Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Bidirectional Relationship Between Psychosocial Factors and Atopic Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Objective: There is growing epidemiological literature focusing on the bidirectional association between psychosocial factors and atopic disorders, but no efforts to quantify the relationship systematically have been published. Methods: We searched Medline, PsycINFO, Web of Science, and PubMed up to June 2007. The studies included were prospective cohort studies investigating the influence of psychosocial factors on atopic disorders and the effect of atopic disorders on mental health. Two investigators independently extracted data and determined study quality. Results: There were 43 studies (in 22 articles), of which 34 evaluated the effect of psychosocial factors on atopic disorders and 9 evaluated the effect of atopic disorders on mental health. The major atopic disease assessed in these studies was asthma (90.7%) with allergic rhinitis, 4.7%; atopic dermatitis, 2.3%; and food allergies, 2.3%. The overall meta-analysis exhibited a positive association between psychosocial factors and future atopic disorder (correlation coefficient (r) as combined size effect . 024; 95% confidence interval, 0.014–0.035; p < . 001) as well as between atopic disorders and future poor mental health (r = .044, 95% confidence interval, 0.021–0.067, p < .001). More notably, the subgroup meta-analysis on the healthy and atopic disorder populations showed psychosocial factors had both an etiological and prognostic effect on atopic disorders. Conclusions: The current review revealed a robust relationship between psychosocial factors and atopic disorders. This supports the use of psychological in addition to conventional physical and pharmacological interventions, in the successful prevention and management of atopic disorders. 95% CI = 95% confidence interval; r = correlation coefficient.
Department of Health , Education and Welfare *

Recent methods of quadratic programming [7-9! are capable of optimizing a broad class of quadratic forms within linear inequality constraints. In general, there may be an infinite number of solutions or an unbounded solution or a numerically singular matrix. Nonnegativity is usually imposed on the solution, in addition to other constraints. However, there are some applications, notably nonlinear regression, where a unique solution can be guaranteed, and where nonnegativity is not required. This paper presents a simple, efficient, stable quadratic programming algorithm in the context of regression.
Halofuginone: a potent inhibitor of critical steps in angiogenesis progression

We have previously demonstrated that halofuginone, a low molecular weight quinazolinone alkaloid, is a potent inhibitor of collagen α1(I) and matrix metalloproteinase 2 (MMP‐2) gene expres¬sion. Halofuginone also effectively suppresses tu¬mor progression and metastasis in mice. These re¬sults together with the well‐documented role of extracellular matrix (ECM) components and matrix degrading enzymes in formation of new blood ves¬sels led us to investigate the effect of halofuginone on the angiogenic process. In a variety of experimen¬tal system, representing sequential events in the angiogenic cascade, halofuginone treatment resulted in profound inhibitory effect. Among these are the abrogation of endothelial cell MMP‐2 expression and basement membrane invasion, capillary tube formation, and vascular sprouting, as well as depo¬sition of subendothelial ECM. The most conclusive anti‐angiogenic activity of halofuginone was demon‐strated in vivo (mouse corneal micropocket assay) by showing a marked inhibition of basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) ‐induced neovascularization in response to systemic administration of halofuginone, either i.p. or in the diet. The ability of halofuginone to interfere with key events in neovascularization, together with its oral bioavailability and safe use as an anti‐parasitic agent, make it a promis¬ing drug for further evaluation in the treatment of a wide range of diseases associated with pathological angiogenesis. —Elkin, M. , Miao, H. ‐Q. , Nagler, A. , Aingorn, E. , Reich, R. , Hemo, I. , Dou, H. ‐L. , Pines, M. , Vlodavsky, I. Halofuginone: a potent inhibitor of critical steps in angiogenesis progression. FASEB J. 14, 2477–2485 (2000)
Effect of hydroxyapatite-containing microspheres embedded into three-dimensional magnesium phosphate scaffolds on the controlled release of lysozyme and in vitro biodegradation

