Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Visits to the Emergency Room for Asthma Attacks and Short-Term Variations in Air Pollution

Background: The ‘case-crossover’ design is a strategy fitted to studying transient effects of intermittent exposure on acute-onset disease occurring shortly after exposure. It has the important advantage of eliminating most confounding variables, allowing a stronger causality inference. Objectives: The objective of the study was to evaluate the relationships between emergency room (ER) visits for asthma attacks and gaseous air pollution changes. Methods: The study included 549 individuals, 3–49 years old, visiting the ER during 1 year. Exposure to gaseous air pollutants (SO2, NO2, O3) on the same day and up to 4 days before was computed according to the patient’s address. The statistical analysis included meteorological data as potential confounding variables. Results: No association could be shown between ER visits and SO2 or NO2 levels. In contrast, there was a statistically significant association between ER visits and mean O3 levels, on the day of admission and also on D –2 and D –3. For an increase of 10 µg/m3, the risk of requiring an ER admission increased by 6–10%. Conclusions: Using this new strategy, we confirmed that ozone changes lead to a moderate increase in risk of requiring an ER admission in asthmatic subjects.
Rates of returns to education and the determinants of earnings in Pakistan.

This paper estimates earnings functions and computes the private rates of returns to different levels of education for Pakistan. The paper is divided into 2 sections. The estimated earnings functions are presented and discussed in the 1st section. In the 2nd section the rates of returns derived from them are analyzed in the context of earlier findings for both Pakistan and developing countries. The 1979 Population, Labour Force, and Migration Survey provided a sample of 2593 wage employees. The updated (1979) earnings functions estimates of private rates of returns to the different levels of education confirm the findings of earlier (1975) studies. The rates of returns are low on an absolute level when compared to an average of developing countries for which these estimates exist. An important reason for this phenomenon is likely to be a policy of wage compression engendered both by government policy and by economic forces. Government policy was instrumental in restricting salaries of the highly educated professionals and administrators in the government sector (numerically large and therefore influential on the labor market). Simultaneously, emigration was instrumental in raising the salaries of the unskilled and semi-skilled production workers who generally attain at most a primary level of education and who represent the bulk of out-migration. The findings also confirm that, at least by using the earnings functions method, the computed rates of returns vary positively with the level of education. This is not in keeping with comparable findings for other developing countries. 1 part of the reason for this is attributed to the system of education that simultaneously causes the filtering up of both bright students and those from influential backgrounds. A significant positive correlation was found between an individual's family background and his earnings. Overall, the private incentive to pursue education in Pakistan is low since returns are below the market rate of interest. Given that discrimination may exist in the labor market, the private incentive to invest in the higher level of education would be lower for those not well placed economically and socially. This suggests the need for strictly policing hiring practices in public and private sectors.
Association of maternal blood pressure in pregnancy with blood pressure of their offspring through adolescence

Abstract This article looks at the association of maternal blood pressure with the blood pressure of the offspring from birth to childhood. The Barker hypothesis states that maternal and “in utero” attributes during pregnancy affect a child’s cardiovascular health throughout life. We present an analysis of a unique dataset that consists of three distinct developmental processes: maternal cardiovascular health during pregnancy; fetal development; and child’s cardiovascular health from birth to 14 years. This study explored whether a mother’s blood pressure reading in pregnancy predicts fetal development and determines if this in turn is related to the future cardiovascular health of the child. This article uses data that have been collected prospectively from a Jamaican cohort which involves the following three developmental processes: (1) maternal cardiovascular health during pregnancy which is the blood pressure and anthropometric measurements at seven time-points on the mother during pregnancy; (2) fetal development which consists of ultrasound measurements of the fetus taken at six time-points during pregnancy; and (3) child’s cardiovascular health which consists of the child’s blood pressure measurements at 24 time-points from birth to 14 years. The inter-relationship of these three processes was examined using linear mixed effects models. Our analyses indicated that attributes later in childhood development, such as child’s weight, child’s baseline systolic blood pressure (SBP), age and sex, predict the future cardiovascular health of children. The results also indicated that maternal attributes in pregnancy, such as mother’s baseline SBP and SBP change, predicted significantly child’s SBP over time.
Contribution of depression and anxiety to impaired health-related quality of life following first myocardial infarction

