Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Magic Lite Chlamydia Immunoassay in Urogenital Samples and Urine versus Chlamydial Culture

Magic Lite Chlamydia assay (commercial test kit for the identification of Chlamydia trachomatis) was evaluated on urogenital samples and urine with chlamydial culture as the reference method. The sediment of the transportation buffer of specimens which were Magic Lite positive but culture negative or toxic was investigated for elementary bodies with fluorescein-labelled anti-chlamydial antibodies. The prevalence of chlamydial infection among the 577 men investigated was 13.7% as estimated by culture and direct immunofluorescence and 6.4% among the 173 women. In order to improve the sensitivity a cut-off value below that recommended by the manufacturer was used. The sensitivity of Magic Lite in male urethral specimens was then 60.8% and that in female urethral/cervical specimens 90.9%. The specificity was 99.6% and 100%, respectively. In urine specimens the sensitivity of Magic Lite was 63.3% (men) and 63.6% (women). The specificity was 99.4% and 100%, respectively. The sensitivity of Magic Lite on male urethral specimens was related to the number of inclusion bodies per well in culture and it was higher among men attending with clinical findings of urethritis (69%) than among asymptomatic men sampled as a screening procedure (36%) (P < 0.05). Corresponding differences between the sexes and between those with and without symptoms were not noted for Magic Lite applied on urine samples.
Effect of Ownership Structure on Corporate Performance and Internal Decision-making Mechanism in Mutual Savings Banks

This study aims to focus on mutual savings banks in financial sector and explore different corporate performances and internal decision-making mechanism based on ownership structure. Especially, mutual savings banks have unique characteristics different from general corporations and financial institution. In this paper, we analyze deciding factors for management performance of mutual savings banks as financial corporations and, through this, to elucidate causes of their bankruptcy or ultimate failure. For case study, Hankook Savings Bank and Dongbu Savings Bank were selected as representative listed large saving banks with assets over 1 trillion won. This study also selected comparison group which can support indexes that caused insolvency of savings banks with assets of over 1 trillion won and investigated industry average and average of healthy and unhealthy savings banks. The results of case study and analysis on group cases in this study are as follows; Unhealthy savings banks tend to have higher asset ratio against capital than healthy ones and under the circumstances without risk management (system) and internal control system, moral hazard occurred by major stockholders who tried to take advantage of expanded asset for their own personal interests. In addition, lax laws and regulations on capital and ownership structure and relaxation policy on operation regulations produced vulnerable capital structure and abnormal asset structure.
Numerology and frame structure for 5G radio access

5G radio access technology is envisioned to operate from sub-1 GHz to 100 GHz using a wide range of deployment options and to support diverse services. This paper proposes OFDM numerology and frame structure for 5G radio access. The numerology is proposed keeping in view realistic propagation channel measurements, mobility, effect of phase noise, and implementation complexity. The frame structure is proposed for both FDD and TDD. The proposed frame structure is flexible, scalable, and fulfills low latency requirements.
The evolution of an inflammatory response.

BACKGROUND The past 25 years have witnessed immense progress in our understanding of the systemic, tissue-specific, and cellular consequences of severe injury and infection. Despite such insights, considerable controversy remains regarding appropriate biologic and management interventions to prevent or ameliorate the associated adverse outcomes. METHODS A review of several scientific developments arising from studies initiated at Cornell University Medical College during the tenure of Dr. G. Tom Shires. The implications of those and subsequent studies are discussed. RESULTS An understanding of patient-specific variation and adaptability could direct individualized biologic and management interventions for severe injury and infection. CONCLUSION Despite more detailed appreciation of the molecular mechanisms of danger and pathogen recognition and response biology, we have much to learn about the complexity of severe injury and infection. There is a great need to extend our investigation of these mechanisms to experimental and stress-modified clinical scenarios.
A Language-Modeling Approach to Health Data Interoperability

The need for health providers to share information is a pressing need in our ever more connected world. A patient’s health information should seamlessly ﬂow from labs to hospitals to primary care ofﬁces. To address this need, in this paper we present the Health E-Match, which focuses on the matching health terms in support of semantic interoperability. Health E-Match determines the semantic similarity between data items, realizing, for instance, that “BHGC (UR)” and “BETA-HCG (QUAL)” both refer to the same pregnancy test, known as “Beta human chorionic gonadotropin, urine qualitative. ” Our approach is grounded in probabilistic machine learning, and leverages several sophisticated methods for comparing the similarity between medical data items beyond simple edit distance. We present two large scale, real-world experiments to verify that our approach is both accurate and has the ability to eventually be “universal” in that models trained on one set of data translate to strong performance on data from a completely different provider.
Born global firms’ growth and collaborative entry mode: the role of transnational entrepreneurs

