Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of Tobacco Control Policies on Information Seeking for Smoking Cessation in the Netherlands: A Google Trends Study

Background The impact of tobacco control policies on measures of smoking cessation behaviour has often been studied, yet there is little information on their precise magnitude and duration. This study aims to measure the magnitude and timing of the impact of Dutch tobacco control policies on the rate of searching for information on smoking cessation, using Google Trends search query data. Methods An interrupted time series analysis was used to examine the effect of two types of policies (smoke-free legislation and reimbursement of smoking cessation support (SCS)) on Google searches for ‘quit smoking’. Google Trends data were seasonally adjusted and analysed using autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) modelling. Multiple effect periods were modelled as dummy variables and analysed simultaneously to examine the magnitude and duration of the effect of each intervention. The same analysis was repeated with Belgian search query data as a control group, since Belgium is the country most comparable to the Netherlands in terms of geography, language, history and culture. Results A significant increase in relative search volume (RSV) was found from one to four weeks (21–41%) after the introduction of the smoking ban in restaurants and bars in the Netherlands in 2008. The introduction of SCS reimbursement in 2011 was associated with a significant increase of RSV (16–22%) in the Netherlands after 3 to 52 weeks. The reintroduction of SCS in 2013 was associated with a significant increase of RSV (9–21%) in the Netherlands from 3 to 32 weeks after the intervention. No effects were found in the Belgian control group for the smoking ban and the reintroduction of SCS in 2013, but there was a significant increase in RSV shortly before and after the introduction of SCS in 2011. Conclusions These findings suggest that these tobacco control policies have short-term or medium-term effects on the rate of searching for information on smoking cessation, and therefore potentially on smoking cessation rates.
A heterogenous automatic feedback semi-supervised method for image reranking

Image reranking, which aims at enhancing the quality of keyword-based image search with the help of image features, recently has become attractive in image search community. A major challenging in this task is that image's visual features do not always well reflect image's semantic meaning. Thus, reranking methods only depending on visual features cannot guarantee to obtain good results. In addition, it is well known that the visual features of an image have strong/weak correlations with its surrounding text. Thus, it is expected that a model considering both visual features and its surrounding text can perform better than those only considering visual features. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose the HAFSRerank--Heterogenous Automatic Feedback Semi-supervised Reranking method which makes use of both visual and textual features simultaneously during reranking. Specifically, in HAFSRerank, a multigraph is firstly constructed in which each node representing an image includes visual and textual features, and the parallel edges between them are weighted by intra-modal similarity and inter-modal similarity. A heterogenous complete graph is further derived from the multigraph. Then, an automatic feedback graph-based semi-supervised learning method is proposed to propagate the reranking scores on the complete graph, which can make use of the inter-modal similarity to update the weights of heterogenous graph automatically. Finally, the result of the semi-supervised learning is used to rerank the images. The experimental results show that HAFSRerank is superior or highly competitive to some state-of-the-art graph-based reranking methods. Moreover, the proposed reranking algorithm can be well interpreted by Bayesian theory, and does not require complex search models for special queries and any additional input from users.
Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800–1914

There was a time when the economic confrontation between East and West was perceived as a confrontation between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. ‘East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,’—thus wrote J. H. Boeke, quoting Rudyard Kipling with warm approval. The notion has since been undermined by deeper explorations into the history of the Chinese and Indian merchant bankers, and the Jews of the Islamic world. Over large parts of Java, with which Boeke was most familiar, there was indeed a sharp contrast between the local communal economy and the sophisticated capitalism of the Dutch colonists. It appeared an inevitable process of history that the Dutch corporations should subjugate the petty Javanese communities of princes, peasants and pedlars. It was also taken for granted that the phenomenon was general and that European gesellschaft did not confront and conquer such petty gemeinschaften in Java alone. But when the individual studies of the Chinese, Indian and Islamic—Jewish long-distance trade and credit networks are seen in over-all perspective, the impression that emerges is one of confrontation, at the higher level, between two gesellschaften: one of European origin, the other Eastern. Nor does it appear to be the sort of outright collision that simply resulted in the latter being broken up and relegated to a corner. The idea nevertheless persists that the ‘bazaar economy’ of the East was a debased, fragmented and marginal sector absorbed and peripheralized within the capitalist world economy of the West.
Jogos Olímpicos Rio 2016: vencedores e perdedores

This paper seeks to question the process of preparation of the Olympic Games in 2016. For that was done a literature review on the subject and their legacies as well as a document analysis of sports institutions, the Olympic Delivery Authority and the Federal Government about the mega event. In this sense , it was found that the preparation of the 2016 Games is prioritizing the actions of market interest, with measures establishing a state of emergency , which does not respect the constitutional laws, are linked to human rights, the environment, public property etc. The beneficiary groups are those who financed the Rio campaign headquarters of mega event and/ or are directly involved with members of all three government levels , as well as proprietary sports entities of the commodity Olympics.
The Discipline of Love

