Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Etoricoxib versus indometacin in the treatment of Chinese patients with acute gouty arthritis: a randomized double‐blind trial

Background Acute gout is an intensely painful, inflammatory arthritis. Although the non‐steroidal anti‐inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) are widely used for this condition, the efficacy is based on only a few studies, particularly in China. We tried to assess the safety and efficacy of etoricoxib in the treatment of acute gouty arthritis in China. Methods A randomized, double‐blind, active comparator study was conducted at 10 sites in China. Patients (n=178; ≥18 years of age) with acute gouty attack (<48 hours) were treated for 5 days with etoricoxib (120 mg/d; n=89) or indometacin (75 mg twice daily; n=89). The primary efficacy end point was self‐assessed pain in the affected joint (0‐4 point Likert scale) from days 2‐5. Secondary end points included investigator assessments of tenderness and swelling, patient/investigator global assessments of response to therapy, and patients discontinuing treatment. Safety was assessed by adverse events (AEs). Results Etoricoxib and indometacin had comparable primary and secondary end points. Mean change difference from baseline from days 2‐5 was 0.03 (95% confidence interval (CI) ‐0.19 to 0.25; P=0.6364), which fell within the prespecified comparative bounds of ‐0.5 to 0.5. No severe AEs were associated with etoricoxib use. Non‐severe AEs were mainly digestive and general, and most (73.7%) were mild, although they caused withdrawal of two subjects in the etoricoxib group, due to bilateral renal calculi and uronephrosis of the left kidney (unrelated to etoricoxib) and fever and chills (potentially etoricoxib‐related). Overall, AEs were similar, although the absolute number of AEs in the etoricoxib group (n=31) was less than the indometacin group (n=34). Conclusions Etoricoxib (120 mg once daily) is effective in treating acute gout, is generally safe and well‐tolerated, and is comparable in efficacy to indometacin (75 mg twice daily).
Managing the performance of non-family employees: a case study of a China-based family-SME

ABSTRACT Family-SMEs utilize their non-family employees to achieve their developmental goals and aspirations. A particular challenge facing many Family-SMEs is how to effectively manage and motivate their non-family employees. Performance management systems represents an important means through which Family-SMEs can achieve this. The limited empirical evidence on performance management systems in Family-SMEs suggest that they are largely ad-hoc in nature and biased towards family-members. Drawing on organizational justice theory, this study seeks to explore how Family-SMEs performance manage their non-family employees, and non-family employees’ reactions to such process. Based on an illustrative case study, we found that Family-SMEs utilized both informal and formal practices to manage their non-family employees’ performance. Moreover, we also identified how family involvement in management can heighten a sense of injustice concerning the process among non-family employees’. Our findings make a valuable contribution to the existing but limited literature on the performance management of non-family employee.
Hash tree based trustworthiness verification mechanism in virtual environment

The trustworthiness of virtual machines is a big security issue in cloud computing. In this paper, we aimed at designing a practical trustworthiness mechanism in virtual environment. With the assist of a third certificate agent, the cloud user generates a trust base and extends it to its VMs. For each service running on the VM, a hash value is generated from all the necessary modules, and these hash values are organized and maintained with a specially designed hash tree whose root is extended from the user's trust base. Before the VM loads a service, the hash tree is verified from the coordinated hash value to check the trustworthiness of the service.
A Qualitative Research On Individual Barriers to Knowledge Sharing: Causes and Remedies A Health-Care Sector Based Study

Management and sharing of knowledge has been among the top most strategic priorities of the organizations, due to its generally acknowledged role toward the improvement of organizational performance,accomplishment of organizational goals and achievement of competitive advantage. However, most of the organizations, despite spending huge budgets on the implementation of quality knowledge management systems, fail to enjoy the benefits of knowledge sharing due a number of individual organizational and technological barriers that impede the successful sharing of knowledge. Hence, it seems extremely important to understand the factors that impede the knowledge sharing and foil the successful implementation of knowledge management systems. This study has been conducted to empirically investigate the individual barriers to knowledge sharing. Based on 75 qualitative interviews within three health-care organizations of the capital of, Pakistan, this research has identified unwillingness to share, lack of motivation, time deficiency, absence of trust, cultural dissimilarity and lack of a common language as some of the most significant individual barriers to knowledge sharing. This study has not only identified the barriers, but, also the remedies to knowledge sharing in the light of the recommendations from the interviewees
HLA-DRB1 shared epitope allele polymorphisms and rheumatoid arthritis: a systemic review and meta-analysis.

