Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The relative impact of income and health on the subjective well-being across generations in Europe

The relative importance of the components contributing to individual wellbeing are likely to change over the life-cycle. Any social policy, whose the main role is to promote the well-being of the population as a whole, neglecting this aspect will redistribute inefficiently the resources across age categories. This paper analyses the life-cycle preferences over income and health. We estimate the relative effects of health and income shocks on individual well-being across age categories by using subjective measure of well-being from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) from 1994 to 2001. The analysis uses self-reported satisfaction with different domains of life (main activity, income, health, free time and housing) to construct a measure of individual well-being. The analysis concludes that the effect of household income on the well-being of the elderly is lower than it is for the young. Moreover, illness is associated to a higher drop in the wellbeing of the elderly than it is for the young. The larger impact of illness on the well-being of the elderly is due to the fact that health disease has more impacts on the other domains of life (i.e. satisfaction with main activity and satisfaction with free time) than for the young suggesting that illness is more depressing among the elderly because it decreases their functioning in the different domains of life preventing them to enjoy their daily activities.
Association of Western and traditional diets with depression and anxiety in women.

OBJECTIVE Key biological factors that influence the development of depression are modified by diet. This study examined the extent to which the high-prevalence mental disorders are related to habitual diet in 1,046 women ages 20-93 years randomly selected from the population. METHOD A diet quality score was derived from answers to a food frequency questionnaire, and a factor analysis identified habitual dietary patterns. The 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) was used to measure psychological symptoms, and a structured clinical interview was used to assess current depressive and anxiety disorders. RESULTS After adjustments for age, socioeconomic status, education, and health behaviors, a "traditional" dietary pattern characterized by vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, and whole grains was associated with lower odds for major depression or dysthymia and for anxiety disorders. A "western" diet of processed or fried foods, refined grains, sugary products, and beer was associated with a higher GHQ-12 score. There was also an inverse association between diet quality score and GHQ-12 score that was not confounded by age, socioeconomic status, education, or other health behaviors. CONCLUSIONS These results demonstrate an association between habitual diet quality and the high-prevalence mental disorders, although reverse causality and confounding cannot be ruled out as explanations. Further prospective studies are warranted.
The Role of Center of Mass Kinematics in Predicting Peak Utilized Coefficient of Friction During Walking *

Abstract: Slips frequently occur when the friction required between the foot and floor exceeds available surface slip resistance. To date, the ability to identify variables that predict an individual’s friction needs during walking, or utilized coefficient of friction (COFU), remains limited. Understanding COFU in the context of pedestrian/walkway accidents is important as individuals who demonstrate higher COFU are at a greater risk of slipping. This study determined if whole body center of mass (CM) kinematics were predictive of peak COFU during walking. Ground reaction forces and kinematic data were recorded simultaneously as subjects walked. Stepwise regression analysis determined that the combination of the subject’s CM‐to‐center‐of‐pressure angle and CM anterior (i.e., forward) velocity predicted 62% of the variance in peak COFU during weight acceptance (p < 0.001). The identified relationships between CM kinematics and peak COFU provide insight into how gait and individual anthropometric characteristics may increase risk for slip initiation.
Shifting Ties: Social Networks in the Surgical Instrument Cluster of Sialkot, Pakistan

The paradox in the industrial district model is understanding how the divergent tendencies of local competition and co-operation are mediated. Social networks are said to provide mechanisms that regulate inter-firm relations and facilitate the flow of knowledge within the confines of the district. Empirical evidence of this, particularly from the South, is limited. This article draws on the case of the export-oriented surgical instrument cluster of Sialkot in Pakistan. It shows how social networks, based on kinship, family and localness, influence production relations, and how the impact of these interlinked local social networks have changed over time. The economic and social reputation that comes from being local is central to vertical and horizontal inter-firm relations within the cluster. Building social and economic ties with external agents is, however, also becoming important, especially to acquire the technical know-how necessary to remain competitive in global markets.
Methods and tools for summarization of entities and facts in knowledge bases

Knowledge bases have become key assets for search and analytics over large document corpora. They are used in applications ranging from highly specialized tasks in bioinformatics to general purpose search engines. The large amount of structured knowledge they contain calls for effective summarization and ranking methods. The goal of this dissertation is to develop methods for automatic summarization of entities in knowledge bases, which also involves augmenting them with information about the importance of particular facts on entities of interest. We make two main contributions. First, we develop a method to generate a summary of information about an entity using the type information contained in a knowledge base. We call such a summary a semantic snippet. Our method relies on having importance information about types, which is external to the knowledge base. We show that such information can be obtained using human computing methods, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, or extracted from the edit history of encyclopedic articles in Wikipedia. Our second contribution is linking facts to their occurrences in supplementary documents. Information retrieval on text uses the frequency of terms in a document to judge their importance. Such an approach, while natural, is difficult for facts extracted from text. This is because information extraction is only concerned with finding any occurrence of a fact. To overcome this limitation we propose linking known facts with all their occurrences in a process we call fact spotting. We develop two solutions to this problem and evaluate them on a real world corpus of biographical documents.
Lysine conjugation properties in human IgGs studied by integrating high‐resolution native mass spectrometry and bottom‐up proteomics

