Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Repartnering after marital dissolution in Italy.

Studies about repartnering relating to Europe and in particular to Southern Europe are not many. The reason for this is attributable to the low diffusion of marital instability in these countries. Anyway, in the last years separations and divorces had a sharp increase; and second unions became more common. The phenomenon of marital dissolution is rapidly growing also in Italy (Istat, 2007). The only analyses on repartnering in Italy with a longitudinal approach are based on data of the second half of the 1990s (Rettaroli, 2002; Angeli, De Rose, 2003). They confirm some results of literature, but as a whole, they give a still fuzzy picture of the determinants of the phenomenon. This paper has analyzed more in depth demographic and social determinants of repartnering (both remarriages and cohabitations) among Italian women who dissolved their first marriage. Moreover, also the effects of the contextual aspect are considered. Due to the different phase of demographic transition which North and South of Italy are going through, there may be, indeed, different models of repartnering in these two areas. Data come from the survey “Family and Social Subjects” conducted in Italy in 2003. Piecewise constant exponential models (Blossfeld, Rohwer, 2002) are used.
Vascular Dysfunction in Women With a History of Preeclampsia and Intrauterine Growth Restriction: Insights Into Future Vascular Risk

Background— Women with a history of placental disease are at increased risk for the future development of vascular disease. It is unknown whether preexisting endothelial dysfunction underlies both the predisposition to placental disease and the later development of vascular disease. The aim of this study was to assess vascular function in postpartum women and to determine whether differences emerged depending on the presentation of placental disease. Methods and Results— Women with a history of early-onset preeclampsia (n=15), late-onset preeclampsia (n=9), intrauterine growth restriction without preeclampsia (n=9), and prior normal pregnancy (n=16) were studied 6 to 24 months postpartum. Flow-mediated vasodilatation and flow-independent (glyceryl trinitrate–induced) vasodilatation were studied through the use of high-resolution vascular ultrasound examination of the brachial artery. Arterial stiffness was assessed by pulse-wave analysis (augmentation index). Laboratory assessment included circulating angiogenic factors (vascular endothelial growth factor, soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1, placental growth factor, and soluble endoglin). Flow-mediated vasodilatation was significantly reduced in women with previous early-onset preeclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction compared with women with previous late-onset preeclampsia and control subjects (3.2±2.7% and 2.1±1.2% versus 7.9±3.8% and 9.1±3.5%, respectively; P<0.0001). Flow-independent vasodilatation was similar among all groups. Similarly, the radial augmentation index was significantly increased among women with previous early-onset preeclampsia and intrauterine growth restriction, but not among late preeclamptic women and control subjects (P=0.0105). Circulating angiogenic factors were similar in all groups. Conclusion— Only women with a history of early-onset preeclampsia or intrauterine growth restriction without preeclampsia exhibit impaired vascular function, which might explain their predisposition to placental disease and their higher risk of future vascular disease.
Early Glycemic Control and Magnitude of HbA1c Reduction Predict Cardiovascular Events and Mortality: Population-Based Cohort Study of 24,752 Metformin Initiators

OBJECTIVE We investigated the association of early achieved HbA1c level and magnitude of HbA1c reduction with subsequent risk of cardiovascular events or death in patients with type 2 diabetes who initiate metformin. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS This was a population-based cohort study including all metformin initiators with HbA1c tests in Northern Denmark, 2000–2012. Six months after metformin initiation, we classified patients by HbA1c achieved (<6.5% or higher) and by magnitude of HbA1c change from the pretreatment baseline. We used Cox regression to examine subsequent rates of acute myocardial infarction, stroke, or death, controlling for baseline HbA1c and other confounding factors. RESULTS We included 24,752 metformin initiators (median age 62.5 years, 55% males) with a median follow-up of 2.6 years. The risk of a combined outcome event gradually increased with rising levels of HbA1c achieved compared with a target HbA1c of <6.5%: adjusted hazard ratio (HR) 1.18 (95% CI 1.07–1.30) for 6.5–6.99%, HR 1.23 (1.09–1.40) for 7.0–7.49%, HR 1.34 (1.14–1.57) for 7.5–7.99%, and HR 1.59 (1.37–1.84) for ≥8%. Results were consistent for individual outcome events and robust by age-group and other patient characteristics. A large absolute HbA1c reduction from baseline also predicted outcome: adjusted HR 0.80 (0.65–0.97) for Δ = −4, HR 0.98 (0.80–1.20) for Δ = −3, HR 0.92 (0.78–1.08) for Δ = −2, and HR 0.99 (0.89–1.10) for Δ = −1 compared with no HbA1c change (Δ = 0). CONCLUSIONS A large initial HbA1c reduction and achievement of low HbA1c levels within 6 months after metformin initiation are associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular events and death in patients with type 2 diabetes.
Modeling Leadership and Influence in Multi-party Online Discourse

