Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Potential Therapeutic Competition in Community-Living Older Adults in the U.S.: Use of Medications That May Adversely Affect a Coexisting Condition

Objective The 75% of older adults with multiple chronic conditions are at risk of therapeutic competition (i.e. treatment for one condition may adversely affect a coexisting condition). The objective was to determine the prevalence of potential therapeutic competition in community-living older adults. Methods Cross-sectional descriptive study of a representative sample of 5,815 community-living adults 65 and older in the U.S, enrolled 2007–2009. The 14 most common chronic conditions treated with at least one medication were ascertained from Medicare claims. Medication classes recommended in national disease guidelines for these conditions and used by ≥2% of participants were identified from in-person interviews conducted 2008–2010. Criteria for potential therapeutic competition included: 1), well-acknowledged adverse medication effect; 2) mention in disease guidelines; or 3) report in a systematic review or two studies published since 2000. Outcomes included prevalence of situations of potential therapeutic competition and frequency of use of the medication in individuals with and without the competing condition. Results Of 27 medication classes, 15 (55.5%) recommended for one study condition may adversely affect other study conditions. Among 91 possible pairs of study chronic conditions, 25 (27.5%) have at least one potential therapeutic competition. Among participants, 1,313 (22.6%) received at least one medication that may worsen a coexisting condition; 753 (13%) had multiple pairs of such competing conditions. For example, among 846 participants with hypertension and COPD, 16.2% used a nonselective beta-blocker. In only 6 of 37 cases (16.2%) of potential therapeutic competition were those with the competing condition less likely to receive the medication than those without the competing condition. Conclusions One fifth of older Americans receive medications that may adversely affect coexisting conditions. Determining clinical outcomes in these situations is a research and clinical priority. Effects on coexisting conditions should be considered when prescribing medications.
Algebraic theory of optimal filter banks

We approach the problem of characterizing an optimal FIR filter bank from an algebraic point of view. We introduce the concept of majorization ordering to compare the performance of various filter banks in an admissible set /spl Lscr/. Using the properties of this ordering, we show that a principal component filter bank is associated with the greatest element in /spl Lscr/. A greatest element does not necessarily exist in /spl Lscr/ hence one has to deal with the closely related notion of a maximal element. We show by construction that a maximal element always exist in /spl Lscr/. An interesting result of the presented algebraic theory is that the connection between principal component filter banks and filter banks with maximum coding gain is clearly revealed. In fact, we show that coding gain is a Schur (1973) convex function preserving the order of majorization.
Hunt Sustainable Development , and the Sustainable Society Toward the Institutionalization of Macromarketing : Sustainable Enterprise , Sustainable Marketing

Major events in the institutionalization of macromarketing include (1) the series of macromarketing conferences that began at the University of Colorado in 1976, (2) the founding of the Journal of Macromarketing in 1981, and (3) the establishment of the Macromarketing Society in 2004. This article focuses on the continuing institutionalization of macromarketing by providing a commentary on Mark Peterson’s new textbook, Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach. The commentary is structured around seven questions: (1) What is Peterson’s ‘‘sustainable enterprise’’? (2) What is a macromarketing approach? (3) What is the ‘‘stability illusion’’ and how does Peterson dispel it with resource-advantage (R-A) theory? (4) How does R-A theory relate to sustainable marketing? (5) Does the text contribute to institutionalization or reinstitutionalization? (6) Was the financial crisis a ‘‘failure of laissez-faire’’? (7) Where is the discussion of the ‘‘welfare-state, Ponzi illusion,’’ and the sustainable society?
Maternal Control of PIN1 Is Required for Female Gametophyte Development in Arabidopsis

Land plants are characterised by haplo-diploid life cycles, and developing ovules are the organs in which the haploid and diploid generations coexist. Recently it has been shown that hormones such as auxin and cytokinins play important roles in ovule development and patterning. The establishment and regulation of auxin levels in cells is predominantly determined by the activity of the auxin efflux carrier proteins PIN-FORMED (PIN). To study the roles of PIN1 and PIN3 during ovule development we have used mutant alleles of both genes and also perturbed PIN1 and PIN3 expression using micro-RNAs controlled by the ovule specific DEFH9 (DEFIFICENS Homologue 9) promoter. PIN1 down-regulation and pin1-5 mutation severely affect female gametophyte development since embryo sacs arrest at the mono- and/or bi-nuclear stages (FG1 and FG3 stage). PIN3 function is not required for ovule development in wild-type or PIN1-silenced plants. We show that sporophytically expressed PIN1 is required for megagametogenesis, suggesting that sporophytic auxin flux might control the early stages of female gametophyte development, although auxin response is not visible in developing embryo sacs.
Domain independent regularities in scenarios