Antibody–drug conjugates (ADCs) are a novel class of biopharmaceuticals several of which are now being investigated in clinical studies. In ADCs, potent cytotoxic drugs are coupled via a linker to reactive residues in IgG monoclonal antibodies. Linkage to lysine residues in the IgGs, using N‐hydroxysuccinimide ester based chemistry, is one of the possible options. To control drug load and specificity, proper knowledge is required about which lysine residues are most accessible and reactive. Here, we combine native MS and bottom‐up proteomics to monitor the overall drug load and site‐specific lysine reactivity, using N‐hydroxysuccinimide‐based tandem mass tags. High‐resolution Orbitrap native MS enables us to monitor and quantify, due to the achieved baseline resolution, the sequential incorporation of up to 69 tandem mass tag molecules into human IgGs. Complementary, bottom‐up proteomics facilitates the identification of some very reactive “hot‐spot” conjugation sites. However, we also identify lysine residues that are highly resistant to chemical labeling. Our integrated approach gives insight into the conjugation properties of IgGs at both the intact protein and residue levels, providing fundamental information for controlling drug load and specificity in lysine‐linked ADCs.
External Debt, Labour Productivity Growth and Convergence: Evidence from Sub‐Saharan Africa

type="main" xml:id="twec12166-abs-0001"> Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has long suffered from lagging productivity and excessive levels of indebtedness. Using both parametric and non-parametric techniques, this paper examines the impact of external debt on labour productivity growth and convergence across SSA economies over the period 1970–2010. The results indicate the presence of debt-overhang effects, regardless of model and sample specification. Debt reduction through the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries and Multilateral Debt Relief initiatives enhanced growth but was not successful in offsetting the debt-overhang effects. Moreover, excessive levels of external debt were responsible for divergence in output per worker over the early 1990s. Although this trend was reversed over the 2000s, reduction in debt through the debt relief initiatives seems to have been insufficient in helping heavily indebted countries in SSA catch up with the labour productivity levels of the best-performing economies in the region.
Basic fibroblast growth factor improves myocardial function in chronically ischemic porcine hearts.

The effect of basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) administration on regional myocardial function and blood flow in chronically ischemic hearts was studied in 26 pigs instrumented with proximal circumflex coronary artery (LCX) ameroid constrictors. In 13 animals bFGF was administered extraluminally to the proximal left anterior descending (LAD) and LCX arteries with heparin-alginate beads and 13 other animal served as controls. bFGF-treated pigs showed a fourfold reduction in left ventricular infarct size compared to untreated controls (infarct size: 1.2 +/- 0.4% vs. 5.1 +/- 1.3% of LV mass, mean +/- SEM, P < 0.05). Percent fractional shortening (% FS) in the LCX area at rest was reduced compared with the LAD region in both bFGF and control pigs. However, there was better recovery in the LCX area after rapid pacing in bFGF-treated pigs (% FSLCX/% FSLAD, 22.9 +/- 7.3%-->30.5 +/- 8.5%, P < 0.05 vs. prepacing) than in controls (16.0 +/- 7.8%-->14.3 +/- 7.0%, P = NS). Furthermore, LV end-diastolic pressure rise with rapid pacing was less in bFGF-treated than control pigs (pre-pacing; pacing; post-pacing, 10 +/- 1; 17 +/- 3; 11 +/- 1* mmHg vs 10 +/- 1; 24 +/- 4; 15 +/- 1 mmHg, *P < 0.05 vs. control). Coronary blood flow in the LCX territory (normalized for LAD flow) was also better during pacing in bFGF-treated pigs than in controls. Thus, periadventitial administration of bFGF in a gradual coronary occlusion model in pigs results in improvement of coronary flow and reduction in infarct size in the compromised territory as well as in prevention of pacing-induced hemodynamic deterioration.
An impact of drainage system on soil water conditions at Lidzbark Warminski experimental site