In this article, we present a novel approach towards the detection and modeling of complex social phenomena in multi-party discourse, including leadership, influence, pursuit of power and group cohesion. We have developed a two-tier approach that relies on observable and computable linguistic features of conversational text to make predictions about sociolinguistic behaviors such as Topic Control and Disagreement, that speakers deploy in order to achieve and maintain certain positions and roles in a group. These sociolinguistic behaviors are then used to infer higher-level social phenomena such as Leadership and Influence, which is the focus of this paper. We show robust performance results by comparing our automatically computed results to participants’ own perceptions and rankings. We use weights learnt from correlations with training examples known leadership and influence rankings of participants to optimize our models and to show performance significantly above baseline for two different languages ‐ English and Mandarin Chinese.
Design of LDPC Codes: A Survey and New Results

This survey paper provides fundamentals in the design of LDPC codes. To provide a target for the code designer, we first summarize the EXIT chart technique for determining (near-)optimal degree distributions for LDPC code ensembles. We also demonstrate the simplicity of representing codes by protographs and how this naturally leads to quasi-cyclic LDPC codes. The EXIT chart technique is then extended to the special case of protograph-based LDPC codes. Next, we present several design approaches for LDPC codes which incorporate one or more accumulators, including quasi-cyclic accumulatorbased codes. The second half the paper then surveys several algebraic LDPC code design techniques. First, codes based on finite geometries are discussed and then codes whose designs are based on Reed-Solomon codes are covered. The algebraic designs lead to cyclic, quasi-cyclic, and structured codes. The masking technique for converting regular quasi-cyclic LDPC codes to irregular codes is also presented. Some of these results and codes have not been presented elsewhere. The paper focuses on the binary-input AWGN channel (BI-AWGNC). However, as discussed in the paper, good BI-AWGNC codes tend to be universally good across many channels. Alternatively, the reader may treat this paper as a starting point for extensions to more advanced channels. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of open problems.
Heart disease and stroke statistics--2009 update: a report from the American Heart Association Statistics Committee and Stroke Statistics Subcommittee.

We thank Drs Sean Coady, Eric L. Ding, Brian Eigel, Gregg C. Fonarow, Linda Geiss, Cherie James, Michael Mussolino, and Michael Wolz for their valuable comments and contributions. We acknowledge Tim Anderson and Tom Schneider for their editorial contributions, and Karen Modesitt for her administrative assistance. Disclosures ⇓⇓⇓⇓ View this table: Writing Group Disclosures View this table: Writing Group Disclosures, Continued View this table: Writing Group Disclosures, Continued View this table: Writing Group Disclosures, Continued # Summary {#article-title-2} Each year, the American Heart Association, in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and other government agencies, brings together the most up-to-date statistics on heart disease, stroke, other vascular diseases, and their risk factors and presents them in its Heart Disease and Stroke Statistical Update. The Statistical Update is a valuable resource for researchers, clinicians, healthcare policy makers, media professionals, the lay …
ICNIRP Guidelines GUIDELINES FOR LIMITING EXPOSURE TO TIME-VARYING

