Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extramedullary hematopoiesis is associated with lower cardiac iron loading in chronically transfused thalassemia patients

The aim of this study was to evaluate, in a large cohort of chronically transfused patients, whether the presence of extramedullary hematopoiesis (EMH) accounts for the typical patterns of cardiac iron distribution and/or cardiac function parameters. We retrospectively selected 1,266 thalassemia major patients who had undergone regular transfusions (611 men and 655 women; mean age: 31.3 ± 8.9 years, range: 4.2–66.6 years) and were consecutively enrolled within the Myocardial Iron Overload in Thalassemia network. The presence of EMH was evaluated based on steady‐state free precession sequences; cardiac and liver iron overloads were quantified using a multiecho T2* approach; cardiac function parameters and pulmonary diameter were quantified using the steady‐state free precession sequences; and myocardial fibrosis was evaluated using the late gadolinium enhancement technique. EMH was detected in 167 (13.2%) patients. The EMH+ patients had significantly lower cardiac iron overload than that of the EMH− patients (P = 0.003). The patterns of cardiac iron distribution were significantly different in the EMH+ and EMH− patients (P < 0.0001), with a higher prevalence of patients with no myocardial iron overload and heterogeneous myocardial iron overload and no significant global heart iron in the EMH+ group EMH+ patients had a significantly higher left ventricle mass index (P = 0.001) and a significantly higher pulmonary artery diameter (P = 0.002). In conclusion, in regularly transfused thalassemia patients, EMH was common and was associated with a thalassemia intermedia‐like pattern of cardiac iron deposition despite regular transfusion therapy. Am. J. Hematol. 90:1008–1012, 2015. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Indicators for the representativeness of survey response

Many survey organizations use the response rate as an indicator for the quality of survey data. As a consequence, a variety of measures are implemented to reduce non-response or to maintain response at an acceptable level. However, the response rate is not necessarily a good indicator of non-response bias. A higher response rate does not imply smaller non-response bias. What matters is how the composition of the response differs from the composition of the sample as a whole. This paper describes the concept of R-indicators to assess potential differences between the sample and the response. Such indicators may facilitate analysis of survey response over time, between various fieldwork strategies or data collection modes. Some practical examples are given.
Dermoscopy of pigmented skin lesions (Part II).

Dermoscopy is a non-invasive technique combining digital photography and light microscopy for in vivo observation and diagnosis of pigmented skin lesions. For dermoscopic analysis, pigmented skin lesions are covered with liquid (mineral oil, alcohol, or water) and examined under magnification ranging from x 6 to x 100, in some cases using a dermatoscope connected to a digital imaging system. The improved visualization of surface and subsurface structures obtained with this technique allows the recognition of morphological structures within the lesions that would not be detected otherwise. These morphological structures can be classified on the basis of both global features, allowing a quick, albeit only preliminary categorization of a given pigmented skin lesion, and local features, representing the letters of the dermoscopic alphabet. Classification of melanoma-specific dermoscopic criteria - namely, atypical pigment network, irregular dots/globules, irregular streaks, blue-whitish veil and regression structures, to name the most important ones - forms the basis of diagnostic algorithms designed to aid the clinician in assessing whether or not a melanocytic lesion is melanoma. A certain number of lesions defy both clinical and dermoscopic diagnosis, and in those cases the ultimate standard for diagnosis is histopathology, especially when performed by well-trained and competent dermatopathologists.
The Student Alcohol Questionnaire: An Updated Reliability of the Drinking Patterns, Problems, Knowledge, and Attitude Subscales

The reliabilities of the Quantity/Frequency Patterns, Problems Resulting from Drinking, Knowledge of Alcohol, and Attitudes Toward Drinking subscales of the Student Alcohol Questionnaire were calculated. The Spearman-Brown reliability coefficients of the subscales were . 84, . 89, . 85, and . 27, respectively. Values of Cronbach alpha for the four subscales were . 86, . 92, . 86, and . 55, respectively.
Wine origin and organic elaboration, differentiating strategies in traditional producing countries

Purpose – This article aims to analyse various wine differentiation strategies (price, origin, type and production system) to counteract the commercial success of new wine producers compared to traditional ones.Design/methodology/approach – The methodology consisted of a survey of 400 Castilla‐La Mancha wine consumers during the month of March 2004, whose preferences were determined through several multivariate techniques.Findings – Three consumer segments were identified: the first shops for wine mainly by price, the second, by origin and the third, by a combination of price and type of wine. In this sense, except for the first segment, where competition by a cheaper wine from other places could endanger the local market, possible strategies would be to continue emphasising origin in a traditional approach and to search for a new wine differentiation based on organic production. Both strategies, which can be carried out jointly, would require government backing in addition to support from the business se.
An adaptive error concealment method selection algorithm for multi-view video coding

