Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Common variable immunodeficiency: association between memory B cells and lung diseases.

BACKGROUND Malabsorption syndrome often develops in patients with common variable immunodeficiency (CVID). Why structural damages appear in some CVID patients and not in others is not fully understood. Memory B cells (MBs) are responsible for the production of specific antibodies, and their defects have previously been related to autoimmune, granulomatous, and lymphoproliferative complications of CVID. The objective of this study was to ascertain whether a relationship exists between MB defects and the clinical outcome of respiratory and intestinal involvement in these patients. METHODS Forty-one CVID patients were grouped as follows, according to the quantification of peripheral MBs: the MB2 group (n = 7) included patients with normal MBs; the MB1 group (n = 16) included patients with low switched MBs; and the MB0 group (n = 18) included patients with absent/low MBs. The clinical outcome of respiratory and intestinal involvement of patients was then compared among the three groups. RESULTS In the MB0 group, chronic lung disease (ie, bronchiectasis and diminished FVC and/or FEV1) developed in 50% of patients vs 13% in the MB1 group and 0% in the MB2 group (p < 0.05). In the MB0 group, malabsorption syndrome or chronic noninfectious diarrhea developed in 50% of patients vs 19% in the MB1 group and 0% in the MB2 group (p < 0.05). No differences were found among the three groups for age at onset of symptoms, delay in diagnosis/treatment, months of follow-up/treatment, and prediagnostic serum IgG concentration. CONCLUSIONS Alterations in MB count appear to be associated with a severe clinical outcome of respiratory and intestinal involvement in CVID. The MB count could be a useful laboratory parameter for orienting the prognosis and management of CVID patients.
Repair – Driven File System Design

File system design has traditionally focused on the on–line performance of the file system while the performance and reliability of file system check, repair, and restore has been for the most part neglected. Journaling and other techniques handle the most common case of file system corruption—half–finished updates interrupted by system crash or other event—but repairing any other form of metadata corruption requires reading and checking the entire file system’s metadata. Unfortunately, disk capacity is growing faster than disk bandwidth, seek times are hardly budging, and the overall chance of an I/O error occurring somewhere on the disk is increasing. The result: the traditional file system check and repair cycle will be not only longer, but also more frequent, with disastrous consequences for data availability. Data reliability will also decline with frequency of corruption. With this reality in mind, we propose repair– driven file system design, the practice of designing file systems with the explicit goal of fast and reliable file system check, repair, and restore.
BioXpress: an integrated RNA-seq-derived gene expression database for pan-cancer analysis

BioXpress is a gene expression and cancer association database in which the expression levels are mapped to genes using RNA-seq data obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas, International Cancer Genome Consortium, Expression Atlas and publications. The BioXpress database includes expression data from 64 cancer types, 6361 patients and 17 469 genes with 9513 of the genes displaying differential expression between tumor and normal samples. In addition to data directly retrieved from RNA-seq data repositories, manual biocuration of publications supplements the available cancer association annotations in the database. All cancer types are mapped to Disease Ontology terms to facilitate a uniform pan-cancer analysis. The BioXpress database is easily searched using HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee gene symbol, UniProtKB/RefSeq accession or, alternatively, can be queried by cancer type with specified significance filters. This interface along with availability of pre-computed downloadable files containing differentially expressed genes in multiple cancers enables straightforward retrieval and display of a broad set of cancer-related genes. Database URL: http://hive.biochemistry. gwu.edu/tools/bioxpress
Risk Factors for School Dropout in a Sample of Juvenile Offenders

Backgrounds: The high rates of school dropout worldwide and their relevance highlight the need for a close study of its causes and consequences. Literature has suggested that school dropout might be explained by multiple causes at different levels (individual, family, school, and neighborhood). The aim of the current study is to examine the relation between individual (defiant attitude, irresponsibility, alcohol abuse, and illegal drugs use), family (educational figure absent and parental monitoring), school factors (truancy and school conflict) and school dropout. Method: Judicial files of all juvenile offenders (218 males and 46 females) with a judicial penal measure in Asturias (Spain) in the year 2012 were examined. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to estimate the relationships between school dropout and individual, family and school variables. Results: As for the individual characteristics, results showed that school dropouts were more irresponsible than non-dropouts. Also they had higher rates of illegal drug use and alcohol abuse. Moreover, lack of parental monitoring emerged as a key predictive factor of school dropout, beyond the type of family structure in terms of the presence of both or only one educational figure. Finally, school factors did not show a significant relationship to school dropout. Conclusions: These findings indicate that school dropout is a multidimensional process. School and family policies that emphasize the role of parental monitoring and prevent alcohol and substance abuse are recommended.
A Cooperative Algorithm for Autonomous Distributed Vehicle Systems with Finite Buffer Capacity

