochlear implant (CI) users who had substantial residual hearing to Hybrid Hearing. Methods: This study was a single-centre prospective, non-inferiority design with repeated measures conducted at Hannover Medical School (MHH). The randomized AABB cross-over design to compensate for learning effects included two test groups. Group 1 compared two systems for Hybrid Hearing (Freedom Hybrid sound processor versus CP900 series sound processor) and Group 2 compared CP900 series sound processor (electric-only) versus the CP900 with Hybrid Hearing in experienced CI users who had confirmed residual low-frequency hearing. Groups 1 and 2 were composed of different participants. Results: Group 1 (n = 24) performance on speech perception tests was equivalent or superior with the CP900 series sound processor showing a statistically significant mean improvement of 1.87 dB in background noise (P < 0.001). The mean speech understanding in quiet showed a better performance by 5% (P = 0.064) for participants tested with the CP900. The patient-reported outcome questionnaire confirmed the beneficial performance with the CP900 series sound processor with Hybrid Hearing. The feasibility portion of the study (Group 2, n = 14) showed an average benefit of 0.54 dB in background noise when using the CP900 with Hybrid Hearing function versus electric-only stimulation. Conclusions: The outcome presents sufficient evidence to show the effectiveness of the CP900 series sound processor with Hybrid Hearing over the Freedom Hybrid for participants with substantial residual hearing. Positive outcomes were observed for improved speech understanding and subjective hearing performance. Further, a trend was demonstrated in the data towards better performance with CP900 with Hybrid Hearing versus electric-only stimulation. Hybrid Hearing users showed a clinically relevant and statistically a significant benefit from the current CP900 series sound processor generation supporting its recommendation, on a case-by-case basis, to current electric-only users. More research is needed to confirm these findings.
Specialization and openness to foreign trade in the European Union

This study explores the relations between inter-industry specialization and openness to foreign competition in the European countries. By controlling for other variables influencing specialization, the study found a negative relationship between openness and inter-industry specialization, meaning that the closer the countries become in their degree of openness to trade, the closer are their industrial structures, as is expected from the Hecksher-Olhin-Vanek framework with equalization of factor prices. Nevertheless, control variables powerful influence specialization, claiming for a more complete theoretical framework.
Pricing Contingent Claims under Interest Rate and Asset Price Risk

type="main" xml:lang="en"> This paper presents a general framework for pricing contingent claims under interest rate and asset price uncertainty. The framework extends Ho and Lee's (1986) valuation framework by allowing not only future interest rates but also future asset prices to depend on the current term structure of interest rates. The approach is shown to provide risk-neutral valuation relationships that are consistent with the initial term structure of interest rates and can be applied to valuation of a broad class of assets including stock options, convertible bonds, and junk bonds.