LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
A double-blind randomized crossover study of oral thalidomide versus placebo for androgen dependent prostate cancer treated with intermittent androgen ablation.

PURPOSE
We determined whether thalidomide can prolong progression-free survival in men with biochemically recurrent prostate cancer treated with limited androgen deprivation therapy.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
A total of 159 patients were enrolled in a double-blind randomized trial to determine if thalidomide can improve the efficacy of a gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist in hormone responsive patients with an increasing prostate specific antigen after primary definitive therapy for prostate cancer. Patients were randomized to 6 months of gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist followed by 200 mg per day oral thalidomide or placebo (oral phase A). At the time of prostate specific antigen progression gonadotropin-releasing hormone agonist was restarted for 6 additional months. Patients were then crossed over to the opposite drug and were treated until prostate specific antigen progression (oral phase B). Testosterone and dihydroxytestosterone were likewise monitored throughout the study.


RESULTS
During oral phase A the median time to prostate specific antigen progression was 15 months for the thalidomide group compared to 9.6 months on placebo (p = 0.21). The median time to prostate specific antigen progression during oral phase B for the thalidomide group was 17.1 vs 6.6 months on placebo (p = 0.0002). No differences in time to serum testosterone normalization between the thalidomide and placebo arms were documented during oral phase A and oral phase B. Thalidomide was tolerable although dose reductions occurred in 47% (58 of 124) of patients.


CONCLUSIONS
Despite thalidomide having no effect on testosterone normalization, there was a clear effect on prostate specific antigen progression during oral phase B. This is the first study to our knowledge to demonstrate the effects of thalidomide using intermittent hormonal therapy.
Hilbert Transform-Based Bearing Failure Detection in DFIG-Based Wind Turbines

Cost-effective, predictive and proactive maintenance of wind turbines assumes more importance with the increasing number of installed wind farms in more remote location (offshore). A well-known method for assessing impeding problems is to use current sensors installed within the wind turbine generator. This paper describes then an approach based on the generator stator current data collection and attempts to highlight the use of the Hilbert transform for failure detection in a doubly-fed induction generator-based. Indeed, this generator is commonly used in modern variable-speed wind turbines. The proposed failure detection technique has been validated experimentally regarding bearing failures. Indeed, a large fraction of wind turbine downtime is due to bearing failures, particularly in the generator and gearbox. Copyright © 2011 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. All rights reserved.
Development of a MALDI MS‐based platform for early detection of acute kidney injury

PURPOSE
Septic acute kidney injury (AKI) is associated with poor outcome. This can partly be attributed to delayed diagnosis and incomplete understanding of the underlying pathophysiology. Our aim was to develop an early predictive test for AKI based on the analysis of urinary peptide biomarkers by MALDI-MS.


EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
Urine samples from 95 patients with sepsis were analyzed by MALDI-MS. Marker search and multimarker model establishment were performed using the peptide profiles from 17 patients with existing or within the next 5 days developing AKI and 17 with no change in renal function. Replicates of urine sample pools from the AKI and non-AKI patient groups and normal controls were also included to select the analytically most robust AKI markers.


RESULTS
Thirty-nine urinary peptides were selected by cross-validated variable selection to generate a support vector machine multidimensional AKI classifier. Prognostic performance of the AKI classifier on an independent validation set including the remaining 61 patients of the study population (17 controls and 44 cases) was good with an area under the receiver operating characteristics curve of 0.82 and a sensitivity and specificity of 86% and 76%, respectively.


