Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Distinguishing the associations between daily mortality and hospital admissions and nitrogen dioxide from those of particulate matter: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Objectives To quantitatively assess time-series studies of daily nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and mortality and hospital admissions which also controlled for particulate matter (PM) to determine whether or to what extent the NO2 associations are independent of PM. Design A systematic review and meta-analysis. Methods Time-series studies—published in peer-reviewed journals worldwide, up to May 2011—that reported both single-pollutant and two-pollutant model estimates for NO2 and PM were ascertained from bibliographic databases (PubMed, EMBASE and Web of Science) and reviews. Random-effects summary estimates were calculated globally and stratified by different geographical regions, and effect modification was investigated. Outcome measures Mortality and hospital admissions for various cardiovascular or respiratory diseases in different age groups in the general population. Results 60 eligible studies were identified, and meta-analysis was conducted on 23 outcomes. Two-pollutant model study estimates generally showed that the NO2 associations were independent of PM mass. For all-cause mortality, a 10 µg/m3 increase in 24-hour NO2 was associated with a 0.78% (95% CI 0.47% to 1.09%) increase in the risk of death, which reduced to 0.60% (0.33% to 0.87%) after control for PM. Heterogeneity between geographical region-specific estimates was removed by control for PM (I2 from 66.9% to 0%). Estimates of PM and daily mortality assembled from the same studies were greatly attenuated after control for NO2: from 0.51% (0.29% to 0.74%) to 0.18% (−0.11% to 0.47%) per 10 µg/m3 PM10 and 0.74% (0.34% to 1.14%) to 0.54% (−0.25% to 1.34%) for PM2.5. Conclusions The association between short-term exposure to NO2 and adverse health outcomes is largely independent of PM mass. Further studies should attempt to investigate whether this is a generic PM effect or whether it is modified by the source and physicochemical characteristics of PM. This finding strengthens the argument for NO2 having a causal role in health effects.
How Departments of Economics Evaluate Teaching

Based on results from a 1999 national survey, William Becker and Michael Watts found that student evaluations of teaching were by far the most widely used, and often the only method used by economics departments, to evaluate teaching in undergraduate economics courses. To investigate whether departments of economics have moved beyond the use of student evaluations of teaching, in 2011 the current authors conducted a national survey of departments based largely on questions used in the 1999 survey. The surveys included items on how courses and teaching are evaluated, and on how that information is used in departmental promotion and salary decisions.
Once upon a time, there was a pulchritudinous princess . . .: The role of word definitions and multiple story contexts in children's learning of difficult vocabulary

ABSTRACT The close relationship between children's vocabulary size and their later academic success has led researchers to explore how vocabulary development might be promoted during the early school years. We describe a study that explored the effectiveness of naturalistic classroom storytelling as an instrument for teaching new vocabulary to 6- to 9-year-old children. We examined whether learning was facilitated by encountering new words in single versus multiple story contexts, or by the provision of age-appropriate definitions of words as they were encountered. Results showed that encountering words in stories on three occasions led to significant gains in word knowledge in children of all ages and abilities, and that learning was further enhanced across the board when teachers elaborated on the new words’ meanings by providing dictionary definitions. Our findings clarify how classroom storytelling activities can be a highly effective means of promoting vocabulary development.
Cultural Values Reflected in Theme and Execution: A Comparative Study of U.S. and Korean Television Commercials

Abstract This study develops a cross-cultural content analysis framework to examine underlying cultural dimensions: individualism/collectivism, time orientation, relationship with nature, and contextuality. Most cross-cultural content analyses have inferred that differences in execution have been due to assumed cultural differences in the societies examined (often based on the work of Hofstede [1980]); the development of the structure proposed here will allow the direct investigation of those cultural issues. Television commercials from the U.S. and Korea were selected as being representative of North American and East Asian commercials. Both countries are present-time oriented, and while individualism and collectivism are prevalent in both cultures, individualism is more dominant in the U.S. Korean commercials stress oneness-with-nature slightly more than U.S. commercials, and U.S. commercials use more direct approaches. Directions for refinement and future research are identified.
The Evolution of Host Specialization in the Vertebrate Gut Symbiont Lactobacillus reuteri

