Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An update on emerging drugs for the treatment of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

ABSTRACT Introduction: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a chronic, progressive fibrotic lung disease of unknown etiology associated with a high morbidity and mortality. The hallmark of the disease is impaired healing after alveolar epithelial injury in the setting of a genetic predisposition. Development of two new drugs has changed the landscape of the treatment of IPF but more work is needed to improve outcomes and improve survival. Areas covered: The development of two antifibrotic agents, nintedanib and pirfenidone has been an exciting landmark in the treatment of IPF. Current research efforts are focused on developing new drugs, as well as combination of new agents with currently available therapies. New molecules in development target not only the deposition of extracellular matrix, but also upstream pathways including those mediated by immunity. Expert opinion: IPF is a complex and a heterogeneous disease involving several different pathways culminating in fibrosis. Efforts are underway to develop drugs targeting the different pathways. The key to the successful treatment of IPF will require identification of better end-points for research as well as precision medicine involving the use of multidrug therapy personalized to specific patients based on endomolecular genotyping.
PULSAR PAIR CASCADES IN MAGNETIC FIELDS WITH OFFSET POLAR CAPS

Neutron star magnetic fields may have polar caps (PCs) that are offset from the dipole axis, through field-line sweepback near the light cylinder or non-symmetric currents within the star. The effects of such offsets on electron–positron pair cascades are investigated, using simple models of dipole magnetic fields with small distortions that shift the PCs by different amounts or directions. Using a Monte Carlo pair cascade simulation, we explore the changes in the pair spectrum, multiplicity, and energy flux across the PC, as well as the trends in pair flux and pair energy flux with spin-down luminosity, Lsd. We also give an estimate of the distribution of heating flux from returning positrons on the PC for different offsets. We find that even modest offsets can produce significant increases in pair multiplicity, especially for pulsars that are near or beyond the pair death lines for centered PCs, primarily because of higher accelerating fields. Pair spectra cover several decades in energy, with the spectral range of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) two orders of magnitude higher than for normal pulsars, and PC offsets allow significant extension of all spectra to lower pair energies. We find that the total PC pair luminosity Lpair is proportional to Lsd, with Lpair ∼ 10−3Lsd for normal pulsars and Lpair ∼ 10−2Lsd for MSPs. Remarkably, the total PC heating luminosity for even large offsets increases by less than a factor of two, even though the PC area increases by much larger factors, because most of the heating occurs near the magnetic axis.
Learning and Peer Effects

We present experimental evidence on the existence of lies which are disadvantageous to the person lying in individual decision problems. Potential reasons for this behavior are preferences for manipulating others’ perceptions or preserving a positive self-perception. If the utility gained from a certain perception outweighs the monetary payoff gained from an advantageous lie or the truth, people will tell a disadvantageous lie. JEL Classification: C91, C92, D82,
Identification of technological structures using patent statistics

This paper studies the use of patent statistics in identifying four aspects of technological structure, namely, the potential knowledge pool, cumulativeness, inter-firm homogeneity in technology levels, and the scope of innovations. The firms are sampled from the chemical (CHEM), the computer (COM) and the electrical and electronic (EE) industries worldwide. Using the proxies defined, we find that (i) the contributions of intra-industry spillover are low, at 12%, 10%, and 9% for the three industries respectively; (ii) they can internalize 15%, 19% and 13% of their previous research efforts respectively; and (iii) a positive relationship between knowledge spillover and technology overlap, and between scope of innovation and number of patents being cited in future.
Exploitation des Liens Sémantiques pour l'Expansion de Requêtes dans un Système de Recherche d'Information

RÉSUMÉ: Dans cet article, nous proposons d’exploiter des liens sémantiques entre concepts pour améliorer la recherche d’information. Un thesaurus électronique de langue générale est utilisé pour la reformulation des requêtes utilisateurs en procédant par un processus d’"expansion prudente" en amont d’un moteur de recherche. Ce processus, transparent à l’utilisateur, exploite d’abord la notion de concepts multitermes pour désambiguïser les mots de la requête. Il s’appuie ensuite sur les relations sémantiques entre concepts pour élargir la requête. L’ensemble conduit à une amélioration significative de la pertinence des réponses retournées par le moteur. Cette technique a été évaluée en utilisant le moteur Mercure développé à l’IRIT, WordNet comme base de données lexicales et Clef2001 comme collection de test.
Android Based Vehicle Tracking System

