Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Information Contents of Trade and Quote Imbalances , and the Hypothesis of Reverse Liquidity : Evidence from a Fully Automated Exchange

In this paper, we study the information contents of imbalances in trades and quotes emanated from an exchange resembling the one envisioned by Black (1971). We find dollar volume is more informative than number in measuring daily trading and quoting activities. Our measure of quote imbalance permits an investigation on the information asymmetry between market and limit orders. In case illegal insider trading does not occur regularly, we present a hypothesis of reverse liquidity as an alternative interpretation for our empirical findings. It could be that market-order traders charge an implicit liquidity premium for fulfilling the contrarian trading demand of limit-order traders. We suspect proprietary traders are filling the vacuum created by the absence of designated market makers and they provide reverse liquidity through their active trading. ∗Corresponding author. Tel: +65 6822 0364 Fax: +65 6822 0777. Email address: christopherting@smu.edu. sg. I would like to thank K. C. Tsui for helpful discussions and comments. A research grant from the Wharton-SMU Research Center is gratefully acknowledged.
Pathogenesis and clinical consequences of iron overload in chronic hepatitis C -- impact of host and viral factors related to iron metabolism

Chronic hepatitis C virus infection is a leading cause of progressive liver fibrosis, liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Iron overload is frequently observed in cases of chronic hepatitis C and has been suggested as a negative prognostic factor for this disease. Although the mechanisms leading to iron accumulation are not fully explained yet, both host and viral factors seem to contribute towards the development of this pathology. Better understanding of the interplay between hepatitis C virus replication and expression of iron regulatory molecules may elucidate new and interesting targets for the effective treatment of chronic hepatitis C.
Radioprotective Effects of Granulocyte-Colony Stimulating Factor in the Jejunal Mucosa of BALB / c Mice

INTRODUCTION Radiation therapy, intended mainly for sterilization of cancer cells, is usually accompanied by adverse effects on the normal tissues surrounding the tumor mass (1, 2). They may lead to difficulties in continuing or completing the radiation therapy and ineffective treatment results. Especially in rectal cancer or uterine cervical cancer where the radiation fields include abdomen and pelvis, it is inevitable to radiation-induced gastrointestinal mucositis. There have been many efforts to reduce the radiation morbidity using physical methods or radiobiological methods such as radiation response modifier (2). Many of the traditional remedies for radiation injury can be discarded as they have been shown to be ineffective or even harmful (3). Granulocyte-colony stimulating factor (G-CSF) or granulocyte-macrophage colony stimulating factor (GM-CSF) is a hematopoietic growth factor and a cytokine that has been widely used to treat neutropenia caused by chemotherapy or radiotherapy. The efficacy of recombinant human hematopoietic growth factors in improving oral mucositis after chemotherapy or radiotherapy has been demonstrated in some clinical studies recently (3, 4, 5). But, the mechanisms of the beneficial effects and the most effective route for administration of G-CSF or GM-CSF on oral mucosal ulceration are unclear. This study was designated to determine whether G-CSF could modify the radiation injury of the jejunal mucosa in irradiated BALB/c mice.
Echocardiographic Diagnosis of Mitral Regurgitation due to Ruptured Chordae Tendineae