The functionality of porous three-dimensional (3D) magnesium phosphate (MgP) scaffold was investigated for the development of a novel protein delivery system and biomimetic bone tissue engineering scaffold. This enhancement can be achieved by incorporation of hydroxyapatite (HA)-containing polymeric microspheres (MSs) into a bulk MgP matrix, and a paste-extruding deposition (PED) system. In this work, the amount of MS and HA was precisely controlled when manufacturing MS-embedded MgP (MS/MgP) composite scaffolds. The main influence was researched in terms of in vitro lysozyme-release, in vitro biodegradation, mechanical properties, and in vitro calcification. The controlled release of lysozyme was indicated, while showing graded release patterns according to HA content. The composite scaffolds degraded gradually with MS content and degradation time. Due to the effect of HA inclusion, the higher HA-containing MS/MgP scaffolds could, not only delay the biodegradation process but also, compensate for the possible loss of mechanical properties. In this regard, it is reasonable to confirm the inverse relationship between biodegradation and corresponding compressive properties. In order to encourage bioactivity and osteoconductivity, the MS/MgP composite scaffolds were subjected to simulated body fluid treatment. Calcium deposition was, in turn, improved with increasing MS and HA content over time. This quantitative result was also proved using morphological and elemental analysis. In summary, a significant transformation of a monolithic MgP scaffold was directed toward a multifunctional bone tissue engineering scaffold equipped with controlled protein delivery, biodegradability, and bioactivity.
Acute myocardial infarction incidence, mortality and case fatality in Santa Clara, Cuba, 2007-2008.

INTRODUCTION Information on acute myocardial infarction incidence and mortality is essential for determining the efficacy of the health system's cardiovascular disease prevention activities; however, in Cuba, sufficient data related to acute myocardial infarction are lacking, particularly at the local level. OBJECTIVE Describe acute myocardial infarction incidence, mortality and case fatality rates from January 2007 through December 2008 in persons aged 45-74 in the municipality of Santa Clara, Villa Clara Province, Cuba. METHODS A retrospective descriptive study was conducted. The World Health Organization MONItoring Trends and Determinants in CArdiovascular Disease Project (MONICA) methodology was used, but only in part, since out-of-hospital case fatalities were not investigated, resulting in insufficient data for such cases. Cases of acute myocardial infarction covered under MONICA definition 1 were included (non-fatal definite, fatal definite, fatal possible, and unclassifiable deaths). Hospitalized patients were followed for 28 days. Incidence, mortality and case fatality rates in the population were calculated by age group (45-54, 55-64 and 65-74 years) and sex. Age-standardized incidence and mortality rates were calculated using the direct method, with the world population as a reference. RESULTS A total of 482 cases of acute myocardial infarction were registered. The percentage of cases of non-fatal definite, fatal definite, fatal possible and fatal with insufficient data were 32%, 18.3%, 26.3% and 13.9% respectively. The cumulative age-standardized incidence per 100,000 population was 433 (95% CI 365-501) in men and 195 (95% CI 152-237) in women, while mortality per 100,000 population was 242 (95% CI 192-292) in men and 120 (95% CI 87-153) in women. Case fatality was 56.4% in men and 62.6% in women. Most fatal cases (65.6%) occurred out of hospital, a trend that was more marked in men (73.9%) than in women (51%). CONCLUSIONS Case fatality from acute myocardial infarction in Santa Clara residents was high, especially in women. Two thirds of fatalities occurred out of hospital, a higher proportion of these deaths in men. It is recommended that the AMI registry be completed by investigating out-of-hospital case fatalities with insufficient data; expanding it to include the 35-44 age group; and that the supply of cardiac marker enzyme immunoassay test kits in Santa Clara be stabilized.
Do teachers need to be leaders? Perceptions of educational leadership and management in the Israeli secondary educational system

ABSTRACT The study explored the perceptions of student-teachers of educational leadership and management with regard to the roles of homeroom teachers and subject teachers in secondary schools. The participants of the study are students in the biggest College of Education in Israel. The analysis was conducted on the students’ posts in an online forum of an academic course using qualitative and quantitative methods. The students’ posts indicated a differentiation between the perceptions of the two roles on the level of ideology as opposed to the practical level. The most prevailing leadership model that emerged from the findings is transformational with four other models, all of which are congruent with the humanistic approach to teaching. Further research should focus on the gaps between school reality and teacher education programmes in order to facilitate the induction phase for novice teachers.
Cause for concern: nurses' reports of hospital care in five countries.

