Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Iron status and restless legs syndrome in the elderly.

The relationship between iron status and the restless legs syndrome (RLS) was examined in 18 elderly patients with RLS and in 18 matched control subjects. A rating scale with a maximum score of 10 was used to assess the severity of RLS symptoms. Serum ferritin levels were reduced in the RLS patients compared with control subjects (median 33 micrograms/l vs. 59 micrograms/l, p < 0.01, Wilcoxon signed rank test); serum iron, vitamin B12 and folate levels and haemoglobin levels did not differ between the two groups. Serum ferritin levels were inversely correlated with the severity of RLS symptoms (Spearman's rho -0.53, p < 0.05). Fifteen patients with RLS were treated with ferrous sulphate for 2 months. RLS severity score improved by a median value of 4 points in six patients with an initial ferritin < or = 18 micrograms/l, by 3 points in four patients with ferritin > 18 micrograms/l, < or = 45 micrograms/l and by 1 point in five patients with ferritin > 45 micrograms/l, < 100 micrograms/l. Iron deficiency, with or without anaemia, is an important contributor to the development of RLS in elderly patients, and iron supplements can produce a significant reduction in symptoms.
Performance analysis of IEEE 802.11a WLAN in block fading channel using SDL simulation

Several new, analytic and simulation, results on the throughput and discard probability of IEEE 802.11a WLAN in error-prone channels are presented. The well-known results on the IEEE 802.11 DCF performance for a channel with uniformly distributed packet errors are extended for the case of space (antenna) diversity at the access point. The analytic expressions are validated via extensive simulations using our SDL-based model of the IEEE 802.11a WLAN. We also developed a four-state Markov model for a bursty block-fading channel based on the modified Gilbert-Elliott channel, and obtained promising results for future low-layer analysis on the WLAN performance.
Value of carcinoembryonic antigen and cytokeratins for the detection of recurrent disease following curative resection of colorectal cancer.

AIM To evaluate the efficacy of postoperative serial assay of carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and cytokeratins for the detection of recurrent disease in patients with colorectal adenocarcinoma after radical surgery. METHODS Between 1993 and 2000, 120 patients with colorectal adenocarcinoma underwent radical surgery in the Department of Surgical Gastroenterology, Federal University of Sao Paulo-Escola Paulista de Medicina, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Periodic postoperative evaluation was performed by assaying markers in peripheral serum, colonoscopy and imaging examination. Presence of CEA was detected using the Delfia method with 5 microg/L threshold, and cytokeratins using the LIA-mat TPA-M Prolifigen method with 72 U/L threshold. RESULTS In the first postoperative year, patients without recurrent disease had normal levels of CEA (1.5 +/- 0.9 microg/L) and monoclonal tissue polypeptide antigen-M (TPA-M, 64.4 +/- 47.8 U/L), while patients with recurrences had high levels of CEA (6.9 +/- 9.8 microg/L, P < 0.01) and TPA-M (192.2 +/- 328.8 U/L, P < 0.05). During the second postoperative year, patients without tumor recurrence had normal levels of CEA (2.0 +/- 1.8 microg/L) and TPA-M (50.8 +/- 38.4 U/L), while patients with recurrence had high levels of CEA (66.3 +/- 130.8 microg/L, P < 0.01) and TPA-M (442.7 +/- 652.8 U/L, P < 0.05). The mean follow-up time was 22.3 mo. There was recurrence in 23 cases. Five reoperations were performed without achieving radical excision. Rises in tumor marker levels preceded identification of recurrences: CEA in seven (30%) and TPA-M in eleven individuals (48%). CONCLUSION Intensive follow-up by serial assay of CEA and cytokeratins allows early detection of colorectal neoplasm recurrence.
Endothermic heat production in honeybee winter clusters

SUMMARY In order to survive cold northern winters, honeybees crowd tightly together in a winter cluster. Present models of winter cluster thermoregulation consider the insulation by the tightly packed mantle bees as the decisive factor for survival at low temperatures, mostly ignoring the possibility of endothermic heat production. We provide here direct evidence of endothermic heat production by `shivering' thermogenesis. The abundance of endothermic bees is highest in the core and decreases towards the surface. This shows that core bees play an active role in thermal control of winter clusters. We conclude that regulation of both the insulation by the mantle bees and endothermic heat production by the inner bees is necessary to achieve thermal stability in a winter cluster.
Diabetes mellitus and risk of prostate cancer in the health professionals follow‐up study