Android, as an operating system, has provided users with great opportunity to innovate and get things done in a mobile device. This paper presents how to use the GPS technology in Android devices to complete an interactive application which can be used to monitor a fleet of vehicles and display their positions on Google Maps. By using SMS messages, this information can be transmitted to the server. It provides a telemonitoring system for distribution or transportation vehicles owned by a specific company. The whole system is made of two key parts. The first one is the client, which represents an Android application that is installed in the vehicle. During a vehicle’s motion, its location can be reported by SMS messages. The second is the server, which is a computer programme representing a map using Google Maps to show the last known locations of all tracked vehicles. The current system is able to provide the monitoring process from anywhere. The purpose of this system is to use the Android platform to provide the following features: i) Location information (longitude, latitude). ii) Real time tracking using SMS. iii) Map View of all vehicles’ locations. This system is needed by many companies to monitor illegal and unethical use of their vehicles. It also provides assurance that the location of the vehicle is known in the case of robbery.
A Novel Six-Band Hysteresis Control for the Packed U Cells Seven-Level Converter: Experimental Validation

In this paper, the authors propose a novel six-band hysteresis technique to efficiently control the seven-level packed U cells (PUC) converter. The proposed PUC combines advantages of the flying capacitor and the cascaded H-bridge topologies. The novel control strategy is proposed in order to insure a good operation of the PUC converter in both inverter and rectifier modes. In case of rectifier operation, the proposed six-band controller is designed to draw a sinusoidal line current (load current in case of inverter operation) with a unity power factor. Harmonics contents of line current (or load current) and rectifier input voltage (or inverter output voltage) are very low which permits the reduction of the active and passive filters ratings resulting on a very high energetic efficiency and a reduced installation cost. The proposed concept was validated through experimental implementation using real-time controller, the DS1103 of dSpace.
Investment in Human Beings

Публикация главы из книги Г. Беккера "Человеческий капитал", в которой рассматривается проблематика инвестиций в повышение квалификации работника через дополнительное образование. Описывается несколько схем оплаты дополнительного образования, дается оценка их эффективности и динамика заработной платы работника в зависимости от выбранной схемы. Русский перевод главы см. : "США: экономика, политика, идеология", № 11, ноябрь, 1993 г.
Intangible Capital and Productivity Growth in Canada

Intangible capital consists of investments that do not take on the solid, physical characteristics of machinery and equipment or buildings. Nevertheless, such investments have some of the properties of other types of investments in that they yield long-lasting benefits as a result of expenditures that are made today. In the National Accounts, these expenditures need to be capitalized rather than expensed as intermediate materials for purposes of estimating gross domestic product (GDP). Recent papers have considered issues surrounding the measurement of intangibles. Baldwin et al. (2005) discussed issues surrounding research and development (RD it also allows cross-country comparisons of Canada to the United States. Second, this paper moves from just measuring investment to also developing capital stock estimates. This requires assumptions about depreciation rates. In both instances, the paper adopts assumptions similar to those used elsewhere in developing estimates for the United States, in order to ensure comparability. Third, the paper incorporates the estimates of intangible capital into the growth-accounting framework so as to understand how it is related to productivity growth. A comparison of Canada and the United States in this regard is also provided.
What drives plan implementation? Plans, planning agencies and developers

This article investigates the determinants of plan implementation by applying a recently‐developed Plan Implementation Evaluation methodology. The lack of methodology to assess the implementation of plans has so far precluded any systematic analysis of the determinants of the implementation of local environmental plans. The article focuses on the implementation of plans in New Zealand. The key factors of implementation are: the quality of the plan; the capacity and commitment of land developers to implement plans; the capacity and commitment of the staff and leadership of planning agencies to implement plans; and the interactions between developers and the agency. The analysis is based on 353 permits implementing six local environmental plans in New Zealand, and on surveys of the developers who obtained the permits and of the planning agencies that granted the permits. The analysis finds that plan implementation is mainly driven by the resources of the planning agencies and by the quality of the plans, rather than by the characteristics of developers. Investments in plan writing and agency and staff capacity building thus improve the implementation of plans in the long‐run.
A Small Open Economy in Depression: Lessons from Canada in the 1930s

This paper tests the hypothesis that idiosyncratic U.S. disturbances and their international propagation can account for the global Depression. Exploiting common stochastic trends in U.S. and Canadian interwar data, we estimate a small open economy model for Canada that decomposes output fluctuations into sources identifiable with world and country-specific disturbances. We find that the onset, depth and duration of output collapse in both Canada and the U.S. are primarily attributable to a common, permanent output shock leaving little significant role for idiosyncratic disturbances originating in either economy.
Accrual or Cash Flow Anomaly? Evidence from New Zealand

