Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Long-term vasodilator therapy in patients with severe aortic regurgitation.

BACKGROUND Vasodilator therapy can reduce the left ventricular volume and mass and improve left ventricular performance in patients with aortic regurgitation. Accordingly, it has been suggested that such therapy may reduce or delay the need for aortic-valve replacement. METHODS We randomly assigned 95 patients with asymptomatic severe aortic regurgitation and normal left ventricular function to receive open-label nifedipine (20 mg every 12 hours), open-label enalapril (20 mg per day), or no treatment (control group) to identify the possible beneficial effects of vasodilator therapy on left ventricular function and the need for aortic-valve replacement. RESULTS After a mean of seven years of follow-up, the rate of aortic-valve replacement was similar among the groups: 39 percent in the control group, 50 percent in the enalapril group, and 41 percent in the nifedipine group (P=0.62). In addition, there were no significant differences among the groups in aortic regurgitant volume, left ventricular size, left ventricular mass, mean wall stress, or ejection fraction. One year after valve replacement, the left ventricular end-diastolic diameter and end-systolic diameter had decreased to a similar degree among the patients who underwent surgery in each of the three groups, and all the patients had a normal ejection fraction. CONCLUSIONS Long-term vasodilator therapy with nifedipine or enalapril did not reduce or delay the need for aortic-valve replacement in patients with asymptomatic severe aortic regurgitation and normal left ventricular systolic function. Furthermore, such therapy did not reduce the aortic regurgitant volume, decrease the size of the left ventricle, or improve left ventricular function.
The Feminization of Domestic Violence in America: The Woozle Effect Goes beyond Rhetoric

One U.S. societal reaction to and evaluation of poverty among its citizens was the concept of the “feminization of poverty. ” In an analogous manner, the frame of reference of domestic violence has been to align women, rather than men, as the recipients of domestic violence. However, epidemiological surveys on the distribution of violent behavior between adult partners suggest gender parity. Similarly, in terms of child abuse, levels of fathers' domestic violence toward their own children are more consonant with those of mothers' rather than they are distinct. Nonetheless, the various perceptions and images, in both the popular and professional presses, seem to emphasize men's violence toward partners and toward children and to de-emphasize women's violence toward their partners and their children. With this shift in emphasis from epidemiological data to images, the political, social, legislative, and judicial forces are thereby directed at men's violence and women's victimization at the exclusion of women's violence and men's victimization. Potential costs of such a shift are presented.
The inflammatory response in drug‐induced acute urticaria: ultrastructural study of the dermal microvascular unit

Background Drug exposure is one of the main aetiologies of urticaria and represents the second most common cause in acute urticarias. Studies involving the ultrastructural aspects of urticaria are relatively rare in the literature. Most of the articles published report on skin biopsies of experimentally induced urticaria, and acute urticaria has been studied even less from a morphological point of view.
Does Goal-Demotion Enhance Cooperation?

Social scientists have long assumed that religion – and more specifically religious rituals – promotes cooperation. It has also been claimed that ritual plays an essential role in enhancing prosociality and cooperation. In this study, using a controlled laboratory experiment, we investigate if a conspicuous and recurrent feature of collective ritualized behaviour, goal-demotion, promotes lasting cooperation. We report that goal-directed collective behaviour is more efficient than goal-demoted behaviour for motivating participants to engage in ulterior cooperation. Plausible interpretations of the data and of the mechanisms involved are discussed.
How Aid Helps Achieving MDGs in Africa: the Case of Primary Education

Since 2000, Official Development Assistance has played a crucial role in efforts related to the achievement of MDGs. This is especially the case in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) which is the world’s largest recipient of foreign aid. This paper assesses the effectiveness of aid and its efficient use in achieving universal primary education in Sub-Saharan Africa. The impact of aid is assessed for a sample of 35 SSA countries over the decade 2000-2010. The results suggest that higher aid to education significantly increases primary completion rate. This result is robust to the use of various methods of estimation, the inclusion of instrument to account for the endogeneity of aid and the set of control variables included in regressions. In addition, this paper shows that there is strong heterogeneity in the efficient use of aid across countries in SSA.
Regulation of inflammatory responses by IL-17F

