Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Altered Quality of Life and Psychological Health (SCL-90-R) in Patients With Chronic Rhinosinusitis With Nasal Polyps

Objectives: To investigate the impact of olfactory dysfunction on quality of life (QOL) and psychological status in patients with chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps (CRSwNP). Methods: A retrospective observational study was conducted from January 2011 to May 2012 with 130 patients with septal deviation (SD) (n = 59) and CRSwNP (n = 71). All patients underwent computed tomography (CT), allergy tests, and sniffin’ stick olfactory test. Anosmia was defined by Threshold-Discrimination-Identification (TDI) scores less than 16. QOL and psychological symptoms were assessed with the Sinonasal Outcome Test-20 (SNOT-20) and Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R). Results: Odor discrimination and identification scores were significantly lower in CRSwNP than in SD (P = .008 and P = .005, respectively). In CRSwNP, identification score decreased with higher CT score (r = −0.29, P = .014). CRSwNP with anosmia showed a decreased QOL (P = .044), and SNOT-20 negatively correlated with TDI in severe CRSwNP (CT score ≥15, r = −0.714, P = .001). Anosmia patients had higher anxiety and phobia scores of SCL-90-R in both SD and CRSwNP. However, depression score increased only in CRSwNP with anosmia (P = .025). Conclusion: Olfactory dysfunction may have significant effects on QOL and psychological health. CRSwNP with anosmia is a distinct phenotype having mixed type of olfactory loss that might have a detrimental effect on depression.
Single‐ and Multiple‐Dose Pharmacokinetics of Riluzole in White Subjects

Riluzole is a novel neuroprotective agent that has been developed for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. A series of studies was undertaken to establish its pharmacokinetics on single‐ and multiple‐dose administration in young white male volunteers. The mean absolute oral bioavailability of riluzole (50‐mg tablet) was approximately 60%. Maximum plasma concentration (Cmax) and area under the concentration—time curve (AUC) values were linearly related to dose for the range studied. Cmax occurred at 1.0 hour to 1.5 hours after administration. Plasma elimination half‐life appeared to be independent of dose. After repeated administration of 100 mg riluzole for 10 days, some intraindividual variability in bioavailability was seen. A high‐fat meal significantly reduced the rate (tmax = 2 hours compared with 0.8 hours; Cmax = 216 ng · mL−1 compared to 387 ng · mL−1) and extent of absorption (AUC = 1,047 ng · hr · mL−1 versus 1,269 ng · hr · mL−1). With multiple‐dose administration, riluzole showed dose related absorption, although the terminal plasma half‐life was prolonged slightly. Steady‐state plasma concentrations were achieved within 5 days. Steady‐state trough plasma concentrations were significantly higher with a 75‐mg dose twice daily than with a 50‐mg dose three times daily, although AUC values did not differ.
A cross-sectional study of somatic symptoms and the identification of depression among elderly primary care patients.

OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between somatization and depression as rated by primary care physicians. METHOD This study was a cross-sectional survey of 355 older adults with and without significant depressive symptoms. Physicians' ratings of somatization and depression were obtained for 341 of the 355 patients. Patients were sorted into 4 groups on the basis of physician ratings (no depression/no somatization, somatization only, depression only, and both somatization and depression). Data were collected from 2001-2003. RESULTS Patients who were rated as somatizing were 4.03 (95% CI, 2.52-6.45) times as likely to be rated as depressed as well as somatizing. A comparison of the 4 groups defined by physicians' ratings found that functional status, ethnicity, number of medical conditions, depressive symptoms, and anxiety were statistically significantly different (P < .05). Primary care physicians were 3.95 (95% CI, 1.53-10.16) times more likely to identify older black patients as somatizing only versus depressed and somatizing compared to older white patients among patients above a threshold on a standard depression instrument. CONCLUSIONS Our study fills a gap in the literature by focusing on the primary care physician ratings of depression and somatization, and also specifically on older primary care patients. Blacks are less likely to be rated as depressed, but this may reflect the tendency of doctors to rate them as somatizing.
Testing long‐run PPP with infinite‐variance returns

This paper investigates the long-run purchasing power parity hypothesis when exchange rate returns and inflation rates are assumed to be heavy-tailed stochastic processes. More specifically, residual-based and likelihood-ratio-based cointegration tests of PPP that explicitly allow for infinite-variance innovations are applied to monthly data (1973:1-1999:12) for Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Our test results are marginally less supportive of PPP when the innovations are assumed to be infinite-variance, α-stable processes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The Social and the Cultural Capital of a Place and their Influence on the Production of Tourism – A Theoretical Reflection based on an Illustrative Case Study