PURPOSE A meta-analysis was preformed to determine which HLA-DRB1 alleles are associated with increased risk of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in Asian patients. METHODS Medline, PubMed, Central, EMBASE, Cochrane, and Google Scholar databases were searched until November 3, 2015 using the following keywords: rheumatoid arthritis; RA, HLA-DRB1; severity; treatment; and, prognosis. Randomized-controlled-trials, prospective, retrospective, cohort and case-controlled studies that examined the HLA-DRB1 allelic association with RA in Asians were included. The frequencies of allelic types and the shared epitope (SE) were compared between patients with or without RA. RESULTS A total of 331 articles were identified after duplicates removed, and 40 studies, with 5470 RA patients and 5837 control patients, were included in the analysis. Pooled odds ratios (ORs) revealed the frequencies of HLA-DRB1*04 and *10 were higher in the RA group, and the frequency of *14 was lower in the RA group as compared to controls (*04: OR = 3.35, 95% CI: 2.28-3.99, p < .001; *10: OR = 2.08, 95% CI: 1.55-2.78, p < .001; *14: OR = 0.70, 95% CI: 0.54-0.90, p = .006). No associations were noted for *01 and *09. Pooled ORs revealed associations of *0101 (OR = 1.58), *0401 (OR = 2.17), *0404 (OR = 1.91), *0405 (OR = 3.73), *0410 (OR = 2.24), *1001 (OR = 1.78) and SE positive (OR = 2.38) with RA. HLA-DRB1 *14 subtypes did not show associations with RA. CONCLUSIONS HLA-DRB1 allelic variations are associated with RA in Asian patients.
The Painter's Feature Selection for Gene Expression Data

Feature selection is a fundamental task in microarray data analysis. It aims at identifying the genes which are mostly associated with a tissue category, disease state or clinical outcome. An effective feature selection reduces computation costs and increases classification accuracy. This paper presents a novel multi-class approach to feature selection for gene expression data, which is called Painter's approach. It has the benefits of both a parameter free technique and a native multi- category method. It consists of two phases. The first is a filtering phase that smooths the effect of noise and outliers, which represent a common problem in microarray data. In the second phase, the actual gene selection is performed. Preliminary experimental results on three public datasets are presented. They confirm the intuition of the proposed approach leading to high classification accuracies.
Competition and Specificity in Market Design: Evidence from Geotargeted Advertising

How should market designers tradeoff liquidity and specificity? We study a natural experiment in the release of a new ad targeting feature by an ad exchange. The platform introduced new targeting into select geographic markets using a regression discontinuity. The experiment affects the specificity advertising assets in the markets (ie, the availability of targeting a city or a zip code). We find evidence that additional specificity reduces the total number of ad impressions delivered by the platform, as advertisers concentrate bidding into fewer, targeted markets. Despite this, we find an overall positive effects on revenue growth in the treated areas. This appears to be driven mainly by increases in clickthrough rates and not through increases in average prices (which actually decreased), and by entry of new advertisers.
Engineering Escherichia coli Cells for Cellobiose Assimilation through a Phosphorolytic Mechanism

ABSTRACT We report here the first engineering effort for Escherichia coli biocatalysts to assimilate cellobiose through a phosphorolytic mechanism. Cytoplasmic expression of the Saccharophagus cellobiose phosphorylase was shown to enable E. coli to use cellobiose. Subsequent knockout and complementation studies provided solid evidence that the endogenous LacY was responsible for the transport of cellobiose.
Segmentation of SAR images using textons

In this paper we investigate the use of the well known textons method [1] for the segmentation of SAR images. Two approaches were tested: using the MR8 filter bank and using only the pixel intensities. The K-NN classification algorithm and the SVM algorithm with both Linear and GHI kernels were used as classifiers. Results obtained with real amplitude SAR images for the separation between water and land demonstrate that the texton method is appropriate for the segmentation of SAR images.
Asperger's syndrome and autism: differences in behavior, cognition, and adaptive functioning.

