Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Extrahepatic metabolism of propofol in man during the anhepatic phase of orthotopic liver transplantation.

We have investigated extrahepatic metabolism of propofol in 10 patients undergoing orthotopic liver transplantation (group 1) (mean age 38 yr, mean weight 60 (SD 7) kg) and compared it with that in 10 patients without liver dysfunction undergoing extrahepatic abdominal surgery (group 2) (mean age 56 yr, mean weight 68 (11) kg). A single i.v. bolus dose of propofol 0.5 mg kg-1 was injected into a peripheral vein 5 min after the beginning of the anhepatic phase in group 1 and 60 min after the induction of anaesthesia in group 2. Arterial blood samples were obtained at 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 min after injection and urine samples were collected every 15 min. Propofol concentrations in whole blood and urine were measured by high performance liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection. Propofol glucuronide was measured in urine by incubation with a specific beta-glucuronidase. The area under the time-blood concentration curve from 0 to 60 min was found to be significantly greater in group 1 (13743 (2830) micrograms litre-1 h-1) than in group 2 (7992 (4895) micrograms litre-1 h-1) (P less than 0.05). Unchanged propofol was not detected in the urine of either group. No significant difference was found in the amount of propofol glucuronide excreted by patients in group 1 (457 (269) micrograms) and in group 2 (921 (672) micrograms). The presence of a propofol metabolite in urine when the liver was excluded from the circulation suggests that extrahepatic metabolism occurred.
On the boundary control of coupled reaction-diffusion equations having the same diffusivity parameters

We consider the problem of boundary stabilization for a system of n coupled parabolic linear PDEs. Particularly, we design a state feedback law with actuation on only one end of the domain and prove exponential stability of the closed-loop system with an arbitrarily fast convergence rate. The backstepping method is used for controller design, and the transformation kernel matrix is derived in explicit form of series of matrix Bessel functions by using the method of successive approximations to solve the corresponding PDE. Thus, the proposed control law becomes available in explicit form. Simulation results support the effectiveness of the suggested design.
Fighting poverty: The minimum wage

T he labour market and its reform are at the centre of theoretical and political discussions about how to achieve high employment. There are two basic approaches. The neoclassical paradigm – the present mainstream approach – assumes that cuts in real wages will increase employment. Reforming labour markets in order to make them more fl exible is thus one of the key recommendations for improving employment and growth. The Keynesian paradigm rejects the neo-classical view. According to Keynes, there is a hierarchy of markets. Economically, the most important is the capital market (including the banking system). In this market , the portfolio decisions of households, banks and enterprises and credit demand and credit supply are analysed. The capital market determines the interest rate and, together with profi t expectations, the investment demand. Also, consumer demand can be affected, for example via changes in stock prices. Investment is the most important element of demand and at the same time the most important link between the capital and the goods markets. As long as there are free capacities in the goods market , demand determines supply. The labour market is at the bottom of the hierarchy of markets. Demand for labour depends on the volume of production and the technology. The latter depends on technological improvements and the distribution of income and is not predictable. This means that, on a theoretical level in the long run, there is no clear relation between the volume of production and the demand for labour. Labour demand will equal labour supply only by chance. Thus, unemployment is a normal state of affairs in a capitalist economy. Most importantly – in contrast to the neoclassical approach – in the Keynesian model, the labour market has no mechanism to create higher employment by itself. Capital and goods markets can be in equilibrium and at the same time the labour market can be in a stable situation of unemployment (Heine and Herr, 2002). Wage levels and prices in the Keynesian model In the Keynesian approach, the wage level does not determine employment, but it is an important factor in determining the price level. 1 In explaining infl ation/ defl ation, Keynes distinguished between cost infl ation/defl ation and demand in-fl ation/defl ation. In the case of cost infl ation, a markup pricing is assumed. If costs increase at the macroeconomic level, enterprises will in-Fighting poverty: The minimum wage Wages, …
An Anticorrelation Kernel for Subsystem Training in Multiple Classifier Systems

We present a method for training support vector machine (SVM)-based classification systems for combination with other classification systems designed for the same task. Ideally, a new system should be designed such that, when combined with existing systems, the resulting performance is optimized. We present a simple model for this problem and use the understanding gained from this analysis to propose a method to achieve better combination performance when training SVM systems. We include a regularization term in the SVM objective function that aims to reduce the average class-conditional covariance between the resulting scores and the scores produced by the existing systems, introducing a trade-off between such covariance and the system's individual performance. That is, the new system "takes one for the team", falling somewhat short of its best possible performance in order to increase the diversity of the ensemble. We report results on the NIST 2005 and 2006 speaker recognition evaluations (SREs) for a variety of subsystems. We show a gain of 19% on the equal error rate (EER) of a combination of four systems when applying the proposed method with respect to the performance obtained when the four systems are trained independently of each other.
Stereo Matching with Mumford-Shah Regularization and Occlusion Handling

