Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acute-phase reactants and the risk of relapse/recurrence in polymyalgia rheumatica: a prospective followup study.

OBJECTIVE To determine laboratory parameters that may be useful in identifying polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR) patients who require long-term corticosteroid therapy. METHODS A prospective followup study of 94 consecutive untreated patients with PMR were assessed for relapse/recurrence for a mean of 39 months. This cohort represented all the patients diagnosed over a 4-year period in 2 Italian secondary referral centers. Patients were monitored for clinical signs and symptoms, erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR), C-reactive protein (CRP), and serum interleukin-6 (IL-6). IL-6 levels were also measured in 43 controls matched to the patients for age and sex. RESULTS The ESR was elevated in 91.5% of the patients prior to therapy initiation, as were CRP in 98.9% and serum IL-6 in 92.6%. Forty-seven (50.0%) patients had at least 1 relapse/recurrence during the followup period and 24 (25.5%) had at least 2. After 4 weeks of prednisone therapy, ESR was elevated in 13.2% patients, CRP in 41.9%, and serum IL-6 in 37.2%. IL-6 levels remained persistently elevated in 9.9% and CRP in 8.7% of patients during the first year of followup, whereas no patient had persistently elevated ESR. Persistently elevated CRP and IL-6 levels were significantly associated with an increased risk of relapse/recurrence. In particular, patients with persistently elevated levels of IL-6 during the first year of therapy had the highest relative risk. CONCLUSION Despite the control of clinical symptoms, corticosteroids do not adequately control the inflammatory process in a subset of patients with PMR who have persistently elevated levels of CRP and IL-6 and who have a higher risk of relapsing.
SELF-ESTEEM AND DEPRESSION OF EMPLOYED VERSUS UNEMPLOYED MALE HOMOSEXUALS IN LONG-TERM MONOGAMOUS PARTNERSHIPS

The relation between self-esteem and depression with regard to employment status of gay men in long-term monogamous partnerships was investigated, specifically to determine if a relation exists between employment status and self-esteem, and between employment status and depression in these men. The relation between eleven biographical and psychosocial variables with self-esteem and depression were also investigated. Non-probability snowball and purposive sampling were used to gather the sample of 56 gay male couples who were predominantly white; middle-class; well-educated; urban-dwelling South Africans; that had been involved for a mean length of 7.3 years. Each couple consisted of an employed partner and an unemployed partner, who had a mean length of 3.4 years of unemployment. Five couples (10 subjects) formed a pilot study and completed only the Revised Janis-Field Feelings of Inadequacy Scale (R-JFFIS), while the remaining 51 couples (102 subjects) completed both the R-JFFIS and the Revised Beck Depression Inventory (R-BDI). An Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) computed for the mixed effect model with fixed factor of employment status nested within the random factor of couple, controlling for the effects of the possible covariates revealed a significant difference between self-esteem of employed and unemployed partners. The difference is not significant for depression. Confirmatory evidence for the importance of age as a significant predictor of selfesteem was found for the whole sample; while perceived health and education were found to be significant predictors of depression. Self-esteem and depression were found to be inversely related in both employed and unemployed partners individually and collectively, while a positive correlation was found between self-esteem of employed and unemployed partners. Multiple
Incidental Similarity Facilitates Behavioral Mimicry Nicolas Guéguen and AngéliqueMartin

Research has shown that mimicry increases the social influence of the mimicker and leads to greater liking of the mimicker. It has been proposed that mimicry is exhibited to create affiliation and rapport during social interaction. In two experiments (total N = 95) we manipulated the role of incidental similarity between two individuals on mimicry behavior. Undergraduates who believed they had (vs. did not have) the same first name (Study 1) or same subject of study (Study 2) as a target presented on videotape were more likely to mimic the target’s nonverbal behavior. Results support the notion that mimicry helps to create affiliation and rapport because the desire to build such a relationship is higher in the similarity condition.
Activating Cross-border Brokerage

Using an original dataset of 4,183 former J-1 Visa holders from 81 countries—all of whom had worked in the U.S.—I examine how skilled return migrants, as cross-border brokers, transfer knowledge about organizational practices from abroad to their home countries. I hypothesize that returnees’ knowledge transfer success depends on their embeddedness in both their home- and host-country workplaces and develop and test theory about the organizational and cultural conditions that activate or suppress skilled returnees’ ability to broker knowledge across borders. Findings show that not only do host- and home-country embeddedness increase knowledge transfer success, but they also interact positively. At the organizational level, however, the presence of other returnees in a home-country workplace decreases the positive effect of a returnee’s host-country embeddedness, whereas the similarity of a returnee’s industry background to the home-country industry increases it. At the country level, high xenophobia in a given home country diminishes the positive effect of host-country embeddedness but increases the positive effect of home-country embeddedness. These findings inform an interpersonal perspective on knowledge transfer, contributing to work on brokerage, organizational learning, employee mobility, and the globalization of expert knowledge.
Time-resolved fluorescence microscopy

