Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Risk of major adverse cardiac events following noncardiac surgery in patients with coronary stents.

IMPORTANCE Guidelines recommend delaying noncardiac surgery in patients after coronary stent procedures for 1 year after drug-eluting stents (DES) and for 6 weeks after bare metal stents (BMS). The evidence underlying these recommendations is limited and conflicting. OBJECTIVE To determine risk factors for adverse cardiac events in patients undergoing noncardiac surgery following coronary stent implantation. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A national, retrospective cohort study of 41,989 Veterans Affairs (VA) and non-VA operations occurring in the 24 months after a coronary stent implantation between 2000 and 2010. Nonlinear generalized additive models examined the association between timing of surgery and stent type with major adverse cardiac events (MACE) adjusting for patient, surgery, and cardiac risk factors. A nested case-control study assessed the association between perioperative antiplatelet cessation and MACE. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES A composite 30-day MACE rate of all-cause mortality, myocardial infarction, and cardiac revascularization. RESULTS Within 24 months of 124,844 coronary stent implantations (47.6% DES, 52.4% BMS), 28,029 patients (22.5%; 95% CI, 22.2%-22.7%) underwent noncardiac operations resulting in 1980 MACE (4.7%; 95% CI, 4.5%-4.9%). Time between stent and surgery was associated with MACE (<6 weeks, 11.6%; 6 weeks to <6 months, 6.4%; 6-12 months, 4.2%; >12-24 months, 3.5%; P < .001). MACE rate by stent type was 5.1% for BMS and 4.3% for DES (P < .001). After adjustment, the 3 factors most strongly associated with MACE were nonelective surgical admission (adjusted odds ratio [AOR], 4.77; 95% CI, 4.07-5.59), history of myocardial infarction in the 6 months preceding surgery (AOR, 2.63; 95% CI, 2.32-2.98), and revised cardiac risk index greater than 2 (AOR, 2.13; 95% CI, 1.85-2.44). Of the 12 variables in the model, timing of surgery ranked fifth in explanatory importance measured by partial effects analysis. Stent type ranked last, and DES was not significantly associated with MACE (AOR, 0.91; 95% CI, 0.83-1.01). After both BMS and DES placement, the risk of MACE was stable at 6 months. A case-control analysis of 284 matched pairs found no association between antiplatelet cessation and MACE (OR, 0.86; 95% CI, 0.57-1.29). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE Among patients undergoing noncardiac surgery within 2 years of coronary stent placement, MACE were associated with emergency surgery and advanced cardiac disease but not stent type or timing of surgery beyond 6 months after stent implantation. Guideline emphasis on stent type and surgical timing for both DES and BMS should be reevaluated.
One Hundred Years of Labor Control: Violence, Militancy, and the Fairtrade Banana Commodity Chain in Colombia

This paper explores the role of Fairtrade certification in mediating banana production relations in Urabá, Colombia. While the country has long been incorporated into the world banana economy, the region's fraught history of dispossession, exploitation, and resistance make it a useful site through which to consider its more recent articulation into the Fairtrade banana commodity chain. In some respects, the emergence of Fairtrade in Urabá could be framed as a win–win. Banana growers have enrolled in certified commodity chains as a way to add value, stabilize their position in a volatile global market, and bring additional resources to workers. However, Fairtrade's role in reframing Urabá as a site of ethical banana production has been contingent upon multiple forms of marginalization and devaluation, expressed in their most extreme form through an armed conflict that swept the region during the last two decades of the 20th century. Fieldwork conducted with banana workers and growers in Urabá suggests that Fairtrade programs resonate with the local industry's longer term strategy to promote voluntarism as the appropriate mechanism for alleviating poverty and inequality. In addition, by creating disparities in the material resources and structures of negotiation available to banana workers, Fairtrade has produced new uneven geographies within the regional banana production complex. These developments are particularly problematic given their potential to undermine labor solidarity in the face of an erosion of labor standards in the global banana economy and the reassertion of elite control in the region.
Itô–Volterra Optimal State Estimation With Continuous, Multirate, Randomly Sampled, and Delayed Measurements

