bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Do Empty Creditors Matter? Evidence from Distressed Exchange Offers
Authors: Danis András 
Published: March 2016

In this paper, I examine the effect of credit default swaps (CDSs) on the restructuring of distressed firms. Using a sample of U.S. distressed exchange offers during the period 2006–2011, I show that the participation rate among bondholders is significantly lower if the firm has CDSs traded on its debt. To address endogeneity concerns, I use the introduction of the Big Bang Protocol as a natural experiment. The results suggest that firms with CDSs find it difficult to reduce debt out of court. This is important because it can increase the likelihood of future bankruptcy, which is inefficient. The findings are consistent with the empty creditor hypothesis, which posits that bondholders who are hedged with CDSs are less likely to participate in a debt restructuring. The paper also contains direct evidence for the existence of empty creditors. This paper was accepted by Amit Seru, finance.
Sense of identity: Craft, decoration and queer challenges in the art of Jakkai Siributr
Authors: Curtin Brian 
Published: March 2016

Abstract
This article examines contemporary debates on the historical and theoretical relationship between craft and visual art through an analysis of the artworks of Jakkai Siributr. Siributr, a Thai artist based in Bangkok and who studied in the United States, creates tapestries and installations based on methods of weaving, constructed textiles and embroidery. Through the tracing of a critical history of relationships between art and craft since early influential precedents in proto-feminist and feminist art to more recent works by Ghada Amer and Do-Ho Suh, the article identifies how the art/craft division is typically understood as transgressed only on certain conditions: that opticality is emphasized over the haptic and the artist is engaged with issues of sociocultural identity. Noting how this complicates pervasive suggestions that the ‘international art world’ is a domain of free play – that is, that all forms of practices are potentially equally valid under the rubric of ‘contemporary art’ – Siributr’s works are explored as disrupting the discursive tradition of art/craft because his methods slip between optic and haptic experience and challenge an easy assimilation to questions of identity. This disruption is partly based on the artist’s use of the form and rhetoric of the ‘decorative’, and the article elaborates the challenges that Siributr poses for unspoken divisions of art and craft in terms of practice and types of engagement. These challenges are contextualized by remarks on the queer-theoretical interest of what it means to expose and break norms and shape less binary or dualistic forms of understanding and practice.
The Practice Guidelines for Primary Care of Acute Abdomen 2015
Authors: Mayumi Toshihiko , Yoshida Masahiro , Tazuma Susumu , Furukawa Akira , Nishii Osamu , Shigematsu Kunihiro , Azuhata Takeo , Itakura Atsuo , Kamei Seiji , Kondo Hiroshi , Maeda Shigenobu , Mihara Hiroshi , Mizooka Masafumi , Nishidate Toshihiko , Obara Hideaki , Sato Norio , Takayama Yuichi , Tsujikawa Tomoyuki , Fujii Tomoyuki , Miyata Tetsuro , Maruyama Izumi , Honda Hiroshi , Hirata Koichi 
Published: March 2016

Background: Since acute abdomen requires accurate diagnosis and treatment within a particular time limit to prevent mortality, the Japanese Society for Abdominal Emergency Medicine in collaboration with four other medical societies launched the Practice Guidelines for Primary Care of Acute Abdomen that were the first English guidelines in the world for the management of acute abdomen. Here we provide the highlights of these guidelines (all CQ and recommendations were shown in supplementary information).Methods: A systematic and comprehensive evaluation of the evidence for epidemiology, diagnosis, differential diagnosis, and primary treatment for acute abdomen was performed to develop the Practice Guidelines for Primary Care of Acute Abdomen 2015. Because many types of pathophysiological events underlie acute abdomen, these guidelines cover the primary care of adult patients with nontraumatic acute abdomen.Results: A total of 108 questions based on 9 subject areas were used to compile 113 recommendations. The subject areas included definition, epidemiology, history taking, physical examination, laboratory test, imaging studies, differential diagnosis, initial treatment, and education. Japanese medical circumstances were considered for grading the recommendations to assure useful information. The two‐step methods for the initial management of acute abdomen were proposed. Early use of transfusion and analgesia, particularly intravenous acetaminophen, were recommended.Conclusions: The Practice Guidelines for Primary Care of Acute Abdomen 2015 have been prepared as the first evidence‐based guidelines for the management of acute abdomen. We hope that these guidelines contribute to clinical practice and improve the primary care and prognosis of patients with acute abdomen.
Interleukin‐18 and Chronic Kidney Disease in Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea Syndrome
Authors: Yoda Aya , Matsubara Hiroshi , Kadota Koichiro , Inoue Keita , Nakamichi Seiko , Nishino Tomoya , Abe Koh , Takeshima Fuminao , Ozono Yoshiyuki 
Published: March 2016