History of diabetes may be associated with decreased prostate cancer (PCa) risk. Published studies have not always accounted for time since diabetes diagnosis or confounding and effect modification by lifestyle factors. The authors investigated the relationship between diabetes and PCa risk in men in the Health Professionals Follow‐Up Study from 1986 to 2004. During that time, 4,511 new PCa cases were identified. Multivariate hazard ratios (HR) were estimated using Cox regression. The HR of PCa comparing men with vs. without diabetes was 0.83 and 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.74, 0.94. PCa risk was not reduced in the first year after diabetes diagnosis (HR: 1.30, CI: 0.97, 1.72), was lower for men diagnosed for 1–6 years (HR: 0.82, CI: 0.66, 1.02), and was even lower for men who had been diagnosed for 6–15 (HR: 0.75, CI: 0.61, 0.93) or >15 years (HR: 0.78, CI: 0.63, 0.96). Reduced PCa risk was stronger in men diagnosed before 1994 (pre‐PSA era) vs. after 1994. The authors also demonstrated that obese and diabetic men had a lower HR for PCa than those who were either not obese and diabetic or obese and non‐diabetic. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that diabetes is associated with reduced PCa risk. Potential biological mechanisms are discussed. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
HSV membrane glycoproteins, their function in viral entry and their use in vaccine studies

It has been estimated that the 90% of the world population is affected by HSV-1 or HSV-2 infections. Clinical manifestations associated with these infectious agents range from cold sores and genital lesions to keratitis, encephalitis and meningoencephalitis. Nowadays these viruses represent a global health and economic burden. Despite a century of scientific research a vaccine for HSV-1 and HSV-2 viruses is still not available. However, in the last years HSV glycoproteins have strongly emerged as putative candidates for vaccine development. In this chapter we provide insights into HSV glycoproteins structure, function and the current state of art in the development of a vaccine for these pathogens.
Market Orientation and Firm Performance among Nigerian SMEs: The Moderating Role of Business Environment

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between market orientation and firm performance, with the moderating variable of business environment. The study employed a cross sectional research design, using a structured questionnaire survey with a sample of 640 SMEs fully operational in Kano state, a total of 511 valid questionnaires were completed and returned representing 79.8 percent response rate. The finding from the study shows that the relationship between market orientation and firm performance was found to be insignificant; the relationship between the business environment and firm performance was also not significant also. The result of moderation indicated that the business environment was found to moderate on the relationship between market orientation and firm performance. The finding of this study will benefit owner/managers of SMEs, regulatory agencies, government at all levels and will also serve as a frame to future studies. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014. v5n23p158
The parallel trajectories and increasing integration of landscape ecology and land system science

ABSTRACT Landscape Ecology and Land Systems Science share a common concern for the dynamics of landscapes, their environmental and human drivers and consequences, and the sustainability of land as a coupled social-ecological system. Both scientific communities employ interdisciplinary approaches to monitoring, understanding and projecting changes in landscapes, and share important epistemic, thematic and methodological interests. Nonetheless, they are also distinguished by important differences in problem framing, base constituencies, core questions, methodologies employed, and engagement with governance and policy. We review these two scientific fields, highlighting key commonalities and differences. By mapping areas of convergence and divergence in these two foremost communities studying land use and landscapes, we highlight promising research areas where the relative strengths of each can be merged to foster new advances in an integrated human-environment science of land systems. Such advances are essential for improved assessments of social-environmental systems dynamics that underpin sustainability themes.
A Clinicopathologic Study of 21 Cases of Pancreatic Cystadenocarcinoma

Cystadenocarcinomas arc rare tumors of Ihe'pancreas. They are half as common as their benign counterpart–the cystadenoma. A review of 21 cases, including eight reported since 1963, revealed that most patients presented with upper abdominal pain and a large palpable upper abdominal mass. All patients had evidence of malignant degeneration occurring in a mucous cystadenoma. None had evidence of a serous cystadenoma. Grading revealed a predominance of low-grade tumors: 20 of the 21 lesions were grade 1 or 2. Cystadenocarcinomas were slightly more frequent in the head of the pancreas. Four patients had metastasis. Complete excision by distal or total pancreatectomy or Whipple pancreaticoduodenectomy is recommended. The five year survival after complete excision is 68%, and for patients with grade 1 lesions, and five year survival is 64%.
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform

challenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and
On the value composition and pricing model of renewable energy source

The renewable energy source has become the important composition of the energy strategy in the developed countries and it is also the important method for the lower carbon economics development in these counties. All these come from the specific characteristics of the renewable energy, such as the advantages of both environment and application. However, it is still the starting stage for the application of the renewable energy in China. Therefore, the higher cost makes it impossible to compete with the traditional energy and the pricing strategy becomes the bottleneck. Based on the marginal opportunity cost theory of sustainable developing natural sources, this paper concentrates on the value composition of the renewable energy and demonstrates them by the way of the dynamic model, which reflects the relations among all the energies. The calculating model is forwarded and it improves the policies for the renewable energy industry, aiming at the development of the competition advantage for our country.
Numerical Schemes for the Optimal Input Flow of a Supply Chain