CONCLUSION AND CLINICAL RELEVANCE
A urinary peptide marker model detects onset of AKI with acceptable accuracy in septic patients. Such a platform can eventually be transferred to the clinic as fast MALDI-MS test format.
Price-Directed Replenishment of Subsets: Methodology and Its Application to Inventory Routing

The idea of price-directed control is to use an operating policy that exploits optimal dual prices from a mathematical programming relaxation of the underlying control problem. We apply it to the problem of replenishing inventory to subsets of products/locations, such as in the distribution of industrial gases, so as to minimize long-run time average replenishment costs. Given a marginal value for each product/location, whenever there is a stockout the dispatcher compares the total value of each feasible replenishment with its cost, and chooses one that maximizes the surplus. We derive this operating policy using a linear functional approximation to the optimal value function of a semi-Markov decision process on continuous spaces. This approximation also leads to a math program whose optimal dual prices yield values and whose optimal objective value gives a lower bound on system performance. We use duality theory to show that optimal prices satisfy several structural properties and can be interpreted as estimates of lowest achievable marginal costs. On real-world instances, the price-directed policy achieves superior, near optimal performance as compared with other approaches. (Inventory Routing; Approximate Dynamic Programming; Price-Directed Operations; Semi-Markov Decision Processes)
Regression and Kriging metamodels with their experimental designs in simulation: A review

This article reviews the design and analysis of simulation experiments. It focusses on analysis via either low-order polynomial regression or Kriging (also known as Gaussian process) metamodels. The type of metamodel determines the design of the experiment, which determines the input combinations of the simulation experiment. For example, a first-order polynomial metamodel requires a "resolution-III" design, whereas Kriging may use Latin hypercube sampling. Polynomials of first or second order require resolution III, IV, V, or "central composite" designs. Before applying either regression or Kriging, sequential bifurcation may be applied to screen a great many inputs. Optimization of the simulated system may use either a sequence of low-order polynomials known as response surface methodology (RSM) or Kriging models fitted through sequential designs including effi cient global optimization (EGO). The review includes robust optimization, which accounts for uncertain simulation inputs.
Joint message-passing decoding of LDPC Codes and partial-response channels

The following is a clarification of the above paper [1]. The terms Rpn(j) = P [xn = jjrp] andQnp(j) = P [xn = j] should be explicitly defined as functions of j; j 2 f0; 1g. Let the partial response channel’s output alphabet be the set I , and letj nn p+ 0 be a vector of binary inputs to the channel (j0; . . . ; j ) except forjn p+ , and let Jn; p; be the set of all such binary inputs. Then the derivation of [1, eq. (1), p. 1412] should be Rpn(j) = P [xn = jjrp] =
Performance evaluation of CS/CB for coordinated multipoint transmission in LTE-A downlink

Coordinated multipoint (CoMP) processing is a key enabling technique in Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) to improve the system spectral efficiency. Among the CoMP processing schemes, while joint transmission (JT) from multiple coordinated eNBs has high computing complexity due to the data sharing, coordinated scheduling/coordinated beamforming (CS/CB) lowers the backhaul requirement. In this paper, based on the modified signal-to-leakage-and-noise ratio (M-SLNR), a transmit precoding algorithm is proposed for CS/CB. The performance of this algorithm is evaluated through system level simulations under imperfect CSI scenario. As illustrated by the simulation results, the proposed algorithm is capable of significantly improving the spectral efficiency of CS/CB than that of single cell multiuser multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO), upon suppressing the dominant leakage interference using as few spatial resources as possible. Specifically, intra-site CoMP and inter-site CoMP employing the proposed algorithm have a spectral efficiency gain of 13% and 20%, respectively, compared with single cell MU-MIMO.
Efficient Circular Thresholding

Otsu's algorithm for thresholding images is widely used, and the computational complexity of determining the threshold from the histogram is O(N) where N is the number of histogram bins. When the algorithm is adapted to circular rather than linear histograms then two thresholds are required for binary thresholding. We show that, surprisingly, it is still possible to determine the optimal threshold in O(N) time. The efficient optimal algorithm is over 300 times faster than traditional approaches for typical histograms and is thus particularly suitable for real-time applications. We further demonstrate the usefulness of circular thresholding using the adapted Otsu criterion for various applications, including analysis of optical flow data, indoor/outdoor image classification, and non-photorealistic rendering. In particular, by combining circular Otsu feature with other colour/texture features, a 96.9% correct rate is obtained for indoor/outdoor classification on the well known IITM-SCID2 data set, outperforming the state-of-the-art result by 4.3%.
Clinical efficacy of acute respiratory viral infections prevention in patients with chronic heart failure.

