nils-herrmann/clean_scirepeval huggingface dataset:
The European Medicines Agency's scientific opinion on oral fexinidazole for human African trypanosomiasis
Venue: PLoS neglected tropical diseases
Year: 2019

1 Office of Anti infectives and Vaccines, Human Medicines Evaluation Division, European Medicines Agency (EMA) Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2 International Affairs Division, European Medicines Agency (EMA) Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 3 Clinical Pharmacology Unit, University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 4 Uganda National Drug Authority, Kampala, Uganda, 5 Medicines Evaluation Department, National Authority of Medicines and Health Products (INFARMED) Lisbon, Portugal, 6 Licensing Division, Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) London, United Kingdom
Nucleation in Sheared Granular Matter.
Venue: Physical review letters
Year: 2018

We present an experiment on crystallization of packings of macroscopic granular spheres. This system is often considered to be a model for thermally driven atomic or colloidal systems. Cyclically shearing a packing of frictional spheres, we observe a first order phase transition from a disordered to an ordered state. The ordered state consists of crystallites of mixed fcc and hcp symmetry that coexist with the amorphous bulk. The transition, initiated by homogeneous nucleation, overcomes a barrier at 64.5% volume fraction. Nucleation consists predominantly of the dissolving of small nuclei and the growth of nuclei that have reached a critical size of about ten spheres.
Dysbiosis and zonulin upregulation alter gut epithelial and vascular barriers in patients with ankylosing spondylitis
Venue: Annals of the rheumatic diseases
Year: 2017

Dysbiosis has been recently demonstrated in patients with ankylosing spondylitis (AS) but its implications in the modulation of intestinal immune responses have never been studied. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of ileal bacteria in modulating local and systemic immune responses in AS.  Ileal biopsies were obtained from 50 HLA B27+ patients with AS and 20 normal subjects. Silver stain was used to visualise bacteria. Ileal expression of tight and adherens junction proteins was investigated by TaqMan real time (RT) PCR and immunohistochemistry. Serum levels of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) LPS binding protein (LPS BP) intestinal fatty acid BP (iFABP) and zonulin were assayed by ELISA. Monocyte immunological functions were studied in in vitro experiments. In addition the effects of antibiotics on tight junctions in human leukocyte antigen (HLA) B27 transgenic (TG) rats were assessed.  Adherent and invasive bacteria were observed in the gut of patients with AS with the bacterial scores significantly correlated with gut inflammation. Impairment of the gut vascular barrier (GVB) was also present in AS, accompanied by significant upregulation of zonulin, and associated with high serum levels of LPS, LPS BP, iFABP and zonulin. In in vitro studies zonulin altered endothelial tight junctions while its epithelial release was modulated by isolated AS ileal bacteria. AS circulating monocytes displayed an anergic phenotype partially restored by ex vivo stimulation with LPS+sCD14 and their stimulation with recombinant zonulin induced a clear M2 phenotype. Antibiotics restored tight junction function in HLA B27 TG rats.  Bacterial ileitis, increased zonulin expression and damaged intestinal mucosal barrier and GVB, characterises the gut of patients with AS and are associated with increased blood levels of zonulin, and bacterial products. Bacterial products and zonulin influence monocyte behaviour.
Action selection in growing state spaces: Control of Network Structure Growth
Venue: ArXiv
Year: 2016

The dynamical processes taking place on a network depend on its topology. Influencing the growth process of a network therefore has important implications on such dynamical processes. We formulate the problem of influencing the growth of a network as a stochastic optimal control problem in which a structural cost function penalizes undesired topologies. We approximate this control problem with a restricted class of control problems that can be solved using probabilistic inference methods. To deal with the increasing problem dimensionality, we introduce an adaptive importance sampling method for approximating the optimal control. We illustrate this methodology in the context of formation of information cascades, considering the task of influencing the structure of a growing conversation thread, as in Internet forums. Using a realistic model of growing trees, we show that our approach can yield conversation threads with better structural properties than the ones observed without control.
Etude de phase II randomisee non comparative de l'anti PD L1 atezolizumab versus chimiotherapie comme traitement de deuxieme ligne chez les patients atteints d'un cancer du poumon a petites cellules (CBPC) resultats de l'essai IFCT 1603
Year: 2019

