Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Onset of clinical immunity to Plasmodium falciparum among Javanese migrants to Indonesian Papua

Abstract Onset of clinical immunity to Plasmodium falciparum occurred among Javanese migrants to Indonesian Papua. Surveillance of the 243 migrants investigated began on the day of their arrival in Indonesian Papua and continued for 33 months. Asexual parasitaemia without fever constituted objective evidence of clinical immunity. Compared with first infection, the odds ratio (OR) for not having fever at the fourth infection within 24 months was 3.2 [95% confidence interval (CI)=1.03-10.2; P=0.02]. The corresponding OR with fewer infections within 24 months was not distinguishable from 1.0. The level of the fourth parasitaemia within 24 months (N=58) was classified as 'high' or 'low' in relation to the median count at first infection (840 parasites/μl; N=187). Fourth parasitaemias that were low—but not those that were high (OR=1.8; CI=0.6-5.4; P=0.35)—were associated with dramatic protection from fever (OR=31; CI=3.5-1348; P=0.0001). Among the adult subjects, the risk of fever with low parasitaemia was significantly higher at the first infection than at the fourth (OR=12.6; CI=1.7-530; P=0.005), indicating the development of clinical immunity. A similar but less marked pattern appeared among the children investigated (OR=6.5; CI=0.8-285; P=0.06).
I-vector speaker verification based on phonetic information under transmission channel effects

Past studies have shown evidence of important speaker-specific content in the higher frequencies of the spectrum, which are filtered out by narrowband channels. Besides, wideband transmissions, which are gaining ground over narrowband communications, offer an extended range of frequencies which account not only for better speech quality and intelligibility, but also for an improved speaker recognition performance. In this work, different phoneme classes (fricatives, nasals, and vowels) were removed from speech of different bandwidths, and a series of i-vector based speaker verification experiments were conducted. Our results show that the performance enhancement with clean wideband speech with respect to clean narrowband speech is principally due to the presence of unvoiced fricative consonants. The effects of codec schemes of different bandwidths on the aforementioned speech are discussed.
GMP-grade preparation of biomimetic scaffolds with osteo-differentiated autologous mesenchymal stromal cells for the treatment of alveolar bone resorption in periodontal disease.

BACKGROUND Periodontal disease is a degenerative illness that leads to resorption of the alveolar bone. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) represent a novel tool for the production of biologic constructs for the treatment of degenerative bone diseases. The preparation of MSC differentiated into osteogenic lineage for clinical use requires the fulfillment of strict good manufacturing practice (GMP) procedures. METHODS MSC were isolated from BM samples and then cultured under GMP conditions. MSC were characterized phenotypically and for their differentiative potential. Cells were seeded onto collagen scaffolds (Gingistat) and induced to differentiate into osteogenic lineages using clinical grade drugs compared with standard osteogenic supplements. Alizarin Red S stain was used to test the deposition of the mineral matrix. Standard microbiologic analysis was performed to verify the product sterility. RESULTS The resulting MSC were negative for CD33, CD34 and HLA-DR but showed high expression of CD90, CD105 and HLA-ABC (average expressions of 94.3%, 75.8% and 94.2%, respectively). Chondrogenic, osteogenic and adipogenic differentiation potential was demonstrated. The MSC retained their ability to differentiate into osteogenic lineage when seeded onto collagen scaffolds after exposure to a clinical grade medium. Cell numbers and cell viability were adequate for clinical use, and microbiologic assays demonstrated the absence of any contamination. DISCUSSION In the specific context of a degenerative bone disease with limited involvement of skeletal tissue, the combined use of MSC, exposed to an osteogenic clinical grade medium, and biomimetic biodegradable scaffolds offers the possibility of producing adequate numbers of biologic tissue-engineered cell-based constructs for use in clinical trials.
Human Resources for the Non-HR Manager

Contents: Preface. Part I: Human Resources for the Non-HR Manager. What's It All About? Understanding Equal Employment Opportunity Law. Part II: Organizational Entry. The Recruiting Process. Hiring New Employees. Interviewing Job Applicants. Part III: Measuring and Evaluating Employee Performance. Conducting Performance Appraisals. Designing Reward Systems. Helping Employees Manage Their Careers. Part IV: Organizational Discipline and Exit. Disciplining Employees. Ending the Employment Relationship. Part V: Day-to-Day Concerns in Human Resources Management. Controlling Sexual Harassment in the Workplace. Managing Age in the Workplace. Managing Employees With Disabilities.
Building Effective Goal-Oriented Dialogue Agents