According to most experts, the U.S. faces a growing shortage of registered nurses, threatening the quality of care hospitals can provide. In the setting of nurse shortages and simultaneous concern about patient safety, nurses' job satisfaction and their assessment of quality of care become critical. This Issue Brief highlights a cross-national survey that describes nurses' perceptions of their hospital work environment, and identifies core problems in work design and workforce management in five countries.
Explaining Underutilization of Tax Depreciation Deductions: Empirical Evidence from Norway

Many corporations do not claim all of their allowable tax depreciation deductions. Intuitively, this kind of behavior might seem odd. However we propose several possible explanations. First, we find strong evidence that firms facing current tax losses or carrying forward past losses underutilize depreciation in order to recover tax losses before they expire. Second, corporations with bad economic performance tend to underutilize their deductions, suggesting that corporations use costly “windowdressing” on their accounting measures. Third, we find support for the hypothesis that tax compliance costs discourage the utilization of accelerated depreciation, especially by small firms. We do not find much support for other hypotheses. For example, we find no evidence of substitution between tax depreciation and private debt due to competition between the benefits of private bank monitoring and the tax savings from using tax allowances to postpone tax payments, as suggested in earlier literature. We also study the effects of the uniform reporting accounting system (typical of many European countries) which can, under certain circumstances, constrain dividends. Forgoing some tax depreciation can loosen the dividend constraint, but the evidence does not support this motivation. Unusual access to extremely detailed individual firm tax return forms in Norway made our empirical analysis possible. In addition, the 1992 Norwegian tax reform provided a natural experiment for testing some of the hypotheses. We use the time-series and cross-sectional variation across Norwegian corporations in 1988, 1991, 1992 and 1993.
Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods

The title of this edited volume is slightly misleading, as its various contributions explore the potential for more historical analysis in organization studies rather than addressing issues associated with time and organizing. Hopefully this will not distract from the important achievement of this volume—important especially for business historians—in further expanding and integrating business history into management and organization studies. The various contributions, elegantly tied together by R. Daniel Wadhwani and Marcelo Bucheli in their substantial introduction (which, by the way, presents a significant contribution in its own right), opens up new sets of questions, especially in terms of future methodological and theoretical developments in the field. This book also reflects the changing institutional location of business historians, who increasingly make their careers in business schools rather than history departments, especially in Europe, reopening old questions of history as a social science. There have been several calls to teach more history in business education, such as the Carnegie Foundation report (2011) that found undergraduate business education too narrow in focus and highlighted the need to integrate more liberal arts teaching into the curriculum. However, in the contemporary research-driven environment of business and management schools, historical understanding is unlikely to permeate the curriculum if historical analysis cannot first deliver significant theoretical contributions. This is the central theme around which this edited volume revolves, and it marks a milestone in this ongoing debate. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that even though I did not contribute to this volume, I have coauthored with several of its contributors and view this book as central to my current research practice.)
A User-Centric Trust and Reputation Method for Service Selection

Our work focuses on selecting a trusted service from service consumer’s perspective. First, we distinguish the two kinds of trust context to separate the ability of service as both a service provider and a service consumer in a service web; and we classify the reputation into two different categories. Second we generate a reputation metric model by improving Subject Logic. The trust decision model based on the metric model takes the reliability of direct experiences as well as indirect experiences into account. Third, by building a "bidirectional" feedback mechanism and pattern analysis of service peers’ behaviors, we address the malicious feedback and dishonest offering faced by using the reputation based trust systems in the service-oriented environment. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on service selection.
Cultivation of Acidophilic Algae Galdieria sulphuraria and Pseudochlorella sp. YKT1 in Media Derived from Acidic Hot Springs

