Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of EGFR inhibition with cetuximab (CET) on the efficacy of paclitaxel (TAX) in previously treated metastatic (MET) urothelial cancer.

4617 Background: The benefit of salvage chemotherapy (chemo) such as weekly TAX is modest in met urothelial ca, with median (med) TTP of ≤3 months and ORR of 10% (95% CI 4-18% (combined results, Vaughn 2002, Joly 2009) High grade urothelial cancer overexpress the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). CET is a monoclonal antibody against EGFR. We conducted a multicenter randomized, noncomparative phase II study to measure the efficacy of CET +/- TAX in patients (pts) with previously treated met urothelial cancer. METHODS Pts with met urothelial cancer who received 1 line of chemo in the perioperative or met setting were enrolled. Pts were randomized to CET 250mg/m2 (after 400 mg/m2 load) +/- TAX 80 mg/m2 weekly. A cycle was 4 weeks (wks). Response (RECIST) was assessed by imaging every 8 wks. We used early progression to assess futility (Litwin Stats Med 2007). Either arm would close if 7 of the initial 15 pts in that arm progressed at the 1st disease evaluation. Either arm would be considered promising if ≥9/28 patients had PFS>16 wks (90.4% power to detect an improvement in Med PFS from 8 to 16 wks with a 7.1% Type 1 error). RESULTS We enrolled 39 evaluable pts (30 male). Med age was 69 years (range 49-79). All pts received prior platinum based chemo in the perioperative (42.8%) or met setting. CET arm closed after 9 of the 1st 11 pts progressed by 8 wks. CET-TAX arm completed full accrual of 28 pts, of which 22 (78.5%) had visceral disease. 11/28 pts had PFS>16 wks. ORR was 25% (95% CI 11%-45%; 1 CR 6PR). Among responders, med duration of response was 190 days (range 56-557) of which 3 have PRs lasting 183, 176, 56+ days after stopping therapy. Med PFS for the CET-TAX was 16 wks (115 days 95% CI 84-207). Med PFS for pts with visceral disease was 112 days (95%CI 58-207). Med PFS for pts with prior perioperative chemo only was 158 days (95% CI 113-NR). Med OS was 37 wks (259 days; 95% CI 195-347). Treatment related AEs grade ≥3 occurring >2 pts were rash (6), fatigue (5), and low magnesium (3). CONCLUSIONS EGFR inhibition with CET appears to augment the antitumor activity of TAX in pts with previously treated urothelial cancers. The CET-TAX combination merits further study to establish its role in treatment of urothelial cancers.
A prospective comparative study on neovascular glaucoma and non‐neovascular refractory glaucoma following Ahmed glaucoma valve implantation

Background Neovascular glaucoma is a refractory disease, and difficult to manage. The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical outcomes of Ahmed glaucoma valve implantation (AGVI) in neovascular glaucoma (NVG) and non‐NVG patients. Methods This prospective, non‐randomized study included 55 eyes of 55 patients with refractory glaucoma; 27 had NVG (NVG group) and 28 had non‐NVG (non‐NVG group). All of the patients underwent AGVI. The NVG group was adjunctively injected with intravitreal ranibizumab/bevacizumab (IVR/IVB) before AGVI. Intraocular pressure (IOP) was the primary outcome measure in this study. Surgical success rate, number of antiglaucoma medications used, best corrected visual acuity (BCVA), and postoperative complications were analyzed between the groups. Results All of the patients completed the study (follow‐up of 12 months). Kaplan‐Meier survival curve analysis indicated that the qualified success rates in the NVG and non‐NVG groups at 12 months were 70.5% and 92.9%, respectively; this difference was significant (P=0.036). The complete success rates in the NVG and non‐NVG groups at 12 months were 66.7% and 89.3%, respectively (P=0.049). Compared with preoperative examinations, the postoperative mean IOP and use of medications were significantly lower at all follow‐up time points in both groups (all P <0.05). There were significant differences in BCVA between the two groups at the 12‐month follow‐up (&khgr;2=9.86, P=0.020). Cox proportional hazards regression showed NVG as a risk factor for surgical failure (RR=15.08, P=0.033). Postoperative complications were similar between the two groups. Conclusions AGVI is a safe and effective procedure in refractory glaucoma, but the success rate of surgery was related to the type of refractory glaucoma. The complete and qualified success rates of NVG patient adjunctive anti‐vascular endothelial growth factor treatment are still lower than those of non‐NVG patients.
Product and Process, Literacy and Orality: An Essay on Composition and Culture.