Recent progress has seen an explosion in dialog systems, including voice-activated bots, text-based chatbots, and email-based bots for scheduling meetings. However real life interaction with these so-called intelligent agents consistently fall short of expectations. Consequently, this project deploys neural-based bots and rule-based bots across a wide variety of tasks in order to analyze where the behavior between the systems differ. We find that even without excessive handcrafted logic, rules-based methods can manage to perform on par with neural-based methods. Based on these results, we pinpoint strategic areas of improvement for neural-based goal-oriented dialog agents.
Price Determination in Emerging Equity Markets

The stock market capitalization of emerging market economies increased from $171 billion in 1986 to $1.9 trillion in 1995 (Gay, 2008). Over the next ten years it grew to $5 trillion in 2005 (Yartey, 2008). A transition towards deregulation of the economy and privatization of state-owned enterprises are considered as main characteristics and drivers of the stock market development in emerging markets over this period. The demographic, social, political and economic features of these emerging economies present tremendous growth potential. Given the immense potential and significance that emerging economies have and their rising role in world economy, it must be understood that they present unique features than their counterparts i.e. developed economies. The equity markets in particular are of greater significance as they have pivotal role in stimulating savings and investments and reducing the cost of capital needed by firms to achieve growth and realize their potential. Subsequently it is argued that asset pricing models (e.g. CAPM & the APT) better suit the developed economies as the assumptions they entail make them more compatible with developed markets than stock markets of emerging economies. The proposed study will conduct research to compare the arbitrage price theory (APT) based macroeconomic multi-factor pricing model(s) against the market risk based capital asset pricing model (CAPM) and its downside risk variants for the emerging equity markets as well as developed markets for comparison purpose.
Value Reporting: Conceptual Framework and Practical Application in the German Dax100

The idea of shareholder-value based management (VBM) has become widely accepted among German corporations, resulting in an increased need to provide value-relevant information to the market. This paper presents a general framework of Value Reporting, which is derived from basic valuation concepts, to give guidance to the contents and structure of the presenta-tion of value-relevant information. A value-driver model is derived, which links valuation components and information necessary for their derivation. This framework is then applied to the current disclosure practice of the German DAX100 companies. The study shows great differences in the quality of information. Overall only about 25% of the desirable information was disclosed.
Different therapeutic strategies for burning mouth syndrome: preliminary data.

BACKGROUND To compare different therapeutic supportive approaches in patients with burning mouth syndrome. A prospective study was carried out for this purpose. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study involved 56 patients with burning mouth syndrome. They were randomly assigned to treatment with capsaicin, alpha-lipoic acid or lysozyme-lactoperoxidase (test drugs) or boric acid (control group). Symptoms were scored after 60 days treatment and 60 days after drug discontinuation. RESULTS At the end of the treatment period, there was a significant reduction in the symptom scores of all of the patients who received the test drugs (P<0.01), and at the end of the follow-up period in the test groups as a whole (P<0.01); the reduction was not significant when considering each test group separately after the treatment period. All of the treatments were more effective than boric acid and there was no significant difference in the symptom scores of the control group at either of the study time-points. CONCLUSIONS Our results demonstrate the similar effectiveness of capsaicin and alpha-lipoic acid in controlling the symptoms of burning mouth syndrome. Lysozyme-lactoperoxidase may be effective in the supportive care of BMS patients with xerostomia. The transitory effect observed after discontinuing drug administration justifies the use of prolonged therapy in chronically affected patients.
Declining output volatility in Germany: impulses, propagation, and the role of monetary policy

The decline in output volatility in Germany is analysed. A lower level of variance in an autoregressive model of output growth can be either due to a change in the structure of the economy (a change in the propagation mechanism) or a reduced error term variance (reduced impulses). In Germany the decline output volatility is due to a decline in the persistence of the growth process. This is in contrast to the US results, where a break in the variance seems to dominate the decline in persistence. A change in the conduct of monetary policy (the establishment of another monetary policy regime) could be part of an explanation for the change in propagation. Stochastic simulations with a New Keynesian DSGE model support the hypothesis.
Centre on Regulation and Competition

This paper is concerned with analysing of regional disparities in China during the 90's and the main causes behind the increased regional disparities. It has identified regional openness, along with the nature of property right, as a critical influencing factor to the regional disparities, while found that the technological capabilities have complex association with economic growth. In particular, the empirical evidence has shown that non-firm R & D activities are highly concentrated in the major urban cities in China to such an extent that these resources appear to be negatively associated with income level when the major cities are excluded out of the analysis. Moreover, the coastal provinces have a very low level of non-firm R & D activities despite their high level of regional openness. However, firm R & D activities are relatively high. This reflects the significant difference in terms of development pattern between inland and coastal provinces. These findings have profound policy implications in the nature and potential economic reform in China. INTRODUCTION There have been a large number of studies examining the convergence hypothesis on both international and intra-national scales. How could the low per capita income countries can catch up with the higher per capita income countries is a prominent theme in the recent macroeconomic literature (Rey & Montouri, 1999). No evidence has shown convergence across most countries as a whole, but convergence does hold among groups with certain characteristics in common and among the regions within a country (Zhang et al., 2001). For the convergence studies on intra-nation scale, there have been many studies that focus on the US experience and show that income convergence in the US has been very strong (Calino & Mills, 1993, 1996a, 1996b; Rey & Montouri, 1999). The parallel to inter-national convergence studies is the disparity studies on intra-national scales for developing economies. The regional disparities has become a dominant issue most concerned with Chinese government since 1990s because this is the most disturbing factor affecting contemporary China in the sense of social stability (Zhao & Tong, 2000). There are two streams of studies on regional disparities in China. One stream has mainly focused on the measurement of regional disparities (Zhang et al, 2001; Fujita & Hu, 2001;
PERSAINGAN INDUSTRI RITEL DI INDONESIA DENGAN MODEL ”LIMA KEKUATAN PESAING M. PORTER”

