Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Structural Transformation and the Deterioration of European Labor Market Outcomes

This paper examines hours worked in continental Europe and the United States from 1956 to 2003. The empirical work establishes two results. First, hours worked in Europe decline by almost 45 percent compared to the United States over this period. Second, this decline is almost entirely accounted for by the fact that Europe develops a much smaller market service sector than the United States. A simple model of time allocation is used to understand these patterns. I find that relative increases in taxes and technological catch‐up can account for most of the differences between the European and American time allocations over this period.
Overexpression of connective tissue growth factor WISP-1 in Chinese primary rectal cancer patients.

AIM To clarify the expression change of Wnt-induced secreted protein-1 (WISP-1) in human rectal cancer and to determine whether it is correlated with invasion and metastasis of human rectal cancer. METHODS Eighty-six paired samples of rectal cancer and surgically resected distant normal rectal tissue were collected and allocated into cancer group and control group respectively. WISP-1 mRNA was detected by relative quantitative real-time RT-PCR and WISP-1 protein was examined by immunohistochemical staining. RESULTS WISP-1 gene overexpression was found in 65% (56/86) primary rectal cancers, 2-30 times that of the level in normal matched rectal tissues (P = 0.001). The mRNA expression level was correlated with Duke's staging, histological differentiation grade and lymph node status. The WISP-1 protein expression was in accordance with mRNA expression level. The positive degree of immunohistochemical staining in the cancer group (1.40 +/- 0.35) was different from that in control group (1.04 +/- 0.08, P < 0.001). Moreover, in cancer group the positive staining degree in high-level mRNA cancers (1.46 +/- 0.37, n = 56) was higher than that in low-level mRNA (1.28 +/- 0.28, n = 30, P = 0.018). CONCLUSION Aberrant levels of WISP-1 expression may play a role in rectal tumorigenesis. WISP-1 may be used as a specific clinical diagnosis and prognosis marker in rectal cancer.
Building Test Collections: An Interactive Guide for Students and Others Without Their Own Evaluation Conference Series

This is a full-day tutorial on building and validating test collections. The intended audience is advanced students who nd themselves in need of a test collection, or actually in the process of building a test collection, to support their own research. Not everyone can talk TREC, CLEF, INEX, or NTCIR into running a track to build the collection you need. The goal of this tutorial is to lay out issues, procedures, pitfalls, and practical advice.
Incentives for Bushmeat Consumption and Importation among West African Immigrants, Minnesota, USA

The knowledge, attitudes, and practices surrounding bushmeat consumption and importation in the United States are not well described. Focus groups of West African persons living in Minnesota, USA, found that perceived risks are low and unlikely to deter consumers. Incentives for importation and consumption were multifactorial in this community.
Error Correction in Lightly Supervised Alignment of Broadcast Subtitles

This paper presents a range of error correction techniques aimed at improving the accuracy of a lightly supervised alignment task for broadcast subtitles. Lightly supervised approaches are frequently used in the multimedia domain, either for subtitling purposes or for providing a more reliable source for training speech–based systems. The proposed methods focus on directly correcting of the alignment output using different techniques to infer word insertions and words with inaccurate time boundaries. The features used by the classification models are the outputs from the alignment system, such as confidence measures, and word or segment duration. Experiments in this paper are based on broadcast material provided by the BBC to the Multi–Genre Broadcast (MGB) challenge participants. Results, show that the order alignment F–measure improves up to 2.6% absolute (15.8% relative) when combining insertion and word– boundary correction
Treatment for cerebral small vessel disease: effect of relaxin on the function and structure of cerebral parenchymal arterioles during hypertension

