Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of 1379 patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma treated by radiation

One thousand three hundred seventy‐nine nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) patients were treated from March 1958 to December 1978. Twenty‐two percent had stage I or II and 78% Stage III or IV had lesions. Two hundred twenty—Kv radiographs were used before 1960; and telecobalt was used from 1961 to 1978. Factors influencing the 5‐year survival rate favorably are youth of patient, being female, pathologic condition (poorly differentiated carcinoma, 45.1% versus adenocarcinoma, 13%), stage (Stage 1,86%, Stage II, 59.5%; Stage III, 45.8%; Stage IV, 29.2%), decade admitted for treatment in the past (31% in the 1950s, 48.6% in the 1970s), total dose delivered to the nasopharynx (40 to 49 Gy, 46%; 70 to 79 Gy, 54.1%; 90 Gy or more, 64%) and prophylactic radiation to the neck regions (with prophylactic irradiation, 53.8%, without prophylactic irradiation, 23%). This implies that prophylactic radiation of the neck is crucial even without positive clinical metastasis. For those who have a residual tumor in the primary site when 70 Gy has been delivered, the total dose may be boosted to more than 90 Gy with the cone‐down technique or on basis of adding 20 Gy to the dose at which the primary lesion disappeared grossly. The common postirradiation complications are: radiation myelitis, trismus, and otitis media. Because disease recurred in some patients after the fifth year, NPC patients should be followed for at least 10 years.
Uncertainty Relations and Sparse Signal Recovery for Pairs of General Signal Sets

We present an uncertainty relation for the representation of signals in two different general (possibly redundant or incomplete) signal sets. This uncertainty relation is relevant for the analysis of signals containing two distinct features each of which can be described sparsely in a suitable general signal set. Furthermore, the new uncertainty relation is shown to lead to im- proved sparsity thresholds for recovery of signals that are sparse in general dictionaries. Specifically, our results improve on the well-known (1 + 1/d)/2-threshold for dictionaries with coherence d by up to a factor of two. Furthermore, we provide probabilistic recovery guarantees for pairs of general dictionaries that also allow us to understand which parts of a general dictionary one needs to randomize over to "weed out" the sparsity patterns that prohibit breaking the square-root bottleneck.
Fast aircraft detection in satellite images based on convolutional neural networks

Aircraft detection in satellite images is generally difficult due to the variations of aircraft type, pose, size and complex background. In this paper, we propose a new aircraft detection framework based on objectiveness detection techniques (e.g., BING) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The advantages are two folds. On one hand, we first introduce the CNN for aircraft detection, as CNN can learn rich features from the raw data automatically and has yielded a state-of-the-art performance in many object detection tasks. On the other hand, the use of candidate object regions proposed by BING achieves a high object detection rate and saves time simultaneously. Experimental results show that the proposed method is fast and effective to detect aircrafts in complex airport scenes. We also construct a dataset for aircraft detection obtained from Google Earth.
Biochemical criteria at 1 year are not robust indicators of response to ursodeoxycholic acid in early primary biliary cirrhosis: results from a 29-year cohort study

In primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC), biochemical criteria at 1 year are considered surrogates of response to ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA). However, due to the slow natural history of PBC, evaluation at 1 year may be suboptimal to assess the therapeutic response, particularly in early disease.
Tree Automata

This work presents a machine-checked tree automata library for Standard-ML, OCaml and Haskell. The algorithms are efficient by using appropriate data structures like RB-trees. The available algorithms for non-deterministic automata include membership query, reduction, intersection, union, and emptiness check with computation of a witness for non-emptiness. The executable algorithms are derived from less-concrete, non-executable algorithms using data-refinement techniques. The concrete data structures are from the Isabelle Collections Framework. Moreover, this work contains a formalization of the class of treeregular languages and its closure properties under set operations.
Hierarchical task analysis ‐ An approach for diagnosing students’ conceptual difficulties

Pupils’ conceptual difficulties in scientific problem‐solving are examined on the basis of their performance on complex tasks and on the simple tasks of which the complex tasks are composed. A theoretical analysis reveals that identical errors on a complex task are not necessarily due to the same errors on the associated component tasks. This is illustrated by reference to actual research findings. The educational implications of this finding are discussed.
Processing of Morphological and Semantic Cues in Russian and German.

