Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biochemical Markers of Atherosclerosis

Biochemical Markers of Atherosclerosis This paper is a brief review of some lipid parameters and serum markers of inflammation in a view of their predictive relevance for the atherosclerotic disease. A discourse on the importance of measuring different lipids and lipoproteins, concentration of LDL particles and apolipoprotein levels is still underway. Also, the recommendations for apolipoprotein (a), phenotypization and other lipid markers have not yet been established. In recent years the recommendations imply simultaneous measuring of multiple markers and calculating the lipid index values such as lipid tetrad index (LTI), lipid pentad index (LPI) and atherogenic index of plasma (AIP). Several circulating markers of inflammation such as C-reactive protein, serum fibrinogen and elevated leukocyte number, are consistently associated with atherosclerosis. In spite of a lack of evidence on measuring the C-reactive protein in a wide population, the guidelines for its application in diagnostics and therapy of coronary heart disease were developed. Some proinflammatory cytokines, adhesion molecules and markers of leukocyte activation are promising markers, requiring, however, more detailed prospective evaluation. The question to be elucidated is if these inflammatory markers are directly involved in the pathogenic process. Biohemijski Markeri Ateroskleroze U ovom radu razmatrani su samo neki lipidni parametri i serumski markeri inflamacije u pogledu njihove prediktivne povezanosti s aterosklerotskom bolešću. Nastavlja se debata o značaju merenja različitih lipida i lipoproteina, uključujući koncentraciju LDL čestica i nivoe apolipoproteina. Takođe, nisu uspostavljene preporuke za apolipoprotein (a) fenotipizaciju i druge lipidne markere. Poslednjih godina preporučuje se simultano merenje nekoliko markera i izračunavanje lipidnih indeksa kao što su lipid tetrada index (LTI), lipid pentada index (LPI) i aterogeni indeks plazme (AIP). Nekoliko cirkulišućih markera inflamacije, npr. C-reaktivni protein, serumski fibrinogen i povišenje broja leukocita, dosledno su udruženi s aterosklerozom. Iako nema dokaza za korisnost merenja Creaktivnog proteina u široj zajednici, formirane su preporuke za njegovu upotrebu u dijagnostici i lečenju koronarne bolesti srca. Neki proinflamatorni citokini, adhezioni molekuli i markeri leukocitne aktivacije su obećavajući markeri, ali zaslužuju dalja prospektivna ispitivanja. Pitanje koje zahteva odgovor je i da li su ti inflamatorni markeri direktno uključeni u patogeni proces.
Behavioral Finance, Decumulation, and the Regulatory Strategy for Robo-Advice

This chapter examines the regulatory and market structure concerns raised by automated financial advisors, and arrives at two conclusions. First, the principles-based regulatory approach of the 1940 Investment Advisors Act in the U.S. appears adequate and sufficiently flexible to address the new issues raised by automation, at least for now. Second, there is a pressing need to develop new mechanisms for encouraging investment robo-advisors (and financial advisors generally) to provide high quality decumulation services to their customers, because neither of the two prevailing compensation approaches—assets under management and commissions—provides sufficient incentive at present, and consumers are poorly equipped to evaluate the quality of decumulation services on their own.
A Novel High Dimensional and High Speed Data Streams Algorithm: HSDStream

This paper presents a novel high speed clustering scheme for high-dimensional data stream. Data stream clustering has gained importance in different applications, for example, network monitoring, intrusion detection, and real-time sensing. High dimensional stream data is inherently more complex when used for clustering because the evolving nature of the stream data and high dimensionality make it non-trivial. In order to tackle this problem, projected subspace within the high dimensions and limited window sized data per unit of time are used for clustering purpose. We propose a High Speed and Dimensions data stream clustering scheme (HSDStream) which employs exponential mov-ing averages to reduce the size of the memory and speed up the processing of projected subspace data stream. It works in three steps: i) initialization, ii) real-time maintenance of core and outlier micro-clusters, and iii) on-demand offline generation of the final clusters. The proposed algorithm is tested against high dimensional density-based projected clustering (HDDStream) for cluster purity, memory usage, and the cluster sensitivity. Experi-mental results are obtained for corrected KDD intrusion detection dataset. These results show that HSDStream outperforms the HDDStream in all performance metrics, especially, the memory usage and the processing speed.
GIVING-- UP-- SPIRIT : COPING STYLE IN JAPAN by Chiya Ikemi

