Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The British Association of Dermatologists audit of atopic eczema management in secondary care. Phase 3: audit of service outcome

Service outcome was examined by a preconsultation (part 1) and a 6‐week postconsultation (part 2) patient questionnaire in 29 hospital dermatology departments randomly selected from an original sample of 187 centres across the U.K. The outcome measures were: quality of life as measured by the Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI) and Children’s DLQI (CDLQI), improvement in sleep loss, improvement in worse aspect of skin disease and return to work or school. Three hundred and fifty‐two questionnaires (115 adults, 237 children) were completed for part 1, and 235 (67%) replied to part 2. The mean DLQI at initial consultation was 12·5, dropping to 9·7 at 6 weeks (P = 0·001). The mean CDLQI at initial consultation was 10·5, dropping to 8·7 at 6 weeks (P < 0·001). Forty‐nine per cent of adults and 44% of children had a > 25% relative improvement in score, which did not meet the 60% working standard. Forty‐four per cent of adults and 47% of children had an improvement in sleep loss at 6 weeks, falling short of the 70% working standard. Sixty‐one per cent of adults and 59% of children had an improvement in the worst aspect of their skin condition at 6 weeks, falling short of the 80% working standard. Of the 20 adults and eight children off work/school during part 1, 70% of adults and 87·5% of children had returned to work/school by 6 weeks. This met the 80% working standard for children but not for adults. On a national scale, only one of the eight working standards for service outcome was met, although most of the working standards were met by at least one of the 11 National Health Service administrative areas. This study presents the first national data on the outcomes of a representative sample of atopic eczema patients seen in secondary care. Small sample sizes, instruments which may be insensitive to change, as well as local factors such as case‐mix, baseline severity and staff to patient ratios need to be taken into account when interpreting these results. Nevertheless, the results of this baseline audit suggest that the outcome of patients with atopic eczema following secondary care consultation may not be as good as some doctors believe. This suggests that an improvement in practice, a re‐evaluation of the working standards, or both, is needed and should be examined in future audit cycles.
C3G promotes a selective release of angiogenic factors from activated mouse platelets to regulate angiogenesis and tumor metastasis

Previous observations indicated that C3G (RAPGEF1) promotes α-granule release, evidenced by the increase in P-selectin exposure on the platelet surface following its activation. The goal of the present study is to further characterize the potential function of C3G as a modulator of the platelet releasate and its implication in the regulation of angiogenesis. Proteomic analysis revealed a decreased secretion of anti-angiogenic factors from activated transgenic C3G and C3G∆Cat platelets. Accordingly, the secretome from both transgenic platelets had an overall pro-angiogenic effect as evidenced by an in vitro capillary-tube formation assay with HUVECs (human umbilical vein endothelial cells) and by two in vivo models of heterotopic tumor growth. In addition, transgenic C3G expression in platelets greatly increased mouse melanoma cells metastasis. Moreover, immunofluorescence microscopy showed that the pro-angiogenic factors VEGF and bFGF were partially retained into α-granules in thrombin- and ADP-activated mouse platelets from both, C3G and C3GΔCat transgenic mice. The observed interaction between C3G and Vesicle-associated membrane protein (Vamp)-7 could explain these results. Concomitantly, increased platelet spreading in both transgenic platelets upon thrombin activation supports this novel function of C3G in α-granule exocytosis. Collectively, our data point out to the co-existence of Rap1GEF-dependent and independent mechanisms mediating C3G effects on platelet secretion, which regulates pathological angiogenesis in tumors and other contexts. The results herein support an important role for platelet C3G in angiogenesis and metastasis.
Farm and off-farm work decisions: the role of human capital.

W ITH modern economic growth, we observe people reallocating resources in response to changes in economic conditions. How accurately they perceive and efficiently they respond to these changes is attributed to allocative ability (Schultz, 1975). This ability is not restricted to managers of firms. People who supply labor services for hire or who are selfemployed also reallocate their time in response to changes in the value of the work they do. With long-term U.S. economic growth, one major adjustment has been a reallocation of labor between farm and nonfarm labor markets. After 1948, long-term economic forces created prospects of higher incomes in the nonfarm sector. A large proportion of both white and black families quit farming and took nonfarm jobs, causing a massive net exodus of people from farms. ' Other farm families have continued to work their farms but have also taken off-farm jobs. Nationally, the percentage of farm operators reporting off-farm work rose from 39% in 1950 to 54% in 1969. Operators working 100 days or more per year off their farms increased from 23% to 40% during the same period (U.S. Department of Commerce, 1973, p. 178). The objective of this paper is to present some econometric evidence of the effect of investments in education and information (agricultural extension) on the off-farm labor supply of farmers.2 The data are county averages per farm for Iowa, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. Important findings are that raising the education level of farmers and increasing the agricultural extension input increase the off-farm labor supply of farmers. This implies that part of the return to education in agriculture arises from its effect on the reallocation of farmers' labor services between farm and nonfarm labor markets. In section I, a labor supply model is developed for household members who face options of having a wage job and a self-employed job. The labor supply decisions are treated as part of a set of joint decisions made by multiple-person farm households on inputs for household consumption and for farm production.3 Section II presents a discussion of the data, the empirical model, and the results from fitting the off-farm labor supply functions. Section III contains further implications, and section IV contains the conclusions.
Identified in the Rat Homology with Susceptibility Loci Previously Collagen-Induced Arthritis in Mice: Striking Identification of Genes Controlling