Background: Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) and chronic kidney disease (CKD) are common diseases encountered in primary care. These diseases share the same pathophysiology of chronic inflammation. In recent years, it was reported that the inflammasome participates in chronic inflammation, and interleukin (IL)‐18 has received significant attention as an inflammasome marker. IL‐18 is also closely associated with renal function, and is a stronger predictive marker of renal function disorder than high‐sensitivity C‐reactive protein (hsCRP) or IL‐6. OSAS is also reported to be an independent risk factor of CKD. However, other basal diseases associated with OSAS and severe renal function disorders may also be CKD risk factors, such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and hyperlipidemia. So it should be carefully interpreted. Therefore, we investigated renal function in OSAS patients with no potentially confounding disorders using IL‐18.Methods: We assessed OSAS severity (apnea–hypopnea index [AHI]); renal function (estimated glomerular filtration rate); and hsCRP, IL‐6, and IL‐18 levels in 23 patients newly diagnosed with OSAS and free from other diseases.Results: Serum levels of IL‐18 demonstrated a significant negative correlated with eGFR (P < 0.05).Conclusions: Even when renal dysfunction is mild, chronic inflammation is present in OSAS patients. We hypothesize that IL‐18 is a useful marker to detect chronic inflammation in OSAS patients and that this chronic inflammation contributes to CKD. These results suggest that IL‐18 is an associative marker for OSAS and renal function disorder, and can help achieve early treatment intervention in primary care.
Long‐term Low‐carbohydrate Diets and Type 2 Diabetes Risk: A Systematic Review and Meta‐analysis of Observational Studies
Authors: Noto Hiroshi , Goto Atsushi , Tsujimoto Tetsuro , Noda Mitsuhiko 
Published: March 2016

Objective: Low‐carbohydrate diets have favorable short‐term effects on body weight and risk factors for cardiovascular disease. However, they are potentially associated with an increased long‐term risk of mortality. Our objective was to elucidate their effects on the incidence of diabetes.Methods: Several databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, ISI Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and ClinicalTrials.gov) were searched for relevant articles that were published prior to May 2015. Cohort studies with a follow‐up period of at least one year were included. Identified articles were systematically reviewed, and those with pertinent data were selected for inclusion in a meta‐analysis. The pooled risk ratio (RR) with 95% confidence interval (CI) for the incidence of diabetes was calculated using the random‐effects model with inverse‐variance weighting.Results: We included 13 studies in a systematic review, followed by a meta‐analysis using pertinent data. Among the 440,669 people that were included in 11 cohort studies, 27,887 (6.3%) cases of diabetes were documented. The risk of incident diabetes among individuals with a low‐carbohydrate diet was not significantly different from that of individuals with a high‐carbohydrate diet: the pooled RR was 1.03 (95% CI, 0.91–1.16).Conclusion: Low‐carbohydrate diets did not show any benefit on the risk of diabetes. However, this analysis is based on limited observational studies, and large‐scale trials examining the complex interactions between low‐carbohydrate diets and long‐term outcomes are needed.
Asymptomatic Hyperuricemia
Authors: Hosoya Tatsuo , Nishio Shinichiro 
Published: March 2016

