Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Association of circulating adiponectin levels with progression of radiographic joint destruction in rheumatoid arthritis

Background Adipokines have inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties that may contribute to erosive joint damage. The association of serum adipokine levels with progression of radiographic joint damage in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) was prospectively explored. Methods Patients with RA underwent serum adipokine assessment (adiponectin, resistin, leptin) at three timepoints and hand/feet x-rays, scored using the Sharp-van der Heijde Score (SHS), at baseline and the third study visit, separated by an average of 39±4 months. The associations of baseline and average adipokine levels with change in SHS were explored, adjusting for pertinent confounders. Results Of the 152 patients studied, 85 (56%) showed an increase in SHS (defined as >0 SHS units). Among the adipokines studied, only adiponectin was significantly associated with radiographic progression, with average adiponectin levels more strongly associated than baseline levels. After adjusting for average C reactive protein and baseline SHS, patients in the highest quartile of average adiponectin had a SHS progression rate more than double the lowest quartile (1.00 vs 0.48 units/year; p=0.008). Similarly, those in the highest quartile of adiponectin had a more than fivefold greater odds of any radiographic progression compared with the lowest quartile (OR 5.75; p=0.002). The magnitude of the association of average adiponectin levels with radiographic progression was greater in women, those with body mass index <30 kg/m2 and those receiving baseline biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs. Conclusions These prospective data provide evidence of temporality and dose-response in the relationship between circulating adiponectin and erosive joint destruction in RA, and highlight subgroups of patients at highest risk for adiponectin-associated radiographic progression.
Innovation Management in the Postal Sector: What Are the Internal Factors Influencing Postal Operator’s Innovation Management?

Since the past decades, the postal sector is undergoing profound reform (liberalization). The major motivation for such reform processes was and still is the belief that liberalization and deregulation stimulates, among others, product and process innovations, both of which are important vehicles for productivity and economic growth. Against the background of such reform processes, postal operators need to increase their performance through innovation in order to gain competitive advantage and to ensure profitability and growth. Therefore, postal companies have to adapt their innovation management to the changing environment. Until today, there is little research on the adaption of postal operator’s innovation management. In this paper, we aim to describe the internal factors that influence postal operators’ innovation management. The goals of this article are 1) to illustrate the internal factors that are influencing an organization’s ability to manage innovation and 2) to analyze these factors for the particular setting of the postal industry.
Uncoupling the senescent phenotype from telomere shortening in hydrogen peroxide-treated fibroblasts.

Normal human cells have a limited replicative potential and inevitably reach replicative senescence in culture. Replicatively senescent cells show multiple molecular changes, some of which are related to the irreversible growth arrest in culture, whereas others resemble the changes occurring during the process of aging in vivo. Telomeres shorten as a result of cell replication and are thought to serve as a replicometer for senescence. Recent studies show that young cells can be induced to develop features of senescence prematurely by damaging agents, chromatin remodeling, and overexpression of ras or the E2F1 gene. Accelerated telomere shortening is thought to be a mechanism of premature senescence in some models. In this work, we test whether the acquisition of a senescent phenotype after mild-dose hydrogen peroxide (H(2)O(2)) exposure requires telomere shortening. Treating young HDFs with 150 microM H(2)O(2) once or 75 microM H(2)O(2) twice in 2 weeks causes long-term growth arrest, an enlarged morphology, activation of senescence-associated beta-galactosidase, and elevated expression of collagenase and clusterin mRNAs. No significant telomere shortening was observed with H(2)O(2) at doses ranging from 50 to 200 microM. Weekly treatment with 75 microM H(2)O(2) also failed to induce significant telomere shortening. Failure of telomere shortening correlated with an inability to elevate p16 protein or mRNA in H(2)O(2)-treated cells. In contrast, p21 mRNA was elevated over 40-fold and remained at this level for at least 2 weeks after a pulse treatment of H(2)O(2). The role of cell cycle checkpoints centered on p21 in premature senescence induced by H(2)O(2) is discussed here.
Macroenvironmental Analysis for Strategic Management: Stakeholders' View of Ghana's University Libraries

This article assesses some political, cultural, technological and international issues believed to affect strategic management in Ghanaian university libraries. The external environment of Ghana is perceived by some major stakeholders of the libraries to be highly uncertain. The macroenvironmental analysis of the strategic positions of the libraries is developed through the identification of opportunities and threats in the political and economic environments.
Measuring Emotions in the Consumption Experience

