Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vitamin B 6 and Risk of Colorectal Cancer A Meta-analysis of Prospective Studies

PY R I D O X A L 5 -P H O S P H A T E (PLP), the principal active coenzyme form of vitamin B6, is involved in almost 100 enzymatic reactions. One function of vitamin B6 is its role in the 1-carbon metabolic pathway, which involves the transfer of 1-carbon groups for DNA synthesis and DNA methylation. Deficiency of vitamin B6 has been associated with considerably impaired 1-carbon metabolism in animals. Hence, low vitamin B6 levels may increase colorectal cancer risk through aberrations in DNA synthesis, repair, and methylation. Vitamin B6 may also suppress colorectal carcinogenesis by reducing cell proliferation, angiogenesis, oxidative stress, inflammation, and nitric oxide synthesis. Major food sources of vitamin B6 include fortified cereals, meat, fish, poultry, starchy vegetables, and some fruits (eg, bananas and avocado). Findings from prospective studies that have examined the association between vitamin B6 intake or PLP levels in the blood and the risk of colorectal cancer have been inconsistent. The aim of this review was to evaluate the evidence from prospective studies on vitamin B6 intake or blood levels of PLP and the risk of colorectal cancer by summarizing it quantitatively with a meta-analytic approach.
Managing the transition from bricks‐and‐mortar to clicks‐and‐mortar: a business process perspective

This paper reports from case study-based research that investigates the impact of the transition from bricks-and-mortar to clicks-and-mortar businesses on the management of core internal business processes. It has two main aims: firstly, to identify the business models for the processes of order fulfilment and delivery used in clicks-and-mortar e-businesses, and any organizational and environmental factors affecting these processes; secondly, to identify the main factors involved in the adoption and use of Internet-based ICTs for e-commerce in clicks-and-mortar e-businesses, and any organizational and environmental factors affecting adoption and use. Results from eight UK-based companies that have been changing from traditional bricks-and-mortar companies to clicks-and-mortar e-businesses are reported. Five main conclusions are drawn from a cross-case analysis: (1) increased integration in e-commerce business processes is inhibited by both technological and business barriers; (2) organizations display various and often confused motives for adopting e-commerce; (3) barriers to the increased adoption of e-commerce are not just technological, but also sociological and economic; (4) the adoption of e-commerce challenges existing supply network relationships; (5) the adoption of e-commerce is tending to automate rather than redesign existing business processes. A three-pronged approach to future research work in this under-researched area is recommended. This encompasses undertaking longitudinal case study research to track e-commerce developments over time, extending the range of cases to include other industry sectors (such as not for profits), and undertaking survey research across a large number of organizations, using quantitative methods, to test the generalizability of the findings from this research. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Atrial Sensing and Blanking in Dual-Chamber Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators

Atrial Sensing and Blanking in Dual-Chamber Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators Accurate atrial sensing during tachycardia is essential for reliable determination of atrial rate, which is a critical component of interval-based dual-chamber supraventricular tachycardia (SVT)–VT discrimination algorithms. Thus, atrial sensing in dual-chamber implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) must be reliable at fast ventricular rates, a technically challenging requirement. Determining the atrial rate during rapidly conducted atrial flutter (AF) requires accurate sensing of low-amplitude signals (Figure I in the Data Supplement). The required high atrial sensitivity increases the risk of atrial oversensing, especially of far-field R waves. Pacemakers rely on a long postventricular atrial blanking period (PVAB) to prevent oversensing of farfield R waves, but ICDs cannot: for a fixed PVAB, the blanked fraction of the cardiac cycle increases with the ventricular rate. For example, a 100-ms PVAB blanks 10% of the cycle at a bradycardia pacing cycle length of 1000 ms, but 33% during rapidly conducted AF with ventricular cycle length of 300 ms. PVABs longer than ≈80 ms produce clinically significant, functional atrial undersensing in rapidly conducted AF, and any PVAB may cause undersensing of alternate atrial electrograms in AF with 2:1 atrioventricular conduction. The inherent trade-off between atrial oversensing and undersensing is problematic. Both cause errors in dual-chamber SVT–VT discrimination algorithms. In contemporary ICDs, ventricular electrogram morphology algorithms mitigate this problem but do not eliminate it.
Incentives and obstacles in implementing inter-organisational interoperability

This paper explores the incentives and obstacles that rise when implementing interoperability in organisations. In the focus we have an inter-organisational information system that has interfaces with several information systems managed by different organisations. Inter-organisational information systems are often connected to the information systems that are aimed to support functionalities in the partnering organisations and that are implemented earlier, even several years earlier in the organisations. This complexity increases degrees of difficulty of the implementation projects. In this paper we argue that there are obstacles that are not noticed or understood in the very beginning when the idea of implementing a joint information system is emerged. On the other hand, we found that mutual trust is an important factor to support the interoperability between the organisations. We limit this paper to consider only interorganisational information systems that are implemented to support pre-defined joint functionalities.
Molecular isoforms of high-mobility group box 1 are mechanistic biomarkers for epilepsy