Although interleukin (IL) 17 has been extensively characterized, the function of IL-17F, which has an expression pattern regulated similarly to IL-17, is poorly understood. We show that like IL-17, IL-17F regulates proinflammatory gene expression in vitro, and this requires IL-17 receptor A, tumor necrosis factor receptor–associated factor 6, and Act1. In vivo, overexpression of IL-17F in lung epithelium led to infiltration of lymphocytes and macrophages and mucus hyperplasia, similar to observations made in IL-17 transgenic mice. To further understand the function of IL-17F, we generated and analyzed mice deficient in IL-17F or IL-17. IL-17, but not IL-17F, was required for the initiation of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis. Mice deficient in IL-17F, but not IL-17, had defective airway neutrophilia in response to allergen challenge. Moreover, in an asthma model, although IL-17 deficiency reduced T helper type 2 responses, IL-17F–deficient mice displayed enhanced type 2 cytokine production and eosinophil function. In addition, IL-17F deficiency resulted in reduced colitis caused by dextran sulfate sodium, whereas IL-17 knockout mice developed more severe disease. Our results thus demonstrate that IL-17F is an important regulator of inflammatory responses that seems to function differently than IL-17 in immune responses and diseases.
Validation of the Hebrew Version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (H-DES) in Israel

Abstract Ob jec tives : The pur pose of this re search was to ex plore the va lid ity of the con cept of dis so ci a tion as mea sured by a He brew version of the Dissociative Ex pe ri ences Scale (H-DES) in Is rael. De sign: The first study ex am ined the re li abil ity and va lid ity of the H-DES by as sess ing 340 con sec u tive ad mis sions to an Is raeli out pa tient clinic, and 290 nonclin i cal sub jects. The sec ond study ex plored the construct va lid ity of the con cept of dis so ci a tion by study ing re la tion ships be tween re ported past traumatization and cur rent lev els of dis so ci a tion among a dif fer ent co hort of 70 women Is raeli out pa tients. Re sults: The H-DES has good testre test and split-half re li abil ity in clin i cal and nonclin i cal sub jects, and is in ter nally con sis tent. Its con vergent va lid ity with the MMPI 2 Philips Dis so ci a tion Scale is good, and it has good cri te rionre lated va lid ity with DSM-IV dissociative dis or der di ag no ses. The con cept of dis so ci a tion as mea sured in Is rael by the H-DES has high re li abil ity and va lid ity. Con clu sions : The re li able iden ti fi ca tion of dis sociative ex pe ri ences in Is rael as well as in sev eral cul tures out side North Amer ica sup ports dis soci a tion as a valid psy cho log i cal con struct with wide spread cross cul tural ap pli ca bil ity. This study con tra dicts claims that dis so ci a tion is merely a pass ing North Amer i can pro fes sional fash ion.
Investigating Experienced ESL Teachers' Pedagogical Knowledge

This study investigated the hypothesis that it is possible to access the pattern of knowledge about teaching and learning (pedagogical knowledge) that experienced teachers utilize while they teach. This hypothesis was investigated through qualitative and quantitative analyses of verbal protocols obtained from teachers who simultaneously watched videotaped segments of themselves teaching and reported on thoughts they had as they taught these segments. Two sets of experienced teachers (N = 7) uniformly reported 20 to 21 categories of pedagogical thoughts that they claimed were in their minds while teaching. Of these, 7 to 8 were reported more frequently than others. The lists of predominant categories for both sets are headed by thoughts concerned with managing both the language the students hear and the language they produce (Language Management). Thoughts about students (Knowledge of Students), thoughts about ensuring the smooth transition of activities in the classroom (Procedure Check), and assessing student participation in and progress with the classroom tasks (Progress Review) were also among those that featured highly on both sets of teachers’ predominance lists. In terms of an approach in analyzing the thought processes of ESL teachers, the study suggests that a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods may be profitable.
The Role of Direct Manipulation of Visualizations in the Development and Use of Multi-level Knowledge Models

