Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Role of Uric Acid in Kidney Fibrosis: Experimental Evidences for the Causal Relationship

Hyperuricemia is a common finding in chronic kidney disease due to decreased uric acid clearance. The role of uric acid as a risk factor for chronic kidney disease has been largely debated, and recent studies suggested a role of uric acid in the causation and progression of kidney fibrosis, a final common pathway in chronic kidney disease. Uric acid and xanthine oxidase may contribute to kidney fibrosis mainly by inducing inflammation, endothelial dysfunction, oxidative stress, and activation of the renin-angiotensin system. Besides, hyperuricemia induces alterations in renal hemodynamics via afferent arteriolopathy and contributes to the onset and progression of kidney fibrosis. Xanthine oxidase inhibitors may prevent kidney damage via lowering uric acid and/or inhibiting xanthine oxidase. However, there is still no sufficient evidence from interventional clinical researches supporting the causal relationship between uric acid and kidney fibrosis. The effect and role of xanthine oxidase inhibitors in preventing kidney fibrosis and chronic kidney disease progression must be further explored by performing future large scale clinical trials.
Transitions from School to Work: Search Time and Job Duration

We consider the early labour market experience of young persons. Using a large data sample of Norwegian individuals finishing education in 1989-91, we analyze the transition from school to work and the duration of the first job. We allow the search duration, the accepted wage, and the job duration to be connected in a system of simultaneous equations which is estimated by maximum likelihood. The empirical evidence suggests that individuals with higher levels of schooling get jobs more quickly, and also have longer durations of their first jobs. Apprentices have shorter search periods and stay in their jobs longer than other individuals at the same educational level. Females appear to have lower reservation wages when entering the labour market (shorter search time and lower wages). They also stay in the first job longer than males do. The search duration and the accepted wage affect job duration positively, but the estimated covariance terms suggest unobserved factors working in the opposite direction.
The Influence of the perception of Fairness on Innovation Idea Value and Knowledge Sharing Behavior in Innovation Idea Networks

This article explores the relationships between innovation idea value, innovators’ perceptions of fairness, and their participation behavior and knowledge sharing behavior in the intrafirm social network. The study uses survey data and a database from a large company that is one of Europe’s top performers in idea management. In addition to the idea database, this study surveys participating employees about their perceptions of fairness and their participation behavior and knowledge sharing behavior. The results show that there is a clear relationship between innovation idea value, employees’ perceptions of fairness, and employees’ participation behavior and knowledge sharing behavior. Furthermore, there is clear evidence that tenure increases the value of innovation ideas. The findings suggest a number of implications for ideation management and for the design of social networks for innovation ideas. To increase the value of innovation ideas, social networks for innovation ideas can be used if the allocation of rewards for idea providers is positively associated with the fairness perceptions of network members.
UTargetless " Schwa : An Articulatory Analysis *

One of the major goals for a theory of phonetic and phonological structure is to be able to account for the (apparent) contextual variation of phonological units in as general and simple a way as possible. While it is always possible to state some pattern of variation using a special "lowlevel" rule that changes the specification of some unit, recent approaches have attempted to avoid stipulating such rules, and instead propose that variation is often the consequence of how the phonological units, properly defined, are organized. Two types of organization have been suggested that lead to the natural emergence of certain types of variation. One is that invariantly specified phonetic units may overlap in time, Le. , they may be co-produced (e.g., Bell-Berti & Harris, 1981; Browman & Goldstein, 1987; Fowler, 1977; 1981a,b; Liberman & Mattingly, 1985), so that the overall tract shape and acoustic consequences of these co-produced units will reflect their combined influence. A second is that a given phonetic unit may be unspecified for some dimension(s) (e.g., Keating, 1988; Ohman, 1966), so that the apparent variation along that dimension is due to continuous trajectories between neighboring units' specifications for that dimension. A particularly interesting case of contextual variation involves reduced (schwa) vowels in English. Investigations have shown that these vowels are particularly malleable: they take on the acoustic (Fowler, 1981a) and articulatory (e.g., Alfonso & Baer, 1982) properties of neighboring vowels. While Fowler (1981a) has analyzed this variation as emerging from the co-production of the reduced vowels and a neighboring stressed vowel, it might also be the case that schwa is completely unspecified for tongue position.
Stochastic Optimization Tools for ELD Problem