The susceptibility to collagen-induced arthritis in the highly susceptible DBA/1 mouse has earlier been shown to be partly controlled by the MHC class II gene A q . To identify susceptibility loci outside of MHC, we have made crosses between DBA/1 and the less susceptible B10.Q strain, both expressing the MHC class II gene A q . Analysis of 224 F 2 intercross mice with 170 micro-satellite markers in a genome-wide scan suggested 4 quantitative trait loci controlling arthritis susceptibility located on chromosomes 6, 7, 8, and 10. The locus on chromosome 6 (Cia6), which was associated with arthritis onset, yielded a logarithm of odds score of 4.7 in the F 2 intercross experiment and was reproduced in serial backcross experiments. Surprisingly, the DBA/1 allele had a recessive effect leading to a delay in arthritis onset. The suggestive loci on chromosomes 7 and 10 were associated with arthritis severity rather than onset, and another suggestive locus on chromosome 8 was most closely associated with arthritis incidence. The loci on chromosomes 7, 8, and 10 all appeared to contain disease-promoting alleles derived from the DBA/1 strain. Interestingly, most of the identiﬁed loci were situated in chromosomal regions that are homologous to regions in the rat genome containing susceptibility genes for arthritis; the mouse Cia6 locus is homologous with the rat Cia3, Pia5, Pia2, and Aia3 ; the locus on chromosome 7 ( Cia7 ) is homologous with the rat Cia2 ; and the locus on chromosome 10 ( Cia8 ) is homologous with the rat Cia4 . The Journal of Immunology, 1999, 163: 2916–2921. use of x 2 statistics, assigning animals to the affected and unaffected groups and comparing the genotypes of affected and unaffected animals. Log likelihood of linkage was calculated with MAP- MAKER/QTL by using the semiquantitative disease severity trait as well as the semiquantitative disease onset trait (29, 31, 32). As signiﬁcance and suggestive linkage threshold values, we have followed the guidelines suggested by Lander and Kruglyak (33).
Perceptual grouping by entrainment in coupled kuramoto oscillator networks

In this article we present a network composed of coupled Kuramoto oscillators, which is able to solve a broad spectrum of perceptual grouping tasks. Based on attracting and repelling interactions between these oscillators, the network dynamics forms various phase-synchronized clusters of oscillators corresponding to individual groups of similar input features. The degree of similarity between features is determined by a set of underlying receptive fields, which are learned directly from the feature domain. After illustrating the theoretical principles of the network, the approach is evaluated in an image segmentation task. Furthermore, the influence of a varying degree of sparse couplings is evaluated.
The Leisure Bias in Cost-Benefit Analyses of Employment and Training Programs

Although increases in earnings that result from Employment and Training (E&T) programs typically come at the cost of losses of leisure to participants, this is almost never taken into account in cost-benefit analyses of E&T programs. This paper develops a method for adjusting for this bias and illustrates how the method can be used to reassess findings from earlier E&T cost-benefit analyses. Results in the paper suggest that the bias from ignoring lost leisure is likely to be sizable unless the E&T program that is subject to cost-benefit analysis increases earnings mainly by raising wage rates or participant reservation wages are near zero. Ignoring the bias will favor E&T programs that emphasize increases in hours of work by focusing on job search or work requirements at the expense of programs that increase wage rates through investments in human capital.
The Investment Performance of the Common Stock Portfolios of Property-Liability Insurance Companies

This paper has examined the investment performance of the common stock portfolios of 20 property-liability insurance companies over the period 1958–1967. The performance of these portfolios was compared with the performance of both equal-weighted and value-weighted random portfolios of common stocks. The evidence indicated that the returns earned by the insurance companies were significantly lower than the returns earned by random portfolios of equivalent risk. While this study is not precisely comparable to the previously published studies of mutual funds in terms of either the methodology employed or the time period considered, the results are quite similar. An additional group of institutional investors can be seen not to have outperformed the “market. ” The presumption of inferior performance is even stronger in the case of the property-liability companies because all the comparisons in this study were made on a gross basis. Most of the studies of mutual fund performance have compared fund returns net of investment expenses to the gross returns from random investments. In those instances where comparisons were made on a gross basis, the performance of fund portfolios was found to be very similar to the performance of random investments.
Foreign Exchange Risk Management

