Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Numerical simulation of parasitic resistance effects in polycrystalline silicon TFTs

Parasitic resistance effects have been investigated in n-channel polycrystalline (polysilicon) silicon thin film transistors (TFTs). We show, both experimentally, and by using two-dimensional numerical simulations, that the transfer characteristics and, in particular, the transconductance are degraded by parasitic resistance effects, which are related to residual implant damage. In particular, we show that residual implant damage gives rise to two types of defected regions across the edges of the gate: the first, not overlapped by the gate, which mainly controls the parasitic resistance. The second, which is gate overlapped, can affect the behavior of the threshold voltage by modifying the classical short channel effect to the reverse short channel effect. The analysis demonstrates that for the fabrication of short-channel polysilicon TFTs an exact control of the implant-damaged regions is necessary.
Electrocortical Correlates of Stimulus Response and Reinforcement

Three patterns of electrical response were identified in the occipital cortex of rhesus monkeys making a differential discrimination: an input pattern that identifies which stimulus has been displayed; a reinforcement pattern that indicates whether the outcome of the differential response was rewarded or in error; and an intention pattern that occurs prior to the response and predicts which response the monkey is about to make. Neither the reinforcement nor the intention pattern is present while the monkeys perform at chance; at this time, only the differences due to input can be distinguished. These results suggest that more than simple input transmission is occurring in the primary visual mechanism. The influence of the experience of the organism is apparently encoded in the averaged electrical potentials recorded from the striate cortex.
A secure two-factor mutual authentication and session key agreement protocol using Elliptic curve cryptography

In this paper, we propose a secure two-factor remote user authentication protocol using Elliptic curve cryptography. The proposed protocol provides the mutual authentication of participants, session key agreement and user anonymity. The security of our proposed protocol is based on one way hash function and elliptic curve cryptosystem and it is secure against all relevant security attacks. Compared with other relevant protocol, the security analysis and performance evaluation show that our proposed protocol can provide high level of security with less communication and computation cost. In addition, the BAN logic is applied to demonstrate the validity of the proposed protocol.
Doping use among young elite cyclists: a qualitative psychosociological approach

Using a psychosociological approach, the purpose of this study was to identify and understand the use of doping substances by young elite cyclists. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with young cyclists who were hoping to find a professional team and cyclists who had recently become professional. All of the young cyclists interviewed took nutritional supplements and believed that they improved their performance, which has been shown by other scholars to be a risk factor for doping. These cyclists believed that doping at the professional level in cycling was acceptable but did not approve of it at the amateur level. They were attracted to doping; they were open to using doping substances themselves if it was the key to continuing their cycling career, but only after they became professional. Team staff, doctors, parents and friends helped to create a “clean” environment that prevented the young cyclists from doping before becoming professional. The more experienced cyclists, who doped or used to dope, transmitted the culture of doping to the young cyclists, teaching them doping methods and which substances to use. This study could help to improve prevention and help to detect doping, as it is clear that doping behaviors begin at the amateur level.
FastML: a web server for probabilistic reconstruction of ancestral sequences

Ancestral sequence reconstruction is essential to a variety of evolutionary studies. Here, we present the FastML web server, a user-friendly tool for the reconstruction of ancestral sequences. FastML implements various novel features that differentiate it from existing tools: (i) FastML uses an indel-coding method, in which each gap, possibly spanning multiples sites, is coded as binary data. FastML then reconstructs ancestral indel states assuming a continuous time Markov process. FastML provides the most likely ancestral sequences, integrating both indels and characters; (ii) FastML accounts for uncertainty in ancestral states: it provides not only the posterior probabilities for each character and indel at each sequence position, but also a sample of ancestral sequences from this posterior distribution, and a list of the k-most likely ancestral sequences; (iii) FastML implements a large array of evolutionary models, which makes it generic and applicable for nucleotide, protein and codon sequences; and (iv) a graphical representation of the results is provided, including, for example, a graphical logo of the inferred ancestral sequences. The utility of FastML is demonstrated by reconstructing ancestral sequences of the Env protein from various HIV-1 subtypes. FastML is freely available for all academic users and is available online at http://fastml.tau. ac.il/.
Work placements as learning environments for patient safety: Finnish and British preregistration nursing students’ important learning events

