Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tissue microarray-based study of patients with lymph node-negative breast cancer shows that HER2/neu overexpression is an important predictive marker of poor prognosis.

BACKGROUND Despite good prognosis in most cases of lymph node (LN)-negative breast cancer, individual patients may have markedly different clinical outcomes. Here, we investigated the prognostic significance of HER2/neu overexpression in these tumors. MATERIALS AND METHODS We employed a tissue microarray to examine HER2/neu overexpression by immunohistochemical staining in 359 consecutive patients diagnosed with LN-negative breast cancer, who underwent surgery from January 1993 to December 1998. RESULTS HER2/neu overexpression was detected in 81 of 359 (23.1%) patients. The 10-year disease-free survival (DFS) values (81.2% versus 61.8%, P value 0.000) and overall survival (OS) rates (85.7% versus 63.9%, P value 0.000) were significantly different between cases with HER2/neu-negative or HER2/neu-positive tumors. After multivariate analysis, HER2/neu status and tumor size were identified as independent prognostic factors for 10-year OS. Moreover, HER2/neu overexpression was significantly associated with poorer clinical outcomes in an intermediate-risk group identified by the St Gallen classification (10-year DFS, 79.6% versus 61.8%, P value 0.000; 10-year OS, 84.7% versus 63.9%, P value 0.000). CONCLUSIONS Our results show that HER2/neu overexpression is an important independent prognostic factor for LN-negative breast cancer cases and support the theory that more intensive adjuvant chemotherapy is required in the population with HER2/neu overexpression.
Toward Sustainable Adoption of Technologies for Human Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: Precursors, Diagnostics, and Prescriptions

This paper proposes and merges an extension of technology acceptance model with ideas from human development research targeting least developed countries. Specifically, the paper proposes an extension of the influence of perceived user resource, which in turn was developed from the original TAM literature. It is also tied to the Information Technology literature about socio-economic development. Our objective is to shed light on the interactions between socioeconomic development needs and factors generally innate to sub-Sahara Africa and other developing countries that impede sustainable technological adoption and diffusion. We argue that developing countries lag in adopting ‘foreign technologies’. We offer diagnostics and prescriptions for how to effect a sustainable technological adoption to support socio-economic development across Sub-Saharan Africa. This article should bring into focus this and other developing regions that are almost non-existent in mainstream Information Systems research.
Early Brain Damage and the Development of Motor Behavior in Children: Clues for Therapeutic Intervention?

The Neuronal Group Selection Theory (NGST) could offer new insights into the mechanisms directing motor disorders, such as cerebral palsy and developmental coordination disorder. According to NGST, normal motor development is characterized by two phases of variability. Variation is not at random but determined by criteria set by genetic information. Development starts with the phase of primary variability,during which variation in motor behavior is not geared to external conditions. At function-specific ages secondary variability starts, during which motor performance can be adapted to specific situations. In both forms, of variability, selection on the basis of afferent information plays a significant role. From the NGST point of view, children with pre- or perinatally acquired brain damage, such as children with cerebral palsy and part of the children with developmental coordination disorder, suffer from stereotyped motor behavior, produced by a limited repertoire or primary (sub)cortical neuronal networks. These children also have roblems in selecting the most efficient neuronal activity, due to deficits in the processing of sensory information. Therefore, NGST suggests that intervention in these children at early age should aim at an enlargement of the primary neuronal networks. With increasing age, the emphasis of intervention could shift to the provision of ample opportunities for active practice, which might form a compensation for the impaired selection.
Changes of Soil Thermal and Hydraulic Regimes in Northern Hemisphere Permafrost Regions over the 21st Century

ABSTRACT Soil moisture (SM), snow depth (SND), and air temperature are crucial factors for the soil thermal and hydraulic regimes in the permafrost regions. This paper analyzes the contribution of these factors to active layer thickness (ALT) under different climate change scenarios in northern hemisphere permafrost regions, using simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) for the early (2016–2035, EP), middle (2046–2065, MP), and late (2080–2099, LP) periods of the 21st century. The results indicate that, with the temperature increasing, the relation between ALT and SM, SND, and mean annual air temperature (MAAT) will change in different permafrost regions. During 1986–2005 (reference period), ALT correlates significantly with SND in Europe only, the contribution of MAAT and SM to ALT are significant over the Tibetan Plateau (TP) and in North America (NA). MAAT is the only significant contribution factor to ALT deepening for all regions. In the 21st century, for the high Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP8.5), MAAT plays a dominant role in ALT over the TP and NA; however, snow effect is enhanced under RCP2.6 and RCP4.5 in Europe and NA. With temperature increasing, the importance of SM and SND alternates for low and middle emission, and gradually declines for high emission. In general, MAAT is the main contributor to ALT during the 21st century, while the impact of SM and SND declines with increasing temperature. Contribution of SM, SND, and MAAT to ALT varies, which illustrates the differences in regional thermal and hydraulic regimes from warming in permafrost regions.
Effects of Meperidine on Pain Intensity and Accuracy of Clinical Diagnosis in Patients with Acute Abdominal Pain: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