The proliferation of touch sensitive display screens has created a new generation of human-computer interaction styles which are so natural and common that even the youngest of users now perceive ordinary static media like a glossy magazine as a broken iPad. The volume of users who expect to be able to pinch, grab, twist and manipulate images on screen is rapidly growing; they drive a renewed interest in developing, assessing, and delivering new direct manipulation systems. Our premise is that one can exploit new technologies to develop new repertoires of direct manipulation, but with increasing pressure to provide semantically-coupled direct manipulation methods to experiment with computational information models. We develop this premise by noting highlights in the evolution of direct manipulation interfaces, and suggest that their selection and deployment can be tailored as visual experiments to debug and extend more complex computational models of information systems and processes. These systems and processes include those of natural systems such as arise in systems biology (e.g., modelling multiple levels of protein structure), but also in "unnatural" systems such as in the identification of hubs and authorities in artificial systems like the World Wide Web (WWW). The immediate consequence of our premise suggests that the design of direct manipulation tools should proceed with the semantics of the modelled systems in mind, so that each users' manipulations provide a new perspective on the concept of "data mining" of large data sets. This will allow users to not just expose implicit relationships, but to incrementally combine explanatory and exploratory investigation by direct manipulation, to adjust and improve the computational knowledge models that emerge from the underlying data.
Transformation Planning of Ecotourism Systems to Invigorate Responsible Tourism

The purpose of this study is to introduce transformation plans that can stimulate responsible ecotourism by using systems thinking to solve ecotourism problems in Korea. Systems thinking is a research method used to understand the operating mechanisms of the variables that influence an entire system, in order to identify its problems. The four types of ecotourism systems are classified as follows: low-infrastructure and resident-initiated, high-infrastructure and resident-initiated, high-infrastructure and government-initiated and low-infrastructure and government-initiated. These systems vary based on the need for tourism facilities and the form of governance. Each type of system is analyzed using the systems thinking process (dynamic thinking, causal thinking, feedback thinking, strategic thinking) at representative ecotourism sites in Jeollanam-do and the following transformation plans are proposed to improve the responsibility at the tourism sites: First, local residents will develop a system to manage and operate ecotourism ventures and establish cooperative governance structures to strengthen the local capacity. Second, ecotourism operators will improve the quality of their educational and interpretative programs and tourist information platforms in order to raise awareness of the responsibilities of ecotourists. Third, ecotourism systems that are improved through ecotourists’ and tour operators' heightened senses of responsibility can sustain ecotourism independently. These transformation plans can be applied to policy proposals for revitalizing ecotourism, to guidelines for improving community resilience and to biological habitat protection plans. This study is meaningful in that it discusses the role of stakeholders in ecotourism planning and promoting responsible tourism and their role in utilizing and conserving natural resources accordingly.
Discovering Frequent Closed Partial Orders from Strings

Mining knowledge about ordering from sequence data is an important problem with many applications, such as bioinformatics, Web mining, network management, and intrusion detection. For example, if many customers follow a partial order in their purchases of a series of products, the partial order can be used to predict other related customers' future purchases and develop marketing campaigns. Moreover, some biological sequences (e.g., microarray data) can be clustered based on the partial orders shared by the sequences. Given a set of items, a total order of a subset of items can be represented as a string. A string database is a multiset of strings. In this paper, we identify a novel problem of mining frequent closed partial orders from strings. Frequent closed partial orders capture the nonredundant and interesting ordering information from string databases. Importantly, mining frequent closed partial orders can discover meaningful knowledge that cannot be disclosed by previous data mining techniques. However, the problem of mining frequent closed partial orders is challenging. To tackle the problem, we develop Frecpo (for frequent closed partial order), a practically efficient algorithm for mining the complete set of frequent closed partial orders from large string databases. Several interesting pruning techniques are devised to speed up the search. We report an extensive performance study on both real data sets and synthetic data sets to illustrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach
On the CEO problem

