Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Three‐Dimensional Model to Study the Epigenetic Effects Induced by the Microenvironment of Human Embryonic Stem Cells

New methods of study are necessary to define the homeostatic mechanisms that regulate stem cell properties and to determine the possible epigenetic influence of the stem cell microenvironment on the phenotype of tumor cells. We recently demonstrated that the tumorgenicity of aggressive cutaneous melanoma cells can be abrogated by the zebrafish embryonic microenvironment. We have developed a three‐dimensional (3D) model, as a corollary of these findings, that allows melanoma cells to be exposed to the microenvironment of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). Using this methodology, we determined that hESC microenvironments can dramatically influence the behavior of aggressive melanoma cells. Specifically, exposure of tumor cells to H1‐ or HSF‐6‐hESC matrices induced a melanocyte‐like phenotype with the ability to form colonies similar to hESCs. Furthermore, melanoma cells were less invasive after culture on hESC microenvironments. These findings demonstrate the utility of this 3D model for studying the unique factors deposited by hESCs and for investigating the epigenetic effects that stem cell microenvironments may have on tumor progression.
Job satisfaction and employee performance of Lebanese banking staff

This paper investigates the relationships between job satisfaction, individual job facets, socio‐demographic variables and job performance in the Lebanese commercial banking sector. The sample consists of 202 employees from nine commercial banks. The results indicate that job satisfaction is not independent in all job facets and that satisfaction with one facet might lead to satisfaction with another. Female employees were found to be less satisfied with all facets except pay. Those with lower educational qualifications were least satisfied. Self‐reported job performance was found to increase with tenure.
Investigation of Instruments to Predict Academic Performance of High-Risk College Students.

Four standardized instruments that measured cognitive and affective domains were administered to 52 high-risk college students in a teacher education program at Memphis State University. The four instruments were School and College Ability Test? Series II (which yielded 3 scores), Study of Values (6 scores), Thorndike Dimensions of Temperament (10 scores), and the Alpha Biographical Inventory (2 scores). Coefficients of correlation were computed between each variable and cumulative grade point average and each variable and grade point average of professional education coursework. Results suggested moderate relationships with cognitive variables, low rela tionships with affective variables. A series of multiple regression analyses involving instruments in all combinations possible was employed to determine the best indicators. The cognitive variables were the best predictors of academic success: SCAT Total ranked as the primary variable in predicting cumulative academic success; ABI Academic Performance ranked as the primary variable in predicting academic success in professional education areas. Because of its strength in both analyses, SCAT Total can be considered the most effective variable for prediction purposes.
Supporting Families under Stress: The Role of Social Networks.

The role of family social networks in mediating the effects of stress has been underscored in the literature. Drawing from sociological and psychological studies, this paper examines the strong positive relationship between social networks and a family's adaptation to societal crises, life transitions and family conflicts. Who helps and when, the types of support offered and given, the conditions influencing the use and effect of networks, and the implications for professional intervention are discussed.
Fostering First Graders’ Fluency With Basic Subtraction and Larger Addition Combinations Via Computer-Assisted Instruction

Achieving fluency with basic subtraction and add-with-8 or -9 combinations is difficult for primary grade children. A 9-month training experiment entailed evaluating the efficacy of software designed to promote such fluency via guided learning of reasoning strategies. Seventy-five eligible first graders were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: guided subtraction (e.g., If 5 + 3 = 8, then 8 – 3 is 5), guided use-a-10 (e.g., If 10 + 7 = 17, then 9 + 7 is 16), or an unguided-practice condition for 30-minute sessions twice a week for 12 weeks. An ANCOVA revealed that at the delayed posttest, the guided-subtraction group outperformed both comparison groups on unpracticed subtraction combinations. Analyses of gains in slow but appropriate use of reasoning and decreases in inefficient strategy use indicated that both types of guided training promoted the learning of a targeted reasoning strategy.
Mitotic Golgi Partitioning Is Driven by the Membrane-Fissioning Protein CtBP3/BARS

Organelle inheritance is an essential feature of all eukaryotic cells. As with other organelles, the Golgi complex partitions between daughter cells through the fission of its membranes into numerous tubulovesicular fragments. We found that the protein CtBP3/BARS (BARS) was responsible for driving the fission of Golgi membranes during mitosis in vivo. Moreover, by in vitro analysis, we identified two stages of this Golgi fragmentation process: disassembly of the Golgi stacks into a tubular network, and BARS-dependent fission of these tubules. Finally, this BARS-induced fission of Golgi membranes controlled the G2-to-prophase transition of the cell cycle, and hence cell division.
On the Generality of Mental Construction in Imagery: When Bananas Become Smiles