We investigated the effect of hypertension on the function and structure of cerebral parenchymal arterioles (PAs), a major target of cerebral small vessel disease (SVD), and determined whether relaxin is a treatment for SVD during hypertension. PAs were isolated from 18‐wk‐old female normotensive Wistar‐Kyoto (WKY) rats, spontaneous hypertensive rats (SHRs), and SHRs treated with human relaxin 2 for 14 d (4 (μg/h; n=8/group) and studied using a pressurized arteriograph system. Hypertension reduced PA inner diameter (58±3 vs. 49±3 μm at 60 mmHg in WKY rats, P<0.05), suggesting inward remodeling that was reversed by relaxin (56±4 μm, P<0.05). Relaxin also increased PA distensibility in SHRs (34 ±2 vs. 10±2% in SHRs, P<0.05). Relaxin was detected in cerebrospinal fluid (110±30 pg/ml) after systemic administration, suggesting that it crosses the blood‐brain barrier (BBB). Relaxin receptors (RXFP1/2) were not detected in cerebral vasculature, but relaxin increased vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and matrix metalloproteinase 2 (MMP‐2) expression in brain cortex. Inhibition of VEGF receptor tyrosine kinase (axitinib, 4 mg/kg/d, 14 d) had no effect on increased distensibility with relaxin, but caused outward hypertrophic remodeling of PAs from SHRs. These results suggest that relaxin crosses the BBB and activates MMP‐2 in brain cortex, which may interact with PAs to increase distensibility. VEGF appears to be involved in remodeling of PAs, but not relaxin‐induced increased distensibility. —Chan, S. ‐L. , Sweet, J. G. , Cipolla, M. J., Treatment for cerebral small vessel disease: effect of relaxin on the function and structure of cerebral parenchymal arterioles during hypertension. FASEB J. 27, 3917–3927 (2013). www.fasebj. org
Pedunculopontine Nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation in a Patient with Primary Progressive Freezing Gait Disorder

Background: Pedunculopontine nucleus (PPN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) has recently been suggested for treatment of medication-unresponsive gait and axial symptoms in Parkinson’s disease. Patients with the rare primary progressive freezing gait disorder (PPFG) have similar disabling symptoms and few therapeutic options. We report here on our experience with PPN DBS in treating a 76-year-old man with medication-refractory PPFG. Methods: The patient was treated with staged PPN DBS and underwent careful pre- and postoperative clinical evaluations up to 12 months after surgery. Results: PPN DBS resulted in only mild improvement in symptoms after 12 months of stimulation. Conclusion: In this single case of a patient with PPFG, PPN DBS served only a limited role in treating his symptoms and adds to the very limited published literature describing patients treated with DBS at this brain target.
Trajectories of relationship stress and inflammatory processes in adolescence

Abstract Researchers have identified cross-sectional links between interpersonal stress and inflammation. Little is known, however, about how these dynamics unfold over time, what underlying immune pathways might exist, or whether moderators such as race could alter the strength of the connection between interpersonal stress and inflammatory processes. We examined whether adolescent girls whose relationship trajectories were characterized by chronic stress would exhibit a proinflammatory phenotype marked by systemic inflammation, heightened cytokine responses to bacterial challenges, and resistance to the anti-inflammatory properties of cortisol. Significant Stress × Race interactions revealed that family stress trajectories predicted glucocorticoid sensitivity and peer stress trajectories predicted cytokine production for White but not Asian girls. Relationship stress trajectories were not associated with systemic inflammation, however. These findings suggest that particular subgroups of adolescent girls who face chronic and elevated stress in their close relationships may be at risk for disruptions to the immune system.
Cross-Study Comparison Reveals Common Genomic, Network, and Functional Signatures of Desiccation Resistance in Drosophila melanogaster

Repeated attempts to map the genomic basis of complex traits often yield different outcomes because of the influence of genetic background, gene-by-environment interactions, and/or statistical limitations. However, where repeatability is low at the level of individual genes, overlap often occurs in gene ontology categories, genetic pathways, and interaction networks. Here we report on the genomic overlap for natural desiccation resistance from a Pool-genome-wide association study experiment and a selection experiment in flies collected from the same region in southeastern Australia in different years. We identified over 600 single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with desiccation resistance in flies derived from almost 1,000 wild-caught genotypes, a similar number of loci to that observed in our previous genomic study of selected lines, demonstrating the genetic complexity of this ecologically important trait. By harnessing the power of cross-study comparison, we narrowed the candidates from almost 400 genes in each study to a core set of 45 genes, enriched for stimulus, stress, and defense responses. In addition to gene-level overlap, there was higher order congruence at the network and functional levels, suggesting genetic redundancy in key stress sensing, stress response, immunity, signaling, and gene expression pathways. We also identified variants linked to different molecular aspects of desiccation physiology previously verified from functional experiments. Our approach provides insight into the genomic basis of a complex and ecologically important trait and predicts candidate genetic pathways to explore in multiple genetic backgrounds and related species within a functional framework.
Complications à long terme des traitements antirétroviraux : observance, résistances et troubles métaboliques