Background The extent to which depression impairs health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in the physically ill has not been clearly established. Aims To quantify the adverse influence of depression and anxiety assessed at the time of first myocardial infarction and 6 months later, on the physical aspect of HRQoL 12 months after the infarction. Method In all, 260 in-patients, admitted following first myocardial infarction, completed the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale and the Medical Outcomes Study SF–36 assessment before discharge and at 6- and 12-month follow-up. Results Depression and anxiety 6 months after myocardial infarction predicted subsequent impairment in the physical aspects of HRQoL (attributable adjusted R 2=9%, P<0.0005). These negative effects of depression and anxiety on outcome were mediated by feelings of fatigue. Depression and anxiety present before myocardial infarction did not predict HRQoL 12 months after myocardial infarction. Conclusions Detection and treatment of depression and anxiety following myocardial infarction improve the patient's health-related quality of life.
A Critical Miss: Video Games, Violence, and Ineffective Legislation

This paper examines the use of social scientific research and the role it played in determining the constitutionality of various video game laws that aimed to restrict the access of minors. Several major cases are examined, with particular attention paid to the courts’ responses to the type, amount, and validity of the social science research presented by various state legislatures as support for the game restrictions. These restrictions are usually centered on assertions that video game violence is harmful to children, as it can increase aggression and antisocial behavior. The paper concludes that the usage of social scientific research by legislatures to censor video games has been unpersuasive and a failure in almost every attempt. Possible causes for this failure are examined.
The Oxazolidinone Linezolid Inhibits Initiation of Protein Synthesis in Bacteria

ABSTRACT The oxazolidinones represent a new class of antimicrobial agents which are active against multidrug-resistant staphylococci, streptococci, and enterococci. Previous studies have demonstrated that oxazolidinones inhibit bacterial translation in vitro at a step preceding elongation but after the charging ofN-formylmethionine to the initiator tRNA molecule. The event that occurs between these two steps is termed initiation. Initiation of protein synthesis requires the simultaneous presence of N-formylmethionine-tRNA, the 30S ribosomal subunit, mRNA, GTP, and the initiation factors IF1, IF2, and IF3. An initiation complex assay measuring the binding of [3H]N-formylmethionyl-tRNA to ribosomes in response to mRNA binding was used in order to investigate the mechanism of oxazolidinone action. Linezolid inhibited initiation complex formation with either the 30S or the 70S ribosomal subunits fromEscherichia coli. In addition, complex formation withStaphylococcus aureus 70S tight-couple ribosomes was inhibited by linezolid. Linezolid did not inhibit the independent binding of either mRNA or N-formylmethionyl-tRNA toE. coli 30S ribosomal subunits, nor did it prevent the formation of the IF2–N-formylmethionyl-tRNA binary complex. The results demonstrate that oxazolidinones inhibit the formation of the initiation complex in bacterial translation systems by preventing formation of theN-formylmethionyl-tRNA–ribosome–mRNA ternary complex.
Semantics and Experience: Universal Metaphors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho

Are there universal as well as culturally particular experiences and expressions of "time"? In "Semantics and Experience", Alverson questions the widely held anthropological assumption that temporal expression and experience represent little more than local cultural constructions. Drawing on extensive data from four widely divergent languages and cultures - English, Mandarin, Hindi and Sesotho - he argues that people everywhere experience time in fundamentally similar ways. Alverson begins by studying time expressions in collocations - stock phrases, idioms, aphorism, or other formulaic expressions. He then examines the metaphors that often compose these collocations and discovers that five basic, universal categories of temporal expression and experience appear in all four languages - despite the independence of these languages from one another and despite the differing conditions of belief, knowledge and institutional structure among their respective cultures. While metaphorically constituted collocations do reflect culturally particular features of ideology, Alverson concludes, they clearly reflect universals of "time" as well. "Semantics and Experience" offers linguistic analysis of time expressions in four radically different languages and cultures. It reveals not only how such expressions vary as a function of ideological and cultural differences but also how, despite these differences, they reveal a basic similarity that points to their origin in a pan-human approach to the construction and cognition of space.
Repercusiones de las metodologías de investigación en la construcción de conocimiento didáctico: una investigación sobre el aprendizaje inicial de la lengua escrita

Resumen En este artículo se exponen una serie de reflexiones suscitadas en torno a un proyecto de investigación sobre las condiciones del aprendizaje inicial de la lengua escrita, desarrollado con el fin de contribuir a la mejora de la práctica docente. Considerando el papel de la investigación en la construcción de conocimiento didáctico en el que se enmarca la actuación de los docentes, se presentan las opciones metodológicas tomadas para el desarrollo de la investigación, se expone la secuencia seguida y se estudian algunos efectos observados tanto en investigadores como en investigados en el primer momento de difusión de los resultados. Se apunta el interés de la complementariedad entre enfoques cuantitativos y cualitativos para la investigación didáctica, reparando sin embargo en las distintas repercusiones que los diferentes tipos de datos, los diferentes tiempos requeridos para el análisis y la diferente manera de concebir la realidad bajo estudio pueden ejercer sobre la formación de docentes.
Can models of agents be transferred between different areas?