Recently, there are so many researches on Autonomous Distributed Manufacturing Systems (ADMSs), where cooperation among agents is used to solve problems, such as the scheduling problem and the vehicle routing problem. We target ADMSs where an ADMS consists of two sub-systems: a Production System (PS) and an Autonomous Transportation System (ATS). This paper discusses an on-line Tasks Assignment and Routing Problem (TARP) for ATSs under conditions of given production schedule and finite buffer capacity. The TARP results in a constrained version of the Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Windows (PDPTW), and this paper gives a mathematical formulation of the problem. This paper, also, proposes a cooperative algorithm to obtain suboptimal solutions in which no deadlocks and buffer overflows occur. By computational experiments, we will examine the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Computational experiments show that the proposed algorithm is able to obtain efficient and deadlock-free routes even though the buffer capacity is less.
Rationalizing the Value Premium under Economic Fundamentals and Political Patronage

This paper studies the value anomaly in the context of Malaysia, an emerging economy with a top heavy, closely held, and state-owned institutional setting. We attribute the anomaly to the investment pattern of growth firms. Our empirical analysis illustrates that growth firms have a tendency to hoard cash, delaying the undertaking of their growth options, especially in poor economic environments. This mitigates their business risk, but lowers their market valuation, driving down their returns. Our hypothesis also reconciles the diverging views stemming from both the neoclassical and behavioural perspectives. JEL Classification: G110 (Portfolio Choice; Investment Decisions), G120 (Asset Pricing).
Investigation of parallel plate mode suppression in UC-PBG FW-CBCPW by using a transient electrooptic field-mapping

A transient electrooptic near-field mapping system based on a gain-switched distributed feedback (DFB) pulsed laser and a CdTe electrooptic crystal was used for measuring near-field patterns of conventional and uniplanar compact photonic band gap (UC-PBG) finite-width conductor-backed coplanar waveguides (FW-CBCPWs). Comparison of transient near-field patterns of the FW-CBCPWs visually shows that parasitic parallel plate modes in the UC-PBG FW-CBCPW are effectively suppressed by using the UC-PBG structure on side-ground plates.
Parents' perceptions of the miscarriage experience

Abstract This study was conducted to examine parents' perceptions of miscarriage. Participants were six married couples who experienced a miscarriage 12–18 months prior to data collection. Data were collected during three open-ended interviews with each subject. The analysis process involved identifying miscarriage events and their significance and the standard of the desirable against which the experience was evaluated. Participants who experienced the most intense grief appeared to be those for whom the pregnancy and baby were real, whose actual miscarriage was widely divergent from their epistemic orientation, and who perceived themselves as unable to act in ways to decrease this divergence.
A Pre-clinical Animal Model of Trypanosoma brucei Infection Demonstrating Cardiac Dysfunction

African trypanosomiasis (AT), caused by Trypanosoma brucei species, results in both neurological and cardiac dysfunction and can be fatal if untreated. Research on the pathogenesis and treatment of the disease has centred to date on the characteristic neurological symptoms, whereas cardiac dysfunction (e.g. ventricular arrhythmias) in AT remains largely unstudied. Animal models of AT demonstrating cardiac dysfunction similar to that described in field cases of AT are critically required to transform our understanding of AT-induced cardiac pathophysiology and identify future treatment strategies. We have previously shown that T. brucei can interact with heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) to induce ventricular arrhythmias in ex vivo adult rat hearts. However, it is unknown whether the arrhythmias observed ex vivo are also present during in vivo infection in experimental animal models. Here we show for the first time the characterisation of ventricular arrhythmias in vivo in two animal models of AT infection using electrocardiographic (ECG) monitoring. The first model utilised a commonly used monomorphic laboratory strain, Trypanosoma brucei brucei Lister 427, whilst the second model used a pleomorphic laboratory strain, T. b. brucei TREU 927, which demonstrates a similar chronic infection profile to clinical cases. The frequency of ventricular arrhythmias and heart rate (HR) was significantly increased at the endpoint of infection in the TREU 927 infection model, but not in the Lister 427 infection model. At the end of infection, hearts from both models were isolated and Langendorff perfused ex vivo with increasing concentrations of the β-adrenergic agonist isoproterenol (ISO). Interestingly, the increased frequency of arrhythmias observed in vivo in the TREU 927 infection model was lost upon isolation of the heart ex vivo, but re-emerged with the addition of ISO. Our results demonstrate that TREU 927 infection modifies the substrate of the myocardium in such a way as to increase the propensity for ventricular arrhythmias in response to a circulating factor in vivo or β-adrenergic stimulation ex vivo. The TREU 927 infection model provides a new opportunity to accelerate our understanding of AT-related cardiac pathophysiology and importantly has the required sensitivity to monitor adverse cardiac-related electrical dysfunction when testing new therapeutic treatments for AT.
Predictors of Music Sight-Reading Ability in High School Wind Players