Abstract Learning to ensure patient safety in complex health care environments is an internationally recognised concern. This article explores and compares Finnish (n = 22) and British (n = 32) pre-registration nursing students’ important learning events about patient safety from their work placements in health care organisations. Written descriptions were collected with critical incident technique and analysed with inductive content analysis. The learning events were likely to relate to the complex situations and mistakes that occurred in care processes. Reflecting enabled students’ positive learning about patient safety by reinforcing the importance of the topic and learning from errors. Two key themes emerged: prevention of errors and safe actions after errors. In both student groups, the events were likely to deal with medication errors, but only British students described events related to falls risk assessments. Overall, students made important observations, which were underutilised. Moving towards holistic design, joint system approaches and interactive learning between and across health care and health care education organisations might help in developing future health care.
The ‘emotionalization of the “war on terror”’: Counter-terrorism, fear, risk, insecurity and helplessness

The ‘war on terror’ has marked the existence of exceptional measures involving military action abroad and the introduction of counter-terrorism legislation in the United Kingdom. Within this context fear, risk and insecurity have been intrinsic in legitimizing the measures created as being necessary to maintain national security. This article presents the findings from a study investigating the impact of the ‘war on terror’ on British Muslims’ emotions. The study revealed how facets of the ‘war on terror’, including ‘human rights and policing’, ‘What if? and pre-emption’, ‘geopolitics and reflexive fear and risk’ and ‘fear from inside the binary’ impacted participants’ emotions. Through exploring how thepolicy measures implemented in the ‘war on terror’ have influenced British Muslims’ emotions, the article takes a small step in addressing the analytical gap in criminological research on emotions in the ‘war on terror’.
Prolonged morphine treatment alters δ opioid receptor post-internalization trafficking

The δ opioid receptor (DOP receptor) undergoes internalization both constitutively and in response to agonists. Previous work has shown that DOP receptors traffic from intracellular compartments to neuronal cell membranes following prolonged morphine treatment. Here, we examined the effects of prolonged morphine treatment on the post‐internalization trafficking of DOP receptors.
Social exchange process in collectivistic countries: an examination of sporting events in China

ABSTRACT Research question: Social Exchange Theory (SET) has been extensively used to study residents’ support, and posits that the likelihood of residents developing a positive attitude toward events is based on their evaluation of the outcomes. Extant literature has overlooked a crucial aspect of the social exchange process – the weights that are assigned by residents to the various benefits and costs in the exchange and evaluation procedure. This study examines the relationship between residents’ perceptions of hosting major events in China, a country that endorses collectivism. Research method: Research participants (N = 1285) were residents of metropolitan Shanghai who knew about the Shanghai Formula One Chinese Grand Prix. The research instrument captured the study's main constructs: (a) perceived benefits of major events, (b) perceived costs of major events, (c) attitude toward major events, and (d) intention to support major events. Results and findings: The results provide support for using SET to examine residents’ perception of the benefits and costs regarding the triple bottom line: economic, social, and environmental components. Residents’ attitudes toward a major event positively influenced their intention to support the event. Perceived costs of a major event have a stronger effect on Chinese residents’ social exchange process. Implications: The results provide important evidence showing that the tendency to ‘sacrifice oneself for the good of a large number of people’ in collectivistic countries can counterbalance the effect of loss aversion, a psychological universal that has been extensively observed in human beings.
Intercellular adhesion molecule‐1 on synovial cells attenuated interleukin‐6‐induced inhibition of osteoclastogenesis induced by receptor activator for nuclear factor κB ligand

In a co‐culture of osteoclast precursor cells and synovial cells, interleukin‐6 (IL‐6) induces osteoclast formation. In contrast, in a monoculture of osteoclast precursor cells, IL‐6 directly suppresses receptor activator for nuclear factor κB ligand (RANKL)‐induced differentiation of osteoclast precursor cells into osteoclasts. In the present study, we explored why the effect of IL‐6 differed between the monoculture and the co‐culture systems. In the monoculture, mouse osteoclast precursor cell line, RAW 264·7 (RAW) cells were cultured with soluble RANKL (sRANKL) for 24 h or 3 days. sRANKL increased both expression of osteoclastogenesis marker, tartrate‐resistant acid phosphatase isoform 5b (TRAP5b) and nuclear factor of activated T cells cytoplasmic 1 (NFATc1), whereas the co‐addition of IL‐6 decreased them both in a dose‐dependent manner. In the co‐culture, RAW cells and human synovial cell line, SW982 cells were cultured with IL‐6 + soluble IL‐6 receptor (sIL‐6R) for 3 days. TRAP5b and NFATc1 expression reduced by IL‐6 was increased by the addition of SW982 cells in a manner dependent upon the number of added cells. IL‐6 + sIL‐6R treatment significantly induced RANKL production in SW982 cells, and anti‐RANKL antibody inhibited IL‐6 + sIL‐6R‐induced osteoclastogenesis. SW982 cells expressed high levels of ICAM‐1 originally, and ICAM‐1 expression was increased significantly by IL‐6 + sIL‐6R. Anti‐ICAM‐1 antibody suppressed IL‐6‐induced osteoclastogenesis. Finally, in the monoculture system, addition of sICAM‐1 dose‐dependently restored the expression of TRAP5b reduced by IL‐6. Similar results were obtained when the formation of TRAP‐positive multi‐nuclear cells were examined using mouse bone marrow cells. In conclusion, IL‐6 gave different results in the co‐culture and monoculture systems because in the co‐culture, ICAM‐1 from the synovial cells restored osteoclastogenesis suppressed by IL‐6.
Systematic evaluation of patient-reported outcome (PRO) protocol content and reporting in UK cancer clinical trials: the EPiC study protocol