The echocardiographic findings from six patients with ruptured chordae tendineae from the posterial mitral valve leaflet and three with ruptured chordae from the anterior leaflet are reported; in all cases the diagnosis was later proven by open-heart surgery. The constellation of echocardiographic findings suggesting ruptured chordae tendineae to the posterior leaflet are: (1) The appearance of echoes within the left atrial chamber, representing prolapse of the posterior leaflet and flail chordae tendineae. This finding, although not consistently observed, is the most pathog-nomonic echocardiographic sign. (2) Increased amplitude of systolic excursion of the left atrial wall, in most cases associated with normal or only mildly increased left atrial diameter. (3) Recognition of thin, low-intensity (noncalcified) mitral valve leaflets. (4) The anterior leaflet may also manifest increased amplitude of motion, and may not coapt normally with the posterior leaflet in systole. (5) Increased amplitude of motion of the interventricular septum with an increased estimated stroke volume and normal-to-increased ejection fraction.The findings suggestive of ruptured chordae tendineae to the anterior leaflet are: (1) A markedly increased amplitude of motion of the anterior mitral valve leaflet is evident. This leaflet appears to approach or touch the left ventricular septum in systole and the left atrial wall in diastole. (2) All of the findings of ruptured chordae to the posterior leaflet are also seen here, except for the observation of the posterior leaflet within the left atrial chamber.This constellation of findings has not been seen in normal indiviuals, nor is it present in patients with mitral insufficiency proven to be due to other factors, such as papillary muscle dysfunction or rheumatic heart disease. Hence, this noninvasive technic enables one to diagnose accurately the presence of mitral regurgitation due to ruptured chordae tendineae.
Statistical real-time communication over Ethernet for manufacturing automation systems

In order to realize real time communication over Ethernet or fast Ethernet, one must be able to bound the medium access time within an acceptable limit. The multiple access nature of an Ethernet makes it impossible to guarantee a deterministic medium access time to individual stations. However one can bound the medium access time statistically by limiting the packet arrival rate at the medium access control (MAC) layer. While focusing on automated manufacturing systems as the main application, the paper considers the connection admission control (CAC) problem for statistically bounding the medium access time of Ethernet. Specifically, a packet is guaranteed to have a medium access time smaller than a predefined bound with a certain probability if the instantaneous packet arrival rate is kept below a certain threshold. Through an analysis, we first derived such a threshold. In order to keep the packet arrival rate under the given threshold, we employ a traffic smoother which: (i) is located between the transport layer and the Ethernet datalink layer and (ii) smooths packet streams between the two layers. The implementation of this traffic smoother requires only a minimal change in the OS kernel without any modification to the current standard of Ethernet MAC protocol or TCP or UDP/IP stack. In order to solve the CAC problem, we derived the probability of transmitting a packet successfully upon each trial by modeling the MAC protocol, 1-persistent CSMA/CD, and the collision resolution protocol, Binary Exponential Backoff, of Ethernet. We implemented a traffic smoother on the Linux OS, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach in providing real time communication over Ethernet.
Authorship Attribution with Author-aware Topic Models

Authorship attribution deals with identifying the authors of anonymous texts. Building on our earlier finding that the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model can be used to improve authorship attribution accuracy, we show that employing a previously-suggested Author-Topic (AT) model outperforms LDA when applied to scenarios with many authors. In addition, we define a model that combines LDA and AT by representing authors and documents over two disjoint topic sets, and show that our model outperforms LDA, AT and support vector machines on datasets with many authors.
Nerve growth factor has a modulatory role on human primary fibroblast cultures derived from vernal keratoconjunctivitis-affected conjunctiva

Purpose To evaluate the role of nerve growth factor (NGF) in remodeling processes of vernal keratoconjunctivitis (VKC). VKC is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the conjunctiva and is characterized by marked tissue remodeling. NGF, a pleiotrophic factor with documented profibrogenic activities, is produced by inflammatory and structural cells populating the VKC conjunctiva and is increased in the serum and tears of VKC patients. Methods Primary cultures of VKC-derived fibroblasts (VKC-FBs) were exposed to increasing NGF concentrations (1-500 ng/ml) to evaluate and compare the expression of α-smooth muscle actin (αSMA, a defining myofibroblast marker), collagens (types I and IV), and metalloproteinases and tissue inhibitors (MMP9/TIMP1, MMP2/TIMP2) at the biochemical as well as molecular levels. Results Endogenous NGF was increased in the VKC-FB supernatant, as compared to healthy-FB supernatant. VKC-FBs expressed αSMA and increased types I and IV collagens. VKC-FBs, and in particular all αSMA positive cells, expressed both trkANGFR and p75NTR, while healthy-FBs only expressed trkANGFR. Exogenous NGF did not change αSMA expression, while αSMA expression was enhanced by specific neutralization of p75NTR. NGF (10 ng/ml) exposure significantly decreased type I collagen expression, without affecting type IV collagen, and increased MMP9mRNA and protein. Conclusions The autocrine modulation of differentiation and response of VKC-FBs to NGF exposure with downregulation of type I collagen and upregulation of MMP9 expression supports a relevant role for NGF in tissue remodeling of VKC.
A Discriminative Approach for Dependency Based Statistical Machine Translation