Scenario is a description technique which has attracted much attention not only from practitioners but also from researchers. Literature on this topic shows the possibilities that this description technique provides to enhance the understanding of task-related descriptions and the communication among stakeholders. On the other hand, the idea of pattern, as a description of a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment and its solution, has also attracted lots of attention, especially in software design. The paper describes an initial taxonomy of domain-independent-scenario patterns and proposes a preliminary process to use this taxonomy for scenario construction.
Power, profit, and principles : industry opportunity structures and the political mobilisation of jewellers

This thesis focuses on the creation of private environmental and social regulation through the interaction of non-state actors in the US market for gold jewellery. By investigating the role of business actors in the development of private regulation through their cooperation and contestation with civil society activists, this study brings a business power lens to the study of non-state institution-building. It focuses on a new case and elaborates on current understandings of ‘industry opportunity structures’ (IOSs), taking a model built for the study of social movements and applying it to business actors. It seeks to treat agents from the private sector as political actors in their own right and traces the effects of industry structures on the emergence, development, and impact of the political mobilisation of ethical, specialty, and diversified jewellers. It argues that business actors face different opportunities for political leverage during the private institution-building process depending on the nature of the firm within which they are embedded. It helps explain the variation observed in firm responses to activist contestation while informing debates over the broader implications of the increasing emergence of private regulation in the global economy. Business actors are embedded agents, subject to the constraints of industry structures and market forces. Opportunities for business actors to mobilise firm resources for political purposes varies with the opportunity window available to them, which expands or contracts with the politicisation of the market. Therefore, contrary to previous interpretations, civil society contestation can actually empower institutional entrepreneurs from the private sector to shape the regulatory landscape. While market forces privilege ‘business interests’, and business power safeguards the autonomy of industry, through learning and leadership there appears to be a cumulative effect to contentious politics that has the potential to ratchet-up private regulation in both its depth and breadth of coverage.
Complex Network Property Analysis of Knowledge Cooperation Networks

The concepts of average path length, clustering coefficient and degree distribution were firstly introduced into knowledge cooperation networks, and the property of complex network mapping from knowledge cooperation networks was studied. The Wiki network of baidu-baike was demonstrated as an example, and the topology of knowledge cooperation networks was compared with World Wide Web, Internet and Science collaboration graph. The results show the interaction structure of knowledge in knowledge cooperation networks.
A Functional Component Based Framework for Cross-Layer Design

We present a framework for cross-layer optimization in small, resource-constrained systems which require a high degree of optimization. We argue that often these systems allow for a departure from conventional network stack design principles opening up broad opportunities for optimizations. We examine these new opportunities and propose a design strategy to take advantage of them. Simulation results are presented in support of our design framework proposal and as motivation for future work in this important area.
Functional Analysis of the Inhibitor of Apoptosis (iap) Gene Carried by the Entomopoxvirus of Amsacta moorei

ABSTRACT The entomopoxvirus from Amsacta moorei (AmEPV) contains none of the commonly recognized vertebrate poxvirus apoptotic suppressor genes. However, AmEPV carries a single inhibitor of apoptosis (iap) gene (AMViap) not present in vertebrate poxviruses. The AMViap gene was active when coexpressed with the Drosophila proapoptotic gene hid in Ld652 cells and can rescue cells from apoptosis as shown by increased number of surviving cells and reduced levels of caspase-3-like activity. We also showed that expression of the AMViap gene rescued polyhedron production in Autographa californica M nucleopolyhedrovirus (AcMNPV)Δp35-infected Sf9 cells during an otherwise abortive infection induced by apoptosis. Surprisingly, deletion of the AMViap gene from the AmEPV genome led to only a modest (10-fold) loss of virion production in infected Ld652 cells, indicating that the AMViap gene is nonessential for virus replication under these conditions. However, infection of Ld652 cells by AmEPV lacking a functional iap gene led to a more rapid induction of cytotoxicity and increased levels of caspase-3-like activity. Similar results were observed and were more pronounced in infected Sf9 and S2 cells. The purified AMVIAP protein also inhibits the enzymatic activities of human caspase-9 and caspase-3 in vitro. Our results indicate that while the AMViap gene was active in controlling apoptosis through the intrinsic pathway, the virus likely encodes additional proteins that also regulate apoptosis.
Retinal transplantation-induced recovery of retinotectal visual function in a rodent model of retinitis pigmentosa.

