Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk factors for developing encapsulating peritoneal sclerosis in the icodextrin era of peritoneal dialysis prescription.

BACKGROUND Encapsulating peritoneal sclerosis (EPS) is an uncommon but potentially devastating complication of peritoneal dialysis. We have observed an increased incidence in our centre over the last few years. METHODS AND PATIENTS To look at potential risk factors for developing EPS, we reviewed 39 cases diagnosed between 2000 and 2009 and compared these with a control group of 71 patients who had been treated by peritoneal dialysis for a minimum of 4 years. Both groups extensively used icodextrin, >80% of patients. RESULTS Both groups had been treated by peritoneal dialysis for a similar time: EPS median 54 months (46-87.5), compared to controls 70 (54-79.5). However, more of the EPS group were treated with peritoneal cyclers (75% vs 46%, X(2) = 6.86, P = 0.009) and prescribed more peritoneal dialysate 14.2 l/day +/- 0.7 vs 10.8 +/- 0.5, P < 0.0001. Although both groups were fast transporters, those with EPS had higher D/P creatinine ratios on peritoneal equilibration testing, 0.84 +/- 0.1 vs 0.77 +/- 0.1, P < 0.05, and lower peritoneal test ultrafiltration volumes, 193 +/- 26 ml vs 283 +/- 21 ml, P < 0.05. Discussion. The patients in the EPS group were faster transporters, with lower peritoneal equilibration and 24-h ultrafiltration volumes, and were exposed to greater volumes of peritoneal dialysates compared to peritoneal dialysis vintage controls.
Localized Flux Maxima of Arsenic, Lead, and Iron around Root Apices in Flooded Lowland Rice

In wetland-adapted plants, such as rice, it is typically root apexes, sites of rapid entry for water/nutrients, where radial oxygen losses (ROLs) are highest. Nutrient/toxic metal uptake therefore largely occurs through oxidized zones and pH microgradients. However, the processes controlling the acquisition of trace elements in rice have been difficult to explore experimentally because of a lack of techniques for simultaneously measuring labile trace elements and O2/pH. Here, we use new diffusive gradients in thin films (DGT)/planar optode sandwich sensors deployed in situ on rice roots to demonstrate a new geochemical niche of greatly enhanced As, Pb, and Fe(II) mobilization into solution immediately adjacent to the root tips characterized by O2 enrichment and low pH. Fe(II) mobilization was congruent to that of the peripheral edge of the aerobic root zone, demonstrating that the Fe(II) mobilization maximum only developed in a narrow O2 range as the oxidation front penetrates the reducing soil. The Fe flux to the DGT resin at the root apexes was 3-fold higher than the anaerobic bulk soil and 27 times greater than the aerobic rooting zone. These results provide new evidence for the importance of coupled diffusion and oxidation of Fe in modulating trace metal solubilization, dispersion, and plant uptake.
Climate Change and Industrial Policy

Industrial policy (IP) can make an important contribution to both environmental and social sustainability. The purpose of this paper is to explore the new rationale for IP due to climate change and to determine its implications for the how of industrial policy. Five implications are discussed, namely the need for international coordination of IPs; for putting human-development, and not emission targets, as the overriding objective of low-carbon IP; of stimulating innovation for energy efficiency, energy diversification, and carbon capture and storage; and for aligning IP with trade policies. Finally the funding needs of low-carbon IPs are discussed, and the importance of private sector funding emphasized.
Defensive Marketing Strategy by Customer Complaint Management: A Theoretical Analysis

On the basis of Hirschman's exit-voice theory, an economic model of defensive marketing strategy is developed for complaint management. Though many firms strive to reduce the number of customer complaints about their products, this objective is found to be questionable. Instead, analysis suggests complaints from dissatisfied customers should be maximized subject to certain cost restrictions. The authors also show that defensive marketing (e.g., complaint management) can lower the total marketing expenditure by substantially reducing the cost of offensive marketing (e.g., advertising). The savings in offensive marketing are often high enough to offset the additional costs associated with compensating complaining customers, even if compensation exceeds the product's profit margin.
A better positioning with BLE tag by RSSI compensation through crowd density estimation

We present a scheme that improves accuracy of 2.4GHz RF tag based indoor positioning. The accuracy of indoor positioning using 2.4GHz RF tags is affected by propagation loss caused by human body shielding, especially in crowded situations. This paper proposes a RSSI compensation scheme that estimate a crowd density level based on detected 2.4 GHz RSSI. We developed a scanner system to sense BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) tag for 2.4 GHz RSSI compensation. We deployed 40 BLE scanners and over 100 BLE tags, and collected data for 100 participants at an actual event over a period of four days. Using the collected data, we estimated crowd density level that can be applied to the proposed compensation scheme based on theoretical methods on propagation loss. Our scheme resulted in 59.8% higher accuracy than simple positioning method without the compensation.
Term Recognition and Extraction based on Semantics for Ontology Construction