In fluorescence microscopy, the fluorescence emission can be characterised not only by intensity and position, but also by lifetime, polarization and wavelength. Fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIM) can report on photophysical events that are difficult or impossible to observe by fluorescence intensity imaging, and time-resolved fluorescence anisotropy imaging (TR-FAIM) can measure the rotational mobility of a fluorophore in its environment. We compare different FLIM methods: a chief advantage of wide-field time-gating and phase modulation methods is the speed of acquisition whereas for time-correlated single photon counting (TCSPC) based confocal scanning it is accuracy in the fluorescence decay. FLIM has been used to image interactions between proteins such as receptor oligomerisation and to reveal protein phosphorylation by detecting fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET). In addition, FLIM can also probe the local environment of fluorophores, reporting, for example, on the local pH, refractive index, ion or oxygen concentration without the need for ratiometric measurements.
THE HEART OF THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE POSITION OF THE VICTIM

The aim of this dissertation, which is based on secondary research involving analysing a range of books, journal articles, Government publications, newspaper articles and videos, is to critically examine the position of the victim in the criminal justice system. The paper looks at the role of political interests in establishing victimfocus policies and the direction towards their placement at the heart of the justice system. This includes the managerialistic values, modernization of the Government and covering-up of punitive measures taken against the offender that all point to the political rhetoric around the centeredness of the victim. Furthermore, the view of traditional justice is accounted for in order to get a grasp of the many underlying factors that can be attributed to the so called rebirth and the consequent concentration on the victim. The paper firstly discusses characteristics of victims, the impact of crime on victims and also their needs for a better understanding of who they are and what can be done to help them. Particular attention is drawn to stereotypes associated with victims and constructions of the ideal victim. Secondly, the adversarial nature of English justice and implications for victims are discussed, as well as some tensions between the interests of the offender and the victim, and the opposed nature of the two. Procedural and service rights especially play an important role in defining whether victims are given appropriate attention. Many new initiatives favour the victim and pledge for its better treatment, but it will be shown that there are conflicts as to what can be done in reality and what is proposed. However, it cannot be disputed that support for victims has progressed significantly within the last decade. In the dissertation, it will be argued that the position of the victim, influenced by these many factors, cannot be at the heart of the system, but has advanced in terms of their treatment.
Limitations in the Feasibility of Pulmonary Embolectomy: A Clinicopathologic Study of 101 Cases of Massive Pulmonary Embolism

Of 101 patients who had major pulmonary emboli confirmed at autopsy, 44 died within 1 hour of the onset of symptoms; 26 had no abrupt change in the clinical course to indicate the presence of emboli; and three died while they were under anesthesia. Of the 28 patients who survived for more than 1 hour after onset of symptoms, seven had incurable malignant lesions, four were unconscious with irreversible brain damage, six were too ill from other diseases to undergo embolectomy, and the diagnosis was not suspected for five. Consequently, of the 101 patients only six would have been selected to undergo pulmonary embolectomy. Only by increasing our diagnostic acumen and by obtaining pulmonary angiograms as soon as possible after onset of symptoms can this salvage rate be improved.
A Naive Theory of Affixation and an Algorithm for Extraction

We present a novel approach to the unsupervised detection of affixes, that is, to extract a set of salient prefixes and suffixes from an unlabeled corpus of a language. The underlying theory makes no assumptions on whether the language uses a lot of morphology or not, whether it is prefixing or suffixing, or whether affixes are long or short. It does however make the assumption that 1. salient affixes have to be frequent, i.e occur much more often that random segments of the same length, and that 2. words essentially are variable length sequences of random characters, e.g a character should not occur in far too many words than random without a reason, such as being part of a very frequent affix. The affix extraction algorithm uses only information from fluctation of frequencies, runs in linear time, and is free from thresholds and untransparent iterations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the approach with example case studies on typologically distant languages.
Defense Technical Information Center Compilation Part Notice ADPO 11970 TITLE : A Recursive Approach to the Construction of k-Balanced

In this paper we discuss some numerical aspects of a particular construction of balanced biorthogonal multifilters by means of the lifting scheme. This construction allows, by simply solving linear equations, to obtain multifilters which do not need prefiltering, and for which the discrete versions of polynomial preservation/annihilation properties, are respectively, satisfied by their low and high-pass branches. In particular, we conduct experiments on how a parameter which appears in our recursive definition of balancing can be chosen to suitably influence the spectral behaviour of the multifilter low-pass branch, making it more effective in image compression problems.
A New Approach To Topographic Altimetry

