Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Factors Associated with the Social Support of Hemodialysis Patients

Background: Support has been gradually acknowledged as a significant factor that exerts a positive influence on hemodialysis patients’ lives as well as on the outcome of the disease. The purpose was to explore factors associated with social support of hemodialysis patients. Methods: The sample studied consisted of 258 patients undergoing hemodialysis in public hospitals in Athens, Greece during 2015. Data collection was performed by the method of the interview using a specially designed questionnaire, which included the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support for the assessment of social support from significant others, family and friends as well as patients’ socio-demographic, clinical and other characteristics. Results: Of the 258 participants, 53.9% were male and 65% were over 60 yr. Regard to social support, patients felt highly supported by their significant others and their family (median 6 for both subscales) and less by their friends (median 4.5 neutral support levels). In terms of patients’ characteristics, statistically significant association of support from significant others and family was observed with marital status (P<0.001 and P<0.001 respectively), place of residence (P<0.001 and P<0.001 respectively) and the number of children (P=0.002 and P=0.007 respectively). Furthermore, statistically significant association of support from friends was observed with age (P <0.001), marital status (P=0.002), and place of residence (P=0.017). Conclusion: Socio-demographic, clinical characteristics and patients’ perceptions are associated with perceived Social Support. Provision of holistic individualized care to hemodialysis patients demands assessment of social support in the daily clinical practice.
NLION: Natural Language Interface for querying ONtologies

Use of semantic web models for representing expert knowledge about a domain as an ontology is becoming increasingly common. However, since these ontologies contain detailed domain information in a formal specification, it cannot be easily understood by a casual user. Providing a natural language interface to ontologies will help such users to retrieve the required information and will further enable use of these ontologies in sophisticated applications. This paper presents NLION, a Natural Language Interface for querying ONtologies, which accepts a natural language query and outputs a SPARQL query. For achieving this, we use semantic relation tagging to recognize the meaning of the user query with respect to the target ontology. NLION effectiveness was analyzed and it was found to be 61.60%.
ANN-based simulation of transcriptional networks in Yeast

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have recently been used to quantitatively model stress-induced transcriptional changes in gene regulatory networks, based on gene expression and DNA-binding information. Here, we extend this approach to study the MSN2/4 regulatory networks in Yeast, which are known to be involved in the stress response. We also refine the ANN models by incorporating the dynamics of transcriptional regulation and test our method on three networks involving YAP1. For the latter we make an extensive search in order to identify potential latencies between transcriptional activation and corresponding changes in the expression of targeted genes. Finally, we test our model's ability to replicate gene-deletion findings in the YAP1 networks. We find that our models can accurately capture the regulatory effect of different transcription factors, under both normal and gene knockout conditions and that incorporating latencies in the ANN models results in significantly higher performance. Overall, we show that ANNs can be used to provide quantitative predictions about the expression profile of targeted genes during the stress response in Yeast.
The effects of age on pain sensitivity: preclinical studies.

OBJECTIVE Preclinical studies of pain and aging represent an area of research where considerations of age, strain, gender, and method of behavioral assessment are but some of the challenges that must be addressed. The results of studies related to the impact of age on pain sensitivity have ranged from increased to decreased sensitivity to no change. Examining the design of these studies one discovers that cross-sectional designs using animals of different ages have been used to evaluate age-related effects in normal animals as well as animals with inflammatory and neuropathic pain conditions. In the present review a summary of these studies is presented along with a discussion of potential mechanisms responsible for changes that have been described. OUTCOME MEASURES The dominant method of behavioral assessment in the majority of studies involving rodents has been reflex-based strategies that unfortunately do not reveal the same effects of experimental manipulations known to affect pain sensitivity in humans. A comparison of results obtained with reflex-based methods versus those obtained with cortically dependent operant methods reveals significant differences. CONCLUSIONS Increases in pain sensitivity under different experimental conditions have been suggested to result from age-related anatomical, physiological, and biochemical changes as well as compensatory changes in homeostatic mechanisms and intrinsic plasticity of somatosensory pathways involved in the processing and perception of pain. Other factors that may contribute to the impact of age on pain sensitivity include dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and changes in autonomic function that occur with advancing age. In the future translational research in the field of pain and aging will need to focus on establishing clinically relevant animal models and assessment strategies to evaluate the causal relationships between the biological changes associated with advancing age and the varied behavioral changes in pain sensitivity.
Remote Progressive Update for Code-Paging Firmware in Flash-Based Networked Embedded Systems