Les progres therapeutiques dans le domaine de l’infection par le Virus de l’Immunodeficience Humaine (VIH) ont transforme le pronostic de cette pathologie. Les personnes seropositives pour le VIH se heurtent aux memes difficultes rencontrees dans les autres types de pathologie chroniques : difficultes a suivre un traitement regulierement, effets secondaires des traitements et perte d’efficacite des molecules. Afin d’ameliorer la prise en charge de ces personnes, de nouvelles molecules comme, par exemple, les analogues non-nucleosidiques (ANN), ont ete developpees en substitution aux antiproteases. Notre travail de recherche concerne l’evaluation prospective des facteurs predictifs de l’echec virologique des ANN, hors essai therapeutique. Concernant les complications a long terme, nous avons compare les modifications lipidiques des deux principales molecules appartenant a la classe des ANN. Considerant qu’il n’allait pas de soi qu’une simplification de posologie de deux a une prise par jour pouvait significativement ameliorer l’observance, nous avons realise un essai randomise afin de comparer les deux posologies. Enfin, nous avons realise une revue de la litterature des essais de non inferiorite dans le domaine des traitements du VIH. Nous avons ainsi mis en evidence l’impact des interruptions de traitement pendant plus de 48 heures sur le risque de resistance genotypique aux ANN et confirme le role independant de la depression dans le risque d’echappement virologique. Le remplacement de l’efavirenz par la nevirapine reduisait le risque cardiovasculaire a 10 ans de 20%. Le passage a la nevirapine en une prise par jour etait bien tolere mais l’augmentation moyenne du taux d’observance mesure par pilulier electronique etait marginale. Enfin, les standards methodologiques relatifs aux essais de non inferiorite etaient rarement respectes, rendant l’interpretation de ces etudes difficile. Notre travail a ainsi contribue a ameliorer les connaissances de la prise en charge a long terme des personnes infectees par le VIH en explorant les relations complexes entre les donnees virologiques, les proprietes pharmacologiques des molecules et les comportements humains
Promotion of glucose utilization by insulin enhances granulosa cell proliferation and developmental competence of porcine oocyte grown in vitro

Summary In vitro culture of the oocyte granulosa cell complexes (OGCs) from early antral follicles (EAFs) shows granulosa cell (GC) proliferation, but to a lesser extent than that observed in vivo during follicle development. As the number of GCs closely relates to energy sufficiency of the oocytes, enhancement of GC proliferation influences oocyte development. GC proliferation depends on glycolysis and insulin-mediated AKT/mTOR signaling pathway; therefore, addition of culture medium containing insulin and glucose may potentially promote GC proliferation and hence improve oocyte development. In the present study, we assessed the effect of exogenous insulin and glucose concentration on GC proliferation and oocyte energy status as well as developmental abilities of porcine oocytes grown in vitro. In the presence of 5.5 mM of glucose (Low), a comparison of 10 versus 20 μg/ml insulin showed that high insulin enhanced GC proliferation but exhausted glucose from the medium, which resulted in low energy status including lipid and adenosine triphosphate of the oocyte. Whereas, in the presence of 20 μg/ml insulin, medium with 11 mM glucose (High) enhanced GC proliferation and oocyte energy status as well as developmental ability up to the blastocyst stage. Considering that there was no difference in OGCs development observed with medium (10 μg/ml insulin) containing 5.5 versus 11 mM glucose, we concluded that the combination of high insulin and glucose enhanced GC proliferation and energy status of oocytes as well as the developmental ability of the oocytes grown in vitro.
Robust and Precise Vehicle Localization Based on Multi-Sensor Fusion in Diverse City Scenes