This paper investigates the presence of the accrual and the cash flow anomalies in the New Zealand stock market for the period of 1987 to 2003. We observe insignificant evidence of the accrual anomaly but find strong evidence of the presence of the cash flow anomaly. However, from 1987 to 1992 – a period before the introduction of the Companies and the Financial Reporting Acts 1993 – the presence of the accrual anomaly was statistically significant suggesting that the introduction of the FRA had a significant impact on the occurrence of the anomaly. We observe further that firms with high discretionary accruals experience significant negative future stock returns. This evidence is consistent with the notion that managers of these firms engage in earnings management.
Towards Structured Analysis of Broadcast Badminton Videos

Sports video data is recorded for nearly every major tournament but remains archived and inaccessible to large scale data mining and analytics. It can only be viewed sequentially or manually tagged with higher-level labels which is time consuming and prone to errors. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework for automatic attributes tagging and analysis of sport videos. We use commonly available broadcast videos of matches and, unlike previous approaches, does not rely on special camera setups or additional sensors. Our focus is on Badminton as the sport of interest. We propose a method to analyze a large corpus of badminton broadcast videos by segmenting the points played, tracking and recognizing the players in each point and annotating their respective badminton strokes. We evaluate the performance on 10 Olympic matches with 20 players and achieved 95.44% point segmentation accuracy, 97.38% player detection score (mAP@0.5), 97.98% player identification accuracy, and stroke segmentation edit scores of 80.48%. We further show that the automatically annotated videos alone could enable the gameplay analysis and inference by computing understandable metrics such as player's reaction time, speed, and footwork around the court, etc.
Farm productivity and rural poverty in India

Armed with new data, we return to an old question from the pages of this journal: to what extent do India's rural poor share in agricultural growth? Combining data from 24 household sample surveys spanning 35 years with other sources, we estimate a model of the joint determination of consumption‐poverty measures, agricultural wages, and food prices. We find that higher farm productivity brought both absolute and relative gains to poor rural households. A large share of the gains was via wages and prices, though these effects took time. The benefits to the poor were not confined to those near the poverty line.
The Role of Farming Experience on the Adoption of Agricultural Technologies: Evidence from Smallholder Farmers in Uganda

Abstract This article investigates the relationship between adoption of and experience with agricultural technologies. We use both non-parametric and parametric estimations on data from rural farmers in Uganda. We find an inverted-U relationship between adoption of and experience with agricultural technologies in banana, coffee and maize. This suggests that farming experience is useful in early stages of adoption of a given technology when farmers are still testing its potential benefits, which later determine its retention or disadoption over time. Thus, gradual advances in technology development and continuous retraining of farmers are essential for sustainable adoption of agricultural technologies for some crops.
Semiparametric identification of structural dynamic optimal stopping time models

This paper presents new identification results for the class of structural dynamic optimal stopping time models that are built upon the framework of the structural discrete Markov decision processes proposed by Rust (1994). We demonstrate how to semiparametrically identify the deep structural parameters of interest in the case where the utility function of an absorbing choice in the model is parametric but the distribution of unobserved heterogeneity is nonparametric. Our identification strategy depends on availability of a continuous observed state variable that satisfies certain exclusion restrictions. If such excluded variable is accessible, we show that the dynamic optimal stopping model is semiparametrically identified using control function approaches.
Oligonucleotide fingerprints of RNA species obtained from rhabdoviruses belonging to the vesicular stomatitis virus subgroup

The relationships among the genomes of various rhabdoviruses belonging to the vesicular stomatitis virus subgroup were analyzed by an oligonucleotide fingerprinting technique. Of 10 vesicular stomatitis viruses, Indiana serotype (VSV Indiana), obtained from various sources, either no, few, or many differences were observed in the oligonucleotide fingerprints of the 42S RNA species extracted from standard B virions. Analyses of the oligonucleotides obtained from RNA extracted from three separate preparations of VSV Indiana defective T particles showed that their RNAs contain fewer oligonucleotides than the corresponding B particle RNA species. The fingerprints of RNA obtained from five VSV New Jersey serotype viruses were easily distinguished from those of the VSV Indiana isolates. Three of the VSV New Jersey RNA fingerprints were similar to each other but quite different from those of the other two viruses. The RNA fingerprints of two Chandipura virus isolates (one obtained from India and one from Nigeria) were also unique, whereas the fingerprint of Cocal virus RNA was unlike that of the serologically related VSV Indiana.
C. elegans sperm bud vesicles to deliver a meiotic maturation signal to distant oocytes