The aim of this study is to evaluate the impact of a drainage system on soil water conditions in a loam soil compared to that in undrained clay loam soil under various topographic conditions. The soils are located on a sloping area at Lidzbark Warminski experimental site (Poland) with well surface water outflow conditions and used as a pasture. The loam soil was drained with ceramic drainage pipes with an average drain spacing of 14 m and an average drain depth of 0.9 m, while the clay loam soil profile was not drained. The research was conducted during the period from 1999 to 2005. Ground water level as well as soil moisture content were measured monthly for both soil profiles. Meteorological conditions (precipitation and data for calculation of reference evapotranspiration) were also recorded. The results obtained show that in the loam soil (drained site) water level is on average 42 cm higher compared to that in the clay loam soil (not drained site). In both soils the amplitude of the ground water level changes was relatively high and exceeds 300 cm. In the drained loam soil, the water level position exceeded the depth of the drainage system in very wet, wet and average years. Under wet meteorological conditions the increase in ground water levels in the clay loam soil was slower than in the loam soil.
Modelling the Firm in its Market and Organizational Environment: Methodologies for Studying Corporate Social Responsibility

The study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can best be mainstreamed within the wider social science literature if it is defined as firms voluntarily assuming responsibility for their externalities, thereby setting the puzzle of how this can be reconciled with the maximization of shareholder value as the central challenge of the subject. Means of resolving the puzzle require modelling the firm interacting with its environment as both a market actor and as an organization, and in particular through the interaction between these two. Such an approach has no need of a separate concept of ‘stakeholders’. The analysis develops through the firm's relations with actual and potential political action (raising the separate issue of corporate citizenship), and the tastes of consumers, investors and employees—the last raising interesting implications for principal–agent theory.
Multiobjective Fuzzy Predictive Torque Control of an induction machine fed by a 3L-NPC inverter

Recently the use of Model Predictive Control (MPC) in electrical motor drives has been reported both theoretically and experimentally. Predictive Torque Control (PTC) has been developed to control induction motor drives, allowing high-performance and fast dynamics. However, the optimization used in PTC is based on a single cost function minimization, where control objectives are merged by using weighting factors. The adjustment of these factors is achieved through a nontrivial process and they are heavily dependent on the system parameters and user requirements, being a complex task in systems where two or three weighting factors must be adjusted. To avoid the well-known time-consuming simulations and branch and bound search process, a Multiobjective Fuzzy Predictive Torque Control (FPTC) is presented for a Three-Level Neutral-Point-Clamped voltage source inverter (3L-NPC). The proposed strategy changes the single cost function with a Multiobjective Optimization based on Fuzzy-Decision-Making. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the behavior of the motor drive under steady-state and dynamic conditions.
Mechanochemical actuators

There are synthetic polymers which can exert a force and mechanical work by contracting themselves in the presence of chemical solutions. They can convert chemical energy directly into mechanical energy, similar to biological (skeletal) muscles. Hence, these synthetic polymers are called mechanochemical systems, mechanochemical actuators, or artificial muscles. Mechanochemical actuators can be obtained with rubber, collagen, and polyelectrolyte gels. This paper surveys the mechanisms of contraction and swelling, the mechanical properties, and several applications of mechanochemical actuators. The mechanochemical engine driven by contractile collagen fibres, which was originally developed by A. Katchalsky and recently examined by some workers in Japan, is also reported. The mechanical properties of polyelectrolyte gels (cross-linked polyacrylic acid and ion-exchange resins, and a mechanochemical piston packed with the resins) are discussed. Mechanochemical actuators of polyelectrolytes can be activated by electric stimulation, and the experimental method and results are presented. Several manufacturing processes for applications of mechanochemical actuators to industrial purposes and robot actuators have also been treated. Several examples of the treatments and experimental results are presented.
Auto-encoder using the bi-firing activation function

Training the whole deep neural network together is restricted by the gradient diffusion problem. Greedy layer-wise training of an auto-encoder has achieved promising results in deep neural networks. However, it can not learn useful input representation from the original input directly. In this work, we propose to use the bi-firing activation function for auto-encoder with an end-to-end training scheme. It not only improves the training efficiency but also learns better features than the traditional stacked auto-encoder. Experimental results show that it extracts more representative features and also outperforms the stacked auto-encoder in supervised classification task.
Specialists, party members, or national representatives: Patterns in co-sponsorship of amendments in the European Parliament

Tabling committee amendments is an important way for Members of the European Parliament to influence legislation, build coalitions, and give signals to constituents. This article questions to what extent these coalitions follow party lines, national lines, or the logic of informational specialisation. Expectations are linked to the theories of legislative organisation and tested using exponential random graph models of the co-sponsorship patterns during the seventh legislature of the European Parliament. The results indicate that representing the same member state, sharing committee membership, and being affiliated to the same European Parliament Party Group all contribute to the formation of recurring co-sponsorship ties. Furthermore, this study indicates that especially the European United Left–Nordic Green Left has strong within-party co-sponsorship bonds and that Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe adopts a pivotal link between left and right in cross-party co-sponsorship.
ADCY5 Couples Glucose to Insulin Secretion in Human Islets