IN 1974, the International Radiation Protection Association (IRPA) formed a working group on non-ionizing radiation (NIR), which examined the problems arising in the field of protection against the various types of NIR. At the IRPA Congress in Paris in 1977, this working group became the International Non-Ionizing Radiation Committee (INIRC). In cooperation with the Environmental Health Division of the World Health Organization (WHO), the IRPA/INIRC developed a number of health criteria documents on NIR as part of WHO’s Environmental Health Criteria Programme, sponsored by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Each document includes an overview of the physical characteristics, measurement and instrumentation, sources, and applications of NIR, a thorough review of the literature on biological effects, and an evaluation of the health risks of exposure to NIR. These health criteria have provided the scientific database for the subsequent development of exposure limits and codes of practice relating to NIR. At the Eighth International Congress of the IRPA (Montreal, 18–22 May 1992), a new, independent scientific organization—the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP)—was established as a successor to the IRPA/INIRC. The functions of the Commission are to investigate the hazards that may be associated with the different forms of NIR, develop international guidelines on NIR exposure limits, and deal with all aspects of NIR protection. Biological effects reported as resulting from exposure to static and extremely-low-frequency (ELF) electric and magnetic fields have been reviewed by UNEP/ WHO/IRPA (1984, 1987). Those publications and a number of others, including UNEP/WHO/IRPA (1993) and Allen et al. (1991), provided the scientific rationale for these guidelines. A glossary of terms appears in the Appendix.
The influence of vector behavior on malaria transmission.

Summary Delays in malaria eradication programs are caused more by non-response of fully susceptible vectors to attack measures than by physiological resistance, though the latter receives more attention. Currently recommended methods for vector studies are reviewed, with suggestions for their extension. Three principal South American vectors are shown to rest mainly outside houses by day; some exophily existed before the use of DDT. Their biting cycles are unimodal, with peak activity near midnight, contrasting with minor vectors and non-vectors with bimodal or crepuscular cycles. A. nuneztovari, hitherto thought an anomalous exophagic and crepscular vector, includes two species, a widely distributed non-vector, A. dunhami, and an endophagic nocturnal vector. Observations, mainly from Colombia, on nocturnal contacts with indoor surfaces by vectors, and on entry to and exit from houses are described; contacts were mainly with the lowest parts of walls, well below the height to which they are sprayed. The times of sighting of vectors resting unfed and fed showed normal distributions, their means separated by intervals of 30 to 150 minutes. In A. darlingi, the interval was 150 minutes in unsprayed, 78 minutes in sprayed houses; in A. punctimacula and A. nuneztovari in sprayed houses, the intervals were 96 and 30 to 60 minutes, respectively. The durations of the contacts showed skewed distributions with short periods, medians 1 to 2.5 minutes in all three species, predominating. Mean durations, biased by a few long periods, were greater, for A. darlingi reaching 12 minutes in sprayed houses, 6 in unsprayed. Times of entry and exit to houses, studied in A. darlingi with a drop-net lowered to enclose a house at intervals through the night, showed that, before spraying, about half the mosquitoes entering fed inside, during a stay of about 2 hours. For 3 months after use of a DDT-HCH mixture, 65% of those entering failed to leave; mean stay was 3 hours. Later, with DDT treatment only, the proportion entering and failing to leave fell to 28%. Vector attack, human receptivity, and infectivity of the plasmodial gametocyte, all reach maxima inside houses, late at night; this is the key to persistence of transmission by susceptible vectors. In spite of the prevailing daytime exophily, vectors make multiple short contacts with insecticide-treated surfaces, repeated on each gonotrophic cycle; these are inadeuate to halt transmission in areas of low elevation, high humidity, and temperature, occupied by poorly housed colonists; insecticides lacking the locomotor stimulant action of DDT may be the remedy.
Dynamic behavior of slowly-responsive congestion control algorithms

The recently developed notion of TCP-compatibility has led to a number of proposals for alternative congestion control algorithms whose long-term throughput as a function of a steady-state loss rate is similar to that of TCP. Motivated by the needs of some streaming and multicast applications, these algorithms seem poised to take the current TCP-dominated Internet to an Internet where many congestion control algorithms co-exist. An important characteristic of these alternative algorithms is that they are slowly-responsive, refraining from reacting as drastically as TCP to a single packet loss.However, the TCP-compatibility criteria explored so far in the literature considers only the static condition of a fixed loss rate. This paper investigates the behavior of slowly-responsive, TCP-compatible congestion control algorithms under more realistic dynamic network conditions, addressing the fundamental question of whether these algorithms are safe to deploy in the public Internet. We study persistent loss rates, long- and short-term fairness properties, bottleneck link utilization, and smoothness of transmission rates.
Closing the gap between rocks and clocks using total-evidence dating

