Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Predictors of mortality in insulin dependent diabetes: 10 year observational follow up study

Abstract Objective: To evaluate the prognostic significance of microalbuminuria and overt diabetic nephropathy and other putative risk factors for cardiovascular and all cause mortality in insulin dependent diabetes. Design: Ten year observational follow up study. Setting: Outpatient diabetic clinic in a tertiary referral centre. Subjects: All 939 adults with insulin dependent diabetes (duration of diabetes five years or more) attending the clinic in 1984; 593 had normal urinary albumin excretion (</=30 mg/24 h), 181 persistent microalbuminuria (31-299 mg/24 h), and 165 overt nephropathy (>/=300 mg/24 h). Main outcome measure: All cause and cardiovascular mortality. Results: Fifteen per cent of patients (90/593) with normoalbuminuria, 25% (45/181) with microalbuminuria, and 44% (72/165) with overt nephropathy at baseline died during follow up. Cox multiple regression analysis identified the following significant predictors of all cause mortality: male sex (relative risk 2.03; 95% confidence interval 1.37 to 3.02), age (1.07; 1.06 to 1.08), height (0.96; 0.94 to 0.98), smoking (1.51; 1.09 to 2.08), social class V versus social class IV (1.70; 1.25 to 2.31), log10 urinary albumin excretion (1.45; 1.18 to 1.77), hypertension (1.63; 1.18 to 2.25), log10 serum creatinine concentration (8.96; 3.34 to 24.08), and haemoglobin A1c concentration (1.11; 1.03 to 1.20). Age, smoking, microalbuminuria, overt nephropathy, and hypertension were significant predictors of cardiovascular mortality. Mortality in patients with microalbuminuria was only slightly increased compared with that in patients with normoalbuminuria. Median survival time after the onset of overt diabetic nephropathy was 13.9 years (95% confidence interval 11.8 to 17.2 years). Conclusions: Abnormally increased urinary albumin excretion and other potentially modifiable risk factors such as hypertension, smoking, poor glycaemic control, and social class predict increased mortality in insulin dependent diabetes. Microalbuminuria by itself confers only a small increase in mortality. The prognosis of patients with overt diabetic nephropathy has improved, probably owing to effective antihypertensive treatment. Key messages Microalbuminuria predicts increased mortality due to progression to overt nephropathy Microalbuminuria by itself confers only a small increase in mortality after age 50 The prognosis in patients with insulin dependent diabetes complicated by nephropathy has improved, probably owing to treatment with antihypertensive agents
Tetracyclines in Food and Feedingstuffs: From Regulation to Analytical Methods, Bacterial Resistance, and Environmental and Health Implications

Antibiotics are widely used as growth promoters in animal husbandry; among them, the tetracyclines are a chemical group of relevance, due to their wide use in agriculture, surpassing in quantities applied almost every other antibiotic family. Seeing the considerable amounts of tetracyclines used worldwide, monitoring of these antibiotics is paramount. Advances must be made in the analysis of antibiotics to assess correct usage and dosage of tetracyclines in food and feedstuffs and possible residues in pertinent environmental samples. The tetracyclines are still considered a clinically relevant group of antibiotics, though dissemination of tolerance and resistance determinants have limited their use. This review focuses on four different aspects: (i) tetracyclines, usage, dosages, and regulatory issues that govern their food-related application, with particular attention to the prohibitions and restrictions that several countries have enforced in recent years by agencies from both the United States and the European Union, (ii) analytical methods for tetracyclines, determination, and residues thereof in feedstuffs and related matrices with an emphasis on the most relevant and novel techniques, including both screening and confirmatory methods, (iii) tetracycline resistance and tetracycline-resistant bacteria in feedstuff, and (iv) environmental and health risks accompanying the use of tetracyclines in animal nutrition. In the last two cases, we discuss the more relevant undesirable effects that tetracyclines exert over bacterial communities and nontarget species including unwanted effects in farmers.
Review of Telehealth Stuttering Management

Objective: Telehealth is the use of communication technology to provide health care services by means other than typical in-clinic attendance models. Telehealth is increasingly used for the management of speech, language and communication disorders. The aim of this article is to review telehealth applications to stuttering management. Methods: We conducted a search of peer-reviewed literature for the past 20 years using the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database, PubMed: The Bibliographic Database and a search for articles by hand. Results: Outcomes for telehealth stuttering treatment were generally positive, but there may be a compromise of treatment efficiency with telehealth treatment of young children. Our search found no studies dealing with stuttering assessment procedures using telehealth models. No economic analyses of this delivery model have been reported. Conclusion: This review highlights the need for continued research about telehealth for stuttering management. Evidence from research is needed to inform the efficacy of assessment procedures using telehealth methods as well as guide the development of improved treatment procedures. Clinical and technical guidelines are urgently needed to ensure that the evolving and continued use of telehealth to manage stuttering does not compromise the standards of care afforded with standard in-clinic models.
RATING SCALE MEASURES OF RESTORATIVE COMPONENTS OF ENVIRONMENTS