The purpose of this study, grounded in near-transfer theory, was to investigate relationships among music sight-reading and tonal and rhythmic audiation, visual field articulation, spatial orientation and visualization, and achievement in math concepts and reading comprehension. A regression analysis with data from four high schools (N = 98) in the American Midwest yielded a 4–variable model that included reading comprehension, rhythmic audiation, visual field articulation, and spatial orientation, F = 21.26, p < 0.001, accounting for 48% of the variance on music sight-reading. The results support previous studies in music education, cognitive science, and neuroscience that have shown that music reading draws on a variety of cognitive skills that include reading comprehension, audiation, spatial-temporal reasoning and visual perception of patterns rather than individual notes.
Crowdsensing in Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks: A Context-aware and Human-centric Approach

In recent years, there have been efforts to collect human contact traces during social events (e.g., conferences) using Bluetooth devices (e.g., mobile phones, iMotes). The results of these studies have enabled the ability to do the crowd-sourcing task from within the crowd, in order to answer questions, such as: what is the current density of the crowd, or how many people are attending the event? However, in those studies, the sensing devices are usually distributed and configured in a certain manner. For example, the number of devices is fixed, people register for the devices on a volunteering basis. In this paper, we treat the above problem as an optimization problem and draw the connection to the vertex cover problem in graph theory. Since finding the optimal solution for minimum vertex cover problem is NP-complete, approximation algorithms have to be used. However, we will show that the well-known approximation algorithms do not perform well with the crowd-sensing task. In this paper, we propose the notions of node observability and coverage utility score and design a new context-aware approximation algorithm to find vertex cover that is tailored for crowd-sensing task. In addition, we design human-centric bootstrapping strategies to make initial assignment of sensing devices based on meta information about the participants (e.g., interests, friendship). The motivation is to assign the sensing task to a more "socialized" device to obtain better sensing coverage. We perform comprehensive experiments on real-world data traces obtained from previous experimental studies in conference and academic social context. The results show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the baseline approximation algorithms in terms of sensing coverage.
The emotional appeal of violent video games for adolescent males

This article proposes a theoretical explanation for the popularity of violent video games among adolescent male gamers. The author uses theories about media and emotion as well as theories about emotion as a process to develop a model for the unfolding of emotion in violent video games. It is argued that violent video games provide a gratifying context for the experience of emotions. The fact that gamers are largely in control of the game implies that they can voluntarily select the emotional situations they confront. This freedom is attractive for adolescents who are in the midst of constructing an identity. For them, the violent game is a safe, private laboratory where they can experience different emotions, including those that arc controversial in ordinary life. Gamers may deliberately select emotions that sustain dominant masculine identity (e.g., anger), as well as emotions that are at odds with dominant masculinity (e.g., fear).
Oxygen Absorption in Cooling Flows

The inhomogeneous cooling flow scenario predicts the existence of large quantities of gas in massive elliptical galaxies, groups, and clusters that have cooled and dropped out of the flow. Using spatially resolved, deprojected X-ray spectra from the ROSAT PSPC, we have detected strong absorption over energies ~0.4-0.8 keV intrinsic to the central ~1' of the galaxy NGC 1399, the group NGC 5044, and the cluster A1795. These systems have among the largest nearby cooling flows in their respective classes and low Galactic columns. Since no excess absorption is indicated for energies below ~0.4 keV, the most reasonable model for the absorber is warm, collisionally ionized gas with T = 105-106 K in which ionized states of oxygen provide most of the absorption. Attributing the absorption only to ionized gas reconciles the large columns of cold H and He inferred from Einstein and ASCA with the lack of such columns inferred from ROSAT and also is consistent with the negligible atomic and molecular H inferred from H I and CO observations of cooling flows. The prediction of warm ionized gas as the product of mass dropout in these and other cooling flows can be verified by Chandra and X-Ray Multimirror Mission.
Object–verb and verb–object in Basque and Spanish monolinguals and bilinguals

