Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The effect of sevelamer on the pharmacokinetics of cyclosporin A and mycophenolate mofetil after renal transplantation.

BACKGROUND After renal transplantation, patients with insufficient graft function may require phosphate binders. It is still unknown if sevelamer, a new calcium-free phosphate binder, interferes with the uptake of immunosuppressants. We studied its effects on the pharmacokinetics of cyclosporin A (CsA) and mycophenolate mofetil. METHODS We examined 10 adults and eight children with stable renal graft function and stable CsA trough levels. A 12 h pharmacokinetic profile (10 observation points) was conducted without sevelamer, after a single dose and after 4 days of treatment with it. CsA levels were measured with both a monoclonal antibody assay (CEDIA) and a polyclonal antibody assay (FPIA), mycophenolic acid (MPA) levels by EMIT assay and CsA metabolites AM1, AM9 and AM4N by a modified HPLC method. RESULTS Sevelamer had no significant effect on CsA kinetics [area under the curve (AUC), peak concentration (C(max)), time of C(max)]. The AUC of AM1 was decreased by 30% and C(max) by 25% after 4 days of sevelamer intake. MPA levels were significantly reduced by a mean of 25% of the AUC (P<0.05) and by 30% of the C(max) after a single dose of sevelamer. CONCLUSIONS A single sevelamer dose reduces the C(max) and the AUC of MPA. Its intake for several days does not significantly influence CsA kinetics.
The last click: why users give up information network navigation

An important part of finding information online involves clicking from page to page until an information need is fully satisfied. This is a complex task that can easily be frustrating and force users to give up prematurely. An empirical analysis of what makes users abandon click-based navigation tasks is hard, since most passively collected browsing logs do not specify the exact target page that a user was trying to reach. We propose to overcome this problem by using data collected via Wikispeedia, a Wikipedia-based human-computation game, in which users are asked to navigate from a start page to an explicitly given target page (both Wikipedia articles) by only tracing hyperlinks between Wikipedia articles. Our contributions are two-fold. First, by analyzing the differences between successful and abandoned navigation paths, we aim to understand what types of behavior are indicative of users giving up their navigation task. We also investigate how users make use of back clicks during their navigation. We find that users prefer backtracking to high-degree nodes that serve as landmarks and hubs for exploring the network of pages. Second, based on our analysis, we build statistical models for predicting whether a user will finish or abandon a navigation task, and if the next action will be a back click. Being able to predict these events is important as it can potentially help us design more human-friendly browsing interfaces and retain users who would otherwise have given up navigating a website.
A pr 2 00 8 HIP-2008-13 / TH Disorder on the landscape

Disorder on the string theory landscape may significantly affect dynamics of eternal inflation leading to the possibility for some vacua on the landscape to become dynamically preferable over others. We systematically study effects of a generic disorder on the landscape starting by identifying a sector with builtin disorder – a set of de Sitter vacua corresponding to compactifications of the Type IIB string theory on Calabi-Yau manifolds with a number of warped Klebanov-Strassler throats attached randomly to the bulk part of the CalabiYau. Further, we derive continuum limit of the vacuum dynamics equations on the landscape. Using methods of dynamical renormalization group we determine the late time behavior of the probability distribution for an observer to measure a given value of the cosmological constant. We find the diffusion of the probability distribution to significantly slow down in sectors of the landscape where the number of nearest neighboring vacua for any given vacuum is small. We discuss relation of this slow-down with phenomenon of Anderson localization in disordered media. dmitry.podolsky@helsinki.fi; URL: www.nonequilibrium. net majumder@mnnit.ac. in niko.jokela@helsinki.fi
Visuospatial Impairment in Persons with Idiopathic Parkinson's Disease:

Evidence for and against the existence of visuospatial impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD) is examined. Review of the literature reveals that authors have found that PD patients with visuospatial impairment demonstrate difficulty in extracting information from embedded material, difficulty with facial recognition, and difficulty in the subsystem of storing visuospatial memory. In contrast, other-authors demonstrate that visuospatial impairments not evidenced in PD and that the deficits noted may be a consequence of . other pathological factors. Discussion includes test validity. the effects of treatment and methodology chosen. Considerations for visuospatial testing in persons with PD are discussed and future directions are considered.
Learning Similarity Function between Objects in Heterogeneous Spaces