This study proposes an adaptive error concealment method selection for multi-view transmission. This study uses the neighboring block motion vector of the damaged block to define two motion correlations, motion degree and homogenous degree, which are used to select the suitable error concealment method for the damaged block construction by the proposed fuzzy reasoning. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can select suitable error concealment algorithm for the damaged multi-view video to reduce concealing time on homogenous damaged block and to improve the reconstructed quality on non-homogenous damaged block. In the performance evaluation, the PSNR of the proposed method have 28.11 dB to 32.4 dB.
Coordination in humanitarian relief chains: chain coordinators

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify chain coordinators and to explore their roles. The paper also highlights certain advantages of coordination, specific competencies of the coordinators, and challenges in the coordination.Design/methodology/approach – This is a case study research. The data were collected through interviews, observations, and personal experiences of working as a logistics manager and a project manager in the 2005 South Asian earthquake.Findings – The coordinated organizations manage a number of complex relationships to respond to the disasters effectively and efficiently. An umbrella organization plays a chain coordinator role in horizontal coordination. The umbrella organization leads, directs, and makes major decisions. A country director/programme manager acts as a strategic coordinator in vertical coordination. However, logistics managers, procurement managers and project managers (operations coordinators) also handle coordination activities. The coordinators’ tangible.
A simulation approach to manage finished goods inventory replenishment economically in a mixed push/pull environment

In this paper we introduce a simulative model, designed and developed to optimally manage an integrated finished goods inventory system, and suitable for adoption in a wide range of make to stock manufacturing firms. The goal of the model is to manage optimally finished goods inventory levels, in order to minimize costs deriving from holding inventory and from adjustment to the master production schedule (MPS) to prevent stock‐outs. A trade off is sought between these costs components. The input variables of the model are: safety stock levels, assessed through coefficients k1, k2 and k3, and the stochastic distribution functions of products demand. The model performances are assessed considering the annual total cost for the inventory management. The model is then tested by a numerical application. The case considered refers to a major firm operating in the zootechnical feeds production industry.
Proximity Based Object Segmentation in Natural Color Images Using the Level Set Method

SUMMARY Segmenting indicated objects from natural color images remains a challenging problem for researches of image processing. In this paper, a novel level set approach is presented, to address this issue. In this segmentation algorithm, a contour that lies inside a particular region of the concerned object is first initialized by a user. The level set model is then applied, to extract the object of arbitrary shape and size containing this initial region. Constrained on the position of the initial contour, our proposed framework combines two particular energy terms, namely local and global energy, in its energy functional, to control movement of the contour toward object boundaries. These energy terms are mainly based on graph partitioning active contour models and Bhattacharyya flow, respectively. Its flow describes dissimilarities, measuring correlative relationships between the region of interest and surroundings. The experimental results obtained from our image collection show that the suggested method yields accurate and good performance, or better than a number of segmentation algorithms, when applied to various natural images.
Indoor Point Cloud Segmentation for Automatic Object Interpretation

The paper presents an algorithm for the automatic segmentation of point clouds from low cost sensors for object interpretation in indoor environments. This algorithm is considering the possible noisy character of the 3D point clouds and is using an iterative RANSAC approach for the segmentation task. For evaluating the robustness, it is applied on two indoor datasets, acquired with the Google Tango tablet and with the NavVis M3 trolley. The realized evaluation reveals the potential of the two systems for delivering data suitable for automatically interpreting indoor structures.
Developing a unified intranet for a metropolitan municipality in South Africa

The cost effectiveness of the utilization of Internet technology opened the door for organizations to use the same technology to share information within the organization (Botha 2004). An intranet (or internal Web) is a network architecture designed to serve the internal information needs of an organization using Web (Internet) concepts and tools (see, for example, Cortese 1996). Turban, Rainer and Potter (2005) indicate that an intranet is a private network that uses Internet software and TCP/IP protocols. Defined technically,
Functional heterotypic interactions between astrocyte and oligodendrocyte connexins

Human genetic diseases and mouse knockouts illustrate that the maintenance of central nervous system myelin requires connexin expression by both astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. Because these cell types express nonoverlapping sets of connexins, the intercellular channels formed between them must be asymmetric with regard to connexin content, defined as heterotypic. Here, we show that oligodendrocyte Cx47 can form heterotypic channels with astrocyte Cx43 or Cx30 but not Cx26, whereas oligodendrocyte Cx32 can functionally interact with astrocyte Cx30 or Cx26 but not Cx43. Thus, as many as four types of intercellular channels could be formed between astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Preliminary – Please do not cite or quote Public Transfers and Spousal Violence

