Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Amniotic Fluid Erythropoietin Correlates With Umbilical Plasma Erythropoietin in Normal and Abnormal Pregnancy

In the human fetus, elevated plasma erythropoietin levels have been found in high-risk pregnancies at delivery. We examined the relationship of amniotic fluid erythropoietin and umbilical plasma erythropoietin at delivery in 17 normal pregnancies, 41 hypertensive pregnancies, and 37 insulin-treated diabetic pregnancies terminated by elective cesarean section without labor. An additional 27 insulin-treated diabetic patients were studied after undergoing variable durations (86–1184 minutes) of labor. Erythropoietin was analyzed using a highly sensitive and specific radioimmunoassay technique. Fetal plasma erythropoietin concentrations were elevated above the control upper range (50.3 mU/mL) in 59% of the hypertensives and in 38% of the diabetics. The amniotic fluid erythropoietin values were significantly lower than the umbilical plasma erythropoietin values in each study group. Although the umbilical plasma erythropoietin values in the abnormal pregnancy groups differed considerably from the corresponding levels in the controls, the ratio of amniotic fluid erythropoietin to umbilical plasma erythropoietin was approximately the same in controls, hypertensives, and diabetics. Furthermore, the plasma and amniotic fluid levels (In transformed) correlated highly significantly in all three individual groups in absence of labor. In the diabetic labor group, this relationship was nonsignificant. We conclude that in the absence of labor, amniotic fluid erythropoietin reflects fetal plasma erythropoietin. We speculate that amniotic fluid erythropoietin may be an antepartum indicator of fetal hypoxemia.
From Optimization to Learning in Changing Environments: The Pittsburgh Immune Classifier System

A simple computational model of secondary immune response is used to provide a Pittsburgh style classiier system with the ability to improve its reaction to already encountered situations in a dynamical cyclic learning environment. Main results obtained with our core algorithm (YaSais) on Time Dependent Optimization problems are brieey reminded before to introduce the Pitts-burgh Immune Classiier System (PICS) which is then experimentally evaluated on both a static and dynamical multiplexer problem. Eventually, the Lazy Optimality EEect, keystone of YaSais' eeciency, is re-examinated in PICS. Suggested enhancements are then experimentally evaluated.
Visual Difficulty and Employment Status in the World

Purpose Using a world-wide, population-based dataset, we sought to examine the relationship between visual difficulty and employment status. Methods The World Health Survey was conducted in 70 countries throughout the world in 2003 using a random, multi-stage, stratified, cluster sampling design. Far vision was assessed by asking about the level of difficulty in seeing and recognizing a person you know across the road (i.e. from a distance of about 20 meters). Responses included none, mild, moderate, severe, or extreme/unable. Participants were asked about their current job, and if they were not working, the reason why (unable to find job, ill health, homemaker, studies, unpaid work, other). The occupation in the last 12 months was obtained. Multinomial regression was used accounting for the complex survey design. Results Of those who wanted to work, 79% of those with severe visual difficulty and 64% of those with extreme visual difficulty were actually working. People who had moderate, severe, or extreme visual difficulty had a higher odds of not working due to an inability to find a job and of not working due to ill health after adjusting for demographic and health factors (P<0.05). Conclusions As the major causes of visual impairment in the world are uncorrected refractive error and cataract, countries are losing a great deal of labor productivity by failing to provide for the vision health needs of their citizens and failing to help them integrate into the workforce.
Detection with RHESSI of High-Frequency X-Ray Oscillations in the Tailof the 2004 Hyperflare from SGR 1806–20

The recent discovery of high-frequency oscillations in giant flares from SGR 1806-20 and SGR 1900+14 may be the first direct detection of vibrations in a neutron star crust. If this interpretation is correct, it offers a novel means of testing the neutron star equation of state, crustal breaking strain, and magnetic field configuration. Using timing data from RHESSI, we have confirmed the detection of a 92.5 Hz quasi-periodic oscillation (QPO) in the tail of the SGR 1806-20 giant flare. We also find another, stronger QPO at higher energies, at 626.5 Hz. Both QPOs are visible only at particular (but different) rotational phases, implying an association with a specific area of the neutron star surface or magnetosphere. At lower frequencies we confirm the detection of an 18 Hz QPO, at the same rotational phase as the 92.5 Hz QPO, and report the additional presence of a broad 26 Hz QPO. We are, however, unable to make a robust confirmation of the presence of a 30 Hz QPO, despite higher count rates. We discuss our results in the light of neutron star vibration models.
Native American Genomics and Population Histories