One of the main reasons for the sustained activity and interest in the field of agent-based systems, apart from the obvious recognition of its value as a natural and intuitive way of understanding the world, is its reach into very many different and distinct fields of investigation. Indeed, the notions of agents and multi-agent systems are relevant to fields ranging from economics to robotics, in contributing to the foundations of the field, being influenced by ongoing research, and in providing many domains of application. While these various disciplines constitute a rich and diverse environment for agent research, the way in which they may have been linked by it is a much less considered issue. The purpose of this panel was to examine just this concern, in the relationships between different areas that have resulted from agent research. Informed by the experience of the participants in the areas of robotics, social simulation, economics, computer science and artificial intelligence, the discussion was lively and sometimes heated.
I k B b enhances the generation of the low-affinity NF k B / RelA homodimer

The NFkB family of dimeric transcription factors regulate inflammatory and immune responses. While the dynamic control of NFkB dimer activity via the IkB–NFkB signalling module is well understood, there is little information on how specific dimer repertoires are generated from Rel family polypeptides. Here we report the iterative construction—guided by in vitro and in vivo experimentation—of a mathematical model of the Rel-NFkB generation module. Our study reveals that IkBb has essential functions within the Rel-NFkB generation module, specifically for the RelA:RelA homodimer, which controls a subset of NFkB target genes. Our findings revise the current dogma of the three classical, functionally related IkB proteins by distinguishing between a positive ‘licensing’ factor (IkBb) that contributes to determining the available NFkB dimer repertoire in a cell’s steady state, and negative feedback regulators (IkBa and -e) that determine the duration and dynamics of the cellular response to an inflammatory stimulus. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms8068
Tetrahedral mesh improvement via optimization of the element condition number

We present a new shape measure for tetrahedral elements that is optimal in that it gives the distance of a tetrahedron from the set of inverted elements. This measure is constructed from the condition number of the linear transformation between a unit equilateral tetrahedron and any tetrahedron with positive volume. Using this shape measure, we formulate two optimization objective functions that are differentiated by their goal: the first seeks to improve the average quality of the tetrahedral mesh; the second aims to improve the worst‐quality element in the mesh. We review the optimization techniques used with each objective function and present experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the mesh improvement methods. We show that a combined optimization approach that uses both objective functions obtains the best‐quality meshes for several complex geometries. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A Corpus of OWL DL Ontologies

Tool development for and empirical experimentation in OWL ontology engineering require a wide variety of suitable ontologies as input for testing and evaluation purposes. Empirical activities often resort to (somewhat arbitrarily) hand curated corpora available on the web, such as the NCBO BioPortal and the TONES Repository, or manually select a set of well-known ontologies. Results may be biased, even heavily, towards these datasets. Sampling from a large corpus of ontologies, on the other hand, may lead to more representative results. Current large scale repositories/web crawls are mostly uncurated, suffer from duplication and contain large numbers of ontology versions, variants, and facets, and therefore do not lend themselves to random sampling. In this paper, we describe the creation of a corpus of OWL DL ontologies using strategies such as web crawling, various forms of de-duplications and manual cleaning, which allows random sampling of ontologies for a variety of empirical applications.
Virtual Hierarchies - An Architecture for Building and Maintaining Efficient and Resilient Trust Chains

In Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), the simple, monopolistic organizational model of certificate issuing entities works fine until we consider real-world issues. Then, issues such as scalability and mutually suspicious organizations create the need for a multiplicity of certificate issuing entities, which introduces the problem of how to organize them to balance resilience to compromise against efficiency of path discovery. Many solutions involve organizing the infrastructure to follow a natural organizational hierarchy, but in some cases, such a natural organizational hierarchy may not exist. However, systems research has given us secure coprocessing for securely carrying out computations among multiple trust domains. Cryptography has produced a number of methods for distributing cryptographic computations, such as secret splitting and threshold cryptography. Last, distributed computing has given us peer-to-peer networking, for creating self-organizing distributed systems. In this paper, we use these latter tools to address the former problem by overlaying a virtual hierarchy on a mesh architecture of peer certificate issuing entities, and achieving both resilience and efficiency. ∗This work was supported in part by Internet2/AT&T, by IBM Research, and by the U.S. Department of Justice, contract 2000-DT-CX-K001. However, the views and conclusions do not necessarily represent those of the sponsors. A preliminary version appears as TR2002-416.
Target Sets: A Tool for Understanding and Predicting the Behavior of Interacting Q-learners