In recent years the development of Ontology’s, leads to explicit formal specifications of the terms in the domain and relations among them. The construction of Ontology often requires a domain specific corpus in conceptualizing the domain knowledge. It is an indispensible task to identify a list of significant terms for constructing a Structured Ontology. In this paper, we investigate the use of Semantic Similarity-based metrics for term recognition and extraction, for ontology construction from the text document. The methodology uses Taxonomy and Wikipedia to reinforce the automatic term recognition and extraction from structured documents. It is done with the assumption of candidate terms for a topic are often associated with its topic-specific keywords through Semantic Similarity-based metrics by making use of WordNet. A hierarchical relationship of super-topics and sub-topics is defined by Taxonomy, meanwhile, Wikipedia is used to provide a semantic relationship and background knowledge for topics that are defined in the Taxonomy to surpervise the term recognition and extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed methodology is viable to be applied in a small corpus supporting Ontology construction, which renders the foundation for higher recall and precision, when compared with existing methodologies.
Hardware-Based Task Dependency Resolution for the StarSs Programming Model

Recently, several programming models have been proposed that try to relieve parallel programming. One of these programming models is StarSs. In StarSs, the programmer has to identify pieces of code that can be executed as tasks, as well as their inputs and outputs. Thereafter, the runtime system (RTS) determines the dependencies between tasks and schedules ready tasks onto worker cores. Previous work has shown, however, that the StarSs RTS may constitute a bottleneck that limits the scalability of the system and proposed a hardware task management system called Nexus to eliminate this bottleneck. Nexus has several limitations, however. For example, the number of inputs and outputs of each task is limited to a fixed constant and Nexus does not support double buffering. In this paper we present Nexus++ that addresses these as well as other limitations. Experimental results show that double buffering achieves a speedup of 54×/143× with/without modeling memory contention respectively, and that Nexus++ significantly enhances the scalability of applications parallelized using StarSs.
Layout-dependent-effects-aware analytical analog placement

Layout-dependent effects (LDEs) have become a critical issue in modern analog and mixed-signal circuit designs. The three major sources of LDEs, well proximity, length of oxide diffusion, and oxide-to-oxide spacing, significantly affect the threshold voltage and mobility of devices. In this paper, we propose the first work to consider the three major sources of LDEs during analog placement. We first transform the three LDE models into nonlinear analytical placement models. Then an LDE-aware analytical analog placement algorithm is presented to mitigate the influence of the LDEs while improving circuit performance. Experimental results show that our placement algorithm can effectively and efficiently reduce the LDE-induced variations and improve circuit performance.
Bisexuality and ageing: Why it matters for social work practice

In relation to the commonly-used sexual identity labels ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’ and ‘bisexual’, bisexual is often the most invisible category. This invisibility and lack of recognition of the needs of bisexuals across the life-course is important to address in the practice of social workers. Taking a life-course approach, bisexuality is particularly illustrative of the complex and changing relationships between sexuality and sexual identities. As we shall discuss, it can also make bisexual identities across the life-course more visible even if people don’t use the identity label of bisexual. Social work has a key role to play in tackling inequalities and their impact in people’s lives. In this chapter, we highlight why bisexuality is an urgent matter for social workers to engage with and outline recent empirical evidence that bisexual people are at higher risk of poverty and poor mental health across the life-course than lesbians and gay men
Corporate Hedging: What, Why and How?

This paper explores the rationale for corporate risk management. Following Smith and Stulz (1985) and Mayers and Smith (1987), the assumption is made that firms can contractually commit to bondholders to maintain a particular risk management policy, or asset volatility. With that as a starting point, the essay derives the optimal hedge portfolio, examines this portfolio's robustness to variance-covariance misestimation, and proposes a new motive for corporate risk management; a firm that hedges its risk increases its optimal amount of debt and so realizes more tax benefits from leverage. Using the capital structure model of Leland (1994), three impacts of risk-reduction on shareholder value are measured: the increase in tax benefits, the reduction of bankruptcy costs and the reduction in the potential cost of the underinvestment problem. The essay's motivation is to serve as a guide to chief financial officers regarding the benefits of risk management and the sources of those benefits, so that risk management can be undertaken in a way that enhances shareholder value, rather than for its own sake.
Design and Implementation of Storage Manager in Main Memory Database System ALT IBASE TM