In this paper, we propose a dependency based statistical system that uses discriminative techniques to train its parameters. We conducted experiments on an EnglishHindi parallel corpora. The use of syntax (dependency tree) allows us to address the large word-reorderings between English and Hindi. And, discriminative training allows us to use rich feature sets, including linguistic features that are useful in the machine translation task. We present results of the experimental implementation of the system in this paper.
A framework for evaluating fusion operators based on the theory of generalized quantifiers

Fuzzy linguistic quantifiers have gained importance as operators for information combination and the fusion of gradual evaluations. They are particularly appealing because of their ease-of-use: people are familiar with these operators in the same way as in everyday language. However, work on mathematical foundations and linguistic justification of fuzzy linguistic quantifiers is scarce. In the paper, we propose a framework for evaluating approaches to fuzzy quantification which relates these to the logic-linguistic theory of generalized quantifiers. By reformulating these approaches as fuzzification mechanisms, we can investigate properties of the fuzzification mappings which express important aspects of the meaning of natural language quantifiers.
Index system and evaluation model of e-commerce customer satisfaction

According to Internet Customer Satisfaction Comprehensive Model (Lee) and BizRate Network Marketing Method of U.S.A, we design an E-commerce Customer Satisfaction Index System. Then we utilize the approach of Customer Satisfaction questionnaire and Principal Component Analysis, provided E-commerce Customer Satisfaction Evaluation Model. Finally, we analyze the survey results, then proposed appropriate countermeasures to improve customer satisfaction.
Training a BN-based user model for dialogue simulation with missing data

The design of a Spoken Dialogue System (SDS) is a long, iterative and costly process. Especially, it requires test phases on actual users either for assessment of performance or optimization. The number of test phases should be minimized, yet without degrading the final performance of the system. For these reasons, there has been an increasing interest for dialogue simulation during the last decade. Dialogue simulation requires simulating the behavior of users and therefore requires user modeling. User simulation is often done by statistical systems that have to be tuned or trained on data. Yet data are generally incomplete with regard to the necessary information for simulating the user decision making process. For example, the internal knowledge the user builds along the conversation about the information exchanged while interacting is difficult to annotate. In this contribution, we propose the use of a previously developed user simulation system based on Bayesian Networks (BN) and the training of this model using algorithms dealing with missing data. Experiments show that this training method increases the simulation performance in terms of similarity with real dialogues.
Analytical Solution for MHD Flow of a Magnetic Fluid within a Thick Porous Annulus

The steady-state problem of a magnetic fluid filling a porous annulus between two cylindrical walls under the influence of a nonuniform radially outward magnetic field has been investigated. The cylindrical walls are either electrically perfectly insulated or electrically perfectly conducting. The permeability of the porous annulus increases with its radial location. The governing partial differential equations were derived carefully and closed form solutions for the profiles of the velocity component and the induced magnetic component were obtained. The effect of the strength of the externally applied magnetic field, the permeability of the porous annulus, and the conductivity of the cylindrical walls were examined through the angular velocity components, as well as the induced magnetic field.
Roles of kinesin and kinesin-like proteins in sea urchin embryonic cell division: evaluation using antibody microinjection