The most disruptive competition industry in Indonesian business is retail industry, having significant role in value chain management of product distribution from producers to consumers. To asess retail industry competition in Indonesia writer use the five force model introduced by Michael Porter. This model is the implementation of S-C-P (Structure-Conduct-Performance) paradigm in industries asessment. This articles concluded that retail industry in Indonesia is attractive and long- lasting industry
A Technique for Analyzing the Spatial Organization of Microtubular Arms and Bridges (MAPs) a

Projections from the walls of microtubules (MTs), present as side arms in isolated MTs and as cross bridges extending between MTs or between MTs and other organelles, are seen in electron micrographs from a variety of organisms. These projections appear to be the morphological correlates of a group of high molecular weight polypeptides collectively referred to as microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs), which includes MAP-I, MAP-2, and tau. Difficulties in identifying arms and bridges in micrographs, angulation of the projections, uncertainties in magnification, and the absence of long straight stretches of MTs for analysis have hindered past attempts to determine the exact arrangement of arms and bridges. Thus, there is presently only limited information on their arrangement. In this respect, McIntosh’ has suggested that M T arms and bridges are attached to strictly periodic sites on the MT wall that are related to its substructure. Conversely, Amos’ has suggested that the MAP-2 projections associated with brain microtubules are arranged according to a symmetrical helical superlattice that repeats after 12 tubulin dimers. Neither of the above models has been adequately tested on data from electron micrographs. We have therefore developed a technique to quantitatively and objectively analyze the arrangement of M T arms and bridges. We use a microdensitometer to scan the area next to a longitudinally sectioned M T (FIGURE l a and b). Standard digital signal enhancement procedures are then applied to the densitometric data, resulting in a filtered binary data sequence (FIGURE lc). The filtered data are then analyzed in each of two ways. (1) Autocorrelograms are formed by correlating the array of a whole record with a template array consisting of the first half of the record. Correlogram peaks from many scans are then pooled to produce a peak frequency histogram. (2) The filtered densitometric data are crosscorrelated with various computer-generated model templates, and a best-fit match is obtained (FIGURE Id). The significance of the match, as compared with random matches to the same model, is then determined for a group of scans. We have analyzed the MAP-2 projections associated with brain MTs (micrographs kindly supplied by H. Kim’) using the two techniques described above. We have found that the match of MAP-2 to a 12-dimer superlattice is highly significant and more than one order of magnitude better than any other model tested (see TABLE 1). We have also found that some longitudinal spacings between MAP-2 projections are compatible
HPSO in Geometric Constraint Solving

We transform the geometric constraint solving into the numerical optimization solving. A new hybrid algorithm is proposed which combines the merits of global search of the Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (PSO) and self organized capacity of ant algorithm. This algorithm uses PSO to search the area where the best solution may exist in the whole space, and then performs fine searching. When the algorithm approaches to the best solution and the search speed is too slow, we can change to the effective search strategy-ant algorithm in order to enhance the ability of the PSO on fine searching. It makes the algorithm get rid off the prematurity convergence situation. We apply this algorithm into the geometric constraint solving. The experiment shows that the hybrid algorithm has the effective convergence property and it can find the global best solution.
A Statistical-Heuristic Feature Selection Criterion for Decision Tree Induction

The authors present a statistical-heuristic feature selection criterion for constructing multibranching decision trees in noisy real-world domains. Real world problems often have multivalued features. To these problems, multibranching decision trees provide a more efficient and more comprehensible solution that binary decision trees. The authors propose a statistical-heuristic criterion, the symmetrical tau and then discuss its consistency with a Bayesian classifier and its built-in statistical test. The combination of a measure of proportional-reduction-in-error and cost-of-complexity heuristic enables the symmetrical tau to be a powerful criterion with many merits, including robustness to noise, fairness to multivalued features, and ability to handle a Boolean combination of logical features, and middle-cut preference. The tau criterion also provides a natural basis for prepruning and dynamic error estimation. Illustrative examples are also presented. >
Speaker adaptation for support vector machine-based word prominence detection