This paper addresses the problem of correspondence establishment in binocular stereo vision. We suggest a novel spatially continuous approach for stereo matching based on the variational framework. The proposed method suggests a unique regularization term based on Mumford-Shah functional for discontinuity preserving, combined with a new energy functional for occlusion handling. The evaluation process is based on concurrent minimization of two coupled energy functionals, one for domain segmentation (occluded versus visible) and the other for disparity evaluation. In addition to a dense disparity map, our method also provides an estimation for the half-occlusion domain and a discontinuity function allocating the disparity/depth boundaries. Two new constraints are introduced improving the revealed discontinuity map. The experimental tests include a wide range of real data sets from the Middlebury stereo database. The results demonstrate the capability of our method in calculating an accurate disparity function with sharp discontinuities and occlusion map recovery. Significant improvements are shown compared to a recently published variational stereo approach. A comparison on the Middlebury stereo benchmark with subpixel accuracies shows that our method is currently among the top-ranked stereo matching algorithms.
Memory Usage Inference for Object-Oriented Programs

We present a type-based approach to statically derive symbolic closed-form formulae that characterize the bounds of heap memory usages of programs written in object-oriented languages. Given a program with size and alias annotations, our inference system will compute the amount of memory required by the methods to execute successfully as well as the amount of memory released when methods return. The obtained analysis results are useful for networked devices with limited computational resources as well as embedded software.
Men are Grass: Bateson, Erickson, Utilization and Metaphor

Abstract The relationship between metaphor and the practice of utilization in therapy and hypnosis can be seen as dependent on metaphor's role in structuring experience. The work of Gregory Bateson and others is used to illustrate how metaphor functions. Bateson's comparison of two forms of syllogistic logic provides a background for distinguishing between the experiential effects of metaphor in contrast to the categorical thinking inherent in simile and analogy. Clinical examples are given to demonstrate how utilization is structured by metaphor, particularly as Bateson has described it in his analysis of the Syllogism in Grass.
Photographing a City: An Analysis of Place Concepts Based on Spatial Choices

Abstract We ask whether the photographs published in web-based image collections do represent different conceptualizations of a city and present a method for gathering and analyzing a data set of more than 12,000 images from Amsterdam, Bamberg, Cardiff, and Dublin. We then propose a measure for the popularity of a location in a city. The analysis of the data set reveals that the popularity follows a power law with very few highly popular locations and a long tail of places in a city that are visited only occasionally. The most popular locations can be identified with the semantic core of the conceptualization of the city in terms of images. This raises the issue of individual differences. We propose another measure that permits to identify users with similar conceptualizations of a city.
Clustering Patterns of Comorbidities Associated with In-Hospital Death in Hospitalizations of US Adults with Venous Thromboembolism

Background: Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a significant source of mortality, morbidity, disability, and impaired health-related quality of life in the world. Objective: We aimed to evaluate the clustering patterns and associations of 29 comorbidities with in-hospital death among adult hospitalizations with a diagnosis of VTE in the United States by analyzing data from the 2009 Nationwide Inpatient Sample. Methods: This cross-sectional study included 153,124 adult hospitalizations with a diagnosis of VTE. Adjusted rate ratios and 95% confidence intervals (CI) for in-hospital death were generated by using multivariable log-linear regression models to measure independent associations between comorbidities and in-hospital death. Results: We estimated that 44,200 in-hospital deaths occurred in 2009 among 773,273 US adult hospitalizations with a diagnosis of VTE. Subgroups of hospitalizations with comorbidities of “congestive heart failure,” “chronic pulmonary disease,” “coagulopathy,” “liver disease,” “lymphoma,” “fluid and electrolyte disorders,” “metastatic cancer,” “peripheral vascular disorders,” “pulmonary circulation disorders,” “renal failure,” “solid tumor without metastasis,” or “weight loss” were positively and independently associated with 1.07 (95% CI: 1.02-1.12 ) to 2.06 (95% CI: 1.97-2.16) times increased likelihoods of in-hospital death, when compared to those without the corresponding comorbidities. The clustering patterns of these comorbidities by 4 disease categories (i.e., “cancer,” “cardiovascular/respiratory/blood,” “gastrointestinal/urologic,” and “nutritional/bodyweight”) were associated with 2.74 to 10.28 times increased likelihoods of in-hospital death, as compared to hospitalizations without any of these comorbidities. The overall increase in the cumulative number of comorbidities corresponded to significantly elevated risks (P-trend<0.01) for in-hospital death among hospitalizations with a diagnosis of VTE. Conclusion: The presence of multiple comorbidities is ubiquitous among hospitalizations of adults with VTE and among in-hospital deaths with VTE in the United States. The findings of our study further suggest that, among hospitalizations of adults with VTE, the presence of certain comorbidities or clustering of these comorbidities significantly elevates the risk of in-hospital death.
Hand Pose Estimation through Weakly-Supervised Learning of a Rich Intermediate Representation