OBJECTIVE To determine whether subtypes of children with pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) differed on variables that were relatively independent of distinguishing criteria. METHOD Higher-functioning children with PDD, 4 through 6 years of age, were differentiated into those with autism (n = 47) and those with Asperger's syndrome (n = 21) on the basis of delayed and deviant language development. The groups were then compared on a wide range of measures including PDD symptoms, adaptive behaviors in communication, socialization, and activities of daily living, and an assessment of verbal and nonverbal cognitive skills. RESULTS Significant differences between the groups existed on many PDD symptoms, adaptive behaviors, and cognitive measures of language competence, but not on aspects of nonverbal communication, nonverbal cognition, or motor development. CONCLUSION Subtypes of children with PDD can be identified that differ on variables relatively independent of defining characteristics. These findings should provide a firm foundation into research to determine whether children with autism and Asperger's syndrome also differ on outcome, etiology, and response to treatment.
Improved harmonic detection algorithm applied to APF

The speed and accuracy of harmonic current detection are the important index of active power filter. Due to the low pass filter, the traditional ip-iq algorithm has the disadvantage of slow detection speed. The paper proposes a variable step size LMS/LMF adaptive filter algorithm. The adaptive filter can not only change the step size according to the change of original signal, but also change the proportion of the Least Mean Square(LMS) algorithm and the Least Four-order Moment (LMF) algorithm, which makes the advantages of high detection accuracy of LMF and high detection speed of LMS fully played. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is effective, and the speed of harmonic current is improved obviously.
Ride-sharing business model for sustainability in developing country: Case Study Nebengers, Indonesia

The growth of population and urban economy increased the need for humans’ mobility to support their activities. On the other hand, online Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is growing rapidly and more affordable. Within few years, there is some sharing economy business formed by using online platform. This condition brings through the emergence of ride-sharing business model using an online platform which can be beneficial to sustainability. This research aims to explore one of ridesharing business models which use the online platform and its impact on sustainability. This research used the procedure of case study method with a single case study of Nebengers. This research explores the case study with the scope of this research is limited by using several conceptual frameworks, they are sharing economy business model, four elements of a business model for sustainability (BMfS), Social Construction of Technology (SCoT), sustainable mobility and agency theory. Nebengers is a sharing economy business using online platform that historically can be explained using Social Construction of Technology (SCoT) Theory. There are conflicts between nebengers entrepreneur and the city government. Nebengers disrupts traditional and formal public transportation services which are managed by the government. However, nebengers also contributes to achieve the city government goal in developing sustainable mobility. The future challenge is how to arrange ride-sharing collaborative governance business model for sustainability in the cities in Indonesia.
A Hybrid Method for Compression of Solar Radiation Data Using Neural Networks

The prediction of solar radiation is important for several applications in renewable energy research. There are a number of geographical variables which affect solar radiation prediction, the identification of these variables for accurate solar radiation prediction is very important. This paper presents a hybrid method for the compression of solar radiation using predictive analysis. The prediction of minute wise solar radiation is performed by using different models of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), namely Multi-layer perceptron neural network (MLPNN), Cascade feed forward back propagation (CFNN) and Elman back propagation (ELMNN). Root mean square error (RMSE) is used to evaluate the prediction accuracy of the three ANN models used. The information and knowledge gained from the present study could improve the accuracy of analysis concerning climate studies and help in congestion control.
A potent neutralizing IgM mAb targeting the N218 epitope on E2 protein protects against Chikungunya virus pathogenesis