In this paper we propose a new speaker adaptation method to improve the detection of prominent words in speech. Prosodic cues are difﬁcult to extract, due to the different features different speakers are using to express, for example prominence. To overcome the problem of variation from the pool of speakers used during training and those encountered during deployment, in speech recognition speaker adaptation techniques like fM-LLR turned out to be very useful. In the case of prominence detection, our results have shown that a discriminative classiﬁer like SVM works better than GMM. Existing adaptation methods like fMLLR are developed for GMM-HMM based classiﬁers under the assumption that the data has a Gaussian distribution. This does not hold for our data, using the fMLLR with the SVM leads not to an improvement for our problem area. Therefore we propose a new adaptation method, which adapts the data to the RBF kernel of the SVM, subsequently regular-izing it with the fMLLR. We investigate how this method can be used to adapt a new speaker to a speaker independent model for word prominence detection. We show that the error rate improves from the speaker adaptation from 16.4% to 14.4%.
Trading firms and the internationalization of the mould cluster of Marinha Grande

The role played by trading firms in the internationalization process of mold makers located within the Marinha Grande cluster (Portugal) is a controversial issue. Besides finding foreign customers some traders provide a full service to customers, from product development to the injection and assembly of plastic parts. These traders add value to mold making and build long-term relations with customers, contributing to clusters’ internationalization. Other traders are accused of opportunistic behavior both as regards their relations with local producers and relations with foreign customers, harming the cluster’s international reputation. This paper aims to contribute to this on-going debate by presenting a study of three mold traders and the relations they have established with foreign customers and with local mold makers.
Silicon-substrate microelectrode arrays for parallel recording of neural activity in peripheral and cranial nerves

A new process for the fabrication of regeneration microelectrode arrays for peripheral and cranial nerve applications is presented. This type of array is implanted between the severed ends of nerves, the axons of which regenerate through via holes in the silicon and are thereafter held fixed with respect to the microelectrodes. The process described is designed for compatibility with industry-standard CMOS or BiCMOS processes (it does not involve high-temperature process steps nor heavily-doped etch-stop layers), and provides a thin membrane for the via holes, surrounded by a thick silicon supporting rim. Many basic questions remain regarding the optimum via hole and microelectrode geometries in terms of both biological and electrical performance of the implants, and therefore passive versions were fabricated as tools for addressing these issues in on-going work. Versions of the devices were implanted in the rat peroneal nerve and in the frog auditory nerve. In both cases, regeneration was verified histologically and it was observed that the regenerated nerves had reorganized into microfascicles containing both myelinated and unmyelinated axons and corresponding to the grid pattern of the via holes. These microelectrode arrays were shown to allow the recording of action potential signals in both the peripheral and cranial nerve settings, from several microelectrodes in parallel. <<ETX>>
Access Control in Healthcare: the methodology from legislation to practice

Translating legislation and regulations into access control systems in healthcare is, in practice, not a straightforward task. Excessive regulation can create barriers to appropriate patient treatment. The main objective of this paper is to present a new methodology that can define, from legislation to practice, an access control policy as well as a RBAC model, in order to comprise generic legislation and regulation issues together with the access control needs from the ends users of a healthcare information system. The methodology includes the use of document analysis as well as grounded theory and mixed methods research. This methodology can be easily applied within a healthcare practice or any other domain with similar requirements. It helps to bridge the gap between legislation and end users' needs, while integrating information security into the healthcare processes in a more meaningful way.
A Comparison of Contrast Metrics for Contrast-based Phase Calibration of Digital Beamforming Remote Sensing Systems

A contrast-based phase calibration algorithm for digital-beamforming radars using three contrast metrics is pre- sented. The performance of the algorithm is studied using a combination of simulated and real radar data. We find that the entropy metric yields the smallest calibration vector, but that the M3 metric appears more robust in low SNR conditions.
G1 phase‐dependent nucleolar accumulation of human histone H1x

Background information: H1 histones are a protein family comprising several subtypes. Although specific functions of the individual subtypes could not be determined so far, differential roles are indicated by varied nuclear distributions as well as differential expression patterns of the H1 subtypes. Although the group of replication‐dependent H1 subtypes is synthesized during S phase, the replacement H1 subtype, H1°, is also expressed in a replication‐independent manner in non‐proliferating cells. Recently we showed, by protein biochemical analysis, that the ubiquitously expressed subtype H1x is enriched in the micrococcal nuclease‐resistant part of chromatin and that, although it shares common features with H1°, its expression is differentially regulated, since, in contrast to H1°, growth arrest or induction of differentiation did not induce an accumulation of H1x.