According to recent study, hyperuricemia is not only a basic pathology of gout, but has been found that it is intimately related to the development and progress of hypertension, chronic renal disease (CKD), cardiovascular disease, and stroke. This means that hypertension, CKD and cardiovascular disease are caused by the direct effect (pro‐oxidant effect) of urate without going through urate crystal deposition.If the above issues can be indicated as clear evidence by treatment of interventional clinical trials, it can be thought that the treatment strategy for hyperuricemia to prevent organ damage will see substantial progress.
Performance of electrolyte measurements assessed by a trueness verification program
Authors: Ge Menglei , Zhao Haijian , Yan Ying , Zhang Tianjiao , Zeng Jie , Zhou Weiyan , Wang Yufei , Meng Qinghui , Zhang Chuanbao 
Published: March 2016

AbstractIn this study, we analyzed frozen sera with known commutabilities for standardization of serum electrolyte measurements in China.Fresh frozen sera were sent to 187 clinical laboratories in China for measurement of four electrolytes (sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium). Target values were assigned by two reference laboratories. Precision (CV), trueness (bias), and accuracy [total error (TEAbout half of the laboratories used a homogeneous system (same manufacturer for instrument, reagent and calibrator) for calcium and magnesium measurement, and more than 80% of laboratories used a homogeneous system for sodium and potassium measurement. More laboratories met the tolerance limit of imprecision (coefficient of variation [CVThe use of commutable proficiency testing/external quality assessment (PT/EQA) samples with values assigned by reference methods can monitor performance and provide reliable data for improving the performance of laboratory electrolyte measurement. The homogeneous systems were superior to the non homogeneous systems, whereas accuracy of assigned values of calibrators and assay stability remained challenges.
A Memory-Based Learning Approach for Named Entity Recognition in Hindi
Authors: Sarkar Kamal , Shaw Sudhir Kumar 
Published: March 2016

AbstractNamed entity (NE) recognition (NER) is a process to identify and classify atomic elements such as person name, organization name, place/location name, quantities, temporal expressions, and monetary expressions in running text. In this paper, the Hindi NER task has been mapped into a multiclass learning problem, where the classes are NE tags. This paper presents a solution to this Hindi NER problem using a memory-based learning method. A set of simple and composite features, which includes binary, nominal, and string features, has been defined and incorporated into the proposed model. A relatively small Hindi Gazetteer list has also been employed to enhance the system performance. A comparative study on the experimental results obtained by the memory-based NER system proposed in this paper and a hidden Markov model (HMM)-based NER system shows that the performance of the proposed memory-based NER system is comparable to the HMM-based NER system.
A graph theoretical approach to data fusion
Authors: Žurauskienė Justina , Kirk Paul D.W. , Stumpf Michael P.H. 
Published: March 2016

AbstractThe rapid development of high throughput experimental techniques has resulted in a growing diversity of genomic datasets being produced and requiring analysis. Therefore, it is increasingly being recognized that we can gain deeper understanding about underlying biology by combining the insights obtained from multiple, diverse datasets. Thus we propose a novel scalable computational approach to unsupervised data fusion. Our technique exploits network representations of the data to identify similarities among the datasets. We may work within the Bayesian formalism, using Bayesian nonparametric approaches to model each dataset; or (for fast, approximate, and massive scale data fusion) can naturally switch to more heuristic modeling techniques. An advantage of the proposed approach is that each dataset can initially be modeled independently (in parallel), before applying a fast post-processing step to perform data integration. This allows us to incorporate new experimental data in an online fashion, without having to rerun all of the analysis. We first demonstrate the applicability of our tool on artificial data, and then on examples from the literature, which include yeast cell cycle, breast cancer and sporadic inclusion body myositis datasets.
Experience Affects Critical Period Plasticity in the Visual Cortex through an Epigenetic Regulation of Histone Post-Translational Modifications
Authors: Baroncelli Laura , Scali Manuela , Sansevero Gabriele , Olimpico Francesco , Manno Ilaria , Costa Mario , Sale Alessandro 
Published: March 2016