We propose a method for hand pose estimation based on a deep regressor trained on two different kinds of input. Raw depth data is fused with an intermediate representation in the form of a segmentation of the hand into parts. This intermediate representation contains important topological information and provides useful cues for reasoning about joint locations. The mapping from raw depth to segmentation maps is learned in a semi/weakly-supervised way from two different datasets: (i) a synthetic dataset created through a rendering pipeline including densely labeled ground truth (pixelwise segmentations); and (ii) a dataset with real images for which ground truth joint positions are available, but not dense segmentations. Loss for training on real images is generated from a patch-wise restoration process, which aligns tentative segmentation maps with a large dictionary of synthetic poses. The underlying premise is that the domain shift between synthetic and real data is smaller in the intermediate representation, where labels carry geometric and topological meaning, than in the raw input domain. Experiments on the NYU dataset show that the proposed training method decreases error on joints over direct regression of joints from depth data by 15.7%.
Trouble for cluster parameter estimation from blind SZ surveys

The Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect of galaxy clusters is a tool to measure three quantities: Compton parameter, electron temperature, and cluster peculiar velocity. However, a major problem is non-removed contamination by astrophysical sources that emit in the SZ frequencies. This includes interstellar dust emission, infra-red (IR) galaxies, and radio sources in addition to primary Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies. The three former contaminations induce systematic shifts in the three SZ parameters. In this study, we carefully estimated, both for a large beam experiment (namely Planck Surveyor) and a small beam experiment (ACT-like), the systematic errors that result if a fraction of the expected levels of emission from dust, IR galaxies, and radio sources remains non-removed. We found that the interstellar dust emission is not a major contaminant for the SZ measurement. Unfortunately, the IR and radio source-induced systematic errors may be extremely large. In particular the intra-cluster temperature and peculiar velocity will be determined inaccurately for Planck and ACT-like experiments, if only the frequency dependences are used for the cleaning. The Compton parameter is also affected by the astrophysical contaminations. The systematic errors in this case were a factor of 2 to 5 times larger than the expected statistical error-bar for Planck. For the ACT-like experiment, the statistical error-bars were larger than in the case of Planck by a factor of about 5, and therefore the systematic shifts remain within about 50% of the statistical errors. We have thus shown that the systematic errors due to contaminating astrophysical emissions can be significantly larger than the statistical errors, which implies that future SZ surveys aiming at measuring cluster temperatures and peculiar velocities will not be able to do so on their own without including additional information like cluster shapes or follow-up observations.
Classification-Aware Hidden-Web Text Database Selection

Many valuable text databases on the web have noncrawlable contents that are "hidden" behind search interfaces. Metasearchers are helpful tools for searching over multiple such "hidden-web" text databases at once through a unified query interface. An important step in the metasearching process is database selection, or determining whch databases are the most relevant for a given user query. Our algorithm is the first to construct In this paper we present algorithms that return the top results for a query, ranked according to an IR-style ranking function, while operating on top of a source with a Boolean query interface with no ranking capabilities (or a ranking capability of no interest to the end user). The algorithms generate a series of conjunctive queries that return only documents that are candidates for being highly ranked according to a relevance metric. Our approach can also be applied to other settings where the ranking is monotonic on a set of factors (query keywords in IR) and the source query interface is a Boolean expression of these factors. Our comprehensive experimental evaluation on the PubMed database and a TREC dataset show that we achieve order of magnitude improvement compared to the current baseline approaches.
Synthesis and characterization of ZnO powders by homogeneous precipitation from different precursors

This experimental work reports the results obtained on the effect of two different zinc precursors (zinc nitrate and zinc acetate), using sodium hydroxide as precipitant agent and different parameters on the synthesis of zinc oxide powders, applying the Taguchi method. The zinc oxide powders were synthesized by the homogeneous precipitation technique. All the resultant precipitates in the process were dried and calcined to produce zinc oxide powders. The powders were characterized by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. The characterization results revealed a hexagonal wurtzite structure with an average particular size of 34.4 to 53.5 nanometers. All the synthesized particles presented different sizes with an irregular geometry.
Replication Study for the Association of 9 East Asian GWAS-Derived Loci with Susceptibility to Type 2 Diabetes in a Japanese Population