The optimal filter for continuous, linear, stochastic, time-varying systems described by the Itocirc-Volterra equations with discontinuous measure is derived. With an appropriately selected measure, the result is applicable to a wide range of observation processes, including the hybrid case of observations formed by an arbitrary combination of continuous and discrete measurements, which may be sampled with a priori unknown, changing, and, possibly, random rates and delays. The simultaneous presence of continuous and sampled measurements causes impulsive discontinuity in the inputs of the optimal filter equations, which leads to a discontinuous change in state estimates every time a sampled measurement becomes available. Using the theory of vibrosolutions, the explicit and unique expressions for the jumps in state estimates and estimation error covariance are derived. Several examples illustrate the procedure of modeling hybrid measurement systems by selecting an appropriate discontinuous measure. We further show that the Itocirc-Volterra model and the main result of the paper can be specialized to several important cases, including state space systems, for which we recover several known state estimation results, and derive a novel optimal filter for continuous LTV systems with an arbitrary combination of continuous and delayed sampled measurements. This optimal filter updates the state estimates for incoming measurements as soon as they become available and does not require prior knowledge of sampling instants and delays, which makes it applicable when deterministic and random changes in sampling and delays are present. Several computational examples demonstrate the implementation of the developed filter and compare its performance to the traditional alternatives using Monte-Carlo simulations
The Objectivization of Medical Diagnosis : The Use of Machine Learning Techniques in Magnetic Resonance Imaging

A growing body of magnetic resonance imaging research focuses on the development of machine learning techniques for the diagnosis of neurological and psychiatric disorders. Workers in this field trumpet machine learning techniques, a set of algorithms that enable the automated classification of data into classes, as the means to make diagnostics an objective science. By delegating the task of diagnosis – the classification of persons as healthy or diseased – to the automated machine, it is believed that the dubious traces of human subjectivity can be eradicated from diagnosis, thereby ensuring the purity of the disease’s truth. In this thesis, I examine the machine learning technologies and conduct a discourse analysis on scientific literature to interrogate the beliefs surrounding these techniques. My work reveals that, despite claims of objectivity, the machine learning algorithm is never completely separated from the human: Machines are complex fusions of humans and nonhumans that work together to generate the truth of a disorder. This hybridity is obscured, however, by the researchers, whose discourse produces an ontological difference and hierarchy in constitution and functioning between humans and machines. Distinguishing the machine from the human, and translating the human production of knowledge into a machine task, is a rhetorical practice that authorizes the truth of disease. Locating the traces of the human and destabilizing the purity of the machine as object is a necessary first step to subjecting these discourses of power to critique.
Numerical Prediction of Rhombic Rotational Magnetization Patterns in a Transformer Core Package

Evaluations of local induction time patterns B(t) in transformer cores show high relevance for both losses and magnetostriction. This paper presents numerical calculations for a three-phase core package stacked from grain-oriented SiFe for BNOM = 1.7 T. Modeling is based on a novel multi-directionally non-linear magnetic equivalence circuit calculation (MACC). It considers non-linear permeability functions in rolling direction, transverse direction (TD), and diagonal direction in overlaps. MACC yields instantaneous local values B, and the corresponding reluctances and permeabilities as a basis for conclusions. Snapshots of induction distributions for important time instants of zero or maximum limb induction reveal dominant roles of anisotropy and multi-directional non-linearity. Small changes of permeability in the TD yield distinct changes of rotational magnetization (RM) and circulating magnetization. Local dynamic magnetization patterns B(t) are calculated considering 180 instants of time, for sufficient resolution of dynamics. The results confirm the formation of RM patterns of oblique rhombic (or lozenge) shape, in contrast to elliptic patterns as frequently assumed. They also confirm that the induction vector B rotates with maximum angular velocity when passing through the TD.
HARD X-RAY TAILS AND CYCLOTRON FEATURES IN X-RAY PULSARS

We review the physical processes occurring in the magnetosphere of accreting X-ray pulsars, with emphasis on those processes that give rise to observable effects in their high (E>10 keV) energy spectra. In the second part we compare the empirical spectral laws used to fit the observed spectra with theoretical models, at the light of the BeppoSAX results on the broad-band characterization of the X-ray pulsar continuum, and the discovery of new (multiple) cyclotron resonance features.
Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 protease inhibitors irreversibly block infectivity of purified virions from chronically infected cells

Synthetic peptide analog inhibitors of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) protease were used to study the effects of inhibition of polyprotein processing on the assembly, structure, and infectivity of virions released from a T-cell line chronically infected with HIV-1. Inhibition of proteolytic processing of both Pr55gag and Pr160gag-pol was observed in purified virions from infected T cells after treatment. Protease inhibition was evident by the accumulation of precursors and processing intermediates of Pr55gag and by corresponding decreases in mature protein products. Electron microscopy revealed that the majority of the virion particles released from inhibitor-treated cells after a 24-h treatment had an immature or aberrant capsid morphology. This morphological change correlated with the inhibition of polyprotein processing and a loss of infectivity. The infectivity of virion particles purified from these chronically infected cell cultures was assessed following treatment with the inhibitor for 1 to 3 days. Virions purified from cultures treated with inhibitor for 1 or 2 days demonstrated a 95- to 100-fold reduction in virus titers, and treatment for 3 days resulted in complete loss of detectable infectivity. The fact that virions from treated cultures were unable to establish infection over the 7- to 10-day incubation period in the titration experiments strongly suggests that particles produced by inhibitor-treated cells were unable to reactivate to an infectious form when they were purified away from exogenous protease inhibitor. Thus, a block of HIV-1 protease processing of viral polyproteins by specific inhibitors results in a potent antiviral effect characterized by the production of noninfectious virions with altered protein structures and immature morphologies.
The two-loop hemisphere soft function

