Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Regional Variation in Patients and Outcomes in the Treatment of Preserved Cardiac Function Heart Failure With an Aldosterone Antagonist (TOPCAT) Trial

Background— Treatment of Preserved Cardiac Function Heart Failure With an Aldosterone Antagonist (TOPCAT) patients with heart failure and preserved left ventricular ejection fraction assigned to spironolactone did not achieve a significant reduction in the primary composite outcome (time to cardiovascular death, aborted cardiac arrest, or hospitalization for management of heart failure) compared with patients receiving placebo. In a post hoc analysis, an ≈4-fold difference was identified in this composite event rate between the 1678 patients randomized from Russia and Georgia compared with the 1767 enrolled from the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina (the Americas). Methods and Results— To better understand this regional difference in clinical outcomes, demographic characteristics of these populations and their responses to spironolactone were explored. Patients from Russia/Georgia were younger, had less atrial fibrillation and diabetes mellitus, but were more likely to have had prior myocardial infarction or a hospitalization for heart failure. Russia/Georgia patients also had lower left ventricular ejection fraction and creatinine but higher diastolic blood pressure (all P<0.001). Hyperkalemia and doubling of creatinine were more likely and hypokalemia was less likely in patients receiving spironolactone in the Americas with no significant treatment effects in Russia/Georgia. All clinical event rates were markedly lower in Russia/Georgia, and there was no detectable impact of spironolactone on any outcomes. In contrast, in the Americas, the rates of the primary outcome, cardiovascular death, and hospitalization for heart failure were significantly reduced by spironolactone. Conclusions— This post hoc analysis demonstrated greater potassium and creatinine changes and possible clinical benefits with spironolactone in patients with heart failure and preserved ejection fraction from the Americas. Clinical Trial Registration— URL: http://www.clinicaltrials. gov. Unique identifier: NCT00094302.
Chemokines in Cancer Development and Progression and Their Potential as Targeting Molecules for Cancer Treatment

Chemokines were initially identified as bioactive substances, which control the trafficking of inflammatory cells including granulocytes and monocytes/macrophages. Moreover, chemokines have profound impacts on other types of cells associated with inflammatory responses, such as endothelial cells and fibroblasts. These observations would implicate chemokines as master regulators in various inflammatory responses. Subsequent studies have further revealed that chemokines can regulate the movement of a wide variety of immune cells including lymphocytes, natural killer cells, and dendritic cells in both physiological and pathological conditions. These features endow chemokines with crucial roles in immune responses. Furthermore, increasing evidence points to the vital effects of several chemokines on the proliferative and invasive properties of cancer cells. It is widely acknowledged that cancer develops and progresses to invade and metastasize in continuous interaction with noncancerous cells present in cancer tissues, such as macrophages, lymphocytes, fibroblasts, and endothelial cells. The capacity of chemokines to regulate both cancerous and noncancerous cells highlights their crucial roles in cancer development and progression. Here, we will discuss the roles of chemokines in carcinogenesis and the possibility of chemokine targeting therapy for the treatment of cancer.
In vitro optimization of liposomal nanocarriers prepared from breast tumor cell specific phage fusion protein

Fusion proteins created by phage display peptides with tumor cell specificity and the pVIII major coat protein of filamentous phages have been explored recently as a simple and cost-effective means for preparing tumor-targeted liposomes that improve the cytotoxicity of anticancer drugs in vitro. The next step in the development of this approach is the optimization of the liposome composition for the maximum targeting activity and subsequent testing in vivo. This study aimed to investigate the impact of preparation protocols, lipid composition and phage protein content on the targeting efficiency of phage protein-modified liposomes. Analysis of size, zeta potential and morphology was used to investigate the effect of preparation protocols on the stability and homogeneity of the phage liposomes. A previously developed coculture targeting assay and a factorial design approach were used to determine the role of lipid composition of the liposomal membrane on the target cell specificity of the phage liposomes. Western blot combined with proteinase K treatment detected the orientation of targeted phage protein in liposomal membrane. Phage protein, DPPG and PEG2k-PE showed positive effects on target specificity of phage liposomes. The results served to identify optimal formulation that offer an improved liposomal affinity for target tumor cells over the non-optimized formulation.
THE RATE AND EFFECTS DISTRIBUTION OF VIABILITY MUTATION IN DROSOPHILA: MINIMUM DISTANCE ESTIMATION