Approximately 30% of epilepsy patients do not respond to antiepileptic drugs, representing an unmet medical need. There is evidence that neuroinflammation plays a pathogenic role in drug-resistant epilepsy. The high-mobility group box 1 (HMGB1)/TLR4 axis is a key initiator of neuroinflammation following epileptogenic injuries, and its activation contributes to seizure generation in animal models. However, further work is required to understand the role of HMGB1 and its isoforms in epileptogenesis and drug resistance. Using a combination of animal models and sera from clinically well-characterized patients, we have demonstrated that there are dynamic changes in HMGB1 isoforms in the brain and blood of animals undergoing epileptogenesis. The pathologic disulfide HMGB1 isoform progressively increased in blood before epilepsy onset and prospectively identified animals that developed the disease. Consistent with animal data, we observed early expression of disulfide HMGB1 in patients with newly diagnosed epilepsy, and its persistence was associated with subsequent seizures. In contrast with patients with well-controlled epilepsy, patients with chronic, drug-refractory epilepsy persistently expressed the acetylated, disulfide HMGB1 isoforms. Moreover, treatment of animals with antiinflammatory drugs during epileptogenesis prevented both disease progression and blood increase in HMGB1 isoforms. Our data suggest that HMGB1 isoforms are mechanistic biomarkers for epileptogenesis and drug-resistant epilepsy in humans, necessitating evaluation in larger-scale prospective studies.
Régulation optimale et éthique des biens dans un duopole Nord-Sud

This text develops a duopolistic North/South model where both firms compete in price. The good from the South is assumed to be ethically unsound (i.e. dubious social content) while those from the North ethically sound. We then study the consequences of monitoring ethics depending on the aims of the authority, the ethical requirements of the country and the confidence of the Northern consumers in the social quality of the Southern goods. It emerges strong convergences of interest between the Northern consumers and the Southern firm. These convergences correspond to the situation where the production of the Southern firm ethically sound and revealed (by monitoring). The interests of the Northern firm can be very different since the situation of lie controlled of the production of the South implies a quasi-monopoly of the Northern firm.
Understanding option prices

Abstract This paper follows the insights of Black and Scholes (1973 J. Political Economy 81 637–54) and Merton (1973 Bell J. Economics Management Sci. 4 141–83) in contexts where their conclusions cannot be exactly obtained. Specifically, we consider an infinite activity Lévy process with no continuous martingale component driving the stock and address the issue of determining capital requirements permitting sufficient time diversification to the option writer. A new framework for pricing options results. Model prices are shown to be potentially consistent with market observations on observed premia. We note that the advance by Rogers (2000 J. Appl. Probability 37 1173–80) on first passage probabilities for spectrally one-sided processes makes the current analysis tractable.
The impact of teamwork on skills: employee perceptions of who gains and who loses

The move to teamworking and the accompanying changes in job boundaries and responsibilities have been viewed as exerting a postitive impact on levels of employee knowledge and skills, particularly where there is also increased training and regular job rotation. However, given the diverse positions of different occupational groups prior to teamworking, in practice a more differentiated relationship between teamworking and skills may be anticipated, with some groups experiencing a much more favourable outcome in terms of the knowledge and skills than others. The study reported here considers the impact of a move to teamworking across an entire manufacturing workforce, incorporating former craft and production grades and different levels in the former job classification hierarchy. Longitudinal findings are reported, with entire workforce surveys undertaken prior to and following the introduction of teamworking. The result is a more finely grained account of the impact of teamworking on skills that also hightlights the need to differentiate the effects of workplace change on different groups of employees.
Information sources and risk attitudes of large-scale farmers, farm managers, and agricultural bankers

Views of large-scale farmers, professional farm managers, and agricultural bankers on sources of information as well as sources of and responses to risk in agriculture are explored. The groups rated nine or more information sources at 3.0 or higher on a 5-point scale for production decisions. Fewer sources were rated as important for marketing and financial decisions. Internal information sources such as records, tenants, or borrowers were highly rated. In contrast to large-scale farmers, both farm managers and agricultural bankers rated professional colleagues as important information sources. Responses were similar with respect to sources of and managerial responses to risk, and in their self-assessment of management skills. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Aerobactin iron transport genes commonly encoded by certain ColV plasmids occur in the chromosome of a human invasive strain of Escherichia coli K1