OBJECTIVES To determine the effects of Meperidine (Pethedine®) on pain intensity, clinical findings, final diagnosis and management of patients with acute abdominal pain. METHODS This was a randomized clinical trial including 100 patients, with lower abdominal pain lasting for less than 48 hours who were referred to the emergency department of Imam Khomeini hospital affiliated with Ilam University of Medical Sciences, over a period of 11 months. Hemodynamically unstable patients were not included in the study. The baseline pain severity was measured using a visual analogue scale (VAS). Patients were randomly assigned to receive 25 mg of intramuscular Meperidine (Pethedine®) (n=50) or 5 mL of intravenous normal saline as placebo intravenously (n=50). After 1-hour the patients were then re-examined and the pain severity was re-assessed and the clinical diagnosis was recorded. RESULTS There was no significant difference between two study groups regarding the baseline characteristics. The mean pain score on arrival was comparable between groups (6.80 ± 1.6 vs. 6.81 ± 1.2; p=0.956). The abdominal tenderness was not affected in Meperidine group. Rebound tenderness disappeared in 4% of the Meperidine group and in 2% of the placebo group. Nausea was decreased in 14% of the Meperidine group and 32% of the placebo group. Changes in the clinical pattern and diagnostic peritoneal signs in patients were negligible and did not significantly interfere with the diagnosis (p=0.133). Diagnostic accuracy was 96% in the Meperidine group and 98% in placebo group, which was not significantly different (p=0.554). CONCLUSION Administration of Meperidine reduces pain intensity in patients with acute abdominal pain without interference with the clinical diagnosis. Thus analgesics could be safely administered to the patients with acute abdominal pain for increasing the patients comfort.
The Many Faces of Alternating-Sign Matrices

I give a survey of different combinatorial forms of alternating-sign matrices, starting with the original form introduced by Mills, Robbins and Rumsey as well as corner-sum matrices, height-function matrices, three-colorings, monotone triangles, tetrahedral order ideals, square ice, gasket-and-basket tilings and full packings of loops.
Development and validation of the injury severity assessment survey/parent report: a new injury severity assessment survey.

OBJECTIVE To develop and pilot test a telephone-based survey instrument that enables parents to identify and characterize the body region and severity of childhood injuries using the Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) scoring system. DESIGN A prospective cross-sectional survey. SETTING The emergency department of an urban, tertiary care, pediatric trauma center. PARTICIPANTS One hundred forty-seven parents of children younger than 18 years and seen in the emergency department for acute treatment of an unintentional injury. INTERVENTIONS None. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE The degree of agreement, measured as sensitivity, specificity, and kappa statistic, between medical record information and parents' responses to the telephone survey regarding the identification and characterization of clinically significant (AIS > or =2) injuries. RESULTS The survey, known as the Injury Severity Assessment Survey/Parent Report, was developed via a systematic review of the AIS 1990 manual. Answers to questions were developed in a way that enabled automated coding of responses into AIS scores or ranges of scores. The sensitivity of the survey (its ability to detect injuries scoring 2 or more on the AIS that were documented in the medical record) varied somewhat by the body region of injury, ranging from 88% for head, face, neck, and spine injuries to 95% for extremity injuries. Intermediate sensitivity (92%) was noted for the detection of significant chest and abdomen injuries. The specificity of the survey (its ability to rule out the presence of a significant injury when one was not documented in the medical record) was more than 95% in each of the 3 body region groups. The kappa statistics for the 3 body region groups ranged from 0.89 to 0.92. CONCLUSIONS A new telephone-based survey has been developed that enables parents to characterize their child's injuries by body region and to differentiate between minor injuries and more significant injuries using a well-established injury classification system. This survey has a significant advantage over previous telephone-based or written surveys of childhood injuries and may be particularly valuable in population-based (e.g., random-digit dial surveys) or multi-institutional studies of pediatric injuries.
Security Assessment of Electricity Distribution Networks Under DER Node Compromises