Cet essai randomise de phase II visait a evaluer l'activite de l'anticorps PD L1 atezolizumab (ATZ) comme traitement systemique du cancer du poumon a petites cellules (CPC) progressant apres une chimiotherapie associant un sel de platine et l'etoposide (CT) Methodes Les patients (pts) ont ete randomises 2 :1 pour recevoir l'ATZ, 1200 mg IV, toutes les 3 semaines jusqu'a progression ou toxicite inacceptable ou une chimiotherapie conventionnelle jusqu'a un maximum de 6 cycles soit en topotecan oral ou IV, soit en une reinduction par carboplatine etoposide. Les principaux criteres d'eligibilite etaient un indice de performance (PS) 0 2 et une maladie mesurable selon RECIST 1.1. Nous n'avons pas effectue de selection sur l'expression tissulaire PD L1. Les patients recevant une corticotherapie, les patients ayant des antecedents de maladie auto immune et ceux presentant des metastases cerebrales ont ete exclus. Le critere d'evaluation principal etait le taux de reponse objective a 6 semaines (confirmation requise a 12 semaines) Resultats Soixante treize patients ont ete randomises (ATZ n 49 CT n 24) entre 03/2017 et 12/2017. Un patient du groupe ATZ n'a recu aucun traitement. Dans le groupe ATZ, 83,7 des patients avaient une PS 0 1, 79,6 avaient une maladie etendue et 67,3 avaient une rechute sensible (progression apres 90 jours depuis la derniere dose de chimiotherapie de premiere ligne) A six semaines, parmi les pts eligibles du groupe ATZ (n 43) une reponse objective etait observee chez un patient (2,3 IC [0,0 6,8] et 8 autres patients avaient une maladie stable (18,6 IC [7,0 30,2] Parmi les patients eligibles du groupe CT (n 21) 9,5 d'entre eux ont obtenu une reponse objective et 52,4 avaient une maladie stable. La survie sans progression etait de 1,4 mois, IC [1,2 1,5] dans le groupe ATZ et 4,2 mois IC, [1,5 5,9] dans le groupe CT. Au moment de soumettre ce resume, 3 patients beneficient toujours du traitement dans le groupe ATZ et aucun dans le groupe CT. Deux patients (4,2 du groupe ATZ ont presente une fatigue qualifiee d'evenement indesirable de grade 3 ou 4. Deux patients dans ce meme groupe ont developpe une dysthyroidie de grade 1. Sur 53 cas pour lesquels du tissu tumoral etait disponible, un seul (2 avait une immunohistochimie positive pour le PD L1.  L'etude clinique IFCT 1603 n'a montre aucun signal d'efficacite de l'atezolizumab comme monotherapie de deuxieme ligne chez les patients atteints d'un CBPC.
Musica y movimiento
Year: 2008

La musica forma parte de nuestras vidas desde que nacemos. La musica ha jugado y juega un papel importante en nuestro desarrollo sociocultural e incluso, para algunos investigadores, la percepcion de patrones sonoros ritmicos podria influir en la adquisicion del lenguaje (Jusczyk, 1999) Detras de esta habilidad para percibir y producir musica existen una serie de procesos complejos que los investigadores estan logrando desentranar en los ultimos anos (ver Koelsch y Siebel, 2005, para una revision) En el campo de la cognicion musical, la mayoria de los estudios tanto comportamentales como neurocientificos se centran en el sistema auditivo (cortex auditivo) y su capacidad para percibir los tonos y ritmos que conforman los estimulos musicales. Sin embargo, no podemos olvidar un aspecto crucial en la musica: el movimiento. Es indudable que la musica y el movimiento han ido de la mano desde tiempos inmemoriales. Como citan Phillips Silver y Trainor (2007) la costumbre de escuchar musica en actitud pasiva es una tradicion reciente surgida en el mundo occidental. En otras culturas la musica no se entiende sin el movimiento. De esta forma, tal y como queremos enfatizar en este articulo, la musica es una experiencia multisensorial, ya que no solo implica el sentido del oido, sino tambien el de nuestro propio movimiento (propiocepcion) y el del equilibrio (sistema vestibular) El estudio de la percepcion multisensorial nos ensena que la informacion que llega a traves de nuestros sentidos interactua y se integra en el cerebro. Asi, sabemos que la informacion visual puede influir
CEO CFO Educational Ties and Mergers and Acquisitions
Year: 2019

This paper analyzes the social connections between a firm's chief executive officer (CEO) and its chief financial officer (CFO) We focus on French educational networks and examine the corporate governance and performance of firms whose CEO and CFO attended the same elite college (Grande ecole) Given the strong involvement of CEOs and CFOs in the takeover process, we investigate acquisition policies and observe that strong social ties within the top management team are associated with higher acquisitiveness and lower returns for bidder shareholders. These results are consistent with excessive managerial homogeneity reducing CEO monitoring and reinforcing decisional biases such as overconfidence. We find that CEOs are more likely to choose socially connected CFOs when CEOs are more powerful and are employed at firms with lower board monitoring. We also show that CEOs are less likely to be fired when the firms' CFOs are drawn from the same network. These results suggest that social connections within executive committees come at the cost of CEO entrenchment and corporate governance failures.
Advanced Topics in Information Dynamics
Year: 2010