Studies of Native American genetic diversity and population history have been transformed over the last decade by important developments in anthropological genetics. During this time, researchers have adopted new DNA technologies and computational approaches for analyzing genomic data, and they have become increasingly sensitive to the views of research participants and communities. As new methods are applied to long-standing questions, and as more research is conducted in collaboration with indigenous communities, we are gaining new insights into the history and diversity of indigenous populations. This review discusses the recent methodological advances and genetic studies that have improved our understanding of Native American genomics and population histories. We synthesize current knowledge about Native American genomic variation and build a model of population history in the Americas. We also discuss the broader implications of this research for anthropology and related disciplines, and we highlight.
Cognitive Aging: A Common Decline of Episodic Recollection and Spatial Memory in Rats

In humans, recognition memory declines with aging, and this impairment is characterized by a selective loss in recollection of previously studied items contrasted with relative sparing of familiarity for items in the study list. Rodent models of cognitive aging have focused on water maze learning and have demonstrated an age-associated loss in spatial, but not cued memory. The current study examined odor recognition memory in young and aged rats and compared performance in recognition with that in water maze learning. In the recognition task, young rats used both recollection and familiarity. In contrast, the aged rats showed a selective loss of recollection and relative sparing of familiarity, similar to the effects of hippocampal damage. Furthermore, performance on the recall component, but not the familiarity component, of recognition was correlated with spatial memory and recollection was poorer in aged rats that were also impaired in spatial memory. These results extend the pattern of impairment in recollection and relative sparing of familiarity observed in human cognitive aging to rats, and suggest a common age-related impairment in both spatial learning and the recollective component of nonspatial recognition memory.
Large-Scale Concept Detection in Multimedia Data Using Small Training Sets and Cross-Domain Concept Fusion

This paper presents the concept detector module developed for the VITALAS multimedia retrieval system. It outlines its architecture and major implementation aspects, including a set of procedures and tools that were used for the development of detectors for more than 500 concepts. The focus is on aspects that increase the system's scalability in terms of the number of concepts: collaborative concept definition and disambiguation, selection of small but sufficient training sets and efficient manual annotation. The proposed architecture uses cross-domain concept fusion to improve effectiveness and reduce the number of samples required for concept detector training. Two criteria are proposed for selecting the best predictors to use for fusion and their effectiveness is experimentally evaluated for 221 concepts on the TRECVID-2005 development set and 132 concepts on a set of images provided by the Belga news agency. In these experiments, cross-domain concept fusion performed better than early fusion for most concepts. Experiments with variable training set sizes also indicate that cross-domain concept fusion is more effective than early fusion when the training set size is small.
A Pressure Group and the Pressured: A Case Report

The organized interest group does not make the laws of the land. It must devise means for gaining access to and influencing those who are constitutionally empowered to make, administer, or otherwise define the law. This study deals with the efforts of one organized group, the Associated Industries of Vermont, to secure its objectives in the 1951 session of the Vermont legislature. The study is correlatively concerned with the legislator's view of the AIV activities and, more broadly, of the legislative process. The Associated Industries of Vermont is a “peak” association; an organized business group which acts as spokesman for many diverse business interests in the state. The membership, which ranges from small manufacturers to the National Life Insurance Company, totaled some 450 concerns in 1951, the year in which the events to be described took place. Membership is by individuals, firms, and a few trade associations. Included were almost all the textile, the granite and marble, and the machine-tool companies in the state—representing three of the state's important industries. A rough estimate of the total payroll of the member concerns was about half of the total payroll of the state. A few retailing and other non-manufacturing members had recently been added.
Renovascular hypertension and ischemic nephropathy.

Major improvements in imaging, medical therapy, and techniques of renal revascularization have changed the landscape of renovascular disease during the past decade. This has been particularly true for atherosclerotic renal artery stenosis, which remains one of the most common conditions known to accelerate hypertension and one of the most common incidentally detected vascular lesions. Despite, or perhaps because of, these developments, few clinical questions provoke more controversy and debate among cardiologists, internists, and nephrologists than decisions about the optimal management of patients with main renal artery stenosis. Even well-informed clinicians from different subspecialties hold widely divergent opinions about the role of renal revascularization, particularly for atherosclerotic disease. Studies of Medicare claims data indicate that application of peripheral intervention procedures varies >14-fold between various parts of the country.1 Some of those from interventional subspecialties (primarily interventional radiology and cardiology) emphasize the major benefits now available from endovascular procedures, including the use of stents. They argue that revascularization offers the potential to improve or reverse renovascular hypertension, to salvage or preserve the renal circulation and renal function, and to improve the management of patients with refractory forms of congestive heart failure.2 A recent review of the use of percutaneous renal artery procedures among Medicare beneficiaries confirms a rise from 7660 claims in 1996 to 18 520 claims in 2000, primarily because of a 2.8-fold increase in procedures by interventional cardiologists.3 Many in the nephrology community review the same published literature and reach nearly opposite conclusions. They argue that recent prospective studies fail to reveal major benefits of blood pressure control related to renal revascularization, that the risks of complications from interventional procedures are substantial, including uncommon but sometimes devastating loss of renal function resulting from atheroembolic disease.4 Despite a wave of enthusiasm in the early 1990s to identify …
The impacts of professional learning communities on science teachers’ knowledge, practice and student learning: a review