Recent research has provided mechanistic insight into the important contributions of the gut microbiota to vertebrate biology, but questions remain about the evolutionary processes that have shaped this symbiosis. In the present study, we showed in experiments with gnotobiotic mice that the evolution of Lactobacillus reuteri with rodents resulted in the emergence of host specialization. To identify genomic events marking adaptations to the murine host, we compared the genome of the rodent isolate L. reuteri 100-23 with that of the human isolate L. reuteri F275, and we identified hundreds of genes that were specific to each strain. In order to differentiate true host-specific genome content from strain-level differences, comparative genome hybridizations were performed to query 57 L. reuteri strains originating from six different vertebrate hosts in combination with genome sequence comparisons of nine strains encompassing five phylogenetic lineages of the species. This approach revealed that rodent strains, although showing a high degree of genomic plasticity, possessed a specific genome inventory that was rare or absent in strains from other vertebrate hosts. The distinct genome content of L. reuteri lineages reflected the niche characteristics in the gastrointestinal tracts of their respective hosts, and inactivation of seven out of eight representative rodent-specific genes in L. reuteri 100-23 resulted in impaired ecological performance in the gut of mice. The comparative genomic analyses suggested fundamentally different trends of genome evolution in rodent and human L. reuteri populations, with the former possessing a large and adaptable pan-genome while the latter being subjected to a process of reductive evolution. In conclusion, this study provided experimental evidence and a molecular basis for the evolution of host specificity in a vertebrate gut symbiont, and it identified genomic events that have shaped this process.
Temporal Effects of Gamma Interferon Deficiency on the Course of Friend Retrovirus Infection in Mice

ABSTRACT The current studies demonstrate complex and seemingly contradictory effects by gamma interferon (IFN-γ) on Friend virus (FV) infection. Both temporal and tissue-specific effects were observed. During the first week of infection, IFN-γ-deficiency caused increased levels of FV infection in multiple tissues. Surprisingly, however, by 2 weeks postinfection, IFN-γ-deficient mice had significantly lower levels of infection in both the spleen and bone marrow compared to wild-type mice. The rapid reduction of virus in the IFN-γ-deficient mice correlated with a more rapid virus-neutralizing antibody response than was observed in the wild-type mice. Furthermore, the virus-neutralizing antibody response in wild-type mice could be accelerated by ablation of their IFN-γ response. Although the IFN-γ-deficient mice developed an accelerated virus-neutralizing antibody response, they did not class-switch to immunoglobulin G class immunoglobulins nor could they maintain long-term virus-neutralizing antibody titers. Eventually, all of the IFN-γ-deficient mice failed to keep persistent virus in check and developed fatal FV-induced erythroleukemia.
Performance evaluation and prediction of storage hierarchies

This paper proposes a modelling methodology combining simulation and analysis for computer performance evaluation and prediction. The methodology is based on a special workload model that is suitable for the generation and description of dynamic program behaviour. A description of this workload model is given in section 2. The applicability of this concept with respect to the design of new storage systems, as well as the improvement or comparison of existing systems, will be described by investigation of the efficiency of small cache memories in section 3.
The TP73 complex network: Ready for clinical translation in cancer?

TP73 is a member of the TP53 family, whose deregulated expression has been reported in a wide variety of cancers and linked to patients' outcome. The fact that TP73 encodes a complex number of isoforms (TAp73 and ΔTAp73) with opposing functions and the cross‐talk with other members of the family (TP53 and TP63) make it difficult to determine its clinical relevance. Here, we review the molecular mechanisms driving TAp73 and ΔTAp73 expression and how these variants inhibit or promote carcinogenesis. We also highlight the intricate interplay between TP53 family members. In addition, we comment on current pharmacological approaches targeting the TP73 pathway and those affecting the TAp73/ΔTAp73 ratio. Finally, we discuss the current data available in the literature that provide evidence on the role of TP73 variants in predicting prognosis. To date, most of the studies that evaluate the status levels of TP73 isoforms have been based on limited‐size series. Despite this limitation, these publications highlight the correlation between high levels of the oncogenic forms and failure to respond to chemotherapy and/or shorter survival. Finally, we emphasize the need for studies to evaluate the significance of combining the deregulation of various members of the TP53 family in order to define patient outcome or their responsiveness to specific therapies. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Predictive Validity of the Dogmatic Rejection Scale

Items were pilot-tested for a new measure of the tendency to reject belief-dissimilar individuals, the Dogmatic Rejection Scale (DRS). Its basis involves assessing the respondent's position on a given topic and then, contingent on that position, assigning a score from an item embodying rejection of individuals with an opposing opinion. Two studies (N = 303 and N = 376), using the Byrne "bogus stranger" procedure, tested the predictive and incremental validity of the DRS. The DRS was, found to predict rejection of a disagreeing "stranger. " Factor and item-by-item analyses led to a revised form of the DRS. Three further studies (N = 102, 82, and 210) were conducted. Again the DRS predicted rejection of the disagreeing "stranger. "From 2 was found to be an improvement over Form 1 in predictive power and reliability. Both Forms 1 and 2 of the DRS showed significantly lower correlations with political ideology than did dogmatism scores. Although each added to the level of prediction obtained when using only one of the two measures, neither the DRS nor the Dogmatism Scale was shown to add significantly more prediction than was added by the other.
Imagination and the Discursive Construction of the Internet