This paper is part of a larger research context where the social and cultural capital of places seem to be fruitful concepts in solving certain theoretical and empirical problems in research on tourism production. The purpose of this paper is to specify and define these concepts, and discuss their scientific productivity by using an illustrative example. The concept of place captures such factors as the sense of or for a specific place. The place is then a materialization of, and an absolute condition for, a certain life mode, which here refers to people's values and way of life at different places. The core of the life mode is grounded primarily in production. Different life modes contain different types of social and cultural capital that could have significance for tourism production. Certain types of social capital appear to be especially influential in the development of small business enterprises. This is labeled “bridging social capital”, which refers to social relations characterized by determination as well as a sense of community and solidarity. As for cultural capital, a longer tradition of smaller businesses appears to promote small business enterprise in the tourism industry. The conclusion is that these concepts are fruitful for analyzing the local breeding ground for small business enterprises in tourism production.
Ultrastructural evidence for a pre‐ and postsynaptic localization of full‐length trkB receptors in substantia gelatinosa (lamina II) of rat and mouse spinal cord

Brain‐derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) exerts its trophic effects by acting on the high‐affinity specific receptor trkB. BDNF also modulates synaptic transmission in several areas of the CNS, including the spinal cord dorsal horn, where it acts as a pain modulator by yet incompletely understood mechanisms. Spinal neurons are the main source of trkB in lamina II (substantia gelatinosa). Expression of this receptor in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) cells has been a matter of debate, whereas a subpopulation of DRG neurons bears trkA receptors and contains BDNF. By the use of two different trkB antibodies we observed that 7.7% and 10.8% of DRG neurons co‐expressed BDNF + trkB but not trkA, respectively, in rat and mouse. Ultrastructurally, full‐length trkB (fl‐trkB) receptors were present at somato‐dendritic membranes of lamina II neurons (rat: 66.8%; mouse: 73.8%) and at axon terminals (rat: 33.2%; mouse: 26.2%). In both species, about 90% of these terminals were identified as primary afferent fibres (PAFs) considering their morphology and/or neuropeptide content. All fl‐trkB‐immunopositive C boutons in type Ib glomeruli were immunoreactive for BDNF and, at individual glomeruli and axo‐dendritic synapses, fl‐trkB receptors were located in a mutually exclusive fashion at pre‐ or postsynaptic membranes. Thus, only a small fraction of fl‐trkB‐immunoreactive dendrites were postsynaptic to BDNF‐immunopositive PAFs. This is the first ultrastructural description of fl‐trkB localization at synapses between first‐ and second‐order sensory neurons in lamina II, and suggests that BDNF may be released by fl‐trkB‐immunopositive PAFs to modulate nociceptive input in this lamina of dorsal horn.
Risk Preference Discrepancy: A Prospect Relativity Account of the Discrepancy Between Risk Preferences in Laboratory Gambles and Real World Investments

In this article, we presented evidence that people are more risk averse when investing in financial products in the real world than when they make risky choices between gambles in laboratory experiments. To provide an account for this discrepancy, we conducted experiments which showed that the range of offered investment funds that vary in their risk-reward characteristics had a significant effect on the distribution of hypothetical funds to those products. We also showed that people are able to use the context provided by the choice set in order the make relative riskiness judgments for investment products. This context dependent relativistic nature of risk preferences is proposed as a plausible explanation of the risk preference discrepancy between laboratory experiments and real-world investments. We also discuss other possible theoretical interpretations of the discrepancy.
World Commodity Prices as a Forecasting Tool for Retail Prices: Evidence from the United Kingdom

This paper investigates, using cointegration and Granger-causality techniques, whether a stable long-run co-movement exists between world commodity prices and U.K. retail prices, and whether short-run changes in commodity prices convey information about future movements in U.K. retail prices. The results show noncointegration and no unidirectional Granger causality from commodity to retail prices. These findings suggest that little may be gained from using developments in commodity prices to forecast movements in retail prices in the inflation-targeting framework followed by the U.K. monetary authorities.
Optimal Single Imaging Window Selection on Earth Observation Satellites

The optimal scheduling of Earth observation satellite is NP-complete. Most of the existing scheduling algorithms regard requests as the observations of point objects and adopt preprocessing methods, such as simple clustering, so as to decrease the problem size. There are also some algorithms in which requests are regarded as the observations of rectangular regions. However, actual requests are often the observation of irregular regions. Therefore, existing methods cannot decrease the problem size effectively. In this paper, the reward rate of each observation request region is sampled at specified space resolution. Then a fast computational method, which is "row accumulations followed by column accumulations", is employed to acquire reward values of all the candidate imaging windows in the satellitepsilas covering of land belt in the given time slot. The method has linear computational complexity on the discrete point count of all the request regions. At last, the imaging windows corresponding to the local maxima of reward values are chosen as candidate imaging windows. Experiments with random inputs show that the methods in this paper can effectively deal with the observation requests with irregular region, those with multi-intersections of covering regions, and those with nonlinear relationship between reward rate and the region covering rate.
Fifty-Year Overview of Judgment and Decision-Making Research in Accounting