Although consumption-related emotions have been studied with increasing frequency in consumer behavior, issues concerning the appropriate way to measure these emotions remain unresolved This article reviews the emotion measures currently used in consumer research and the theories on which they are based; it concludes that the existing measures are unsuited for the purpose of measuring consumption-related emotions. The article describes six empirical studies that assess the domain of consumption-related emotions, that identify an appropriate set of consumption emotion descriptors (the CES), and that compare the usefulness of this descriptor set with the usefulness of other measures in assessing consumption-related emotions. Copyright 1997 by the University of Chicago.
Student Progress Modeling with Skills Deficiency Aware Kalman Filters

One new usage of Learning Analytics in Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) is sequencing based on performance prediction, which informs sequencers whether a student mastered or not a specific set of skills. Matrix Factorization (MF) performance prediction is particularly appealing because it does not require tagging involved skills in tasks. However, MFâs difficult interpretability does not allow to show the studentâs state evolution, i.e. his/her progress over time. In this paper we present a novel progress modeling technique integrating the most famous control theory state modeler, the Kalman Filter, and Matrix Factorization. Our method, the Skill Deficiency aware Kalman State Estimation for Matrix Factorization, (1) updates at each interaction the studentâs state outperforming the baseline both in prediction error and in computational requirements allowing faster online interactions; (2) models the individualized progress of the students over time that could be later used to develop novel sequencing policies. Our results are tested on data of a commercial ITS where other state of the art methods were not applicable.
Longitudinal reproductive hormone profiles in infants: peak of inhibin B levels in infant boys exceeds levels in adult men.

The gonads are usually considered quiescent organs in infancy and childhood. However, during the first few postnatal months of life, levels of gonadotropins and sex hormones are elevated in humans. Recent epidemiological evidence suggests that environmental factors operating perinatally may influence male reproductive health in adulthood. The early postnatal activity of the Sertoli cell, a testicular cell type that is supposed to play a major role in sperm production in adulthood is largely unknown. Recently, the peptide hormone inhibin B was shown to be a marker of Sertoli cell function in the adult male. In the adult woman, inhibin B is secreted by the granulosa cells. Longitudinal serum levels of inhibin B were measured in healthy boys (n = 15) and girls (n = 15), in cord blood, and every third month during the first 2 yr of life. In addition, serum levels of FSH, LH, and testosterone (boys) were measured in the same group of children. In boys, inhibin B, FSH, LH, and testosterone levels were all elevated at 3 months of age. However, the peak of inhibin B was unexpectedly high, into the supraadult range (mean +/- SE, 378 +/- 23 pg/mL) and persisted much longer than the elevation of FSH, LH, and testosterone. Thus, although levels of FSH, LH, and testosterone decreased into the range observed later in childhood by the age of 6-9 months, serum inhibin B levels remained elevated up to at least the age of 15 months. In girls, the hormonal pattern was generally more complex, with a high interindividual variation in levels of inhibin B, FSH, and LH within each age. In conclusion, the sustained elevation of inhibin B to supraadult levels in infant boys indicates that the neonatal period may be a developmental window important for Sertoli cell proliferation and maturation. Thus, the gonads may be potentially vulnerable to exogenous endocrine interference, e.g. from environmental factors during this period of life. Measurement of serum levels of inhibin B in infants may give clinical clues about developmental deficiencies in the gonads that otherwise only become apparent around puberty or later in life.
Hardware implementation of a robust watermarking technique for digital images

Development of digital watermarking technology has enabled the copyright protection and content authentication of digital multimedia data. Watermarking technique for digital images uses either spatial or frequency domain method. This paper describes a discrete cosine transform (DCT) based blind watermarking method for digital images and its hardware implementation using BeagleBoard. Experimental results show that the developed method is robust against various attacks and potentially compatible with JPEG compression.
The role of morphological data in phylogeny reconstruction.

Schwarz, G. 1978. Estimating the dimension of a model. Ann. Stat.6:461–465.Semple, C. , and M. Steel. 2003. Phylogenetics. Oxford University Press,Oxford.Sober, E. 1988. Reconstructing the past—Parsimony, evolution, and in-ference. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.Sober, E. 2002. Reconstructing ancestral character states—A like-lihood perspective on cladistic parsimony. The Monist 85:156–176.Steel, M. , and D. Penny. 2000. Parsimony, likelihood, and the roleof models in molecular phylogenetics. Mol. Biol. Evol. 17:839–850.
Using Context Inference to Improve Sentence Ordering for Multi-document Summarization

In this paper, we propose a novel context inference-based approach for sentences ordering in mult i-document summarization application. Our method first detects whether or not two summarizat ion sentences should be adjacent according to the similarity between one summarizat ion sentence and the context of the other one, and then it co mputes the reliability of the adjacent summarization sentences based on the similarity and their relative position. To be specific, the first sentence will be selected according to features of sentence, and the second sentence will be selected if and only if it has the maximu m reliability with previous sentence. Evaluation result shows that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art ones on DUC2004 corpus.
DNA Fragmentation in Chronic Glomerulonephritis: An Immunohistological Analysis

