Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Longitudinal Modeling of Social Media with Hawkes Process Based on Users and Networks

Online social media provide a platform for rapid network propagation of information at an unprecedented scale. In this paper, we study the evolution of information cascades in Twitter using a point process model of user activity. Twitter is rich with heterogenous information on users and network structure. We develop several Hawkes process models considering various properties of Twitter including conversational structure, users' connections and general features of users including the textual information, and show how they are helpful in modeling the social network activity. Evaluation on Twitter data sets shows that incorporating richer properties improves the performance in predicting future activity of users and memes.
Oxidation as a crucial reaction for cholesterol to induce tissue degeneration: CD36 overexpression in human promonocytic cells treated with a biologically relevant oxysterol mixture

Oxidative stress, inflammation and altered cholesterol metabolism and levels are among the pathogenetic mechanisms of cognitive impairment that may accompany aging. Within the research area of hypercholesterolemia and age‐related disease processes, the molecular mechanisms of cholesterol interaction with the inflammatory cells of the macrophage lineage are yet to be elucidated. We thus investigated the effect of both non‐oxidized and oxidized cholesterol on monocytic cell differentiation and foam cell formation, as it occurs within vascular lesions during progression of atherosclerosis. In vitro experiments performed on human U937 promonocytic cells showed that a biologically representative mixture of oxysterols markedly stimulated CD36 expression and synthesis. In contrast, non‐oxidized cholesterol did not exert any effect on CD36 mRNA and protein levels. Furthermore, the oxysterol‐induced up‐regulation of CD36 appeared to be based on the subsequent activation of protein kinase Cδ (PKCδ), extracellular signal‐regulated kinase 1/2 (ERK1/2) and peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptor γ (PPARγ). Cells overexpressing CD36 were indeed able to actively take up oxidized low‐density lipoproteins, and become foam cells. The essential role of ERK pathway and CD36 receptor in oxysterol‐induced foam cell formation was proved by the prevention of the latter event when monocytic cells were incubated in the presence of MEK1/2 selective inhibitor or anti‐CD36 specific antibody. These experimental findings point to cholesterol oxidation as an essential reaction for this sterol to exert cellular stress and tissue damage in age‐related diseases in which inflammation represents a main driving force.
Mediational pathways of meditation and exercise on mental health and perceived stress: A randomized controlled trial

This study investigated the effects of mindfulness and exercise training on indicators of mental health and stress by examining shared mediators of program effects. Community-recruited adults (N = 413) were randomized into one of three conditions: (a) mindfulness-based stress reduction, (b) moderate intensity exercise, or (c) wait-list control. Composite indicator structural equation models estimated direct, indirect, and total effects. Results showed that mindfulness-based self-efficacy fulfilled a prominent role in mediating meditation and exercise program effects. Findings suggest that mindfulness and exercise training share similar mechanisms that can improve global mental health, including adaptive responses to stress.
Barriers to Accessing Services by People with Disabilities in Nigeria: Insights from a Qualitative Study

This article examines the experiences of people with disabilities in Nigeria and specifically the barriers they encounter in accessing various services in the country based on the framework of the social model of disability. Qualitative methods were utilized in the data collection and interpretation. The results indicated that people with disabilities in the country encounter a plethora of barriers in accessing various important services. These obstacles to accessing essential services deprive people with disabilities the opportunity to acquire services that would enhance the development of their potential and leading productive and contributing lives. These barriers to accessing services and the implications of strategies that could ameliorate these adverse conditions are discussed. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2016. v6n2p113
Cardiac magnetic resonance imaging myocardial perfusion reserve index assessment in women with microvascular coronary dysfunction and reference controls.

