Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Reunifying Privacy Law

In the years since Samuel Warren and Louis Brandies proposed a unified theory of invasion of privacy tort liability, American information privacy law became increasingly fragmented and decreasingly coherent. William Prosser’s 1960 article, Privacy, which heavily influenced the Restatement of Torts, endorsed and hastened this trend toward fragmentation, which spread from tort law to the various statutory branches of information privacy law. This paper argues for the reunification of privacy law in two connected ways. First, Prosser’s fragmented privacy tort should be replaced with a unitary tort for invasion of privacy that looks to the private or public nature of the information, the degree to which a defendant’s conduct violates existing social norms, and the social welfare implications of the defendant’s conduct. Second, the reunified common law of torts should become the model for judicial interpretation of various other branches of information privacy law, such as the Freedom of Information Act’s privacy provisions, the Privacy Act, and the constitutional right of information privacy. The paper examines how this reunification project can be accomplished, why it is desirable, and whether it is consistent with the Supreme Court’s methodological guidance in privacy controversies.The final section of the paper argues that the pending United States Supreme Court case of Nelson v. NASA is an ideal vehicle for pushing the law of information privacy back towards its relatively coherent and unified origins. Nelson will be the first Supreme Court case in thirty-three years to confront squarely the question of whether the Constitution protects a right to information privacy apart from the Fourth Amendment context. Because the common law tort cause of action and constitutional action involve similar harms and considerations, it is appropriate to reconcile the presently divergent doctrines, though this could be done in one of two ways. The most sensible approach to reunification is to conclude, as the Sixth Circuit has, that there is no such thing as a constitutional right to information privacy, and that such rights are appropriately vindicated via tort or statutory remedies. An alternative approach would be to recognize the existence of a constitutional right, as most circuit courts have, but to hold that the elements of a constitutional violation mimic those associated with the reunified privacy tort.
Sexual Harassment 2.0

Sexual harassment is a complex and evolving practice. The emergence of sexually discriminatory behavior in cyberspace is only one of the most recent and most striking examples of the phenomenon’s increasing complexity. Sexual harassment law, however, has not kept pace with this evolution. Discrimination law has not been adequately “updated” to address new and amplified practices of sex discrimination. Its principal limitation is that it assumes sexual harassment to be a “single-setting” phenomenon, i.e. that the harassing activity and its resulting harms occur in the same protected setting. By contrast, this Article proposes a “multiple-setting” conception of sexual harassment that recognizes how harassing activity can take place in one setting – for instance, an online message board – and have effects in another setting – for instance, in a victim’s place of employment. In order to address multiple-setting harassment, a third-party liability regime similar to that of traditional sexual harassment law should be introduced into other contexts. In the context of online abuse, liability for sexual harassment should attach to website operators. This will create an incentive for website operators to adopt preemptive, self-regulatory measures against online sexual harassment, much as employers and school administrators have done in the offline setting.
Recombinant Human Thrombomodulin in Acute Exacerbation of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis.

BACKGROUND Acute exacerbation (AE) of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) presents as episodes of acute respiratory worsening closely associated with endothelial damage and disordered coagulopathy. Recombinant human soluble thrombomodulin (rhTM) regulates the coagulation pathway mainly by reducing thrombin-mediated clotting and enhancing protein C activation. We investigated the efficacy of rhTM for the treatment of patients with AE-IPF. METHODS This historical control study comprised 40 patients with AE-IPF. Twenty patients treated with rhTM (0.06 mg/kg/d) for about 6 days (rhTM group) and 20 patients treated without rhTM (control group) were evaluated. The predictors of 3-month mortality (logistic regression model) were evaluated. RESULTS There was no difference in baseline characteristics between the control group and the rhTM group. Three-month mortality of the rhTM group and control group was 30.0% and 65.0%, respectively. In univariate analysis, C-reactive protein and rhTM therapy were significant determinants for 3-month survival. In multivariate analysis, rhTM therapy (OR, 0.219; 95% CI, 0.049-0.978; P = 0.047) was an independent significant determinant for 3-month survival. CONCLUSIONS We found that rhTM therapy improved 3-month survival of AE-IPF. The results observed here warrant further investigation of rhTM in randomized control trials.
L'economia e l'arte