A firm's chief executive officer (CEO) is interested in, amongst other things, the data sequence {X(t)}/sub t=1//sup /spl infin//. This data sequence cannot be observed directly, perhaps because it represents tactical decisions by a competitor of the firm. The CEO deploys a team of agents who observe independently corrupted versions of {X(t)}/sub t=1//sup /spl infin//. Because {X(t)} is only one among many pressing matters to which the CEO must attend, the combined data rate at which the agents may communicate information about their observations to the CEO is limited to, say, R bps. If the agents were permitted to conference and decide what to send to the CEO on the basis of their pooled data, then in the limit as L/spl rarr//spl infin/ they usually would be able to smooth out their independent noises entirely and thereby allow the CEO to achieve a fidelity of D(R), where D(/spl middot/) is the distortion- rate function of {X(t)}. In particular, with data pooling D can be made arbitrarily small if R exceeds the entropy rate of {X(t)}. Suppose, however, that the agents are not permitted to convene, agent i having to send data based solely on his own noisy observations {Y/sub i/(t)}. The authors show that there does not exist a finite value of the total data rate R for which even infinitely many agents, if they are not permitted to convene, can make D arbitrarily small. Furthermore, in this isolated-agents case they determine the asymptotic behavior of the minimal error frequency in the limit as R and then L tend to infinity. <<ETX>>
CLaC at ImageCLEF 2009

This paper describes our participation at ImageCLEF 2009. We participated in the photographic retrieval task (ImageCLEFPhoto). Our method is based on intermedia pseudo-relevance feedback. We have enhanced the pseudo-relevance feedback mechanism by using semantic selectional restrictions. We use Terrier for text retrieval and our own simple block-based visual retrieval engine. The results obtained at imageCLEF 2009 show that our method is robust and promising. However, there is room for improvement on the visual retrieval as well as the topics without cluster descriptions.
Maternal mental distress influences child outcomes in brief parent training.

BACKGROUND Brief Parent Training (BPT) promotes effective parenting in parents of children with conduct problems. As previous research has provided inconsistent results, this study explored the impact of maternal mental distress on outcomes of BPT. METHOD Participants included 216 families randomized to BPT or a comparison group. RESULTS Maternal distress negatively predicted five of eight outcomes, regardless of intervention allocation. Low-maternal distress predicted lower conduct problems (parent- and teacher-reported), whereas high distress predicted higher teacher-reported conduct problems in BPT relative to comparisons. CONCLUSIONS Refinement of interventions to help children with conduct problems and distressed mothers should be prioritized.
Elevated Tumor-Associated Antigen Expression Suppresses Variant Peptide Vaccine Responses

Variant peptide vaccines are used clinically to expand T cells that cross-react with tumor-associated Ags (TAA). To investigate the effects of elevated endogenous TAA expression on variant peptide-induced responses, we used the GP70 TAA model. Although young BALB/c mice display T cell tolerance to the TAA GP70423–431 (AH1), expression of GP70 and suppression of AH1-specific responses increases with age. We hypothesized that as TAA expression increases, the AH1 cross-reactivity of variant peptide-elicited T cell responses diminishes. Controlling for immunosenescence, we showed that elevated GP70 expression suppressed AH1 cross-reactive responses elicited by two AH1 peptide variants. A variant that elicited almost exclusively AH1 cross-reactive T cells in young mice elicited few or no T cells in aging mice with Ab-detectable GP70 expression. In contrast, a variant that elicited a less AH1 cross-reactive T cell response in young mice successfully expanded AH1 cross-reactive T cells in all aging mice tested. However, these T cells bound the AH1/MHC complex with a relatively short half-life and responded poorly to ex vivo stimulation with the AH1 peptide. Variant peptide vaccine responses were also suppressed when AH1 peptide is administered tolerogenically to young mice before vaccination. Analyses of variant-specific precursor T cells from naive mice with Ab-detectable GP70 expression determined that these T cells expressed PD-1 and had downregulated IL-7Rα expression, suggesting they were anergic or undergoing deletion. Although variant peptide vaccines were less effective as TAA expression increases, data presented in this article also suggest that complementary immunotherapies may induce the expansion of T cells with functional TAA recognition.
Economic burden and quality of life of vulvodynia in the United States