A technique for surveying the earth's topographic elevation from satellites with a pulse-limited altimeter is investigated. The technique is based on a novel data processing scheme that will permit the formation of synthetic resolution from power-detected radar echoes from incoherent targets. The proposal is unusual in that the detector is nonlinear, but is based on the observation that the mean power of incoherent radar clutter is a linear functional of the scatterer density. The method is examined theoretically, and it is shown the technique is practicable for the surface geometries examined. Limitations imposed by the nature of normal incidence backscatter are discussed, and key areas needing further work are identified.
TRAJECTORY PATTERN DETECTION BY HMM PARAMETER SPACE FEATURES AND EIGENVECTOR CLUSTERING

We develop an object trajectory pattern learning method that has two significant advantages over past work. First, we represent trajectories in the HMM parameter space which overcomes the trajectory sampling problems of the existing methods. The proposed features are more expressive and enable detection of trajectory patterns that cannot be detected with the conventional trajectory representations reported so far. Second, we determine common trajectory paths by analyzing the optimal cluster number rather than using a predefined number of clusters. We compute affinity matrices and apply eigenvalue decomposition to find clusters. We prove that the number of clusters governs the number of eigenvectors used to span the feature similarity space. We are thus able to automatically compute the optimal number of patterns. We show that the proposed method accurately detects common paths for various camera setups.
The Roles of Type and Timing: Rethinking the Education Gradient in Childcare Based on the German Case

Parental investments shape differences in human capital development. Time is a particular important resource. Using the latest German Time Use Survey from 2001/02 this paper investigates if educational patterns in the allocation of parental time to childcare have the potential to explain observed disparities in child development. The analysis pays special attention to both partner’s contribution and to the child’s age by defining three child-age groups (0-3, 4-6, 7-9). Using estimation techniques that meet the specific requirements of time use data I am able to show that there is no unambiguously positive educational gradient for mothers in Germany. In the youngest group there is even a negative relationship between maternal university education and childcare, while it is associated with much higher caring times by the father. Next, exploring the effect of education on the allocation of the time with children to specific types of care, the analysis reveals that higher educated mothers devote relatively more time to those childcare activities that can be assumed to foster human capital development in each child-age group. High educated fathers most strongly focus on basic care when the children are young. I provide comparable estimates for the U.S. based on the American Time Use Survey of 2003. The pattern for the allocation of time is almost the opposite. Besides it is the partner’s education which raises the mother’s caring time. There are similarities for types of care. Stimulating activities seem to be preferred and both higher educated parents seem to adapt relatively better to the child’s age-dependent needs.
Energetic Consequences of Nitrite Stress in Desulfovibrio vulgaris Hildenborough, Inferred from Global Transcriptional Analysis

ABSTRACT Many of the proteins that are candidates for bioenergetic pathways involved with sulfate respiration in Desulfovibrio spp. have been studied, but complete pathways and overall cell physiology remain to be resolved for many environmentally relevant conditions. In order to understand the metabolism of these microorganisms under adverse environmental conditions for improved bioremediation efforts, Desulfovibrio vulgaris Hildenborough was used as a model organism to study stress response to nitrite, an important intermediate in the nitrogen cycle. Previous physiological studies demonstrated that growth was inhibited by nitrite and that nitrite reduction was observed to be the primary mechanism of detoxification. Global transcriptional profiling with whole-genome microarrays revealed coordinated cascades of responses to nitrite in pathways of energy metabolism, nitrogen metabolism, oxidative stress response, and iron homeostasis. In agreement with previous observations, nitrite-stressed cells showed a decrease in the expression of genes encoding sulfate reduction functions in addition to respiratory oxidative phosphorylation and ATP synthase activity. Consequently, the stressed cells had decreased expression of the genes encoding ATP-dependent amino acid transporters and proteins involved in translation. Other genes up-regulated in response to nitrite include the genes in the Fur regulon, which is suggested to be involved in iron homeostasis, and genes in the Per regulon, which is predicted to be responsible for oxidative stress response.
Effects of dose of LH on androgen production and luteinization of ovine theca cells cultured in a serum-free system.