The purpose of this study is to gain a clearer understanding of the Japanese coping style of "giving-up-spirit" (akirame no seishin) and the tendency of Japanese living in the United States to relinquish this style as a result of longevity in and acculturation to the United states. It was hypothesized that the longer Japanese reside in the United States, the more acculturated they become (i.e. the higher they score on the SL-ASIA Scale); the longer Japanese reside in the United States, the less they use the Japanese coping style of "giving-up-spirit" (i.e. the less externally directed they score on Rotter's Locus of Control scale); and the more acculturated Japanese become, the more internally directed they score on the Rotter's Locus of Control Scale. A positive correlation was found between longevity and acculturation level: r = . 34, p < . 05. A negative correlation was found between longevity and external locus of control: r = -. 21, p < . 05. The results confirmed two of the hypotheses: the longer Japanese have resided in the United States, the more acculturated they have become; and the longer Japanese have resided in the United States, the less externally controlled they have become. These findings are consistent with previous studies of Japanese that have concluded that increased exposure to Western culture leads to higher internality of locus of control. Future study should be concerned with visa status as well as age at time of migration when investigating changes in acculturation level and locus of control as a function of longevity in the United States.
STUDIA EDUKACYJNE NR 23/2012

Lazuras Lambros, Pyżalski Jacek, Barkoukis Vassilis, Tsorbatzoudis Haralambos, Empathy and Moral Disengagement in Adolescent Cyberbullying: Implications for Educational Intervention and Pedagogical Practice [Empatia i rozhamowanie moralne jako predykatory cyberbullyingu: implikacje dla interwencyjnych i profi laktycznych działań edukacyjnych]. Studia Edukacyjne nr 23, 2012, Poznań 2012, pp. 57-69. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISBN 97883-232-2520-1. ISSN 1233-6688 Cyberbullying represents an emerging form of adolescent aggression that is channelled contemporary through information and communications technologies (ICTs). Research on the psychosocial correlates is still growing but the available evidence highlights the importance of moral disengagement and empathy in predicting cyberbullying behavior. Educators can benefi t from this research and accordingly develop curricula and employ practices that tap moral and empathic beliefs in young people, in order to curb the onset and prevalence of cyberbullying among students. The present article discusses the nature of cyberbullying, reviews the studies assessing the relationships between empathy, moral disengagement and cyberbullying in adolescents, and presents the implications for educational interventions and pedagogical practice.
Technological Aspects of Scalable Processes for the Production of Functional Liposomes for Gene Therapy

The success of gene delivery systems in in vivo or in vitro applications depends on efficient transfection. Cationic liposomes remain a promising alternative for nonviral DNA carriers, mainly because they protect DNA from interstitial fluids and easily interact with cells (Gregoriadis, 1993; Lasic, 1997). However, in order to be effective in the immunological response, cationic liposomes must be functional and reach their specific target. Stability, reduced toxicity, efficiency in delivering genes to cells, and specific targeting to the nucleus are essential requirements for prophylactic and/or therapeutic performance. In order to achieve these standards, important physico-chemical parameters in liposomes must be controlled, such as the functionality of the lipids, the concentration of the cationic lipid, DNA loading (reflected by the R+/molar charge ratio), the zeta potential, size, and polydispersity. Several laboratory experiments have already explored DNA vaccines using cationic lipids. A classical investigation of lipid functionality and composition, as well as the efficiency of cationic liposomes as DNA carriers, was performed by Perrie and colleagues (Perrie & Gregoriadis, 2000; Perrie et al., 2001). The plasmid pRc/CMV HBS encoding the S (small) region of hepatitis B surface antigen was encapsulated in dehydrated-hydrated liposomes composed of egg phosphatidylcholine (EPC, bilayer-forming lipid), 1,2-dioleoyl-3trimethylammonium-propane (DOTAP, cationic lipid), 1,2-dioleoyl-sn-glycero-3phosphoethanolamine (DOPE, helper lipid) in a 50:25:25 percent molar ratio. The authors demonstrated that the encapsulation process protects the DNA vaccine against incubation with sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) due to DNA incorporation inside the liposome lamella (Perrie & Gregoriadis, 2000), and a better immunological response was obtained with cationic liposomes compared to naked DNA. Concerning size and polydispersity, different authors have reported that nanoparticle size is an important parameter for transfection success (Ma et al., 2007; Ogris et al., 1998; Rejman et al., 2004; Ross & Hui, 1999; Wiewrodt et al., 2002). Indeed, most of the variability in transfection procedures is a consequence of non-viral gene delivery systems with high polydispersity index values. The polydispersity index is related to the width of the particle
Preliminary molecular phylogeny and biogeography of the monobasic subfamily Calinaginae (Lepidoptera, Nymphalidae)