The four key words in my title have been among the most frequently and widely used by the current generation of composition teachers, researchers, and scholars. In this essay, I will argue that, as opposing pairs of terms-product versus process, literacy versus orality-they bear a special relationship to one another, one that resembles a ratio: Product is to literacy as process is to orality. Product and process are code words for a set of generalizations in the history of composition, while literacy and orality represent similar structures in the history of culture. The ratio enables a dialectical and critical, or metahistorical, perspective on the relation of writing instruction to its cultural contexts. Considered in the light of ideological analysis, product and literacy tend to line up on the side of centralized authority and managerial control, while process and orality demand an atmosphere of free and open-ended exchange among social equals. In short, the two pairs of contraries evoke the central dilemmas of a liberal democracy, reproducing in the classroom the conflicts of political forum. In the field of composition, "process, not product" emerged in the 1970s as a rallying slogan for a new generation of writing instructors (Young; Hairston). In this formulation, "process" signified an interactive approach to teaching, according to which the teacher would intervene as a personal presence early and regularly in the development of student papers. This classroom model contrasted strongly with what its advocates perceived as the dominant paradigm of writing instruction, the so-called "current-traditional" or "product-oriented" model, in which the teacher played an authoritarian role as the guardian of grammatical and rhetorical propriety and the judge of finished student papers. Whereas the "product-oriented" instructor felt most comfortable in the lecture hall and the professorial office equipped with red pens and handbooks of error codes, practitioners of the new "process pedagogy" turned the classroom into a workshop and met their students after class in newly formed writing centers or labs. They introduced a more generous portion of face-to-face, one-to-one communication; dialogue generally preceded writing, and talk often served as
Ophi Research in Progress Series 2010 Multidimensional Poverty and Its Discontents

This paper is part of the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative's Research in Progress (RP) series. These are preliminary documents posted online to stimulate discussion and critical comment. The series number and letter identify each version (i.e. paper RP1a after revision will be posted as RP1b) for citation. Please cite these papers as Author Last name, First name, " Title " (Year) OPHI Research in Progress ##a. and AusAID are also recognised for their past support. Introduction The multidimensionality of poverty is not in dispute.
Uncertainty in predictions of disease spread and public health responses to bioterrorism and emerging diseases

Concerns over bioterrorism and emerging diseases have led to the widespread use of epidemic models for evaluating public health strategies. Partly because epidemic models often capture the dynamics of prior epidemics remarkably well, little attention has been paid to how uncertainty in parameter estimates might affect model predictions. To understand such effects, we used Bayesian statistics to rigorously estimate the uncertainty in the parameters of an epidemic model, focusing on smallpox bioterrorism. We then used a vaccination model to translate the uncertainty in the model parameters into uncertainty in which of two vaccination strategies would provide a better response to bioterrorism, mass vaccination, or vaccination of social contacts, so-called “trace vaccination. ” Our results show that the uncertainty in the model parameters is remarkably high and that this uncertainty has important implications for vaccination strategies. For example, under one plausible scenario, the most likely outcome is that mass vaccination would save ≈100,000 more lives than trace vaccination. Because of the high uncertainty in the parameters, however, there is also a substantial probability that mass vaccination would save 200,000 or more lives than trace vaccination. In addition to providing the best response to the most likely outcome, mass vaccination thus has the advantage of preventing outcomes that are only slightly less likely but that are substantially more horrific. Rigorous estimates of uncertainty thus can reveal hidden advantages of public health strategies, suggesting that formal uncertainty estimation should play a key role in planning for epidemics.
Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work