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of transnational entrepreneurs in growing born global firms, with a focus on the growth process facilitated by collaborative entry mode. ,The author chose the solar photovoltaic industry as the empirical setting. This industry is a particularly good context for the study because many firms in this industry sell knowledge-intensive products internationally from their inception. The primary data consist of 32 in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, industry association representatives, research institute scholars, and professional service firms. ,The study highlights the importance of transnational entrepreneurs who develop born global firms to maturity by using their technological knowledge, international connections, and bicultural advantages to navigate and leverage institutional complexity. Collaborative entry mode with distributors enables born global firms’ high growth rapidly, whereas transnational entrepreneurs play a central role in building and expanding international network. Initial public offering in overseas stock exchange accelerates the high growth trajectory of born global firm by signalling its maturity. ,The author took a process perspective by examining the growth and maturity of born global firms by collaborative partnership; the author’s focus on the role of transnational entrepreneurs highlighted entrepreneurs’ sensitivity to institutional complexity along the growth trajectory. ,The author recommends both incumbent and entrepreneurial firms in developed economies collaborate with transnational entrepreneurs in various business areas. Industry firms may be able to cooperate on product and marketing development, and professional service firms can offer services to expand born global firms further, because transnational entrepreneurs follow the global “rules of the game”. ,The author shed important light on the role of transnational entrepreneurs throughout the growth of born global firms via collaborative entry mode. Furthermore, the author develops a multilevel framework for analysing the combined influence of transnational entrepreneur and institutional complexity on the growth of born global firm.
How Consumers Respond to Competing Market Signals: the Effects of Conflicting Quality Information and Consumer Thoughtfulness

EXTENDED ABSTRACT To credibly communicate the quality of their products to consumers in markets where quality is unobservable, marketers often send quality signals. Instead of directly addressing a product's quality, signals provide information external to the product which consumers can use to make quality inferences (Bloom and Reve, 1990). Quality signals that have received attention in the marketing and economics literature include brand name (e.g., Price and Dawar, 2002), price (e.g., Rao and Monroe, 1989), advertising (e.g., Kilhlstrom and Riordan, 1984), retailer reputation (e.g., Purohit and Srivastava 2001), and warranties (e.g., Boulding and Kirmani 1993).
Does the stock market misprices customer satisfaction

In this thesis the pricing of customer satisfaction by the stock market is investigated. This is done by creating a portfolio based on the top 20% best performing companies according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. This portfolio is compared with the performance of S&P 500. In this thesis we find that the strategy realized a higher return in almost every year between 2000 and 2015. This went together with a higher volatility in all of the years. Also the regression, which was used to calculate alpha and beta, showed this pattern. The average Sharpe ratio of the portfolio and the S&P 500 indicated that our strategy is more lucrative because our strategy gives a better reward in terms of return for the risk taken than the S&P 500.
Quantitative analysis of eumelanin and pheomelanin in hair and melanomas.

In this study, a method is provided for analyzing quantitatively the content and the class of melanin pigments in the tissues, e.g., hair and melanoma. The method is simple and rapid because it does not require the isolation of melanins from the tissues. The rationale was that permanganate oxidation of eumelanin yields pyrrole-2,3,5-tricarboxylic acid (PTCA) as its major pyrrolic product, which may serve as a quantitatively significant indicator of eumelanin, while hydriodic acid hydrolysis of pheomelanin yields amino-hydroxyphenylalanine (AHP) as a specific indicator of pheomelanin. The degradation products, PTCA and AHP, were determined by high-performance liquid chromatography. Sepia melanosome-melanin and synthetic 5-S-cysteinyldopa-melanin served as reference standards of eumelanin and pheomelanin, respectively. Our method provided data that corresponded well to the content and class of melanins in normal hair. Based on this control study, it was found that the melanins in the melanosomes of both B16 and Harding-Passey (HP) melanomas were eumelanic and that the melanin content in B16 melanosomes was more than 10 times higher than that in HP melanosomes, though these two melanosomes revealed distinct colors and ultrastructures, i.e., brown-black, eumelanosome-like granules in B16 and reddish- or light-brown, pheomelanosome-like granules in HP.
Anxiety and Vagal Control of Heart Rate

