Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nonobese population in a developing country has a high prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver and significant liver disease

There is a paucity of community‐based epidemiological data on nonalcoholic fatty liver (NAFL) among nonaffluent populations in developing countries. Available studies are radiological and/or biochemical and lack histological assessment, limiting their strength. We conducted a prospective epidemiological study comprising a 1:3 subsample of all adult (>18 years) inhabitants of a rural administrative unit of West Bengal, India. Subjects positive for hepatitis B virus and/or hepatitis C virus infection and consuming any amount of alcohol were excluded. Diagnosis of NAFL was by dual radiological screening protocol consisting of ultrasonographic and computed tomographic examination of the liver. Transient elastographic examination and liver biopsy were performed in a subset to identify significant liver disease. The risk factors of having NAFL were analyzed. A total of 1,911 individuals were analyzed, 7% of whom were overweight and 11% of whom had abdominal obesity. The prevalence of NAFL, NAFL with elevated alanine aminotransferase, and cryptogenic cirrhosis was 8.7%, 2.3%, and 0.2%, respectively. Seventy‐five percent of NAFL subjects had a body mass index (BMI) <25 kg/m2, and 54% were neither overweight nor had abdominal obesity. The subjects with the highest risk of having NAFL were those with a BMI >25 kg/m2 (odds ratio 4.3, 95% confidence interval 1.6‐11.5). Abdominal obesity, dysglycemia (fasting plasma glucose >100 mg/dL or elevated homeostatic model assessment of insulin resistance), and higher income were the other risk factors. Even having a normal BMI (18.5‐24.9 kg/m2) was associated with a 2‐fold increased risk of NAFL versus those with a BMI <18.5 kg/m2. Conclusion: There is a significant prevalence of NAFL and potentially significant liver disease, including cryptogenic cirrhosis, in this predominantly nonobese, nonaffluent population in a developing country. NAFL will be a major determinant of future liver disease burden in countries of the developing world. (HEPATOLOGY 2010)
[Problems of interrupted pregnancy among working women].

Literature on the relationship between the occupational exposure and interrupted pregnancy is reviewed. Analysis of the epidemiologic data in various European countries indicates an increase in the incidence of miscarriages from 3.8-10.5% among nonworking women to 5.2-15.2% among working women. The course and outcome of pregnancy is affected by the occupation, length of employment, type of work, exposure to hazardous chemicals, position during work, and microclimate at the work place. Complicated and interrupted pregnancies are the most frequent among the workers of the chemical industry. Exposure to benzene causes anemia, leukopenia and hemorrhage. Chronic exposure to low concentrations of tin increases the incidence of stillbirth. Phosphorus, arsenic, cadmium, barium, chlorine, chromium, gallium, and fluorine penetrate the placental barrier, accumulate in the embryonic tissues, and increase the antenatal and postnatal embryonic lethality. Genetic effects of chromium ar associated with increased frequency of chromosome aberrations. Other factors that have a detrimental effect on pregnancy include occupational vibration, exposure to ionizng radiation (incidence of spontaneous abortion among the personnel of radiology departments in Sofia, Bulgaria reaches 24%), exposure to pesticides, exposure to infectious diseases among the health personnel, and exposure to veterinary diseases among the agricultural workers and workers of the food processing industry.
Landmark-based pedestrian navigation from collections of geotagged photos

Mobile phones are an attractive platform for landmark-based pedestrian navigation systems. To be practical, such a system must be able to automatically generate lightweight directions that can be displayed on these mobile devices. We present a system that leverages an online collection of geotagged photographs to automatically generate navigational instructions. These are presented to the user as a sequence of images of landmarks augmented with directional instructions. Both the landmark selection and image augmentation are done automatically. We present a user study that indicates these generated directions are beneficial to users and suggest areas for future improvement.
A Dormant Internal Ribosome Entry Site Controls Translation of Feline Immunodeficiency Virus

ABSTRACT The characterization of internal ribosome entry sites (IRESs) in virtually all lentiviruses prompted us to investigate the mechanism used by the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) to produce viral proteins. Various in vitro translation assays with mono- and bicistronic constructs revealed that translation of the FIV genomic RNA occurred both by a cap-dependent mechanism and by weak internal entry of the ribosomes. This weak IRES activity was confirmed in feline cells expressing bicistronic RNAs containing the FIV 5′ untranslated region (UTR). Surprisingly, infection of feline cells with FIV, but not human immunodeficiency virus type 1, resulted in a great increase in FIV translation. Moreover, a change in the cellular physiological condition provoked by heat stress resulted in the specific stimulation of expression driven by the FIV 5′ UTR while cap-dependent initiation was severely repressed. These results reveal the presence of a “dormant” IRES that becomes activated by viral infection and cellular stress.
Polybrominated Diphenyl Ether (PBDE) Levels in Livers of U.S. Human Fetuses and Newborns

Polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) brominated flame retardants have recently been found to contaminate humans in the United States and other countries. U.S. human breast milk and blood levels of PBDEs are presently the highest in the world. U.S. cord blood samples tested positive for PBDEs, but until now there have been no peer-reviewed published data concerning levels of PBDEs in human tissue prior to and immediately after birth. Liver tissues were obtained from 4 stillborn fetuses and 7 liveborn infants, ranging from 20.5 to 39 wk gestational age; only 2 of the liveborn infants lived longer than 4 h and none were formula-fed or nursed, so tissue levels reflect intrauterine PBDE intake only. All samples were contaminated with PBDEs. Levels varied from 4 to 98 ppb, lipid. The mean level was 23.1 and the median 15.2 ppb, lipid. PBDE levels did not increase with gestational age. These data document the transfer of PBDEs from maternal to fetal tissue. PBDE concentrations are somewhat lower than those reported in adult blood or breast milk. The health consequences of prenatal contamination are not clear at present.
Vox Populi Annotation: Measuring Intensity of Ideological Perspectives by Aggregating Group Judgments

Polarizing discussions about political and social issues are common in mass media. Annotations on the degree to which a sentence expresses an ideological perspective can be valuable for evaluating computer programs that can automatically identify strongly biased sentences, but such annotations remain scarce. We annotated the intensity of ideological perspectives expressed in 250 sentences by aggregating judgments from 18 annotators. We proposed methods of determining the number of annotators and assessing reliability, and showed the annotations were highly consistent across different annotator groups.
Addressing Stereotypes and Ageism in a Life Span Development Course

A primary purpose of teaching is to help students become able to critically evaluate their own knowledge base to see where biases and stereotypes exist. An activity that serves to structure a class period is to expand on Fried's (1988) exercise in which students generate positive and negative stereotypes about older adults. The instructor must prepare extensively beforehand by anticipating student responses and finding psychological research and theories that address each of the anticipated stereotypes. Thus, the stereotypes serve as a springboard for a lecture on aging as well as a discussion of ageism. Student response to the activity is positive.
Improvement on the elastic visualization of thermal lesion using block wavelet shrinkage

We proposed a method of block wavelet shrinkage (BW-Shrink) to improve the strain visualization of microwave-induced lesion by denoising the estimated displacements. The proposed method adaptively approaches the elastogrpahic noise distribution by applying wavelet shrinkage in group of local blocks respectively. The blocks are conjunctive to each other to cover the whole region of interest (ROI). In vitro experiments on porcine livers show that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNRe) and the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNRe) are significantly improved (more than 5-dB) while the lesion edges are well preserved. Also, the lesion sizes measured from the elastograms and the morphological samples show strong consistency.
Subcutaneous Immunization with Inactivated Bacterial Components and Purified Protein of Escherichia coli, Fusobacterium necrophorum and Trueperella pyogenes Prevents Puerperal Metritis in Holstein Dairy Cows

In this study we evaluate the efficacy of five vaccine formulations containing different combinations of proteins (FimH; leukotoxin, LKT; and pyolysin, PLO) and/or inactivated whole cells (Escherichia coli, Fusobacterium necrophorum, and Trueperella pyogenes) in preventing postpartum uterine diseases. Inactivated whole cells were produced using two genetically distinct strains of each bacterial species (E. coli, F. necrophorum, and T. pyogenes). FimH and PLO subunits were produced using recombinant protein expression, and LKT was recovered from culturing a wild F. necrophorum strain. Three subcutaneous vaccines were formulated: Vaccine 1 was composed of inactivated bacterial whole cells and proteins; Vaccine 2 was composed of proteins only; and Vaccine 3 was composed of inactivated bacterial whole cells only. Two intravaginal vaccines were formulated: Vaccine 4 was composed of inactivated bacterial whole cells and proteins; and Vaccine 5 was composed of PLO and LKT. To evaluate vaccine efficacy, a randomized clinical trial was conducted at a commercial dairy farm; 371 spring heifers were allocated randomly into one of six different treatments groups: control, Vaccine 1, Vaccine 2, Vaccine 3, Vaccine 4 and Vaccine 5. Late pregnant heifers assigned to one of the vaccine groups were each vaccinated twice: at 230 and 260 days of pregnancy. When vaccines were evaluated grouped as subcutaneous and intravaginal, the subcutaneous ones were found to significantly reduce the incidence of puerperal metritis. Additionally, subcutaneous vaccination significantly reduced rectal temperature at 6±1 days in milk. Reproduction was improved for cows that received subcutaneous vaccines. In general, vaccination induced a significant increase in serum IgG titers against all antigens, with subcutaneous vaccination again being more effective. In conclusion, subcutaneous vaccination with inactivated bacterial components and/or protein subunits of E. coli, F. necrophorum and T. pyogenes can prevent puerperal metritis during the first lactation of dairy cows, leading to improved reproduction.
Metabolic Effects of Hypocaloric Diets in Management of Gestational Diabetes