Two studies were conducted with the aim of developing a set of rating scale measures of restorative components of environments. In Study 1, 238 Norwegian undergraduates acting as subjects imagined themselves to be either in a nature environment or a city environment which they rated on unipolar scales intended to describe how they experienced the environments. In Study 2 another sample of 157 subjects recruited from the same population of Norwegian undergraduates viewed videos of a forest, park, sea area, city, and a snowy mountain, imagining themselves to be in these environments while performing ratings on the same scales. In both studies factor analyses yielded results in agreement with a theory proposed by Kaplan and Kaplan (1989). However, the being away factor posited by the theory was split into two factors, one with high loadings on rating scales tapping being physically away, the other with high loadings on rating scales tapping being psychologically away. The remaining three factors were defined by rating scales tapping extent, fascination, and compatibility, respectively. Composite measures of the factors had acceptable reliability. Furthermore, as predicted, environments with nature elements generally scored higher than city environments on all measures. Compatibility and fascination predicted preference ratings of the environments, whereas escape and compatibility predicted selfratings of relaxation.
Three temptations of leaders

Purpose – Despite the challenge of precisely defining the nature of temptation, this paper seeks to collect contrasting perspectives of this less attractive side of leadership and sets out to find a cure, or rather prevention, for falling into its grasp.Design/methodology/approach – Following a literature review of the temptations to which leaders succumb, the results of focused and intimate case studies of highly respected leaders highlight just what they are tempted with and how and why they particularly may succumb to hedonism, power and posterity.Findings – Extracts of interviews with an international sample of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) and significant others reveal a distinctly human experience from which it is considered no‐one is exempt. Included in the sample were female top managers but no discernable difference between the genders could be ascertained. The idiosyncratic nature of response to temptation positioned each interviewees experience as unique. It is concluded that certain measures.
Salient Object Detection via Bootstrap Learning Supplementary Materials

In Figure 2(a), we provide the Precision and Recall (P-R) curves of the proposed bootstrap learning algorithm when each of the three features (RGB, CIELab and LBP) is removed, respectively. These results show that each feature contributes to detect salient objects. In addition, we show the P-R curve of the proposed method in comparison with those of single-scale methods in Figure 2(b), which demonstrates the effects of the multiscale integration in the proposed method. These results show that the efficiency of the proposed method could be largely improved by adopting only single scale at the expense of some decrease in accuracy.
Building a Cloud for Yahoo!

Yahoo! is building a set of scalable, highly-available data storage and processing services, and deploying them in a cloud model to make application development and ongoing maintenance signiﬁcantly easier. In this paper we discuss the vision and requirements, as well as the components that will go into the cloud. We highlight the challenges and research questions that arise from trying to build a comprehensive web-scale cloud infrastructure, emphasizing data storage and processing capabilities. (The Yahoo! cloud infrastructure also includes components for provisioning, virtualization, and edge content delivery, but these aspects are only brieﬂy touched on.)
The Neurological Manifestations of H1N1 Influenza Infection; Diagnostic Challenges and Recommendations

Background: World Health Organization declared pandemic phase of human infection with novel influenza A (H1N1) in April 2009. There are very few reports about the neurological complications of H1N1 virus infection in the literature. Occasionally, these complications are severe and even fatal in some individuals. The aims of this study were to report neurological complaints and/or complications associated with H1N1 virus infection. Methods: The medical files of all patients with H1N1 influenza infection admitted to a specified hospital in the city of , from October through November 2009 were reviewed. More information about the patients were obtained by phone calls to the patients or their care givers. All patients had confirmed H1N1 virus infection with real-time PCR assay. Results: Fifty-five patients with H1N1 infection were studied. Twenty-three patients had neurological signs and/or symptoms. Mild neurological complaints may be reported in up to 42% of patients infected by H1N1 virus. Severe neurological complications occurred in 9% of the patients. The most common neurological manifestations were headache, numbness and paresthesia, drowsiness and coma. One patient had a Guillain-Barre syndrome-like illness, and died in a few days. Another patient had focal status epilepticus and encephalopathy. Conclusions: The H1N1 infection seems to have been quite mild with a self-limited course in much of the world, yet there appears to be a subset, which is severely affected. We recommend performing diagnostic tests for H1N1influenza virus in all patients with respiratory illness and neurological signs/symptoms. We also recommend initiating treatment with appropriate antiviral drugs as soon as possible in those with any significant neurological presentation accompanied with respiratory illness and flu-like symptoms.
The Regenerative Potential of Notochordal Cells in a Nucleus Pulposus Explant