Calinaga (Moore 1857) is a rare and enigmatic Asian butterfly genus whose phylogenetic placement within Nymphalidae has only recently been established. The evolutionary history of Calinaga species however remains unknown. Here we explore the phylogeography of Calinaga using 1310 bp of sequence data from two molecular (mtDNA barcode and ribosomal protein S5 nuclear gene) and two morphological traits (genitalia and wing pattern). Within the proposed phylogenetic framework, we estimate the ages of divergence within the genus and reconstruct their historical biogeography. We found strong support for monophyly of Calinaga and support for the most recent accepted species in the genus. Our results indicate that the common ancestor of Calinaga first split in the Eocene (~43 million years ago) in southern China, probably as a consequence of geological and environmental impacts of the collision of the Indian and Asian subcontinents. In the Oligocene/Miocene, the extrusion of Indochina from the continent caused further dramatic orogenetic changes that promoted isolation and speciation events within the genus while Pleistocene climatic changes also influenced the distribution and further speciation. A dispersal–vicariance analysis suggests that vicariance events have played a far more important role than dispersal in the distribution of extant species.
Stochastic Boolean Satis ability

Satis ability problems and probabilistic models are core topics of arti cial intelligence and computer science. This paper looks at the rich intersection between these two areas, opening the door for the use of satis ability approaches in probabilistic domains. The paper examines a generic stochastic satis ability problem, SSat, which can function for probabilistic domains as Sat does for deterministic domains. It shows the connection between SSat and well studied problems in belief network inference and planning under uncertainty, and de nes algorithms, both systematic and stochastic, for solving SSat instances. These algorithms are validated on random SSat formulae generated under the xed-clause model. In spite of the large complexity gap between SSat (PSPACE) and Sat (NP), the paper suggests that much of what we have learned about Sat transfers to the probabilistic domain.
Performance Evaluation of Neural Network Prediction for Data Prefetching in Embedded Applications

Embedded systems need to respect stringent real time constraints. Various hardware components included in such systems such as cache memories exhibit variability and therefore affect execution time. Indeed, a cache memory access from an embedded microprocessor might result in a cache hit where the data is available or a cache miss and the data need to be fetched with an additional delay from an external memory. It is therefore highly desirable to predict future memory accesses during execution in order to appropriately prefetch data without incurring delays. In this paper, we evaluate the potential of several artificial neural networks for the prediction of instruction memory addresses. Neural network have the potential to tackle the nonlinear behavior observed in memory accesses during program execution and their demonstrated numerous hardware implementation emphasize this choice over traditional forecasting techniques for their inclusion in embedded systems. However, embedded applications execute millions of instructions and therefore millions of addresses to be predicted. This very challenging problem of neural network based prediction of large time series is approached in this paper by evaluating various neural network architectures based on the recurrent neural network paradigm with pre-processing based on the Self Organizing Map (SOM) classification technique. Keywords—Address, data set, memory, prediction, recurrent
afety of Dobutamine Stress eal-Time Myocardial Contrast Echocardiography

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine the safety of dobutamine stress myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) obtained by real-time contrast echocardiography (RTCE) and intravenous ultrasound contrast in a large cohort of patients with suspected coronary artery disease (CAD). BACKGROUND Despite the increasing number of studies showing the potential clinical utility of myocardial contrast perfusion imaging with commercially available contrast agents, the safety of this technique in a clinical setting has not been demonstrated. METHODS Over a four-year period, 1,486 patients underwent dobutamine stress RTCE with low mechanical index pulse sequence schemes after intravenous injections of commercially available contrast agents (35% Definity, Bristol Myers Squibb Medical Imaging Inc., North Billerica, Massachusetts; 65% Optison, GE-Amersham, Princeton, New Jersey). The hemodynamic and adverse effects of RTCE were compared with 1,012 patients who underwent conventional dobutamine stress echocardiography (DSE) without contrast. The feasibility of image analysis was defined as the ability to analyze MPI in at least two of the three standard segments in each left ventricular wall. RESULTS No myocardial infarction or death occurred during dobutamine stress. There was no difference in the incidence of nonsustained ventricular tachycardia, sustained ventricular tachycardia, or supraventricular tachycardia during dobutamine infusion between RTCE and DSE. Myocardial perfusion imaging was considered feasible for analysis in 94% of the walls at baseline and 95% at peak stress. The anterior, lateral, and posterior walls were the most common regions in which MPI was not feasible. Myocardial perfusion imaging with RTCE had a higher accuracy for detecting patients with angiographically significant CAD than the analysis of wall motion (84% vs. 66%, respectively; p 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Dobutamine stress RTCE appears to be a safe and feasible technique for evaluating patients with known or suspected CAD. (J Am Coll Cardiol 2005;45:1235–42) © 2005 by the ublished by Elsevier Inc. doi:10.1016/j.jacc. 2005.01. 024
Joint regression modeling of two cumulative incidence functions under an additivity constraint and statistical analyses of pill-monitoring data