OBJECTIVE We sought to comparatively assess cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (CMRI) myocardial perfusion reserve index (MPRI) in women with confirmed microvascular coronary dysfunction (MCD) cases and reference control women. BACKGROUND Women with signs or symptoms of myocardial ischemia in the absence of obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD) frequently have MCD which carries an adverse prognosis. Diagnosis involves invasive coronary reactivity testing (CRT). Adenosine CMRI is a non-invasive test that may be useful for the detection of MCD. METHODS Fifty-three women with MCD confirmed by CRT and 12 age- and estrogen-use matched reference controls underwent adenosine CMRI. CMRI was assessed for MPRI, calculated using the ratio of myocardial blood flow at hyperemia/rest for the whole myocardium and separately for the 16 segments as defined by the American Heart Association. Statistical analysis was performed using repeated measures ANOVA models. RESULTS Compared to reference controls, MCD cases had lower MPRI values globally and in subendocardial and subepicardial regions (1.63±0.39 vs. 1.98±0.38, P=0.007, 1.51±0.35 vs. 1.84±0.34, P=0.0045, 1.68±0.38 vs. 2.04±0.41, P=0.005, respectively). A perfusion gradient across the myocardium with lower MPRI in the subendocardium compared to the subepicardium was observed for both groups. CONCLUSIONS Women with MCD have lower MPRI measured by perfusion CMRI compared to reference controls. CMRI may be a useful diagnostic modality for MCD. Prospective validation of a diagnostic threshold for MPRI in patients with MCD is needed.
Online Customer Reviews and Consumer Evaluation: The Role of Review Font

Inspired by the literature on website visual design and feelings-as-information theory, the present research demonstrates that font may affect the impact of online reviews without changing review content. Specifically, two experiments show that the effect of review valence (positive vs. negative) on consumers’ product/service evaluation is stronger when the reviews are written in a difficult-to-read (vs. easy-to-read) font. However, this effect of font diminishes among high-involvement consumers. This research suggests that the processing ease of the reviews, which could be manipulated through the visual elements of online reviews may affects processing depth and thus the impact of the reviews.
The Ratio KL-6 to SLX in Serum for Prediction of the Occurrence of Drug-Induced Interstitial Lung Disease in Lung Cancer Patients with Idiopathic Interstitial Pneumonias Receiving Chemotherapy

We retrospectively evaluated whether the ratio KL-6 to SLX in serum (K/S ratio) before chemotherapy was a predictor for the occurrence of drug-induced interstitial lung disease (D-ILD) in lung cancer patients with idiopathic interstitial pneumonias (IIPs). D-ILD occurred in 8 of 20 IIPs-positive cases and in 14 of 100 IIPs-negative cases (40 vs. 14%, p = .015). In IIPs-positive cases, the high K/S ratio (>20) before first-line chemotherapy had a tendency to increase the risk of D-ILD (p = .085). Serum K/S ratio may be a useful predictor for the occurrence of D-ILD in lung cancer patients with IIPs.
Using 3D Point Clouds Derived from UAV RGB Imagery to Describe Vineyard 3D Macro-Structure

In the context of precision viticulture, remote sensing in the optical domain offers a potential way to map crop structure characteristics, such as vegetation cover fraction, row orientation or leaf area index, that are later used in decision support tools. A method based on the RGB color model imagery acquired with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed to describe the vineyard 3D macro-structure. The dense point cloud is first extracted from the overlapping RGB images acquired over the vineyard using the Structure from Motion algorithm implemented in the Agisoft PhotoScan software. Then, the terrain altitude extracted from the dense point cloud is used to get the 2D distribution of height of the vineyard. By applying a threshold on the height, the rows are separated from the row spacing. Row height, width and spacing are then estimated as well as the vineyard cover fraction and the percentage of missing segments along the rows. Results are compared with ground measurements with root mean square error (RMSE) = 9.8 cm for row height, RMSE = 8.7 cm for row width and RMSE = 7 cm for row spacing. The row width, cover fraction, as well as the percentage of missing row segments, appear to be sensitive to the quality of the dense point cloud. Optimal flight configuration and camera setting are therefore mandatory to access these characteristics with a good accuracy.
A Model-Based Analysis of Spillovers: The Case of Poland and the Euro Area