Study Design In vitro disk explant culture. Objective Notochordal cells (NCs) have been shown to upregulate matrix production by nucleus pulposus (NP) cells in coculture. To examine the translation of these in vitro results to a nativelike setting, the regenerative potential of NCs injected into NP tissue was assessed in this study. Methods NP explants were cultured after injection with NCs in phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) or with PBS alone (sham). At days 0 and 42, cell viability and morphology, water, DNA, sulfated glycosaminoglycan and hydroxyproline content, and gene expression of anabolic markers were analyzed. Results NCs remained viable during culture, but their morphology changed. The biochemical content remained unchanged, except for the DNA content in the NC group. Overall ACAN expression remained unchanged, whereas COL2A1 decreased during culture. Conclusions No overall anabolic response was observed when NCs were injected into NP explants. NCs were found to survive but did not display the typical NC morphology by the end of the culture period.
Gender recognition from face images with local WLD descriptor

In various biometric applications, gender recognition from facial images plays an important role. In this paper, we investigate Weber's Local Descriptor (WLD) for gender recognition. WLD is a texture descriptor that performs better than other similar descriptors but it is holistic due to its very construction. We extend it by introducing local spatial information; divide an image into a number of blocks, calculate WLD descriptor for each block and concatenate them. This spatial WLD descriptor has better discriminatory power. Spatial WLD descriptor has three parameters. Through a large number of experiments performed on FERET database, we report the best combination of these parameters and that our proposed spatial WLD descriptor with simplest classifier gives much better accuracy i.e. 99.08% with lesser algorithmic complexity than state-of-the-art gender recognition approaches.
Persistence of human papillomavirus DNA in benign and (pre)malignant skin lesions from renal transplant recipients.

An extremely diverse group of human papillomavirus (HPV) types consisting of epidermodysplasia verruciformis (EV)-associated HPV types and other cutaneous HPV types (e.g., HPV types 2 and 3) is associated with nonmelanoma cancers and benign lesions of the skin. The frequent presence of multiple HPV types in single skin biopsy specimens of renal transplant recipients prompted us to develop PCR techniques for the detection of distinct (sub)groups of genotypically related cutaneous HPV types, i.e., three subgroups of EV-associated HPV types and two groups (A2 and A4) of other cutaneous HPV types. This approach generally allowed a reliable identification of HPV genotypes by direct sequencing of the PCR products, despite the frequent occurrence of multiple infections. The targeted spectrum of HPV types comprises 66 cutaneous HPV types including 21 putative novel HPV types. We also detected 17 putative novel HPV subtypes. We demonstrated that the skin of nearly all renal transplant recipients who developed various benign and (pre)malignant skin lesions was persistently infected with one or more EV-associated HPV types and/or HPV types belonging to groups A2 and A4. The frequency and distribution of EV-associated HPV and HPV types belonging to groups A2 and A4 were similar in biopsy specimens from hyperkeratotic papillomas (77.5%), squamous cell carcinomas (77. 8%), and actinic keratoses (67.9%) but appeared to be lower in specimens of basal cell carcinomas (35.7%), benign lesions (38.5%), and clinically normal skin (32.3%). These findings suggest that renal transplant recipients are prone to persistent cutaneous HPV infection. Our data do not support the existence of high-risk cutaneous HPV types.
Quantum Key Distribution Based on Selective Post-Processing in Passive Optical Networks

One of the main obstacles to the widespread adoption of quantum cryptography has been the difficulty of integration into standard optical networks, largely due to the tremendous difference in power of classical signals compared with the single quantum used for quantum key distribution. This makes the technology expensive and hard to deploy. In this letter, we show an easy and straightforward integration method of quantum cryptography into optical access networks. In particular, we analyze how a quantum key distribution system can be seamlessly integrated in a standard access network based on the passive optical and time division multiplexing paradigms. The novelty of this proposal is based on the selective post-processing that allows for the distillation of secret keys avoiding the noise produced by other network users. Importantly, the proposal does not require the modification of the quantum or classical hardware specifications neither the use of any synchronization mechanism between the network and quantum cryptography devices.
Recurrent Amaurosis Fugax in a Patient after Stanford Type A Dissection Depending on Blood Pressure and Haemoglobin Level

