Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effects of race and region on cardiovascular morbidity among elderly Americans with diabetes.

OBJECTIVE There is conflicting evidence about whether nonwhite Americans with diabetes have an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). Because geographic region is known to influence the risk of CVD in the U.S., we sought to determine the effects of race and region on cardiovascular morbidity among elderly Americans with diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS We performed a national, retrospective, cohort study using the Medicare claims of 126,153 white and 17,962 black patients with diabetes, aged > or =65 years in 1994, who were followed through 1999 for incident acute myocardial infarction, ischemic heart disease, stroke, and heart failure. The effect of race, sex, and region on the incidence of these diseases was assessed using Cox proportional hazards regression, adjusting for baseline demographics and comorbidities. RESULTS The incidence of any CVD ranged from 23.9/100 person-years among southern black men to 29.2/100 person-years among non-southern black women. The risk of CVD was lower among southern black men (hazard ratio 0.87 [95% CI 0.82-0.92]) and women (0.95 [0.91-0.99]) than their southern white counterparts. In the three other U.S. regions combined (northeast, midwest, and west), black men had a similar risk for CVD (1.01 [0.95-1.07]), and black women had a greater risk (1.10 [1.05-1.16]) than non-southern white men and women, respectively. CONCLUSIONS Among elderly Americans with diabetes, the incidence of CVD is unlikely to differ a great deal between whites and blacks. Residence in the South seems to confer a modest benefit for elderly black people with diabetes.
DEVELOPMENTS OF TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEMS AND COLLECTIVE MIND IN VIRTUAL TEAMS

In this study, we examine the developments of transactive memory systems and collective mind and their influence on performance in virtual teams. Although one of the oft‐cited benefits of the virtual team is the ability of its members to contribute diverse knowledge and expertise, the question of how virtual team members can bring their respective knowledge and expertise to solve the problems they face has been largely ignored in the past research on virtual teams. Building on an emerging body of socio‐cognitive literature, we argue that transactive memory systems and the collective mind are two important variables that explain team performance. We tested our hypotheses with a longitudinal data set that was collected from 38 virtual teams of graduate management students from six universities in four countries over eight weeks. The results suggest that the influence of team members' early communication volume on team performance decreases as teams develop transactive memory systems and a collective mind. The results further suggest that the development of a collective mind represents a high‐order learning in team settings.
The resilient entrepreneur: the use of successful coping behaviours to experience relief from emotional intensity by entrepreneurs in Canada

There is a lack of qualitative research demonstrating the emotional processes that entrepreneurs experience after they first start their businesses. This dissertation analyzed the emotional processes experienced by ten entrepreneurs during their venture’s start-up phase. A constructivist grounded theory research design was used to collect and analyze data in this investigation. Research findings showed entrepreneurs experienced simultaneous emotions that were of an intense nature during their early stages of business. These emotions included some combination of: excitement, anxiety/fear, disappointment, pressure/self-doubt, isolation, and relief. In addition, entrepreneurs identified entrepreneurial distress related to the constant need for action in their ventures and the use of technology, including cellular phones, email, and social media. Entrepreneurs described a gradual reduction in emotional intensity as they gained experience and learned how to cope. Coping behaviours used by entrepreneurs to counteract the overwhelming nature of emotions were: (a) developing improved entrepreneurial social networks, (b) gaining experience/learning from mistakes, and (c) changing their perspective on life as a whole. Coping behaviours aided in the reduction and fluctuation of entrepreneurial emotions.
Importance of supernovae at z > 1.5 to probe dark energy

The accelerating expansion of the universe suggests that an unknown component with strongly negative pressure, called dark energy, currently dominates the dynamics of the universe. Such a component makes up ~70% of the energy density of the universe yet has not been predicted by the standard model of particle physics. The best method for exploring the nature of this dark energy is to map the recent expansion history, at which Type Ia supernovae have proved adept. We examine here the depth of survey necessary to provide a precise and qualitatively complete description of dark energy. Realistic analysis of parameter degeneracies, allowance for natural time variation of the dark energy equation of state, and systematic errors in astrophysical observations all demonstrate the importance of a survey covering the full range 0
A Model of Parental Attitudes and the Academic Achievement of Adolescents.