2. Introduction Foreign exchange risk is the exposure of a company’s financial strength to the potential impact of movements in foreign exchange rates. The risk is that adverse fluctuations in exchange rates may result in a reduction in measures of financial strength. It is acknowledged that specific foreign exchange risk practices may differ among banks depending upon factors such as the institution’s size, and the nature and complexity of its activities. However, a comprehensive foreign exchange risk programme should deal with, at a minimum, good management information systems, contingency planning and other managerial and analytical techniques.
Exploring the Impacts of Intellectual Property on Intellectual Capital and Company Performance: The Case of Iranian Computer and Electronic Organizations

Purpose - This paper aims to empirically explore the effects of Intellectual Property (IP) on Intellectual Capital (IC) and firm performance in Iran.Design/Methodology/Approach - A questionnaire-oriented survey from senior and top manager in Iranian computer and electronic industry was utilized for regression analysis. Finding - The findings indicate that IP significantly influences other dimension of IC which consists of Human Capital (HC), Relational Capital (RC) and Structural Capital (SC). The study also provides empirical evidence that gaining firm performance is positively related to these three elements of IC. Research limitation/Implications - Firstly, more advanced statistical techniques with larger number of respondent could be used to evaluate the regression equations. Secondly, the companies chosen for the study are from two specific and fairly similar industries in Iran. Thus, the results may not be applicable to other industries in different countries.Practical Implications - With a broad view on IP that considers its creation, protection and utilization too, IP have a central role in knowledge-based organizations to enhance competitive advantages.Originality/Value - This study builds on and extends the research made by Bollen et al. (2005) to link IP and IC to company performance. On the contrary, the authors focus on the effects of IP on other parts of IC.
Resources in vocational education and post‐schooling outcomes

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the determinants of labour market outcomes after the initial vocational basic education (ISCED 3). Design/methodology/approach - A multinomial logit model is used for examining the effect of school resources and other factors on students' post-schooling outcomes defined as employment, further studies, non-employment and dropping out. Analysis has been done by using unique linked register data on students, their parents, teachers, educational organisations and business companies in Finland. Findings - The results indicate that teaching expenditures do not matter but teachers' characteristics have a role to play. Teachers with a university degree increase the employment probability of the students, whereas the formal competence of the teachers does not have such positive effects. The students' characteristics and performance in comprehensive schools play an important role in determining the outcomes. Local business conditions affect the outcomes of boys but less those of girls. The official quality evaluations adopted in recent years seem to pay attention especially to such aspects of education production that are important for providing capabilities for further studies but less so for employability. Originality/value - Employability seems to be a great challenge to the initial vocational basic education. The findings for local business conditions give support to the view that measures of education policy do not suffice but need to be complemented with those of regional or employment policy, for example, policies aiming to increase regional mobility of the labour force. Such complementary tools are particularly important for boys.
Are cariocas getting ready for the Games? Sport participation and the Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympic Games

Bidding and organizing committees of mega-events greatly emphasize the intangible benefits derived from hosting such events in their communities, despite the lack of research confirming intangible legacies. This research note is intended to contribute to the sport event management field by discussing an oft-cited but rarely explored intangible legacy of the Olympic Games: the sport participation legacy. In this study, interviews were conducted with physical education professionals currently residing in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the host of the 2016 Olympic Games. Preliminary conclusions from the study revealed that there are high expectations of the Olympic Games legacies, particularly in regards to sport participation. This optimistic view contrasted with perceptions that corruption, evident when Rio de Janeiro hosted the 2007 Pan-American Games, may again taint a mega-sport event in Brazil.
Relational Deep Learning: A Deep Latent Variable Model for Link Prediction

Link prediction is a fundamental task in such areas as social network analysis, information retrieval, and bioinformatics. Usually link prediction methods use the link structures or node attributes as the sources of information. Recently, the relational topic model (RTM) and its variants have been proposed as hybrid methods that jointly model both sources of information and achieve very promising accuracy. However, the representations (features) learned by them are still not effective enough to represent the nodes (items). To address this problem, we generalize recent advances in deep learning from solely modeling i.i. d. sequences of attributes to jointly modeling graphs and non-i.i. d. sequences of attributes. Specifically, we follow the Bayesian deep learning framework and devise a hierarchical Bayesian model, called relational deep learning (RDL), to jointly model high-dimensional node attributes and link structures with layers of latent variables. Due to the multiple nonlinear transformations in RDL, standard variational inference is not applicable. We propose to utilize the product of Gaussians (PoG) structure in RDL to relate the inferences on different variables and derive a generalized variational inference algorithm for learning the variables and predicting the links. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that RDL works surprisingly well and significantly outperforms the state of the art.
Family Violence Quality Assessment Tool for Primary Care Offices

