Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Competing Solutions: American Health Care Proposals and International Experience

With health care reform at the top of the domestic agenda, this volume assesses the Clinton administration's proposals and several alternative plans by discussing how six other countries have organized health care finance and delivery to achieve universal access to comparable quality care at much lower costs. The six countries examined--Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, and Japan--reveal both the variety and fundamental similarities of medical care systems in the rest of the industrialized world. Joseph White uses foreign experience to indicate the proper direction for American reform and to identify interesting alternatives that suggest compromises for what are usually presented in the U.S. as " either-or" choices. Examples include the role allowed for private insurance within all national systems; exceptions to fee schedules in Australia, France, and Germany; and the complaint mechanism for malpractice in New South Wales. White begins by describing each country's system and then follows with chapters disucssing three classes of problems. " Quality and Access" uses the experience of other countries to establish a reasonable baseline for what the U.S. should aim to achieve. " Collecting the Money" discusses who pays and how. " Controlling Costs" explains how other countries have moderated their cost increases. The final chapter assesses American reform proposals in light of the foreign evidence. White argues that a synthesis of " competition" and " regulation" is possible and that such a synthesis is approached by the Clinton proposals. But he also identifies areas where those proposals fall short or risk collapsingof their own weight. He concludes by comparing the administration's proposals to the major alternatives. " This book is serious scholarship at its best. Comprehensive in scope, insightful in character, and compelling in its reasoning, the book presents a balanced treatment of alternative proposals. " Choice
The local arena for combating poverty. Malmö, Sweden.

Reducing poverty and social exclusion is one of the main challenges for ensuring social cohesion in Europe. The research project COPE – Combating Poverty in Europe: Re-organising Active Inclusion through Participatory and Integrated Modes of Multilevel Governance’ – analyses trends of poverty and social exclusion in Europe, and examines the dynamics of minimum income protection policies that potentially help alleviate the risk of poverty in Europe. A particular focus is on the situation of single mothers, long-term unemployed and the working poor, who face particular risks of poverty and social exclusion. To what extent have minimum income policies functioned as last resort social security for these three groups, and in what sense can ‘active inclusion’ policies credited with protecting them from poverty and social exclusion? The present report is part of COPE’s effort to uncover the dynamics of local level policy reforms in the area ‘active inclusion’, namely reforms affecting local policies that specify the adequacy of minimum income benefits, the provision of employment services, as well as the organisation of access to social services in Malmo. It focuses particularly on the three groups’ single mothers, long-term unemployed persons, as well as the working poor. (Less)
Risk factors for spontaneous abortion.

A case-control study was conducted to evaluate risk factors for spontaneous abortions. Cases were 94 women with two or more unexplained miscarriages (after exclusion of genetic, endocrine and Müllerian factors) and no term pregnancy, controls were 176 women admitted for normal delivery to the same clinic where cases were identified. Questions were asked about personal characteristics and habits, and gynaecological history. A family history of recurrent miscarriage was more common among women with spontaneous miscarriages than among the controls (13 cases versus 8 controls, relative risk (RR) = 3.2, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.3-8.1). Compared to women whose menarche occurred at age 11 or younger, the RRs were 0.8 when menarche occurred at age 12-13 and 0.5 at age 14 or more: this trend in risk was statistically significant. Compared with never smokers, current smokers had about a 40% increased risk of miscarriage and the risk increased with number of cigarettes per day. No association emerged with sociodemographic characteristics (e.g. education, marital status, age of the partner), reproductive history (age at first pregnancy), type of contraceptive used and other general lifestyle habits (e.g. alcohol or coffee consumption).
Noise Invariant Frame Selection: A Simple Method to Address the Background Noise Problem for Text-independent Speaker Verification

The performance of speaker-related systems usually degrades heavily in practical applications largely due to the presence of background noise. To improve the robustness of such systems in unknown noisy environments, this paper proposes a simple pre-processing method called Noise Invariant Frame Selection (NIFS). Based on several noisy constraints, it selects noise invariant frames from utterances to represent speakers. Experiments conducted on the TIMIT database showed that the NIFS can significantly improve the performance of Vector Quantization (VQ), Gaussian Mixture Model-Universal Background Model (GMM-UBM) and i-vector-based speaker verification systems in different unknown noisy environments with different SNRs, in comparison to their baselines. Meanwhile, the proposed NIFS-based speaker verification systems achieves similar performance when we change the constraints (hyper-parameters) or features, which indicates that it is robust and easy to reproduce. Since NIFS is designed as a general algorithm, it could be further applied to other similar tasks.
Risk-Adjusted Return When Returns Are Not Normally Distributed