The aerobactin-mediated iron uptake system encoded by pColV-K30 and other ColV plasmids has been associated with the ability of Escherichia coli strains to cause disease. We investigated whether the pColV-K30 aerobactin system is present in E. coli K1 VW187 isolated from a human neonate with meningitis. This strain exhibited a functional aerobactin-mediated iron uptake system, as assessed by a cross-feeding bioassay and by its sensitivity to cloacin, a bacteriocin that recognizes the outer membrane receptor for iron-aerobactin complexes. By using a variety of techniques, we could not find any plasmid harboring the aerobactin genes. Hybridization of restriction endonuclease-cleaved chromosomal DNA from strain VW187 with various clones containing subsets of the pColV-K30 aerobactin region showed that the aerobactin genes were located on a 10.5-kilobase-pair chromosomal HindIII restriction fragment which also contained IS1-like insertion sequences. The chromosomal aerobactin region showed a high degree of conservation when compared with the homologous region in plasmid pColV-K30, although it was located on a different restriction endonuclease site environment.
Multi-Entity Dependence Learning with Rich Context via Conditional Variational Auto-encoder

Multi-Entity Dependence Learning (MEDL) explores conditional correlations among multiple entities. The availability of rich contextual information requires a nimble learning scheme that tightly integrates with deep neural networks and has the ability to capture correlation structures among exponentially many outcomes. We propose MEDL_CVAE, which encodes a conditional multivariate distribution as a generating process. As a result, the variational lower bound of the joint likelihood can be optimized via a conditional variational auto-encoder and trained end-to-end on GPUs. Our MEDL_CVAE was motivated by two real-world applications in computational sustainability: one studies the spatial correlation among multiple bird species using the eBird data and the other models multi-dimensional landscape composition and human footprint in the Amazon rainforest with satellite images. We show that MEDL_CVAE captures rich dependency structures, scales better than previous methods, and further improves on the joint likelihood taking advantage of very large datasets that are beyond the capacity of previous methods.
Stratégies de contrôle de la carence en fer dans les pays en développement

La carence en fer est le probleme nutritionnel le plus prevalent au niveau mondial, en particulier dans les pays en developpement (PED). Elle apparait lorsque l'absorption du fer ne peut compenser les besoins et les pertes. Les besoins sont particulierement eleves chez les femmes enceintes, les jeunes enfants et les adolescentes. Dans les PED, la cause principale de la carence en fer est la faible disponibilite du fer du regime alimentaire. Ses consequences sont nombreuses et affectent la sante des individus mais aussi le developpement des societes et des pays dans lesquels ils vivent. Bien que ces consequences soient connues et que toute une gamme d'interventions soit disponible, les politiques de sante n'ont pas accorde a la carence en fer toute l'attention necessaire. La prevention de la carence en fer et l'amelioration du statut en fer dans tous les groupes d'une population aux besoins differents impliquent de combiner les interventions : amelioration des pratiques alimentaires visant a augmenter la consommation et la biodisponibilite du fer ; enrichissement en fer d'aliments destines a l'ensemble de la population ou cibles sur certains groupes comme les jeunes enfants ; supplementation en fer. Ces interventions sont d'autant plus efficaces qu'elles integrent des mesures de sante publique, comme le controle des infections et la promotion de l'allaitement maternel, et qu'elles sont couplees a des programmes de controle d'autres carences en micronutriments. La mise en place de plans nationaux pour la nutrition ainsi que la participation concertee du secteur public, des industries, de la communaute et des medias devraient contribuer au controle de la carence en fer.
Crown-of-Thorns Sea Star Acanthaster cf. solaris Has Tissue-Characteristic Microbiomes with Potential Roles in Health and Reproduction

ABSTRACT Outbreaks of coral-eating crown-of-thorns sea stars (CoTS; Acanthaster species complex) cause substantial coral loss; hence, there is considerable interest in developing prevention and control strategies. We characterized the microbiome of captive CoTS and assessed whether dysbiosis was evident in sea stars during a disease event. Most tissue types had a distinct microbiome. The exception was female gonads, in which the microbiomes were highly variable among individuals. Male gonads were dominated (>97% of reads) by a single Mollicutes-related operational taxonomic unit (OTU). Detailed phylogenetic and microscopy analysis demonstrated the presence of a novel Spiroplasma-related bacterium in the spermatogenic layer. Body wall samples had high relative abundance (43 to 64% of reads) of spirochetes, likely corresponding to subcuticular symbionts reported from many echinoderms. Tube feet were characterized by Hyphomonadaceae (24 to 55% of reads). Pyloric cecal microbiomes had high alpha diversity, comprising many taxa commonly found in gastrointestinal systems. The order Oceanospirillales (genera Endozoicomonas and Kistimonas) was detected in all tissues. A microbiome shift occurred in diseased individuals although differences between tissue types were retained. The relative abundance of spirochetes was significantly reduced in diseased individuals. Kistimonas was present in all diseased individuals and significantly associated with diseased tube feet, but its role in disease causation is unknown. While Arcobacter was significantly associated with diseased tissues and Vibrionaceae increased in diversity, no single OTU was detected in all diseased individuals, suggesting opportunistic proliferation of these taxa in this case. This study shows that CoTS have tissue-characteristic bacterial communities and identifies taxa that could play a role in reproduction and host health. IMPORTANCE Coral-eating crown-of-thorns sea stars (CoTS; Acanthaster species complex) are native to the Indo-Pacific, but during periodic population outbreaks they can reach extreme densities (>1,000 starfish per hectare) and function as a pest species. On the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, CoTS have long been considered one of the major contributors to coral loss. There has been significant investment in a targeted control program using lethal injection, and there is interest in developing additional and complementary technologies that can increase culling efficiencies. The biology of CoTS has been studied extensively, but little is known about their associated microbiome. This cultivation-independent analysis of the CoTS microbiome provides a baseline for future analyses targeting the functional role of symbionts, the identification of pathogens, or the development of reproduction manipulators.
Phenylbiguanide not phenyldiguanide is used to evoke the pulmonary chemoreflex in anaesthetized rabbits