This paper studies economic and financial spillovers from the euro area to Poland in a two-country semi-structural model. The model incorporates various channels of macrofinancial linkages and cross-border spillovers. We parameterize the model through an extensive calibration process, and provide a wide range of model properties and evaluation exercises. Simulation results suggest a prominent role of foreign demand shocks (euro area and global) in driving Poland's output, inflation and interest rate dynamics, particularly in recent years. Our model also has the capability for medium-term conditional forecasting and policy analysis.
TESTING FOR "MONOPOLY" EQUILIBRIUM*

This paper develops a very general test for "monopoly. " Using standard comparative statics analysis, the authors derive testable restrictions on the firm's reduced-form revenue equation which must be satisfied by any profit-maximizing firm whose choices are not affected by either strategic interactions or the threat of entry. For such an unfettered monopolist, the sum of the factor price elasticities of the reduced-form revenue equation must be nonpositive. The set of interesting alternative hypotheses is not empty. The authors develop simple models of oligopolistic, competitive, and monopolistically-competitive markets for which this test statistic may take on positive values. Copyright 1987 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Testing the Canonical Model of Exchange Rates with Unobservable Fundamentals

In this paper, the authors test the asset market approach or canonical model of exchange rates. They treat exchange rate fundamentals as unobservable. The empirical results do not reject the canonical model and, therefore, the embedded rational expectations assumption, in sharp contrast with previous empirical evidence. The authors also find evidence of feedback from the exchange rate to fundamentals, which is normally omitted in the theoretical literature. Copyright 1997 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.
Draft Genome Sequence of the Arsenic-Resistant Bacterium Brevundimonas denitrificans TAR-002T

ABSTRACT We report the 3.2-Mb draft genome sequence of Brevundimonas denitrificans strain TAR-002T, isolated from deep-sea floor sediment. The draft genome sequence of strain TAR-002T consists of 3,231,216 bp in 44 contigs, with a G+C content of 68.47%, 3,866 potential coding sequences (CDSs), 3 rRNAs, and 45 tRNAs.
What Policy Features Determine Life Insurance Lapse? An Analysis of the German Market

type="main" xml:lang="en"> With the largest data set ever used for this purpose (covering more than 1 million contracts), we analyze the impact of product and policyholder characteristics on lapse in the life insurance market. The data are provided by a German life insurer and cover two periods of market turmoil that we incorporate into our proportional hazards and generalized linear models. The results show that product characteristics such as product type or contract age and policyholder characteristics such as age or gender are important drivers for lapse rates. Our findings improve the understanding of lapse drivers and might be used by insurance managers and regulators for value- and risk-based management.
Lack of association of the angiotensinogen‐6 polymorphism with blood pressure levels in the comprehensive NHLBI Family Blood Pressure Program

Objective To evaluate the association between the angiotensinogen-6 polymorphism (AGT-6) and blood pressure levels. Design Data were analysed from the first 4322 subjects of the NHLBI Family Blood Pressure Program (FBPP), consisting of four networks (GenNet, GENOA, HyperGEN and SAPPHIRe), each conducting a multicentre observational family study to identify and characterize the genetic determinants of hypertension and blood pressure. The four studies use different designs (concordent sibpairs, discordant pairs, sibships, extended pedigrees), target different ethnic groups (Caucasian, African-American, Japanese, Chinese), and have different inclusion/exclusion criteria. However, the protocols and definitions were standardized across networks before data collection to allow maximum poolability. Methods Each network/racial group was analysed separately, using generalized linear models that accounted for the non-independence of family members and/or the confounding of anti-hypertensive medications as needed. The results were also pooled using a pre-planned metaanalysis technique. Results AGT-6 was not significantly associated with blood pressure in any network/racial group. In the meta-analysis, the pooled effect of AGT-6 was small [hazard ratio = 1.10, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.99–1.22, P = 0.0647 for systolic; hazard ratio = 1.04, 95% CI = 0.89–1.21, P = 0.6383 for diastolic]. A post-hoc analysis restricting to subjects meeting JNC VI criteria for Stage I hypertension (blood pressure >140/90 mmHg or medicated) showed a stronger statistically significant relationship for systolic blood pressure (hazard ratio = 1.44, 95% CI = 1.04–2.00, P = 0.0283). Conclusions AGT-6 has minimal to no effect on the inter-individual variation of blood pressure levels, and is at best a ‘minor gene’ for blood pressure in the population as a whole.
Corpus development for Indonesian consumer-health question answering system