ELD determines the power to be generated by the committed units so that the total cost can be minimized while satisfying the required constraints. Here the cost function is highly non linear, non-convex and non differentiable. Therefore, classical optimization methods usually face problem to converge. This paper presents a comparative study of three different algorithms i.e. MPSO, clonal selection algorithm and gravitational search algorithm for solving the ELD problem. Simulation results were performed with different test cases and comparisons are performed. The simulation result reveals the comparative performance and suggested the best technique which is easy to implement, with less execution time. Economic load dispatch is a vital part of the optimization task in power system generation, whose characteristics are complex and highly non linear, is to schedule the committed unit outputs, So that the required load demand can be fulfilled at minimum cost while satisfying equality and inequality constraints. In conventional ELD the cost function of all generators is approximately represented by a simple quadratic function and is solved by different optimization technique such as dynamic programming and non-linear programming techniques. However non-off these methods may be able to provide an optimal solution for they usually get stuck at a local optimum (1),(2). Recently, as an alternative to the conventional mathematical approaches, modern heuristic optimal technique such as simulated annealing (SA), evolutionary programming (EP), genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimization (PSO), neural networks and tabu search have been given much attention by many researches due to their ability to find global or quasi global optimum solutions. Although these heuristic methods do not always guarantee the global optimal solution in finite time, they often provide fast and reasonable solution. PSO is a population based, self-adaptive search optimization technique introduced by Kennedy and Eberhart in 1995.It solves nonlinear and non-continuous optimization problems very effectively and proves its success for many power system problems (17),(20). This paper proposes new optimization approaches, to solve ELD problems using improved gravitational search algorithm has shown the efficiency of GSA over others. In order to establish the capability of GSA to optimize the non-smooth cost function of 3 and 40 generator systems. The results obtained are compared with these of EP, PSO and AIS. The proposed methodology emerges out to be a robust optimization technique for solving ELD problem for various curve natures and power systems.
Neoliberalism, Education and Citizenship Rights of Unemployed Youth in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Via the evocation of two personal narratives of lived experiences of/with youth in South Africa, the paper addresses issues relating to youth, unemployment, education and structural injustice. These narrative vignettes reflect events of injustice that occur within the human sphere and fall within the interstices between competing discourses as sites of struggle for meaning and supremacy. It is here where the lived effects of unjust political structures can be witnessed as violent assaults on individual and collective bodies, psyches and souls, while the indomitability of the human spirit rallies to rise above such adversity. Both experiences, while specific, nevertheless articulate a difficult ‘glocalising’ relationship with ‘the general’ and ‘universal’ in the global interconnectedness of injustice and the effects of a dehumanising ideology. They are underscored by a historical legacy of apartheid and authoritarianism, but advanced through a newer discourse of neoliberal, globalising modernism. Both ideologies converge in untroubled alignment through similarly operational codes of control and the endemic forms and frames of (in)difference. The paper argues that racialised unemployed youth in South Africa carry the burden of structural political dysfunctionality and state ineptitude, and they are pathologised and differentially constructed as ‘failed’ citizens as a consequence. Not only are South African youth expected to carry the burden of unemployment, but also the flag of the nation’s political transformation as well, in a context of contradiction and maladministration overlaid by the debilitating effects of neoliberal governmentality. Youth identity is framed in nationalist economic terms, justified and advanced through the contemporary, global, modernist condition, supported by neoliberal capitalist relations. The historical, embodied and material injustices shape what is possible for youth, specifically unemployed youth, in South Africa today.
Speech Spectral Envelope Enhancement by HMM-Based Analysis/Resynthesis

We propose a speech enhancement-by-resynthesis framework whose strength lies in a common statistical speech model that is shared by the analysis and synthesis stages. First, a spectro-temporal analysis is performed and masked spectro-temporal regions are identified using a noise model. Then, HMM synthesis is used to reconstruct the spectral envelope in masked regions in a manner which is conditioned on the reliable regions, preventing the resynthesis from regressing to the training data mean. As a demonstration we enhance noise-corrupted speech utterances from a small vocabulary corpus for which good statistical models are available. Perceptual evaluation of speech quality and log spectral distances demonstrate considerable performance improvements over baseline approaches that do not exploit strong speech knowledge. The letter is accompanied by audio examples.
Sparse Reconstructions for Inverse PDE Problems