We present a robust and precise localization system that achieves centimeter-level localization accuracy in disparate city scenes. Our system adaptively uses information from complementary sensors such as GNSS, LiDAR, and IMU to achieve high localization accuracy and resilience in challenging scenes, such as urban downtown, highways, and tunnels. Rather than relying only on LiDAR intensity or 3D geometry, we make innovative use of LiDAR intensity and altitude cues to significantly improve localization system accuracy and robustness. Our GNSS RTK module utilizes the help of the multi-sensor fusion framework and achieves a better ambiguity resolution success rate. An error-state Kalman filter is applied to fuse the localization measurements from different sources with novel uncertainty estimation. We validate, in detail, the effectiveness of our approaches, achieving 5-10cm RMS accuracy and outperforming previous state-of-the-art systems. Importantly, our system, while deployed in a large autonomous driving fleet, made our vehicles fully autonomous in crowded city streets despite road construction that occurred from time to time. A dataset including more than 60 km real traffic driving in various urban roads is used to comprehensively test our system.
Comments on "A Metrics Suite for Object Oriented Design"

A suite of object oriented software metrics has recently been proposed by S.R. Chidamber and C.F. Kemerer (see ibid., vol. 20, p. 476-94, 1994). While the authors have taken care to ensure their metrics have a sound measurement theoretical basis, we argue that is premature to begin applying such metrics while there remains uncertainty about the precise definitions of many of the quantities to be observed and their impact upon subsequent indirect metrics. In particular, we show some of the ambiguities associated with the seemingly simple concept of the number of methods per class. The usefulness of the proposed metrics, and others, would be greatly enhanced if clearer guidance concerning their application to specific languages were to be provided. Such empirical considerations are as important as the theoretical issues raised by the authors. >
Non-uniform Q-factor distribution in microwave filters

This paper presents the analysis for non-uniform Q-factor distributions in bandpass filter, particularly the case where the first and last resonators have reduced Q-factor compared with the rest of the resonators. It is shown that these have no effect on filter selectivity, only on overall loss. The theory is backed up with full-wave electromagnetic field simulation and measured data for a prototype filter.
CubeCover– Parameterization of 3D Volumes

Despite the success of quad‐based 2D surface parameterization methods, effective parameterization algorithms for 3D volumes with cubes, i.e. hexahedral elements, are still missing. CubeCover is a first approach for generating a hexahedral tessellation of a given volume with boundary aligned cubes which are guided by a frame field.
The Association Between Apolipoprotein E Genetic Polymorphisms and Multiple Sclerosis

Cor res pon den ce Ad dress/Ya z›fl ma Ad re si: Nebahat Taşdemir MD, Dicle University Medical Faculty, Department of Neurology, Istanbul, Turkey Gsm: +90 533 388 05 46 E-mail: nebahat@dicle.edu. tr Re cei ved/Ge liş ta ri hi: 21.07. 2011 Ac cep ted/Ka bul ta ri hi: 07.05. 2012 © Arc hi ves of Neu ropsy chi atry, pub lis hed by Ga le nos Pub lis hing / © Nö rop si ki yat ri Ar şi vi Der gi si, Ga le nos Ya yı ne vi ta ra f›n dan ba s›l m›fl t›r. ABS TRACT Background: Although the etiology of multiple sclerosis (MS) has not yet been clearly elucidated, MS is a chronic inflammatory disease, in which genetic and environmental factors are involved. The association between apolipoprotein E (APOE) genetic polymorphisms and various neurodegenerative diseases, including MS, is controversial. In the current study, specific APOE genotypes were investigated in patients with MS. Methods: Fifty patients clinically diagnosed with MS and 30 healthy volunteers were included in the study. The APOE genotype was identified via the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) method. The patient and control groups were compared in terms of the frequency of APOE genotypes. Results: The APOE genotype distribution in the patient group was as follows: ε3/ε3, 82.0%; ε3/ε4, 12.0%; and ε2/ε3, 6.0%. There were no significant differences between the patient and control groups with respect to the frequency of APOE genotypes, and APOE ε4 allele carriage (p=0.56). However, the frequency of APOE ε4 allele carriers were significantly higher among male patients (p=0.007). Conclusion: These findings suggest that the APOE genotype has no effect on susceptibility to MS. Further studies with larger sample sizes to be able to include all APOE genotypes are warranted. Identification of genetic factors that may have a role in the etiology of MS will make a substantial contribution to the knowledge of the prevention and treatment of MS. (Arc hi ves of Neu ropsy chi atry 2013; 50: 110-115)
Shared power allocation among subcarriers of OFDM systems