Many application problems such as data visualization, document retrieval, image annotation, collaborative filtering, and machine translation can be formalized as a task that utilizes a similarity function between objects in two heterogeneous spaces. In this paper, we address the problem of automatically learning such a similarity function using labeled training data. Conventional metric learning can be viewed as learning of similarity function over one single space, while the ‘metric learning’ problem in this paper can be regarded as learning of similarity function over two different spaces. We assume that the objects in the two original spaces are linearly mapped into a new space and dot product in the new space is defined as the similarity function. The metric learning problem then becomes that of learning the two linear mapping functions from training data. We then give a general and theoretically sound solution to the learning problem. Specifically, we prove that although the learning problem is non-convex, the global optimal solution exists and one can find the optimal solution using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). We also show that the solution is ‘generalizable’ to unobserved data and it is possible to kernelize the method. We conducted two experiments; one experiment shows that keywords and images can be visualized in the same space based on the similarity function learned with our method, and the other experiment shows that the accuracy of document retrieval can be improved with the similarity function (relevance function) learned with our method.
Contested texts: issues of plagiarism

Popular views of plagiarism are based on the concept of original authorship and the moral and economic implications of it. Plagiarism itself is usually linked with academic misconduct by students and by teachers/lecturers/writers. Reaction by institutions and professional groups tends to be one of discipline and punishment, at times in law, most often by gatekeeping bodies. The growth of the Internet has made gatekeeping difficult. Academic life tries to balance gatekeeping with facilitation, and this dialectic presents real challenges today, above all where collaborative writing is concerned. Post‐modern views of authors and texts add to the complexity. It is suggested that popular views of plagiarism may not be flexible enough.
NF-κB Is Required for Smac Mimetic-Mediated Sensitization of Glioblastoma Cells for γ-Irradiation–Induced Apoptosis

Evasion of apoptosis contributes to radioresistance of glioblastoma, calling for novel strategies to overcome apoptosis resistance. In this study, we investigated the potential of the small molecule Smac mimetic BV6 to modulate radiosensitivity of glioblastoma cells. Here, we identify a novel proapoptotic function of NF-κB in γ-irradiation–induced apoptosis of glioblastoma cells by showing, for the first time, that NF-κB is critically required for Smac mimetic–mediated radiosensitization. BV6 significantly increases γ-irradiation–triggered apoptosis in several glioblastoma cell lines in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Calculation of combination index (CI) reveals that the interaction of BV6 and γ-irradiation is highly synergistic (CI < 0.3). Molecular studies show that BV6 stimulates NF-κB activation, which is critical for radiosensitization, because genetic inhibition of NF-κB by overexpression of the dominant-negative superrepressor IκBα-SR significantly decreases BV6- and γ-irradiation–induced apoptosis. Also, the BV6-mediated enhancement of γ-irradiation–triggered caspase activation, drop of mitochondrial membrane potential, and cytochrome c release is abolished in cells overexpressing IκBα-SR. Similarly, NF-κB inhibition by ectopic expression of a kinase dead mutant of IKKβ prevents the BV6-mediated sensitization for γ-irradiation. The clinical relevance is underscored by experiments with primary tumor samples showing that BV6 sensitizes primary cultured glioma cells as well as glioblastoma-initiating cancer stem cells derived from surgical specimens for γ-irradiation. In conclusion, we identify NF-κB as a critical mediator of Smac mimetic-conferred radiosensitization of glioblastoma cells. These results have important implications for the development of Smac mimetic–based combination protocols for radiosensitization of glioblastoma. Mol Cancer Ther; 10(10); 1867–75. ©2011 AACR.
The American Achievement Ideology as Perceived by Urban African-American Students

