Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dyadic Dimensions of Armed Conflict, 1946—2007

In 2007, 34 armed conflicts were active worldwide, up by one from 2006 and by five from 2003, the year with the lowest number of active armed conflicts since the 1970s. While the number of conflicts increased, the number of wars, i.e. conflicts with over 1,000 battle-related deaths in a year, dropped by one to four. Five of the conflicts from 2006 were no longer active in 2007, but during the year, two previously recorded conflicts (in Mali and Pakistan) were restarted by new actors and two (in Angola and Peru) by previously recorded rebel groups. For the first time since 2004, two new conflicts were recorded: a conflict over governmental power in Niger and a territorial conflict in DRC. A conflict may involve one or more dyads or pairs of warring parties. In the 236 conflicts active since 1946, 487 dyads have been recorded in the new UCDP Dyadic Dataset. While most intrastate conflicts involve a single rebel group fighting the government, in 30 of the conflicts two or more dyads were active simultaneously. In 2002 and 2003, over 30% of the active conflicts involved more than one rebel group. The number of active rebel groups and changes in the set of groups are important elements of the complexity of any armed conflict, and the study of these aspects should be greatly facilitated with the new dataset. By adding the dyadic dimension to the study of conflicts, the analysis of a range of phenomena that have hardly been captured by previously available data is made possible.
Association of a Continuous Quality Improvement Initiative With Practice and Outcome Variations of Contemporary Percutaneous Coronary Interventions

Background— The objective of this study was to evaluate the association of a continuous quality improvement program with practice and outcome variations of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). Methods and Results— Data on consecutive PCI were collected in a consortium of 5 hospitals; 3731 PCIs reflected care provided at baseline (January 1, 1998, to December 31, 1998), and 5901 PCIs reflected care provided after implementation of a continuous quality improvement intervention (January 1, 2002, to December 31, 2002). The intervention included feedback on outcomes, working group meetings, site visits, selection of quality indicators, and use of bedside tools for quality improvement and risk assessment. Postintervention data were compared with baseline and with 10 287 PCIs from 7 hospitals added to the consortium in 2002. Quality indicators included use of preprocedural aspirin or clopidogrel, use of glycoprotein IIb/IIIa receptor blockers and postprocedural heparin, and amount of contrast media per case. Outcomes selected included emergency CABG, contrast nephropathy, myocardial infarction, stroke, transfusion, and in-hospital death. Compared with baseline and the control group, the intervention group at follow-up had higher use of preprocedural aspirin and glycoprotein IIb/IIIa blockers, lower use of postprocedural heparin, and a lower amount of contrast media per case (P<0.05). These changes were associated with lower rates of transfusions, vascular complications, contrast nephropathy, stroke, transient ischemic attack, and combined end points (all P<0.05). Conclusions— Our nonrandomized, observational data suggest that implementation of a regional continuous quality improvement program appears to be associated with enhanced adherence to quality indicators and improved outcomes of PCI. A randomized clinical trial is needed to determine whether this is a “causal” or a “casual” relationship.
How to select a replication protocol according to scalability, availability and communication overhead

Data replication is playing an increasingly important role in the design of parallel information systems. In particular, the widespread use of cluster architectures in high-performance computing has created many opportunities for applying data replication techniques in new areas. For instance, as part of work related to cluster computing in bioinformatics, we have been confronted with the problem of having to choose an optimal replication strategy in terms of scalability, availability and communication overhead. Thus, we have evaluated several representative replication protocols in order to better understand their behavior in practice. The results obtained are surprising in that they challenge many of the assumptions behind existing protocols. Our evaluation indicates that the conventional read-one/write-all approach is the best choice for a large range of applications requiring data replication. We believe this is an important result for anybody developing code for computing clusters as the read-one/write-all strategy is much simpler to implement and more flexible than quorum-based approaches. In this paper we show that, in addition, it is also the best choice using a number of other selection criteria.
PlexinA3 Restricts Spinal Exit Points and Branching of Trunk Motor Nerves in Embryonic Zebrafish

The pioneering primary motor axons in the zebrafish trunk are guided by multiple cues along their pathways. Plexins are receptor components for semaphorins that influence motor axon growth and path finding. We cloned plexinA3 in zebrafish and localized plexinA3 mRNA in primary motor neurons during axon outgrowth. Antisense morpholino knock-down led to substantial errors in motor axon growth. Errors comprised aberrant branching of primary motor nerves as well as additional exit points of axons from the spinal cord. Excessively branched and supernumerary nerves were found in both ventral and dorsal pathways of motor axons. The trunk environment and several other types of axons, including trigeminal axons, were not detectably affected by plexinA3 knock-down. RNA overexpression rescued all morpholino effects. Synergistic effects of combined morpholino injections indicate interactions of plexinA3 with semaphorin3A homologs. Thus, plexinA3 is a crucial receptor for axon guidance cues in primary motor neurons.
Pretransplant Immediately Early‐1‐Specific T Cell Responses Provide Protection for CMV Infection After Kidney Transplantation

Cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection is still a major complication after kidney transplantation. Although cytotoxic CMV‐specific T cells play a crucial role controlling CMV survival and replication, current pretransplant risk assessment for CMV infection is only based on donor/recipient (IgG)‐serostatus. Here, we evaluated the usefulness of monitoring pre‐ and 6‐month CMV‐specific T cell responses against two dominant CMV antigens (IE‐1 and pp65) and a CMV lysate, using an IFN‐γ Elispot, for predicting the advent of CMV infection in two cohorts of 137 kidney transplant recipients either receiving routine prophylaxis (n = 39) or preemptive treatment (n = 98). Incidence of CMV antigenemia/disease within the prophylaxis and preemptive group was 28%/20% and 22%/12%, respectively. Patients developing CMV infection showed significantly lower anti‐IE‐1‐specific T cell responses than those that did not in both groups (p < 0.05). In a ROC curve analysis, low pretransplant anti‐IE‐1‐specific T cell responses predicted the risk of both primary and late‐onset CMV infection with high sensitivity and specificity (AUC > 0.70). Furthermore, when using most sensitive and specific Elispot cut‐off values, a higher than 80% and 90% sensitivity and negative predictive value was obtained, respectively. Monitoring IE‐1‐specific T cell responses before transplantation may be useful for predicting posttransplant risk of CMV infection, thus potentially guiding decision‐making regarding CMV preventive treatment.
Capturing and Reusing Functional and Non-functional Requirements Knowledge: A Goal-Object Pattern Approach

Pattern-based approach has proven to be an effective means for capturing and reusing past experience and best practices to facilitate communication and shorten the time required for software modeling. However, current knowledge capture is limited to mostly functional knowledge. Knowledge reuse is also often manual and limited to low-scale small model fragments. This paper presents a goal-object pattern framework that captures both functional and non-functional requirements knowledge that is modeled using UML and a goal-oriented method. Patterns in this framework are a collection of model refinement methods, each defining a single model element generation step in the target model. The patterns are model-driven in that they are defined using a UML metamodel and then used as such. The framework also supports incremental knowledge capture in that large-grain patterns can be composed from fine-grain ones, and also application-independent patterns can be specialized into application-specific ones. The framework is illustrated using a simplified on-line bookstore application to demonstrate how large-scale reuse may be possible
Fairness and isolation in multi-tenant storage as optimization decomposition

Shared storage services enjoy wide adoption in commercial clouds. But most systems today provide weak performance isolation and fairness between tenants, if at all. Most approaches to multi-tenant resource allocation are based either on per-VM allocations or hard rate limits that assume uniform workloads to achieve high utilization. Instead, Pisces, our system for shared key-value storage, achieves datacenterwide per-tenant performance isolation and fairness. Pisces achieves per-tenant weighted fair sharing of system resources across the entire shared service, even when partitions belonging to different tenants are co-located and when demand for different partitions is skewed or timevarying. The focus of this paper is to highlight the optimization model that motivates the decomposition of Pisces's fair sharing problem into four complementary mechanisms--- partition placement, weight allocation, replica selection, and weighted fair queuing---that operate on different time-scales to provide system-wide max-min fairness. An evaluation of our Pisces storage prototype achieves nearly ideal (0.98 Min- Max Ratio) fair sharing, strong performance isolation, and robustness to skew and shifts in tenant demand.
Introduction to Special Issue on Severe Disabilities and School-Wide Positive Behavior Support

Positive behavior support (PBS) first emerged more than 20 years ago in response to numerous aversive interventions applied to individuals with severe disabilities to stop their problem behaviors. In many ways, the Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps (TASH), and its journal Research and Practice for Persons With Severe Disabilities, formerly JASH, can be considered the original home of PBS. During the late 1980s to early 1990s, TASH published what are now seminal work that sent shock waves through the research and professional communities, providing compelling evidence and ideas for what are now the basic tenets of PBS. Chief among these published work are Guess, Helmstetter, Turnbull, and Knowlton’s (1987) monograph that exposed aversive interventions, Berkman and Meyer’s (1988) case study that illustrated how the quality of one man’s life and history of self-abuse was radically altered through functional assessment and positive interventions, and Horner et al.’s (1990) article that initially defined PBS. For many years, research on PBS focused almost exclusively on individuals with severe disabilities; however, when applied to school settings, PBS rapidly emerged as an intervention approach with applicability for all students who might present behavioral challenges, including those with and those without disabilities. Furthermore, building on the basic PBS tenets of prevention, skill building, and environmental modification, PBS has expanded from an approach designed primarily for individuals to one that encompasses the entire school community. School-wide PBS (SWPBS) is the most recent development of this expanded focus. School-wide PBS refers to a systems approach toward preventing and addressing behavioral challenges in schools. Predicated on a model introduced by Walker et al. (1996) for antisocial behaviors in schools, SWPBS promulgates a triangle heuristic to describe a threetiered systems approach toward addressing behavioral concerns in schools. Starting from the base of the triangle and moving to the apex, these levels of interventions as described by Horner, Sugai, Todd, and Palmer (2005) include the following:
The Impact of Creative Dance and Movement Training on the Life Satisfaction of Older Adults: An Exploratory Study