This work consists of an interpretation of the relationship between art and economy, in the framework of the more general relationship between art and science. Starting from the historical presupposition that the dual concept of economy and art has lead to interesting results, we affirm that in theory not only is this approach possible but also legitimate. To prove our proposition, we have followed a very simple reasoning: if scientific knowledge and artistic knowledge have similar characteristics, and if economy is a science, then the numerous links between economy and art (and consequently the economists' interest in issues related to the field of art) are not surprising. Our thesis is supported both through a static approach, and through a dynamic one. However the "Economics of the Art" has only recently become an actual sector of political economy, that is since when economists have started to focus on issues raised by a precise object of search, rather than an indistinct object of interest: the themes currently tackled are not connected with those occasional or personal determinants that stimulated past - however important - researches.
Secrecy rate maximization for information and energy transfer in MIMO beamforming networks

Consider a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming system, where a multi-antenna base station transmits information and energy simultaneously to a multi-antenna information receiver (IR) and a number of multi-antenna energy receivers (ERs). The ERs are assumed to possess dual functionality such that they can also decode information. This gives rise to the physical layer security issue of providing confidential information to the IR while ensuring efficient energy harvesting for the ERs. Hence, we employ an artificial noise (AN)-aided secrecy approach at the transmitter, where the AN improves the security by interfering with the information decoding at the ERs while, at the same time, providing them with wireless energy to harvest. In this paper, we address the problem of jointly optimizing the beamforming matrix for the IR and the covariance matrix of the AN such that the secrecy rate is maximized subject to energy harvesting constraints and a total power constraint. The corresponding optimization problem is a difference of convex functions (DC) programming problem, which is generally non-convex. Nevertheless, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) strategy to tackle this problem for the cases of a square and a non-square IR channel. The performance of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated by simulation results.
Phosphorus and bacterial growth in drinking water

The availability of organic carbon is considered the key factor to regulate microbial regrowth in drinking water network. However, boreal regions (northern Europe, Russia, and North America) contain a large amount of organic carbon in forests and peatlands. Therefore, natural waters (lakes, rivers, and groundwater) in the northern hemisphere generally have a high content of organic carbon. We found that microbial growth in drinking water in Finland is highly regulated not only by organic carbon but also by the availability of phosphorus. Microbial growth increased up to a phosphate concentration of 10 micrograms of PO4-P liter-1. Inorganic elements other than phosphorus did not affect microbial growth in drinking water. This observation offers novel possibilities to restrict microbial growth in water distribution systems by developing technologies to remove phosphorus efficiently from drinking water.
Dynamiques industrielles et reconfiguration des réseaux d'alliances : une comparaison des biotechnologies appliquées à la santé humaine et à l'agro-alimentaire en France

Ce papier analyse la dynamique des reseaux d'alliances et plus particulierement la division du travail qui s'opere entre les differents types d'acteurs (Grands Groupes Industriels, Entreprises Specialisees de Biotechnologies et Instituts de Recherche Academique) qui interviennent dans l'industrie des biotechnologies. Differents travaux montrent qu'au fur et a mesure du developpement de l'industrie les acteurs centraux de ces reseaux changent (des instituts et des Entreprises Specialisees en Biotechnologie vers les grands groupes) de meme que la nature des alliances qu'ils nouent entre eux (croissance des alliances orientees sur l'acces au marche, croissance des alliances horizontales ESB-ESB) (Rothaermel et Deeds, 2004, 2006 ; Pyka et Saviotti, 2005). Mais alors que ces etudes travaillent specifiquement sur des ESB du domaine de la sante, d'autres etudes, moins nombreuses (Valentin et Jensen, 2003 ; Senker et Mangematin, 2005), presentent une image differente pour les ESB de l'agroalimentaire (moindre implication des Entreprises Specialisees en Biotechnologie, permanence des grands groupes, non remis en cause par l'introduction des biotechnologies, comme l'ont ete leurs confreres de la pharmacie). Nous proposons dans ce papier d'illustrer plus directement les similitudes et differences dans la dynamique des reseaux d'alliances des ESB de ces deux domaines, sante et agroalimentaire, en nous appuyant sur un echantillon d'ESB francaises, sur la periode 1977-2005
Neuroscience and Education: Blind Spots in a Strange Relationship

This article—mainly referring to the situation in Germany—consists of three parts. In a first section the current presence of neurosciences in the public discourse will be described in order to illuminate the background which is relevant for contemporary educational thinking. The prefix ‘neuro-’ is ubiquitous today and therefore concepts like ‘neuropedagogy’ or ‘neurodidactics’ seem to be in the mainstream of modern thinking. In the second part of the article the perspective changes from the public discourse to the disciplinary discourse; a brief excursus into developmental psychiatry, neuropsychology and modern psychoanalysis will be made in order to demonstrate how the results of neuroscientific research are integrated in their theoretical frameworks. These three disciplines have no difficulty in integrating neuroscientific findings because each of them possesses a systematic core composed of ‘native concepts’. In contrast to them, educational theory has much more difficulty with such integration, as will be shown in the third part of the essay. On the one hand, neuroscientific thinking seems to be able to dominate education rather easily and without great resistance, especially in the fields of early childhood education, instruction and learning—mainly by simplifying educational processes and by reducing the complexity of the educational task to a mere ‘relationship problem’. On the other hand, this attraction of neuroscience in education might be understood as the reflection of a theoretical deficit in educational theory itself, with the significance of affect and emotion not receiving proper attention.
Deep sequencing-based identification of small non-coding RNAs in Streptomyces coelicolor