The aim of this article is to analyse the acquisition of object–verb/verb–object word order in Spanish and Basque by monolinguals (L1), early simultaneous bilinguals (2L1) and successive bilinguals, exposed to their second language before ages 5–6 (child L2). In this study, the second language (child L2) is acquired naturalistically, in a preschool setting with no formal instruction for the Basque L2 speakers and by environmental contact for the Spanish L2 speakers. Spanish and Basque are differentiated by their canonical word order as subject–verb–object and subject–object–verb, respectively. In Spanish, the subject–verb–object order is predominant (almost exclusive) in narrative contexts, whereas in Basque, both object–verb and verb–object word orders are possible in these contexts for pragmatic reasons, with a similar use in everyday language. The productions of a few L1 and 2L1 subjects are analysed longitudinally within the 1;06–3;00 age span. Cross-sectional data from 49 subjects who developed a child L2 are analysed at ages 5 and 8. The results reveal that the bilingual children apply the same syntactic patterns as the monolinguals in their respective languages independently of 2L1 or child L2 acquisition.
Constructing a Fault(y) Zone: Misrepresentations of American Cities and Suburbs, 1900–1950

The way we think about the geography of American cities and suburbs in the first half of this century has, for several decades, been framed by the writings of Ernest W. Burgess, Homer Hoyt, Chauncy Harris, and Edward Ullman. Burgess's zonal model has been especially influential, gaining ascendancy in the postwar period. Contemporaries knew, and recent historical research has shown, that this model was faulty in several important respects. It gained influence as later scholars simplified its conception of the suburban commuter fringe, at first to a contrast between industrial and residential suburbs and then to the singular myth of the middle-class enclave. Suburban affluence came to be contrasted with inner-city poverty. This revised zonal model implied the existence of a political, social, and economic fault zone between city and suburbs and differed markedly from that which Burgess had developed. It gained influence even over historical research because it was associated with the influential Chicag.
Plasmacytoid DC promote priming of autoimmune Th17 cells and EAE

EAE, an animal model for MS, is a Th17 and Th1‐cell‐mediated autoimmune disease, but the mechanisms leading to priming of encephalitogenic T cells in autoimmune neuroinflammation are poorly understood. To investigate the role of plasmacytoid DC (pDC) in the initiation of autoimmune Th17‐ and Th1‐cell responses and EAE, we depleted pDC with anti‐pDC Ag‐1 (anti‐PDCA1) mAb prior to immunization of C57BL/6 mice with myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG). pDC‐depleted mice developed less severe clinical and histopathological signs of EAE than control mice, which demonstrates a promoting role for pDC in the initiation of EAE. The levels of type I IFN were much lower in the sera from anti‐PDCA1‐treated mice. However, neutralization of type I IFN ameliorated the early phase of EAE but did not alter the severity of disease. Thus, only a minor part of the EAE‐promoting effect of pDC appears to be mediated by IFN‐α/β secretion. The numbers of MOG‐specific Th17 cells, but not Th1 cells, were lower in spleen from anti‐PDCA1‐treated mice compared with controls. In contrast, pDC depletion a week after MOG immunization resulted in more severe clinical signs of EAE. In conclusion, we demonstrate that pDC promote initiation of MOG‐induced Th17‐cell responses and EAE.
Human Capital Theory: Foundations of a Field of Inquiry

This review of human capital theory begins in 1776 and ends in the 1960s, when the theoretical and empirical foundations of the field were articulated and established. The review is organized to provide a general reference to human capital theory, its historical development, and its major methodological approaches. While human capital research has not been limited to education, it usually includes empirical measures of education and produces results that affect educators and education policy. Review of the foundation studies that were conceived by Nobel prize laureates and historically prominent economists supports the position that educators should draw their own informed conclusions and define the agenda of future human capital research.
Circulação e consumo de telenovela: Passione num cenário multiplataforma

A proposta deste artigo é discutir a circulação e o âmbito do consumo da telenovela Passione, tendo como ponto de partida a esfera da recepção. Para tanto, empreendeu-se um estudo focado nas plataformas digitais Twitter, Orkut, Facebook e Blogs, ambientes nos quais os receptores repercutem a trama e fazem circular novos produtos referentes à novela. Os resultados nos permitem inferir que a forma de consumir e de ser receptor se modifica no atual contexto de convergência em que mídias e indivíduos estão inseridos
Outsourcing, financialisation and the crisis

This article argues that financialisation and outsourcing, neoliberal globalisation's two defining transformations, interact so powerfully that neither can be understood separately from the other. It further argues that the transformations in the sphere of production are primary, and that the global shift of production processes to low–wage countries was driven by the desire of northern TNCs to cut production costs in order to counter the falling rate of profit, resulting in a deepening of capitalism's imperialist and parasitic character. Understanding the relation between financialisation and outsourcing is key to understanding why the global crisis heralded by the 1987 stock market crash did not erupt for another two decades, why this crisis has its roots not in finance but in capitalist production, to understanding the form and dynamics of this crisis, and why it marks the beginning of a protracted global depression that cannot be resolved within capitalism.