An innovative numerical technique is presented to adjust the inflow to a supply chain in order to achieve a desired outflow, reducing the costs of inventory or the goods timing in warehouses. The supply chain is modeled by a conservation law for the density of processed parts coupled to an ODE for the queue buffer occupancy. The control problem is stated as the minimization of a cost functional $J$ measuring the queue size and the quadratic difference between the outflow and the expected one. The main novelty is the extensive use of generalized tangent vectors to a piecewise constant control, which represent time shifts of discontinuity points. Such a method allows convergence results and error estimates for an upwind-Euler steepest descent algorithm, which is also tested by numerical simulations.
An Incremental Approach to Entity Resolution

We present a query-time entity resolution process that works in a highly parallel fashion. We use the application MobEx to showcase our process, which consists of a mobile client and a server, where the server takes the role of a mediator and carries out the resolution. Results are propagated to the client as early as possible. Resolution results that are produced later in the process are send as updates to the client and thus improve earlier results.
Soluble Phosphorus Removal Through Adsorption on Spent Alum Sludge

In the present study freshly precipitated spent alum sludge [15-75 mg Al l−1] and alum [3-15 mg Al l−1] were tested and compared for their efficiency to remove phosphorus in synthetic wastewater [10mg P l−1, 25°C, pH=6] and it was proven that pure alum is much more efficient at phosphorus removal than the spent alum sludge. The effect of the pH on phosphorus removal efficiency was studied and it was proven that maximum orthophosphate removal is achieved in pH values 5-6 in both cases, alum and spent alum sludge, although alum is efficient in a wider pH range (4-7). The effect of aging [up to two months at 25°C] on the efficiency of the spent sludge to remove phosphorus in synthetic wastewater was studied and it was proven that this efficiency is decreased through aging (up to 20% for 2 months aging). X-ray diffraction was used in order to examine whether this decrease is caused by changes in the structure of adsorbent and a mechanism was proposed to explain the above changes. Kinetics was investigated in the case of fresh and aged spent alum sludge and the pseudo-second-order chemisorption rate equation fits satisfactorily the experimental data [k: 0.286-1.048 g mmol−1 min−1, at 23-26°C]. Finally, equilibrium was studied for fresh and aged spent alum sludge and the Freundlich isotherm fitted best the experimental data suggesting heterogeneous sorption [KF=14.4-19.7, N: 0.13-0.20].
Designing Lower-Dimensional Regular Arrays for Algorithms with Uniform Dependencies

In this paper, we will propose a polynomial-time method to designm-dimensional regular arrays forn(n? m+ 1) dimensional algorithms with uniform dependencies, regular algorithms. The proposed method has two steps: the first one is to transform an independently partitioned regular algorithm to a new one, which has an identity dependence matrix. We call this stepidentity transformation, which is an affine one. In the second step, we propose a spacetime mapping in a fixed form to map the new regular algorithm to a lower-dimensional regular array. Thus, anaffine spacetime mappingis constructed by combining the identity transformation and the fixed form's spacetime mapping together. With the proposed affine spacetime mapping, the original regular algorithm can be mapped to a lower-dimensional regular array in polynomial time, which depends only on the number of dimensions of the regular algorithm. Meanwhile, the designed regular array is asymptotically optimal in time and space.
Modelling information diffusion based on non-dominated friends in social networks

In recent years, social networks have played a strong role in diffusing information among people all around the globe. Therefore, the ability to analyse the diffusion pattern is essential. A diffusion model can identify the information dissemination pattern in a social network. One of the most important components of a diffusion model is information perception which determines the source each node receives its information from. Previous studies have assumed information perception to be just based on a single factor, that is, each individual receives information from their friend with the highest amount of information, whereas in reality, there exist other factors, such as trust, that affect the decision of people for selecting the friend who would supply information. These factors might be in conflict with each other, and modelling diffusion process with respect to a single factor can give rise to unacceptable results with respect to the other factors. In this article, we propose a novel information diffusion model based on non-dominated friends (IDNDF). Non-dominated friends are a set of friends of a node for whom there is no friend better than them in the set based on all considered factors, considering different factors simultaneously significantly enhance the proposed information diffusion model. Moreover, our model gives a chance to all non-dominated friends to be selected. Also, IDNDF allows having partial knowledge by each node of the social network. Finally, IDNDF is applicable to different types of data, including well-known real social networks like Epinions, WikiPedia, Advogato and so on. Extensive experiments are performed to assess the performance of the proposed model. The results show the efficiency of the IDNDF in diffusion of information in varieties of social networks.
Incorporating word embeddings in the hierarchical dirichlet process for query-oriented text summarization