Reinforcement learning agents that interact in a common environment frequently aect each others’ perceived transition and reward distributions. This can result in convergence of the agents to a sub-optimal equilibrium or even to a solution that is not an equilibrium at all. Several modifications to the Qlearning algorithm have been proposed which enable agents to converge to optimal equilibria under specified conditions. This paper presents the concept of target sets as an aid to understanding why these modifications have been successful and as a tool to assist in the development of new modifications which are applicable in a wider range of situations.
Integration of the DAYCENT Biogeochemical Model within a Multi-Model Framework

Agricultural residues are the largest near term source of cellulosic 13 biomass for bioenergy production, but removing agricultural residues sustainably 14 requires considering the critical roles that residues play in the agronomic system. 15 Determining sustainable removal rates for agricultural residues has received 16 significant attention and integrated modeling strategies have been built to evaluate 17 sustainable removal rates considering soil erosion and organic matter constraints. 18 However the current integrated model does not quantitatively assess soil carbon 19 and long term crop yields impacts of residue removal. Furthermore the current 20 integrated model does not evaluate the greenhouse gas impacts of residue 21 removal, specifically N2O and CO2 gas fluxes from the soil surface. The DAYCENT 22 model simulates several important processes for determining agroecosystem 23 performance. These processes include daily Nitrogen-gas flux, daily carbon dioxide 24 flux from soil respiration, soil organic carbon and nitrogen, net primary productivity, 25 and daily water and nitrate leaching. Each of these processes is an indicator of 26 sustainability when evaluating emerging cellulosic biomass production systems for 27 bioenergy. A potentially vulnerable cellulosic biomass resource is agricultural 28 residues. This paper presents the integration of the DAYCENT model with the 29 existingmore » integration framework modeling tool to investigate additional environment 30 impacts of agricultural residue removal. The integrated model is extended to 31 facilitate two-way coupling between DAYCENT and the existing framework. The 32 extended integrated model is applied to investigate additional environmental 33 impacts from a recent sustainable agricultural residue removal dataset. The 34 integrated model with DAYCENT finds some differences in sustainable removal 35 rates compared to previous results for a case study county in Iowa. The extended 36 integrated model with DAYCENT also predicts that long term yields will decrease. « less
Parental child-rearing practices, behavior problems and pre-school children's social competence

The study examined associations between parents' childrearing practices, behavior problems and pre-school children's social competence. A total of 48 mothers and 33 fathers, when their firstborn children were aged six, completed an interview about child-rearing practices and the Social Skills Rating System that also assesses behavior problems. Spearman correlations indicated positive associations between maternal coercive practices and children's behavior problems, especially those related to externalizing. Positive correlations were also found between fathers' coercive practices and internalizing problems, as well as among fathers' inductive and non-interference practices with children's cooperation and assertiveness, respectively. Girls' mothers reported higher levels of self-control and social competence than did boys' mothers. Moreover, lower SES mothers referred more coercive practices while higher SES mothers reported more inductive practices. Findings underscore the relationship between fathers' inductive practices and children's social competence. In addition, results suggested associations among both mothers' and fathers' coercive practices and children's behavior problems.
Toward a Formalization of the Process to Select IMIA Yearbook Best Papers

Summary Background: Each year, the International Medical Informatics Association Yearbook recognizes significant scientific papers, labelled as “best papers”, published the previous year in the subfields of biomedical informatics that correspond to the different section topics of the journal. For each section, about fifteen pre-selected “candidate” best papers are externally peer-reviewed to select the actual best papers. Although based on the available literature, little is known about the pre-selection process. Objective: To move toward an explicit formalization of the candidate best papers selection process to reduce variability in the literature search across sections and over years. Methods: A methodological framework is proposed to build for each section topic specific queries tailored to PubMed and Web of Science citation databases. The two sets of returned papers are merged and reviewed by two independent section editors and citations are tagged as “discarded”, “pending”, and “kept”. A protocolized consolidation step is then jointly conducted to resolve conflicts. A bibliographic software tool, BibReview, was developed to support the whole process. Results: The proposed search strategy was fully applied to the Decision Support section of the 2013 edition of the Yearbook. For this section, 1124 references were returned (689 PubMed-specific, 254 WoS-specific, 181 common to both databases) among which the 15 candidate best papers were selected. Conclusions: The search strategy for determining candidate best papers for an IMIA Yearbook’s section is now explicitly specified and allows for reproducibility. However, some aspects of the whole process remain reviewer-dependent, mostly because there is no characterization of a ”best paper“.