We are concerned with the numerical solution of linear parameter identification problems for parabolic PDE, written as an operator equation $Ku=f$. The target object $u$ is assumed to have a sparse expansion with respect to a wavelet system $Psi={psi_lambda}$ in space-time, being equivalent to a priori information on the regularity of $u=mathbf u^ opPsi$ in a certain scale of Besov spaces $B^s_{p,p}$. For the recovery of the unknown coefficient array $mathbf u$, we miminize a Tikhonov-type functional begin{equation*} min_{mathbf u}|Kmathbf u^ opPsi-f^delta|^2+alphasum_{lambda}omega_lambda|u_lambda|^p end{equation*} by an associated thresholded Landweber algorithm, $f^delta$ being a noisy version of $f$. Since any application of the forward operator $K$ and its adjoint involves the numerical solution of a PDE, perturbed versions of the iteration have to be studied. In particular, for reasons of efficiency, adaptive applications of $K$ and $K^*$ are indispensable cite{Ra07}. By a suitable choice of the respective tolerances and stopping criteria, also the adaptive iteration could recently be shown to have regularizing properties cite{BoMa08a} for $p>1$. Moreover, the sequence of iterates linearly converges to the minimizer of the functional, a result which can also be proved for the special case $p=1$, see [DaFoRa08]. We illustrate the performance of the resulting method by numerical computations for one- and two-dimensional inverse heat conduction problems. References: [BoMa08a] T. Bonesky and P. Maass, Iterated soft shrinkage with adaptive operator evaluations, Preprint, 2008 [DaFoRa08] S. Dahlke, M. Fornasier, and T. Raasch, Multiscale Preconditioning for Adaptive Sparse Optimization, in preparation, 2008 [Ra07] T. ~Raasch, Adaptive wavelet and frame schemes for elliptic and parabolic equations, Dissertation, Philipps-Universit"at Marburg, 2007
Fast safety verification of interior parts of automobiles

A program for automatically verifying safety regulations specified on the interior part of the automobile is developed. In the ECE regulation, any surface of the interior part is requested to have roundness larger than R3.2 where a sphere of diameter 165mm can collide. Our developed program initially generates points sufficiently covering the visible surface of the model. For each point, sphere-object intersections associated with the regulations are evaluated. If the surface portion around the point cannot satisfy the geometric condition of the regulation, red color is painted to the point. As the result, corner shapes of the CAD model with possibly injuring the driver and passenger in the car crash are extracted and displayed.
The Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin

Explores the political careers of Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin, who overcame defeat early in their political careers and rose to the highest elected offices in their respective countries. "The Strategy of Campaigning" demonstrates how and why two of the most successful leaders of our time succeeded in their political aspirations, despite - or perhaps because of - their apparent "policy extremism": that is, their advocacy of policy positions far from the apparent mainstream. The book analyzes policy extremism's viability as a political strategy, which enables candidates to forge new coalitions and out-flank conventional political allegiances.
Very Efficient Video Segmentation Techniques

Shot boundary detection (SBD) is the first fundamental step to managing video databases. It segments video data into the basic units for indexing and retrieval. Many automatic SBD techniques exists. They, however, are based on sequential search, and therefore too expensive for practical use. To address this problem, we explore a different direction to SBD in this paper. We investigate a non-linear approach in which most video frames do not need to be compared. This idea is fundamentally different from all existing methods. In fact, it is orthogonal to these schemes in the sense that it can be applied to substantially improve their performance. Our experiments show that this idea speeds up a conventional method based on color histograms up to 16 times while preserving the same accuracy. On the average, the improvement is five times according to our experiments on 26 videos of six different types.
Closed paths whose steps are roots of unity

We give explicit formulas for the number $U_n(N)$ of closed polygonal paths of length $N$ (starting from the origin) whose steps are $n^{\textrm{th}}$ roots of unity, as well as asymptotic expressions for these numbers when $N \rightarrow \infty$. We also prove that the sequences $(U_n(N))_{N \geq 0}$ are $P$-recursive for each fixed $n \geq 1$ and leave open the problem of determining the values of $N$ for which the $\textit{dual}$ sequences $(U_n(N))_{n \geq 1}$ are $P$-recursive.
LQR motion control and analysis of a prototype spherical robot

This article presents the results of a study on a prototype of spherical rolling robot and proposed a linear quadratic regulator controller to stabilize the system. The dynamic model of this spherical rolling robot has been presented with 2-DOF pendulum located inside a spherical shell and considered as a plate-ball system. The motion of the system is generated with a servo motor for left and right direction and a DC motor for forward and backward motion. Dynamic equations of the system are derived based on Euler-Lagrange method. Controlling a spherical robot is a challenging problem till today due to its nature of kinematics and highly nonlinear dynamics. Accordingly, a mid loop linear quadratic regulator (LQR) has been designed using full-state feedback to control the spherical robot. Simulation and experimental test have been carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.
Mutation analysis of NR2E3 and NRL genes in Enhanced S Cone Syndrome

