Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Contribution of intravascular versus interstitial purines and nitric oxide in the regulation of exercise hyperaemia in humans

Abstract The regulation of blood flow to skeletal muscle involves a complex interaction between several locally formed vasodilators that are produced both in the skeletal muscle interstitium and intravascularly. The gas nitric oxide (NO) and the purines ATP and adenosine, are potent vasodilators that are formed by multiple cell types and released into the skeletal muscle interstitium and in plasma in response to muscle contraction. Cellular sources of ATP and NO in plasma are erythrocytes and endothelial cells, whereas interstitial sources are skeletal muscle cells and endothelial cells. Adenosine originates primarily from extracellular degradation of ATP. During exercise the concentrations of ATP and adenosine increase markedly in the interstitium with smaller increases occurring in plasma, and thus the interstitial concentration during exercise is severalfold higher than in plasma. The concentration of NO metabolites (NOx) in interstitium and plasma does not change during exercise and is similar in the two compartments. Adenosine and NO have been shown to contribute to exercise hyperaemia whereas the role of ATP remains unclear due to lack of specific purinergic receptor blockers. The relative role of intravascular versus interstitial vasodilators is not known but evidence suggests that both compartments are important. In cardiovascular disease, a reduced capacity to form adenosine in the muscle interstitium may be a contributing factor in increased peripheral vascular resistance.
Sex differences in the outcomes of peripheral arterial disease: a population-based cohort study.

BACKGROUND The role of sex in the outcomes of patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD) has been poorly studied. We sought to investigate differences in the long-term adverse cardiovascular and limb outcomes between men and women with PAD. METHODS We conducted a population-based cohort study with up to 7 years of follow-up using linked administrative databases in Ontario, Canada. Patients aged 40 years or older who visited a vascular surgeon between Apr. 1, 2004, and Mar. 31, 2007 (index date), and carried a diagnosis of PAD comprised the study cohort. The primary outcome was a composite of death or hospital admission for stroke or myocardial infarction. Secondary outcomes included lower limb amputation or revascularization. We used Cox proportional hazards modelling to compute unadjusted hazard ratios (HRs) and HRs adjusted for baseline covariates. RESULTS A total of 6915 patients were studied, of whom 2461 (35.6%) were women. No significant differences in the risk of the primary outcome were observed between men and women (adjusted HR 0.99 [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.92-1.05]). Women were less likely than men to undergo minor amputation (adjusted HR 0.73 [95% CI 0.62-0.85]) and arterial bypass surgery (adjusted HR 0.82 [95% CI 0.71-0.94]) but were more likely to be admitted to hospital for acute myocardial infarction (adjusted HR 1.15 [95% CI 1.00-1.31]). There were no sex differences in the rates of major amputation or transluminal percutaneous angioplasty. INTERPRETATION We identified no significant differences in the composite risk of major adverse cardiovascular events between women and men with PAD, although our findings suggest men may be at increased risk for adverse limb events compared with women. Cardiovascular health campaigns should focus on both women and men to promote early diagnosis and management of PAD.
Outcomes of Myringoplasty in Wet and Dry Ears

RESULTS: The graft take rate was 87% for the wet ear group and 90.4% for the dry ear group. The hearing gain rate was 91.3% for the wet ear group and 92.3% for the dry ear group. Differences were found to be statistically nonsignificant for both graft intake (p=0.665) and hearing gain (p=1.00). CONCLUSION: The success of myringoplasty is not adversely affected by the presence of mucoid ear discharge at time of surgery, and outcomes are comparable to those of the operation done for dry ear.
Distributed Simulation and the Grid: Position Statements

The Grid provides a new and unrivaled technology for large scale distributed simulation as it enables collaboration and the use of distributed computing resources. This panel paper presents the views of four researchers in the area of Distributed Simulation and the Grid. Together we try to identify the main research issues involved in applying Grid technology to distributed simulation and the key future challenges that need to be solved to achieve this goal. Such challenges include not only technical challenges, but also political ones such as management methodology for the Grid and the development of standards. The benefits of the Grid to end-user simulation modelers also are discussed.
Androgen‐repressed messages in the rat ventral prostate