The objective of this study was to apply and estimate a structural model in order to better understand the academic achievement among adolescents. Despite initial evidence indicating the importance of adolescent perceptions on school performance, there have been few studies that have explored the relationship among parental attitudes, their perception by the adolescent, and academic achievement. The theoretical model of this study placed an emphasis on parental attitudes and expectations, the student's perception of them, and certain psychological and academic characteristics of the student. The study utilized data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study. The model accounted for 75% of the variance in academic achievement across the four sample ethnic groups used. After prior achievement, student expectations had the strongest direct impact on achievement. The greatest indirect effects derived from the perception of parental expectations. The findings support the position that parental expectations and perceptions of parental expectations are essential in raising the academic expectations and thus, the achievement of adolescents. Implications for parents, educators, and other school personnel are discussed.
Time to pregnancy among Danish laboratory technicians who were a part of the National Birth Cohort.

OBJECTIVES The Danish National Birth Cohort was used to examine whether laboratory work was associated with reduced fecundity. METHODS Self-reported data on laboratory work and waiting time to pregnancy (0-2, 3-5, 6-12 and > 12 months) were used for 829 female laboratory technicians interviewed in 1997-2003. Altogether 6250 female teachers formed the reference group. A discrete-time survival analysis with a complementary log-log link was applied to estimate the fecundability ratio between the exposed and unexposed women, with adjustment for maternal age, gravidity, smoking, prepregnancy body mass index, and paternal job. RESULTS No difference in time to pregnancy was found between the laboratory technicians and teachers or between the laboratory technicians with different exposures. The adjusted fecundability ratio for the laboratory technicians was 0.94 [95% confidence interval (95% CI) 0.86-1.02] for all pregnancies and 0.98 (95% CI 0.86-1.13) for first pregnancies. A healthy worker effect was found for the laboratory technicians working with the work processes under study. CONCLUSIONS The results do not suggest that laboratory work in Denmark at present impairs female fecundity.
On Mayan-Araucanian Comparative Phonology

Louisa Stark has made a convincing and promising start at a genetic relation for Mayan and Araucanian. ' Apart from the impressive number of probable cognates, the correspondences which do not consist of identities are striking; this is the sort of phonological correspondence that we should expect for such a relation. In the consonantism there are also developments that fit in well with Uru-Chipaya. The loss of glottalization is noteworthy. But even more striking is the frequency, as in Uru-Chipaya also, of different reflexes of consonants (especially in the continuants) in root-final position from what is found in root (word) initial.2 Both Araucanian and UruChipaya give the appearance of having altered the finals of earlier Mayan-like monosyllables, and then of having added on suffixes. This is what we might expect of a Mayan-like language that had moved into a Quechua-like Sprachbund.
Influence of environmental information in natural scenes and the effects of motion adaptation on a fly motion-sensitive neuron during simulated flight

ABSTRACT Gaining information about the spatial layout of natural scenes is a challenging task that flies need to solve, especially when moving at high velocities. A group of motion sensitive cells in the lobula plate of flies is supposed to represent information about self-motion as well as the environment. Relevant environmental features might be the nearness of structures, influencing retinal velocity during translational self-motion, and the brightness contrast. We recorded the responses of the H1 cell, an individually identifiable lobula plate tangential cell, during stimulation with image sequences, simulating translational motion through natural sceneries with a variety of differing depth structures. A correlation was found between the average nearness of environmental structures within large parts of the cell's receptive field and its response across a variety of scenes, but no correlation was found between the brightness contrast of the stimuli and the cell response. As a consequence of motion adaptation resulting from repeated translation through the environment, the time-dependent response modulations induced by the spatial structure of the environment were increased relatively to the background activity of the cell. These results support the hypothesis that some lobula plate tangential cells do not only serve as sensors of self-motion, but also as a part of a neural system that processes information about the spatial layout of natural scenes.
The Topology of Hepatitis B Virus Pregenomic RNA Promotes Its Replication