Economic models of the family suggest that transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women may increase the incidence of spousal abuse between partners. This study uses data from a survey in Mexico to examine the impact of the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program on spousal abuse rates and the threat of violence. We find mixed evidence regarding program impacts: although women in beneficiary households are 30 percent less likely to be victims of physical and sexual abuse than women in non-beneficiary households, they are substantially more likely to receive violent threats with no subsequent physical abuse. We present a model of asymmetric information in household bargaining to document how increases in women’s income can lead to an increase in the amount of rents that husbands are willing to extract, and in turn lead to a rise in their use of violent threats with no subsequent physical abuse and a reduction in the actual use of spousal abuse – predictions consistent with the empirical evidence. A previous preliminary version of the paper was circulated as ‘Women’s Income, Female Status, and Spousal Violence: Effects of the Mexican Oportunidades Program” (March 2006). We are grateful to Dwayne Benjamin, Morley Gunderson, Deborah Reed, and Aloysius Siow, whose suggestions greatly improved the paper. We would also like to thank Michael Baker, Gillian Hamilton, Heidi Shierholz, and seminar participants at Toronto and the PAA 2006 Conference for helpful comments, as well as Caridad Araujo, Tania Barham, Marta Rubio, Iliana Yaschine, and the staff at Oportunidades for providing administrative data and their general support throughout. Research support from the Institute of Business and Economics Research at UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto Connaught Fund is gratefully acknowledged. We are responsible for any errors that may remain. * Assistant Professor, Economics Department, University of Toronto. Address: 100 Saint George St., Room 4057, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3G3, Canada. Tel: 416-946-5299; E-mail: gustavo.bobonis@utoronto.ca. † Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Thompson Hall, Amherst, MA 01003, USA; Tel: 413-545-2012; E-mail: mgb@econs.umass. edu. ‡ Professor, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Apartado postal 4-106, Cuernavaca, Morelos, 62431, México. Tel: (52-777)-329-1853. E-mail: rcastro@servidor.unam. mx.
Measurement of Efficiency of Shrimp (penaeus monodon) Farmers in Andhra Pradesh

The definition of technical efficiency by Farrell (1957) led to the development of methods for estimating the relative technical efficiencies of firms. The measurement of firm-specific technical efficiency is based upon deviations of observed output from the best production or efficient production frontier. If a firm’s actual production point lies on the frontier it is perfectly efficient. If it lies below the frontier then it is technically inefficient, with the ratio of the actual to potential production defining the level of efficiency of the individual firm. The present study was taken up during 2007-08 in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Stratified random sampling was adopted to select the respondents. A total of 480 respondents were selected from 16 villages across four mandals of the East Godavari district. The selected mandals are predominantly shrimp farming areas, with optimum salinity and excellent irrigation facilities.
Comparison of Different Confidence Intervals of Intensities for an Open Queueing Network with Feedback

In this paper we propose a consistent and asymptotically normal estimator (CAN) of intensities ρ1 , ρ2 for a queueing network with feedback (in which a job may return to previously visited nodes) with distribution-free inter-arrival and service times. Using this estimator and its estimated variance, some 100(1-α)% asymptotic confidence intervals of intensities are constructed. Also bootstrap approaches such as Standard bootstrap, Bayesian bootstrap, Percentile bootstrap and Bias-corrected and accelerated bootstrap are also applied to develop the confidence intervals of intensities. A comparative analysis is conducted to demonstrate performances of the confidence intervals of intensities for a queueing network with short run data.
Codeword scrambling for multi-stream transmission in MIMO channel

We propose to independently scramble the codewords of the parallel data streams which are transmitted through multiple antennas in the multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channel. The codeword scrambling converts any possibly competing codewords of the interfering streams into invalid random words in the viewpoint of the decoder of the desired stream when the channel coefficient vectors of two or more parallel streams become very close. It also plays a role of effective interference variance reduction when the code rate is low enough to use a repetition rate matching after a baseline channel encoding. Simulation results show that the scrambling can improve the decoding performance especially when the MIMO channel is highly correlated in the transmitter side or the repetition rate is high.
Formulation of a Production Strategy for a Software Product Line

Abstract : Software product lines are of strategic importance to the organizations that adopt them, affecting both an organization's position in an existing market and its ability to react to new and changing markets. An organization's production system (i.e., how it builds its products) is also of strategic importance, directly affecting, for example, that organization's ability to deliver new products quickly (i.e., its time to market). The production strategy for a software product line is the high-level description of how the production system realizes both the core assets and products. The production strategy is derived from the organization's business strategy and is intended to coordinate the actions of the core asset and product developers. The strategy describes how the product line practices should be employed so that the product line organization will achieve its production goals. This technical note describes a technique, which is based on well-known procedures for defining and evaluating a business strategy, for formulating the production strategy of a production system. An example of strategy creation is provided.
Priori-driven dimensions of face-space: experiments incorporating eye-tracking information