As part of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of AFAANZ, we consider the breadth of judgment and decision-making (JDM) experimental research in accounting over that 50-year period. Our review is divided by decade and between auditing, financial accounting and management accounting. In four major journals, we found 5745 papers between 1970 and 2009, which we consider impressive and strong support for the opportunity to publish in this field. Our aim is to encourage more JDM research from Australians and New Zealanders, and to allow researchers in particular specialisations to get a better understanding of the JDM research in other specialisations.
Size and Investment Performance: A Research Note

This article examines the performance of actively managed Australian equity funds and the extent to which both fund size and manager size are related to risk-adjusted returns. Larger investment managers, by definition, engage in higher trade volume. The literature documents that transaction costs and trade difficulty increase with trade size, given difficulties associated with ‘large’ trades and their potential market impact on security prices. Therefore, ceteris paribus , large orders are consistent with lower levels of efficiency in trade execution and higher transaction costs. While larger investment managers may experience material disadvantages relative to their smaller counterparts, the Australian literature to date has largely ignored the issues of asset size and the long run performance of investment offerings. This article, employing returns and fund size data that control for survivorship bias, documents that while large retail active equity funds earn higher risk-adjusted returns (after expenses) than small funds, the difference in mean performance is not significantly different. In the institutional sphere, the study also finds no statistically significant performance differences (net of expenses) between funds on the basis of portfolio size. These findings suggest the hypothesis that performance declines with fund size is not supported empirically. This article examines the relationship between the size of actively managed Australian equity funds (and managers) and risk-adjusted performance in the period 1991–2000. The issue of portfolio asset size and the implications for investment performance has been acknowledged by academics, fund managers, asset consultants and investors as being of critical importance in the selection process of investment managers. However, the evidence concerning the relationship between fund manager performance and fund asset size in Australia is surprisingly scarce. Size also has implications for performance related to transaction costs (the ease with which investment managers can successfully exploit information), performance measurement given Sharpe’s (1991) arithmetic of active management, and the growth rate of a manager (i.e., fund flows). From an institutional setting, the relationship between size and performance is also important, given
[Effectiveness of Nivolumab in Large-Cell Neuroendocrine Carcinoma of the Lung - A Report of Two Cases].

BACKGROUND The anti-programmed death-1 antibody nivolumab is an important treatment option for non-small-cell lung carcinoma.However, its effectiveness for large-cell neuroendocrine carcinomas(LCNEC)is still controversial.Here, we report 2 cases of LCNECs that responded to nivolumab.Case 1: A 62-year-old man received chemotherapy and radiotherapy for stage III A lung adenocarcinoma.One year later, another lung lesion was observed and diagnosed as LCNEC using surgical lung biopsy.Although he subsequently received some chemotherapy regimens, the patient developed new brain metastasis, expanded mediastinal lesion, and increased levels of the tumor marker pro-gastrin releasing peptide(ProGRP). We started nivolumab as the sixth-line treatment.In response, ProGRP levels significantly decreased and the mediastinal lesion became smaller.Case 2: A 55-year-old man was diagnosed with stage III A LCNEC and received chemotherapy and radiotherapy.The primary lesion was controlled; however, lung metastases developed and chemotherapy was unable to control them.We provided treatment with nivolumab as the third-line therapy.The tumor marker ProGRP decreased and the lung metastases became smaller. CONCLUSION Nivolumab can be a valuable treatment option for LCNEC.
Pricing of mountain range derivatives under a principal component stochastic volatility model

In this paper, a multidimensional stochastic volatility process is introduced. This process is simpler than existing ones in terms of number of parameters while keeping practical stylized facts like stochastic correlation and volatility. The pricing of two mountain range derivatives, Altavista and Everest, is analyzed under this framework, showing sensitivities to parameters, number of eigenvalues, and maturity time. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Demonstration of Amyloid Deposits and Neurofibrillary Changes in Whole Brain Sections

Selective and sensitive silver staining of extracellular amyloid deposits and intraneuronal neurofibrillary changes can be applied to 50–150 μ. m thick polyethylene glycol sections and/or 5–15 μ. m thick paraffin sections. The silver techniques take advantage of physical development of the nucleation sites thus permitting tight control of the entire procedure. Both techniques can be applied to routinely fixed autopsy material. They do not require particular skills and considerably facilitate processing of large numbers of sections through entire hemispheres of the human brain.
Fund management and its effect in the Greek social security system