This paper focuses on the security assessment of electricity distribution networks (DNs) with vulnerable distributed energy resource (DER) nodes. The adversary model is a simultaneous compromise of DER nodes by strategic manipulation of generation setpoints. The loss to the defender (DN operator) includes loss of voltage regulation and cost of induced load control under supply-demand mismatch caused by the attack. A three-stage defender-attacker-defender (DAD) game is formulated: in Stage 1, the defender chooses a security strategy to secure a subset of DER nodes; in Stage 2, the attacker compromises a set of vulnerable DERs and injects false generation setpoints; in Stage 3, the defender responds by controlling loads and non-compromised DERs. Solving this trilevel optimization problem is hard due to nonlinear power flows and mixed-integer decision variables. To address this challenge, the problem is approximated by a tractable formulation based on an $\epsilon$-linear power-flow model. The set of critical DER nodes and the setpoint manipulations characterizing the optimal attack strategy are computed. An iterative greedy approach to computing attacker-defender strategies for the original nonlinear problem is proposed. These results provide guidelines for optimal security investment and defender response in preattack and postattack conditions, respectively.
Contention in Structured Concurrency: Provably Efficient Dynamic Non-Zero Indicators for Nested Parallelism

Over the past two decades, many concurrent data structures have been designed and implemented. Nearly all such work analyzes concurrent data structures empirically, omitting asymptotic bounds on their efficiency, partly because of the complexity of the analysis needed, and partly because of the difficulty of obtaining relevant asymptotic bounds: when the analysis takes into account important practical factors, such as contention, it is difficult or even impossible to prove desirable bounds. In this paper, we show that considering structured concurrency or relaxed concurrency models can enable establishing strong bounds, also for contention. To this end, we first present a dynamic relaxed counter data structure that indicates the non-zero status of the counter. Our data structure extends a recently proposed data structure, called SNZI, allowing our structure to grow dynamically in response to the increasing degree of concurrency in the system. Using the dynamic SNZI data structure, we then present a concurrent data structure for series-parallel directed acyclic graphs (sp-dags), a key data structure widely used in the implementation of modern parallel programming languages. The key component of sp-dags is an in-counter data structure that is an instance of our dynamic SNZI. We analyze the efficiency of our concurrent sp-dags and in-counter data structures under nested-parallel computing paradigm. This paradigm offers a structured model for concurrency. Under this model, we prove that our data structures require amortized (1) shared memory steps, including contention. We present an implementation and an experimental evaluation that suggests that the sp-dags data structure is practical and can perform well in practice.
Factors Influencing Customer’s E-Loyalty in Tourism E-Marketplace

Tourism is a rapidly growing industrial sector in the world. Rapid development in technology is able to provide convenience and innovation in marketing tourism online. This study analyzes the factors that influence e-Loyalty of customers which related to intention or tendency to visit and repurchase a trip package on marketplace tourism site. The framework of this study is adopted from e-Service Quality framework, complemented with other antecedents of e-Loyalty. Furthermore, the data analysis used PLS – SEM with SmartPLS tools. The result of this research indicates that customer e-Loyalty is predisposed by e-Service Quality through e-Perceived Value and e-Trust.
Design of QFT-based self-tuning deadbeat controller

This paper presents a design method of self-tuning Quantitative Feedback Theory (QFT) by using improved deadbeat control algorithm. QFT is a technique to achieve robust control with pre-defined specifications whereas deadbeat is an algorithm that could bring the output to steady state with minimum step size. Nevertheless, usually there are large peaks in the deadbeat response.By integrating QFT specifications into deadbeat algorithm, the large peaks could be tolerated. On the other hand, emerging QFT with adaptive element will produce a robust controller with wider coverage of uncertainty. By combining QFT-based deadbeat algorithm and adaptive element, superior controller that is called self tuning QFT-based deadbeat controller could be achieved. The output response that is fast, robust and adaptive is expected. Using a grain dryer plant model as a pilot case-study, the performance of the proposed method has been evaluated and analyzed. Grain drying process is very complex with highly nonlinear behaviour, long delay, affected by environmental changes and affected by disturbances. Performance comparisons have been performed between the proposed self-tuning QFT-based deadbeat, standard QFT and standard dead-beat controllers. The efficiency of the self-tuning QFT based dead-beat controller has been proven from the tests results in terms of controller’s parameters are updated online, less percentage of overshoot and settling time especially when there are variations in the plant.
Are General Practitioners Getting the Information They Need from Hospitals to Manage Their Lung Cancer Patients? A Qualitative Exploration