ABSTRACT Previous analysis of hepatitis B virus (HBV) indicated base pairing between two cis-acting sequences, the 5′ half of the upper stem of ε and φ, contributes to the synthesis of minus-strand DNA. Our goal was to identify other cis-acting sequences on the pregenomic RNA (pgRNA) involved in the synthesis of minus-strand DNA. We found that large portions of the pgRNA could be deleted or substituted without an appreciable decrease in the level of minus-strand DNA synthesized, indicating that most of the pgRNA is dispensable and that a specific size of the pgRNA is not required for this process. Our results indicated that the cis-acting sequences for the synthesis of minus-strand DNA are present near the 5′ and 3′ ends of the pgRNA. In addition, we found that the first-strand template switch could be directed to a new location when a 72-nucleotide (nt) fragment, which contained the cis-acting sequences present near the 3′ end of the pgRNA, was introduced at that location. Within this 72-nt region, we uncovered two new cis-acting sequences, which flank the acceptor site. We show that one of these sequences, named ω and located 3′ of the acceptor site, base pairs with φ to contribute to the synthesis of minus-strand DNA. Thus, base pairing between three cis-acting elements (5′ half of the upper stem of ε, φ, and ω) are necessary for the synthesis of HBV minus-strand DNA. We propose that this topology of pgRNA facilitates first-strand template switch and/or the initiation of synthesis of minus-strand DNA.
Pilot Reuse Strategy Maximizing the Weighted-Sum-Rate in Massive MIMO Systems

Pilot reuse in the multi-cell massive multi-input multi-output system is investigated where user groups with different priorities exist. Recent investigation on pilot reuse has revealed that when the ratio of the coherent time interval to the number of users is reasonably high, it is beneficial not to fully reuse pilots from interfering cells. This paper finds the optimum pilot assignment strategy that would maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) given the user groups with different priorities. A closed-form solution for the optimal pilot assignment is derived and is shown to make intuitive sense. Performance comparison shows that under wide range of channel conditions, the optimal pilot assignment that uses extra set of pilots achieves better WSR performance than conventional full pilot reuse.
Small firm environmental ethics: how deep do they go?

This paper explores the meaning of environmental ethics in the small firm domain. A distinction is made between two approaches: conventional ethical discourse based on shallow ecological principles and a new ethical discourse based on deep ecology principles. Using the literature in this multi-disciplinary field of inquiry a link is made between small firms, ethics and the environment. Empirical research data based on the author’s doctoral work with firms in Leeds is discussed. The research results indicate that small firms from the study are predominantly operating a conventional ethic discourse and are framing their response to the environmental challenge using a shallow ecology ethic.
Characterization of the genes encoding herpes simplex virus type 1 and type 2 alkaline exonucleases and overlapping proteins

A detailed sequence analysis of the herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) and HSV-2 DNA encoding the alkaline exonuclease mRNA clusters has been completed. Three partially colinear mRNAs (2.3, 1.9, and 0.9 kilobases) are completely encoded within the DNA sequence presented. The putative promoter regions of the transcripts were inserted upstream of a plasmid-borne chloramphenicol acetyl transferase (CAT) gene and assayed for their ability to induce transcription of the CAT gene upon low multiplicity of infection with HSV in transient expression assays. We conclude that the expression of all three transcripts appear to be controlled by individual promoters. The 2.3-kilobase mRNA contains an open translational reading frame sufficient to encode 626 amino acids for the HSV-1 alkaline exonuclease enzyme; this value is 620 amino acids for HSV-2. A comparison of the predicted amino acid sequences of the HSV-1 and HSV-2 alkaline exonuclease enzymes revealed significant amino acid differences in the N-terminal portions of the two proteins; however, computer analyses suggest that the three-dimensional structures of the HSV-1 and HSV-2 nuclease enzymes are very similar. The 0.9-kilobase mRNA contains an open reading frame which shares a small amount of out-of-phase overlap with the C-terminal portion of the alkaline nuclease open reading frame. This open reading frame has the capacity to encode a 96-amino-acid polypeptide (10,500 daltons).
Social Support and Health: A Theoretical and Empirical Overview