This article discusses examples of work tasks and interaction in five elementary schools in contrasting social class communities. The examples illustrate differences in classroom experience and curriculum knowledge among the schools. The paper also assesses student work in each social setting in the light of a theoretical approach to social class analysis. It is suggested that there is a “hidden curriculum” in school work that has profound implication for theory—and practice—in education.
Identification of Multi-word Expressions by Combining Multiple Linguistic Information Sources

We propose a framework for using multiple sources of linguistic information in the task of identifying multiword expressions in natural language texts. We define various linguistically motivated classification features and introduce novel ways for computing them. We then manually define interrelationships among the features, and express them in a Bayesian network. The result is a powerful classifier that can identify multiword expressions of various types and multiple syntactic constructions in text corpora. Our methodology is unsupervised and language-independent; it requires relatively few language resources and is thus suitable for a large number of languages. We report results on English, French, and Hebrew, and demonstrate a significant improvement in identification accuracy, compared with less sophisticated baselines.
Orthodontic management of traumatised teeth: a national survey of UK orthodontists.

BACKGROUND/AIM There is a lack of research into orthodontic movement and management strategies of traumatised teeth. The aim of this survey was to assess the knowledge of UK based orthodontists in the orthodontic management of traumatised teeth. MATERIALS/METHODS A 24-item questionnaire survey was electronically distributed to all members of the British Orthodontic Society. RESULTS A total of 213 respondents completed the survey with the majority of these being UK registered specialists in orthodontics. Three responses were excluded as one was not based within the UK and two were orthodontic trainees with less than one year of experience, leaving a total of 210 respondents. The majority had orthodontically treated up to three patients with a history of dental trauma in the preceding three months. Obtaining a trauma history was done by the majority of respondents. A wide variation in times waited by respondents before orthodontically treating teeth with different types of traumatic injuries was observed. Similarly, the preferred orthodontic management strategies of traumatised teeth differed substantially among respondents. Almost all respondents were interested in further training in the management of dental trauma. CONCLUSIONS The study showed a wide variation in the orthodontic management of traumatised teeth among UK based orthodontists. Further training and national guideline establishment are indicated for orthodontic management of traumatised teeth in the UK. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Server Network Scalability and TCP Offload

Server network performance is increasingly dominated by poorly scaling operations such as I/O bus crossings, cache misses and interrupts. Their overhead prevents performance from scaling even with increased CPU, link or I/O bus bandwidths. These operations can be reduced by redesigning the host/adapter interface to exploit additional processing on the adapter. Offloading processing to the adapter is bene cial not only because it allows more cycles to be applied but also of the changes it enables in the host/adapter interface. As opposed to other approaches such as RDMA, TCP offload provides benets without requiring changes to either the transport protocol or API. We have designed a new host/adapter interface that exploits offloaded processing to reduce poorly scaling operations. We have implemented a prototype of the design including both host and adapter software components. Experimental evaluation with simple network benchmarks indicates our design significantly reduces I/O bus crossings and holds promise to reduce other poorly scaling operations as well.
Demographic, Physical Activity, and Route Characteristics Related to School Transportation: An Exploratory Study