Background: Experimental data suggest that apoptosis plays an important pathophysiological role in glomerulonephritis by restoring tissue structure after proliferation of intrinsic renal cells and infiltration of leukocytes. Relatively little is known of apoptosis in human glomerulonephritis, particularly in predicting renal function during follow-up. Methods: In order to colocalize different markers for cell damage in renal tissue from patients with different forms of glomerulonephritis (GN), a series of semithin sections from 34 kidney biopsies were studied retrospectively. Normal kidney from a nephrectomy specimen with a small renal adenocarcinoma served as a control. DNA fragmentation, expression of tissue transglutaminase II, BAX and BCL-2 were visualized immunohistochemically. In some renal biopsies, immunohistochemical staining for activated caspase 3 was performed. Proinflammatory markers (C-reactive protein, leukocytes), serum creatinine, creatinine clearance, total proteinuria, albuminuria, α1-microglobulin and IgG excretion were determined at the time of biopsy. Serum creatinine and total proteinuria were assessed 6 and 12 months after renal biopsy. Results: Nuclei with different degrees of DNA fragmentation were mainly found in epithelial cells of tubules, but also in glomerular cells, regardless of the form of GN studied. Transglutaminase II expression was found only in cells with a strong staining for DNA fragmentation. DNA fragmentation localized to glomerular cells was more pronounced in proliferative than in non-proliferative forms of GN, being most abundant in patients with rapid progressive GN. Staining for activated caspase 3 in selected biopsies confirmed the presence of apoptosis. BAX and BCL-2 staining was detected within the same cells, but exhibited a different intracellular distribution. In proliferative GN, the extent of DNA damage in tubular epithelial cells significantly corresponds with the concentration of serum creatinine (p < 0.04) and with urinary excretion of α1-microglobulin (p < 0.01) at the time of biopsy. A significant correlation (p < 0.01) was seen between glomerular DNA fragmentation and follow-up total proteinuria 12 months after biopsy for proliferative forms of GN. The damaged glomerular area (e.g. mesangial sclerosis) significantly correlated with DNA fragmentation in proliferative, but not in nonproliferative GN at the time of biopsy. Furthermore, glomerular damaged showed a significant correlation with tubular DNA damage in proliferative GN. Conclusion: In glomerular cells, apoptosis may be important for the clearance of proliferating cells whereas in tubules, cell damage showed dependence on the degree of tubular injury mediated by inflammation and/or proteinuria. Although the degree of apoptosis in tubular cells correlates with serum creatinine in proliferative GN at the time of biopsy, it is of limited use to predict future renal function.
Architecture-oriented visualization

Tracking the changing dynamics of object-oriented frameworks[5], design patterns[7], architectural styles[8], and subsystems during the development and reuse cycle can aid producing complex systems. Unfortunately, current object-oriented programming tools are relatively oblivious to the rich architectural abstractions in a system.This paper shows that architecture-oriented visualization, the graphical presentation of system statics and dynamics in terms of its architectural abstractions, is highly beneficial in designing complex systems. In addition, the paper presents architecture-aware instrumentation, a new technique for building efficient on-line instrumentation to support architectural queries. We demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the scheme with case studies in the design of the Choices object-oriented operating system.
Critical transformations: Macrostructures, religion, and critique

Can critical research on religion offer both an ideology critique and a critical retrieval of religious import? This article suggests that it can, offering a programmatic sketch for a full-fledged critique of religion—a critique both aimed at religion and inspired by religion in a self-critical fashion. The sketch weds elements of a robustly normative critique of Western society with insights derived from the Frankfurt School. First the article maps three societal macrostructures that organize much of contemporary social life—civil society, proprietary economy, and administrative state. Then it discusses solidarity, resourcefulness, and justice as societal principles that can sustain a critique of societal macrostructures. Next it identifies normative deficiencies within and between these macrostructures. On the basis of this architectonic critique, the article then provides an account of religion in its critical and utopian roles. It concludes by envisioning a normative and emancipatory transformation of society as a whole.
The potential of effector-target genes in breeding for plant innate immunity