The hemisphere soft function is calculated to order alpha_s^2. This is the first multi-scale soft function calculated to two loops. The renormalization scale dependence of the result agrees exactly with the prediction from effective field theory. This fixes the unknown coefficients of the singular parts of the two-loop thrust and heavy-jet mass distributions. There are four such coefficients, for 2 event shapes and 2 color structures, which are shown to be in excellent agreement with previous numerical extraction. The asymptotic behavior of the soft function has double logs in the CF CA color structure, which agree with non-global log calculations, but also has sub-leading single logs for both the CF CA and CF TF nf color structures. The general form of the soft function is complicated, does not factorize in a simple way, and disagrees with the Hoang-Kluth ansatz. The exact hemisphere soft function will remove one source of uncertainty on the alpha_s fits from e+e- event shapes.
Monocyte-derived cultured dendritic cells are susceptible to human immunodeficiency virus infection and transmit virus to resting T cells in the process of nominal antigen presentation

The susceptibility of monocyte-derived cultured dendritic cells (DCs) to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection and their role in viral transmission in the immune response were studied in detail. We observed that highly purified cultured DCs were infected with the T-tropic Lai strain of HIV type 1 (HIV-1Lai) via the CD4 receptor, and this was followed by formation of the complete provirus as detected by PCR. HIV mRNAs were transcribed at only low levels, and virus production was undectable; however, the addition of the purified protein derivative antigen of tuberculin and of autologous resting T cells to HIV-1Lai-infected DCs but not to HIV-1Lai-infected macrophages led to massive HIV transmission and production. These data suggest that the interaction of infected DCs with T cells during the normal immune response could play an important role in the activation and expansion of HIV.
Beauty is More Than Skin Deep: Components of Attractiveness

This study examined the complex interrelationships among various static and dynamic components of physical attractiveness and their contributions to overall ratings of attractiveness and to the favorability of initial impressions. Two separate groups of undergraduate students completed a self-report measure of social and communication skills and were videotaped and photographed during initial encounters in a laboratory setting. The videotape segment or photographs were then shown to independent groups of judges who made multiple ratings of subjects' physical attractiveness, initial likability, and attractiveness as a dating partner. A series of structural equation models were fitted to the data. The model that provided the best fit to the data indicated that facial beauty and dynamic components of attractiveness were the most important contributors to overall evaluations of attractiveness, and that overall attractiveness in turn affected the positivity of initial impressions and desirability as a potentia.
E Protein Domain III Determinants of Yellow Fever Virus 17D Vaccine Strain Enhance Binding to Glycosaminoglycans, Impede Virus Spread, and Attenuate Virulence

ABSTRACT The yellow fever virus (YFV) 17D strain is one of the most effective live vaccines for human use, but the in vivo mechanisms for virulence attenuation of the vaccine and the corresponding molecular determinants remain elusive. The vaccine differs phenotypically from wild-type YFV by the loss of viscerotropism, despite replicative fitness in cell culture, and genetically by 20 amino acid changes predominantly located in the envelope (E) protein. We show that three residues in E protein domain III inhibit spread of 17D in extraneural tissues and attenuate virulence in type I/II interferon-deficient mice. One of these residues (Arg380) is a dominant glycosaminoglycan-binding determinant, which mainly accounts for more rapid in vivo clearance of 17D from the bloodstream in comparison to 17D-derived variants with wild-type-like E protein. While other mutations will account for loss of neurotropism and phenotypic stability, the described impact of E protein domain III changes on virus dissemination and virulence is the first rational explanation for the safety of the 17D vaccine in humans.
Job Satisfaction of University Woman Teachers in Bangladesh

This study examines the relationships between job satisfaction, individual job facets, and socio-demographic variables in the public universities in Bangladesh. The research was conducted through mail survey. The sample consists of 500 teachers from two large universities in Bangladesh. Among the 500 questionnaires, 21 were returned, of the remaining 479 questionnaires, 232 usable responses were received, for a final response rate of 46.6%. This study identified whether female university teachers are satisfied or not compare to their counterpart. The results of Mann-Whitney U test also indicate that female are more satisfied than their counterpart. One major finding is that female employees were found to be more satisfied with promotion, fringe benefits and support of teaching but less satisfied with interpersonal relation with colleagues. The results also indicated that job satisfaction is not independent in all facets and that satisfaction with one facet might lead to satisfaction with another.
An Unsupervised Approach to Predict Functional Relations between Genes Based on Expression Data