Purpose. To investigate the demographic, physical activity, and route characteristics related to children's school trips. Design. Cross-sectional exploratory study. Setting. Eighteen elementary schools in the Austin Independent School District, Austin, Texas. Subjects. One hundred twelve children aged 7 to 12 years. Measures. Accelerometer and Global Positioning System (GPS) devices provided objective measures of school travel and physical activity. Parental survey (response rate = 34.2%) provided children's demographic and household information. Analysis. Generalized linear regression analyses were used for unadjusted and adjusted models estimating correlates of total moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and school trip–related MVPA's contribution rate. Results. Walking trips were . 44 miles (.71 km) on average. Those who walked to school had about 11 more minutes of daily MVPA than nonwalkers (35.03 vs. 24.06) and higher proportions of their daily MVPA obtained from school commute trips (21.78% vs. 2.41%). School trips accounted for 11.2% of total daily MVPA on average, 12.9% for those who met the physical activity recommendation, and 35.2% for the sedentary children who belonged to the lowest MVPA quartile. Conclusion. Active school commuting appears to be a valuable means to promote physical activity, and its contributions toward total physical activity vary across different demographic groups and community settings. Objective and detailed data from GPS and accelerometer units can facilitate the assessment of route/trip characteristics and physical activity implications of school transportation.
Stop and Start Control: A Distinction within Self–Control

A theoretical distinction within self–control, between stop control and start control, was investigated in two studies. Study 1 consisted of a pilot study in which expert ratings of existing self–control items were used to distinguish between stop and start control items and a confirmatory factor analyses of these items using a student sample (N = 474). Also, stop and start control were related to overall affect and behavioural outcomes. Stop control was negatively related to negative affect, whereas start control was positively related to positive affect. Study 2 (N = 226) replicated some of these findings; stop control was the best predictor (−) of smoking and alcohol consumption whereas start control was the best predictor (+) of exercising and studying. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Deep Spectral Clustering Using Dual Autoencoder Network

The clustering methods have recently absorbed even-increasing attention in learning and vision. Deep clustering combines embedding and clustering together to obtain optimal embedding subspace for clustering, which can be more effective compared with conventional clustering methods. In this paper, we propose a joint learning framework for discriminative embedding and spectral clustering. We first devise a dual autoencoder network, which enforces the reconstruction constraint for the latent representations and their noisy versions, to embed the inputs into a latent space for clustering. As such the learned latent representations can be more robust to noise. Then the mutual information estimation is utilized to provide more discriminative information from the inputs. Furthermore, a deep spectral clustering method is applied to embed the latent representations into the eigenspace and subsequently clusters them, which can fully exploit the relationship between inputs to achieve optimal clustering results. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that our method can significantly outperform state-of-the-art clustering approaches.
Evidence and Consequences of the Central Role of the Kidneys in the Pathophysiology of Sympathetic Hyperactivity

Chronic elevation of the sympathetic nervous system has been identified as a major contributor to the complex pathophysiology of hypertension, states of volume overload – such as heart failure – and progressive kidney disease. It is also a strong determinant for clinical outcome. This review focuses on the central role of the kidneys in the pathogenesis of sympathetic hyperactivity. As a consequence, renal denervation may be an attractive option to treat sympathetic hyperactivity. The review will also focus on first results and the still remaining questions of this new treatment option.
Quality of life after first-ever stroke: An interview-based study from Blantyre, Malawi.

BACKGROUND In post-stroke patients, impairment of quality of life (QOL) has been associated with functional impairment, age, anxiety, depression, and fatigue. Good social support, higher education, and better socioeconomic status are associated with better QOL among stroke survivors. In Africa, studies from Nigeria and Tanzania have reported on post-stroke QOL. AIM The aim of this study was to describe QOL more than six months after first-ever stroke in Malawi. METHODS This was an interview-based study about a stroke-surviving cohort. Adult patients were interviewed six or twelve months after their first ever stroke. HIV status, modified stroke severity scale (mNIHSS) score, and brain scan results were recorded during the acute phase of stroke. At the time of the interviews, the modified Rankin scale (mRS) was used to assess functional outcome. The interviews applied the Newcastle Stroke-specific Quality of Life Measure (NEWSQOL). All the data were analysed using Statview™: the X(2) test compared proportions, Student's t-test compared means for normally distributed data, and the Kruskal-Wallis test was used for nonparametric data. RESULTS Eighty-one patients were followed up at least six months after the acute stroke. Twenty-five stroke patients (ten women) were interviewed with the NEWSQOL questionnaire. Good functional outcome (lower mRS score) was positively associated with better QOL in the domains of activities of daily living (ADL)/self-care (p = 0.0024) and communication (p = 0.031). Women scored worse in the fatigue (p = 0.0081) and cognition (p = 0.048) domains. Older age was associated with worse QOL in the ADL (p = 0.0122) domain. Seven patients were HIV-seroreactive. HIV infection did not affect post-stroke QOL. CONCLUSION In Malawi, within specific domains, QOL after stroke appeared to be related to patients' age, sex, and functional recovery in this small sample of patients.
Soft-tissue metastasis revealing a pancreatic adenocarcinoma: one case report and a review of literature