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a medically important human viral pathogen that causes Chikungunya fever accompanied with debilitating and persistent joint pain. Host-elicited or passively-transferred monoclonal antibodies (mAb) are essential mediators of CHIKV clearance. Therefore, this study aimed to generate and characterize a panel of mAbs for their neutralization efficacy against CHIKV infection in a cell-based and murine model. To evaluate their antigenicity and neutralization profile, indirect enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), an immunofluorescence assay (IFA) and a plaque reduction neutralization test were performed on mAbs of IgM isotype. CHIKV escape mutants against mAb 3E7b neutralization were generated, and reverse genetics techniques were then used to create an infectious CHIKV clone with a single mutation. 3E7b was also administered to neonate mice prior or after CHIKV infection. The survival rate, CHIKV burden in tissues and histopathology of the limb muscles were evaluated. Both IgM 3E7b and 8A2c bind strongly to native CHIKV surface and potently neutralize CHIKV replication. Further analyses of 3E7b binding and neutralization of CHIKV single-mutant clones revealed that N218 of CHIKV E2 protein is a potent neutralizing epitope. In a pre-binding neutralization assay, 3E7b blocks CHIKV attachment to permissive cells, possibly by binding to the surface-accessible E2-N218 residue. Prophylactic administration of 3E7b to neonate mice markedly reduced viremia and protected against CHIKV pathogenesis in various mice tissues. Given therapeutically at 4 h post-infection, 3E7b conferred 100% survival rate and similarly reduced CHIKV load in most mice tissues except the limb muscles. Collectively, these findings highlight the usefulness of 3E7b for future prophylactic or epitope-based vaccine design.
A new prognostic system for hepatocellular carcinoma: A retrospective study of 435 patients

The clinical outcome of cirrhotic patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) depends both on the residual liver function and tumor characteristics. However, the relative prognostic weight of these variables is not well defined. The aims of this study were to verify the value of known prognostic factors and to devise a prognostic index more sensitive than the commonly used Okuda stage. A retrospective analysis of the cases of HCC diagnosed at 16 Italian institutions from 1990 to 1992 was performed. Overall survival was the only end point used in the analysis. The Cox model, stratified by locoregional treatment, was used for multivariate analyses. The final model was derived from 10 randomly chosen training samples, and the prognostic validity of the Cancer of the Liver Italian Program (CLIP) score was assessed on the corresponding testing samples. Four hundred thirty‐five cases of HCC were collected. As of January 1997, 313 patients (72%) were deceased. Overall median survival was 20 months. At multivariate analysis, independent predictive factors of survival were Child‐Pugh stage, tumor morphology, α‐fetoprotein (AFP), and portal vein thrombosis. A simple scoring system (CLIP score) was thus produced, assigning linear scores (0/1/2) to the covariates. Compared with Okuda stage, the CLIP score, structured as a six‐category tool, has a greater discriminant ability, revealing a class of patients with an impressively more favorable prognosis and another class with a relatively shorter life expectancy. The CLIP score is a new prognostic system that accounts for both liver function and tumor characteristics. It is easy to calculate and appears to give more precise information than the Okuda stage.
Functional domains in the renal type IIa Na/P(i)-cotransporter.

The proximal tubular brush border membrane type IIa Na/P(i)-cotransporter is an important element in overall phosphate (Pi) homeostasis. Its regulation is tightly associated with membrane retrieval/reinsertion mechanisms. Specific molecular domains are involved in its internalization (predicted third intracellular loop) and in its apical expression (carboxy-terminus). Regulation and apical expression require a correct ('proximal tubular') cellular context and interaction with specific cellular proteins (scaffolding). Basic cotransport function is via a 3 Na+ to 1 P(i)-coupling ratio, also including the possibility of a Na+-leak, and is strongly affected by changes in pH. This function can be assigned to monomeric transporter molecules. The predicted first intracellular and third extracellular loops contribute important functional characteristics. It is suggested that they may form "re-entrant loops" and thereby a "permeation pore. " Sequences in this region determine also pH-sensitivity and affinities in P(i)- and in Na+-interaction, respectively.
Does Securitization for Government Staff Personal Loan Perform?