Microalgae possess a high potential for producing pigments, antioxidants, and lipophilic compounds for industrial applications. However, the cultivation of microalgae comes at a high cost. To reduce the cost, changes from a closed bioreactor to open pond system and from a synthetic medium to environmental or wastewater-based medium are being sought. However, the use of open pond systems is currently limited because of contamination by undesirable organisms. To overcome this issue, one strategy is to combine acidophilic algae and acidic drainage in which other organisms are unable to thrive. Here, we tested waters from sulfuric acidic hot springs (Tamagawa, pH 1.15 and Tsukahara, pH 1.14) in Japan for the cultivation of the red alga Galdieria sulphuraria 074G and the green alga Pseudochlorella sp. YKT1. Both of these spring waters are rich in phosphate (0.043 and 0.145 mM, respectively) compared to other environmental freshwater sources. Neither alga grew in the spring water but they grew very well when the waters were supplemented with an inorganic nitrogen source. The algal yields were ∼2.73 g dry weight/L for G. sulphuraria and ∼2.49 g dry weight/L for P. sp. YKT1, which were comparable to those in an autotrophic synthetic medium. P. sp. YKT1 grew in the spring waters supplemented either of NH4+, NO3- or urea, while G. sulphuraria grew only when NH4+ was supplemented. For P. sp. YKT1, the spring water was adjusted to pH 2.0, while for G. sulphuraria, no pH adjustment was required. In both cases, no additional pH-buffering compound was required. The phycocyanin of the thermophilic G. sulphuraria is known to be more thermostable than that from the Spirulina platensis currently used in phycocyanin production for commercial use. The phycocyanin content in G. sulphuraria in the Tsukahara water supplemented with NH4+ was 107.42 ± 1.81 μg/mg dry weight, which is comparable to the level in S. platensis (148.3 μg/mg dry weight). P. sp. YKT1 cells in the Tamagawa water supplemented with a nitrogen source formed a large amount of lipid droplets while maintaining cellular growth. These results indicate the potential of sulfuric hot spring waters for large-scale algal cultivation at a low cost.
Sovereign Debt Without Default Penalties

We develop a theory of sovereign borrowing where default penalties are not implementable. We show that when debt is held by both domestic and foreign agents, the median voter might have an interest in serving it. Our theory has important practical implications regarding (a) the role of financial intermediaries in sovereign lending, (b) the effect of capital flows on price volatility including the possible overvaluation of debt to the point that the median voter is priced out of the market, and (c) debt restructuring where creditors are highly dispersed. Copyright 2009, Wiley-Blackwell.
Attack-Surface Metrics, OSSTMM and Common Criteria Based Approach to “Composable Security” in Complex Systems

In recent studies on Complex Systems and Systems-of-Systems theory, a huge effort has been put to cope with behavioral problems, i.e. the possibility of controlling a desired overall or end-to-end behavior by acting on the individual elements that constitute the system itself. This problem is particularly important in the “SMART” environments, where the huge number of devices, their significant computational capabilities as well as their tight interconnection produce a complex architecture for which it is difficult to predict (and control) a desired behavior; furthermore, if the scenario is allowed to dynamically evolve through the modification of both topology and subsystems composition, then the control problem becomes a real challenge. In this perspective, the purpose of this paper is to cope with a specific class of control problems in complex systems, the “composability of security functionalities”, recently introduced by the European Funded research through the pSHIELD and nSHIELD projects (ARTEMIS-JU programme). In a nutshell, the objective of this research is to define a control framework that, given a target security level for a specific application scenario, is able to i) discover the system elements, ii) quantify the security level of each element as well as its contribution to the security of the overall system, and iii) compute the control action to be applied on such elements to reach the security target. The main innovations proposed by the authors are: i) the definition of a comprehensive methodology to quantify the security of a generic system independently from the technology and the environment and ii) the integration of the derived metrics into a closed-loop scheme that allows real-time control of the system. The solution described in this work moves from the proof-of-concepts performed in the early phase of the pSHIELD research and enriches it through an innovative metric with a sound foundation, able to potentially cope with any kind of application scenarios (railways, automotive, manufacturing, .). Key-Words: Complex Systems, Closed-loop, Dynamic Composability, E2E Security, Common Criteria, Attack surface metrics, Optimization WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on SYSTEMS Andrea Fiaschetti, Andrea Lanna, Martina Panfili Silvano Mignanti, Antonio Pietrabissa, Francesco Delli Priscoli Roberto Cusani, Gaetano Scarano, Andrea Morgagni E-ISSN: 2224-2678 187 Volume 14, 2015
Discovering the Structure of Cloud Applications Using Sampled Packet Traces