Four experiments are reported which examined the effect of element concreteness on discovery performance by university students during the mental synthesis task. In this task, subjects attempt to combine given elements into a new figure using mental imagery. Discovery performance was not significantly different whether the subjects synthesised novel figures from the names of simple geometric shapes and alphanumerical characters, the names of concrete objects, visual presentation of the objects, or when physically manipulating the objects. A decrement in discovery performance when subjects attempted to synthesise novel figures from the names of elements which have variable shapes suggested that characteristics of the elements can have functional consequences for mental synthesis performance. The scope of the mental synthesis task ranges widely over stimulus materials and subject abilities. The results are discussed in terms of automatic and controlled processes in figure construction and interpretation.
The role of religion in human values: a case study

By helping social norms to be internalized, values are indirectly sources of relationship behaviour. Likewise, cultural traditions, religion and language have different meanings that shape beliefs and influence social life. Thus, it seems important to revaluate the role of values in social life in a society which is extremely distinguishable in religious terms. An adaptation of Schwartz’s (1994a) value survey was used. MANOVA analysis revealed significant differences between groups in four value types and in three higher dimensions. Overall, results indicate that a combination of Schwartz’ values with insights from individualism/collectivism can be useful in contexts like Mozambique, a nation characterized by divergent religious groups, which can lead to a collision between religious viewpoints and values. Altogether, it seems most important to investigate further the historical and social influences that shape individual and communal identities with regard to questions of religion and values.
Quality assessment of systematic reviews in software engineering: a tertiary study

Context: The quality of an Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is as good as the quality of the reviewed papers. Hence, it is vital to rigorously assess the papers included in an SLR. There has been no tertiary study aimed at reporting the state of the practice of quality assessment used in SLRs in Software Engineering (SE). Objective: We aimed to study the practices of quality assessment of the papers included in SLRs in SE. Method: We conducted a tertiary study of the SLRs that have performed quality assessment of the reviewed papers. Results: We identified and analyzed different aspects of the quality assessment of the papers included in 127 SLRs. Conclusion: Researchers use a variety of strategies for quality assessment of the papers reviewed, but report little about the justification for the used criteria. The focus is creditability but not relevance aspect of the papers. Appropriate guidelines are required for devising quality assessment strategies.
Learning visual affordances of objects and tools through autonomous robot exploration

Endowing artificial agents with the ability of predicting the consequences of their own actions and efficiently planning their behaviors based on such predictions is a fundamental challenge both in artificial intelligence and robotics. A computationally practical yet powerful way to model this knowledge, referred as objects affordances, is through probabilistic dependencies between actions, objects and effects: this allows to make inferences across these dependencies, such as i) predicting the effects of an action over an object, or ii) selecting the best action from a repertoire in order to obtain a desired effect over an object. We propose a probabilistic model capable of learning the mutual interaction between objects in complex tasks that involve manipulation, where one of the objects plays an active tool role while being grasped and used (e.g., a hammer) while another item is passively acted upon (e.g., a nail). We consider visual affordances, meaning that we do not model object labels or categories; instead, we compute a set of visual features that represent geometrical properties (e.g., convexity, roundness), which allows to generalize previously-acquired knowledge to new objects. We describe an experiment in which a simulated humanoid robot learns an affordance model by autonomously exploring different actions with the objects present in a playground scenario. We report results showing that the robot is able to i) learn meaningful relationships between actions, tools, other objects and effects, and to ii) exploit the acquired knowledge to make predictions and take optimal decisions.
Binarized Convolutional Landmark Localizers for Human Pose Estimation and Face Alignment with Limited Resources

Our goal is to design architectures that retain the groundbreaking performance of CNNs for landmark localization and at the same time are lightweight, compact and suitable for applications with limited computational resources. To this end, we make the following contributions: (a) we are the first to study the effect of neural network binarization on localization tasks, namely human pose estimation and face alignment. We exhaustively evaluate various design choices, identify performance bottlenecks, and more importantly propose multiple orthogonal ways to boost performance. (b) Based on our analysis, we propose a novel hierarchical, parallel and multi-scale residual architecture that yields large performance improvement over the standard bottleneck block while having the same number of parameters, thus bridging the gap between the original network and its binarized counterpart. (c) We perform a large number of ablation studies that shed light on the properties and the performance of the proposed block. (d) We present results for experiments on the most challenging datasets for human pose estimation and face alignment, reporting in many cases state-of-the-art performance. Code can be downloaded from https://www.adrianbulat. com/binary-cnn-landmarks
PageRank on Semantic Networks, with Application to Word Sense Disambiguation

This paper presents a new open text word sense disambiguation method that combines the use of logical inferences with PageRank-style algorithms applied on graphs extracted from natural language documents. We evaluate the accuracy of the proposed algorithm on several sense-annotated texts, and show that it consistently outperforms the accuracy of other previously proposed knowledge-based word sense disambiguation methods. We also explore and evaluate methods that combine several open-text word sense disambiguation algorithms.
Consumer Food Satisfaction: Fulfillment of Expectations or Evaluation of Performance?