AIM
The aim of the study was to evaluate the ARVI prevention effectiveness in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF) using interferon inducer amixin.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
Conducted a comprehensive survey, dynamic monitoring and treatment of 60 patients aged from 49 to 70 years (mean age 60.25±4.57 years, 17 men and 43 women) with CHF with preserved ejection fraction of left ventricle (LVEF) (≥50%), II-III functional class (FC) according to the classification of new York Heart Association (NYHA), which developed as a result of coronary heart disease (CHD), hypertensive disease (HD). Of these, 30 patients (group 1) on the background of standard therapy for CHF received for the prevention of ARVI tiloron (Amixin) at a dose of 125 mg once a week for 6 weeks, two courses for 1 year. Group 2 patients received only standard therapy for CHF.


RESULTS
A decrease in the frequency of ARVI in patients with CHF treated with Amixin was found, which was accompanied by a decrease in the severity of subclinical inflammation by reducing the production of proinflammatory (IL-1β) and increasing the production of anti-inflammatory (IL-10) cytokines, reducing neurohumoral activation (reducing levels of aldosterone and Nt-proBNP), increasing the level of α- and γ-interferon. The positive dynamics of biomarkers of systemic inflammation and neurohormonal activation explains the improvement of the clinical course in patients with CHF (increase of tolerance to physical loads, reducing the number of visits to General practitioner and hospital admissions in the hospital during 12 months of observation).


CONCLUSION
A promising approach to the prevention of SARS in patients with CHF is course therapy with Amixin (2 times a year before the seasonal rising in the incidence of respiratory viral infections and influenza), which allows to achieve both decreasing in the frequency of SARS per year, and improvement the clinical course of CHF.
Postnatal Lactate as an Early Predictor of Short-Term Outcome after Intrapartum Asphyxia

OBJECTIVES: To compare the predictive value of pH, base deficit and lactate for the occurrence of moderate-to-severe hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE) and systemic complications of asphyxia in term infants with intrapartum asphyxia.STUDY DESIGN: We retrospectively reviewed the records of 61 full-term neonates (≥37 weeks gestation) suspected of having suffered from a significant degree of intrapartum asphyxia from a period of January 1997 to December 2001.The clinical signs of HIE, if any, were categorized using Sarnat and Sarnat classification as mild (stage 1), moderate (stage 2) or severe (stage 3). Base deficit, pH and plasma lactate levels were measured from indwelling arterial catheters within 1 hour after birth and thereafter alongwith every blood gas measurement. The results were correlated with the subsequent presence or absence of moderate-to-severe HIE by computing receiver operating characteristic curves.RESULTS: The initial lactate levels were significantly higher (p=0.001) in neonates with moderate-to-severe HIE (mean±SD=11.09±4.6) as compared to those with mild or no HIE (mean±SD=7.1±4.7). Also, the lactate levels took longer to normalize in these babies. A plasma lactate concentration >7.5±mmol/l was associated with moderate-or-severe HIE with a sensitivity of 94% and specificity of 67%. The sensitivity and negative predictive value of lactate was greater than that of the pH or base deficit.CONCLUSIONS: The highest recorded lactate level in the first hour of life and serial measurements of lactate are important predictors of moderate-to-severe HIE.
Preschool children’s use of cues to generic meaning

Sentences that refer to categories - generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs are friendly") - are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues. The first three experiments tested whether 3- and 4-year-olds use (a) the immediate linguistic context, (b) their previous knowledge, and (c) the social context to determine whether an utterance with ambiguous scope (e.g., "They are afraid of mice", spoken while pointing to 2 birds) is generic. Four-year-olds were able to take advantage of all the cues provided, but 3-year-olds were sensitive only to the first two. In Experiment 4, we tested the relative strength of linguistic-context cues and previous-knowledge cues by putting them in conflict; in this task, 4-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, preferred to base their interpretations on the explicit noun phrase cues from the linguistic context. These studies indicate that, from early on, children can use contextual and semantic information to construe sentences as generic, thus taking advantage of the category knowledge conveyed in these sentences.
The spectrum of Castleman's disease: mimics, radiologic pathologic correlation and role of imaging in patient management.