Web-based question answering services facilitate users to seek more personalized health-related information. However, the users sometimes have to wait for a while until their questions to be answered. Automatic question answering research can assist the system to generate or retrieve the answer to users. Our work was a pioneering study on consumer-health question answering for Bahasa Indonesia. We built a corpus of 86,731 consumer-health questions, collected from 5 different websites. As part of annotation, we classify the sub-topics for each question, which corresponds to medical specialization. Question sub-topic classification is completed by two complementary approaches: dictionary-based and machine learning-based.
Clustering - What Both Theoreticians and Practitioners Are Doing Wrong

Unsupervised learning is widely recognized as one of the most important challenges facing machine learning nowadays. However, in spite of hundreds of papers on the topic being published every year, current theoretical understanding and practical implementations of such tasks, in particular of clustering, is very rudimentary. This note focuses on clustering. The first challenge I address is model selection---how should a user pick an appropriate clustering tool for a given clustering problem, and how should the parameters of such an algorithmic tool be tuned? In contrast with other common computational tasks, for clustering, different algorithms often yield drastically different outcomes. Therefore, the choice of a clustering algorithm may play a crucial role in the usefulness of an output clustering solution. However, currently there exists no methodical guidance for clustering tool selection for a given clustering task. I argue the severity of this problem and describe some recent proposals aiming to address this crucial lacuna.
State of the Art: Reproducibility in Artificial Intelligence

Background: Research results in artificial intelligence (AI) are criticized for not being reproducible. Objective: To quantify the state of reproducibility of empirical AI research using six reproducibility metrics measuring three different degrees of reproducibility. Hypotheses: 1) AI research is not documented well enough to reproduce the reported results. 2) Documentation practices have improved over time. Method: The literature is reviewed and a set of variables that should be documented to enable reproducibility are grouped into three factors: Experiment, Data and Method. The metrics describe how well the factors have been documented for a paper. A total of 400 research papers from the conference series IJCAI and AAAI have been surveyed using the metrics. Findings: None of the papers document all of the variables. The metrics show that between 20% and 30% of the variables for each factor are documented. One of the metrics show statistically significant increase over time while the others show no change. Interpretation: The reproducibility scores decrease with in- creased documentation requirements. Improvement over time is found. Conclusion: Both hypotheses are supported.
Hepatic fibrosis and immune phenotype vary by HCV viremia in HCV/HIV co-infected subjects