This study examines the on-line processing of morphological cues to sentence interpretation in Russian and German with the goal of evaluating the relative impacts of cue availability and cue reliability. Both Russian and German use the cues of word order, animacy, case-marking, and subject-verb agreement to identify the agent of active transitive sentences. However, the availability of the case-marking cue is higher in Russian than in German. Using a picture-choice paradigm, we contrasted case-marking and animacy in Russian and German. The reaction times showed larger effects of casemarking in Russian than in German and effects of animacy in German, but not in Russian. These results suggest that the higher the availability of a cue, the larger the processing benefits associated with the presence of this cue and the smaller the impact of other converging information. A recurrent cascaded backpropagation network was designed to simulate these effects. The network succeeded in capturing the essential languag.
An exploration of Biggs’ constructive alignment in course design and its impact on students’ learning approaches

This paper investigates whether instructors’ adoption of constructive alignment has any impact on university students’ learning approaches, which are highly correlated with students’ achievement of learning outcomes. A multi-method model with a combination of qualitative and quantitative design was adopted, using document analysis, interviews and survey. The analysis of covariance results suggested that regardless of individual differences, students would adjust their learning approaches and study behaviours in response to the classroom teaching and learning environment. Students in more ‘constructively aligned courses’ were more likely to adopt deep learning approaches and less likely to use surface learning approaches in their study of a particular course.
Words or Characters? Fine-grained Gating for Reading Comprehension

Previous work combines word-level and character-level representations using concatenation or scalar weighting, which is suboptimal for high-level tasks like reading comprehension. We present a fine-grained gating mechanism to dynamically combine word-level and character-level representations based on properties of the words. We also extend the idea of fine-grained gating to modeling the interaction between questions and paragraphs for reading comprehension. Experiments show that our approach can improve the performance on reading comprehension tasks, achieving new state-of-the-art results on the Children's Book Test dataset. To demonstrate the generality of our gating mechanism, we also show improved results on a social media tag prediction task.
Interactions between the NO-Citrulline Cycle and Brain-derived Neurotrophic Factor in Differentiation of Neural Stem Cells*

Background: NO and BDNF are responsible for numerous functions in the CNS; however, joint actions exerted by these factors have not been studied. Results: BDNF reversed the block on neural differentiation caused by insufficient NO signaling. Conclusion: The NO-citrulline cycle and BDNF through up-regulation of p75 expression interact for restoring normal NO signaling and promoting neural differentiation. Significance: New insights are provided for BDNF and NO-citrulline cycle actions in neurogenesis. The diffusible messenger NO plays multiple roles in neuroprotection, neurodegeneration, and brain plasticity. Argininosuccinate synthase (AS) is a ubiquitous enzyme in mammals and the key enzyme of the NO-citrulline cycle, because it provides the substrate l-arginine for subsequent NO synthesis by inducible, endothelial, and neuronal NO synthase (NOS). Here, we provide evidence for the participation of AS and of the NO-citrulline cycle in the progress of differentiation of neural stem cells (NSC) into neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes. AS expression and activity and neuronal NOS expression, as well as l-arginine and NOx production, increased along neural differentiation, whereas endothelial NOS expression was augmented in conditions of chronic NOS inhibition during differentiation, indicating that this NOS isoform is amenable to modulation by extracellular cues. AS and NOS inhibition caused a delay in the progress of neural differentiation, as suggested by the decreased percentage of terminally differentiated cells. On the other hand, BDNF reversed the delay of neural differentiation of NSC caused by inhibition of NOx production. A likely cause is the lack of NO, which up-regulated p75 neurotrophin receptor expression, a receptor required for BDNF-induced differentiation of NSC. We conclude that the NO-citrulline cycle acts together with BDNF for maintaining the progress of neural differentiation.
Real Time Fine-Grained Categorization with Accuracy and Interpretability

A well-designed fine-grained categorization system usually has three contradictory requirements: accuracy (the ability to identify objects among subordinate categories); interpretability (the ability to provide human-understandable explanation of recognition system behavior); and efficiency (the speed of the system). To handle the trade-off between accuracy and interpretability, we propose a novel "Deeper Part-Stacked CNN" architecture armed with interpretability by modeling subtle differences between object parts. The proposed architecture consists of a part localization network, a two-stream classification network that simultaneously encodes object-level and part-level cues, and a feature vectors fusion component. Specifically, the part localization network is implemented by exploring a new paradigm for key point localization that first samples a small number of representable pixels and then determine their labels via a convolutional layer followed by a softmax layer. We also use a cropping layer to extract part features and propose a scale mean-max layer for feature fusion learning. Experimentally, our proposed method outperform state-of-the-art approaches both in part localization task and classification task on Caltech-UCSD Birds-200-2011. Moreover, by adopting a set of sharing strategies between the computation of multiple object parts, our single model is fairly efficient running at 32 frames/sec.
Radical Roles for RAGE in the Pathogenesis of Oxidative Stress in Cardiovascular Diseases and Beyond