Abstract Economic and demographic slowdown has put under strain public pension systems around the globe. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of the Greek social security system and investigate the issue of pension fund management. Our empirical analysis focuses on whether flexible investment rules (including equity investment) could have taken the pressure off the Greek public pension system while reducing the risks associated with such flexibility. The empirical results of the paper suggest that efficient management of reserves can result in additional significant revenues at acceptable levels of financial risk. However, pension fund management flexibility cannot by itself resolve the problem of social security system.
European Generic Medicines Association (EGA) vision

Patients are at the heart of the generic and biosimilar medicine industries’ mission. We are committed to supplying them with high-quality medicines, delivering better value and ensuring the sustainability of our European healthcare systems. We are, and will continue pursuing this universal aim of a healthier society through trustworthy partnerships including EU institutions, national regulators, patient groups, healhtcare professionals and other stakeholders to increase public health in Europe.
H∞ filter design for discrete-time linear systems with sector-bounded nonlinearities: an LMI approach

This paper concerns the problem of full-order and reduced-order H∞ filter design for discrete-time system with sector-bounded nonlinearities. The purpose of this paper is to design full-order and reduced-order filter with the same nonlinearity such that the filtering error system is asymptotically stable and has a guaranteed H∞ performance. By using slack variable technique, sufficient conditions are obtained for the existence of admissible filters. Moreover, in order to overcome the non-convex constraint for reduced-order H∞ filter design, by converting the structural constraint on the Lyapunov matrix to the constraint on the slack variables, the admissible filter can be obtained from the solution of convex optimization problem in terms of linear matrix inequality, which can be solved via efficient interior-point algorithms. Numerical example is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.
Growth of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in India

Zones are popular instruments in developing countries for pursuing export-led growth strategies. Developing countries have built zones as models for selective policy applications and for easier integration into the world economy. India is not an exception. However, the recent Special Economic Zones (SEZs) that have come up following the SEZ Act of 2005 have created several controversies. These include concerns over accentuation of economic divides and industrial relocation. This article examines the rationale behind zone-based growth strategies and studies the international evidence on zones. It also looks closely at India’s earlier and current experience with zones. It finds that India’s new SEZs are following specific locational patterns on account of discriminatory incentive structures that are also inducing distinct product-orientations in these zones.
Interrater Reliability of the Modified Jadad Quality Scale for Systematic Reviews of Alzheimer’s Disease Drug Trials

Drug therapies for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have been evaluated in clinical trials over the past 2 decades. Systematic reviews of AD drug trials can shed more light on the efficacy of pharmaceutical interventions. The modified Jadad scale can be used to assess the quality of trial reports that are candidates for inclusion in these systematic reviews. The interrater reliability of the modified Jadad scale was examined during such a review. Three blinded reviewers rated the quality of 42 AD drug trial reports: the intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.90. The modified Jadad scale appears to be a useful tool for AD research because of the very good interrater reliability. Also, it is composed of items that are well suited to the specific disease characteristics of AD. Further research should focus on the validity of this instrument.
Cloning-Independent and Counterselectable Markerless Mutagenesis System in Streptococcus mutans

ABSTRACT Insertion duplication mutagenesis and allelic replacement mutagenesis are among the most commonly utilized approaches for targeted mutagenesis in bacteria. However, both techniques are limited by a variety of factors that can complicate mutant phenotypic studies. To circumvent these limitations, multiple markerless mutagenesis techniques have been developed that utilize either temperature-sensitive plasmids or counterselectable suicide vectors containing both positive- and negative-selection markers. For many species, these techniques are not especially useful due to difficulties of cloning with Escherichia coli and/or a lack of functional negative-selection markers. In this study, we describe the development of a novel approach for the creation of markerless mutations. This system employs a cloning-independent methodology and should be easily adaptable to a wide array of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacterial species. The entire process of creating both the counterselection cassette and mutation constructs can be completed using overlapping PCR protocols, which allows extremely quick assembly and eliminates the requirement for either temperature-sensitive replicons or suicide vectors. As a proof of principle, we used Streptococcus mutans reference strain UA159 to create markerless in-frame deletions of 3 separate bacteriocin genes as well as triple mutants containing all 3 deletions. Using a panel of 5 separate wild-type S. mutans strains, we further demonstrated that the procedure is nearly 100% efficient at generating clones with the desired markerless mutation, which is a considerable improvement in yield compared to existing approaches.
American Power and World Order

American Power and World Order, Christian Reus-Smit, Themes for the 21st Century; Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004, pp. xii, 184. This book begins and ends with analogies between the United States and Rome. The analogies are familiar ones. The remarkable military, economic and technological preponderance of America are acknowledged. The fatal flaws of hubris and “immoderate greatness” are asserted and warned against. In between, Christian Reus-Smit weaves a narrative of decline, in which he attempts to explain why America is unable to exercise international influence commensurate with its material preponderance in the world.