Background Clinicians are mandated reporters for child abuse and elder abuse. Medical organizations recommend that patients be assessed for domestic violence. To date, the only quality improvement instrument related to family violence is a tool for assessing hospitals' domestic violence efforts. Methods Using the Delphi method of consensus among national experts, we modified the hospital tool (Delphi Instrument for Domestic Violence for Hospital Programs) to make it applicable for primary care offices assessing for family violence (child abuse, intimate partner violence, and elder abuse). Face validity and the ability of an office/nurse manager to complete the tool independently were tested in 32 primary care practices in Ohio and Minnesota. Results The final instrument includes 111 items divided into 9 categories with a total possible score of 100%. The highest score among primary care practices was 91.4%, achieved by a family medicine office. Offices that focused on family violence–related issues for more than 4 years and were located in an urban area had higher scores. Conclusions The US Preventive Guideline task force calls for tools related to violence screening and management. To our knowledge, this represents the first family violence quality improvement tool for primary care offices.
Functional specialization within the dorsolateral frontal cortex for serial order memory

Monkeys with lesions restricted to two anatomically distinct regions of the dorsolateral frontal cortex were tested on a novel task that was developed to assess memory for the order of occurrence of stimuli. Monkeys with bilateral lesions of the mid-dorsolateral frontal cortex (cytoarchitectonic areas 46 and 9) were severely impaired, whereas monkeys with lesions of the posterior region of the dorsolateral frontal cortex (area 8 and rostral area 6) performed as well as the normal control animals. These results show that the prim ate Mid-dorsolateral frontal cortex is a critical component of a neural circuit underlying the monitoring of the serial order of stimuli.
The DAS28 in rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia patients.

OBJECTIVE To compare the DAS28 (Disease Activity Score including a 28-joint count) values of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and fibromyalgia (FM) patients, and to establish whether high pain levels and impaired mood influence DAS28 values. METHODS DAS28 values were calculated in 62 consecutive patients with RA and in 26 patients suffering from FM. Values for DAS28 scores as well as for the single items of the patient cohorts were compared using Student's t-tests. To evaluate the item weighting and internal consistency of the total score factor analysis was performed and Cronbach's alpha calculated. RESULTS RA patients showed a mean DAS28 score of 4.23 (+/-1.2; range 0.77-7.46) and in FM patients the mean DAS28 came to 4.04 (+/-1.13; range 1.19-6.28). DAS28 values of RA and FM patients were not significantly different statistically. Comparing the single components of the score, however, highly significant differences (P<0.0005) occurred between RA and FM patients. Cronbach's alpha for the DAS28 in RA patients amounted to 0.7329, indicating high internal consistency, whereas in FM patients it was 0.4832. CONCLUSION The DAS28, as expected, proved to be inappropriate to express disease activity in FM patients. DAS28 values for expressing disease activity in RA patients may be flawed by coexisting FM and should therefore be regarded with caution as high pain levels more than impaired mood may lead to higher total scores.
Popular protest in authoritarian regimes: evidence from communist and post-communist states

The paper shows that sustained popular protest is a recurrent feature in many authoritarian regimes and that a regime type strongly shapes its characteristics. Popular protest often leads to important changes in the personal composition and policies of elites, which considerably affect the structure and operation of authoritarian regimes, and at times produce regime change. Evidence is provided from authoritarianism in Poland and Yugoslavia, in which sustained protests contributed to the fall of communism, and from competitive authoritarian regimes in post-communist Serbia and Ukraine, which were repeatedly undermined by protest waves and brought to an end by pressure ‘from below’.
Simultaneous adsorption of SO2 and NO from flue gas over mesoporous alumina

Mesoporous alumina (MA) with a higher ability to simultaneously remove SO2 and NO was prepared by the evaporation-induced self-assembly process. The adsorption capacities of MA are 1.79 and 0.702 mmol/g for SO2 and NO, respectively. The Brunauer–Emmett–Teller method was used to characterize the adsorbent. Simultaneous adsorption of SO2 and NO from flue gas over MA in different operating conditions had been studied in a fixed bed reactor. The effects of temperature, oxygen concentration and water vapour were investigated. The experimental results showed that the optimum temperature for MA to simultaneously remove SO2 and NO was 90°C. The simultaneous adsorption capacities of SO2 and NO could be enhanced by increasing O2 when its concentration was below 5%. The changes of simultaneous adsorption capacities were not obvious when O2 concentration was above 5%. The increase in relative humidity results in an increase after dropping of SO2 adsorption capacity, whereas the adsorption capacity of NO showed an opposite trend. The results suggest that MA is a great adsorbent for simultaneous removal of SO2 and NO from flue gas.