Oxidative stress is a central mechanism by which the receptor for advanced glycation endproducts (RAGE) mediates its pathological effects. Multiple experimental inquiries in RAGE-expressing cultured cells have demonstrated that ligand-RAGE interaction mediates generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and consequent downstream signal transduction and regulation of gene expression. The primary mechanism by which RAGE generates oxidative stress is via activation of NADPH oxidase; amplification mechanisms in the mitochondria may further drive ROS production. Recent studies indicating that the cytoplasmic domain of RAGE binds to the formin mDia1 provide further support for the critical roles of this pathway in oxidative stress; mDia1 was required for activation of rac1 and NADPH oxidase in primary murine aortic smooth muscle cells treated with RAGE ligand S100B. In vivo, in multiple distinct disease models in animals, RAGE action generates oxidative stress and modulates cellular/tissue fate in range of disorders, such as in myocardial ischemia, atherosclerosis, and aneurysm formation. Blockade or genetic deletion of RAGE was shown to be protective in these settings. Indeed, beyond cardiovascular disease, evidence is accruing in human subjects linking levels of RAGE ligands and soluble RAGE to oxidative stress in disorders such as doxorubicin toxicity, acetaminophen toxicity, neurodegeneration, hyperlipidemia, diabetes, preeclampsia, rheumatoid arthritis and pulmonary fibrosis. Blockade of RAGE signal transduction may be a key strategy for the prevention of the deleterious consequences of oxidative stress, particularly in chronic disease.
Using playfulness to cope with psychological stress: taking into account both positive and negative emotions

Playfulness increases positive emotions (PEs) and enhances psychological well-being. However, no studies have examined whether playfulness serves as a stress–coping resource, nor assessed both positive and negative emotions (NEs) as coping outcomes. The current study used the Process Model of Stress and Coping to examine whether playfulness helps university students cope with psychological stress. Both PE and NE were examined as immediate coping outcomes, assessing life satisfaction as a more comprehensive outcome. Using structural equation modeling to analyze the data, we found that heightened playfulness was associated with more PE, which led to greater life satisfaction. Heightened playfulness was also related to less NE, partially offsetting the adverse effects of stress. The results contribute to the leisure literature by showing the value of playfulness as a coping resource, the applicability of the Process Model of Stress and Coping, and the importance of examining both emotional and more comprehensive coping outcomes.
Women Who Kill: Offenders or Defenders?

Interviews with 18 women prisoners in Missouri who were convicted of killing their male partners found that 16 had been physically abused by their partners and only 5 were permitted to present evidence of their physical abuse during their trials. Half the women received life sentences with no possibility of parole or no possibility of parole for 50 years. To ensure justice for battered women who kill in self-defense, social workers are encouraged to learn more about this population and to engage in advocacy on behalf of these women.
Evaluation of two harvesting systems for the supply of wood-chips in Norway spruce forests affected by bark beetles

Nacrtak For sanitary reasons, spruce trees affected by bark beetles (Ips typographus L.) should be removed out of the stand as soon as possible, to avoid the propagation of the beetles to healthy trees. One possibility, to utilize the accruing crown material in a reasonable way (instead of burning it) could be, to use it as wood-chips for biomass heating plants. The aim of this project was therefore to determine the productivity of two harvesting and processing systems for wood-chips as a joint-product of round wood in Norway spruce (Picea abies L.) forests affected by bark beetles. Two systems with different sorting criteria were studied: processing of sawlogs, pulpwood and wood-chips (System A) in comparison to the processing of only sawlogs and wood-chips (System B). In System A, the energy wood was chipped with a chipper mounted on a forwarder that was working directly in the stand. In System B, the material to be chipped was previously concentrated along the forest road with a forwarder, and a chipper mounted on a truck was used for chipping. In System A, 0.18 t of dried chips could be harvested per m3 of round wood, and in System B 0.26 t of dried chips per m3 of round wood. The cost of chipping in the stand was 4.74 /m3 of chips and the cost of chipping along the forest road after transporting the chipping material by a forwarder was 5.63 /m3 of chips. Therewith, a cost-covering supply of wood-chips may be obtained out of such stands. Concerning the ratio of energy input to energy output it can be said that the systems required 1.5% and 2% of energy output that was obtained using the respective system.
First experience with rapamycin-based immunosuppression to improve kidney function after heart transplantation.