The delivery of cancer services is primarily hospital-based; however, General Practitioners (GPs) have a key role to play within the context of a multidisciplinary model of care. In order to fulfill their role in cancer care GPs must receive complete and timely information from appropriate members of the hospital team. The aim of this study was to investigate perceptions of the quality, format and timeliness of the patient information GPs receive from a multidisciplinary hospital-based lung cancer team, and elicit how communication between the team and the GP could be improved. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with a representative sample (n=22) of members of the hospital team and a sample of GPs (n=8). A grounded theory approach was used to categorise the data. Most communications with GPs were from medical officers; however, GPs desired information from all health professional groups in the hospital-based lung cancer team. Most GPs were dissatisfied with the timing of communication. A multidisciplinary discharge summary was suggested as a means of providing both clinical and social information from the team to the GP. Further developments in electronic health records could improve access to patient information by GPs. Results from this study illustrate the need for GPs to receive information from all members of the multidisciplinary hospital team so that they may fulfill their diverse role in supporting patients through all phases of the cancer journey.
Effects of Interactive Sonification on Emotionally Expressive Walking Styles

This paper describes two experiments conducted to investigate the role of sonically simulated ground materials in modulating both production and recognition of walks performed with emotional intentions. The results of the first experiment showed that the involved auditory feedbacks affected the pattern of emotional walking in different ways, although such an influence manifested itself in more than one direction. The results of the second experiment showed the absence of an influence of the sound conditions on the recognition of the emotions from acoustic information alone. Similar results were found in both experiments for musically-trained and untrained participants. Our results suggest that tempo and sound level are two acoustical features important in both production and recognition of emotions in walking. In addition, the similarities of the presented results with those reported in the music performance domain, as well as the absence of an influence of musical expertise lend support to the “motor origin hypothesis of emotional expression in music” according to which a motor origin for the expression of emotions is common in all those domains of human activity that result in the generation of an acoustical signal.
Female preferences drive the evolution of mimetic accuracy in male sexual displays

Males in many bird species mimic the vocalizations of other species during sexual displays, but the evolutionary and functional significance of interspecific vocal mimicry is unclear. Here we use spectrographic cross-correlation to compare mimetic calls produced by male satin bowerbirds (Ptilonorhynchus violaceus) in courtship with calls from several model species. We show that the accuracy of vocal mimicry and the number of model species mimicked are both independently related to male mating success. Multivariate analyses revealed that these mimetic traits were better predictors of male mating success than other male display traits previously shown to be important for male mating success. We suggest that preference-driven mimetic accuracy may be a widespread occurrence, and that mimetic accuracy may provide females with important information about male quality. Our findings support an alternative hypothesis to help explain a common element of male sexual displays.
Detection of Credit Card Fraud Transactions Using Machine Learning Algorithms and Neural Networks: A Comparative Study

Use of online transactions in day to day life has been increasing since last decade due to advancements in technology and network connectivity. Due to ease, simplicity and user friendliness of the online transaction system, new users are constantly joining the vast population benefitting from such system. Credit card fraud resulting from misuse of the system is defined as theft or misuse of one's credit card information which is used for personal gains without the permission of the card holder. To detect such frauds, it is important to check the usage patterns of a user over the past transactions. Comparing the usage pattern and current transaction, we can classify it as either fraud or a legitimate transaction. In this paper, the techniques used are KNN, Naïve Bayes, Logistic Regression, Chebyshev Functional Link Artificial Neural Network (CFLANN), Multi-Layer Perceptron and Decision Trees which are evaluated on basis of their result evaluated in terms of various accuracy metrics.
INTEGRATING PHYLOGENY AND EXPERIMENTAL ETHOLOGY: FROM PATTERN TO PROCEs

Phylogenetic systematics offers ethologists a method for uncovering macroevolutionary patterns of behavioral diversity, which can be used to generate predictions for experimental investigation of microevolutionary processes. I used phylogenetic methods to disentangle the contributions of various selection pressures in the evolution of sexually dimorphic nuptial coloration in gasterosteid fishes in general, and Gasterosteus aculeatus in particular. Based upon the phylogenetic relationships between breeding colors and breeding behaviors in the gasterosteids, three predictions relevant to a discussion of nuptial coloration in G. aculeatus were proposed. The origin and elaboration of nuptial coloration was (1) weakly associated with male/male interactions (intrasexual selection), (2) moderately associated with parental care (natural selection) and (3) strongly associated with male/female interactions (intersexual selection). I tested the hypothesized macroevolutionary relationships between male breeding color and behavior in two sets of experiments studying changes in male nuptial coloration across the breeding cycle and female choice based on intensity of male color. The results of these experiments at the microevolutionary level of analysis corroborated the macroevolutionary predictions and confirmed the original intuition of previous researchers: male body color intensity is an important component of female mate choice in G. aculeatus. This study demonstrates that a phylogenetic hypothesis can generate predictions that are experimentally testable and falsifiable.