A study was conducted to explore gender differences in the American achievement ideology among 148 gifted and nongifted African-American males and females in an urban school district. Also explored were the perceptions these students had regarding social, cultural, and psychological determinants of achievement and underachievement. Results did not indicate differential determinants of under-achievement by gender; however, statistically significant differences were found by academic program (gifted and nongifted). Gifted students expressed the greatest support for the achievement ideology. Implications are drawn and recommendations are offered for urban educators and those working with African-American children.
Concavity of entropy under thinning

Building on the recent work of Johnson (2007) and Yu (2008), we prove that entropy is a concave function with respect to the thinning operation T<inf>α</inf>. That is, if X and Y are independent random variables on Z<inf>+</inf> with ultra-log-concave probability mass functions, then H(T<inf>α</inf>X + T<inf>1-α</inf>Y) ≥ αH(X) + (1 - α)H(Y), 0 ≤ α ≤ 1, where H denotes the discrete entropy. This is a discrete analogue of the inequality (h denotes the differential entropy) h(√αX + √1 - αY ) ≥ αh(X) + (1 - α)h(Y), 0 ≤ α ≤ 1, which holds for continuous X and Y with finite variances and is equivalent to Shannon's entropy power inequality. As a consequence we establish a special case of a conjecture of Shepp and Olkin (1981). Possible extensions are also discussed.
A High Level of Patient Activation Is Observed But Unrelated to Glycemic Control Among Adults With Type 2 Diabetes

Abstract Objective. To measure patient activation and its relationship to glycemic control among adults with type 2 diabetes who had not participated in a formal diabetes self-management education program as a baseline assessment for tailoring diabetes education in a primary care setting. Research design and methods. Patient activation was assessed in a stratified, cross-sectional study of adults with controlled (n = 21) and uncontrolled (n = 27) type 2 diabetes, who were receiving primary care at a unique family practice center of Baylor Health Care System in Dallas, Tex. Results. The mean patient activation was 66.0 (95% confidence interval [CI] 60.8–71.2) among patients with uncontrolled diabetes and 63.7 (55.9–71.5) among those with controlled diabetes (P = 0.607). A significant association was observed between the self-management behavior score and activation among patients whose glycemia was under control (ρ = 0.73, P = 0.01) as well as among patients with uncontrolled glycemia (ρ = 0.48, P < 0.001). Conclusions. Although activation is correlated with self-management and may be important in tailored patient-centered approaches to improving diabetes care outcomes, the highest stage of activation may be necessary to achieve glycemic control. These findings reinforce the importance of conducting prerequisite needs assessments so diabetes educators are able to tailor their educational interventions to individual patients' needs and readiness to take action.
Oral creatine supplementation facilitates the rehabilitation of disuse atrophy and alters the expression of muscle myogenic factors in humans

1 We investigated the effect of oral creatine supplementation during leg immobilization and rehabilitation on muscle volume and function, and on myogenic transcription factor expression in human subjects. 2 A double‐blind trial was performed in young healthy volunteers (n=22). A cast was used to immobilize the right leg for 2 weeks. Thereafter the subjects participated in a knee‐extension rehabilitation programme (3 sessions week−1, 10 weeks). Half of the subjects received creatine monohydrate (CR; from 20 g down to 5 g daily), whilst the others ingested placebo (P; maltodextrin). 3 Before and after immobilization, and after 3 and 10 weeks of rehabilitation training, the cross‐sectional area (CSA) of the quadriceps muscle was assessed by NMR imaging. In addition, an isokinetic dynamometer was used to measure maximal knee‐extension power (Wmax), and needle biopsy samples taken from the vastus lateralis muscle were examined to asses expression of the myogenic transcription factors MyoD, myogenin, Myf5, and MRF4, and muscle fibre diameters. 4 Immobilization decreased quadriceps muscle CSA (∼10 %) and Wmax (∼25 %) by the same magnitude in both groups. During rehabilitation, CSA and Wmax recovered at a faster rate in CR than in P (P < 0.05 for both parameters). Immobilization changed myogenic factor protein expression in neither P nor CR. However, after rehabilitation myogenin protein expression was increased in P but not in CR (P < 0.05), whilst MRF4 protein expression was increased in CR but not in P (P < 0.05). In addition, the change in MRF4 expression was correlated with the change in mean muscle fibre diameter (r=0.73, P < 0.05). 5 It is concluded that oral creatine supplementation stimulates muscle hypertrophy during rehabilitative strength training. This effect may be mediated by a creatine‐induced change in MRF4 and myogenin expression.
Swarm Aggregation under Fading Attractions