Poly (A)+ RNA from the prostates of both intact and castrated rats was translated in a message‐dependent reticulocyte lysate, and the translation products were electrophoresed on SDS/polyacrylamide gels. Fluorography of these gels showed the expected disappearance, after castration, of the prostate steroid‐binding proteins as well as a number of other androgen‐dependent proteins. Two major (Mr 40,000 and 45,000) and several minor proteins appeared in the translation products of the castrated rat prostate RNA. Criss‐cross liquid hybridization analysis between prostate poly (A+) RNA from intact and castrated rats also showed the disappearance of the abundant prostate steroid‐binding protein sequences after castration and the synthesis of several new low to medium abundance sequences. Northern hybridization experiments demonstrated the presence of at least two, and possibly four androgen‐repressed poly (A)+ RNA sequences. The most prominent of these, an RNA of 2,000 nucleotides, appeared within 2 days of castration, reaching a maximum on day 4 at a level approximately 400 times greater than the normal level. The other major sequence (a sequence of 1,000 nucleotides) appears after 4 days, reaching a peak between days 8 and 11. Sequences similar to these new RNAs could play an important role in the long‐term resistance of prostatic cancer to hormone therapy in humans.
Stabilization of a coupled second order ODE-wave system

This paper considers the stabilization of a coupled second order ODE-wave system, where the ODE dynamics contain the solution of the wave equation at an intermediate point. We design a stabilizing feedback controller by choosing a suitable target system and backstepping transformation. The backstepping transformation is defined in terms of several kernel functions, for which we establish existence, uniqueness and smoothness properties. We also prove exponential stability for the resulting closed-loop system. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed feedback controller is verified via a numerical example.
Regionalism in the new globalized economy : politics of scale and the discourse of regionalism--Comparative politics of two Japanese global city-regions.

REGIONALISM IN THE NEW GLOBALIZED ECONOMY: POLITICS OF SCALE AND THE DISCOURSE OF REGIONALISM COMPARATIVE POLITICS OF TWO JAPANESE GLOBAL CITY-REGIONSTakashi Tsukamoto December, 2005 This study examines the effects of globalization on state restructuring and the status of cities and local governments. I conduct a comparative case study of two Japanese world cities, Tokyo and Osaka, Japan. Existing globalization theories offer only partial explanations that fail to grasp the dynamic aspects of such rescaling. To explore the dynamics of government restructuring, this study investigates the relationship between decentralization, regionalization and globalization, highlighting the role of local leaders who employed political rhetoric in their efforts to rescale the city. This research finds that uneven economic effects of globalization are not the direct cause for the political actions of local leaders for government rescaling. Instead, local leaders pursued regionalism as political strategy, including to improve their ability to gain central government aid and to improve independent local economic viability, depending on the conditions of locally specific intergovernmental relations. Regionalism was a function of competition between city-regions over central government aid rather than globalization. The Japanese central government favored directly Tokyo as its strongest city-region for investment under globalization. In response,
Genetic instability in gastric epithelial neoplasias categorized by the revised vienna classification.