The pulmonary chemoreflexes evoked by phenylbiguanide (PBG), phenyldiguanide (PDG), phenylguanidine (PG) and 5‐hydroxytryptamine (5‐HT) have been investigated in the pentobarbitone‐anaesthetized rabbit. The rank order of potency was 5‐HT greater than PBG greater than PG greater than PDG. The responses evoked by all agonists were antagonized by pre‐treatment with the selective 5‐HT3 receptor antagonist MDL 72222, suggesting that their reflex effects are mediated by 5‐HT3 receptors located on pulmonary vagal afferents. Furthermore, considering the low potency and long injection response time of PDG compared to PBG, we conclude that previous workers have used PBG and not PDG to identify non‐myelinated pulmonary vagal afferents and to evoke the pulmonary chemoreflex.
Analysis by fluorescence microscopy of the development of compartment-specific gene expression during sporulation of Bacillus subtilis

The use of a fluorogenic substrate, 5-octanoylaminofluorescein-di-beta-D-galactopyranoside, for beta-galactosidase has made it possible to visualize enzyme activity in individual cells of sporulating populations of Bacillus subtilis by fluorescence microscopy. lacZ fusions to different sporulation-associated genes have been used to investigate the cell compartmentalization of gene expression during sporulation. A strain with a lacZ fusion to sspA, a gene which is transcribed by E-sigma G at a late stage of sporulation, displayed predominantly compartment-specific fluorescence. Expression of the early-expressed spoIIA locus, which includes the structural gene for sigma F, was seen not to be compartmentalized. Populations of strains with lacZ fusions to gpr and dacF, genes which are transcribed by E-sigma F at intermediate stages of sporulation, included some organisms showing uncompartmentalized fluorescence and others showing compartment-specific fluorescence; the proportion showing compartment-specific fluorescence increased in samples taken later in sporulation. Several possible explanations of the results obtained with gpr and dacF are considered. A plausible interpretation is that sigma F activity is initially not compartmentalized and becomes compartmentalized as sporulation progresses. The progression to compartmentalization does not require the activities of the sporulation-specific factor sigma E or sigma G but may require some product of sigma F activity.
The devolution of HR to the line: Implications for perceptions of people management effectiveness

The devolution of human resource responsibilities from human resource managers to line managers is both a growing and global trend. A number of authors has suggested that there are positive as well as negative consequences of devolution. The current study conducted a survey of US human resource managers to explore the effect of devolution on human resource managers' perceptions of people management effectiveness in their organizations. Results revealed a positive effect of devolution on perceived people management effectiveness. However, this effect was qualified by an interaction between devolution and line support. Contrary to expectation, this interaction revealed that providing line managers with training and support for their human resource responsibilities had a greater positive impact on perceived effectiveness in organizations that had not devolved (non devolvers) compared to those that had (devolvers).
AML‐related technologies: a systemic risk

Purpose – The paper seeks to analyse the systemic effects of AML‐technologies and regulations, at both national and organizational levels.Design/methodology/approach – It focuses the power of systems theory, particularly the insights about self‐referential systems, to describe the organizational and bureaucratic phenomena that have emerged from the introduction of technology in the AML domain.Findings – The paper confronts the technological instrumentalism both prevalent in the AML community and implied by the actions of regulators. It demonstrates the many false assumptions being made, and calls on the whole AML community to re‐think and clarify its position.Research limitations/implications – This is the second paper describing an ongoing research project that focuses theory on the phenomena occurring when information and computer technologies are applied in the AML arena. The project is experimental and in its early stages, and so is necessarily limited in scale, but not in scope. The objective is to i.