Castleman's disease (CD) is a rare benign lymphoid disorder with variable clinical course. The two principal histologic subtypes of CD are hyaline-vascular and plasma cell variants and the major clinicoradiological entities are unicentric and multicentric CD. Management of CD is tailored to clinicoradiologic subtype. In this review, we describe the CT, MR and PET/CT findings in Castleman's disease which can help suggest a diagnosis of CD as well as emphasize role of imaging in management of patients with CD.
TURNING PARAMETERS OPTIMIZATION FOR SURFACE ROUGHNESS BY TAGUCHI METHOD

In the present study an attempt has been made to investigate the effect of cutting parameters (cutting speed, feed rate, and depth of cut) on surface roughness in a turning operation of cast iron. Experiments have been conducted using Taguchi’s experimental design technique. An orthogonal array, the signal to noise ratio, and the analysis of variance are employed to investigate the cutting characteristics of cast iron using carbide tool. Optimum cutting parameters for minimizing surface roughness were determined. Experimental results reveal that among the cutting parameters, the cutting speed is most significant machining parameter for surface roughness followed by feed rate and depth of cut in the specified test range.
Maternal BMI, parity, and pregnancy weight gain: influences on offspring adiposity in young adulthood.

CONTEXT
The prevalence of obesity among women of childbearing age is increasing. Emerging evidence suggests that this has long-term adverse influences on offspring health.


OBJECTIVE
The aim was to examine whether maternal body composition and gestational weight gain have persisting effects on offspring adiposity in early adulthood.


DESIGN AND SETTING
The Motherwell birth cohort study was conducted in a general community in Scotland, United Kingdom.


PARTICIPANTS
We studied 276 men and women whose mothers' nutritional status had been characterized in pregnancy. Four-site skinfold thicknesses, waist circumference, and body mass index (BMI), were measured at age 30 yr; sex-adjusted percentage body fat and fat mass index were calculated.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE
Indices of offspring adiposity at age 30 yr were measured.


RESULTS
Percentage body fat was greater in offspring of mothers with a higher BMI at the first antenatal visit (rising by 0.35%/kg/m2; P<0.001) and in offspring whose mothers were primiparous (difference, 1.5% in primiparous vs. multiparous; P=0.03). Higher offspring percentage body fat was also independently associated with higher pregnancy weight gain (7.4%/kg/wk; P=0.002). There were similar significant associations of increased maternal BMI, greater pregnancy weight gain, and parity with greater offspring waist circumference, BMI, and fat mass index.


CONCLUSIONS
Adiposity in early adulthood is influenced by prenatal influences independently of current lifestyle factors. Maternal adiposity, greater gestational weight, and parity all impact on offspring adiposity. Strategies to reduce the impact of maternal obesity and greater pregnancy weight gain on offspring future health are required.
Time-progressive mantle-melt evolution and magma production in a Tethyan marginal sea: A case study of the Albanide-Hellenide ophiolites

