Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
First report of Squash leaf curl china virus causing mosaic symptoms on summer squash (Cucurbita pepo) grown in Varanasi district of India

Severe incidence of a mosaic disease was observed on summer squash (Cucurbita pepo), commonly called pepo, grown in Varanasi during June–September of Khariff season 2007. Symptoms observed were mosaic, puckering on the leaves, wartiness on fruits, general stunting of plants and low yield. PCR amplification with degenerate primers designed to target the conserved sequences of coat protein gene of whitefly transmitted geminiviruses showed ∼800 bp fragment in all symptomatic samples tested, indicating the association of a geminivirus with the disease. Nucleotide sequence analysis of the amplified fragment showed 99% identity with pumpkin isolate of squash leaf curl china virus (SLCCNV) from Lucknow. It showed 85–96.7% homology with other isolates of SLCCNV from India and abroad. Phylogenetic analysis revealed the isolate on pepo from Varanasi clustered with SLCCNV isolates on pumpkin from Lucknow and Coimbatore.
The Effects of Shared Decision Making on Different Renal Replacement Therapy Decisions in Patients With Chronic Kidney Disease

ABSTRACT Background The prevalence and incidence of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in Taiwan are the highest of any country in the world. The different renal replacement therapies that are adopted by patients with ESRD significantly affect their social roles and daily life. However, because of the complexities of different renal replacement therapies, patients may be unsure of which to choose. Purpose The aim of this study was to explore the effectiveness of a shared decision-making (SDM) program regarding different renal replacement therapies for patients with chronic kidney disease. Methods A quasi-experimental design was conducted at two similar regional hospitals in Miaoli County, Taiwan. One hospital hosted the intervention group, and the other hospital hosted the control group. The 31 participants in the intervention group took part in a SDM program. The 36 control group participants took part in the pre-ESRD care program. Data collection included demographic and disease characteristics, decisional conflict scale, and decision self-efficacy scale. Results were analyzed using independent t test, Fisher’s exact test, generalized estimating equation, and paired t tests. Results The study results revealed that the intervention group experienced a significant increase in decision self-efficacy and a significant decrease in decisional conflict at 1 month after receiving the SDM intervention in comparison to before and immediately after receiving the intervention. Moreover, the intervention group had higher decision self-efficacy and lower decisional conflict than the control group. Conclusions/Implications for Practice The SDM program may be an effective intervention for complex decision-making processes, such as the process involved in making renal replacement treatment decisions. The SDM program group intervention improved decisional conflict and decision self-efficacy. Thus, to improve patients’ decision-making processes, the application of an SDM program focused on the personal values and opinions of patients with ESRD will be necessary. Physicians and case managers of patients with ESRD should act in complementary and cooperative roles in SDM programs.
Antibodies to Citrullinated Proteins (ACPA) Associate with Markers of Osteoclast Activation and Bone Destruction in the Bone Marrow of Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis

Normalizing bone metabolism is a challenge in rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Studies in mice suggest that anti-citrullinated protein antibodies (ACPAs) can trigger osteoclast activation and bone resorption in the bone marrow. However, data on the presence and role of ACPAs in human bone marrow are scarce. We investigated whether ACPAs can contribute to osteoclast activation and bone erosion in RA bone marrow. Anti-cyclic citrullinated peptide antibodies (anti-CCP Abs), osteoclast activation indicators–the tartrate-resistant acid phosphatase 5b (TRAP5b) and cathepsin K, and bone degradation marker–C-terminal telopeptide of type I collagen (CTX-I) were measured in the bone marrow and peripheral blood of RA patients using ELISAs. We found that ACPAs present in RA bone marrow was associated with increased amounts of TRAP5b, cathepsin K and CTX-I in this location. Levels of IL-8, the key mediator of anti-citrullinated protein antibody (ACPA)-induced bone resorption, were also elevated in bone marrow containing anti-CCP Abs and positively correlated with TRAP5b and cathepsin K concentrations. Higher levels of TRAP5b, cathepsin K, CTX-I and IL-8 in bone marrow compared to peripheral blood indicate local generation of these molecules. Our results complement data from animal studies and highlight the relevance of ACPAs and bone marrow in bone resorption in RA.
Does Marriage Really Matter to Health? Intra- and Inter-Country Evidence from China, Japan, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea

Background The health benefits of marriage have been demonstrated mainly by studies on Western populations. This study aims to test whether the benefits are also valid in East Asian populations. Methodology/Principal Findings Individuals (n = 8,538) from China, Japan, Taiwan, and the Republic of Korea were sampled from the 2006 East Asian Social Survey. The association between self-rated health status and two marriage-related independent variables was analyzed using multivariate logistic regression models. In a two-level analysis for individuals from all countries, married individuals were more likely to report very good or good health compared to their never-married counterparts [odds ratio (OR) 1.56; 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.16−2.10]. However, the addition of marital satisfaction disintegrated the significant association of marriage with self-rated health. Married individuals in satisfying marriages were more likely to report very good or good health compared with never-married individuals (OR 1.85; 95% CI 1.37−2.50). In contrast, married individuals in dissatisfying marriages were as likely to report very good or good health as never-married individuals (OR 0.78; 95% CI 0.50−1.24). In a one-level analysis for each country, the importance of marital satisfaction varied greatly across countries. Unlike in other countries, in Japan, married individuals in dissatisfying marriages were about half as likely to report very good or good health as never-married individuals (OR 0.51, 95% CI 0.31−0.83), thereby showing no significant benefits from marriage with regard to self-rated health. Conclusion/Significance The present study of East Asian countries suggests that marital satisfaction is of greater importance in determining self-rated health than marriage itself, and that the importance of marital satisfaction varies across countries. Further research is required to better understand the relationship between marital satisfaction and self-rated health in different socio-cultural settings, and to establish effective social policies aiming at improving public health.
TRECVID 2006 Overview

The TREC Video Retrieval Evaluation (TRECVID) 2006 represents the sixth running of a TREC-style video retrieval evaluation, the goal of which remains to promote progress in content-based retrieval from digital video via open, metrics-based evaluation. Over time this effort should yield a better understanding of how systems can effectively accomplish such retrieval and how one can reliably benchmark their performance. TRECVID is funded by the Disruptive Technology Office (DTO) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States. Fifty-four teams (twelve more than last year) from various research organizations — 19 from Asia, 19 from Europe, 13 from the Americas, 2 from Australia and 1 Asia/EU team — participated in one or more of four tasks: shot boundary determination, high-level feature extraction, search (fully automatic, manually assisted, or interactive) or pre-production video management. Results for the first 3 tasks were scored by NIST using manually created truth data. Complete manual annotation of the test set was used for shot boundary determination. Feature and search submissions were evaluated based on partial manual judgments of the pooled submissions. For the fourth exploratory task participants evaluated their own systems. Test data for the search and feature tasks was about 150 hours (almost twice as large as last year) of broadcast news video in MPEG-1 format from US (NBC, CNN, MSNBC), Chinese (CCTV4, PHOENIX, NTDTV), and Arabic (LBC, HURRA) sources that had been collected in November 2004. The BBC Archive also provided 50 hours of “rushes” pre-production travel video material with natural sound, errors, etc. against which participants could experiment and try to demonstrate functionality useful in managing and mining such material.
A synopsis of the prevalence rates and environmental risk factors for myopia

The prevalence rates of myopia are higher in urban Asian cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore. One observation over the past few decades is that the prevalence rates of myopia have been rising and there is an epidemic of myopia in Asia. The age‐old question of the roles of nature and nurture in this process remains unanswered. The strongest evidence for an environmental link to myopia is near work activity. Childhood exposure to night lighting has also been explored in different studies but the results have been mixed. Twin studies, segregation analysis and association studies have demonstrated that hereditary factors play an important role in myopia development. The exact nature and interplay of genetic and environmental factors is not known and data suggest that environmental factors may interact with genetic factors to increase the risks of developing myopia. Future research is needed to identify specific modifiable lifestyle factors and genetic markers for myopia. This will enable preventive measures such as health education to be instituted.
Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development

Under anarchy, uncoordinated competitive theft by “roving bandits” destroys the incentive to invest and produce, leaving little for either the population or the bandits. Both can be better off if a bandit sets himself up as a dictator—a “stationary bandit” who monopolizes and rationalizes theft in the form of taxes. A secure autocrat has an encompassing interest in his domain that leads him to provide a peaceful order and other public goods that increase productivity. Whenever an autocrat expects a brief tenure, it pays him to confiscate those assets whose tax yield over his tenure is less than their total value. This incentive plus the inherent uncertainty of succession in dictatorships imply that autocracies will rarely have good economic performance for more than a generation. The conditions necessary for a lasting democracy are the same necessary for the security of property and contract rights that generates economic growth.
Self‐Determination Theory and the Relation of Autonomy to Self‐Regulatory Processes and Personality Development