Malaysian firms have been reported to involve in Asset-Backed Securities since 1986s where Cagamas is a pioneer. The objective of this study to determine the primary market spread and analyze on firm financial performance. The methodology for this paper using regression analysis for the study period 2007-2012. They are three determinants that contribute and statistically significant for this research paper. The measurement of financial performance does not have any impact during subprime mortgage crisis. The firm results shows increasing profitability, reducing debt, stronger company value and shareholders earning better dividend.
Perceptions of Trust: Communicating Climate Change to Cattle Producers

The Cattle and Climate Conversations Workshop for Cooperative Extension and Natural Resources Conservation Service, the last activity funded through a multi-regional United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) grant, took place in October 2016 in Denver, Colorado, for Extension and Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) representatives in the Southwest and Mountain West who work extensively with cattle producers. The purpose of this study was to identify how Extension agents and NRCS personnel in this workshop viewed the issue of “trust,” as it relates to communicating the topic of climate change to cattle producers. Three focus groups, comprised of 29 attendees of the workshop, were conducted simultaneously at the end of the conference. Specific themes about trust included the politically charged nature of climate change, climate change data manipulation, negativity of media surrounding climate change, weathercasters getting predictions wrong, agriculture getting a “black eye” with the public, and participants’ relationships with cattle producers. Findings indicate varying levels of distrust, related to sources of information and influence on the topic of climate change, greatly impact how and whether Extension Service and NRCS employees actually talk “climate change” to cattle producers. Based on the study’s findings, it is recommended that for Extension and NRCS employees to talk about controversial issues, like climate change, it is important to create relationships with clients. In addition, communication and education professionals working with cattle producers should avoid politicizing the topic of climate change if they want climate-related programs to be accepted.
Bis(4-pyridyl) disulfide–2,2′-[(p-phenylenebis(oxy)]diacetic acid (1/1)

The asymmetric unit of the title 1:1 co-crystal, C10H8N2S2·C10H10O6, comprises two half-molecules, the bis(4-pyridyl) disulfide having twofold rotational symmetry and the 2,2′-[(p-phenylenebis(oxy)]diacetic acid having crystallographic inversion symmetry. In the disulfide molecule, the dihedral angle between the two pyridine rings is 86.8 (1)°, while the carboxyl groups of the substituted quinone lie essentially in the plane of the benzene ring [dihedral angle = 5.3 (1)°]. In the crystal, the components are linked via intermolecular O—H⋯N hydrogen bonds into zigzag chains which extend along c and are interlinked through C—H⋯π associations.
Lyric Quotation in Plato

Chapter 1 Foreword Chapter 2 Introduction Chapter 3 Simonides' Ode to Scopas in the Protagoras Chapter 4 Callicles' Quotation of Pindar in the Gorgias Chapter 5 Stesichorus' Palinode in the Phaedrus Chapter 6 Conclusion Chapter 7 Bibliography Chapter 8 Index
Modeling of Skin Color and Translucency 1

The computer modeling of skin appearance has a wide range of applications, from the generation of realistic images for educational and entertainment purposes to the screening of medical conditions and the assessment of the efficacy of sunscreens and cosmetics. Skin appearance attributes, such as color and translucency, result from complex light interaction processes. In order to simulate these processes and obtain reliable predictions about skin appearance attributes, it is necessary to take into account the biophysical properties of the different skin tissues such as thickness, refractive index, and the presence of light absorbers and scatterers. Although the main skin tissues are normally represented by layers during light transport simulations, the number of skin layers and Gladimir V. G. Baranoski,a Tenn F. Chen,a and Aravind Krishnaswamyb aUniversity of Waterloo, 200 University Ave. West, Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G1, Canada bGoogle Inc., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, USA