The study reports the development of a serum-free culture system for sheep thecal cells that overcomes the problem of spontaneous luteinization and the use of this system to study the control of proliferation and differentiation. Theca cells were isolated by enzymatic dispersion from small follicles (< 3.5 mm) and the effect of plating densities (25-100 x 10(3) cells per well), LH (0.001-100 micrograms l-1), insulin (1-5000 micrograms l-1), insulin-like growth factor I (IGF-I) analogue (1-100 micrograms LR3-IGF-I l-1) and epidermal growth factor (EGF) (0.005-50 micrograms l-1) on the number of cells and androstenedione and progesterone production were determined. Plating density had a marked effect on the pattern of hormone secretion with densities between 50 and 75 x 10(3) cells per well resulting in a high androstenedione: progesterone ratio at optimum doses of LH (0.1 micrograms l-1: P < 0.001). In the first 48 h, the production of both androstenedione and progesterone was stimulated in a dose-dependent manner by LH (P < 0.001). However, the production of androstenedione was ten times higher than that of progesterone and was more sensitive to LH (ED50 value 0.08 micrograms l-1 for androstenedione and 1 microgram l-1 for progesterone). From 48-144 h of culture higher doses of LH (> 1 ng ml-1) inhibited androstenedione (P < 0.001) and stimulated progesterone (P < 0.001) and resulted in a marked change in cell morphology, thus reflecting both functional and morphological luteinization. At optimum doses of LH, both insulin and IGF stimulated cell proliferation (P < 0.001) and androstenedione production (P < 0.001) in a dose responsive manner and there was a significant (P < 0.001) interaction between them. In contrast, both insulin and IGF-I inhibited (P < 0.001) progesterone production in a dose responsive manner. EGF stimulated cell proliferation (P < 0.001) and progesterone production (P < 0.001), but inhibited androstenedione production (P < 0.001), in a dose responsive manner. In conclusion, this culture system exhibits physiologically relevant responses to known in vivo modulators of follicle development. The biphasic nature of the theca cell response to LH emphasises the exquisite sensitivity of theca cells to LH stimulation and highlights the importance of dose-response relationships in the gonadotrophic control of ovarian function.
Medical regulation, spectacular transparency and the blame business.

PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to explore general practitioners' (GPs') and psychiatrists' views and experiences of transparent forms of medical regulation in practice, as well as those of medical regulators and those representing patients and professionals. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH The research included interviews with GPs, psychiatrists and others involved in medical regulation, representing patients and professionals. A qualitative narrative analysis of the interviews was then conducted. FINDINGS Narratives suggest rising levels of complaints, legalisation and blame within the National Health Service (NHS). Three key themes emerge. First, doctors feel "guilty until proven innocent" within increasingly legalised regulatory systems and are consequently practising more defensively. Second, regulation is described as providing "spectacular transparency", driven by political responses to high profile scandals rather than its effects in practice, which can be seen as a social defence. Finally, it is suggested that a "blame business" is driving this form of transparency, in which self-interested regulators, the media, lawyers, and even some patient organisations are fuelling transparency in a wider culture of blame. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS A relatively small number of people were interviewed, so further research testing the findings would be useful. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS Transparency has some perverse effects on doctors' practice. SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS Rising levels of blame has perverse consequences for patient care, as doctors are practicing more defensively as a result, as well as significant financial implications for NHS funding. ORIGINALITY/VALUE Transparent forms of regulation are assumed to be beneficial and yet little research has examined its effects in practice. In this paper we highlight a number of perverse effects of transparency in practice.
Iterative Reweighted $\ell_{2}/\ell_{1}$  Recovery Algorithms for Compressed Sensing of Block Sparse Signals

In many applications of compressed sensing the signal is block sparse, i.e., the non-zero elements of the sparse signal are clustered in blocks. Here, we propose a family of iterative algorithms for the recovery of block sparse signals. These algorithms, referred to as iterative reweighted ℓ2/ℓ1 minimization algorithms (IR-ℓ2/ℓ1), solve a weighted ℓ2/ℓ1 minimization in each iteration. Our simulation and analytical results on the recovery of both ideally and approximately block sparse signals show that the proposed iterative algorithms have significant advantages in terms of accuracy and the number of required measurements over non-iterative approaches as well as existing iterative methods. In particular, we demonstrate that, by increasing the block length, the performance of the proposed algorithms approaches the Wu-Verdú theoretical limit. The improvement in performance comes at a rather small cost in complexity increase. Further improvement in performance is achieved by using a priori information about the location of non-zero blocks, even if such a priori information is not perfectly reliable.
Adaptive searching mechanisms for a cardiology information retrieval system

Medical knowledge is inherently complex and uncertain. Medical experts may provide different interpretations for symptoms since all of them also depend on a given context and most of them are established by statistical utilization. It is necessary a whole knowledge baggage in order to understand and take care of patients with cardiovascular diseases adequately. For this reason, the NOESIS system, an Integrated Project (IP) partially funded by the EU, has been conceived aiming at being a valuable instrument for cardiologic medical information retrieval from heterogeneous, distributed medical databases that mediates medical decision of critical health conditions. The adaptation features that are supported in the NOESIS platform generate a personalized searching process for the users depending on the information stored in their personal profiles. The objective of this paper is the description of a new adaptive searching mechanism developed using innovative technologies in order to obtain, use and manipulate medical information