The ever-growing amount of textual data available online creates the need for automatic text summarization tools. Probabilistic topic models are able to infer semantic relationships between sentences which is a key step of extractive summarization methods. However, they strongly rely on word co-occurrence patterns and fail to capture the actual semantic relationships between words such as synonymy, antonymy, etc. We propose a novel algorithm which incorporates pre-trained word embeddings in the probabilistic topic model in order to capture semantic similarities between sentences. These similarities provide the basis for a sentence ranking algorithm for query-oriented summarization. The summary is then produced by extracting highly ranked sentences from the original corpus. Our method is shown to outperform state-of-the-art algorithms on a benchmark dataset.
INHALATION OF BENZPYRENE AND CANCER IN MAN

Both cigarette smoke and polluted urban air contain very small amounts of benzo[a]pyrene, or BaP, a substance which is carcinogenic to experimental animals if relatively large amounts are applied in certain ways such as skin painting or subcutaneous injection. This suggested the possibility that the BaP in cigarette smoke might account for the high degree of association between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, and it suggested the possibility that BaP poliution of urban air might perhaps increase the risk of lung cancer. Some years ago Wynder and Hoffman found an average of 2.5 pg of BaP in the smoke from 100 American cigarettes smoked mechanically. ' The average amount has dropped considerably in more recent years. Based upon this, it would appear that even during a lifetime of heavy cigarette smoking, the concentration of BaP per square centimeter of bronchial tissue over which it might be spread would be extremely small as compared with the dose required to produce skin cancer in mice. The concentration of BaP in the air of large American cities is reported to vary from about 0.3 to 6.0 pgl1,OOO cubic meters in summer and from 6.0 to as high as 74.0 in winter. * The air of British cities is more heavily contaminated with BaP. In some British cities, in winter it varies from 73.0 to as high as 170.0 pgl1,OOO cubic meters of air.g During the course of a year, nonsmokers living in some of these cities probably inhale far more BaP than do heavy cigarette smokers living in rural areas of America. Even so, the amount is extremely low as compared with the amount required to produce skin cancer in susceptible strains of mice, surface area being taken into consideration, Largely because of interest in the possible effects of small amounts of BaP in cigarette smoke and in urban air, we decided to study mortality from lung cancer and other causes among people with very heavy occupational exposure to BaP in air. Roofers and waterproofers are such a group. Sawicki collected air samples in the vicinity of men working in pitch roofing operations and found 14,000 pg of BaP/ 1,000 cubic meters of air (see TABLE 1 ) . Even higher amounts were found in air samples collected close to where a roofer was attending a kettle of hot pitch. Thus it would appear that roofers working with hot pitch are exposed to far greater amounts of BaP than are heavy cigarette smokers living in urban areas.
Sense and sustainability revisited: the limits of total factor productivity measures of sustainable agricultural systems

Many economists have advocated and applied total social factor productivity (TSFP) (i.e., total factor productivity estimated with both market and non-market inputs and externalities, and with all factors valued at social prices) as a single all-embracing measure of agricultural sustainability. This paper reviews the conceptual and practical issues in measuring TSFP and shows that no one measure alone will be theoretically or empirically robust as an indicator of sustainability. TSFP is a conceptually flawed measure since inclusion of non-market inputs and outputs and social price-based valuation, in most cases, violates the theoretical basis underlying those estimates. Trends in TSFP also have limited value in diagnosing the nature of sustainability problems, unless changes in productivity are related to underlying changes in technology, human and physical infrastructure, and indicators of resource quality. More attention needs to be given to defining key indicators of agro-ecosystem health and relating these measures to trends in productivity. This analysis must be sufficiently disaggregated and for a long enough time period to allow for spatial and temporal variability inherent in agricultural production. Secondary data at the district level on both conventional inputs and outputs and resource quality have recently allowed more quantitative estimates of sustainability and its causes. With limited data, yield growth decomposition analysis can often be used to provide valuable insights into sustainability problems. Meanwhile, there is a need to invest in long-term experimental and panel surveys offarmers and their fields for key production systems in order to provide long-term data that will allow full productivity accounting, using more formal statistical procedures. Regardless of the approach selected, the findings of this paper strongly suggest a need for economists, agronomists and soil scientists to collaborate in integrating approaches in order to provide more robust and informative measures of sustainability. © 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Toward the Employability—Link Model: Current Employment Transition to Future Employment Perspectives

This article goes into a critical analysis of the concept of employability, its development across historical periods, its components, and different strategic approaches to enhance workers' employability throughout their career. Given the need for a systematic analysis and more empirical research in the field, the authors come up with the so-called employability—link model that is aimed to guide future practitioners and researchers as far as their specific choices as regard core components of the concept that ought to be made. The article concludes with a thorough onset of possible future research questions that are assumed to be of importance given the current labor market situation. The employability—link model has implications for individual and organizational career interventions aimed at increasing life-long employability.