Gradient descent methods have been widely used for organizing multi-agent systems, in which they can provide decentralized control laws with provable convergence. Often, the control laws are designed so that two neighboring agents repel/attract each other at a short/long distance of separation. When the interactions between neighboring agents are moreover nonfading, the potential function from which they are derived is radially unbounded. Hence, the LaSalle's principle is sufficient to establish the system convergence. This technical note investigates, in contrast, a more realistic scenario where interactions between neighboring agents have fading attractions. In such setting, the LaSalle type arguments may not be sufficient. To tackle the problem, we introduce a class of partitions, termed dilute partitions, of formations which cluster agents according to the inter- and intra-cluster interaction strengths. We then apply dilute partitions to trajectories of formations generated by the multi-agent system, and show that each of the trajectories remains in a compact subset along the evolution, and converges to the set of equilibria.
Ecophysiological Characterization of Ammonia-Oxidizing Archaea and Bacteria from Freshwater

ABSTRACT Aerobic biological ammonia oxidation is carried out by two groups of microorganisms, ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB) and the recently discovered ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA). Here we present a study using cultivation-based methods to investigate the differences in growth of three AOA cultures and one AOB culture enriched from freshwater environments. The strain in the enriched AOA culture belong to thaumarchaeal group I.1a, with the strain in one enrichment culture having the highest identity with “Candidatus Nitrosoarchaeum koreensis” and the strains in the other two representing a new genus of AOA. The AOB strain in the enrichment culture was also obtained from freshwater and had the highest identity to AOB from the Nitrosomonas oligotropha group (Nitrosomonas cluster 6a). We investigated the influence of ammonium, oxygen, pH, and light on the growth of AOA and AOB. The growth rates of the AOB increased with increasing ammonium concentrations, while the growth rates of the AOA decreased slightly. Increasing oxygen concentrations led to an increase in the growth rate of the AOB, while the growth rates of AOA were almost oxygen insensitive. Light exposure (white and blue wavelengths) inhibited the growth of AOA completely, and the AOA did not recover when transferred to the dark. AOB were also inhibited by blue light; however, growth recovered immediately after transfer to the dark. Our results show that the tested AOB have a competitive advantage over the tested AOA under most conditions investigated. Further experiments will elucidate the niches of AOA and AOB in more detail.
Moving Plans of the Elderly: A Test of the Stress-Threshold Model

The aim of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical model for the explanation of moving plans among elderly persons. This model of moving behaviour of the elderly is more or less similar to the ‘residential satisfaction model of relocation’, developed by Speare, and consists of three sets of variables: (1) background characteristics (personal characteristics, discrepancies with regard to several housing and neighbourhood characteristics, and social bonds); (2) level of housing and neighbourhood dissatisfaction; and (3) moving plans. The main feature of this model is the intervening role of the two dissatisfaction variables: it is assumed that the background characteristics influence the levels of housing and/or neighbourhood dissatisfaction, which in turn affect the moving plans. In order to test this model, covariance structure analysis is utilized among a sample of elderly residents in two districts of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Although the results support the residential mobility model to a large extent—the levels of housing and neighbourhood dissatisfaction act mostly as intervening variables—some unexpected findings emerge. In addition, the percentage of unexplained variance in moving plans is relatively large. For this reason, a number of suggestions are given to extend the theoretical model towards a better explanation of moving plans of elderly persons. One of these suggestions, that is, including the appropriateness of the dwelling in the near future as an intervening variable, is tested. It is shown that this factor plays an important intervening role, which implies that the elderly do not consider to move only because they are dissatisfied with their living conditions at the moment, but that those who expect their house to be inappropriate in the short term are more inclined to move. Therefore, in future research on the moving behaviour of the elderly it is necessary to take this anticipatory behaviour into account.
Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications the Agreement Problem for Unrooted Phylogenetic Trees Is Fpt