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has several properties which make it an attractive modulation scheme for high speed wireless transmission links. In this paper, a novel power sharing technique is proposed for different users to improve the system performance. The proposed technique is based on use of variable amplitude of subcarriers (VAS). Power can be increased to the users who are crossing the reference boundary (RB) and moving farther towards foot print (FP) of a cell. In this way the users having weak SNR can sustain their call even in multipath fading environment. Assuming knowledge of the instantaneous channel gain estimation for all users, we propose an OFDM dynamic adaptive subcarriers scheme to maintain optimum SNR level of the subchannels which are in deep fade. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is much better than that of other algorithms.
Structure-aware Stylization of Mountainous Terrains

We present a method for the stylization of mountainous terrains that allows creating abstract representations in different rendering styles. Our method consists of two major components: structure-aware terrain ﬁltering and streamline-based hatching. For a given input terrain we compute different Levels-of-Detail (LoD) according to a crest line oriented importance measure and then ﬁlter each LoD accordingly. We generate ﬂow ﬁelds for each LoD and compute streamlines to direct the production of hatching lines. The combination of crest and silhouette lines with streamline-based hatching allows us to create a variety of styles in different Levels-of-Detail. We evaluate our method using several terrains and demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by composing a number of different illustration styles.
Dynamic Load Balancing of Dispatch Scheduling for Solid State Disks

Providing low-latency and high-throughput is an important design feature of an I/O scheduler. Especially, when multiple applications share and compete for a storage resource, the operating system is required to schedule the IO requests for the maximum throughput. Recently, the flash-based storage, solid-state drive (SSD) has been popularly used in various computing systems and traditional scheduling algorithms have been researched and tuned for the emerging flash-based storages. However, the SSDs suffer from the contention problem caused by multiple I/O requests and experience significant performance degradation. This is mainly due to the concurrently accesses to a finite set of flash memory chips. In this paper we propose Dynamic Load Balanced Queuing (DLBQ) that reorders the I/O requests and evenly distributes the accesses on flash memory chips to avoid contention. For that purpose, we have introduced a virtual time method which chases the run-time status of the SSD. We have evaluated the throughput and latency of DLBQ versus the four I/O schedulers with micro benchmarks and server benchmarks. The experimental results show that the throughput of DLBQ is improved by 11 percent on a 128 GB SSD and 15 percent on a 256 GB SSD while ensuring a bounded latency.
Variable potassium content in rabbit cultured tracheal smooth muscle cells

INTRODUCTION There is considerable interest in the use of smooth muscle cells in culture to establish the molecular and ionic events which underlie pathological accelerated growth and division. As yet little is known about ionic concentrations and distributions in these cells, whether these are maintained throughout different passage numbers, and whether alterations in fluxes of ions can modulate growth and division. We present preliminary results, obtained from rabbit tracheal airway smooth muscle (ASM) cells in culture, which show that X-ray microanalysis is an effective technique for such studies.
Integration of Discrepant Sales Forecasts: The Influence of Plausibility Inferences Based on an Evoked Range

The authors hypothesize that when managers integrate two projections to form a sales estimate, they evoke and use a sales range to judge inappropriately the plausibility of each projection. This judged plausibility, as well as the “margin of error” (based on the market research company's typical accuracy), is used to assign weights to each projection. Five experiments find strong evidence for this process and demonstrate a resulting bias.