During an early phase of enhanced sensitivity called the critical period (CP), monocular deprivation causes a shift in the response of visual cortex binocular neurons in favor of the nondeprived eye, a process named ocular dominance (OD) plasticity. While the time course of the CP for OD plasticity can be modulated by genetic/pharmacological interventions targeting GABAergic inhibition, whether an increased sensory-motor experience can affect this major plastic phenomenon is not known. We report that exposure to environmental enrichment (EE) accelerated the closure of the CP for OD plasticity in the rat visual cortex. Histone H3 acetylation was developmentally regulated in primary visual cortex, with enhanced levels being detectable early in enriched pups, and chromatin immunoprecipitation revealed an increase at the level of the BDNF P3 promoter. Administration of the histone deacetylase inhibitor SAHA (suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid) to animals reared in a standard cage mimicked the increase in H3 acetylation observed in the visual cortex and resulted in an accelerated decay of OD plasticity. Finally, exposure to EE in adulthood upregulated H3 acetylation and was paralleled by a reopening of the CP. These findings demonstrate a critical involvement of the epigenetic machinery as a mediator of visual cortex developmental plasticity and of the impact of EE on OD plasticity.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTWhile it is known that an epigenetic remodeling of chromatin structure controls developmental plasticity in the visual cortex, three main questions have remained open. Which is the physiological time course of histone modifications? Is it possible, by manipulating the chromatin epigenetic state, to modulate plasticity levels during the critical period? How can we regulate histone acetylation in the adult brain in a noninvasive manner? We show that the early exposure of rat pups to enriching environmental conditions accelerates the critical period for plasticity in the primary visual cortex, linking this effect to increased histone acetylation, specifically at the BDNF gene level. Moreover, we report that the exposure of adult animals to environmental enrichment enhances histone acetylation and reopens juvenile-like plasticity.
Deletion ofVax1from Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone (GnRH) Neurons Abolishes GnRH Expression and Leads to Hypogonadism and Infertility
Authors: Hoffmann Hanne M. , Trang Crystal , Gong Ping , Kimura Ikuo , Pandolfi Erica C. , Mellon Pamela L. 
Published: March 2016

Hypothalamic gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons are at the apex of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis that regulates mammalian fertility. Herein we demonstrate a critical role for the homeodomain transcription factor ventral anterior homeobox 1 (VAX1) in GnRH neuron maturation and show thatVax1deletion from GnRH neurons leads to complete infertility in males and females. Specifically, globalVax1knock-out embryos had normal numbers of GnRH neurons at 13 d of gestation, but no GnRH staining was detected by embryonic day 17. To identify the role of VAX1 specifically in GnRH neuron development,Vax1floxmice were generated and lineage tracing performed inVax1flox/flox:GnRHcre:RosaLacZmice. This identified VAX1 as essential for maintaining expression ofGnrh1. The absence of GnRH staining in adultVax1flox/flox:GnRHcremice led to delayed puberty, hypogonadism, and infertility. To address the mechanism by which VAX1 maintainsGnrh1transcription, the capacity of VAX1 to regulateGnrh1transcription was evaluated in the GnRH cell lines GN11 and GT1-7. As determined by luciferase and electrophoretic mobility shift assays, we found VAX1 to be a direct activator of the GnRH promoter through binding to four ATTA sites in the GnRH enhancer (E1) and proximal promoter (P), and able to compete with the homeoprotein SIX6 for occupation of the identified ATTA sites in the GnRH promoter. We conclude that VAX1 is expressed in GnRH neurons where it is required for GnRH neuron expression of GnRH and maintenance of fertility in mice.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTInfertility classified as idiopathic hypogonadotropic hypogonadism (IHH) is characterized by delayed or absent sexual maturation and low sex steroid levels due to alterations in neuroendocrine control of the hypothalamic-pituitary-gonadal axis. The incidence of IHH is 1–10 cases per 100,000 births. Although extensive efforts have been invested in identifying genes giving rise to IHH, >50% of cases have unknown genetic origins. We recently showed that haploinsufficiency of ventral anterior homeobox 1 (Vax1) leads to subfertility, making it a candidate in polygenic IHH. In this study, we investigate the mechanism by which VAX1 controls fertility finding that VAX1 is required for maintenance ofGnrh1gene expression and deletion ofVax1from GnRH neurons leads to complete infertility.
Propagating Neural Source Revealed by Doppler Shift of Population Spiking Frequency
Authors: Zhang Mingming , Shivacharan Rajat S. , Chiang Chia-Chu , Gonzalez-Reyes Luis E. , Durand Dominique M. 
Published: March 2016