This work is sequel to the book "A Treatise in Information Geometry" submitted to vixra in late 2009. The aim of this dissertation is to continue the development of fractal geometry initiated in the former volume. This culminates in the construction of first order self referential geometry, which is a special form of 8 tensor construction on a differential manifold with nice properties. The associated information theory has many powerful and interesting consequences. Additionally within this treatise, various themes in modern mathematics are surveyed Galois theory, Category theory, K theory, and Sieve theory, and various connections between these structures and information theory investigated. In particular it is demonstrated that the exotic geometric analogues of these constructions save for Category theory, which is foundational form special cases of the self referential calculus.
Perspectives of online trust and similar constructs: a conceptual clarification
Venue: ICEC '06
Year: 2006

In order to make progress in a scientific field, scholars need to find a consistent terminology to be able to adequately test their hypotheses, to communicate their results among each other and to build on each others findings. In this paper we address current conceptual problems in online trust research. We provide a conceptual investigation of online trust as an important contribution to the development of research on trust in electronic commerce. A framework is proposed for conceptualizing online trust that facilitates an integration of different trust definitions. Furthermore the relationships between trust and similar but distinct concepts such as confidence, hope, faith, reliance, familiarity or distrust, are analyzed. Finally several implications for the design of empirical studies on online trust are presented and some promising avenues for future research are made out.
The Artist as Soldier: Howard Cook's Self Portrait in a Foxhole
Year: 2020

In the summer of 1943, Taos artist Howard Cook (1901 1980) traveled to the South Pacific to serve as a correspondent in the U.S. Army's short lived War Art Unit. During his assignment, Cook produced hundreds of sketches documenting the daily lives of Allied soldiers working there; yet, one group stands out for its subject matter: the artist himself. Collectively titled Self Portrait in a Foxhole, these works depict Cook taking shelter during an air raid and, together with his writings, offer an invaluable perspective into his interpretation of war through art. This essay explores Cook's wartime oeuvre by examining the Self Portrait group's depiction of vulnerability. Through an expressionistic use of ink and paint and a compositional emphasis on his passivity, Cook offers a personalized interpretation of combat conditions that underscores his sense of exposure. Although his self representation initially appears distinct from the more assertive soldiers in his other sketches, when viewed together, they collectively demonstrate Cook's efforts to record a nuanced impression of the war, reflecting a broader tradition of exploring war's deleterious effects on soldiers. More broadly, Cook's oeuvre highlights the significance of the War Art Unit and the potential for more scholarship on this initiative.
Parenting styles and their impact on children's academic self concept, behavioural problems and executive functions
Year: 2018

Parental styles have a significant impact on children's developmental outcomes. It could be argued that negative parenting characteristics, including strictness, neglect, control, punishment, and lack of support potentially impact child academic self concept, behavioural problems as well as child's cognitive abilities. The current thesis examines this question in Kurdish primary school children. This thesis comprises 6 chapters: Chapter 1 and 2 consist of an introduction and literature review about the topic. Chapter 3 reports study 1 which examines parenting styles and their relationship with academic self concept and behavioural problems. This chapter also considers whether academic self concept serves as a mediator in the relationship between parenting styles and behavioural problems. In support of previous studies, results indicate a vital role of parenting styles on children's academic self concept and behavioural problems among Kurdish children. The results also indicate that academic self concept serves as a significant mediator in the relationship between parenting styles with prosocial behaviour and internalising problems. Chapter 4 reports study 2, which is an intervention study. This study tests the impact of Systematic Training for Effective Parenting (STEP) programme to improve parenting styles and decrease parental stress. After three months a follow up study was carried out in order to examine the effectiveness of the STEP programme. It was found that the intervention was effective in promoting parenting styles and reducing the level of parental stress in Kurdish mothers. The follow up study showed that the changes were sustained over a three months period. However, contrary to expectation, no significant statistical differences were found in academic self concept and behavioural problems between children whose mothers attended STEP and others whose mothers did not attend. Chapter 5 reports study 3 in which the individual differences in executive functions based on the parental monitoring and hyperactivity expressed by children was investigated. Additionally, a moderating role of parental monitoring in the relationship between children's executive function and hyperactivity was performed in this study. Results indicated that children subjected to poor parental monitoring and showing a high level of hyperactivity had difficulties in inhibitory control, accuracy, processing speed and task persistence compared with the matched sample. PROCESS analysis indicated a significant moderating role of parental monitoring in the association between accuracy, verbal inhibition and task persistence with hyperactivity. The last chapter, Chapter 6, summarizes the findings of the empirical studies and provides the discussion, conclusion, limitations, implications and suggestions for future research.
Answering ComplexQuestions by Joining Multi Document Evidence withQuasi Knowledge Graphs
Year: 2019

Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on the fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding trainingdata bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state of the art baselines.
The Effect of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) on Firm Performance: Evidence from the Diversified Industry of Sri Lanka
Year: 2018

The objective of this empirical study is to explore the effect of the adoption of ERM on the performance of the diversified industry of Sri Lanka. The extent of the adoption of ERM is assessed based on eight ERM functions recognized by the ERM integrated framework of the committee of sponsoring organization of the Treadway Commission and use return on equity as a proxy to measure firm performance. This study finds ERM supportive internal environment, risk aligned objective setting, event identifications, and risk response have a positive impact on firm performance. However, none of those impacts were statistically significant. Surprisingly, empirical evidence reveals that risk assessment and control activities have a negative impact on the firm performance. Information communication and monitoring functions indicate a significant impact on firm performance. Nevertheless, monitoring function shows a negative impact on the firm performance. The researcher believes this negative impact is attributable to the increased cost of monitoring activities that is crucial for a diversified business setup. This empirical evidence induces the researcher to conclude that, except for communication and monitoring, the adoption of ERM has no significant impact on the firm performance. These findings are contradictory with the findings of prior researchers.
Vaccines for Staphylococcus aureus and Target Populations.
Venue: Current topics in microbiology and immunology
Year: 2017

Staphylococcus aureus is a leading pathogen in surgical site, intensive care unit, and skin infections, as well as healthcare associated pneumonias. These infections are associated with an enormous burden of morbidity, mortality, and increase of hospital length of stay and patient cost. S. aureus is impressively fast in acquiring antibiotic resistance, and multidrug resistant strains are a serious threat to human health. Due to resistance or insufficient effectiveness, antibiotics and bundle measures leave a tremendous unmet medical need worldwide. There are no licensed vaccines on the market despite the significant efforts done by public and private initiatives. Indeed, vaccines tested in clinical trials in the last two decades have failed to show efficacy. However, they targeted single antigens and contained no adjuvants and efficacy trials were performed in severely ill subjects. Herein, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of potential target populations for efficacy trials taking into account key factors such as population size, incidence of S. aureus infection, disease outcome, primary endpoints, as well as practical advantages and disadvantages. We describe the whole blood assay as a potential surrogate of protection, and we show the link between phase III clinical trial data of failed vaccines with their preclinical observations. Finally, we give our perspective on how new vaccine formulations and clinical development approaches may lead to successful S. aureus vaccines.
The Effects of Vegetarian and Vegan Diet during Pregnancy on the Health of Mothers and Offspring
Venue: Nutrients
Year: 2019

Vegetarian and vegan diets have increased worldwide in the last decades, according to the knowledge that they might prevent coronary heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. Althought plant based diets are at risk of nutritional deficiencies such as proteins, iron, vitamin D, calcium, iodine, omega 3, and vitamin B12, the available evidence shows that well planned vegetarian and vegan diets may be considered safe during pregnancy and lactation, but they require a strong awareness for a balanced intake of key nutrients. A review of the scientific literature in this field was performed, focusing specifically on observational studies in humans, in order to investigate protective effects elicited by maternal diets enriched in plant derived foods and possible unfavorable outcomes related to micronutrients deficiencies and their impact on fetal development. A design of pregestational nutrition intervention is required in order to avoid maternal undernutrition and consequent impaired fetal growth.
Phragmites australis meets Suaeda salsa on the "red beach" Effects of an ecosystem engineer on salt marsh litter decomposition.
Venue: The Science of the total environment
Year: 2019

Suaeda salsa is a pioneer species in coastal wetlands of East Asia and recently an ecosystem engineer species, Phragmites australis, has started to enter into S. salsa communities owing to either autogenic or external drivers. The consequences of this phenomenon on the ecosystem functions of coastal wetlands are still unclear, especially for decomposition processes. Here we compared the decomposition rate of S. salsa litter, and associated litter chemistry dynamics, between sites with and without P. australis encroachment. We conducted a litter transplantation experiment to tease apart the effects of litter quality and decomposing environment or decomposer community composition. Our results showed that P. australis encroachment led to higher carbon and phosphorus losses of S. salsa litter, but equal losses of total mass, lignin, hemicellulose and nitrogen. Phragmites australis encroachment might affect decomposition rate indirectly by making S. salsa produce litter with higher lignin concentrations or via increasing the fungal diversity for decomposition. Moreover, P. australis as an ecosystem engineer might also alter the allocation of total phosphorus between the plants and the soils in coastal wetlands. Our findings indicate that P. australis could impact aboveground and belowground carbon and nutrient dynamics in coastal wetlands, and highlight the important consequences that encroaching plant species, especially ecosystem engineers, can have on ecosystem functions and services of coastal wetlands, not only in East Asia but probably also elsewhere in the world.