Although hypocaloric diets have been advocated for the management of the obese gravida and the obese mother with gestational diabetes, there is no general agreement on how severely calories should be restricted or on how this therapeutic approach compares with insulin therapy. The lack of consensus is in part because of the lack of studies comparing insulin management with the effects of different degrees of hypocaloric feeding and its effects on metabolism and glycemic status. We review the effects of 50 and 33% calorie restriction on glycemic status and intermediary fuel status in obese gestational diabetic subjects and compare the results with the administration of 20 U NPH and 10 U regular insulin every morning, a therapy of proven value in reducing macrosomia in gestational diabetes. When the two calorie-restriction regimens were compared after a 9-h overnight fast, glycemic status improved 10–20% on both. Ketonuria increased about twofold with 50% calorie restriction, but on average no increase in ketonuria was seen on the 33% calorie-restriction regimen. Both calorie-restriction programs led to a reduction in levels of plasma triglyceride, a correlate of infant birth weight. In contrast, the insulin regimen diminished ketonuria, but glycemic status improved little, and plasma triglyceride concentrations did not decline. Although more studies are needed to confirm these trends, the beneficial effect of 33% calorie restriction, which occurred without marked ketonuria, is consistent with previous studies in gestational diabetes. In addition, the simultaneous improvements observed in plasma glucose and triglyceride concentrations suggest that moderate calorie restriction may be valuable in preventing macrosomia in the offspring of the obese subject with gestational diabetes. A clinical trial to test this hypothesis is warranted.
Data Fusion in Metabolomics Using Coupled Matrix and Tensor Factorizations

With a goal of identifying biomarkers/patterns related to certain conditions or diseases, metabolomics focuses on the detection of chemical substances in biological samples such as urine and blood using a number of analytical techniques, including nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), and fluorescence spectroscopy. Data sets measured using these methods provide partly complementary information, and their joint analysis has the potential to reveal underlying structures, which are, otherwise, difficult to extract. While we can collect vast amounts of data using different analytical methods, data fusion remains a challenging task, in particular, when the goal is to capture the underlying factors and use them for interpretation, e.g., for biomarker identification. Furthermore, many data fusion applications require joint analysis of heterogeneous (i.e., in the form of higher order tensors and matrices) data sets with shared/unshared factors. In order to jointly analyze such heterogeneous data sets, we formulate data fusion as a coupled matrix and tensor factorization (CMTF) problem, which has already proved useful in many data mining applications, and discuss its extension to a structure-revealing data fusion model, i.e., a data fusion model that can identify shared and unshared factors. The traditional methods commonly used for data fusion in the presence of shared/unshared factors are matrix factorization-based methods. Using both simulations and prototypical experimental coupled data sets, we assess the performance of various state-of-the-art data fusion methods and demonstrate that while matrix factorization-based approaches have limitations when used for joint analysis of heterogeneous data sets, the structure-revealing CMTF model can successfully capture the underlying factors by exploiting the low-rank structure of higher order data sets.
Topic extraction from millions of tweets using singular value decomposition and feature selection

Social media offers a wealth of insight into how significant topics - such as the Great East Japan Earthquake, the Arab Spring, and the Boston Bombing - affect individuals. The scale of available data, however, can be intimidating: during the Great East Japan Earthquake, over 8 million tweets were sent each day from Japan alone. Conventional word vector-based social media analysis method using Latent Semantic Analysis, Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or graph community detection often cannot scale to such a large volume of data due to their space and time complexity. To overcome the scalability problem, in this paper, high performance Singular Vector Decomposition (SVD) library redsvd has been used to identify topics over time from the huge data set of over two hundred million tweets sent in the 21 days following the Great East Japan Earthquake. While we begin with word count vectors of authors and words for each time slot (in our case, every hour), authors' clusters from each slot are extracted by SVD and k-means. And then, the original fast feature selection algorithm named CWC has been used to extract discriminative words from each cluster. As a result, authors' clusters recognized as topics as well as issues of conventional social media analysis method for big data can be visualized overcoming the scalability problem.
Kinematic behavior of southern Alaska constrained by westward decreasing postglacial slip rates on the Denali Fault, Alaska