Translated from the 2001 French version, The Internet Imaginaire chronicles the development of the Internet and the discourse surrounding this technology. Patrice Flichy ‘‘consider[s] these discourses as an integral part of the development of a technical system’’ (p. 2), more than just an analysis of the discourse accompanying the growth of the Internet. Overall, Flichy’s project is more than just tracking the co-emergence of a discourse and the Internet. His project is useful for understanding the process of innovation in general, and how writing and wishing and debate lay the building blocks of any technology. As he concludes in the last chapter, technological ‘‘[u]topias are not opposed to reality; on the contrary, they are one of the elements on which it is based’’ (pp. 207 208). Further still, the ‘‘social imaginaire enables a society to construct its identity by expressing its expectations for the future’’ (p. 208). Thus, The Internet Imaginaire is an argument for understanding technological innovation*specifically the Internet*as a result of innovators’ abilities to draw upon the many communicative practices and speculations surrounding the technology in the culture, rather than simply understanding innovation as a result of innovators’ intuition. Flichy would argue that innovation of media technologies is a collective, discursive process rather than a series of solo achievements in static, linear histories. Flichy’s method in this book is to undertake an eclectic discourse analysis of several U.S. texts. One corpus contains writings by the so-called ‘‘founding fathers of information highways, the Internet, and virtual reality,’’ with an emphasis on texts written at the time of these technological developments rather than retrospective histories (p. 12). Another corpus contains ‘‘comments by academics, experts, and journalists,’’ especially those writings appearing in Wired magazine (p. 12). Although
Molecular characterization, expression of chicken TBK1 gene and its effect on IRF3 signaling pathway

TRAF family member-associated NF-κB activator (TANK)-binding kinase1 (TBK1) is a serine-threonine kinase at the crossroads of multiple interferon (IFN)-inducing signaling pathways in innate immunity. The importance of TBK1 in antiviral immunity is well established in mammal models, but in chicken, the molecular characterization and potential function of TBK1 remain unclear. In the present study, the open-reading frame (ORF) of chicken TBK1 (chTBK1) was cloned and characterized. The sequencing results revealed that the chTBK1 ORF consists of 2190 base pairs (bp) encoding a deduced protein of 729 amino acid residues. Multiple sequence alignment analysis demonstrated chTBK1 similarity to other birds and mammals, which indicates that it is evolutionarily conserved. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) results showed that chTBK1 was ubiquitously expressed in chicken tissues and expression was especially high in immune tissues. In addition, the expression of chTBK1 was significantly up-regulated by infection with avian leukosis virus subgroup J (ALV-J) both in vivo and in chicken embryo fibroblasts (CEFs) challenged with ALV-J or stimulated with poly I:C in vitro. Consistent with the activation of chTBK1, the interferon regulatory factor 3 (IRF3) and IFNβ gene in CEFs were also up-regulated after challenge with ALV-J or polyI:C. In contrast, the expression of IRF3 and IFNβ in CEFs was significantly reduced by siRNA targeting the chTBK1 gene compared with a negative control (NC) during ALV-J infection or polyI:C transfection. In conclusion, our results demonstrated that chTBK1 may be an important immunoregulator for IRF3 and IFNβ induction in response to viral stimulation in chicken.
Vehicle-Component Identification Based on Multiscale Textural Couriers

This paper presents a novel method for identifying vehicle components in a monocular traffic image sequence. In the proposed method, the vehicles are first divided into multiscale regions based on the center of gravity of the foreground vehicle mask and the calibrated-camera parameters. With these multiscale regions, textural couriers are generated based on the localized variances of the foreground vehicle image. A new scale-space model is subsequently created based on the textural couriers to provide a topological structure of the vehicle. In this model, key feature points of the vehicle can significantly be described based on the topological structure to determine the regions that are homogenous in texture from which vehicle components can be identified by segmenting the key feature points. Since no motion information is required in order to segment the vehicles prior to recognition, the proposed system can be used in situations where extensive observation time is not available or motion information is unreliable. This novel method can be used in real-world systems such as vehicle-shape reconstruction, vehicle classification, and vehicle recognition. This method was demonstrated and tested on 200 different vehicle samples captured in routine outdoor traffic images and achieved an average error rate of 6.8% with a variety of vehicles and traffic scenes.
Efficacy of intravenous continuous infusion of fluorouracil compared with bolus administration in advanced colorectal cancer.