Face-space has become established as an effective model for representing the dimensions of variation that occur in collections of human faces. For example, a change of expression from neutral to smiling can be represented by one axis in a face space. Principal components can be used to determine the axes of a face-space, however, standard principal components are based entirely on the data set from which they are computed, and do not express any domain specific information about the application of interest. In this paper, we propose a face-space analysis that combines the variance criterion used in principal components with some prior knowledge about the task-driven experiment. The priors are based on measuring eye movements of participants to frontal 2D faces during separate gender and facial expression categorization tasks. Our findings show that saccades to faces are task-driven, especially from 500 to 1000 milliseconds, and automatic recognition performance does not improve with additional exposure time.
Internalization of prolactin receptor and prolactin in transfected cells does not involve nuclear translocation.

Prolactin (PRL) interacts with a specific, well characterized plasma membrane receptor (PRLR) that is coupled to signal transduction pathways involving Jak2, Fyn, and MAP kinases, and signal transducers and activators of transcription (STAT). Although a few previous studies have indicated nuclear translocation of PRL in IL-2 stimulated T lymphocytes, PRL-dependent Nb2 lymphoma cell lines and 235-1 lactotrophs, the mechanisms of nuclear targeting remain unknown and conflicting results have been reported concerning the putative nuclear translocation of the PRLR. We therefore decided to investigate nuclear translocation of PRLR and PRL in various cell lines transfected with an expression plasmid encoding PRLR, using confocal laser microscopy. We have constructed various cDNAs of the long and short forms of the rat PRLR containing an oligonucleotide encoding a Flag epitope inserted either just before the N-terminal amino acid or in the C-terminal end of the mature receptor (named N-terminal or C-terminal Flag-tagged PRLR). The corresponding receptors function as the PRLR in transfected cells: they are expressed at the plasma membrane and in compartments of the secretory pathway, they bind PRL with normal affinity (Kd= 4x10(-10) M) and have the same capacity to stimulate the transcriptional activity of a milk protein (beta-casein) gene as wild-type PRLR. In addition, the tagged receptors are much more efficiently immunodetected using anti-Flag antibodies, as compared to anti-PRL antibodies (U5 or U6). Immunofluorescence combined with detailed confocal laser microscopy showed that addition of PRL (0 to 12 hours) to COS-7, CHO and NIH-3T3 transfected fibroblasts induces rapid internalization of the receptor (long form), without any translocation to the nucleus. Using PRL-R tagged both in the N-terminal or C-terminal regions of the mature receptor excludes the possibility of a cleaved fragment which could have been subsequently imported into the nucleus. An absence of nuclear translocation of PRLR was also observed in a 293 cell line stably expressing the receptor, and in physiological targets for PRL, i.e. in Nb2 lymphoma cells expressing the Nb2 form of the receptor or in BGME mammary gland epithelial cells upon overexpression of a Flag-tagged PRLR. Similarly, the short form of the PRLR was not detected in nuclei of transfected COS cells upon PRL treatment. Clearly, our results provide evidence that internalization of the plasma membrane PRLR does not lead to nuclear translocation of the receptor, or part of it, in most fibroblasts and epithelial cells at physiological concentrations of PRL. Also, in co-localization experiments, PRL was internalized without nuclear translocation. Activation of STATs transcription factors and MAP kinases, as well as translocation of these proteins to the nucleus following their phosphorylation, probably remains the intracellular mechanism coupling stimulation to nuclear events.
Countercurrent chromatography.

Countercurrent Chromatography (CCC) and Centrifugal Partition Chromatography (CPC) are unique liquid-liquid processes that accommodate crude mixtures, exhibit high selectivity, and rely on the creative formulation of biphasic solvent systems. No adsorption to solid supports generates loss-free sample recovery, and the high volume proportion of stationary phase gives CCC/CPC high loading capacity with enhanced resolution separations. Hosted by: &
Phone-aware neural language identification

Pure acoustic neural models, particularly the LSTM-RNN model, have shown great potential in language identification (LID). However, the phonetic information has been largely overlooked by most of existing neural LID models, although this information has been used in the conventional phonetic LID systems with a great success. We present a phone- aware neural LID architecture, which is a deep LSTM-RNN LID system but accepts output from an RNN-based ASR system. By utilizing the phonetic knowledge, the LID performance can be significantly improved. Interestingly, even if the test language is not involved in the ASR training, the phonetic knowledge still presents a large contribution. Our experiments conducted on four languages within the Babel corpus demonstrated that the phone-aware approach is highly effective.