This article draws on a small-scale qualitative study to explore the relationship between some of the more implicit disciplinary dimensions of schooling and a group of boys' investments in heterosexual romance. It argues that romance provided the boys with a cultural repertoire—that is, a narrative resource or set of discursive practices—through which they negotiated and made imaginative sense of the “little cultural world” of their college. In particular, the article suggests that romance served to police and discipline relations of class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in the pupils' culture while providing for the boys a mode of subjective orientation to key disciplinary practices of schooling. As such, romance may be seen as a resource through which the boys “worked themselves into” the dispositions of a middle-class or professional habitus.
Co-operative scheduling for balancing throughput gains and fairness in cell-edge enhancement schemes for wireless networks

Multi-point reception techniques for enhancing cell-edge throughput are currently under standardization in cellular wireless standards as Single Frequency Dual Cell (SFDC) [1] in 3GPP and as Single Carrier Multi Link(SCML) [2] in 3GPP2. Unlike soft-handover operation, User Equipment(UEs) at cell-edge (handover zone) can independently request data from adjacent cells in multi point operation. Although the cell-edge UEs are benefited, there is a trade-off with fairness towards the in-cell UEs that get served only by a single serving cell, and the overall cell throughput and this paper proposes a joint scheduling algorithm to address this trade-off. To support practical implementation of such a scheme in current multi-vendor wireless networks, the cells participating in multi-point operation need to share throughput feedback via standards based mechanisms. Numerical results through computer simulation based on system parameters conforming to 3GPP2 evaluation methodology is presented. The results show that the proposed scheme can provide higher throughput for cell-edge users while maintaining the fairness towards other users in the system.
Transglutaminase overexpression sensitizes neuronal cell lines to apoptosis by increasing mitochondrial membrane potential and cellular oxidative stress

‘Tissue’ transglutaminase (tTG) selectively accumulates in cells undergoing apoptosis both in vivo and in vitro. Considering the central role played by mitochondria in apoptosis, we investigated the relationships existing amongst tTG expression, apoptosis and mitochondrial function. To this aim we studied the mechanisms of apoptosis in a neuronal cell line (SK‐N‐BE (2)) in which the tTG‐expression was driven by a constitutive promoter. Furthermore, a tet‐off inducible promoter was also used in 3T3 fibroblastic cells used as control. Both cell lines, when expressing tTG, appeared ‘sensitized’ to apoptosis. Strikingly, we found major differences in the morphological features of mitochondria among cell lines in the absence of apoptotic stimuli. In addition, these ultrastructural characteristics were associated with specific functional features: (i) constitutively hyperpolarized mitochondria and (ii) increased reactive oxygen intermediates production. Importantly, after mitochondrial‐mediated apoptosis by stauro‐ sporine, a rapid loss of mitochondrial membrane potential was found in tTG cells only. Taken together, these results seem to suggest that, via hyperpolarization, tTG might act as a ‘sensitizer’ towards apoptotic stimuli specifically targeted to mitochondria. These results could also be of pathogenetic relevance for those diseases that are characterized by increased tTG and apoptotic rate together with impaired mitochondrial function, e.g. in some neurodegenerative disease.
SPG20 Protein Spartin Associates with Cardiolipin via Its Plant-Related Senescence Domain and Regulates Mitochondrial Ca2+ Homeostasis

Hereditary spastic paraplegias (HSPs) are a group of neurological disorders characterized clinically by spasticity of lower limbs and pathologically by degeneration of the corticospinal tract. Troyer syndrome is an autosomal recessive HSP caused by a frameshift mutation in the spartin (SPG20) gene. Previously, we established that this mutation results in a lack of expression of the truncated mutant spartin protein. Spartin is involved in many cellular processes and associates with several intracellular organelles, including mitochondria. Spartin contains a conserved plant-related senescence domain at its C-terminus. However, neither the function of this domain nor the roles of spartin in mitochondrial physiology are currently known. In this study, we determined that the plant-related senescence domain of spartin interacts with cardiolipin but not with two other major mitochondrial phospholipids, phosphatidylcholine and phosphatidylethanolamine. We also found that knockdown of spartin by small interfering RNA in a human neuroblastoma cell line resulted in depolarization of the mitochondrial membrane. In addition, depletion of spartin resulted in a significant decrease in both mitochondrial calcium uptake and mitochondrial membrane potential in cells treated with thapsigargin. Our results suggest that impairment of mitochondrial calcium uptake might contribute to the neurodegeneration of long corticospinal axons and the pathophysiology of Troyer syndrome.
Garaph: Efficient GPU-accelerated Graph Processing on a Single Machine with Balanced Replication