Total-evidence dating (TED) allows evolutionary biologists to incorporate a wide range of dating information into a unified statistical analysis. One might expect this to improve the agreement between rocks and clocks but this is not necessarily the case. We explore the reasons for such discordance using a mammalian dataset with rich molecular, morphological and fossil information. There is strong conflict in this dataset between morphology and molecules under standard stochastic models. This causes TED to push divergence events back in time when using inadequate models or vague priors, a phenomenon we term ‘deep root attraction’ (DRA). We identify several causes of DRA. Failure to account for diversified sampling results in dramatic DRA, but this can be addressed using existing techniques. Inadequate morphological models also appear to be a major contributor to DRA. The major reason seems to be that current models do not account for dependencies among morphological characters, causing distorted topology and branch length estimates. This is particularly problematic for huge morphological datasets, which may contain large numbers of correlated characters. Finally, diversification and fossil sampling priors that do not incorporate all the available background information can contribute to DRA, but these priors can also be used to compensate for DRA. Specifically, we show that DRA in the mammalian dataset can be addressed by introducing a modest extra penalty for ghost lineages that are unobserved in the fossil record, for instance by assuming rapid diversification, rare extinction or high fossil sampling rate; any of these assumptions produces highly congruent divergence time estimates with a minimal gap between rocks and clocks. Under these conditions, fossils have a stabilizing influence on divergence time estimates and significantly increase the precision of those estimates, which are generally close to the dates suggested by palaeontologists. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Dating species divergences using rocks and clocks’.
Approximating Theoretical Linguistics Classification in Real Data: the Case of German “nach” Particle Verbs

Testing a theory against real world data can sometimes be helpful in figuring out the shortcomings of your current theory. In this paper, we test a theory about the syntax-semantics interface of German nach-particle verbs against data from a web corpus in order to see if we can use our automatic NLP machinery to corroborate the predictions of the theory. We use state-of-the-art parsers to automatically annotate our data with the features predicted by the theory and then apply a standard clustering approach to approximate the nach-particle verb classes of the theory. The results of our experiment not only help us highlighting the more problematic parts of the theory but also teach us about the strengths and weaknesses of our automatic analysis tools. TITLE AND ABSTRACT IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE, L2 (OPTIONAL, AND ON SAME PAGE) Corpusbasierte Uberprufung einer semantischen Klassifikation deutscher nach-Partikelverben Um Unzulanglichkeiten einer Theorie auszumachen ist es mitunter vonnoten, Hypothesen gegen echtes Textmaterial abzugleichen. In diesem Beitrag soll diskutiert werden, wie Vorhersagen einer Theorie zum syntaktischen und semantischen Verhalten deutscher nach-Partikelverben gegen Netztexte abgeglichen werden konnen und wie dabei eine automatische Textverarbeitung unterstutzend zum Tragen kommt. Es werden Parser des letzten Stands der Forschung verwendet um die Daten mit den von der Theorie vorhergesagten Merkmalen zu annotieren bevor ein standardisiertes Clustering-Verfahren angewandt wird um die theoretischen nach-Partikel-Verb-Klassen nachzubilden. Die Resultate des Experiments unterstreichen nicht nur Problemfalle der Theorie sondern zeigen auch die Starken und Schwachen der automatischen Analyse.
A local face statistics recognition methodology beyond ICA and/or PCA