ABSTRACT This paper investigates whether consumers when buying food products are likely to form expectation-performance comparisons or whether they are more likely to base their satisfaction assessment on performance evaluation. Three different experiments were conducted in order to investigate the problem setting. The food products used were shrimp (experiment A), cheese (experiment B), and potato chips (experiment C). In contrast to the suggestions put forward in the literature on satisfaction research, the results did not show disconfirmation to have any significant effect on satisfaction. The results also revealed that a higher task involvement increased respondents' propensity to incorporate performance perceptions in their assessment of disconfirmation. However, a higher task involvement did not affect the relation between disconfirmation and satisfaction, which remained insignificant across involvement levels.
Phylogenetic analysis in the anomaly zone.

The concatenation method has been widely used as a means of combining data to estimate phylogenetic trees (Huelsenbeck et al. 1996a, 1996b; Glazko and Nei 2003). However, simulation studies have shown that the maximum likelihood (ML) estimate of the species tree for concatenated sequences may be statistically incon sistent if the gene trees are highly heterogeneous (Ko laczkowski and Thornton 2004; Kubatko and Degnan 2007). Recently, Degnan and Rosenberg (2006) defined an "anomaly zone"? a set of short internal branches in species trees that will generate gene trees that are discor dant with the species tree more often than gene trees that are concordant. Kubatko and Degnan (2007) went on to show that when DNA sequences are generated from gene trees simulated from species trees in the anomaly zone, as well as from species trees slightly outside this zone but still with short internal branches, the ML esti mate of the species tree for the concatenated sequences can be inconsistent, resulting in increasing certainty in the wrong species tree. These studies were all performed with a molecular clock on rooted gene and species trees within the variation realized in stochastic simulations of DNA sequences under the Jukes and Cantor (1969) model of nucleotide substitution. They applied the ML method with a clock to recover phylogenetic trees from their simulated concatenated data sets.
Orai1 Mediates Exacerbated Ca2+ Entry in Dystrophic Skeletal Muscle

There is substantial evidence indicating that disruption of Ca2+ homeostasis and activation of cytosolic proteases play a key role in the pathogenesis and progression of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD). However, the exact nature of the Ca2+ deregulation and the Ca2+ signaling pathways that are altered in dystrophic muscles have not yet been resolved. Here we examined the contribution of the store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE) for the pathogenesis of DMD. RT-PCR and Western blot found that the expression level of Orai1, the pore-forming unit of SOCE, was significantly elevated in the dystrophic muscles, while parallel increases in SOCE activity and SR Ca2+ storage were detected in adult mdx muscles using Fura-2 fluorescence measurements. High-efficient shRNA probes against Orai1 were delivered into the flexor digitorum brevis muscle in live mice and knockdown of Orai1 eliminated the differences in SOCE activity and SR Ca2+ storage between the mdx and wild type muscle fibers. SOCE activity was repressed by intraperitoneal injection of BTP-2, an Orai1 inhibitor, and cytosolic calpain1 activity in single muscle fibers was measured by a membrane-permeable calpain substrate. We found that BTP-2 injection for 2 weeks significantly reduced the cytosolic calpain1 activity in mdx muscle fibers. Additionally, ultrastructural changes were observed by EM as an increase in the number of triad junctions was identified in dystrophic muscles. Compensatory changes in protein levels of SERCA1, TRP and NCX3 appeared in the mdx muscles, suggesting that comprehensive adaptations occur following altered Ca2+ homeostasis in mdx muscles. Our data indicates that upregulation of the Orai1-mediated SOCE pathway and an overloaded SR Ca2+ store contributes to the disrupted Ca2+ homeostasis in mdx muscles and is linked to elevated proteolytic activity, suggesting that targeting Orai1 activity may be a promising therapeutic approach for the prevention and treatment of muscular dystrophy.
Manufacturing Productivity Growth across European Union States: 1978 – 94

This paper explores the sources of rising manufacturing output and labour productivity across thirteen European Union states between 1978 and 1994. Despite the severe deindustrialisation trends of the past two decades, manufacturing output continued to expand and thus contribute to overall economic growth. The analysis here reveals several key aspects of this process. First, the geographical distribution of the sector across Europe for the entire period is characterised by considerable stability. Contrary to some initial fears, the slow but steady integration process has not led to the wholesale migration of manufacturing activity from one member state to another. Second, total factor productivity increases seem to account for most of the recorded output and labour productivity gains. Third, there is, however, significant spatial variation in the performance of individual industrial bases. Smaller countries' growth rates appear to surpass those of the larger states, and the European South demonstrates higher growth rates than the North. Nevertheless, and this is the final point, there is an absence of clear signs of convergence. Geographical inequalities continue to hold, as the technology gap between advanced and lagging economies remains as wide as ever. Such findings raise some important issues about the role of EU regional policies and the challenges that they face at the dawn of the 21st century.
Automatic Skin Lesion Analysis using Large-scale Dermoscopy Images and Deep Residual Networks