Ten new and seventeen previously reported Enhanced S Cone Syndrome (ESCS) subjects were used to search for genetic heterogeneity. All subjects were diagnosed with ESCS on the basis of clinical, psychophysical and/or electroretinography testing using published criteria. Mutation analysis was performed on the NR2E3 nuclear receptor gene by single strand conformation analysis and direct sequencing, which revealed either homozygous (N=13) or compound heterozygous (N=11) mutations in 24 subjects (89%), heterozygous mutations in 2 subjects (7%) and no mutations in 1 subject (4%). Fifteen different mutations were identified, including six not previously reported. The subject (Patient A) with no detected NR2E3 mutation had features not usually associated with ESCS, in particular moderate rod photoreceptor function in peripheral retina and an abnormally thick retinal nerve fibre layer. Mutation analysis of the NRL, CRX, NR1D1 and THRB genes in this individual revealed a heterozygous one base‐pair insertion in exon 2 of the NRL gene, which results in a predicted truncation of the NRL protein. Loss‐of‐function NRL alleles have not been described previously in humans, but since the same mutation was present in unaffected family members, it raises the possibility that the abnormal ESCS phenotype in Patient A may result from a digenic mechanism, with a heterozygous NRL mutation and a mutation in another unknown gene. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Combining parson's problems with program visualization in CS1 context

Parson's problems, in which students solve programming assignments by putting code fragments in the correct order, can be an easy way to start the assignments as there is no need to write code or struggle with the syntax. In this paper, we report results from a preliminary experiment in which we combined two existing libraries, js-parsons and Jsvee. We extended the original feedback of js-parsons with program visualizations to show for the students how their solution was executed and why it possibly did not work as expected. We analyzed the usage of the visualizations, and the results show that over half of the students viewed them if they were available. Novices who used the visualizations tend to need more submissions than the other novices, which may imply the weaker students find visualizations more useful. However, more research is needed to analyze the learning effects.
Fixing the Domain and Range of Properties in Linked Data by Context Disambiguation

The amount of Linked Open Data available on the Web is rapidly growing. The quality of the provided data, however, is generally-speaking not fundamentally improving, hampering its wide-scale deployment for many real-world applications. A key data quality aspect for Linked Open Data can be expressed in terms of its adherence to an underlying welldened schema or ontology, which serves both as a documentation for the end-users as well as a xed reference for automated processing over the data. In this paper, we rst report on an analysis of the schema adherence of domains and ranges for Linked Open Data. We then propose new techniques to improve the correctness of domains and ranges by i) identifying the cases in which a property is used in the data with several dierent semantics, and ii) resolving them by updating the underlying schema and/or by modifying the data without compromising its retro-compatibility. We experimentally show the validity of our methods through an empirical evaluation over DBpedia by creating expert judgements of the proposed xes over a sample of the data.
Comparing overall survival between first generation EGFR-TKIs and chemotherapy in lung cancer patients with Del19/L858R

Objective Combined overall survival (OS) analysis of Lux-Lung 3 and Lux-Lung 6 demonstrated that patients with epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) exon 19 deletions (Del19) would benefit from first-line second generation EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs) afatinib but not for those with L858R. This study was to investigate the survival difference between first-line first generation EGFR-TKIs and chemotherapy in patients with either Del19 or L858R, and to directly compare OS in these two mutation groups. Methods Eligibles were all prospective and retrospective studies comparing EGFR-TKIs with conventional chemotherapy or receiving single agent EGFR-TKIs and demonstrating survival analysis based on mutation types. The primary outcome was OS measured as pooled hazard ratios (HRs). All measures were pooled using randomeffects models and 95% confidential interval (95% CI) was calculated. Results A total of 14 studies incorporating 1,706 patients with either Del19 or L858R were included. Enrolling patients with Del19 or L858R in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), first-line first generation EGFR-TKIs were associated with no OS benefit, compared with chemotherapy (pooled HRTKI/Chemo for Del19: 0.82, 95% CI: 0.64-1.06, P = 0.14; pooled HRTKI/Chemo for L858R: 1.15, 95% CI: 0.85-1.56, P = 0.38). Direct comparison of Del19 with L858R receiving with first-line first generation EGFR-TKIs demonstrated no significant survival difference (pooled HR19/21: 0.88, 95% CI: 0.67-1.16, P = 0.37). Conclusions Among patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring Del19 and L858R, first-line first generation EGFR-TKIs demonstrated no survival benefit comparing with chemotherapy. Direct comparison between Del19 and L858R revealed no significant survival difference after first-line first generation EGFR-TKIs.