The struggle for freedom has been a dominant political theme throughout history. Repeatedly, repressive regimes have gained control over countries, eventually to be challenged by one or more rebellious individuals who topple the tyranny and proclaim freedom. Evidence of such conflicts can be found in the Greek war cry, “Freedom or death,” a sentiment echoed by Patrick Henry’s famous demand, “Give me liberty or give me death. ” In more recent times this struggle has been reflected in the actions of such people as Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, who worked to promote their people’s voices and self-governance. Through the millennia and across cultures an analogous struggle for self-governance has also played out at the psychological level of individuals during development. Born with an inherent tendency toward self-organization and growth, individuals struggle to act with volition and integrity amid social forces that can make them feel controlled like pawns or helpless (de Charms, 1968; Deci & Ryan, 1985b). At this individual level of analysis, it is not tyrannical political systems, but rather more proximal interpersonal forces in the everyday contexts of people’s lives, which represent the primary sources of control. That is, the salient controls for most people stem from external pressures, rewards, or contingent approval of peers, parents, teachers, managers, and other significant people. This personal struggle between the experience of autonomy and its impingement by control represents a backdrop for every human life. Regarding conflicts over freedom at the historical, sociopolitical, and economic levels, many thinkers have stressed the importance of freedom and self-governance as a component of healthy development and successful societies (e.g., Sen, 1999). Yet whereas political and economic freedom has many champions, within the discipline of psychology the importance of autonomy has had few proponents. Various mainstream
Automatic crosslingual thesaurus generated from the Hong Kong SAR Police Department Web corpus for crime analysis

based approach to align English/Chinese Hong Kong Police press release documents from the Web is first presented. We also introduce an algorithmic approach to generate a robust knowledge base based on statistical correlation analysis of the semantics (knowledge) em- bedded in the bilingual press release corpus. The re- search output consisted of a thesaurus-like, semantic network knowledge base, which can aid in semantics- based crosslingual information management and re- trieval. For the sake of national security, very large volumes of data and information are generated and gathered daily. Much of this data and information is written in different languages, stored in different locations, and may be seemingly unconnected. Crosslingual semantic interop- erability is a major challenge to generate an overview of this disparate data and information so that it can be ana- lyzed, shared, searched, and summarized. The recent terrorist attacks and the tragic events of September 11, 2001 have prompted increased attention on national se- curity and criminal analysis. Many Asian countries and cities, such as Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore, have been advised that they may become the next targets of terror- ist attacks. Semantic interoperability has been a focus in digital library research. Traditional information retrieval (IR) approaches normally require a document to share some common keywords with the query. Generating the associations for the related terms between the two term spaces of users and documents is an important issue. The problem can be viewed as the creation of a the- saurus. Apart from this, terrorists and criminals may communicate through letters, e-mails, and faxes in lan- guages other than English. The translation ambiguity sig- nificantly exacerbates the retrieval problem. The problem is expanded to crosslingual semantic interoperability. In this paper, we focus on the English/Chinese crosslingual semantic interoperability problem. However, the devel- oped techniques are not limited to English and Chinese languages but can be applied to many other languages. English and Chinese are popular languages in the Asian region. Much information about national security or crime is communicated in these languages. An efficient auto- matically generated thesaurus between these languages is important to crosslingual information retrieval between English and Chinese languages. To facilitate crosslingual information retrieval, a corpus-based approach uses the term co-occurrence statistics in parallel or comparable corpora to construct a statistical translation model to cross the language boundary. In this paper, the text-
Referencing Objects in FIPA SL: An Analysis and Proposal

Although the syntax and semantics of mainstream agent content languages are based on those of predicate logic, the popularity of the Java programming language, the availability of various free Java-based agent development toolkits and the use of frame-based ontology modelling languages have meant that many developers of multi-agent systems are accustomed to conceptualising their problem domain in terms of classes and objects. This paper examines the current practice of referring to objects within FIPA SL expressions using functional terms, with particular focus on how well this corresponds to the semantics of the language. After concluding that this use of functional terms is not correct, an extension to the syntax for identifying reference expressions is proposed. This notation allows objects to be referenced in terms of their attribute values in a well defined way, while requiring minimal change to current patterns of use.
Capitalizing on the weekend effect