Recent advances in storage (e.g., DDR4, SSD, NVM) and accelerators (e.g., GPU, Xeon-Phi, FPGA) provide the opportunity to efficiently process large-scale graphs on a single machine. In this paper, we present Garaph, a GPU-accelerated graph processing system on a single machine with secondary storage as memory extension. Garaph is novel in three ways. First, Garaph proposes a vertex replication degree customization scheme that maximizes the GPU utilization given vertices' degrees and space constraints. Second, Garaph adopts a balanced edge-based partition ensuring work balance over CPU threads, and also a hybrid of notify-pull and pull computation models optimized for fast graph processing on the CPU. Third, Garaph uses a dynamic workload assignment scheme which takes into account both characteristics of processing elements and graph algorithms. Our evaluation with six widely used graph applications on seven real-world graphs shows that Garaph significantly outperforms existing state-of-art CPU-based and GPU-based graph processing systems, getting up to 5.36× speedup over the fastest among them.
CAUSATIVES IN GERMAN

In this paper I argue for a unified account of causative constructions in German. The approach rests on assumptions for case assignment and subcategorization which will be independently motivated by an analysis of passive constructions. It will be shown that the difference between standard causatives and what I call causative passives should be analyzed as a special case of optional subcategorization: causative lassen optionally subcategorizes for an external argument of the embedded verb, the non-realization of which leads to a causative passive. The adoption of a (synthetic) passive bare infinitive, as advocated for in the literature, can thus be dispensed with. Instead, causative passive can be shown to function like a combination of causative and passive, thereby creating a "passivelike" structural context.
Essays on Financial Econometrics with Applications to Commodity , Equity , and Foreign Exchange Markets

In the first chapter, I estimate dynamic factors from the term structure of credit spreads and the term structure of equity option implied volatilities, and I provide a comprehensive characterization of the dynamic relationships among those credit spread factors and equity volatility factors. I find strong evidence that the volatility factors, especially the volatility level factor, Granger cause credit spread levels, confirming the theoretical predictions of Merton (1974) in a significantly richer and more nuanced environment than previously achieved. Simultaneously, I also find evidence of reverse Granger causality from credit spreads to equity volatility, operating through the slope factors, consistent with the market microstructure literature such as Fleming and Remolona (1999a, 1999b), which finds that price discovery often happens first in bond markets. Hence my results extend and unify both the corporate bond pricing and market microstructure literatures, deepening our understanding of stock and bond market interaction and suggesting profitable trading strategies. In the second chapter, which is a joint work with Frank X. Diebold, we study the dynamics of the U.S. Treasury yield term structure by applying the Nelson-Siegel models introduced in Diebold and Li (2006) and its arbitrage-free version developed by Christensen, Diebold, and Rudebusch (2007). We analyze in-sample by testing the risk-neutral restrictions, which establish the absence from arbitrage, on the NelsonSiegel factors estimated under the physical measure. We thus compare the term structure modeling between the risk-neutral measure and the physical measure. Specifically, we show that the risk-neutral restrictions on the factor dynamics are well-satisfied, and those factors have the following properties: 1) the level factor is a unit-root process and does not affect the other two factors; 2) the slope and curvature factors are meanreverting processes that revert at the same rate; 3) the curvature factor forecasts the slope factor, but not conversely. Moreover, we find that utilizing these restrictions can improve out-of-sample forecast performance. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Economics First Advisor Francis X. Diebold Second Advisor David K. Musto Third Advisor Aureo de Paula This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn. edu/edissertations/209
Flexible and efficient memory object metadata

Compiler-based tools can protect software from attack and find bugs within programs. To support programs written in type-unsafe languages such as C, such tools need to add code into a program that must, at run-time, take a pointer into a memory object and locate metadata for that memory object. Current methods of locating metadata are either flexible (supporting metadata of varying sizes) at the expense of speed and scalability or are fast (e.g., by using shadow tables) at the cost of flexibility (metadata is small and must always be the same size). This paper presents a new method of attaching metadata to memory objects, named Padding Area MetaData (PAMD), that is both flexible and efficient. Metadata can be any size, and different memory objects can have different sized metadata. While flexible, the algorithm for finding the metadata given a pointer into the memory object takes constant time. Our method extends Baggy Bounds with Accurate Checking (BBAC) which attaches constant-sized metadata to memory objects for performing precise dynamic bounds checks. Our design supports variable-sized metadata, and our implementation supports larger programs. We evaluated the performance and scalability of PAMD using dynamic bounds checking as an exemplar of our method. Our results show that our method adds at most 33% overhead to an identical dynamic bounds checking tool that trades precision for performance by using a simple shadow table. Our results also show that our method, while having the same flexibility as splay trees, performs significantly faster and scales better as a program allocates more memory.
Characterization of a Goα Mutant That Binds Xanthine Nucleotides*