This study examined the impact of dance and movement training on the life satisfaction of older adults. Members of the experimental group participated in weekly dance and movement classes for 8 months. A matched comparison group was selected Members of both groups were pretested using a global measure of life satisfaction and the Philadelphia Geriatric Center Morale Scale. Analysis of covariance revealed significant positive changes in life satisfaction in the experimental group when compared to the matched group (p = .05). Observations and verbal comments support these findings.
Frequency-Domain Algorithms for Visual Analysis on Genomic Structures in Prokaryotes

Frequency-domain algorithms are studied to provide the composition of each nucleic acid base simultaneously across numerous frequencies and along the base-positions, through Fourier transformation and color mapping of the bases. And also, composite colored scalograms are constructed by continuous wavelet transformation to provide their individual localized time and periodic energy content in a single figure. The visualization of three-dimensional information in the forms of bases, frequencies and base-positions allows visual analysis of correlated structural and genomic information, which can hardly be obtained from the conventional character string analysis. Significant features of the studied prokaryotic genomes were revealed by the use of the programs developed
The Role of Pharmacomechanical Endovascular Intervention for Iliofemoral Vein Thrombosis Compared to Conventional Anticoagulation Therapy

Although anticoagulation therapy is the primary treatment for deep vein thrombosis (DVT), it has not been associated with the rapid recanalization of the venous occlusion. Moreover, it is associated with long-term disability due to post-thrombotic syndrome (PTS). In contrast, pharmacomechanical endovascular intervention (PMI) results in more rapid clinical improvement in DVT patients, but there are few reports on its long-term outcomes. This retrospective study evaluated the clinical effectiveness of PMI compared to conventional anticoagulation therapy (ACA) for acute and subacute iliofemoral DVT. We reviewed the medical records of 102 patients with iliofemoral DVT. A total of 46 patients for ACA and 56 patients for PMI were enrolled. We analyzed the clinical differences between the PMI and ACA groups by comparing the clinical signs, residual DVT free-rate, and PTS-free rate. There were no statistically significant differences in the demographic characteristics and risk factors except age between the groups (age: ACA, 52.0 ± 18.0 years; PMI, 59.0 ± 17.0 years; P = 0.035). The 1-, 3-, and 5-year residual DVT-free rate (ACA = 84.7%, 71.6%, and 46.0%; PMI = 82.1%, 76.8%, and 76.8%, respectively; P = 0.235) was not significantly different. However, the 1-, 3-, and 5-year PTS-free rate was significantly different (ACA = 93.5%, 74.0%, and 55.7%; PMI = 92.9%, 90.0%, and 90.0%, respectively; P = 0.019). There was no significant difference in the rate of other complications. PMI showed a lower incidence of PTS during the follow-up period. Therefore, PMI should be considered as an effective therapeutic modality for patients with iliofemoral DVT.
Modelling heterogeneous location habits in human populations for location prediction under data sparsity

In recent years, researchers have sought to capture the daily life location behaviour of groups of people for exploratory, inference, and predictive purposes. However, development of such approaches has been limited by the requirement of personal semantic labels for locations or social/spatial overlap between individuals in the group. To address this shortcoming, we present a Bayesian model of mobility in populations (i.e., groups without spatial or social interconnections) that is not subject to any of these requirements. The model intelligently shares temporal parameters between people, but keeps the spatial parameters specific to individuals. To illustrate the advantages of population modelling, we apply our model to the difficult problem of overcoming data sparsity in location prediction systems, using the Nokia dataset comprising 38 individuals, and find a factor of 2.4 improvement in location prediction performance against a state-of-the-art model when training on only 20 hours of observations.
Does the Experience of Interpersonal Predictors of Suicidal Desire Predict Positive Attitudes Toward Physician Assisted Suicide?