Firmware update over a network connection is an essential but expensive feature for many embedded systems due to the relatively high power consumption and limited bandwidth. This work proposes a page-level, link-time technique that minimizes not only the size of patching scripts but also perturbation to the firmware memory, over the entire sequence of updates in the system’s lifetime. Experimental results show our technique to reduce the energy consumption of firmware update by 38‐42% over the state-of-the-art.
A ‘Big’ legacy? Evaluating volunteers’ experiences of London 2012 and beyond

This study aims to discover whether the Olympic experience transformed London 2012 volunteers into engaged citizens. The chapter was underpinned by the British government’s hope that Olympic volunteering may help with building a ‘Big Society’. The experiences of twenty London 2012 volunteers are structured into three phases, with data taken from their diaries and interviews. There is evidence of transformation in many of the participants’ lives and sense of self, with some experiencing clear turning points or rites of passage. It also seems that their London 2012 volunteering experience increased their community engagement in the widest sense.
Masers as probes of massive star formation in the nuclear disk

Abstract OH(1720 MHz) and methanol masers are now recognized to be excellent probes of the interactions of supernova remnants with molecular clouds and tracers of massive star formation, respectively. To better understand the nature of star formation activity in the central region of the Galaxy, we have used these two classes of masers combined with the IRAC and MIPS data to study prominent sites of ongoing star formation in the nuclear disk. The nuclear disk is characterized by massive GMCs with elevated gas temperatures, compared to their dust temperatures. We note an association between methanol masers and a class of mid-infrared “green sources”. These highly embedded YSOs show enhanced 4. 5μm emission due to excited molecular lines. The distribution of methanol masers and supernova remnants suggest a low efficiency of star formation (with the exception of Sgr B2), which we believe is due to an enhanced flux of cosmic ray electrons impacting molecular clouds in the nuclear disk. We also highlight the importance of cosmic rays in their ability to heat molecular clouds, and thus increase the gas temperature.
Modulation of the immune response to transplanted tumors in rats by selective depletion of neutrophils in vivo using a monoclonal antibody: abrogation of specific transplantation resistance to chemical carcinogen-induced syngeneic tumors by selective depletion of neutrophils in vivo.

The role of neutrophils in transplantation immunity to syngeneic rat tumors was examined using a monoclonal antibody (RP-3) that depletes rat neutrophils selectively in vivo. We used 2 chemical carcinogen-induced transplanted tumors of different antigenic specificity (KMT-17 and KDH-8 of WKA rat origin). When neutrophils were selectively depleted by i.p. injection of RP-3 at the time of in vivo priming with X-irradiated tumor cells, the growth of subsequently s.c. transplanted identical tumors was not inhibited, in contrast to the group of rats immunized without RP-3 treatment. Tumor growth was also not inhibited when the immune rats were treated with RP-3 at the time of identical viable tumor cell challenge. These results suggest that neutrophils play a role in both the priming and effector phases of specific transplantation resistance to syngeneic tumors.
How can Financing of Social Services be Pro-Poor ?

(UNRISD) is an autonomous agency engaging in multidisciplinary research on the social dimensions of contemporary problems affecting development. Its work is guided by the conviction that, for effective development policies to be formulated, an understanding of the social and political context is crucial. The Institute attempts to provide governments, development agencies, grassroots organizations and scholars with a better understanding of how development policies and processes of economic, social and environmental change affect different social groups. Working through an extensive network of national research centres, UNRISD aims to promote original research and strengthen research capacity in developing countries. This is not a formal UNRISD publication. The responsibility for opinions expressed in signed studies rests solely with their author(s), and availability on the UNRISD Web site (http://www.unrisd.org) does not constitute an endorsement by UNRISD of the opinions expressed in them. No publication or distribution of these papers is permitted without the prior authorization of the author(s), except for personal use. Summary In the first part, a brief discussion of the interactive relationship (synergy) between income growth and social policy is presented. Our model of synergy leads to a set of pro-poor recommendations which explicitly integrate economic and social policies. Social services financing is a critical link between economic and social policies; however, the paper argues that social policies alone cannot be pro-poor; economic policies must be complementary and reinforce that objective. Recent good and bad experiences on financing social policy are presented from various countries and assessed in terms of how progressive and solidaristic they are. From this perspective, recent trends are not very encouraging. Since the inception of structural adjustment programs, there has been a push towards VATs (and other indirect taxes). Indirect taxes are not pro-poor sources of revenue for social polices. Nevertheless, not all reforms have had negative effects. In particular, within the last ten years or so, there has been a growing recognition among policy-makers on the detrimental effects of user fees. Countries should be encouraged to implement direct progressive taxes. The United Nations and the IFIs should take a leading role in terms of capacity building in this area. Donors should help foot the bill in terms of training and the required infrastructure to ensure compliance with these taxes.
Self-tuning of a sunlight-deflickering filter for moving scenes underwater