Streptomyces coelicolor is considered the model organism among Gram positive, GC rich bacteria. Its genome has been sequenced but little is known about the occurrence and distribution of small non-coding RNAs in this biotechnologically relevant organism. Using deep sequencing we analyzed the transcriptome at the end of exponential growth, which corresponds to the onset of secondary metabolism. We mapped 193 transcriptional start sites of mRNA genes and identified putative new and alternative open reading frames. We identified 63 non-coding RNAs including 29 cis encoded antisense RNAs, and confirmed expression for 11, most of them being growth-phase dependent. A comparison between the sequencing results and bioinformatic sRNA predictions using Dynalign and RNAz revealed only a small overlap between the different approaches.
Detection and sequence analysis of accessory gene regulator genes of Staphylococcus pseudintermedius isolates

Background: Staphylococcus pseudintermedius (SP) is the major pathogenic species of dogs involved in a wide variety of skin and soft tissue infections. The accessory gene regulator (agr) locus of Staphylococcus aureus has been extensively studied, and it influences the expression of many virulence genes. It encodes a two-component signal transduction system that leads to down-regulation of surface proteins and up-regulation of secreted proteins during in vitro growth of S. aureus. The objective of this study was to detect and sequence analyzing the AgrA, B, and D of SP isolated from canine skin infections. Materials and Methods: In this study, we have isolated and identified SP from canine pyoderma and otitis cases by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and confirmed by PCR-restriction fragment length polymorphism. Primers for SP agrA and agrBD genes were designed using online primer designing software and BLAST searched for its specificity. Amplification of the agr genes was carried out for 53 isolates of SP by PCR and sequencing of agrA, B, and D were carried out for five isolates and analyzed using DNAstar and Mega5.2 software. Results: A total of 53 (59%) SP isolates were obtained from 90 samples. 15 isolates (28%) were confirmed to be methicillin-resistant SP (MRSP) with the detection of the mecA gene. Accessory gene regulator A, B, and D genes were detected in all the SP isolates. Complete nucleotide sequences of the above three genes for five isolates were submitted to GenBank, and their accession numbers are from KJ133557 to KJ133571. AgrA amino acid sequence analysis showed that it is mainly made of alpha-helices and is hydrophilic in nature. AgrB is a transmembrane protein, and AgrD encodes the precursor of the autoinducing peptide (AIP). Sequencing of the agrD gene revealed that the 5 canine SP strains tested could be divided into three Agr specificity groups (RIPTSTGFF, KIPTSTGFF, and RIPISTGFF) based on the putative AIP produced by each strain. The AIP of SP contains serine and produce lactone ring structured AIP. Conclusion: Presence of AgrA, B, and D in all SP isolates implies the importance of this regulatory system in the virulence genes expression of the SP bacteria. SP isolates can be typed based on the AgrD auto-inducible protein sequences as it is being carried out for typing of S. aureus isolates. However, further studies are required to elucidate the mechanism of controlling of virulence genes by agr gene locus in the pathogenesis of soft tissue infection by SP.
Testing the nicotine dependence measure mFTQ for adolescent smokers: A multinational investigation

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES As a measure of nicotine dependence among adolescent smokers, the modified Fagerström Tolerance Questionnaire (mFTQ; seven items), has been successfully used in the United States (USA). Nonetheless, the validity and reliability of mFTQ at the international level is still needed. The current study is the first to test the validity and reliability of mFTQ in four countries: Thailand, Spain, the USA, and Russia. METHODS In a cross-sectional survey, mFTQ, risk factors of nicotine dependence, and sociodemographic characteristics were assessed. Risk factors included age of first cigarette, frequency of alcohol use, frequency of marijuana use, and number of cigarettes smoked yesterday. Salivary cotinine was also obtained in Thailand and Spain. RESULTS For all four countries, mFTQ exhibited a single factor structure, as supported by previous work in the USA. For all studied countries except Thailand, mFTQ presented acceptable internal reliability. Overall, risk factors of nicotine dependence have predicted mFTQ scores across countries. Frequency of alcohol use in the USA and frequency of marijuana use in Thailand and Spain were not associated with mFTQ scores. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS mFTQ is a single-factor measure of nicotine dependence that shows acceptable internal consistency and validity across countries. Further work can advance the scale and tailor it to different cultures. SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE mFTQ can be a clinically practical international measure of nicotine dependence. This study provides initial support for the utility of the mFTQ among Thai, Spanish, American, and Russian adolescents. Further research is needed to test and advance mFTQ across cultures. (Am J Addict 2017;26:689-696).
Generative model for abandoned object detection