Recently, a number of authors have shown that by using dynamic trading strategies and/or investing in options, a portfolio's Sharpe ratio can be increased even when the portfolio manager has no “skill. ” The increased Sharpe ratio results from creating a return distribution that is significantly different from normal and typically has significant negative skewness. The author presents a generalized approach to calculating the Sharpe ratio of an asset or a portfolio when the return distribution is not necessarily normal. The procedure adjusts the entire distribution of the asset's return so that it will match the return distribution of a benchmark (e.g., S&P 500). The Sharpe ratio of the adjusted return can then be directly compared to that of the benchmark. The author applies the procedure to simulated data and the historical data on hedge fund indices.
The retinoblastoma gene is involved in malignant progression of astrocytomas

Loss of chromosome 13q occurs in up to 50% of human astrocytomas, suggesting the presence of an astrocytoma tumor suppressor gene on that chromosome. To determine whether the retinoblastoma susceptibility gene (Rb) on 13q 14 contributes to the formation of astrocytomas, we examined 85 tumors for loss of heterozygosity (LOH) at the intragenic Rb 1.20 locus. LOH was detercted in 16 of 54 informative high‐grade astrocytomas (30%), but was not detected in 12 low‐grade gliomas. Deletion mapping with flanking markers on 13q revealed that the Rb 1.20 region was preferentially targeted by the deletions. Tumors with LOH at Rb 1.20 were examined for mutations in the remaining Rb allele using single‐strand conformational polymorphism (SSCP) analysis and direct DNA sequencing. Mutations were detected in exon 8 (1 tumor), exon 24 (2 tumors), and intron 24 (1 tumor). Rb protein expression, as assessed by immunohistochemistry, was altered in 3 of 9 cases with LOH and in 1 tumor without LOH. Our results demonstrate that Rb inactivation contributes to the formation of high‐grade astrocytomas, and therefore implicate a second, known tumor suppressor gene in astrocytoma tumorigenesis.
Peacekeeping and critical theory

A deconstruction of the role of peace support operations suggests that they sustain a particular order of world politics that privileges the rich and powerful states in their efforts to control or isolate unruly parts of the world. As a management device it has grown in significance as the strategic imperatives of the post-industrialized, capitalist world have neutered the universal pretensions of the United Nations. Drawing on the work of Robert Cox and Mark Duffield, this essay adopts a critical theory perspective to argue that peace support operations serve a narrow, problem-solving purpose – to doctor the dysfunctions of the global political economy within a framework of liberal imperialism. Two dynamics in world politics might be exploited to mobilize a counter-hegemonic transformation in global governance. First, a radical change in the global trade system and its problematic institutions will create opportunities to emancipate the weak from economic hegemony. Second, future network wars are likely to require increasingly subtle and flexible teams, similar to disaster relief experts, to supply preventive action, economic aid and civilian protection. This might only be achieved by releasing peace support operations from the state-centric control system, and making them answerable to more transparent, more democratic and accountable multinational institutions.
Flexible friends? Lone parents and retail

This paper considers a so far unappreciated sector of the labour market – lone parents. The number of lone parents has increased dramatically in recent years. Consideration of lone parents allows for a discussion of two key issues within the contemporary labour market: the attempts by government to increase the number of lone parents in work; and relatedly, governmental initiatives which have sought to reform the tax and benefit system to make work more attractive and also address the need for work‐life balance for parents. The paper considers these issues by reporting a small‐scale piece of research that sought to address the viability of the supermarket sector as a suitable employer for lone parents. The results suggest that the increasing numbers of students entering the labour market means that supermarkets are unlikely to consider lone parents as an important, discrete source of labour.
Effects of a second insemination after ovulation on fertilization rate and accessory sperm count in sows.

Insemination immediately after ovulation causes low fertilization results owing to a low fertilization rate and possibly also owing to polyspermic fertilization. The present experiment was undertaken to study the effects of a second insemination after ovulation on fertilization rate and embryonic development. In multiparous crossbred sows, transrectal ultrasonography was used at intervals of 4 h to determine ovulation. All sows (n = 91) were artificially inseminated with 3 x 10(9) mixed spermatozoa and, in 31 sows, a second insemination took place at 3 +/- 1 (mean +/- SD) h after ovulation. At 119 +/- 5 h after ovulation, the percentage of normal embryos and the accessory sperm count were determined. In the sows that were inseminated once, the percentage of normal embryos decreased when insemination took place more than 24 h before ovulation, from 88 +/- 20% (16-24 h; n = 15) to 63 +/- 40% (24-32 h; n = 10) (P < 0.05). In the sows that were inseminated again after ovulation, the percentage of normal embryos was high, irrespective of the period between first insemination and ovulation. The difference in percentage of normal embryos between the sows that were inseminated once or twice was significant when the first insemination took place between 24 and 32 h before ovulation; 63 +/- 40% (inseminated once, n = 10) and 97 +/- 5% (inseminated twice, n = 8) (P < 0.05). The accessory sperm count of the normal embryos in a litter was positively related to the percentage of normal embryos in a litter, and this relation was not affected by the interval between first insemination and ovulation or by the number of inseminations. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Using index numbers for deflation in environmental accounting