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within the ADCY5 gene, encoding adenylate cyclase 5, are associated with elevated fasting glucose and increased type 2 diabetes (T2D) risk. Despite this, the mechanisms underlying the effects of these polymorphic variants at the level of pancreatic β-cells remain unclear. Here, we show firstly that ADCY5 mRNA expression in islets is lowered by the possession of risk alleles at rs11708067. Next, we demonstrate that ADCY5 is indispensable for coupling glucose, but not GLP-1, to insulin secretion in human islets. Assessed by in situ imaging of recombinant probes, ADCY5 silencing impaired glucose-induced cAMP increases and blocked glucose metabolism toward ATP at concentrations of the sugar >8 mmol/L. However, calcium transient generation and functional connectivity between individual human β-cells were sharply inhibited at all glucose concentrations tested, implying additional, metabolism-independent roles for ADCY5. In contrast, calcium rises were unaffected in ADCY5-depleted islets exposed to GLP-1. Alterations in β-cell ADCY5 expression and impaired glucose signaling thus provide a likely route through which ADCY5 gene polymorphisms influence fasting glucose levels and T2D risk, while exerting more minor effects on incretin action.
Stress-Induced Respiratory Pattern Changes in Asthma

Objectives: To build upon prior research on stress-related breathing pattern changes in asthma. Previous research has considered a limited set of respiratory parameters and has remained equivocal. Emotions and stress are known to change the respiratory pattern. In asthma, certain breathing patterns have adverse effects on the airways and lead to symptom exacerbation. Methods: We studied respiration during resting conditions and an acute psychosocial stressor (a free speech and mental arithmetic task) in participants with asthma (n = 20) and healthy controls (n = 19). The respiratory pattern was recorded with respiratory inductance plethysmography. Partial pressure of end-tidal carbon dioxide (PCO2) was measured with capnometry before and after stress. Results: The overall minute ventilation was higher in asthma (mean [standard deviation] = 9.0 [4.0] L versus 6.8 [4.1] L, p <.05), but levels of the PCO2 were comparable (34.6 [3.5] mm Hg versus 35.0 [3.7] mm Hg, p =.667) to healthy controls during prestress and poststress phases. Participants with asthma also showed a significant lengthening of inspiration, expiration, and the total respiratory cycle during stress compared with healthy controls (p <.05). During stress tasks, all participants showed marked increases in tidal volume, inspiratory flow, minute ventilation, tidal volume instability, ribcage contribution to tidal volume, and ribcage-abdominal asynchrony. A significant increase in tidal volume instability and a tendency toward lengthening of expiration and the total respiratory cycle were observed in quiet-sitting periods at prestress to poststress in asthma. Conclusions: Expiratory lengthening and variable tidal volumes are characteristic for individuals with asthma during psychosocial stress. The function and possible association of these changes with symptom exacerbations require further study.ATI = Asthma Trigger Inventory; FeNO = fraction of exhaled nitric oxide; fR = respiration rate; PCO2 = partial pressure of carbon dioxide; %RCI = percentage of rib cage contribution to inspiratory volume; TE = expiratory time; TI = inspiratory time; TSST = Trier Social Stress Test; TTOT = total respiratory cycle time; TI/TTOT = respiratory timing; V'E = minute ventilation; VE RMSSD = expiratory volume instability; VI RMSSD = inspiratory volume instability; VT = tidal volume
Can Evolutionary-based Brain Map Be Used as a Complementary Diagnostic Tool with fMRI, CT and PET for Schizophrenic Patients?

Objective: In this research, a new approach termed as “evolutionary-based brain map” is presented as a diagnostic tool to classify schizophrenic and control subjects by distinguishing their electroencephalogram (EEG) features. Methods: Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is employed to find discriminative frequency bands from different EEG channels. By deploying the energy of those selected frequency bands from different channels within each time frame (window) on the scalp geometry, a sort of two dimensional points along with their values are created; by applying Lagrange interpolation, an image can be constructed. Finally, by averaging the images belonging to successive time frames, an evolutionary-based brain map is created. Results: In this study, twenty subjects from each group voluntarily participated and their EEG signals were caught from 20 channels. The energy of selected bands for different channels are arranged in a feature vector for each time frame and applied to Fisher linear discriminant analysis (FLDA) resulting in 83.74% diagnostic accuracy between the two groups. The achieved result by the proposed method was much higher than applying the energy of standard EEG bands (delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma) to the same classifier which just provided 77.04% accuracy. Applying T-test to the achieved results supports the supremacy of the proposed method as an automatic powerful diagnostic tool. Conclusion: The proposed brain map is capable of highlighting the same physiological and anatomical changes which are observed in fMRI, PET and CT as differentiable indicators between controls and schizophrenic patients.