PURPOSE To map the spatiotemporal decline in retinally driven activity in the superior colliculus (SC) of transgenic S334ter-line-3 rats that express a mutated rhodopsin, which causes photoreceptor degeneration. To determine whether transplantation of fetal retinal sheets into the subretinal space of these rats can recover visual activity in the SC. METHODS A visual stimulus was presented to the eye, and responses were recorded across the SC of untreated S334ter-line-3 rats aged 28 to 288 days. These data were used to draw a map of the developing scotoma. Intact retinal sheets from embryonic day 19 rats were transplanted into the subretinal space of S334ter-line-3 rats between 21 and 28 days of age. Responses to retinal stimulation were mapped in the SC of transplanted and sham control rats 78 to 163 days after surgery. The morphology of the retinas in all groups was examined. RESULTS Photoreceptor cell loss in untreated rats matched the decline in visual activity in the SC. At 28 days, there was a scotoma in the area of the SC that represents the central retina and, by 63 days, it had enlarged to cover the entire retinal representation. Visual responses were evoked in 64% of rats with retinal transplants. These retinally driven responses were confined to a small, contiguous region of the SC that represents the sector of the retina where the transplant was placed. Visual responses were absent in the SC outside this area in transplant recipients and throughout the SC of untreated and sham control rats. CONCLUSIONS Transplantation of fetal retinal sheets induced recovery of visual activity in the SC in this model of RP. The mechanisms underlying this functional recovery remain to be resolved, but these results suggest that transplantation should be further explored as a therapy for RP.
The impact of FOXO on dopamine and octopamine metabolism in Drosophila under normal and heat stress conditions

ABSTRACT The forkhead boxO transcription factor (FOXO) is a component of the insulin signalling pathway and plays a role in responding to adverse conditions, such as oxidative stress and starvation. In stressful conditions, FOXO moves from the cytosol to the nucleus where it activates gene expression programmes. Here, we show that FOXO in Drosophila melanogaster responds to heat stress as it does to other stressors. The catecholamine signalling pathway is another component of the stress response. In Drosophila, dopamine and octopamine levels rise steeply under heat, nutrition and mechanical stresses, which are followed by a decrease in the activity of synthesis enzymes. We demonstrate that the nearly twofold decline of FOXO expression in foxoBG01018 mutants results in dramatic changes in the metabolism of dopamine and octopamine and the overall response to stress. The absence of FOXO increases tyrosine decarboxylase activity, the first enzyme in octopamine synthesis, and decreases the enzymatic activity of enzymes in dopamine synthesis, alkaline phosphatase and tyrosine hydroxylase, in young Drosophila females. We identified the juvenile hormone as a mediator of FOXO regulation of catecholamine metabolism. Our findings suggest that FOXO is a possible trigger for endocrinological stress reactions. Summary: The transcription factor FOXO affects catecholamine metabolism under normal and heat stress conditions in D. melanogaster, and juvenile hormone (JH) is a mediator of this effect.
An egocentric approach to machine intelligence

Intimate to the functioning and behavior of intelligent systems is the manner in which information is represented internally. The conventional approach to intelligent system design assumes a particular bias in the manner by which this information is represented. Typically, this is characterized by an "abstract" or "objective" design methodology which holds that intelligence is not a function of the physical nature of the system. Such an approach suffers from several shortcomings, most notably problems relating to scaling and complexity. Recent physiological research, however, has demonstrated that physical bodily form is a fundamental building block in the organization of mammalian cortical structures. Consequently, this article explores such a biologically motivated "subjective" or "egocentric" approach to system design, and demonstrates its utility in a simple robot arm control problem.
Parallel and local learning for fast probabilistic neural networks in scalable data mining

Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN) represent knowledge in the form of simple well understood Bayesian models, which are most suitable for data mining applications that also need confidence levels. However if the number N of pattern neurons grows large, the evaluation of a single unknown sample has still O(N) complexity, which is not scale well. Parallelism can efficiently work towards speeding up the large neural networks. Whereas the PNN run time can be reduced by parallelism, its computational cost can be decreased by keeping only the globally most important pattern neurons. While such parsimonious global models have been studied for a long time, there is another way that is related to local learning algorithms. Maintain all N pattern neurons but to classify any unknown x use only the local ones, the k nearest neighbor to x neurons. This local learning PNN is investigated here. By using confidence ratio outputs we optimize the number of k nearest neighbor neurons for the best PNN performance. Combined with the parallel approach using p processors the method can reduce the cost of classifying an unknown x from O(N) to O(k/p).
An Empirical Analysis of Community Center Rents

This article is the winner of the Retail Real Estate manuscript prize (sponsored by the International Council of Shopping Centers) presented at the 2001 American Real Estate Society Annual Meeting. This study empirically models the determinants of community center rent. It employs a two-stage model that estimates center vacancy in the first stage and then includes predicted vacancy in a second stage demand model investigating endogenous and exogenous determinants of community center rent. The data includes information on maximum and minimum square foot rent for 118 community centers in Atlanta, Georgia. Maximum community center rent is highly correlated with a centerâ€™s predicted vacancy rate and location within the Atlanta area. Additionally, rent at both maximum and minimum levels is influenced by trade area purchasing power, property age and to a lesser extent by proximity to a regional mall, center design and neighborhood factors.
Bayesian VoIP Quality Evaluation Using the Time Between Retried Calls