UNLABELLED This study was designed to gain initial experience with rapamycin in thoracic organ transplant recipients with severely compromised kidney function, i.e. to see whether and how kidney function will improve with a rapamycin-based immunosuppressive protocol. METHODS Twelve heart transplant patients were included into the study (serum creatinine > 2.5 mg/dL), with an average time after transplantation of more than 4 years. The calcineurin inhibitor (cyclosporine A = 9, tacrolimus = 3) was reduced by 50 %, and rapamycin added to reach a target level of 8 - 12 ng/dL. Azathioprine was halted, corticosteroid treatment remained unchanged. RESULTS After implementing the rapamycin-based immunosuppression kidney function improved in all patients within one week. Serum creatinine dropped from 3.1 +/- 0.6 mg/dL to 2.7 +/- 0.5 mg/dL ( p = 0.0004), creatinine clearance increased from 30.4 +/- 11 mL/min to 40.8 +/- 10.5 mL/min ( p = 0.003). This improvement continued until 3 months after the conversion ( p = 0.032). Thereafter, no statistically significant changes were noted up to 6 months posttransplant ( p = 0.41). Serum cyclosporine levels dropped from 180 +/- 40 ng/mL to 132 +/- 46 ng/mL on average ( p = 0.002). Side-effects occurred in 4 patients and were all related to a rapamycin level exceeding 12 ng/mL. CONCLUSIONS We conclude that transplant patients with impaired kidney function will have an immediate benefit from partially replacing calcineurin inhibitors by rapamycin.
Online Electoral Competition in Different Settings

This article takes a close look at two important theories concerning the effects that online party campaigning has on party competition. The equalization and normalization theories are tested for systematic logical dependence on conditions present in existing studies within the research field. The conditions are country-specific contextual settings and studyspecific methodology. The method of qualitative comparative analysis is used, such that variable based reasoning can be applied in the low n case study. The main result of the analysis is that findings of normalization are mostly dependent on offline conditions — electoral settings in particular — being favourable to major parties. Concerning findings of equalization, an online media environment favourable to minor parties, compared to the offline environment proved important. Through a meta-analytical approach, the article brings important information to light on how scholarly interpretations of the two theories have been constructed.
Long-Term Efficacy of Three Contraceptive Approaches for Population Control of Wild Horses

Controlling fertility of feral horses through the use of long-acting contraceptives or sterilization approaches has been championed as a reasonable and humane solution for addressing overpopulation problems in several western states. However, methods to accomplish long-term contraceptive efficacy of horses following a single treatment have been lacking. In fall 2002 and spring 2003, we initiated a study to compare the long-term efficacy of a single-shot contraceptive vaccine directed at gonadotropin releasing hormone (GonaCon ™ ) to that of a single-shot vaccine directed at the zona pellucida (SpayVac) and to the use of intrauterine contraceptive devices (IUD). Both vaccines were administered with AdjuVac ™ , an adjuvant developed at the National Wildlife Research Center. The objectives of the study were to determine: 1) 3-year efficacy for preventing pregnancy, 2) whether the contraceptive effects are reversible, and 3) whether there are contraindications. The Nevada Department of Agriculture provided the feral mares, which were maintained at the Nevada State Penitentiary, Carson City, facility. Mares were dewormed and given health vaccinations annually. Eight untreated control mares were compared to 12 mares treated with SpayVac, 16 mares treated with GonaCon ™ , and 15 mares treated with copper-containing IUDs. Only 25% (2/8) of the control mares were not pregnant or infertile in the first year. All mares in the SpayVac group were infertile, and 94% (15/16) were infertile in the GonaCon ™ group during the first breeding season. In Year 2, 80% (10/12) of the SpayVac-treated mares and 60% (9/15) of the GonaCon ™ -treated mares were infertile. In Year 3, 80% of the SpayVac mares and 53% (8/15) of the GonaCon ™ -treated mares were infertile. For IUD-treated mares, 80% (12/15) were infertile after Year 1, but only 29% (4/14) and 14% (2/14) were infertile after Years 2 and 3, respectively. For IUD mares that were infertile, it was possible to visualize the IUD by ultrasonography, leading us to conclude that mares that became pregnant had lost their IUDs. For mares given SpayVac, uterine edema was commonly observed. In Years 2 and 3, antibody titers for SpayVac were progressively lower compared to titers observed in Year 1.
User-operated speech in noise test: Implementation and comparison with a traditional test

Abstract Objective: The purpose of this study was to implement and evaluate a user-operated speech in noise test. Design: The test is based on the Danish speech material Dantale II, which consists of five words sentences (18). For each word presented the subject selected a response from ten alternative words. Two versions of the test were made: one with and one without the possibility that for each word presented the subject could answer “I do not know” (? -button). Using a listening test the two versions were evaluated against a traditional test, where the subjects orally repeated the words that were perceived. Study sample: Twenty-four normal-hearing subjects. Results: The speech intelligibility as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio can be described by logistic functions in the different user-operated tests and in the traditional test. The logistic parameters obtained from the user-operated test with the ? -button agree with the parameters obtained in a traditional test. The homogeneity of the speech material is uninfluenced when the material is used in a user-operated test. Conclusions: It is reasonable to use the Dantale II speech material for a user-operated speech in noise test, and the use of the ? -button is favourable.