BACKGROUND/AIMS The aim of this study was to determine the structural chromosomal aberrations, such as loss of heterozygosity (LOH) and microsatellite instability (MSI), at multiple tumor suppressor gene loci in gastric epithelial neoplasia categorized by the revised Vienna classification. METHODS All tissue samples were excised by endoscopic mucosal resection. Sixty category 3 (low-grade adenoma) tissue samples and 51 category 4 samples (high-grade adenoma and intramucosal carcinoma with adenoma) were examined at the 7 sets of microsatellite loci linked to the tumor suppressor gene locus. RESULTS For category 3 and 4 tissue samples, there were no differences in the frequencies of LOH-positive chromosomes or the extent of chromosomal loss. The Helicobacter-pylori (H. pylori)-positive rate was significantly higher in MSI-positive category 4 samples than in category 3 samples (p=0.04). The frequency of MSI positivity was significantly higher in category 4 samples than in category 3 samples (p=0.003). CONCLUSIONS H. pylori infection is associated with genetic instability of the premalignant lesion. MSI occurs in the early stages of gastric carcinogenesis and its occurrence increases during malignant transformation. Detection of MSI in premalignant gastric lesions may be a surveillant of risk of malignant transformation.
Effects of Prescription Coinsurance and Income-Based Deductibles on Net Health Plan Spending for Older Users of Inhaled Medications

Background:Health plans that increase prescription cost-sharing for their patients may increase overall plan costs. We analyzed the impact on health plan spending of a switch in public drug insurance from full coverage to a prescription copayment (copay), and then to income-based deductibles plus coinsurance (IBD). Methods:We studied British Columbia residents 65 years of age or older who were dispensed inhaled steroids, &bgr;2 agonists or anticholinergics on or after January 1996. Multivariable linear regression was used to estimate health plan costs for the population using inhalers by the Ministry of Health (MOH) during the copay and IBD policies. We estimated costs for excess physician visits and emergency hospitalizations based on data from a previously published cohort study and cost data from the MOH. We estimated the net change in MOH spending as the sum of changes in spending for inhalers, physician visits, hospitalizations, and policy administration costs. Results:Net health plan spending increased by C$1.98 million per year during the copay policy [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.10–4.34], and C$5.76 million per year during the first 10 months of the IBD policy (95% CI: 1.75–10.58). Out-of-pocket spending by older patients increased 30% during the copay policy (95% CI: 24–36) and 59% during the IBD policy (95% CI: 56–63). Conclusions:British Columbia's experience indicates that cost containment focused on cost-shifting to patients may increase net expenditures for the treatment of some diseases. Health plans should consult experts to anticipate the potential cross-program impacts of policy changes.
Content-Oriented User Modeling for Personalized Response Ranking in Chatbots

Automatic chatbots (also known as chat-agents) have attracted much attention from both researching and industrial fields. Generally, the semantic relevance between users’ queries and the corresponding responses is considered as the essential element for conversation modeling in both generation and ranking based chat systems. By contrast, it is a nontrivial task to adopt the users’ information, such as preference, social role, etc., into conversational models reasonably, while users’ profiles play a significant role in the procedure of conversations by providing the implicit contexts. This paper aims to address the personalized response ranking task by incorporating user profiles into the conversation model. In our approach, users’ personalized representations are latently learned from the contents posted by them via a two-branch neural network. After that, a deep neural network architecture is further presented to learn the fusion representation of posts, responses, and personal information. In this way, the proposed model could understand conversations from the users’ perspective; hence, the more appropriate responses are selected for a specified person. The experimental results on two datasets from social network services demonstrate that our approach is hopeful to represent users’ personal information implicitly based on user generated contents, and it is promising to perform as an important component in chatbots to select the personalized responses for each user.
Beyond Weights And Discounting:Decision Analysis Tools For Integrated Planning

An evaluation of management options can be supported with formal decision analysis tools which attempt to integrate objective and subjective information. There seems, however, to be little exploration of decision analysis tools beyond weights and discounting for the formalisation of value judgements. This paper argues that we need to look beyond weights and discounting for tools which may better reflect value judgements about: intergenerational equity and; balancing economic, social and environmental outcomes. The paper presents some alternative tools for articulating value judgements in integrated assessment.
Removal of water-vapor-induced fluctuations in T-ray signals: a preliminary study