This work presents a novel approach to predict functional relations between genes using gene expression data. Genes may have various types of relations between them, for example, regulatory relations, or they may be concerned with the same protein complex or metabolic/signaling pathways and obviously gene expression data should contain some clues to such relations. The present approach first digitizes the log-ratio type gene expression data of S. cerevisiae to a matrix consisting of 1, 0, and −1 indicating highly expressed, no major change, and highly suppressed conditions for genes, respectively. For each gene pair, a probability density mass function table is constructed indicating nine joint probabilities. Then gene pairs were selected based on linear and probabilistic relation between their profiles indicated by the sum of probability density masses in selected points. The selected gene pairs share many Gene Ontology terms. Furthermore a network is constructed by selecting a large number of gene pairs based on FDR analysis and the clustering of the network generates many modules rich with similar function genes. Also, the promoters of the gene sets in many modules are rich with binding sites of known transcription factors indicating the effectiveness of the proposed approach in predicting regulatory relations.
Alzheimer’s Caregiver Differences in Experience of Loss, Grief Reactions and Depressive Symptoms Across Stage of Disease

The self-reported losses, grief reactions, and depressive symptoms experienced by caregivers in the early, middle, and late stages of dementia were assessed using open-ended descriptive questions and scaled measures including the Meuser-Marwit Caregiver Grief Inventory (MM-CGI; Marwit & Meuser, 2002). Ninety-nine caregivers associated with an urban Alzheimer’s Association chapter were surveyed by post. While there were moderate levels of grief and depression reported across the entire sample, those caring for individuals in the late stage of dementia reported significantly more symptoms of grief and depression than those in the early or middle stages. Responses to open-ended questions regarding losses and grief also differed across the groups in the three disease stages. The late-stage group’s comments most resembled bereavement, in keeping with the higher grief and depression scores among members of this group. Findings suggest there are different emotional tasks faced by caregivers as the dementia progresses, and it is important to acknowledge the particular losses and facilitate grieving at each stage.
An Intelligent Tutoring approach to support students and technicians in electrical installation design

Designing electric installation projects, demands not only academic knowledge, but also other types of knowledge not easily acquired through traditional instructional methodologies. A lot of additional empirical knowledge is missing and so the academic instruction must be completed with different kinds of knowledge, such as real-life practical examples and simulations. On the other hand, the practical knowledge detained by the most experienced designers is not formalized in such a way that is easily transmitted. In order to overcome these difficulties present in the engineers formation, we are developing an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS), for training and support concerning the development of electrical installation projects to be used by electrical engineers, technicians and students.
On test program compaction

While compaction of binary test sequences for generic sequential circuits has been widely explored, the compaction of test programs for processor-based systems is still an open area of research. Test program compaction is practically important because there are several scenarios in which Software-based Self-Test (SBST) is adopted, and the size of the test program is often a critical parameter. This paper is among the first to propose algorithms able to automatically compact an existing test program. The proposed solution is based on instruction removal and restoration, which is shown to significantly reduce the computational cost compared with instruction removal alone. Experimental results are reported, showing the compaction capabilities and computational costs of the proposed algorithms.
A programmable system for artistic volumetric lighting

We present a method for generating art-directable volumetric effects, ranging from physically-accurate to non-physical results. Our system mimics the way experienced artists think about volumetric effects by using an intuitive lighting primitive, and decoupling the modeling and shading of this primitive. To accomplish this, we generalize the physically-based photon beams method to allow arbitrarily programmable simulation and shading phases. This provides an intuitive design space for artists to rapidly explore a wide range of physically-based as well as plausible, but exaggerated, volumetric effects. We integrate our approach into a real-world production pipeline and couple our volumetric effects to surface shading.
Urban Regeneration's Poisoned Chalice: Is There an Impasse in (Community) Participation-based Policy?

The meteoric rise of 'participation' in urban policy is premised upon the supposed benefits it brings in terms of added project 'efficiency', 'sustainability' and even 'empowerment' of participants. Yet, even as participation appears to reach its very zenith, it comes under heightened criticism from a growing chorus of observers. Some critics have suggested, for example, that 'participation', and contemporary urban regeneration's preferred institutional vehicle for it, 'partnership', can have a capacity for tyrannical decision-making. The article draws upon a diverse range of literature, including the rich experience of almost 20 years of 'participation' in the 'developing world', as well as the findings of a research project looking at a major regeneration programme on Merseyside, in order to highlight the multifaceted problems of—and possibilities for-participation. Ultimately, whether participation can alter social stratification within communities is unclear, it may even (re)produce inequalities. The difficulties should not mean that the participatory project is jettisoned. Rather, the article is a call for a research and policy debate characterised by a greater degree of honesty and maturity concerning participation.