This paper proposes an algorithm for abandoned object detection based on generative model of low level features. First, suspected blobs are detected by foreground detection and pixel variance thresholding. Then several low level features on blobs are calculated to remove false alarms, which include pixel variance over time, edge intensity score, edge variance over time, foreground completeness, histogram contrast with respect to surrounding background, bag color model and priors of height and width. The last two features are used as threshold. For other features, their log probability ratio between distributions on positive examples and negative ones are tted by sigmoid function. At last, the fitted log probability ratios are weighted to construct a classifier. The algorithm has been verified in 29 challenging scenes and produces very low false alarms and missing detection.
Words without Boundaries: Computational Approaches to Chinese Word Segmentation

The fact that words are not conventionally demarcated in Chinese orthography makes the process of word segmentation non-trivial. Chinese word segmentation remains a challenging topic in Chinese computational linguistics. We survey previous approaches to Chinese word segmentation, including dictionary look-up, strength of internal binding, as well as character tagging and machine learning. The Word Boundary Decision (WBD) approach which requires no prior lexical knowledge is proposed. It is shown that the WBD model greatly reduces the complexity of Chinese word segmentation and may provide a promising approach to address domain adaption and robustness issues.
Influence of persistent thyroxine reduction on spermatogenesis in rats neonatally exposed to 2,2',4,4',5,5'-hexa-chlorobiphenyl.

BACKGROUND The aim of the present study is to determine the long-term testicular effects of neonatal exposure to PCB153. METHODS Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats were treated by oral gavage with PCB153 in corn oil at doses of 0, 0.025, and 2.5 mg/kg per day from postnatal day 3 (PND 3) to PND7. The rats were sacrificed on PND 8 and PND 77. TUNEL in situ detection for testis apoptosis, immunohistochemical staining of thyroid gland for thyroxine (T4), semi-quantitative RT-PCR for mRNA expression, and radioimmunoassay (RIA) for serum hormone levels were performed. RESULTS Neonatal treatment with PCB153 at both doses had no obvious effects on body weight, testis weight, testis histology, and germ cell apoptosis, but decreased T4 staining in thyroid gland was observed on PND 8. On PND 77, neonatal treatment with 2.5 mg/kg per day of PCB153 significantly reduced daily sperm product (DSP). Serum levels of thyroxine (T4) and free thyroxine (FT4) decreased, but there were no differences in thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) level between the control and exposed groups. Gap junction connexin43 (CX43) and cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor (CDKI) P27kip1 mRNA expression, which was associated with Sertoli cell differentiation, was significantly reduced after PCB153 treatment on PND 8 but not on PND 77. Androgen-binding protein (ABP) and androgen receptor (AR) mRNA expression, which indicates Sertoli cell maturation, was suppressed on PND 77 after neonatal PCB153 exposure. CONCLUSIONS The findings in this study suggest that neonatal exposure to PCB153 induces persistent T4 reduction, which disturbs Sertoli cell function, and subsequently results in alterations in adult spermatogenesis. Birth Defects Res (Part B) 89:18-25, 2010. (c) 2009 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
A model for the time-order error in contrast discrimination

Trials in a temporal two-interval forced-choice discrimination experiment consist of two sequential intervals presenting stimuli that differ from one another as to magnitude along some continuum. The observer must report in which interval the stimulus had a larger magnitude. The standard difference model from signal detection theory analyses poses that order of presentation should not affect the results of the comparison, something known as the balance condition (J.-C. Falmagne, 1985, in Elements of Psychophysical Theory). But empirical data prove otherwise and consistently reveal what Fechner (1860/1966, in Elements of Psychophysics) called time-order errors, whereby the magnitude of the stimulus presented in one of the intervals is systematically underestimated relative to the other. Here we discuss sensory factors (temporary desensitization) and procedural glitches (short interstimulus or intertrial intervals and response bias) that might explain the time-order error, and we derive a formal model indicating how these factors make observed performance vary with presentation order despite a single underlying mechanism. Experimental results are also presented illustrating the conventional failure of the balance condition and testing the hypothesis that time-order errors result from contamination by the factors included in the model.