Objective Prospective studies have demonstrated that anxiety predicts sudden cardiac death, but the mechanism underlying this increased risk is unclear. This study examined whether anxiety is associated with reductions in vagal control of heart rate in healthy volunteers. Method Trait anxiety (T-ANX) was measured, using the Spielberger State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), in 93 healthy men and women 25 to 44 years of age. Power spectral analysis was used to measure two indices of vagal control: baroreflex control of heart rate (BRC) and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Results High trait anxiety (T-ANX > 41, N = 23) was associated with significantly reduced vagal control of the heart, compared with low trait anxiety (T-ANX < 31, N = 22), as indicated by a 36% reduction in BRC (p < .001) and an 8% reduction in RSA (p < .05). Furthermore, T-ANX scores were negatively correlated with levels of BRC (r = -.30, p < .005), and levels of RSA (r = -.26, p < .05). Conclusions These findings provide evidence that trait anxiety is associated with reductions in vagal control of the heart. Additional studies are needed to examine whether low vagal control is involved in the increased risk of sudden cardiac death associated with anxiety.
Historical perspective: the low tar lie

There's an old adage which says, “The more things change, the more they stay the same. ” There is no product to which this adage applies more than to cigarettes. Although the public may believe that the major change in terms of cigarette design over the past 40 years has been the reduction of risk posed by low tar filter cigarettes, cigarettes today are just as deadly as they were back in the 1950s, and perhaps even more so.1 Why is there this disparity between consumer belief and harsh reality? When the first scientific studies were published in the early 1950s linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer, the tobacco industry introduced and widely promoted filtered cigarettes. In fact cigarette ads at that time blatantly stated that filtered cigarettes were in fact safe.2 Filters, they claimed, greatly reduced the toxins that made non-filtered cigarettes so harmful. In their effort to convince the public of the safety of filters, the major tobacco companies enlisted Hollywood, famous athletes, the American Medical Association, and other very prominent medical groups in this whole debate.3 Today 98% of all cigarettes that are smoked in this country are filtered. Clearly industry advertising and marketing practices played a major role in the growth of this segment of the market. But the government played an unwitting role as well. When the 1964 Surgeon General's report was released,4 it did not contain any information regarding the relative safety of filtered versus non-filtered cigarettes. But two years later, the US Public Health Service issued the following statement on cigarette smoke constituents: “The preponderance of the scientific evidence strongly suggests that the lower the tar and nicotine content of the cigarette smoke, the less harmful would be the effect. ”5 Soon after, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began testing …
Not All Packets Are Equal, Part 2: The Impact of Network Packet Loss on Video Quality

For pt. 1 see ibid., vol. 13, no. 1, p.70-5 (2009). In this second part of a two-part article, the authors highlight the impact that different durations of IP packet loss have on the quality of experience for IP-based video streaming services. They describe the visual impairments that result from such packet losses and present the results of testing and analysis to compare impairments for different loss durations for both MPEG-2-encoded standard and high-definition services.
Automated Characterization of Mammographic Density for Early Detection of Breast Cancer Risk

--Mammographic density provides significant amount of information about breast cancer risk. Therefore, automated appraisal of mammographic density could help the radiologist to assess the risk of developing breast cancer. This paper presents fully automated breast tissue characterization methodology for mammograms, which consists of three phases: i) preprocessing ii) feature extraction and iii) classification. To remove the high frequency artifact such as labels and wedges, Otsu’s global thresholding method and connected component labeling is employed. This paper incorporates a new straight line method proposed by us in our earlier work to remove the pectoral muscle from the breast area which is our region of interest. Haralick’s texture descriptors and Zernike moment descriptors are extracted from the region of interest. SVM and BPNN classifiers are used to classify the extracted features into one of the three breast parenchyma classes viz., dense, glandular and fatty tissue. The work reported an accuracy of 95.83%.
PLANNING IN REACTIVE ENVIRONMENTS

The diffusion of domotic and ambient intelligence systems have introduced a new vision in which autonomous deliberative agents operate in environments where reactive responses of devices can be cooperatively exploited to fulfill the agent's goals. In this article a model for automated planning in reactive environments, based on numerical planning, is introduced. A planner system, based on mixed integer linear programming techniques, which implements the model, is also presented. The planner is able to reason about the dynamic features of the environment and to produce solution plans, which take into account reactive devices and their causal relations with agent's goals by exploitation and avoidance techniques, to reach a given goal state. The introduction of reactive domains in planning poses some issues concerning reasoning patterns which are briefly depicted. Experiments of planning in reactive domains are also discussed.
Using intramyocardial electrograms combined with other noninvasive methods for monitoring acute rejection following human heart transplantation