T his paper investigates potential profits from a day-of-the-week trading rule. International evidence from six countries shows that potential gains from following a day-of-the-week trading strategy are significant. A number of studies document that average returns on U.S. common stocks vary across days of the week. ' Specifically, evidence shows the average return on Monday is low or even negative, and the Friday return generally is high. This so-called weekend effect or day-of-the-week effect for common stock returns has been found as well in other developed countries such as the U.K., Japan, Canada, and Australia. ' There is further evidence of the day-of-theweek effect in the small-sized securities markets of Far Eastern countries such as Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It is interesting that returns on common stocks of the Far Eastern countries (including Japan) are lowest on Tuesday which corresponds in actual time to Monday in the U.S. market. This seems to imply that worldwide dissemination of information has an almost instantaneous influence on the world market. For example, Tuesday returns in Korea may reflect the same information that affects the Monday returns in the U.S. market, because Seoul is fourteen hours behind New York. International correlations also might be related to arbitrage between securities that are close substitutes. All this evidence together strengthens our belief that common stock returns are generally low in the beginning of the week and become higher toward the ~ e e k e n d . ~ Ignoring transaction costs, the day-of-theweek pattern for return distributions suggests that excess returns could be earned in the U.S. market using a simple trading rule such as buying at the close on Monday and selling at the close on Friday. The day-of-the-week trading rule can be modified to buy at the close on Tuesday for the Far Eastern countries where the lowest return is on Tuesday.
Market , Organizational , and Strategic Factors Affecting Media Entrepreneurs in Emerging Economies

Since the late 1980s, major changes have taken place in the global political economy. As a result of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the end of the Cold War, the expansion of global trade, and other factors, numerous countries have begun moving towards more open political and economic systems. Accompanying these political and economic changes has been a corresponding liberalization of national media systems. Many nations, such as those in Eastern Europe, that have undergone transitions to democratic political systems, have abandoned government ownership of the media. They have moved, instead, to new media systems based on private ownership. Others, such as the People’s Republic of China have slowly eased prohibitions against private ownership of some media even while maintaining more authoritarian political systems and some government control over media. Among nations using a more mixed approach to liberalization, the opening of the media to more private investment and competition reflects, at least in part, the recognition that access to information is a critical issue for nations wishing to compete successfully in the global economy. Among Western policy makers, media professionals and mass communication scholars, these changes have been largely celebrated. A central tenet of the Libertarian political philosophy that underpins most Western political systems is that media that operate free from government control are a necessary condition for the functioning of democracy -although scholars now recognize that in nations undergoing major socio-political transitions, the relationship between independent media and democracy is complex and potentially fraught with hazards (McConnell & Becker, 2002). Similarly, media have come to be recognized as a critical infrastructure industry for economic development efforts. Economists have demonstrated that asymmetric access to information places the have-nots at a measurable disadvantage in economic competition (Vikery, 1961; Mirrlees, 1990). Also, over the past few decades, the economy of developed nations increasingly has been driven by innovation, which is an information-dependent process (Hollifield, Vlad & Becker, 2003). Media play a central role in distributing information in the marketplace and providing timely access to information necessary to innovation processes. Finally, copyright industries have themselves become a growth industry worldwide, generating jobs, tax revenues and export
Marriage Market Matching and Conspicuous Consumption in China

Visible expenditures which convey higher socioeconomic status may help individuals differentiate themselves in the marriage market when there is competition for partners and imperfect information. We examine a unique dataset of automobile purchasers in China to investigate the extent to which skewed sex ratios influence expenditure decisions for this highly visible commodity. Using a triple difference approach, we show that unmarried male consumers who face an unfavorable sex ratio purchase more expensive, luxury vehicles than their married peers. Lower income borrowers and those residing in regions with the worst sex ratios exhibit the largest relative degree of conspicuous consumption. In addition to the direct cost of consumption signaling, we demonstrate that this behavior generates negative externalities in the form of lower average fuel economy and higher average vehicle weight. As it has worsened sex ratios, status competition and the associated negative repercussions we identify represent unintended consequences of China's one child policy.
From rule of man to rule of law: An unintended consequence of corruption in China in the 1990s

The ethics of government in the People's Republic of China have been corroded by rampant corruption over the last two decades. The corruption has not only weakened the state's legitimacy and capacity to govern, but also provided an opportunity (to a certain degree, a catalyst) for a possible change from a traditional society ruled by man into a rational‐legal society ruled by law. Economic reforms over the past 20 years have unleashed market forces in a nation so dominated by the Party‐state that basic boundaries and distinctions defining the limits of markets and official power have been weak or nonexistent. At one level, this has made for an increase in corruption and confusion about the meanings of the term. At another, it has produced a situation that requires the improvement of the legal system to handle the issue effectively. Beijing leadership seems to have realized the importance of strengthening the legal system in addressing this issue. This shift in strategy may have profound implications for t.
China and World Trade

The revival in global growth in the second quarter of last year can be traced to a sharp rise in domestic demand in mainland China, as well as Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea. While GDP increased in Germany, France and Japan as well, growth in these economies relied on a rise in external demand, whereas domestic demand in these countries continued to decline. The rise in Asian domestic demand has been strongly supported by a series of fiscal packages. The scope of stimulus packages introduced in the larger Asian economies dwarfs the size of packages introduced in most European economies, averaging 4–5 per cent of GDP.