Introduction Emerging evidence suggests that patient-reported outcome (PRO)-specific information may be omitted in trial protocols and that PRO results are poorly reported, limiting the use of PRO data to inform cancer care. This study aims to evaluate the standards of PRO-specific content in UK cancer trial protocols and their arising publications and to highlight examples of best-practice PRO protocol content and reporting where they occur. The objective of this study is to determine if these early findings are generalisable to UK cancer trials, and if so, how best we can bring about future improvements in clinical trials methodology to enhance the way PROs are assessed, managed and reported. Hypothesis: Trials in which the primary end point is based on a PRO will have more complete PRO protocol and publication components than trials in which PROs are secondary end points. Methods and analysis Completed National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Portfolio Cancer clinical trials (all cancer specialities/age-groups) will be included if they contain a primary/secondary PRO end point. The NIHR portfolio includes cancer trials, supported by a range of funders, adjudged as high-quality clinical research studies. The sample will be drawn from studies completed between 31 December 2000 and 1 March 2014 (n=1141) to allow sufficient time for completion of the final trial report and publication. Two reviewers will then review the protocols and arising publications of included trials to: (1) determine the completeness of their PRO-specific protocol content; (2) determine the proportion and completeness of PRO reporting in UK Cancer trials and (3) model factors associated with PRO protocol and reporting completeness and with PRO reporting proportion. Ethics and dissemination The study was approved by the ethics committee at University of Birmingham (ERN_15-0311). Trial findings will be disseminated via presentations at local, national and international conferences, peer-reviewed journals and social media including the CPROR twitter account and UOB departmental website (http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/cpro0r). Trial registration number PROSPERO CRD42016036533.
A BioSecure ( DS 2 ) Report on the Technological Evaluation of Score-level Quality-dependent and Cost-sensitive Multimodal Biometric Performance

This report summarizes the result of the BioSEcure DS2 (Desktop) evaluation campaign. This campaign aims at evaluating multimodal fusion algorithms involving face, fingerprint and iris biometrics for person authentication, targeting at the application of physical access control in a medium-sized establishment with some 500 persons. While multimodal biometrics is a well investigated subject in the literature, there exists no benchmark results on which basis fusion algorithms can be compared. Working towards this goal, we designed two sets of experiments: quality-dependent and cost-sensitive evaluations. The quality-dependent evaluation aims at evaluating how well fusion algorithms can perform under changing quality of raw biometric images principally due to change of devices. The cost-sensitive evaluation, on the other hand, aims at how well a fusion algorithm can perform given restricted computation and in the presence of software and hardware failures, resulting in errors such as failure to acquire and failure to match. Since multiple capturing devices are available, a fusion algorithm should be able to handle this non-ideal but nevertheless realistic scenario. It is on this ground that this evaluation is proposed. In both evaluations, a fusion algorithm is supplied with scores from each biometric comparison subsystems as well as the quality measures of both the template and the quality measures. The evaluation campaign is very encouraging, receiving 15 fusion systems. To the best of our knowledge, the BioSecure DS2 evaluation campaign is the first attempt to benchmark both quality-dependent and cost-sensitive fusion algorithms. Our evaluation suggests that while using all the available biometric sensors can definitely increase the fusion performance, one has to tradeoff with the increased cost in terms of acquisition time, computation time and the physical cost of hardware maintenance. A promising solution which does not increase this composite factors of cost is dynamic fusion, as demonstrated in our experiments. In the presence of changing image quality which may due to change of acquisition devices and/or device capturing configurations, we observe that the top performing fusion algorithms are those that exploit the automatically derived quality measures in order to recover the most probable biometric device from which the associated biometric data was scanned.
Sox9 regulates self‐renewal and tumorigenicity by promoting symmetrical cell division of cancer stem cells in hepatocellular carcinoma