Abstract HCV and HIV independently lead to immune dysregulation. The mechanisms leading to advanced liver disease progression in HCV/HIV coinfected subjects remain unclear. In this cross-sectional study, we assessed the association of HCV viremia, liver fibrosis, and immune response patterns in well-characterized HIV phenotypes: Elite controllers (Elites), HIV controlled (ARTc), and HIV uncontrolled (ARTuc) matched by age and race. Groups were stratified by HCV RNA status. Regulatory T-cell frequencies, T-cell activation (HLADR+CD38+), apoptosis (Caspase-3+), and intracellular cytokines (interferon-&ggr;, IL-2, IL-17) were assessed using multiparametric flow-cytometry. Liver fibrosis was scored by AST to platelet ratio index (APRI). We found liver fibrosis (APRI) was 50% lower in Elites and ARTc compared to ARTuc. Higher liver fibrosis was associated with significantly low CD4+ T cell counts (P < 0.001, coefficient r = −0.463). Immune activation varied by HIV phenotype but was not modified by HCV viremia. HCV viremia was associated with elevated CD8 T-cell Caspase-3 in Elites, ARTuc, and HIV− except ARTc. CD8 T-cell Caspase-3 levels were significantly higher in HCV RNA+ Elites (P = 0.04) and ARTuc (P = 0.001) and HIV− groups (P = 0.02) than ARTc. Importantly, ARTuc HCV RNA+ had significantly higher CD4 T-cell interleukin-17 levels than ARTuc HCV RNA− (P = 0.005). HIV control was associated with lower liver fibrosis in HCV/HIV co-infected women. HCV viremia is associated with an inflammatory CD4 TH-17 phenotype in absence of HIV control and higher frequency of pro-apoptosis CD8 T-cells critical to avert progression of HIV and HCV disease that is attenuated in ART controllers. Elite controllers with HCV viremia are more prone to CD8 T-cell apoptosis than ART controllers, which could have negative consequences over time, highlighting the importance of ART control in HCV/HIV coinfected individuals.
Optimal risk transfer

This article develops a methodology to optimally design a financial issue to hedge non-tradable risk on financial markets, in the general framework of convex risk measures. The modelling involves a minimization of the risk borne by issuer given the constraint imposed by a buyer who enters the transaction if and only if her risk remains below a given threshold. Both agents have also the opportunity to invest all their residual wealth on financial markets but may not have the same access to financial investments.
Norms, Third-Party Sanctions, and Cooperation

In recent years, a large body of literature has explored the relative roles of bilateral reciprocity and centralized authority in enforcing cooperative behavior. These are, of course, the two most prominent institutional alternatives discussed since the time of Hobbes. More recently, scholars such as Axelrod (1986) and Ellickson (1987) have drawn attention to a third alternative: social norms.
Automatic Scoring Method for Descriptive Test Using Recurrent Neural Network

In this paper, we propose an automatic evaluation method for the descriptive type test. The method is based on Recurrent Neural Networks trained on a non-labeled language corpus and manually graded students’ answers. The experimental results show that the proposed method is the second best result among (cid:28)ve conventional methods, including BLEU, RIBES, and several sentence-embedding meth-ods. And, the proposed method gives the best performance among several sentence embedding methods.
Temperature quantification using the proton frequency shift technique: In vitro and in vivo validation in an open 0.5 tesla interventional MR scanner during RF ablation

Open magnetic resonance (MR) scanners allow MR‐guided targeting of tumors, as well as temperature monitoring of radio frequency (RF) ablation. The proton frequency shift (PFS) technique, an accurate and fast imaging method for temperature quantification, was used to synthesize thermal maps after RF ablation in an open 0.5 T MR system under ex vivo and in vivo conditions. Calibration experiments with 1.5% agarose gel yielded a chemical shift factor of 0.011 ± 0.001 ppm/°C (r2 = 0.96). Three gradient echo (GRE) pulse sequences were tested for thermal mapping by comparison with fiberoptic thermometer (Luxtron Model 760) readings. Temperature uncertainty decreased from high to low bandwidths (BW): ±5.9°C at BW = 15.6 kHz, ±1.4°C at BW = 3.9 kHz, and ±0.8°C at BW = 2.5 kHz. In vitro experiments (N = 9) in the paraspinal muscle yielded a chemical shift factor of 0.008 ± 0.001 ppm/°C. Temperature uncertainty was determined as ±2.7°C (BW = 3.9 kHz, TE = 19.3 msec). The same experiments carried out in the paraspinal muscle (N = 9) of a fully anesthetized pig resulted in a temperature uncertainty of ±4.3°C (BW = 3.9 kHz, TE = 19.3 msec), which is higher than it is in vitro conditions (P < 0.15). Quantitative temperature monitoring of RF ablation is feasible in a 0.5 T open‐configured MR scanner under ex vivo and in vivo conditions using the PFS technique. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2001;13:437–444. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.