Previous studies suggest that kinesin heavy chain (KHC) is associated with ER-derived membranes that accumulate in the mitotic apparatus in cells of early sea urchin embryos (Wright, B. D., J. H. Henson, K. P. Wedaman, P. J. Willy, J. N. Morand, and J. M. Scholey. 1991. J. Cell Biol. 113:817-833). Here, we report that the microinjection of KHC- specific antibodies into these cells has no effect on mitosis or ER membrane organization, even though one such antibody, SUK4, blocks kinesin-driven motility in vitro and in mammalian cells. Microinjected SUK4 was localized to early mitotic figures, suggesting that it is able to access kinesin in spindles. In contrast to KHC-specific antibodies, two antibodies that react with kinesin-like proteins (KLPs), namely CHO1 and HD, disrupted mitosis and prevented subsequent cell division. CHO1 is thought to exert this effect by blocking the activity of a 110- kD KLP. The relevant target of HD, which was raised against the KHC motor domain, is unknown; HD may disrupt mitosis by interfering with an essential spindle KLP but not with KHC itself, as preabsorption of HD with KHC did not alter its ability to block mitosis. These data indicate that some KLPs have essential mitotic functions in early sea urchin embryos but KHC itself does not.
Intrinsic Mode Entropy for Nonlinear Discriminant Analysis

Several methods of measuring entropy of time series have been developed and applied on physiological signals in order to distinguish data sets according to their underlying nonlinear dynamics. These methods are not well adapted for studying the time series in different scales, in the presence of dominant local trends and low-frequency components. In this letter, intrinsic mode entropy (IMEn) is proposed as an entropy measure over multiple oscillation levels. Robustness to local trends is ensured with this new measure, enabling an efficient characterization of the underlying nonlinear dynamics of the time series considered. IMEn is obtained by computing the Sample Entropy (SampEn) of the cumulative sums of the intrinsic mode functions extracted by the empirical mode decomposition method. An example of an application of IMEn is then presented, with the method able to successfully discriminate between two groups of subjects (elderly versus control) for signals of postural stability
Some Algorithmic Improvments for the Containment Problem of Conjunctive Queries with Negation

Query containment is a fundamental problem of databases. Given two queries q 1 and q 2 , it asks whether the set of answers to q 1 is included in the set of answers to q 2 for any database. In this paper, we investigate this problem for conjunctive queries with negated subgoals. We use graph homomorphism as the core notion, which leads us to extend the results presented in [Ull97] and [WL03]. First, we exhibit sufﬁcient (but not necessary) conditions for query containment based on special subgraphs of q 2 , which generalize that proposed in [WL03]. As a corollary, we obtain a case where the time complexity of the problem decreases. From a practical viewpoint, these properties can be exploited in algorithms, as shown in the paper. Second, we propose an algorithm based on the exploration of a space of graphs, which improves existing algorithms.
Investigating Interaural Frequency-Place Mismatches via Bimodal Vowel Integration

For patients having residual hearing in one ear and a cochlear implant (CI) in the opposite ear, interaural place-pitch mismatches might be partly responsible for the large variability in individual benefit. Behavioral pitch-matching between the two ears has been suggested as a way to individualize the fitting of the frequency-to-electrode map but is rather tedious and unreliable. Here, an alternative method using two-formant vowels was developed and tested. The interaural spectral shift was inferred by comparing vowel spaces, measured by presenting the first formant (F1) to the nonimplanted ear and the second (F2) on either side. The method was first evaluated with eight normal-hearing listeners and vocoder simulations, before being tested with 11 CI users. Average vowel distributions across subjects showed a similar pattern when presenting F2 on either side, suggesting acclimatization to the frequency map. However, individual vowel spaces with F2 presented to the implant did not allow a reliable estimation of the interaural mismatch. These results suggest that interaural frequency-place mismatches can be derived from such vowel spaces. However, the method remains limited by difficulties in bimodal fusion of the two formants.
Genome-wide RNAi screen identifies the Parkinson disease GWAS risk locus SREBF1 as a regulator of mitophagy