It is generally assumed that social support has a favorable impact on the maintenance of health and on coping with illness. However, results are inconsistent and even conflicting. This is partly due to conceptual and methodological shortcomings. In order to overcome these problems and to guide further research, we present a taxonomy of social relationships and a causal process model. Social integration, cognitive social support and behavioral social support are distinguished and related to personality, stress, coping and the pathogenic process. In the causal model we propose that social support is depicted both as mediating the effects of stress on illness as well as directly affecting illness. A meta analysis was conducted that related social support and social integration to morbidity and mortality based on eighty empirical studies, including more than 60,000 subjects. Data subsets revealed disparate patterns of results that give rise to intriguing theoretical questions. Evidently, social support operates in complex ways. Several causal models are specified which represent alternative pathways of social support processes. Where social support was associated with less illness, a direct effect model was proposed. In cases where more support was seemingly paradoxically associated with illness it is assumed that a mobilization of support has taken place. In conclusion, some recent research examples that help illustrate future directions untangling the social support-illness relationship are presented.
Using Regression Techniques for Coping with the One-Sample-Size Problem of Face Recognition

There is a number of face recognition paradigms which ensure good re c gnition rates with frontal face images. However, the majority of them require an extensive training set a nd degrade in their performance when an insufficient number of training images is available. This is especially true fo r applications where only one image per subject is at hand for training. To cope with this one-sample-size (OSS) problem, we propose to employ subspace projection based regression techniques rather than modifica ti ns of the established face recognition paradigms, such as the principal component or linear discriminant ana lysis, as it was done in the past. Experiments performed on the XM2VTS and ORL databases show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Also presented ia a comparative assessment of several regression techniques and some popular face recognition methods.
Blue light communities: cultural interoperability and shared learning between ambulance staff and police officers in emergency response

A central feature of debate and controversy within organisations has been the effectiveness or otherwise of cross-agency working. At the front end of service delivery this becomes a matter of what has become known as the ‘interoperability’ of agencies and professions as they work jointly in problem solving, particularly in emergency situations and incidents. This paper examines the specific issues of interoperability between police officers and ambulance staff engaging in street work. Based on interviews with 45 practitioners, it exposes the cultural dynamics of working together across these two organisations. Applying the conceptual framework of ‘communities of practice’ to this particular dynamic, it discusses the various dimensions of situated learning between police officers and ambulance staff which enable these two professions to operate in a relatively coherent fashion. It concludes that central to the front-end effectiveness of emergency response is the degree of ‘cultural interoperability’ which police officers and ambulance staff would appear to benefit from. Extending the communities of practice framework further, it focuses on two critical cultural features of interoperability: communication and exchange based behaviour.
STEMI and NSTEMI: are they so different? 1 year outcomes in acute myocardial infarction as defined by the ESC/ACC definition (the OPERA registry).