Soft tissue metastases from pancreatic adenocarcinoma are rare lesions and can be the source of diagnostic confusion both clinically and pathologically. To our knowledge, one patient has been reported on with soft tissue lesions that ultimately disclose a pancreatic adenocarcinoma. We report here on a patient who presented with a metastatic soft tissue lesion in the trochanter, and the buttocks, as the initial manifestation of pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Soft tissue metastasis from pancreatic carcinoma is a rare finding. Clinicians should be aware that metastatic soft tissue lesions could be the initial presenting sign for pancreatic cancer. Also, the immunohistochemical staining for CK 7 and 19 may be helpful for the diagnosis of metastatic pancreatic adenocarcinoma.
Convex Block-sparse Linear Regression with Expanders - Provably

Sparse matrices are favorable objects in machine learning and optimization. When such matrices are used, in place of dense ones, the overall complexity requirements in optimization can be significantly reduced in practice, both in terms of space and run-time. Prompted by this observation, we study a convex optimization scheme for block-sparse recovery from linear measurements. To obtain linear sketches, we use expander matrices, i.e., sparse matrices containing only few non-zeros per column. Hitherto, to the best of our knowledge, such algorithmic solutions have been only studied from a non-convex perspective. Our aim here is to theoretically characterize the performance of convex approaches under such setting. Our key novelty is the expression of the recovery error in terms of the model-based norm, while assuring that solution lives in the model. To achieve this, we show that sparse model-based matrices satisfy a group version of the null-space property. Our experimental findings on synthetic and real applications support our claims for faster recovery in the convex setting -- as opposed to using dense sensing matrices, while showing a competitive recovery performance.
Diversity of Anaerobic Microbes in Spacecraft Assembly Clean Rooms

ABSTRACT Although the cultivable and noncultivable microbial diversity of spacecraft assembly clean rooms has been previously documented using conventional and state-of-the-art molecular techniques, the occurrence of obligate anaerobes within these clean rooms is still uncertain. Therefore, anaerobic bacterial communities of three clean-room facilities were analyzed during assembly of the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Anaerobic bacteria were cultured on several media, and DNA was extracted from suitable anaerobic enrichments and examined with conventional 16S rRNA gene clone library, as well as high-density phylogenetic 16S rRNA gene microarray (PhyloChip) technologies. The culture-dependent analyses predominantly showed the presence of clostridial and propionibacterial strains. The 16S rRNA gene sequences retrieved from clone libraries revealed distinct microbial populations associated with each clean-room facility, clustered exclusively within gram-positive organisms. PhyloChip analysis detected a greater microbial diversity, spanning many phyla of bacteria, and provided a deeper insight into the microbial community structure of the clean-room facilities. This study presents an integrated approach for assessing the anaerobic microbial population within clean-room facilities, using both molecular and cultivation-based analyses. The results reveal that highly diverse anaerobic bacterial populations persist in the clean rooms even after the imposition of rigorous maintenance programs and will pose a challenge to planetary protection implementation activities.