A collection T of k unrooted phylogenetic trees on different leaf sets is said to be strictly compatible or in agreement if there exists a tree T such that each tree in T can be obtained from T by deleting leaves and suppressing degree-2 vertices. The problem of determining if a set of unrooted trees is in agreement has been proved NP-hard in 1992. Here, we show that an f (k) · n algorithm exists, for some computable function f of k, proving that strict compatibility of unrooted phylogenetic trees is fixed-parameter tractable with respect to the number k of trees. Designing a practical FPT algorithm remains an open problem. 386 Scornavacca et al. The agreement problem is FPT
Pourquoi les suppressions d'emplois ne produisent-elles pas une hausse de la performance ? Eléments pour l'amélioration du modèle de calcul décisionnel

L’evolution des conceptions manageriales en terme d’emploi a conduit a instaurer, dans les representations des dirigeants, un lien entre reduction des effectifs et augmentation de la performance des entreprises. Selon cette logique, toute reduction de postes est source d’economie et contribue ainsi a l’amelioration de la performance. Cet article a pour premier objet d’interroger la pertinence de ce presuppose de sens commun ; sa seconde finalite est de chercher a expliquer les raisons de la refutation de ce lien par des etudes academiques et a fournir des elements de reflexion aux dirigeants pour l’amelioration du processus decisionnel.
Did European Labor Markets Become More Competitive in the 1990s? Evidence from Estimated Worker Rents

This paper analyses the evolution of quantitative measures of employee rents in Europe during the nineties, using the European Household Panel Survey. One looks at two class of measures: wage differentials between workers along industry and firm size dimensions, and estimated welfare differences between employed and unemployed using a model of labor market transitions. The results are largely negative; there is robust evidence of falling rents during that period only in Ireland.
A constant-frequency method for improving light-load efficiency in synchronous buck converters

The low-voltage synchronous rectifier buck topology suffers from low efficiency at light loads due to dissipation that does not scale with load current. In this paper we present a method for improving light-load efficiency in synchronous buck converters by reducing gate drive losses. We propose a new gate drive technique whereby the gate voltage swing dynamically scales with load current such that gate drive loss is traded for conduction loss. Since conduction losses scale with the square of load current, an optimal gate swing exists that, at light loads, is shown to be less than the supply voltage. Using this method we obtain a 6.25% increase in converter efficiency at a load current of 10 mA and operating at a constant switching frequency of 2 MHz.
Effects of inhibitors of serine protease, phenoloxidase and dopa decarboxylase on the melanization of Dirofilaria immitis microfilariae with Armigeres subalbatus haemolymph in vitro

The melanization of Dirofilaria immitis microfilariae in Armigeres subalbatus haemolymph in vitro is a two-step process. Firstly, the microfilariae are encased in a transparent capsule, then the capsule material is melanized later. Benzamidine HCl and p-amidinophenylmethanesulfonyl fluoride, both serine protease inhibitors, inhibited the deposition of the transparent capsule material and melanization. Diethyldithiocarbamate, a phenoloxidase inhibitor, did not prevent the deposition of the transparent capsule material but it did inhibit melanization. m-Hydroxybenzylhydrazine, a dopa decarboxylase inhibitor, had no inhibitory action on the deposition of the transparent capsule material. However, the time for the transparent capsule to become melanized was delayed due to the presence of m-hydroxybenzylhydrazine in the test system. Immunocytochemical localization showed that prophenoloxidase and/or phenoloxidase was present in the transparent capsule material. These results suggest (1) that prophenoloxidase cascade is essential in the melanization of microfilariae in mosquitoes and its putative activation behaviour is similar to that of other insects and (2) that the deposition of transparent capsule material is a result of the activation of prophenoloxidase by serine proteases and the melanization of the transparent capsule material is due to the presence of active phenoloxidase in capsule.