Abstract Systematic trends in the general price level of goods and services are the subject of extensive measurement and significant interest among researchers, policy makers and the general public. Dynamic price measurement is also important in environmental accounting in that real measures of augmented output are required to draw inferences on sustainability. This paper computes price indices for emissions of five air pollutants in the United States. Using marginal damages, the paper computes Paasche, Laspeyres, Fisher and Tornquist index numbers for five air pollutants spanning the period 1999–2008 for use in computing real environmental accounts. Evidence of time series heterogeneity in the marginal damages is detected: marginal damages for nitrogen oxides increase by a factor of two and marginal damages for NH3 decrease by one-half. The analysis finds that nominal gross damages from air pollution in the United States decrease by 40 per cent between 1999 and 2008.
The Role of Data-driven Priors in Multi-agent Crowd Trajectory Estimation

Resource constraints frequently complicate multi-agent planning problems. Existing algorithms for resource-constrained, multi-agent planning problems rely on the assumption that the constraints are deterministic. However, frequently resource constraints are themselves subject to uncertainty from external influences. Uncertainty about constraints is especially challenging when agents must execute in an environment where communication is unreliable, making on-line coordination difficult. In those cases, it is a significant challenge to find coordinated allocations at plan time depending on availability at run time. To address these limitations, we propose to extend algorithms for constrained multi-agent planning problems to handle stochastic resource constraints. We show how to factorize resource limit uncertainty and use this to develop novel algorithms to plan policies for stochastic constraints. We evaluate the algorithms on a search-and-rescue problem and on a power-constrained planning domain where the resource constraints are decided by nature. We show that plans taking into account all potential realizations of the constraint obtain significantly better utility than planning for the expectation, while causing fewer constraint violations.
A multi-stage attack mitigation mechanism for software-defined home networks

Software-defined Home Networks (SDHN) is a key development trend of smart home which is proposed to realize multi-home visual sharing. With the improved openness and programming ability, SDHN faces increased network threat than traditional home networks. Especially, because of the diversity and heterogeneity of smart home products, multi-stage attack is more convenient to be performed in SDHN. To mitigate multi-stage attack in SDHN, some significant problems are needed to be addressed. The first problem is security assessment along with attack events. The second one is countermeasure selection problem based on security assessment result and security policy. The third one is attack mitigation countermeasure deployment problem according to current network context to meet the countermeasure decision instantly. In this paper, a multi-stage attack mitigation mechanism is proposed for SDHN using Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Firstly, an evidence-driven security assessment method using SDN factors and NFV-based detection is designed to perform security assessment along with observed security events. Secondly, an attack mitigation countermeasure selection method is proposed. The evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism is effective for multi-stage attack mitigation in SDHN1.
Deletion of CGLD1 Impairs PSII and Increases Singlet Oxygen Tolerance of Green Alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

The green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a key model organism for studying photosynthesis and oxidative stress in unicellular eukaryotes. Using a forward genetics approach, we have identified and characterized a mutant x32, which lacks a predicted protein named CGLD1 (Conserved in Green Lineage and Diatom 1) in GreenCut2, under normal and stress conditions. We show that loss of CGLD1 resulted in minimal photoautotrophic growth and PSII activity in the organism. We observed reduced amount of PSII complex and core subunits in the x32 mutant based on blue-native (BN)/PAGE and immunoblot analysis. Moreover, x32 exhibited increased sensitivity to high-light stress and altered tolerance to different reactive oxygenic species (ROS) stress treatments, i.e., decreased resistance to H2O2/or tert-Butyl hydroperoxide (t-BOOH) and increased tolerance to neutral red (NR) and rose bengal (RB) that induce the formation of singlet oxygen, respectively. Further analysis via quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) indicated that the increased singlet-oxygen tolerance of x32 was largely correlated with up-regulated gene expression of glutathione-S-transferases (GST). The phenotypical and physiological implications revealed from our experiments highlight the important roles of CGLD1 in maintaining structure and function of PSII as well as in protection of Chlamydomonas under photo-oxidative stress conditions.
Fusing wavelet and short-term features for speaker identification in noisy environment