In the first part of this dissertation, we propose a parametric regression model for cumulative incidence functions (CIFs) which are commonly used for competing risks data. Our parametric model adopts several parametric functions as baseline CIFs and a proportional hazard or a generalized odds rate model for covariate effects. This parametric model explicitly takes into account the additivity constraint that a subject should eventually fail from one of the causes so the asymptotes of the CIFs should add up to one. Our primary goal is to propose a parametric regression model that provides regression parameters for the CIFs of both the primary and secondary risks. Moreover, we introduce a modified Weibull baseline distribution. The inference procedure is straightforward. Parameters are estimated via the maximization of the likelihood. Standard errors are obtained via the Hessian of the log-likelihood. We demonstrate the good practical performance of this parametric model. We simulate the underlying processes for cause 1 and cause 2, and compare our models with some existing methods. In the second part of this dissertation, we propose several approaches for the modeling and analysis of medication bottle opening events data, and focus on frailty models, in both parametric and semiparametric forms. This approach provides regression coefficients which are of great interest to investigators and clinicians. A time effect can also be estimated. We apply our approaches to the analysis of a medication bottle opening event data set. To our knowledge, this is the first study of prescription bottle opening events which focuses on time between medication administrations through frailty models. We discuss the interpretation of the random effect of a subject, and how it can help characterize the adherence of that individual relative to that of the other subjects. We then present an exploratory cluster analysis of the survival curves of the participants.
DETECTION OF HUMAN FACES IN COLOR IMAGES AND PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT SKIN CHROMINANCE SPACES AND SKIN CHROMINANCE MODELS

The overall objective of the project is to build a system that detects human faces in a given color image and to compare performance of different chrominance models and chrominance spaces. For face detection, approach is to detect skin color and segment given image into skin and non-skin regions. In a skin segmented image, the region of skin whose height to width ratio falls under well-known Golden ratio = (1 +√5)) / 2  some tolerance, the probability of that region to be considered as face is very high. In this implementation, evaluation of this assumption has been performed. To be able to find out what skin looks like, system has to generate statistical model of skin color. A training set of 54 skin samples (37,020 pixels) and 28 background samples (23,229 pixels) used to generate such models. This paper discusses two types of statistical models - Single Gaussian Model and Gaussian Mixture Model. Performance of both these model has been compared and the best fit model for given dataset has been used. Training dataset was collected using University of Stirling’s face database and several images from internet is used. Since dataset comes from different sources, it might result in some unknowns in dataset. One way to eliminate such unknowns is to separate color information from intensity or try to reduce effect of illumination by normalizing color information. To reduce effect of unknowns, this paper uses normalized-rgb (Red, Green, Blue) (illumination is normalized across three color, so effect is reduced), HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value) space (intensity and chromaticity part are independent) and CIE-xyz (Commission Internationale de l'Elcairage) (Machine independent) color spaces. Chrominance models in all three color spaces have been generated and compared to find which color space best suits the selected dataset.
The impact of commercial open source software on proprietary software producers and social welfare

Purpose: A growing number of commercial open source software, based on community open source, appears in many segments of the software market. The purpose of this study is to investigate how commercial open source software affects the pricing (market share or profit) of proprietary software producer, consumer surplus and social welfare. Design/methodology: To analyze the impact of commercial open source software on proprietary software producer, this study constructs two vertical-differentiation models: the basic model considers proprietary software only competing with community open source software, and its extended one considers proprietary software competing with both community and commercial open source software. Findings: This study mainly finds that the presence of commercial open source software can lead to the decrease of the software price and profit for proprietary software producer, while the consumer surplus and social welfare will be increased. However, it does not necessarily cause the decline in the market share for proprietary software producer. Originality/value: The main contribution of this study is to examine the effect of commercial open source software on the competitive strategies of proprietary software producer, consumer surplus and social welfare
Alternative pathways into university: Are tertiary preparation programs a viable option?

During the past three decades, the student populations of Australian universities have become more heterogeneous as the higher education sector expanded and new alternative entry pathways were established. Broadening access to university study and, therefore, to professional and semi-professional occupations, provides avenues for social mobility. In this paper, we examine whether students entering university via alternative entry pathways, and in particular, on-campus tertiary preparation programs, have similar levels of achievement and attainment as students who entered via the more traditional pathway after completing Year 12. Our analysis is conducted on data from one regional university and our results show that students who were not eligible to enrol on the basis of their secondary school results were no more likely than traditional students to discontinue their studies. ;