Several GTP binding proteins, including EF-Tu, Ypt1, rab-5, and FtsY, and adenylosuccinate synthetase have been reported to bind xanthine nucleotides when the conserved aspartate residue in the NKXD motif was changed to asparagine. However, the corresponding single Goα mutant protein (D273N) did not bind either xanthine nucleotides or guanine nucleotides. Interestingly, the introduction of a second mutation to generate the Goα subunit D273N/Q205L switched nucleotide binding specificity to xanthine nucleotide. The double mutant protein GoαD273N/Q205L (GoαX) bound xanthine triphosphate, but not guanine triphosphate. Recombinant GoαX (GoαD273N/Q205L) formed heterotrimers with βγ complexes only in the presence of xanthine diphosphate (XDP), and the binding to βγ was inhibited by xanthine triphosphate (XTP). Furthermore, as a result of binding to XTP, the GoαX protein underwent a conformational change similar to that of the activated wild-type Goα. In transfected COS-7 cells, we demonstrate that the interaction between GoαX and βγ occurred only when cell membranes were permeabilized to allow the uptake of xanthine diphosphate. This is the first example of a switch in nucleotide binding specificity from guanine to xanthine nucleotides in a heterotrimeric G protein α subunit.
Analysis of the in vitro nanoparticle–cell interactions via a smoothing-splines mixed-effects model

A mixed-effects statistical model has been developed to understand the nanoparticle (NP)–cell interactions and predict the rate of cellular uptake of NPs. NP–cell interactions are crucial for targeted drug delivery systems, cell-level diagnosis, and cancer treatment. The cellular uptake of NPs depends on the size, charge, chemical structure, and concentration of NPs, and the incubation time. The vast number of combinations of these variable values disallows a comprehensive experimental study of NP–cell interactions. A mathematical model can, however, generalize the findings from a limited number of carefully designed experiments and can be used for the simulation of NP uptake rates, to design, plan, and compare alternative treatment options. We propose a mathematical model based on the data obtained from in vitro interactions of NP–healthy cells, through experiments conducted at the Nanomedicine and Advanced Technologies Research Center in Turkey. The proposed model predicts the cellular uptake rate of silica, polymethyl methacrylate, and polylactic acid NPs, given the incubation time, size, charge and concentration of NPs. This study implements the mixed-model methodology in the field of nanomedicine for the first time, and is the first mathematical model that predicts the rate of cellular uptake of NPs based on sound statistical principles. Our model provides a cost-effective tool for researchers developing targeted drug delivery systems.
Generating correlated random variates based on an analogy between correlation and force

An approach for generating dependent random variates with specified marginal distributions and measure of correlation is developed based upon an analogy between correlation and force. We first examine the mathematical transformation implied by this analogy and attempt to construct a general algorithm for generating variates that have the desired properties. We then examine the limitations of this approach, noting some potentially surprising distributional consequences associated with linear combinations of random variables. We conclude with the development of an algorithm for generating correlated Uniform (0,1) random variates with (approximately) a specified product-moment correlation.
Consistency in Adult Functioning: The Influence of Social Stress

ABSTRACT Guided by three models of adult development, this paper both describes and predicts change in several dimensions of personal functioning, based on a study of 216 men and women who in 1969 were high school seniors, newlyweds, middle-aged parents, and pre-retirees. They were re-interviewed two, five, seven and eleven years later. From the descriptive phase of analysis a number of changes were found, especially among measures of specific emotional experiences, medical visits, and positive life events. The results also indicated that general statements about stability and change can be misleading. In the predictive phase, hierarchical set multiple regression statistics demonstrated that two of the more commonly studied dependent variables, symptomatology and happiness, follow different pathways. Stressful life events proved to be strong predictors of both dependent variables for both men and women.
Introducing virtuality to enhance game-related physical artifacts

Various smart artifacts that embed computers and sensors have been developed. Some of these artifacts include extra hardware components to enhance their functionalities, but the components are always real, not virtual. Ubiquitous computing technologies for introducing virtuality offer the possibility of adding virtual components to physical artifacts, but this possibility has not been sufficiently exploited in previous research. In this paper, we present the Augmented Trading Card Game (Augmented TCG) as a case study for enhancing physical artifacts by integrating virtuality. Augmented TCG monitors the opponent’s movement using MS Kinect and maps them onto a virtual character representing the opponent rather than directly displaying the real opponent’s actions. An image of the opponent’s card is also projected onto the table in front of the player. Thus, the player feels as if he/she is playing face-to-face with the opponent. Moreover virtuality allows more information to be displayed during game play. We conducted several experiments to examine how players feel while playing a game,, and we present Augmented TCG experiences as a case study in integrating virtuality into physical artifacts.