Background Acute allograft rejection in heart transplantation remains as one of the major complications. Obligatory graft surveillance is still achieved with the invasive and expensive endomyocardial biopsy (EMB). Our study aimed to study the use of intramyocardial electrograms combined with other noninvasive methods for the monitoring of acute rejection after human heart transplantation. Methods Permanent pacemakers were implanted in 58 patients undergoing heart transplantations. Intramyocardial electrograms (IMEG) were recorded periodically and the results were compared with those from EMBs. The R wave amplitude of the IMEG was used as the index value, the average R wave amplitude at the third week following transplantation was considered as the baseline, and a reduction of >20% compared with the baseline was regarded as a positive result. EMB was performed in cases of positive IMEG results and also at other times. Other noninvasive methods were used to help the diagnosis. Acute rejection (AR) was defined as International Society of Heart‐Lung Transplantation grade IIIA or higher. Results We obtained 1231 IMEG records and 127 EMBs. Of the total 127 EMBs, 53 were positive, in which there were 42 IMEG positive results and 11 negative, while in the rest 74 negative EMBs, there were 9 IMEG positive results and 65 negative. The sensitivity of IMEG for the diagnosis of AR was 79.2%, and the specificity was 87.8%. The positive predictive value was 82.4% and the negative predictive value was 85.5%. Of the total of 1231 IMEG records, 51 were positive and 1180 were negative. Excluding 11 proved by EMB to be false negative, if the other 1169 were considered as no evidence of rejection, through the other noninvasive methods, AR diagnosed by this noninvasive monitoring strategy, the sensitivity was 79.2%, and the specificity was 99.2%. The positive predictive value was 82.4% and the negative predictive value was 99.1%. Conclusions IMEG can be used as a noninvasive method for monitoring AR following heart transplantation. It is a continuous, safe and inexpensive method, and could reduce the need for EMB combined with other noninvasive methods, without reducing the detection of rejection.
Analytical expressions for the ergodic capacities of certain MIMO systems by the Mellin transform

The paper demonstrates the use of Mellin transforms in the analytical evaluation of the mean capacity of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems in various fading environments. Results are derived for the mean capacity for the following systems: a single-input-multiple-output (SIMO) system with Rayleigh fading, an (N, N) MIMO system with Rayleigh fading, an (N, N) MIMO system with a keyhole. A general asymptotic formula is derived that is valid for a wide variety of fading environments.
Piecewise tone reproduction for high dynamic range imaging

To display high dynamic range (HDR) images onto conventional displayable devices that have low dynamic range (LDR) such as monitors and printers, we propose a piecewise tone reproduction operator with chromatic adaptation. The strong point of our operator is to reproduce displayable LDR images while maintaining a perceptual match between the real world and the displayed image. The algorithm for dynamic range reduction relies on piecewise constructs and suitable tone reproduction functions that depend on the estimations of global luminance modification and local luminance adaptation. Combined with dynamic range reduction, the proposed algorithm also applies the chromatic adaptation technique of the color appearance model in order to preserve the chromatic appearance and color consistency across scene and display environments. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves good subjective results while preserving details of the image. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm has a fast, simple and practical structure for implementation.
KEY-FRAME EXTRACTION USING THRESHOLD TECHNIQUE

Triggered by technological innovation, there has been an enormous increase in the utilization of video for many significant applications. Video will be one of the key issues in the upcoming information technology and education. To increase the effectiveness of their content on the web and create new revenue stream, future content owners, publishers and educators will need to deliver video to users in ways that exploit proven economic models for the web and confirm to the demand both qualitative and quantitative of forthcoming internet usage patterns. To extract valid information from video, process video data efficiently, and reduce the transfer stress of network, more and more attention is being paid to the video processing technology. The amount of data in video processing is significantly reduced by using video segmentation and key-frame extraction. So, these two technologies have gradually become focus of research. This paper presents the method of selecting effective key-frames for video browsing where the new strategy is to extract most characteristic frame. The methodology applied here extracts the key frames using a Threshold Technique where the calculated threshold is brought out in comparison with the Difference Histogram of the Images. Experimental results show that the extracted key-frames can summarize the salient features and characteristics of the video maintaining the integrity of the information contained in that video. The method is highly feasible with high efficiency and
When are international managers a cost effective solution? an exploratory study in a sample of spanish mncs

A common claim in the literature of expatriation is the one referring to the high costs of expatriation. In this paper, on the basis of transaction cost literature, we show how limited this approach is. In particular, we 'consider a set of costs that, although ignored in traditional expatriation literature, must be accounted for when an MNC is deciding on whether to recruit expatriates or local managers in its subsidiaries. These costs include selection, training and performance evaluation costs. We also formulate a series of hypotheses around the situations in which the total costs of recruiting expatriates are lower than those generated by local managers. We them test these hypotheses in a sample of 124 SpaniSh MNCs. The results of the study allow us to explain the apparent contradiction that, although businesses have a need to reduce costs, they continue to employ apparently costly practices such as expatriation.