Abstract Objective: To explore the economic burden and quality of life of vulvodynia in the United States. Methods: We conducted a web-based survey from 2009 to 2010. Patients who responded to a National Vulvodynia Association advertisement completed the survey every month, recording their own costs and their employers’ payments related to vulvodynia in the previous month. A total of 302 patients entered data for at least 1 month and among them, 97 patients had completed data for 6 months. We used multiple imputation to generate values for unobserved cost components. For insurance payments, we also extracted the average insurance payments for direct healthcare services relating to vulvodynia from a commercial insurance database. The total costs were disaggregated into direct healthcare costs, direct non-healthcare costs and indirect costs. We also assessed patients’ quality of life by using Euro QOL 5 dimensions (EQ-5D) in a follow-up survey. Results: The total costs in 6 months were $8862.40 per patient, of which $6043.34 (68.19%) were direct healthcare costs, $553.81 (6.25%) were direct non-healthcare costs and $2265.25 (25.56%) were indirect costs. Based on the reported prevalence range of 3–7% in the US, our analysis yielded an annual national burden ranging from $31 to $72 billion in the US. However, the estimate should be viewed with caution as our study sample was non-probability. The average EQ-5D score was 0.74 ± 0.19 in vulvodynia patients. Conclusion: Vulvodynia is associated with a huge economic burden to both individuals and society. It is also related to a relatively low quality of life.
ROP Defense in the Cloud through LIve Text Page-level Re-ordering - The LITPR System

As cloud computing environments move towards securing against simplistic threats, adversaries are moving towards more sophisticated attacks such as ROP (Return Oriented Programming). In this paper we propose the LIve Text Page-level Re-ordering (LITPR) system for prevention of ROP style attacks and in particular the largely unaddressed Blind ROP attacks on applications running on cloud servers. ROP and BROP, respectively, bypass protections such as DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) that are offered by the Linux operating system and can be used to perform arbitrary malicious actions against it. LITPR periodically randomizes the in-memory locations of application and kernel code, at run time, to ensure that both ROP and BROP style attacks are unable to succeed. This is a dramatic change relative to ASLR which is a load time randomization technique.
The importance of anchor text for ad hoc search revisited

It is generally believed that propagated anchor text is very important for effective Web search as offered by the commercial search engines. "Google Bombs" are a notable illustration of this. However, many years of TREC Web retrieval research failed to establish the effectiveness of link evidence for ad hoc retrieval on Web collections. The ultimate resolution to this dilemma was that typical Web search is very different from the traditional ad hoc methodology. So far, however, no one has established why link information, like incoming link degree or anchor text, does not help ad hoc retrieval effectiveness. Several possible explanations were given, including the collections being too small for anchors to be effective, and the density of the link graph being too low. The new TREC 2009 Web Track collection is substantially larger than previous collections and has a dense link graph. Our main finding is that propagated anchor text outperforms full-text retrieval in terms of early precision, and in combination with it, gives an improvement in overall precision. We then analyse the impact of link density and collection size by down-sampling the number of links and the number of pages respectively. Other findings are that, contrary to expectations, (inter-server) link density has little impact on effectiveness, while the size of the collection has a substantial impact on the quantity, quality and effectiveness of anchor text. We also compare the diversity of the search results of anchor text and full-text approaches, which show that anchor text performs significantly better than full-text search and confirm our findings for the ad hoc search task.