In an open-air setting, one source of fluctuations in a T-ray (THz) pulsed signal is attributed to water vapor. Fluctuations of this type are generally undesired, and so the water vapor is commonly removed in a closed chamber. Yet, in some applications a closed chamber is not feasible. This paper presents a preliminary study on a computational means to address the problem. Initially, the complex frequency response of water vapor is modeled from spectral line data. Using a deconvolution technique, together with fine tuning of the line strength at each frequency, the response is partially removed from a measured T-ray pulse, with minimal signal distortion.
Dividend Policy, Signal Information For The Capital Market

Accumulated profits represent one of the most important sources of financing for companies and dividends represent cash flows due to holders of shares. The decision on the distribution of dividends to the shareholders, although it seems very simple at first sight, affect both the investment decision, as well as the financing policy of the firm because it is a question of choose between dividend distribution and reinvesting a big part of profits, by the company in question. The dividend policy of firms is influenced by rules, customs, beliefs, public opinion, general economic conditions and other factors who are in permanent change with a different impact on the companies. In these circumstances, it can not be mathematically and uniform modeled for all companies and for all the moments. Thus, the policy adopted by a company must be in accordance with the degree of shareholders satisfaction and with firm objectives.
Chocolate Craving and Hunger State: Implications for the Acquisition and Expression of Appetite and Food Choice

The importance of hunger state for the acquisition and expression of chocolate craving was investigated. Seventeen chocolate cravers and 12 non-cravers were supplied with chocolate and instructed to eat some twice a day for 14 days. Within each group, subjects were allocated to one of two conditions, hungry- or full-trained. Hungry-trained subjects were asked to eat the chocolate exclusively at least 2 h after last eating; full-trained subjects were asked only to eat the chocolate 15-30 min after eating a meal. A diary was kept to encourage and allow assessment of compliance. At the start and end of the 2 weeks, subjects rated their craving for and anticipated intake of chocolate prior to eating it; then, on initial tasting, pleasantness of the taste was rated. All subjects made these ratings on one day when hungry and on another when full, as defined above. For cravers and non-cravers who ate chocolate exclusively when hungry, chocolate craving increased post-training, but, at least for cravers, only when ratings were made while hungry. For full-trained subjects, chocolate craving decreased post-training, but this decrease did not depend on whether subjects were currently hungry or full. A similar pattern of results was found for anticipated intake and pleasantness of taste, except that pleasantness did not increase in hungry-trained subjects. The results are interpreted with reference to learned control of appetite and in particular to recent findings on incentive learning processes. Craving for chocolate or other foods may be an expression of a strong appetite elicited by hunger that has been acquired by repeated experience of eating the craved food when hungry.
Quantitative dietary exposure assessment of the Catalonian population (Spain) to the mycotoxin deoxynivalenol

The mycotoxin deoxynivalenol (DON) is one of the most common contaminants of cereals worldwide, and its occurrence has been widely reported in raw foods and foodstuffs, around the European region, including Catalonia. In the present work, a stochastic methodology has been applied to accurately assess the exposure of the Catalonian population (Spain) to DON through food consumption. Raw contamination data was provided by a large survey conducted in this region, in addition to the raw consumption data from a nutritional study specifically designed to assess the dietary intake of the main foodstuffs related to DON contamination for all population age groups. Contamination and consumption data were combined by simulation using an essentially parametric (P-P) method. The P-P method draws sampling values from distribution functions fitted to consumption and contamination data sets. Moreover, to quantify the accuracy and reliability of the statistics estimates, we built the related confidence intervals using a pseudo-parametric bootstrap method. Considering the results drawn from the P-P simulation method, the Catalonian population should be expected to be exposed at moderated levels of deoxynivalenol, the infants and individuals with ethnic dietary patterns being the most exposed population groups
Use of Regression Diagnostics in Political Science Research