This work deals with the design of a real-time approach for automatic parameter tuning in a deflickering process of videos of a moving landscape scene underwater perturbed with sunlight waves. The tuner performs a continuous parameter optimization inside a basic filter, which employes feedback in order to improve the performance. Also it is able to adapt the optimum to eventual changing of the scenario conditions. Moreover, issues like the parameter sensitivity and loop stability are addressed equally. The results have been illustrated by means of a worked-out case-study employing real film material of a scenario underwater. The approach was motivated by the SLAM applications with monocamera vision-based vehicles underwater and simple hardware implementations in FPGA structures.
Women in the international cocaine trade: gender, choice and agency in context

10 Introduction to the thesis . 12 CHAPTER 1: DRUG TRAFFICKING, WOMEN, MYTH AND MISONCEPTION . 16 Introduction . 16 Context of investigation: the cocaine trade . 16 Crime’s metaphors; imagining drug trafficking . 17 Reagan’s war on drugs: the creation of ‘suitable enemy’ . 18 War on Drugs: women mules as subcategory . 19 Drug trafficking as ‘enterprise crime’ . 22 Exclusion of women; generalising from all male samples . 23 Review of available literature: where are women in drug trafficking literature? 25 The subject of this thesis: subject, scope and territory . 28 Crime in context: drug trafficking and globalisation . 29 Chapter summary and aims of this thesis . 31 CHAPTER 2: WOMEN DRUG MULES: VICTIMISATION AND VOLITION . 33 Introduction: explaining women’s presence in the drug trade . 33 ‘Feminisation of poverty’ . 33 The drug trade as ‘equal opportunities employer’ . 39 Women in the international drug trade: emancipated women or victims of poverty? 43 CHAPTER 3: THEORISING WOMEN AND DRUG TRAFFICKING: BEYOND STRUCTURE AND AGENCY . 45 Introduction: Beyond dualisms, the structured action approach. 45 Social structure; structured action . 45 Gender and structured action . 46 Structured action: Messerschmidt on masculinities and crime . 47 Structured action: Miller’s critique of Messerschmidt on femininities and crime . 48 Miller’s development of structured action theory . 50 Theorising in the global context . 56 Implications for theorising structure and agency . 57 Chapter conclusion: Theorising gender and mule-work: beyond victimisation and volition . 59 CHAPTER 4: IMAGINING PRISON: POLITICAL FRONTIER; NARRATIVE LANDSCAPE . 60 Introduction: contextualising the research . 60 The place of prisons in Ecuador in international anti-drug politics . 60 The effects of exporting justice . 63 Prisons in Ecuador: site of globalised politics and exported justice . 65 The place of prison within drug trafficking . 65 Contextualising the research site and research subjects . 68 Prison as a narrative landscape . 69 Talk and time in men’s and women’s prisons in Ecuador. 70
Commodity Trading Advisors Funds : Analysis and Application

Commodity trading advisors funds (CTAs) are funds that are managed by professional money managers using global futures and options markets as a medium. CTAs normally provide high after-fee returns compared with traditional asset classes. We propose to employ stochastic dominance (SD) approach to rank the performance of CTAs. There are several advantages of SD approach in evaluating the performance of funds. First, it allows us to compare the entire return distributions of two funds instead of just the mean or median returns as used in most conventional studies. Second, it is nonparametric and free from the ambiguous issue of correctly specifying asset pricing models. Third, it does not require the return distributions to be normally distributed and allows for minimal assumptions about investors’ utility functions. Fourth, SD approach also allows for a meaningful economic interpretation of the results. Hence, we argue that SD approach is more appropriate compared with traditional approaches as a filter in the CTAs selection process.
TREATING THE CONCEPT "INTELLECTUAL MOBILITY" AS AN INTEGRATED CHARACTERISTIC OF FUTURE PROFESSIONALS

The article considers mobility as an essential development factor for professionals and indentifies the place of intellectual mobility in the hierarchy of various dimensions of mobility. The genesis of the concept 'intellectual mobility' has been deduced. Here we show the necessity of the development of this integrated characteristic that provides the ability of future engineers to change quickly the types and forms of intelligence activity without reducing its efficiency and productivity. The structure of intellectual mobility and its main components (intellectual capabilities and personality traits) are given. It is stated that the development of intellectual mobility should be guided by the structural model of intelligence developed by
Absolute Magnitudes of Be Stars