Accurate and up-to-date knowledge of how a cloud tenant's VMs utilize the underlying cloud infrastructure is essential for many cloud management tasks including tenant onboarding, optimized VM placement, performance optimization, and debugging. Unfortunately, existing solutions such as instrumentation at the hypervisors or standard networking protocols such as LLDP only provide a partial picture of cloud tenant's application structures and how they stress the underlying infrastructure. In this paper, we consider whether it is possible to use sFlow, a standardized mechanism for packet header sampling available in most commodity network switches, to extract such information in an accurate and scalable manner. We overcome the challenges posed by the purely passive and highly sampled nature of sFlow data, and describe a tool, sFinder, that automatically and continuously extracts such information. Our evaluation using sampled sFlow data from a real private cloud show that sFinder is accurate and efficient.
Performance evaluation of prioritized fair scheduling in HSDPA networks under urban situations

This paper presents a new prioritized scheduling called prioritized fair channel-dependent scheduling (PFCDS) in enhanced universal mobile telecommunications system (EUMTS). There are some fair and efficient scheduling algorithms deriving from round-robin (RR) scheduling and C/I scheduling to achieve the trade-off between both the two extreme methods for quality-of-service (QoS). PFCDS scheduling reaches a balance between the aims for effective throughput utilization and distinguishing fairness of all the users. All these algorithms have been implemented in network simulator 2 (ns-2), employing input trace files of signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) via MATLAB. We set up several scenarios to investigate their pros and cons under urban situations, and show the simulation results of PFCDS, compared with other prioritized scheduling algorithms
Enhanced and prolonged baculovirus-mediated expression by incorporating recombinase system and in cis elements: a comparative study

Baculovirus (BV) is a promising gene vector but mediates transient expression. To prolong the expression, we developed a binary system whereby the transgene in the substrate BV was excised by the recombinase (ΦC31o, Cre or FLPo) expressed by a second BV and recombined into smaller minicircle. The recombination efficiency was lower by ΦC31o (≈40–75%), but approached ≈90–95% by Cre and FLPo in various cell lines and stem cells [e.g. human adipose-derived stem cells (hASCs)]. Compared with FLPo, Cre exerted higher expression level and lower negative effects; thus, we incorporated additional cis-acting element [oriP/Epstein–Barr virus nuclear antigen 1 (EBNA1), scaffold/matrix attached region or human origin of replication (ori)] into the Cre-based BV system. In proliferating cells, only oriP/EBNA1 prolonged the transgene expression and maintained the episomal minicircles for 30 days without inadvertent integration, whereas BV genome was degraded in 10 days. When delivering bmp2 or vegf genes, the efficient recombination/minicircle formation prolonged and enhanced the growth factor expression in hASCs. The prolonged bone morphogenetic protein 2 expression ameliorated the osteogenesis of hASCs, a stem cell with poor osteogenesis potential. Altogether, this BV vector exploiting Cre-mediated recombination and oriP/EBNA1 conferred remarkably high recombination efficiency, which prolonged and enhanced the transgene expression in dividing and non-dividing cells, thereby broadening the applications of BV.