Long-term slip rates for the Denali Fault in southern Alaska are derived using ^(10)Be cosmogenic radionuclide (CRN) dating of offset glacial moraines at two sites. Correction of ^(10)Be CRN model ages for the effect of snow shielding uses historical, regional snow cover data scaled to the site altitudes. To integrate the time variation of snow cover, we included the relative changes in effective wetness over the last 11 ka, derived from lake-level records and δ^(18)O variations from Alaskan lakes. The moraine CRN model ages are normally distributed around an average of 12.1 ± 1.0 ka (n = 22, ± 1σ). The slip rate decreases westward from ~13 mm/a at 144°49′W to about 7 mm/a at 149°26′W. The data are consistent with a kinematic model in which southern Alaska translates northwestward at a rate of ~14 mm/a relative to a stable northern Alaska with no rotation. This suggests progressive slip partitioning between the Denali Fault and the active fold and thrust belt at the northern front of the Alaska range, with convergence rates increasing westward from ~4 mm/a to 11 mm/a between ~149°W and 145°W. As the two moraines sampled for this study were emplaced synchronously, our suggestion of a westward decrease in the slip rate of the Denali Fault relies largely upon the measured offsets at both sites, regardless of any potential systematic uncertainty in the CRN model ages.
Optimal Managerial Tenure in Dynamic Agency with Renegotiation

This paper examines the impact of repeated renegotiation on incentives and managerial tenure when performance information is serially correlated. In addition to providing a general solution to a multi-period agency problem with serially correlated performance measures, the paper characterizes optimal managerial tenure/turnover policies as a function of the time-series properties of performance measures. With negatively correlated performance measures, the principal prefers longer managerial tenure, and no turnover is optimal. With positively correlated performance measures, absent a switching cost, turnover every period is optimal. In the presence of a fixed switching cost, interior optimal turnover policies exist if the performance measures are positively correlated. The optimal turnover policies present an alternative to theories of performancedriven managerial turnover and are consistent with evidence that a majority of managerial turnovers are (age-related) normal retirements.
Tumor Growth Need Not Be Driven by Rare Cancer Stem Cells

The cancer stem cell hypothesis postulates that tumor growth is driven by a rare subpopulation of tumor cells. Much of the supporting evidence for this intriguing idea is derived from xenotransplantation experiments in which human leukemia cells are grown in immunocompromised mice. We show that, when lymphomas and leukemias of mouse origin are transplanted into histocompatible mice, a very high frequency (at least 1 in 10) of the tumor cells can seed tumor growth. We suggest that the low frequency of tumor-sustaining cells observed in xenotransplantation studies may reflect the limited ability of human tumor cells to adapt to growth in a foreign (mouse) milieu.
Shared Information Goods

Once purchased, information goods are often shared within small social communities. Software and music, for example, can be easily shared among family or friends. In this paper, we ask whether such sharing will undermine seller profit. We reach several surprising conclusions. We find, for example, that under certain circumstances sharing will markedly increase profit even if sharing is inefficient in the sense that it is more expensive for consumers to distribute the good via sharing than it would be for the producer to simply produce additional units. Conversely, we find that sharing can markedly decrease profit even where sharing reduces net distribution costs. These results contrast with much of the prior literature on small-scale sharing, but are consistent with results obtained in related work on the topic of commodity bundling. Our findings highlight the relative importance of demand reshaping, as opposed to cost considerations, in determining the profitability effects of sharing. Copyright 1999 by the University of Chicago.
UniVR: A Universal Variance Reduction Framework for Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method

We revisit an important class of composite stochastic minimization problems that often arises from empirical risk minimization settings, such as Lasso, Ridge Regression, and Logistic Regression. We present a new algorithm UniVR based on stochastic gradient descent with variance reduction. Our algorithm supports non-strongly convex objectives directly, and outperforms all of the state-of-the-art algorithms, including both direct algorithms (SAG, MISO, and SAGA) and indirect algorithms (SVRG, ProxSVRG, SDCA, ProxSDCA, and Finito) for such objectives. Our algorithm supports strongly convex objectives as well, and matches the best known linear convergence rate. Experiments support our theory. As a result, UniVR closes an interesting gap in the literature because all the existing direct algorithms for the non-strongly convex case perform much slower than the indirect algorithms. We thus believe that UniVR provides a unification between the strongly and the non-strongly convex stochastic minimization theories.
Power and strategic change in a multinational industrial corporation

Purpose – The aim of the study was to analyze the use of power in a strategic change process within a large forest industry company. The organization in question had a total of 7,700 employees, 6‐8 organizational levels, over 30 production units and a widespread international sales network. The study highlighted the organization's internal narration as an important element in the use of power. It started in conjunction with the appointment of the new management group and continued throughout the two‐year monitoring period, so that gradually all organizational layers were involved in interpreting their roles and positions in the new structure.Design/methodology/approach – The empirical data were collected during a period of more than two years through participatory observation and the change narrative was made using the change report method. The use of power was observed from the perspective of the management group. The researcher had a dual role; he served both as a researcher and a member of the manageme.