AIMS The ESC/ACC redefined myocardial infarction as any amount of necrosis caused by ischaemia. The aim of this study was to describe the management and outcomes using 'real-world' data taking the new definition of acute myocardial infarction into account. METHODS AND RESULTS A total of 2,151 consecutive patients (76.0% men) with a myocardial infarction were enrolled at 56 centres in France. The median delay to presentation was shorter in patients with ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) vs. non-STEMI (NSTEMI) (4 vs. 7 h, P < 0.0001). STEMI patients were more likely to receive fibrinolysis (28.9 vs. 0.7%, P < 0.0001) or undergo PCI (71.0 vs. 51.6%, P < 0.0001) but less likely to have bypass surgery (3.1 vs. 4.9%, P < 0.05). At discharge, patients with STEMI received more aggressive secondary prevention therapies than those with NSTEMI, which was not supported by differences in disease severity. A total of 1878 patients were followed-up for 1 year: 36.7% of STEMI and 41.5% of NSTEMI patients were rehospitalized (P = 0.05); 16% in both groups were revascularized. In-hospital mortality was similar (4.6 vs. 4.3%), and 1-year mortality was 9.0% in STEMI patients and 11.6% in NSTEMI patients (Log-Rank P = 0.09). Independent correlates of in-hospital mortality were untreated dyslipidaemia, advanced age, diabetes, and low blood pressure. The strongest predictors of 1-year mortality were heart failure and age. Similar predictors were found in STEMI and NSTEMI subgroups. CONCLUSIONS Despite different management, patients with STEMI and NSTEMI have similar prognoses and independent correlates of outcome. These findings support the new definition of myocardial infarction.
Development of an ADL instrument targeting elderly persons with age-related macular degeneration.

BACKGROUND In order to estimate the needs of early intervention in a health education program, an ADL instrument measuring feelings of (in)security was needed. The instrument was intended to detect early signs of decline and to evaluate ADL performance among persons with AMD. An evaluative instrument must have a high level of responsiveness, which is the ability to detect true changes over time but must also show a high level of intra-individual agreement in a test-retest assessment. PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to develop an ADL instrument for evaluative purposes and to establish the reliability and the responsiveness of the instrument. METHOD The target group comprised all persons referred by an ophthalmologist for low vision rehabilitation, 65 years and older, living at home, with aged-related macular degeneration as the primary diagnosis and with distance visual acuity of the better eye with best correction not lower than 0.1. A non-parametric statistical method that is developed for paired ordered parametrical data was applied in order to measure the systematic and occasional intra-rater disagreement separately and to measure the responsiveness. CONCLUSION The test-retest study showed that the ADL-instrument had a high level of test-retest stability, which is a condition for responsiveness. The instrument was found to be responsive. It could therefore detect true longitudinal changes and be used for evaluative purposes targeting elderly with AMD.
Effects of Exercise on Aortic Input Impedance and Pressure Wave Forms in Normal Humans

The effects of supine bicycle exercise on the input impedance of the ascending aorta were studied in thirteen male subjects undergoing cardiac catheterization, but in whom no cardiovascular disease was found. Ascending aortic flow velocity and pressure were recorded simultaneously from a multisensor catheter with an electromagnetic flow velocity probe and a pressure sensor mounted at the same location. A second pressure sensor at the catheter tip provided left ventricular pressure. Fick cardiac outputs were used to scale the velocity signal to instantaneous volumetric flow. Input imped- ance was calculated from 10 harmonics of aortic pressure and flow. For each subject, impedance moduli and phases from a minimum of 15 beats during rest and exercise were averaged. Peripheral resistance decreased from a resting value of 1142 ± 51 (± SE) dynes sec/cm6 to 712 ± 39 dynes sec/cm6 during exercise. Characteristic impedance remained unchanged with a resting value of 47 ± 4 dynes sec/cm5and an exercise value of 45 ± 4 dynes sec/cm5. These results were associated with an increase in aortic pressure (96 ± 2 to 111 ± 2 mm Hg) and pulse wave velocity implying a decrease in aortic compliance. An increase in aortic cross-sectional area apparently offsets the effects of these changes in compliance and pulse wave velocity to result in an unchanged characteristic impedance. The increase in pulse wave velocity caused wave reflections to occur earlier during exercise, but the general characteristics of the pressure wave shapes remained unchanged. Circ Res 48: 334-343, 1981