This paper presents a new method for determining the voice quality of a VoIP carrier at a given time. The current methods rely on the voice stream analysis, their main drawback being the large computational power required and the cost for licenses. The method presented in this paper analyses the time difference between successive calls from the same source number to the same destination number, and identifies a connection between this calling pattern and the voice quality of a VoIP carrier. The advantage of this method relies in its low computational power requirement, as the voice stream analysis is no longer required. Bayesian networks are built to infer the exact a posteriori probability of poor voice quality. A case study was performed on a prepaid long distance carrier and the results show that a large percent (above 50%) of the customer complaints can be identified using this method.
An Improved FCM algorithm for Color Image Segmentation

In this paper, an improved fuzzy C-means clustering (IFCM) algorithm for color image segmentation is proposed to solve the problem of heavy calculating burden and the disadvantage that clustering performance is affected by initial cluster centers for FCM, which is simple and easy to implement in color Image segmentation. For one thing, the quick subtractive clustering (QSC) is used for getting initial cluster centers of the image data points. For another, the first component of color feature set discovered by Ohta is chosen as the one-dimensional eigenvector. In order to reduce the computational complexity, the mapping from pixel space to eigenvector space is used for modifying the object function. Furthermore, combined the two problems of cluster centers initialization and cluster validity goes research to find optimizing the number of clusters. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm has better effect and lower computational complexity on color image segmentation.
Documenting Requirements Traceability Information : A Case Study Master ' s thesis

The literature lists many benefits of requirements traceability and standards suggest that it should be practiced. However, available literature concentrates on industries developing complex and large systems with several thousands of requirements. Thus, the companies developing systems with only approximately a hundred requirements face the challenge to define what traceability information to document and how. The goals of this thesis were to introduce requirements traceability and to offer guidelines for documenting traceability information for these companies. The thesis is part of the QURE (Quality Through Requirement) project at Helsinki University of Technology. The thesis begins with an introduction of traceability classes, relations and benefits of documenting them. It also presents techniques and tools to document traceability information. The theory part ends with discussion of the costs and problems of practicing requirements traceability. The case study part of the thesis consists of an analysis of requirements traceability and good practices developed for documenting traceability information in a case company. In addition, improvement actions that were taken by the company are presented. The thesis ends with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the work, the most important of which is the observation that pre-traceability is the first that the target group companies could document and benefit from whereas there can be many problems in documenting post-traceability information.
The Intrinsic Size of Sagittarius A* from 0.35 to 6 cm

We present new high-resolution observations of Sagittarius A* at wavelengths of 17.4-23.8 cm with the Very Large Array in the A configuration with the Pie Town Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) antenna. We use the measured sizes to calibrate the interstellar scattering law and find that the major axis size of the scattering law is smaller by ~6% than previous estimates. Using the new scattering law, we are able to determine the intrinsic size of Sgr A* at wavelengths from 0.35 to 6 cm using existing results from the VLBA. The new law increases the intrinsic size by ~20% at 0.7 cm and <5% at 0.35 cm. The intrinsic size is 13RS at 0.35 cm and is proportional to λγ, where γ is in the range 1.3-1.7.
Dual band LNA/mixer using conjugate matching for implantable biotelemetry

A fully integrated 2.4/5.2-GHz dual-band low-noise amplifier (LNA) / mixer for implantable biotelemetry is presented. By using conjugate matching technique, the proposed front-end receiver circuit integrates LNA output and mixer input into a single chip at the 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz ISM band. The proposed front-end circuit was designed for super-heterodyne receiver. By switching local oscillator (LO) frequency, the output of proposed circuit is the intermediate frequency at the 400 MHz frequency band. The chip has been designed and fabricated in a TSMC 0.18-mum CMOS technology. The active chip area is about 1040 mum x 760 mum. The proposed front-end circuit exhibits a 22.6 dB gain, a 4.5 dB noise figure, and OP1dB of -15 dBm at 2.4 GHz and exhibits a 10.5 dB gain, a 5.9 dB noise figure, and OP1dB of -14.2 dBm at 5.2 GHz. In order to achieve single chip design target, this chip input was designed with on-chip matching component. The return loss of proposed circuit reaches more than 25 dB at the both 2.4 GHz and 5.2 GHz. The proposed circuit exhibits 9.4 mW power consumption by 1.8-V supply.