In a regression analysis there may be certain data points (which may or may not be outliers) that are influential in the sense that their presence or absence significantly influences the obtained values of the estimated regression coefficients. The nature of these effects needs to be analyzed in order to determine which, if any, data points should be removed from the data set in order to improve coefficient estimates. A relatively new technique for identifying influential data points is called regression diagnostics. In this presentation, the technique is discussed and its potential usefulness demonstrated by an application on a data set previously analyzed by Tufte (1974).
Comparison of long‐term results of transurethral incision of the prostate with transurethral resection of the prostate, in patients with benign prostatic hypertrophy

One hundred patients with benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH) were randomized to transurethral incision (TUIP) or transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP). The average prostate weight before operation was not more than 30.0 g. Indications for the operations were based on the disease history, physical examination, digital rectal examination, laboratory values, and pressure‐flow examination. All operations were performed with patients under spinal anesthesia. TUIP was performed with a Collins knife, and TURP was performed with a resectoscope. Follow‐up was performed 24 months after the operations. After treatment there were statistically significant daytime and nocturnal reduction in voiding frequencies of 2.9 and 1.7, respectively, after TUIP, and 2.0 and 1.5 after TURP. In both groups, there occurred significantly better maximal flow rate from 7.6 mL/s to 16.9 mL/s in group I and from 6.9 mL/s to 17.6 mL/s in group II. The mean values of linearized passive urethral resistance relation in both groups significantly decreased from 3.6 ± 0.6 to 1.0 ± 0.5 after TUIP and from 3.9 ± 04 to 1.4 ± 0.5 after TURP. The TUIP procedure is effective and safe for patients with a small number of complications. Neurourol. Urodynam. 21:112–116, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Redescription of Rhadinorhynchus ornatus (Acanthocephala: Rhadinorhynchidae) from Skipjack Tuna, Katsuwonus pelamis, Collected in the Pacific Ocean off South America, with Special Reference to New Morphological Features

Abstract Adults of Rhadinorhynchus ornatus Van Cleave, 1918 were collected from the small intestine of skipjack tuna, Katsuwonus pelamis (Linnaeus), in the high seas of the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of South America (new parasite locality record) and described using optical microscopy and a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Our specimens were somewhat comparable to those described from North America and Japan, but had more trunk spines. Definitive differences between the length and thickness of each of the dorsal and ventral proboscis hooks are noted for the first time, with most ventral middle hooks being relatively shorter and more robust than dorsal middle hooks. The SEM documented, for the first time, the different surface topography of the tegument in the proboscis, the neck, and in 3 trunk regions; the presence of microtrichs in the mid- and posterior trunk regions; the elevated base of trunk spines; the circular arrangement of basal proboscis hooks; the different morphology of all dorsal and ventral proboscis hooks and the striations of their surface; the ribbed surface topography of eggs; the elevated slit-like female gonopore; and the rimmed edge of the bursa. The presence of microtrichs on the tegumental surface is further supported by transmission electron microscopy studies. This is the first report of microtrichs in any species of Acanthocephala and the second report of striations in proboscis hooks. The geographical distribution of R. ornatus appears to correspond, at least in part, to that of its epipelagic primary host, K. pelamis, throughout the world in waters ranging in temperature from 14.7 to 30 C.
No safe haven: a study of violence exposure in an urban community.

OBJECTIVE To examine levels of violence exposure and reports of feeling unsafe in relation to psychological and behavioral characteristics for a general population sample of youths from an urban setting. METHOD A comprehensive survey of high-risk behaviors, attitudes, indicators of adaptive behavior, and daily involvements was administered to a sample of 2,248 students in the 6th, 8th, and 10th grades in an urban public school system. RESULTS More than 40% of the youths surveyed reported exposure to a shooting or stabbing in the past year, and 74% reported feeling unsafe in one or more common environmental contexts. Multiple regression analyses indicated significant relationships between violence exposure/feeling unsafe and a set of indicators of psychological and behavioral adaptation and expressed attitudes. CONCLUSIONS These results attest to the picture of violence as a common fact of inner-city life and to the demand that is placed on urban youths to accommodate in their psychological development to chronic threat and lack of safety.