The current study examined the relationship between Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) attitudes and interpersonal risk factors of suicidal desire as outlined by the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicidal behavior (Joiner, 2005). It was hypothesized that both thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness would be positively related to PAS acceptance. Results indicated that thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness predicted significance of favorable attitudes toward PAS in a college sample. Results suggest that attitudes toward PAS may be influenced by the experience of thwarted belongingness and perceived burdensomeness and provide a clear rationale for the study of these variables in populations more apt to consider hastened death. Future work regarding the application of the interpersonal-psychological theory of suicidal behavior in hastened death research is discussed.
Travails of Truth: Achieving Justice for Victims of Impunity in Nigeria

Following its transition to democracy from an authoritarian military rule marked by gross violations of human rights, Nigeria established the Human Rights Violations Investigations Commission (HRVIC) in 1999. This paper critically examines the contributions of the HRVIC, popularly known as the ‘Oputa Panel,’ to the field of transitional justice and the rule of law. It sets out the process of establishing the Commission, its mandate and how this mandate was interpreted during the course of the Commission's work. The challenges faced by the Oputa Panel, particularly those that relate to its legal status and relationship with the judiciary, are analyzed in an attempt to draw useful guidelines from these challenges for other truth commissions. Recourse by powerful individuals to the judicial process in a bid to shield themselves from the HRVIC merits particular review as it raises questions regarding the transformation of the judiciary and the rule of law in the wake of an authoritarian regime.
Modeling and minimization of routing congestion

Typical placement objectives involve reducing net-cut cost or minimizing wirelength. Congestion minimization is least understood, however, it models routability most accurately. In this paper, we study the congestion minimization problem during placement. First we point out that the bounding box router used previously is not an accurate measurement of the congestion in the placement. We use a realistic global router to evaluate congestion in the placement stage. This ensures that the final placement is truely congestion minimized. We also propose two new post processing algorithms, the flow-based cell-centric algorithm and the net-centric algorithm. While the flow-based cell-centric algorithm can move multiple cells at the same time to minimize the congestion, it suffers large consumption of memory. Experimental results show that the net-centric algorithm can effectively identify the congested spots in the placement and reduce the congestion. It can produce on an average 7.7% less congestion than the bounding box router method. Finally, we use a final global router to verify that the placement obtained from our algorithm has 39% less congestion than a wirelength-optimized placement obtained by TimberWolf (commercial version 1.3.1).
Combat exposure severity as a moderator of genetic and environmental liability to post-traumatic stress disorder

Background Twin studies of veterans and adults suggest that approximately 30–46% of the variance in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is attributable to genetic factors. The remaining variance is attributable to the non-shared environment, which, by definition, includes combat exposure. This study used a gene by measured environment twin design to determine whether the effects of genetic and environmental factors that contribute to the etiology of PTSD are dependent on the level of combat exposure. Method The sample was drawn from the Vietnam Era Twin Registry (VETR) and included 620 male–male twin pairs who served in the US Military in South East Asia during the Vietnam War era. Analyses were based on data from a clinical diagnostic interview of lifetime PTSD symptoms and a self-report measure of combat exposure. Results Biometric modeling revealed that the effects of genetic and non-shared environment factors on PTSD varied as a function of level of combat exposure such that the association between these factors and PTSD was stronger at higher levels of combat exposure. Conclusions Combat exposure may act as a catalyst that augments the impact of hereditary and environmental contributions to PTSD. Individuals with the greatest exposure to combat trauma were at increased risk for PTSD as a function of both genetic and environmental factors. Additional work is needed to determine the biological and environmental mechanisms driving these associations.
Influence of Internal Communication on Technological Proactivity, Organizational Learning, and Organizational Innovation in the Pharmaceutical Sector

This investigation formulates a global model to analyze the influence of internal communication (IC) on technological proactivity (TP), organizational learning (OL), and organizational innovation (OI); the direct and indirect relationships between these strategic variables; and the influence of OI on organizational performance (OP). The hypotheses are tested using data from 164 European and U.S. technological firms. The results show that (a) IC influences TP, OL, and OI; (b) TP influences OL and OI, and OL influences OI; and (c) OI influences OP. This article discusses these findings and provides several implications for future research.
Wind turbine fault detection and fault tolerant control - An enhanced benchmark challenge

Wind turbines are increasingly growing larger, becoming more complex, and being located in more remote locations, especially offshore. Interest in advanced controllers for normal operation has expanded in recent years, but fault detection and fault tolerant control for wind turbines is a less well-developed area of interest. In this benchmark challenge, we have reworked a previous challenge paper to present a more sophisticated wind turbine model - a modern 5 MW turbine implemented in the FAST software - and updated fault scenarios. These updates enhance the realism of the challenge and will therefore lead to solutions that are significantly more useful to the wind industry. This paper presents the challenge model and the requirements for challenge participants. In addition, it provides additional information about the faults selected for the challenge and their basis in field data.