Effective Speaker Identification System (SIS) involves extracting features effectively. In this paper, we propose a feature extraction scheme based on wavelet analysis which is used along with short-term features. To overcome the drawbacks of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), we propose to combine Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) with Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features. The combined features were used as inputs to K-nearest neighbors (Knn) classifier. The effectiveness of the proposed method is investigated for closed-set text-independent SIS in clean and noisy environments. The experimental results indicated that the proposed approach can achieve better identification rate performance with feature extraction using SWT rather than DWT.
Relation of higher folate intake to lower risk of Alzheimer disease in the elderly.

BACKGROUND Higher intake of folate and vitamins B6 (pyridoxine hydrochloride) and B12 (cyanocobalamin) may decrease the risk of Alzheimer disease (AD) through the lowering of homocysteine levels. OBJECTIVE To relate intake of folate and vitamins B6 and B12 to AD risk. DESIGN AND PATIENTS We followed up 965 persons 65 years or older without dementia at baseline for a mean +/- SD period of 6.1 +/- 3.3 person-years after the administration of a semiquantitative food frequency questionnaire. Total, dietary, and supplement intake of folate and vitamins B6 and B12 and kilocalorie intake were estimated from the questionnaire responses. We related energy-adjusted intake of folate and vitamins B6 and B12 to incident AD using the Cox proportional hazards regression model. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Incident AD. RESULTS We found 192 cases of incident AD. The highest quartile of total folate intake was related to a lower risk of AD (hazard ratio, 0.5; 95% confidence interval, 0.3-0.9; P=.02 for trend) after adjustment for age, sex, education, ethnic group, the epsilon4 allele of apolipoprotein E, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, current smoking, heart disease, stroke, and vitamin B6 and B12 levels. Vitamin B6 and B12 levels were not related to the risk of AD. CONCLUSIONS Higher folate intake may decrease the risk of AD independent of other risk factors and levels of vitamins B6 and B12. These results require confirmation with clinical trials.
Religious Attendance and Biological Functioning

Objective: This study explores the role of religious attendance across a wide range of biological markers. Method: The data are drawn from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project to assess continuous and categorical biomarker specifications. Results: Across specifications, higher levels of attendance are associated with lower levels of pulse rate and overall allostatic load. Depending on the specification, higher levels of attendance are also associated with lower levels of body mass, diastolic blood pressure, C-reactive protein, and Epstein–Barr virus. Attendance is unrelated to dehydroepiandrosterone, systolic blood pressure, and glycosylated hemoglobin across specifications. Discussion: The study confirms that religious attendance is associated with healthier biological functioning in later life. Additional research is needed to verify these patterns with other data sources and to test viable mediators of the association between religious attendance and biological risk.
Management of diffusely infiltrating glioma in the elderly

Purpose of review Genetic, epigenetic, and expression analyses have refined the traditional, histopathology-based classification of diffusely infiltrating gliomas. This review summarizes these trends and implications for elderly patients. Recent findings The vast majority of diffusely infiltrating gliomas in elderly patients share an unfavorable molecular phenotype, that is, telomerase reverse transcriptase promoter mutation in the absence of isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) mutation and 1p/19q codeletion. Histopathologically, these are mostly astrocytic tumors and treatment is guided by the methylation status of the O6-methylguanine-DNA-methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter. 1p/19q codeletion indicates oligodendroglial histology and benefit from the addition of procarbazine, chlorethyl-cyclohexyl-nitroso-urea/lomustine, and vincristine polychemotherapy to radiotherapy. These tumors are almost exclusively associated with IDH mutations, but their molecular profile is rare in elderly patients. Two large phase III trials, RTOG 0825 and AVAglio, failed to demonstrate an overall survival benefit from antiangiogenic therapy with bevacizumab added to combined chemoradiotherapy (TMZ) in patients with newly diagnosed glioblastoma, but a trend toward improved survival with increasing age can be noted. Ongoing clinical trials in elderly patients with diffusely infiltrating glioma will clarify the role of combined chemoradiotherapy, and of bevacizumab or other antiangiogenic agents as an adjunct to radiotherapy. Summary The choice of first-line therapy in elderly patients with diffusely infiltrating glioma is between postoperative hypofractionated radiotherapy and chemotherapy, guided by MGMT methylation in most patients.