The major sperm protein (MSP) is the central cytoskeletal element required for actin-independent motility of nematode spermatozoa. MSP has a dual role in Caenorhabditis elegans reproduction, functioning as a hormone for both oocyte meiotic maturation and ovarian muscle contraction. The identification of the signaling function of MSP raised the question, how do spermatozoa, which are devoid of ribosomes, ER and Golgi, release a cytoplasmic protein lacking a signal sequence? Here, we provide evidence that MSP export occurs by the budding of novel vesicles that have both inner and outer membranes with MSP sandwiched in between. MSP vesicles are apparently labile structures that generate long-range MSP gradients for signaling at the oocyte cell surface. Both spermatozoa and non-motile spermatids bud MSP vesicles, but their stability and signaling properties differ. Budding protrusions from the cell body contain MSP, but not the MSD proteins, which counteract MSP filament assembly. We propose that MSP generates the protrusive force for its own vesicular export.
The Nature of Persistence in Turkish Real Exchange Rates

The objective of this paper is to investigate the persistence in Turkish real exchange rates (RER) using unit root tests and autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average (ARFIMA) models. We consider two RERs, one in terms of the German DM and the other, in terms of the US$. The plots of these RERs (based on both wholesale price indices and consumer price indices) for the period 1984.01-2000.09 reveal that they contain multiple shifts in their deterministic terms, one of which may need to be treated as an outlier for some of the series. Hence, when this aspect is taken into account in both the unit root tests and the ARFIMA models, we find strong evidence of stationarity in almost all series, together with significant long-memory components. These findings, then, support the validity of the absolute version of the "quasi" purchasing power parity hypothesis for Turkey.
Tooth loss in molars with and without furcation involvement - a systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to investigate risk of tooth loss in molars with furcation involvement (FI) based on initial diagnosis. MATERIALS AND METHODS A systematic search of the literature was conducted in Ovid Medline, Embase, LILACS and Cochrane Library for longitudinal studies with at least 3 years follow-up including measures of FI and data on tooth loss. RESULTS A total of 21 studies were included in the review, from an initial search of 1207 titles. The relative risk of tooth loss during maintenance therapy attributable to FI was 1.46 (95% CI = 0.99-2.15, p = 0.06) for studies up to 10 years and 2.21 (95% CI = 1.79-2.74, p < 0.0001) for studies with a follow-up of 10-15 years. A gradual increase in the risk of tooth loss was observed for molars with degree II and III FI. CONCLUSIONS The presence of FI approximately doubles the risk of tooth loss for molars maintained in supportive periodontal therapy for up to 10-15 years. However, most molars, even with grade III FI respond well to periodontal therapy, suggesting that every effort should be made to maintain these teeth when possible. Long-term studies reporting patient-reported outcomes are needed to substantiate this conclusion.
Analytical variability among methods for the measurement of 25-hydroxyvitamin D: still adding to the noise.

OBJECTIVES To compare total 25-hydroxyvitamin D [25(OH) D] results measured by 3 direct immunoassays, including the previous version of the DiaSorin Liaison2 assay and the current versions of the Siemens Centaur2 and the Abbott Architect assays, with results measured in serum extracts by liquid chromatography/tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS) and radioimmunoassay (RIA). METHODS Our study sample consisted of 163 consecutive clinical specimens submitted to our laboratory for 25(OH)D testing. RESULTS Regression and bias analyses of the data revealed that results measured by the 3 direct immunoassay methods had high degrees of random variability and bias relative to the results determined by LC/MS and RIA. The relative biases between results measured by the direct assays and the comparison methods exceeded a recommended criterion for the total allowable error of a 25(OH)D test in as many as 48% of our clinical specimens. Of the subjects in our study sample, 33, 37, 30, 45, and 71 were classified as vitamin D deficient based on results determined by LC/MS, RIA, Liaison2, Architect, and Centaur2, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Intermethod variability in 25(OH)D assays continues to limit our progress toward the establishment of reference values for 25(OH)D in health and our efforts to gain a better understanding of the role of vitamin D insufficiency as a risk factor for disease.