We present a comprehensive overview of the melt evolution of the upper mantle peridotites and different lava types occurring in the Jurassic Albanide-Hellenide ophiolites, based on new and extant geochemical data and trace element modeling. Peridotites consist of lherzolites and harzburgites that are variably depleted, and show increasing light rare earth element (LREE) enrichment with increasing whole-rock depletion. The spatial-temporal relationships of volcanic rocks indicate four discrete types with progressively younging ages: (1) normal midoceanic ridge basalts (N-MORBs); (2) medium-Ti basalts (MTBs); (3) island arc tholeiitic (IAT) basalts; (4) boninitic rocks. Our REE modeling reveals the following results. (1) Moderately depleted lherzolites represent N-MORB mantle residua produced by 10%–20% partial melting of a depleted MORB mantle source. Melt extraction formed N-MORB lavas. (2) Residual lherzolite underwent 5%–8% partial melting without any subduction influence, producing MTB magmas. (3) Following subduction initiation, these refractory lherzolites were enriched in LREEs by subduction-derived fluids. Their partial melting (~10%–20%) generated IAT magmas. (4) With continued subduction, the highly depleted residual mantle left after the previous melting events underwent significant LREE enrichment and high degree (15%–25%) partial melting, producing the youngest, boninitic rocks. The residual mantle after boninitic melt extraction is represented by extremely refractory harzburgites. This progressive melt evolution of the upper mantle peridotites and volcanic rock types is compatible with that of the subduction initiation–related magmatism and mantle dynamics in the Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc-trench rollback system, and indicates a time-progressive mantle-melt evolution in the upper plate of the Tethyan subduction system. LITHOSPHERE; v. 10; no. 1; p. 35–53; GSA Data Repository Item 2017330 | Published online 14 September 2017 https://doi.org/10.1130/L602.1
Organizational Culture What is Organizational Culture ?

1. Artifacts: These are visible components of culture, they are easy to formulate, have some physical shape, yet its perception varies from one individual to another. 1. Rituals and ceremonies: New hire trainings, new hire welcome lunches, annual corporate conferences, awards, offsite meetings and trainings are few examples of most common rituals and ceremonies. 2. Symbols & Slogans: These are high level abstraction of the culture; they effectively summarize organization’s intrinsic behavior. Symbols are rituals, awards or incentives that symbolize preferred behavior; “employee of the month” is one such example of a symbol. Slogans are linguistic phrases that are intended for the same reason, “customer first” is an example of corporate slogan. 3. Stories: These are narratives based on true events, but often exaggerated as it told from old to new employees. The stories of the organization’s founders or other dominant leaders are the most common ones, the challenges they had faced and how they dealt with those hurdles etc. In some form, these are stories of the organization’s heroes, employees relate the current system due to events that had happened in the past and stories are the medium that carries the legacies.
Revisiting IS business value research: what we already know, what we still need to know, and how we can get there

Received: 24 September 2009 Revised: 22 March 2010 2nd Revision: 6 December 2010 3rd Revision: 29 July 2011 4th Revision: 5 February 2012 5th Revision: 24 April 2012 6th Revision: 10 June 2012 Accepted: 29 August 2012 Abstract The business value of investments in Information Systems (IS) has been, and is predicted to remain, one of the major research topics for IS researchers. While the vast majority of research papers on IS business value find empirical evidence in favour of both the operational and strategic relevance of IS, the fundamental question of the causal relationship between IS investments and business value remains partly unexplained. Three research tasks are essential requisites on the path towards addressing this epistemological question: the synthesis of existing knowledge, the identification of a lack of knowledge and the proposition of paths for closing the knowledge gaps. This paper considers each of these tasks. Research findings include that correlations between IS investments and productivity vary widely among companies and that the mismeasurement of IS investment impact may be rooted in delayed effects. Key limitations of current research are based on the ambiguity and fuzziness of IS business value, the neglected disaggregation of IS investments, and the unexplained process of creating internal and competitive value. Addressing the limitations we suggest research paths, such as the identification of synergy opportunities of IS assets, and the explanation of relationships between IS innovation and change in IS capabilities. European Journal of Information Systems (2013) 22, 139–169. doi:10.1057/ejis.2012.45; published online 13 November 2012
The effect of acid accumulation in power-transformer oil on the aging rate of paper insulation

In this article we explain how acids are formed in the oil and in paper insulation and their involvement in paper degradation. The acidity of the oil reached at the end of a number of paper-aging experiments is reported, and relationships between it and temperature, moisture, oxygen, degree of polymerization (DP), and aging time are presented.