Purpose. A transient painless monocular visual loss due to a decrease in retinal circulation—also known as “amaurosis fugax”—often precedes acute territorial cerebral ischaemia. The case we present underlines the importance of a comprehensive diagnostic workup in patients with amaurosis fugax. Case Report. A 44-year-old man who had suffered from a dissection of the ascending aorta (Stanford Type A) five months ago presented with recurrent monocular vision problems. Episodes with sectional vision loss mainly occurred in combination with low blood pressure levels. Furthermore, the haemoglobin level was chronically low (Hb 9.7 mg/dL), and the patient was by mistake on a simultaneous therapy with phenprocoumon and unfractionated heparin. Carotid artery duplex scanning revealed a high-grade stenosis of the proximal right common carotid artery. MR imaging corroborated hypoperfusion in brain area corresponding to the right MCA. Conclusion. Our patient is an example in whom transient retinal ischaemic attacks may originate from haemodynamic reasons.
Financial Valuation and Risk Management Working Paper No . 99 Financial Development and the Instability of Open Economies

This paper introduces a framework for analyzing the role of nancial factors as a source of instability in small open economies. Our basic model is a dynamic open economy model with a tradeable good produced with capital and a country-speci c factor. We also assume that rms face credit constraints, with the constraint being tighter at a lower level of nancial development. A basic implication of this model is that economies at an intermediate level of nancial development are more unstable than either very developed or very underdeveloped economies. This is true both in the sense that temporary shocks have large and persistent e¤ects and also in the sense that these economies can exhibit cycles. Thus, countries that are going through a phase of nancial development may become more unstable in the short run. Similarly, full capital account liberalization may destabilize the economy in economies at an intermediate level of nancial development: phases of growth with capital inows are followed by collapse with capital outows. On the other hand, foreign direct investment does not destabilize.
Beyond the officially sacred: religion, secularism, and the body in the production of subjectivity

Recent calls for new geographies of religion draw attention to how religion shapes the formation of subjectivity. Focusing on pious Muslim women's new veiling practices in Istanbul, I chart possible geographical analyses not only of religion but also of secularism as the two phenomena intersect and compete with one another in complex and often contradictory ways. I approach veiling as a gendered embodied spatial practice that reveals the intertwined production of bodies and subjectivities. Social meanings, the wider political context and spatial regimes that govern everyday life, as well as individual experiences, shape the production of corporeal piety. For the case I analyze, the hegemonic ideology of secularism, the highly politicized issue of veiling, and the informal and formal restrictions on the headscarf all come into play. This analysis offers new insights about the geographies of the body, subjectivity, and the city by highlighting the significant role religion and secularism play in their production.
Context effects of pictures and words in naming objects, reading words, and generating simple phrases

In five language production experiments it was examined which aspects of words are activated in memory by context pictures and words. Context pictures yielded Stroop-like and semantic effects on response times when participants generated gender-marked noun phrases in response to written words (Experiment 1A). However, pictures yielded no such effects when participants simply read aloud the noun phrases (Experiment 2). Moreover, pictures yielded a gender congruency effect in generating gender-marked noun phrases in response to the written words (Experiments 3A and 3B). These findings suggest that context pictures activate lemmas (i.e., representations of syntactic properties), which leads to effects only when lemmas are needed to generate a response (i.e., in Experiments 1A, 3A, and 3B, but not in Experiment 2). Context words yielded Stroop-like and semantic effects in picture naming (Experiment 1B). Moreover, words yielded Stroop-like but no semantic effects in reading nouns (Experiment 4) and in generating noun phrases (Experiment 5). These findings suggest that context words activate the lemmas and forms of their names, which leads to semantic effects when lemmas are required for responding (Experiment 1B) but not when only the forms are required (Experiment 4). WEAVER++ simulations of the results are presented.
O-structures: semantics for versioned memory

This paper introduces O-structures, a novel architectural memory element that can be used to facilitate parallelism in task-based execution models. Much like register renaming, each write to an O-structure creates a new version of program memory at that location. These versions can be accessed concurrently and out of program order. O-structures provide a set of semantics that match the needs of task-based execution models, specifically allowing tasks to synchronize on specific versions of memory as well as coordinate access when the necessary version is not known at compile time. In this work, we describe O-structures and provide their complete semantics. We also discuss how a task-based execution of basic data structure manipulations on common data structures (arrays, lists, trees, etc) operate. Results are presented that measure the exposed memory-level parallelism (MLP) in these operations. We find that for previously difficult to parallelize data-structures, such as linked lists, binary trees and sparse-matrix codes we see significant memory level parallelism (50--100 operations per cycle) when using O-structures.
On the Expected Value and Higher-Order Moments of the Euclidean Norm for Elliptical Normal Variates

We consider the Euclidean norm of a bivariate normal vector, equivalently, the amplitude or envelope of a complex Gaussian variable with correlated real and imaginary parts - known also as Hoyt or Nakagami-q distribution. Such a model, popular in fading and other communication contexts, is also relevant for the analysis of spatial errors in positioning-related applications, namely localization. In this paper an efficient expression in terms of complete elliptic integrals is given for the expected value, and good approximations in simple algebraic form are derived. Results are generalized to moments of any order.