Increasing numbers of infectious crop diseases that are caused by fungi and oomycetes urge the need to develop alternative strategies for resistance breeding. As an alternative for the use of resistance (R) genes, the application of mutant susceptibility (S) genes has been proposed as a potentially more durable type of resistance. Identification of S genes is hampered by their recessive nature. Here we explore the use of pathogen‐derived effectors as molecular probes to identify S genes. Effectors manipulate specific host processes thereby contributing to disease. Effector targets might therefore represent S genes. Indeed, the Pseudomonas syringae effector HopZ2 was found to target MLO2, an Arabidopsis thaliana homologue of the barley S gene Mlo. Unfortunately, most effector targets identified so far are not applicable as S genes due to detrimental effects they have on other traits. However, some effector targets such as Mlo are successfully used, and with the increase in numbers of effector targets being identified, the numbers of S genes that can be used in resistance breeding will rise as well.
Accidental News: The Great Oil Spill as Local Occurrence and National Event

Beginning with the assumption that news is constituted through purpopse at hand, we examine the coverage given the Santa Barbara oil spill by a national sample of newspapers, determining the types of news subjects and news activities which become national events. It is found that federal officials and business spokesmen have greater access to news media than conservationists and local officials. It is found that symbolic topics and not topics with implications for distribution of wealth receive preponderant coverage. Implications of current methods of news gathering for the maintenance of ideological domination are discussed.
MOOC's business models: turning black swans into gray swans

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are black swans. A black swan is an unexpected event that emerges from reality and alters the reality itself. MOOCs have affected supply and demand in higher education. MOOCs distribute knowledge, classes on many areas of expertise for free. Millions of users, from all over the world are enrolling MOOCs courses. Universities are sharing resources and knowledge in the Internet no matter who or why. This paradigm shift has an impact on people's life. So, how can universities survive if they are giving knowledge for free? This paper presents a literature review on MOOCs. We also modulate this reality to minimize the jeopardy and maximize the good opportunities that MOOCs bring.
[Angiogenesis and hematological malignancies].

BACKGROUND It is fairly well documented that the growth and metastasis of solid tumours is accompanied by increased formation of new blood vessels emanating from a pre-existing vascular bed. Recent findings suggest that angiogenesis also takes place in haematological malignancies. These findings suggest that angiogenesis might be a potential target for therapy. MATERIALS AND METHODS A short review is presented on the basis of literature identified on PubMed and Medline as well as our own data. RESULTS When surrogate markers are used, such as the plasma concentration of angiogenic growth factors or the density of blood vessels within the bone marrow, angiogenesis is associated with poor prognosis and treatment outcome in haematopoietic malignancy. While human treatment data are scarce, findings in animal experiments suggest that anti-angiogenesis might retard leukemogenesis. INTERPRETATION The proliferation and dissemination of malignant blood cells seems to be related to increased angiogenesis in the bone marrow. Targeting components of the angiogenic process might offer adjunct treatment modalities in haematopoietic malignancy.
Using the K Nearest Neighbor Method and BM25 in the Patent Document Categorization Subtask at NTCIR-5

Patent processing is extremely important for industry, business, and law. We participated in the F-term categorization subtask at NTCIR-5, in which, we classified patent documents into their F-terms using the k-nearest neighbor method. For document classification, F-term categories are both very precise and useful. We entered five systems in the F-term categorization subtask. They obtained the best f-measures of all 18 participating systems. This confirmed the effectiveness of our method. After the contest, we performed the experiments again during the theme categorization subtask, even though we did not officially enter. The results showed that our system obtained higher f-measures than the highest obtained by the other systems performing the subtask. This also confirmed the effectiveness of our method.
Plasma Endothelin Determination as a Prognostic Indicator of 1-Year Mortalit After Acute Myocardial Infarction

Background Plasma endothelin concentrations are in- creased in the acute phase of myocardial infarction and in chronic heart failure. Since endothelin may contribute to hemodynamic deterioration by potent vasoconstrictory and cardiotoxic actions, increased plasma levels may be associated with an unfavorable prognosis after myocardial infarction. Methods and Results We tested the hypothesis that plasma endothelin determination in the subacute phase of myocardial infarction is related to subsequent survival and assessed whether plasma endothelin measurements provide additional prognostic information to that obtained from clinical and biochemical variables previously known to be associated with high mortality. Plasma endothelin determination was obtained from 142 patients (average age +SD, 67.8+±10.1 years) on day 3 after documented myocardial infarction and was related to 1-year mortality. Sixteen patients died during the follow-up period. In a univariate Cox proportional-hazards model, day 3 plasma endothelin concentrations were significantly related to mortality (P<.0001). Patient age, previous treatment for systemic hypertension, presence of clinical heart failure, and plasma atrial natriuretic factor levels were all related to mortality in univariate analysis but provided no additional prognostic information to that obtained from endothelin determination in a multivariate model. Conclusions Plasma endothelin concentrations are strongly related to outcome after myocardial infarction and provide prognostic information independent of clinical and biochemical variables previously associated with a poor prognosis. (Circulation. 1994;89:1573-1579.)