Electrical activity in the brain during normal and abnormal function is associated with propagating waves of various speeds and directions. It is unclear how both fast and slow traveling waves with sometime opposite directions can coexist in the same neural tissue. By recording population spikes simultaneously throughout the unfolded rodent hippocampus with a penetrating microelectrode array, we have shown that fast and slow waves are causally related, so a slowly moving neural source generates fast-propagating waves at ∼0.12 m/s. The source of the fast population spikes is limited in space and moving at ∼0.016 m/s based on both direct and Doppler measurements among 36 different spiking trains among eight different hippocampi. The fact that the source is itself moving can account for the surprising direction reversal of the wave. Therefore, these results indicate that a small neural focus can move and that this phenomenon could explain the apparent wave reflection at tissue edges or multiple foci observed at different locations in neural tissue.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTThe use of novel techniques with an unfolded hippocampus and penetrating microelectrode array to record and analyze neural activity has revealed the existence of a source of neural signals that propagates throughout the hippocampus. The source itself is electrically silent, but its location can be inferred by building isochrone maps of population spikes that the source generates. The movement of the source can also be tracked by observing the Doppler frequency shift of these spikes. These results have general implications for how neural signals are generated and propagated in the hippocampus; moreover, they have important implications for the understanding of seizure generation and foci localization.
Opening Holes in the Blanket of Inhibition: Localized Lateral Disinhibition by VIP Interneurons
Authors: Karnani Mahesh M. , Jackson Jesse , Ayzenshtat Inbal , Hamzehei Sichani Azadeh , Manoocheri Kasra , Kim Samuel , Yuste Rafael 
Published: March 2016

Inhibitory interneurons in the neocortex often connect in a promiscuous and extensive fashion, extending a “blanket of inhibition” on the circuit. This raises the problem of how can excitatory activity propagate in the midst of this widespread inhibition. One solution to this problem could be the vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) interneurons, which disinhibit other interneurons. To explore how VIP interneurons affect the local circuits, we use two-photon optogenetics to activate them individually in mouse visual cortexin vivowhile measuring their output with two-photon calcium imaging. We find that VIP interneurons have narrow axons and inhibit nearby somatostatin interneurons, which themselves inhibit pyramidal cells. Moreover, via this lateral disinhibition, VIP cellsin vivomake local and transient “holes” in the inhibitory blanket extended by SOM cells. VIP interneurons, themselves regulated by neuromodulators, may therefore enable selective patterns of activity to propagate through the cortex, by generating a “spotlight of attention”.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTMost inhibitory interneurons have axons restricted to a nearby area and target excitatory neighbors indiscriminately, raising the issue of how neuronal activity can propagate through cortical circuits. Vasoactive intestinal peptide-expressing interneurons (VIPs) disinhibit cortical pyramidal cells through inhibition of other inhibitory interneurons, and they have very focused, “narrow” axons. By optogenetically activating single VIPs in live mice while recording the activity of nearby neurons, we find that VIPs break open a hole in blanket inhibition with an effective range of ∼120 μm in lateral cortical space where excitatory activity can propagate.