Absolute magnitudes of Be stars of luminosity classes IV and V are studied by comparison with those of B stars of the same spectral type. On average, Be stars are brighter than B stars of the corresponding spectral type, which agrees with some previous results. However, a very new and interesting result is that this over-luminosity is larger for later Be stars, while it is well known that emission characteristics are fainter for these stars. The very fast rotation of late Be stars, close to the break-up velocity, is the most likely physical explanation. Furthermore, a very preliminary study of the B2e stars shows that the absolute magnitude is innuenced by the anisotropic envelope.
Neurodegeneration and Epilepsy in a Zebrafish Model of CLN3 Disease (Batten Disease)

The neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses are a group of lysosomal storage disorders that comprise the most common, genetically heterogeneous, fatal neurodegenerative disorders of children. They are characterised by childhood onset, visual failure, epileptic seizures, psychomotor retardation and dementia. CLN3 disease, also known as Batten disease, is caused by autosomal recessive mutations in the CLN3 gene, 80–85% of which are a ~1 kb deletion. Currently no treatments exist, and after much suffering, the disease inevitably results in premature death. The aim of this study was to generate a zebrafish model of CLN3 disease using antisense morpholino injection, and characterise the pathological and functional consequences of Cln3 deficiency, thereby providing a tool for future drug discovery. The model was shown to faithfully recapitulate the pathological signs of CLN3 disease, including reduced survival, neuronal loss, retinopathy, axonopathy, loss of motor function, lysosomal storage of subunit c of mitochondrial ATP synthase, and epileptic seizures, albeit with an earlier onset and faster progression than the human disease. Our study provides proof of principle that the advantages of the zebrafish over other model systems can be utilised to further our understanding of the pathogenesis of CLN3 disease and accelerate drug discovery.
Non-metrical scene reconstruction using a quasi-calibrated prime lens based camera

Three dimensional (3-D) vision techniques in the field of Computer Vision aims mainly at reconstructing a scene to find its three dimensional geometrical information. Passive 3-D vision techniques such as computational stereo vision method do surface reconstruction from disparities arising in images of the same scene taken from multiple views. For reconstruction leading to metrical information of the 3-D geometry of the scene the camera pose with respect to some world reference frame and the camera parameters such as the focal length, sensor size has to be accurately known. Such information especially the pose of the camera might not be known in many applications such as in agricultural, under-water explorations since a unique universal frame of reference is not possible. Also the constancy of the internal camera parameters will not be valid in many applications requiring good accuracy in reconstruction. In such cases the cameras used for passive triangulation is said to be un-calibrated. Stereo vision technique generally requires two images and which need not be from two different cameras. The paper is an attempt to use a single moving camera with which the image of the same scene is acquired from two different views. Since the scene geometry and the pose of the camera are unknown the problem to be addressed is close the so called Structure from Motion (SfM) problem in Computer Vision. The reconstruction method developed in the paper is extended further to segment top surfaces of cuboid shaped objects considered as the objects of interest in the scene reconstruction process. Though the information in the case considered is non-metrical the applications that pose such un-calibrated camera as a demand are plenty.
Learning of parameters of intuitionistic statement networks

The paper presents method of learning weights parameters of intuitionistic statement networks on the base of learning data. The approach is based on the application of substitutional network model which is equivalent to intuitionistic statement networks in the sense of conditional dependency between statements. The substitutional model is a generative model which allows to compute its own parameters even on the base of complete or incomplete learning data. In the paper the general conditions to achieve substitutional model and the method of its analysis are presented. Finally the weights of intuitionistic statement networks are identified on the basis of substitutional model analysis.
A Low Complexity Algorithm for Receiver Antenna Selection in MIMO Systems

For a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with more antennas at the receiver than the transmitter, selecting the same number of receiver antennas as the number of transmitter antennas can take most of the advantages of MIMO capacity performance and at the same time reduce the system hardware cost and computational complexity. In this paper, a novel effective low complexity near-optimal antenna selection algorithms based on maximization channel capacity is proposed for the MIMO array configuration. Different from many existing fast antenna selection algorithms which obtain the sub-optimal channel sub matrix by adding or removing one row per step exploit re-computing formula, our algorithm acquires the near-optimal channel matrix by a faster updating formula. In such faster updating formula, the formula is updating rather than re-c omputing, so that the matrix inverse operation is avoided. Due to using an effective iteration processing, our antenna selection algorithm reduces computational complexity and leads to a substantial improvement in the capacity optimally for moderating to high signal to noise ratio (SNRs), and obtains almost the same capacity and bit error ratio (BER) performance as that of the exhaustive-search-based optimal antenna selection algorithm. Compared to the conventional sub-optimal antenna selection algorithms, our algorithm has lower computational complexity and achieves almost the same capacity and BER performance as the optimal selection algorithm. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulation results illustrate that the new algorithm outperforms the existing sub-optimal antenna selection methods.