The purpose of this article is to provide a review of empirical studies investigating the impact of professional learning communities (PLCs) on science teachers’ practices and knowledge. Across 14 articles that satisfied the definition we embraced, most were devoted to the change in science teaching practices, disciplinary content knowledge (DCK) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of K–12 science teachers. Although a small number of studies have implicit focus on comparing measures of student learning, we set out to examine the studies in science education and present how teachers engaged in PLCs focusing on examining and exploring strategies to promote student learning. Analysis of the related studies resulted in the following: PLCs can help teachers increase their PCK and DCK; increases in PCK and DCK may facilitate the change in teacher practices from traditional into more inquiry-based approaches; science teachers collaboratively focusing on student learning in PLCs are more likely to change their practice; and studies do not embrace student learning as an essential feature of PLCs. Methodological flaws and future directions along with implications for science teachers’ professional development are discussed.
Inventories and the Short-Run Dynamics of Commodity Prices

The idea that wages rise relative to alternatives as job seniority accumulates is the foundation of the theory of specific human capital, as well as other widely accepted theories of compensation. The fact that persons with longer job tenures typically earn higher wages tends to support these views, yet this evidence ignores the decisions that have brought individuals to the combination of wages, job tenure, and experience that are observed in survey data. Allowing for sources of bias generated by these decisions, this paper uses longitudinal data to estimate a lower bound on the avenge return to job seniority among adult men. I find that 10 years of current job seniority raises the wage of the typical male worker in the U.S. by over 25 percent. This is an estimate of what the typical worker would lose if his job were to end exogenously. Overall, the evidence implies that accumulation of specific capital is an important ingredient of the typical employment relationship, and of life-cycle earnings and productivity as well. Continuation of these relationships has substantial specific value for workers.
The Skewness of Science

Scientific publications are cited to a variable extent. Distributions of article citedness are therefore found to be very skewed even for articles written by the same author, approaching linearity in a semilog plot. It is suggested that this pattern reflects a basic probability distribution with some similarity to the upper part of a normal (Gaussian) distribution. Such a distribution would be expected for various kinds of highly specialized human activity, parallels being found in the distribution of performance by top athletes and in the publication activity of university scientists. A similar skewness in the distribution of mean citedness of different authors may combine with the variability in citedness of each author's articles to form a two‐leveled citational hierarchy. Such a model would be capable of accounting for the extremely skewed distribution of citedness observed for all articles within a scientific field, which approaches linearity in a double‐log rather than in a semilog plot. The skewness implies that there will always be a large fraction of uncited publications, the size of the fraction depending on the citation practices (such as the number of references per publication) within the field in question. However, as part of a continuous probability distribution even uncited articles have a definite probability of contributing to scientific progress. Since it is furthermore impossible to eliminate uncited articles for statistical reasons, they should be the cause of neither worry nor remedy. The citational variability between articles in a journal is less (semilog linearity) than in the corresponding field as a whole, suggesting that each journal represents a select, stratified sample of the field. However, the variability is still too large to make the journal impact factor (the average citedness of the journal's articles) suitable as a parameter for evaluation of science. Fifteen percent of a journal's articles collect 50% of the citations, and the most cited half of the articles account for nearly 90% of the citations. Awarding the same value to all articles would therefore tend to conceal rather than to bring out differences between the contributing authors. The skewness in the citedness distribution of each author's articles, the large overlap between different authors and the existence of field‐dependent systematic differences in citedness would seem to make even article citations unsuitable for evaluation of individual scientists or research groups. At the national level, citations may be more useful, provided due corrections are made for the field effects. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Artificial Neural Network Nonlinear Equalizer for Coherent Optical OFDM

We propose a novel low-complexity artificial neural network (ANN)-based nonlinear equalizer (NLE) for coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) and compare it with the recent inverse Volterra-series transfer function (IVSTF)-based NLE over up to 1000 km of uncompensated links. Demonstration of ANN-NLE at 80-Gb/s CO-OFDM using 16-quadrature amplitude modulation reveals a Q -factor improvement after 1000-km transmission of 3 and 1 dB with respect to the linear equalization and IVSTF-NLE, respectively.
The Micro-Level Dynamics of Declining Labour Share: Lessons from the Finnish Great Leap