Conventional database systems are optimized for the particular characteristics of disk storage environment. Main memory database systems use the different implementation techniques to structure and organize the user data and system catalogs. In this paper, we present the design and implementation considerations of our main memory database system ALTIBASE TM that is currently applied to the time-critical applicaitons. We focus on the design issues of storage manager in ALTIBASE TM . The major components are introduced, and features and characteristics of transaction management method are described. In order to evaluate our transaction performance, we show various experimental reports as measured by the TPS
Network Analysis and Canada's Large Value Transfer System

Analysis of the characteristics and structure of a network of financial institutions can provide insight into the complex relationships and interdependencies that exist in a payment, clearing, and settlement system (PCSS), and allow an intuitive understanding of the PCSS's efficiency, stability, and resiliency. The authors review the literature related to the PCSS network and describe the daily and intraday network structure of payment activity in the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS), which is an integral component of Canada's financial system. The picture that emerges confirms that the LVTS is highly centralized among a few key participants, similar to other PCSSs, based on the network of relationships. This could heighten the systemic importance of these participants, and the susceptibility of the system to financial contagion. There have been small variations in the relative importance of individual banks, but the network-wide pattern of relationships has remained stable from 2004 to 2008, even through the credit crisis.
An FPGA implementation of 30Gbps security module for GPON systems

GPON systems require gigabit throughput data encryption for security and privacy. This paper presents an implementation of very high speed security module for GPON on Virtex4 FPGA. The security module supports payload encryption with constant delay by using counter mode AES algorithm. Our design of AES has three advanced features: composite field arithmetic SubByte, efficient MixColumn transformation, and on-the-fly key-scheduling. Full-pipelined architecture is employed for the AES architecture in order to achieve the high performance for security module. The experiment shows that the proposed architecture can achieve a throughput of 30 Gbits/s on a Xilinx Virtex-4 VLX100-12 device. The performance of our design is well suitable for encryption applications of GPON systems.
Towards Understanding Controversy on Herzberg Theory of Motivation

Herzberg's motivator-hygiene theory provided great stimulus to the investigators for advancing research on job satisfaction. In 1959, Herzberg, Mausner and Snyderman dropped a bombshell on the traditional view of job satisfaction by introducing motivator-hygiene theory and challenged to the established model of job satisfaction. Herzberg theorized that provision of motivators such as recognition, work itself, advancement, responsibility and achievement generates job satisfaction while their absence leads to no job satisfaction but has nothing to do with job dissatisfaction. On the other hand, lack of hygiene factors such as working conditions, pay, interpersonal relations, job security, company policies and administration produces job dissatisfaction and has nothing to do with job satisfaction. Since the inception of theory, it has been tested across divergent cultures, samples, occupations and methods but to date there is still no consensus to what extent Herzberg's theoretical predictions are valid. This prompted the researchers to undertake this qualitative review of empirical studies to improving the understanding about mounting controversies surrounding such influential theory. Based on qualitative analysis, it can be concluded that possibility of empirical substantiation of theory would be higher provided replication of Herzberg's original methodology is undertaken. Since Herzberg's theory is still valid (Jones and Lloyd 2005) even though half a century is gone since it was first proposed, so organization leadership is urged to first identify what satisfies or dissatisfies their workforce and initiate change programs to nurturing their job satisfaction and elevating job dissatisfaction which may motivate them for higher productivity and retention besides reducing their exit turnover or its intentions. Further, researchers may conduct meta-analytical study or systematic qualitative review rather than non systematic review as undertaken in this particular study.
Low power 8-GHz ultra-wideband active balun

A new low-power CMOS active balun is designed for ultra-wideband applications, using a pair of common-source NMOS and common-gate PMOS transistors. This balun gives an impedance transformation ratio of 1:2. Without compensation feedback, the circuit provides a differential signal within 2dB and 3deg of gain and phase imbalance, respectively, up to 8-GHz. Total power consumption is only 1.44 mW at the supply voltage of Vdd=1.2V, much less than 12 mW of the traditional active balun. This saves 88% of power. The circuit can be fully integrated in RFIC for low power and low cost
Logoot: A Scalable Optimistic Replication Algorithm for Collaborative Editing on P2P Networks

Massive collaborative editing becomes a reality through leading projects such as Wikipedia. This massive collaboration is currently supported with a costly central service. In order to avoid such costs, we aim to provide a peer-to-peer collaborative editing system. Existing approaches to build distributed collaborative editing systems either do not scale in terms of number of users or in terms of number of edits. We present the Logoot approach that scales in these both dimensions while ensuring causality, consistency and intention preservation criteria. We evaluate the Logoot approach and compare it to others using a corpus of all the edits applied on a set of the most edited and the biggest pages of Wikipedia.
Computational Prediction of Blood-Brain Barrier Permeability Using Decision Tree Induction