Significance This study presents the first results, to our knowledge, of a whole-genome RNAi screen to identify factors that promote Parkin-mediated mitophagy, which have been validated for conservation across species. Top hits comprise several components of the sterol regulatory element binding transcription factor (SREBF) lipogenesis pathway, and we show that provision of exogenous lipids can promote the mitophagy pathway. Because SREBF1 has been identified as a risk locus for sporadic Parkinson disease (PD) through genome-wide association studies, the identification of SREBF1 in our screen provides evidence for mechanistic insight into the pathogenesis of sporadic PD. Thus, our functional studies provide the first insight, to our knowledge, into why the master regulator for lipogenesis, SREBF1, may contribute to sporadic PD and further underscore the impact of dysfunctional mitophagy on pathogenesis. Genetic analysis of Parkinson disease (PD) has identified several genes whose mutation causes inherited parkinsonism, as well as risk loci for sporadic PD. PTEN-induced kinase 1 (PINK1) and parkin, linked to autosomal recessive PD, act in a common genetic pathway regulating the autophagic degradation of mitochondria, termed mitophagy. We undertook a genome-wide RNAi screen as an unbiased approach to identify genes regulating the PINK1/Parkin pathway. We identified several genes that have a conserved function in promoting mitochondrial translocation of Parkin and subsequent mitophagy, most notably sterol regulatory element binding transcription factor 1 (SREBF1), F-box and WD40 domain protein 7 (FBXW7), and other components of the lipogenesis pathway. The relevance of mechanisms of autosomal recessive parkinsonism to sporadic PD has long been debated. However, with the recent identification of SREBF1 as a risk locus for sporadic PD, our findings suggest a common mechanistic link between autosomal recessive and sporadic PD, and underscore the importance of mitochondrial homeostasis.
A Comparison of Psychoanalytic Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety (Panic/Agoraphobia) and Personality Disorders (APD Study): Presentation of the RCT Study Design.

OBJECTIVES Anxiety disorders, most notably panic disorders and agoraphobia, are common mental disorders, and there is a high comorbidity with personality disorders. Randomized controlled trails addressing this highly relevant group of patients are missing. DESIGN The multicenter Anxiety and Personality Disorders (APD) study investigates 200 patients with panic disorder and/or agoraphobia with comorbid personality disorder in a randomized control-group comparison of psychoanalytic therapy (PT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), including 100 patients in each group. Each patient will be examined over a period of six years, regardless of the duration of the individual treatment. The main issues that are addressed in this study are the comparison of the efficacy of PT and CBT in this special patient population, the comparison of the sustainability of the effects of PT and CBT, the comparison of the long-term cost-benefit-ratios of PT and CBT as well as the investigation of prescriptive patient characteristics for individualized treatment recommendations (differential indication). DISCUSSION The APD study compares efficacy, sustainability, and cost-benefit-ratios of CBT and PT for anxiety plus personality disorders in a randomized controlled trail. The study design meets the requirements for an efficacy study for PT, which were recently defined. TRIAL REGISTRATION Current Controlled Trials ISRCTN12449681.
A Space–Time Permutation Scan Statistic for Disease Outbreak Detection

Background The ability to detect disease outbreaks early is important in order to minimize morbidity and mortality through timely implementation of disease prevention and control measures. Many national, state, and local health departments are launching disease surveillance systems with daily analyses of hospital emergency department visits, ambulance dispatch calls, or pharmacy sales for which population-at-risk information is unavailable or irrelevant. Methods and Findings We propose a prospective space–time permutation scan statistic for the early detection of disease outbreaks that uses only case numbers, with no need for population-at-risk data. It makes minimal assumptions about the time, geographical location, or size of the outbreak, and it adjusts for natural purely spatial and purely temporal variation. The new method was evaluated using daily analyses of hospital emergency department visits in New York City. Four of the five strongest signals were likely local precursors to citywide outbreaks due to rotavirus, norovirus, and influenza. The number of false signals was at most modest. Conclusion If such results hold up over longer study times and in other locations, the space–time permutation scan statistic will be an important tool for local and national health departments that are setting up early disease detection surveillance systems.