Malignant melanoma has one of the most rapidly increasing incidences in the world and has a considerable mortality rate. Early diagnosis is particularly important since melanoma can be cured with prompt excision. Dermoscopy images play an important role in the non-invasive early detection of melanoma [1]. However, melanoma detection using human vision alone can be subjective, inaccurate and poorly reproducible even among experienced dermatologists. This is attributed to the challenges in interpreting images with diverse characteristics including lesions of varying sizes and shapes, lesions that may have fuzzy boundaries, different skin colors and the presence of hair [2]. Therefore, the automatic analysis of dermoscopy images is a valuable aid for clinical decision making and for image-based diagnosis to identify diseases such as melanoma [1-4]. Deep residual networks (ResNets) has achieved state-of-the-art results in image classification and detection related problems [5-8]. In this ISIC 2017 skin lesion analysis challenge [9], we propose to exploit the deep ResNets for robust visual features learning and representations.
Student-Professor Relationship Styles, Childhood Attachment Bonds and Current Academic Orientations

Within the past decade, attachment theory has been productively extended into the domains of close adult relationships. Indeed, a key theoretical construct attachment security has been shown to predict a variety of important relationship out comes, including perceived trust, affect self-regulation, and overall dyadic adjustment. More recently, attachment theory has guided research into non-intimate relationships, again with supportive results. In keeping with this initiative, the present study explored whether college students adopting typically secure vs insecure styles of relating to professors also differed in their descriptions of early attachment bonds with parents, and in their responses to measures of current academic motivation and adjustment. Findings indicated that, relative to their peers with insecure relationship styles, students in secure relationships with their professors experienced significantly warmer and more supportive childhood emotional bonds with their mothers. In addition, they evidenced significantly more favorable academic attitudes and stronger feelings of social integration and connectedness within the university community.
Urological Survey Urolithiasis / Endourology Evidence for Net Renal Tubule Oxalate Secretion in Patients With Calcium Kidney Stones

Little is known about the renal handling of oxalate in patients with idiopathic hypercalciuria (IH). To explore the role of tubular oxalate handling in IH and to evaluate whether differences exist between IH and normal controls, we studied 19 IH subjects, 8 normals, and 2 bariatric stone formers (BSF) during a one-day General Clinical Research Center protocol utilizing a low oxalate diet. Urine and blood samples were collected at 30to 60-min intervals while subjects were fasting and after they ate three meals providing known amounts of calcium, phosphorus, sodium, protein, oxalate, and calories. Plasma oxalate concentrations and oxalate filtered loads were similar between patients (includes IH and BSF) and controls in both the fasting and fed states. Urinary oxalate excretion was significantly higher in patients vs. controls regardless of feeding state. Fractional excretion of oxalate (FEOx) was greater than 1, suggesting tubular secretion of oxalate, in 6 of 19 IH and both BSF, compared to none of the controls (p 0.00001). Adjusted for water extraction along the nephron, urine oxalate rose more rapidly among patients than normals with increases in plasma oxalate. Our findings identify tubular secretion of oxalate as a key mediator of hyperoxaluria in calcium stone formers, potentially as a means of maintaining plasma oxalate in a tight range.
Russian and Georgian Entrepreneurs and Non-Entrepreneurs: A Study of Value Differences

This study seeks to extend the body of knowledge of international and cross-cultural entrepreneurship and management research by testing hypotheses dealing with the degree of variance in cultural values between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs in two countries of the former Soviet Union: Russia and Georgia. A total of 867 entrepreneurs, managers, and production employees responded to a survey based on Hofstede’s work-related cultural values framework. Significant differences between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs existed on three of five cultural dimensions: Power Distance, Masculinity, and Long-term Orientation. However, the study also demonstrated that, in international entrepreneurship research, making distinctions between entrepreneurs and the rest of the population is not as fruitful as contrasting entrepreneurs with specific occupational and status groups. Thus, in this study entrepreneurs were, in some cases, different from managers but similar to employees, and, in some other cases, similar to managers but different from employees. An important implication is that some values are deeper rooted in a culture’s fabric and are less malleable than others. Thus, for Russia, Power Distance and Masculinity were substantially different from the earlier reported levels, whereas Individualism and Long-term Orientation were close to them. Also, for constructs measured in this study, significant differences were found in entrepreneurial and work-related values between the two countries of the former USSR, despite similarities in economic, political, and ideological legacies.