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a highly aggressive liver tumor containing cancer stem cells (CSCs) that participate in tumor propagation, resistance to conventional therapy, and promotion of tumor recurrence, causing poor patient outcomes. The protein SRY (sex determining region Y)‐box 9 (Sox9) is a transcription factor expressed in some solid tumors, including HCC. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying Sox9 function in liver CSCs remain unclear. Here, we show that Sox9 is highly expressed in liver CSCs and that high levels of Sox9 predict a decreased probability of survival in HCC patients. We demonstrate that Sox9 is required for maintaining proliferation, self‐renewal, and tumorigenicity in liver CSCs. Overexpression of exogenous Sox9 in liver non‐CSCs restored self‐renewal capacity. Additionally, a reduction in the asymmetrical cell division of spheroid‐cultured liver CSCs was observed when compared with differentiated cancer cells or liver CSCs with inhibited Notch signaling. Furthermore, we demonstrate that Sox9 is responsible for the asymmetrical‐to‐symmetrical cell division switch in liver CSCs. Sox9 also negatively regulates Numb expression, contributing to a feedback circuit that maintains Notch activity and directs symmetrical cell division. Clinical analyses revealed that the Sox9HighNumbLow profile is associated with poor prognosis in human HCC patients. Conclusion: We demonstrate that Sox9 plays a critical role in self‐renewal and tumor propagation of liver CSCs and identify the molecular mechanisms regulated by Sox9 that link tumor initiation and cell division. (Hepatology 2016;64:117–129)
A Cross Decomposition Procedure for the Facility Location Problem with a Choice of Facility Type

Consider a capacitated facility location problem in which each customer is assumed to have a unit demand, and each facility capacity has to be chosen from the given set of admissible levels. Under the restriction that each customer's unit demand be met by exactly one facility, the objective is to select a set of facilities to open, along with their capacities, and to assign customer's demand to them so as to minimize the total cost which includes fixed costs of opening facilities as well as variable assignment costs. The problem is modelled as a pure 0-1 program which extends the scope of applicability significantly over that by conventional location models. Based on Cross Decomposition recently developed by Van Roy, a solution procedure is proposed , which exploits the special structure of the problem. Computational results with a set of test problems shows the superiority of our solution procedure to other related ones.
Qualidade de vida e gravidade da dependência de tabaco Quality of life and severity of tobacco dependence

Background: Quality of life is a construct that has been increasing its importance as a means to access the impact, either of a given pathology or of a therapeutic strategy applied to a given subject. This parameter has been researched in the most various areas, among which, smoking. Objective: Evaluating the association between quality of life and the severity of tobacco dependence. Method: A transversal study has been applied, using a convenience sample of 276 tobacco users, selected at random, tobacco-related diseases free. The instruments used were: World Health Organization Quality of Life Instrument (WHOQOL-BREF), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Fagerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence and a social and demographic data file. Results: It has been found association between the severity of tobacco dependence and the lowest scores in all domains of quality of life, evaluated by WHOQOL-BREF. Such result has been influenced by anxiety and depression symptoms. Conclusion: Heavy smokers have less quality of life but this group its also that with heavy depressive and anxiety symptoms, therefore, it is important that more studies are applied on the topic.
The Morality and Emotion of Forgiveness: How Three Moral Concerns And Four Emotions are Relevant to Forgiveness Decisions

The purpose of this dissertation was to understand the relationship of morality and emotion to forgiveness decisions. Since religious, philosophical, and literary cultures have historically offered instruction on when it is morally right or wrong to forgive others, I predicted that a morality-forgiveness link does exist. I examined the moralityforgiveness link using the theoretical framework of Moral Foundations Theory (MFT). MFT also predicts that emotions play a role in how we interpret situations. Using Google AdWords as a recruitment method, I surveyed 237 US adults online about how they perceive five foundational aspects of morality, their decisions to forgive, and emotions they experience when wronged by others. I found that Google AdWords is a quick, reliable alternative to university recruiting and results in a sample similar to the US Internet population, but it can also be relatively expensive. I found that a moralityforgiveness link did occur within my sample, and that the moral foundation of Purity was an important predictor of forgiveness beyond the traditional moral foundation of Harm and Fairness. I found that people who were asked about whether they experienced anger and compassion when wronged by others, and people who were not asked, did not differ in their forgiveness decisions, implying that whether asked about anger and compassion or not, many people feel both emotions in reaction to wrongdoing of others. I also discovered that two additional emotions, beyond anger and compassion, significantly predicted forgiveness: embarrassment and contempt; and a model accounting for the linear effect of embarrassment, compassion, anger, and contempt accounted for over 47% of the variance in forgiveness decisions.