Predicting blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability is essential to drug development, as a molecule cannot exhibit pharmacological activity within the brain parenchyma without first transiting this barrier. Understanding the process of permeation, however, is complicated by a combination of both limited passive diffusion and active transport. Our aim here was to establish predictive models for BBB drug permeation that include both active and passive transport. A database of 153 compounds was compiled using in vivo surface permeability product (logPS) values in rats as a quantitative parameter for BBB permeability. The open source Chemical Development Kit (CDK) was used to calculate physico-chemical properties and descriptors. Predictive computational models were implemented by machine learning paradigms (decision tree induction) on both descriptor sets. Models with a corrected classification rate (CCR) of 90% were established. Mechanistic insight into BBB transport was provided by an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)-based binary classifier analysis to identify the most predictive chemical substructures. Decision trees revealed descriptors of lipophilicity (aLogP) and charge (polar surface area), which were also previously described in models of passive diffusion. However, measures of molecular geometry and connectivity were found to be related to an active drug transport component.
Statistical methods for sustainable risk identification methodologies

This paper focuses on the comparison of suitable methodologies that can help identifying the risk factors more appropriately. For this purpose a comparative study between the available techniques, namely Experience & Knowledge (EK), Questionnaire (Q) and Direct Communication (DC) has been made based on the survey that has been conducted on more than 100 respondents. By tabulating the results the weighted index is calculated that is summarized afterwards to portray the appropriate risk identification methodology for all the risk factors that have been addressed in this paper.
Adventures in Multilingual Parsing

The typological diversity of the world’s languages poses important challenges for the techniques used in machine translation, syntactic parsing and other areas of natural language processing. Statistical models developed and tuned for English do not necessarily perform well for richly inflected languages, where larger morphological paradigms and more flexible word order gives rise to data sparseness. Since paradigms can easily be captured in rule-based descriptions, this suggests that hybrid approaches combining statistical modeling with linguistic descriptions might be more effective. However, in order to gain more insight into the benefits of different techniques from a typological perspective, we also need linguistic resources that are comparable across languages, something that is currently lacking to a large extent. In this talk, I will report on two ongoing projects that tackle these issues in different ways. In the first part, I will describe techniques for joint morphological and syntactic parsing that combines statistical dependency parsing and rule-based morphological analysis, specifically targeting the challenges posed by richly inflected languages. In the second part, I will present the Universal Dependency Treebank Project, a recent initiative seeking to create multilingual corpora with morphosyntactic annotation that is consistent across languages.
Contributions of population stereotypes and mental simulations to sentence comprehension

Embodied accounts of action-language processing propose that meaning is constructed with the assistance of relevant sensory-motor representations (eg., Fischer & Zwaan, 2008). In support of this view, comprehending an action-sentence can slow the production of an overt action, when features of that action are incompatible with corresponding sentence features (Glenberg & Kaschak, 2002). Additionally, performing an overt action can impede the comprehension of incompatible action-sentences (Zwaan & Taylor, 2006). Action-sentence comprehension can even be disrupted by watching visual displays with incompatible directional features. Namely, comprehending a sentence describing a movement in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction is less efficient when simultaneously viewing a stimulus moving in an incompatible direction, even when no overt manual rotation action is performed. Embodied accounts contend that such action-sentence compatibility effects arise as a result of covert simulations of specific motor programs developed through one’s physical experiences with particular objects. I present evidence that these effects could also be generated by a more abstract type of knowledge, that is not tied to a particular object. I am referring here to the idea of a population stereotype, which is the natural tendency of people to associate the direction of certain actions with the conceptual properties of a physical display (e.g., a clockwise device rotation implies an increase in device output). Such population stereotypes typically are consistent with specific motor experiences. For example, turning down the volume of a stereo in many cases involves a counterclockwise rotation of a dial, and this experience is consistent with a population stereotype that implies that reducing a quantity is achieved by a counterclockwise action. If comprehension of a sentence describing reducing the volume on a stereo is faster while turning a dial in a counterclockwise direction, it can not be determined if a resulting compatibility effect reflects compatibility between the described action and the stereotype, or between the described action and real motor experiences. I will present a case in which a population stereotype is not compatible with everyday experiences and establish that population stereotypes make a substantial contribution to action-sentence compatibility effects. I will also report a number of unsuccessful attempts to replicate previous studies of action-sentence compatibility and discuss replication attempts made by others.