We have reviewed the independent component analysis (ICA), as an unsupervised ANN learning algorithm for redundancy reduction and feature extraction, and compared its performance with the classical principal component analysis (PCA) of face images, known as "eigenfaces". Based on our experiments, we believe that with PCA and ICA representations, a promising 85% to 95% PD with approximately 5% to 10% FAR in the ROC experiments might be achieved for a closed library set of persons, each of which has different profiles and lightening expressions. ICA encodes face images with statistically independent variables, which are not necessarily associated with the orthogonal axes, while PCA is always associated with orthogonal eigenvectors. Sometimes, the projections onto the ICA non-orthogonal axes are above the recognition threshold while the projections upon the orthogonal PCA axes are under the threshold However, both these pixel-based statistical processing algorithms have their drawbacks. The major one is that they weight the whole face equally and therefore lack the local geometry information. We argue that a fully robust face recognition or pattern recognition system should take both the gestalt geometry principle and the individual statistical features into account, i.e. it should approach from both statistical and geometry perspectives. An efficient way to implement both is the local or regional statistics, which may be called the local ICA or local PCA.
In vivo and in vitro effects of statins on lymphocytes in patients with Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

BACKGROUND Statins have apoptotic effects on many cell types. Hashimoto's thyroiditis (HT) is an autoimmune disease in which cell-mediated autoimmune mechanisms are pathogenetically involved. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to evaluate the in vivo effects of Simvastatin on thyroid function, lymphocyte subtypes and also to investigate the apoptotic effects of Simvastatin, Mevastatin, Pravastatin and Cerivastatin on lymphocytes from patients with HT. METHODS In the first part of the study, 11 patients with HT and subclinical hypothyroidism (SH) were given Simvastatin (20 mg/day) for 8 weeks. Ten patients with SH and HT served as the control group. No treatment was given to controls. Thyroid function, C-reactive protein (CRP) levels and lymphocyte subtypes of both groups were determined before the study and after 8 weeks. In the second part of the study, the apoptotic effects of statins on lymphocytes were evaluated in patients with HT (n = 10) and normal subjects (n = 10) in vitro. Apoptosis was investigated by using Annexin-V and propidium iodide. Lymphocytes from patients and controls were incubated with different concentrations of Simvastatin, Cerivastatin, Mevastatin and Pravastatin. RESULTS An increase in serum free tri-iodothyronine and free thyroxine levels and a decrease in TSH levels were observed (P < 0.05) with Simvastatin treatment. CD4+ cells and B lymphocytes increased whilst CD8+ cells, natural killer cells and activated T lymphocytes decreased significantly in the treatment group (P < 0.05). The CRP level of the group also decreased with Simvastatin but it did not reach significance (P = 0.057). None of parameters was found to be different from the baseline in the control group. In in vitro experiments, apoptosis was observed in CD3 + (both in CD8+ and CD4+ cells) with all statins in both patient and control samples. Mevalonate, which was used in experiments, reversed apoptosis in some but not all samples. CONCLUSIONS The results of this study suggested that Simvastatin is an immune modulatory agent and improves thyroid function in patients with HT. This effect is probably mediated via lymphocyte apoptosis as demonstrated with in vitro experiments and is not confined to Simvastatin since Mevastatin, Pravastatin and Cerivastatin also induced apoptosis in lymphocytes.
Genomic and epigenetic alterations deregulate microRNA expression in human epithelial ovarian cancer

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are an abundant class of small noncoding RNAs that function as negative gene regulators. miRNA deregulation is involved in the initiation and progression of human cancer; however, the underlying mechanism and its contributions to genome-wide transcriptional changes in cancer are still largely unknown. We studied miRNA deregulation in human epithelial ovarian cancer by integrative genomic approach, including miRNA microarray (n = 106), array-based comparative genomic hybridization (n = 109), cDNA microarray (n = 76), and tissue array (n = 504). miRNA expression is markedly down-regulated in malignant transformation and tumor progression. Genomic copy number loss and epigenetic silencing, respectively, may account for the down-regulation of ≈15% and at least ≈36% of miRNAs in advanced ovarian tumors and miRNA down-regulation contributes to a genome-wide transcriptional deregulation. Last, eight miRNAs located in the chromosome 14 miRNA cluster (Dlk1-Gtl2 domain) were identified as potential tumor suppressor genes. Therefore, our results suggest that miRNAs may offer new biomarkers and therapeutic targets in epithelial ovarian cancer.