Aims East Asian genome-wide association studies (GWAS) for type 2 diabetes identified 8 loci with genome-wide significance, and 2 loci with a borderline association. However, the associations of these loci except MAEA locus with type 2 diabetes have not been evaluated in independent East Asian cohorts. We performed a replication study to investigate the association of these susceptibility loci with type 2 diabetes in an independent Japanese population. Methods We genotyped 7,379 Japanese participants (5,315 type 2 diabetes and 2,064 controls) for each of the 9 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), rs7041847 in GLIS3, rs6017317 in FITM2−R3HDML−HNF4A, rs6467136 near GCCI−PAX4, rs831571 near PSMD6, rs9470794 in ZFAND3, rs3786897 in PEPD, rs1535500 in KCNK16, rs16955379 in CMIP, and rs17797882 near WWOX. Because the sample size in this study was not sufficient to replicate single SNP associations, we constructed a genetic risk score (GRS) by summing a number of risk alleles of the 9 SNPs, and examined the association of the GRS with type 2 diabetes using logistic regression analysis. Results With the exception of rs1535500 in KCNK16, all SNPs had the same direction of effect (odds ratio [OR]>1.0) as in the original reports. The GRS constructed from the 9 SNPs was significantly associated with type 2 diabetes in the Japanese population (p = 4.0 × 10-4, OR = 1.05, 95% confidence interval: 1.02–1.09). In quantitative trait analyses, rs16955379 in CMIP was nominally associated with a decreased homeostasis model assessment of β-cell function and with increased fasting plasma glucose, but neither the individual SNPs nor the GRS showed a significant association with the glycemic traits. Conclusions These results indicate that 9 loci that were identified in the East Asian GWAS meta-analysis have a significant effect on the susceptibility to type 2 diabetes in the Japanese population.
Can Endogenously Chosen Institutions Mitigate the Free-Rider Problem and Reduce Perverse Punishment?

Previous experiments on public goods dilemmas have found that the opportunity to punish leads to higher contributions and reduces the free rider problem; however, a substantial amount of punishment is targeted on high contributors. In the experiment reported here, subjects are given the opportunity to vote on rules governing punishment. We found that, from their first opportunity to vote, no group ever allowed punishment of high contributors, most groups eventually voted to allow punishment of low contributors, and a minority of groups never allowed any form of punishment. Groups allowing punishment of low but not high contributors had significantly higher efficiency and contributions than comparison groups with unrestricted punishment. JEL Classification: C91, C92, D71, H41
Across Generations: Immigrant Families in America

Acknowledgments IntroductionPart I: How Has the Immigrant Past Shaped the Immigrant Present in New York City and Amsterdam? 1. Immigration History and the Remaking of New York 2. To Amsterdam: Migrations Past and Present Part II: What Difference Does the Urban Economy Make to Immigrant Incorporation? 3. Immigrants in New York City's Economy 4. From Amsterdamned to I AmsterdamPart III: Is Islam in Amsterdam Like Race in New York City? 5. Nativism, Racism, and Immigration in New York City 6. Governing through Religion in AmsterdamPart IV: How Are Immigrants Entering the Precincts of Power in New York City and Amsterdam? 7. The Rise of Immigrant Influence in New York City Politics 8. Immigrant Political Engagement and Incorporation in AmsterdamPart V: How Are the Children of Immigrants Shaped by and also Changing New York City's and Amsterdam's Cultural Life? 9. Immigrants, the Arts, and the "Second-Generation Advantage" in New York 10. Immigrant Youths' Contribution to Urban Culture in AmsterdamAbout the Contributors Index
How Can the Crisis Vulnerability of Emerging Economies Be Reduced

Emerging countries in many cases are more crisis-prone than highly developed industrialized countries. This is in many cases due to a weak or volatile financial sector. The best policy to strengthen crisis resistance is the building up of a sound financial position. A sound financial position of a country also increases the capacities to get out of a crisis. For getting out of a crisis, however, an important additional general condition must be fulfilled: the economy must increase its international competitiveness to assure growth, the only way out of a crisis. Building up a sound financial position and a competitive private sector, therefore, should be a pre-crisis policy. It relates to the public sector as well as the financial institutions. Once a crisis has erupted in an unsound financial environment there is no chance to escape a crisis sustainably avoiding a painful process. The blueprint for getting out of a crisis suggests a complex policy approach. The private financial sector must undergo structural reforms (in reality closing down or downscaling unsound institutions) and the government must apply fiscal austerity measures to reduce public debt, regaining credibility and by this creating new fiscal options for counteracting crisis effects. Labour costs can be reduced by increasing the labour market flexibility (e.g. by easier hiring and firing and higher wage spreads especially towards the lower wage scale) and by measures directly reducing labour costs. The result of such measures will be an increase of unemployment and of felt unemployment risks by large population groups as well as general real income losses from labour. The fiscal austerity measures in addition and in short term will reduce economic activities and thus aggravate the social problems. These negative social effects of getting out of a crisis are the most crucial and controversial policy issue. People and their interest organizations to a greatly varying extent will accept or refuse