PURPOSE The administration of fluorouracil (5-FU) by continuous intravenous infusion (CI) is an alternative to the bolus administration of 5-FU in patients with advanced colorectal cancer. Although more than 1,200 patients have been enrolled onto randomized trials that compared these two treatment modalities, there is still no definitive evidence of an advantage of 5-FU CI, and the magnitude of this advantage, if any, is also controversial. A meta-analysis was performed to assess this benefit in terms of tumor response and survival, and to compare the toxicity profiles of these two modalities of administration of 5-FU. DESIGN Individual data of 1,219 patients included in six randomized trials served as the basis for this meta-analysis, which was conducted by an independent secretariat in close collaboration with the investigators. RESULTS Tumor response rate was significantly higher in patients assigned to 5-FU CI than in patients assigned to 5-FU bolus (22% v 14%; overall response odds ratio, 0.55; 95% confidence interval [95% CI], 0.41 to 0.75; P = .0002). Overall survival was also significantly higher in patients assigned to 5-FU CI (overall hazards ratio [HR], 0.88; 95% CI, 0.78 to 0.99; P = .04), although the median survival times were close. Multivariate analyses showed that randomized treatment and performance status were the only two significant predictors of tumor response, whereas the same plus primary tumor site were independent significant predictors of survival (patients with rectal cancer did somewhat better). Grade 3 or 4 hematologic toxicity was more frequent in patients assigned to 5-FU bolus (31% v 4%; P < 10(-16)), whereas hand-foot syndrome was more frequent in the 5-FU CI group (34% v 13%; P < 10(-7)). CONCLUSION 5-FU CI is superior to 5-FU bolus in terms of tumor response and achieves a slight increase of overall survival. The hematologic toxicity is much less important in patients who receive 5-FU CI, but hand-foot syndrome is frequent in this group of patients.
Optimized Interface Diversity for Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC)

An important ingredient of the future 5G systems will be Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC). A way to offer URLLC without intervention in the baseband/PHY layer design is to use interface diversity and integrate multiple communication interfaces, each interface based on a different technology. Our approach is to use coding to seamlessly distribute coded payload and redundancy data across multiple available communication interfaces. We formulate an optimization problem to find the payload allocation weights that maximize the reliability at specific target latency values. By considering different scenarios, we find that optimized strategies can significantly outperform k- out-of-n strategies, where the latter do not account for the characteristics of the different interfaces. Our approach is supported by experimental results.
Asymmetric signature schemes for efficient exact edit similarity query processing

Given a query string Q, an edit similarity search finds all strings in a database whose edit distance with Q is no more than a given threshold τ. Most existing methods answering edit similarity queries employ schemes to generate string subsequences as signatures and generate candidates by set overlap queries on query and data signatures. In this article, we show that for any such signature scheme, the lower bound of the minimum number of signatures is τ + 1, which is lower than what is achieved by existing methods. We then propose several asymmetric signature schemes, that is, extracting different numbers of signatures for the data and query strings, which achieve this lower bound. A basic asymmetric scheme is first established on the basis of matching q-chunks and q-grams between two strings. Two efficient query processing algorithms (IndexGram and IndexChunk) are developed on top of this scheme. We also propose novel candidate pruning methods to further improve the efficiency. We then generalize the basic scheme by incorporating novel ideas of floating q-chunks, optimal selection of q-chunks, and reducing the number of signatures using global ordering. As a result, the Super and Turbo families of schemes are developed together with their corresponding query processing algorithms. We have conducted a comprehensive experimental study using the six asymmetric algorithms and nine previous state-of-the-art algorithms. The experiment results clearly showcase the efficiency of our methods and demonstrate space and time characteristics of our proposed algorithms.
Twenty years later: explaining the persistence of the glass ceiling for women leaders

Purpose – The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide a theoretical explanation for the persistence of the glass ceiling keeping women from assuming leadership positions.Design/methodology/approach – The methodological approach of this paper is to compare and contrast social role theory and expectation states theory as theoretical underpinnings to explain the persistence of a glass ceiling for women leaders.Findings – Both social role theory and expectation states theory belong to the structural/cultural models describing differences between the genders. Social role theory and expectation states theory explicate diverse reasons for the emergence of these differences. However, both theories propose that gender differences will result in evaluation bias against women.Practical implications – As a result of evaluation bias against women, the glass ceiling phenomenon keeping women from assuming top leadership positions continues to occur.Originality/value – This paper is being written on the 20 year an.