In contrast with the experiences of the UK and the US, the distribution of labour and capital income has changed sharply in favour of capital in most Continental European and Nordic countries during the past two decades. We examine forces behind the evolution of the aggregate labour share by analysing the dynamics of labour shares within and between firms/plants in the Finnish business sector. Using a decomposition method applied in labour economics and productivity analysis, we show that much of the decline in the aggregate labour share stems from the reallocation of resources between firms and plants, while labour shares at the firm/plant level have remained relatively stable.
The Dimensionality of Postmaterialism: An Application of Factor Analysis to Ranked Preference Data

Previous research indicates that the measurement instrument for postmaterialist value-orientations is not one-dimensional, as R. Inglehart assumed. Instead, it seems to capture three independent dimensions suggesting an interpretation based on Habermas's theory of a 'colonization' of the lifeworld. In particular, the dimensions seem to catch different political potentials provoked by the penetration of the lifeworld by the econo-administrative complex. Two questions raised by these findings are addressed. First, they are based on a special measurement model for ranked preference data with largely unknown properties - thus, the model's ability to uncover the dimensional structure of Inglehart's instrument can be questioned. Second, the interpretation referring to Habermas requires that the dimensions are basically identical throughout advanced industrial countries and approximately stable over time. In this respect, the earlier findings are inconclusive. Results suggest that the measurement model accurately estimates number and structure of the latent dimensions implied by a set of rankings. In addition, the claim that Inglehart's instrument captures several independent and approximately identical dimensions in different industrial countries is confirmed with respect to Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. Results also indicate that the dimensions are stable within countries
PrivWatcher: Non-bypassable Monitoring and Protection of Process Credentials from Memory Corruption Attacks

Commodity operating systems kernels are typically implemented using low-level unsafe languages, which leads to the inevitability of memory corruption vulnerabilities. Multiple defense techniques are widely adopted to mitigate the impact of memory corruption on executable code and control data. Nevertheless, there has not been much attention to defend against corruption of non-control data despite the fact that previous incidents of kernel exploitation showed that corrupting non-control data is a real threat. We present PrivWatcher, a framework for monitoring and protecting the integrity of process credentials and their usage contexts from memory corruption attacks. PrivWatcher solves multiple challenges to achieve this objective. It introduces techniques to isolate and protect the data that define process credentials and guarantee the locality of this data within the protected memory. Then, by adopting a dual reference monitor model, it guarantees the Time of Check To Time of Use (TOCTTOU) consistency between verification and usage contexts for process credentials. Moreover, it provides a secure mechanism that allows the presumably protected kernel code to verify the protected data without relying on unprotected data fields. PrivWatcher provides non-bypassable integrity assurances for process credentials and can be adapted to enforce a variety of integrity policies. In this paper, we demonstrate an application of PrivWatcher that enforces the original semantics of the OS kernel's access control policy: a change in process privileges is legitimate only if an uncompromised kernel would have allowed it. We implemented a PrivWatcher prototype to protect Ubuntu Linux running on x86-64. Evaluation of our prototype showed that PrivWatcher is effective and efficient.
Erythrocyte folate concentrations, CpG methylation at genomically imprinted domains, and birth weight in a multiethnic newborn cohort

Epigenetic mechanisms are proposed to link maternal concentrations of methyl group donor nutrients with the risk of low birth weight. However, empirical data are lacking. We have examined the association between maternal folate and birth weight and assessed the mediating role of DNA methylation at nine differentially methylated regions (DMRs) of genomically imprinted genes in these associations. Compared with newborns of women with folate levels in the lowest quartile, birth weight was higher in newborns of mothers in the second (β = 143.2, se = 63.2, P = 0.02), third (β = 117.3, se = 64.0, P = 0.07), and fourth (β = 133.9, se = 65.2, P = 0.04) quartiles, consistent with a threshold effect. This pattern of association did not vary by race/ethnicity but was more apparent in newborns of non-obese women. DNA methylation at the PLAGL1, SGCE, DLK1/MEG3 and IGF2/H19 DMRs was associated with maternal folate levels and also birth weight, suggestive of threshold effects. MEG3 DMR methylation mediated the association between maternal folate levels and birth weight (P =0.06). While the small sample size and partial scope of examined DMRs limit our conclusions, our data suggest that, with respect to birth weight, no additional benefits may be derived from increased maternal folate concentrations, especially in non-obese women. These data also support epigenetic plasticity as a key mechanistic response to folate availability during early fetal development.