The empirical distribution of the mean viability of mutation accumulation lines, obtained from three published experiments, was analyzed using minimum‐distance estimation. In two cases (Mukai et al. 1972; Ohnishi 1977), mutations were allowed to accumulate in copies of chromosome II protected from natural selection and recombination. In the other one (Fernández and López‐Fanjul 1996), they accumulated in inbred lines derived from an isogenic stock. In contrast with currently accepted hypotheses, we consistently estimated low (about 0.01) genomic viability mutation rates, λ, and a small kurtosis of the distribution of mutational effects on viability (a) in the three datasets. Minimum‐distance estimates of the per‐generation mean viability change due to mutation (λE[a]) were also obtained. These were very similar for both chromosomal datasets, their absolute values being about five times smaller than estimates obtained from the observed change in mean viability during the mutation process. It must be noted that, in both experiments, viability was measured relative to the Cy chromosome of a Cy/Pm stock. Thus, an unnoticed viability increase in this Cy chromosome may have resulted in overestimation of the mean viability reduction in the lines. In parallel, minimum‐distance estimation of λE(a) from inbred lines data (where the selective pressure during the accumulation process was larger) was even somewhat smaller, in absolute value, and very close to the estimate obtained by comparing the mean viability of the lines with that of the control isogenic line. The evolutionary importance of these results, as well as their relevance to the solution of the mutational load paradox, is discussed.
DudeTM: Building Durable Transactions with Decoupling for Persistent Memory

Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) offers non-volatility, byte-addressability and fast access at the same time. To make the best use of these properties, it has been shown by empirical evidence that programs should access NVM directly through CPU load and store instructions, so that the overhead of a traditional file system or database can be avoided. Thus, durable transactions become a common choice of applications for accessing persistent memory data in a crash consistent manner. However, existing durable transaction systems employ either undo logging, which requires a fence for every memory write, or redo logging, which requires intercepting all memory reads within transactions. This paper presents DUDETM, a crash-consistent durable transaction system that avoids the drawbacks of both undo logging and redo logging. DUDETM uses shadow DRAM to decouple the execution of a durable transaction into three fully asynchronous steps. The advantage is that only minimal fences and no memory read instrumentation are required. This design also enables an out-of-the-box transactional memory (TM) to be used as an independent component in our system. The evaluation results show that DUDETM adds durability to a TM system with only 7.4 ~ 24.6% throughput degradation. Compared to the existing durable transaction systems, DUDETM provides 1.7times to 4.4times higher throughput. Moreover, DUDETM can be implemented with existing hardware TMs with minor hardware modifications, leading to a further 1.7times speedup.
Understanding mobile commerce end-user adoption: a triangulation perspective and suggestions for an exploratory service evaluation framework

In the literature on mobile commerce service adoption, aggregate diffusion issues or technology issues are usually the focus. However; a comparison of the slow adoption of WAP services in Europe with the successful adoption of comparable I-mode services in Japan and technologically simple SMS-based services in Scandinavia, suggests that aggregate and technology-based models are insufficient to explain the mobile commerce adoption process. We suggest that alternative explanations may be found in both the business models at the supply side and in the individual end-users behavior at the demand side of the mobile commerce value chain. We focus on this demand side issue, and consider the adoption requirements of mobile commerce end-users. A triangulation of three perspectives on the mobile commerce end-user is suggested to understand and explain the end-user adoption process. The three perspectives view the end-user as a technology user, a consumer and a network member, respectively. The three perspectives are combined in a common framework. With each perspective follows relevant theories, models and methodologies. We also suggest applying the framework to design evaluation guidelines that can be used by service providers, operators and terminal producers to evaluate and predict end-user adoption of mobile commerce services in 3G and later mobile technologies.
Enhancing matrix factorization through initialization for implicit feedback databases

The implicit feedback based recommendation problem---when only the user history is available but there are no ratings---is a much harder task than the explicit feedback based recommendation problem, due to the inherent uncertainty of the interpretation of such user feedbacks. Still, this practically important recommendation task received less attention and therefore there are only a few common implicit feedback based algorithms and benchmark datasets. This paper focuses on a common matrix factorization method for the implicit problem and investigates if recommendation performance can be improved by appropriate initialization of the feature vectors before training. We present a general initialization framework that preserves the similarity between entities (users/items) when creating the initial feature vectors, where similarity is defined using e.g. context or metadata information. We demonstrate how the proposed initialization framework can be coupled with MF algorithms. The efficiency of the initialization is evaluated using various context and metadata based similarity concepts on two implicit variants of the MovieLens 10M dataset and one real life implicit database. It is shown that performance gain can attain 10% improvement in recall@50 and in AUC@50.
Assay of relative heterotrophic potential in the sea: the use of specifically labelled glucose.

The glucose dissimilation of a marine pseudomonad was investigated using manometric techniques as well as glucose specifically labelled at different sites. Data from radiorespirometric procedures indicated that some 90% of the glucose catabolized was routed through the Entner-Doudoroff pathway. The observed differences between the amount of carbon assimilated and the amount catabolized were discussed in relation to the heterotrophic uptake method which is currently being applied to problems in aquatic microbial ecology.
Parallels between wind and crowd loading of bridges

Parallels between the dynamic response of flexible bridges under the action of wind and under the forces induced by crowds allow each field to inform the other. Wind-induced behaviour has been traditionally classified into categories such as flutter, galloping, vortex-induced vibration and buffeting. However, computational advances such as the vortex particle method have led to a more general picture where effects may occur simultaneously and interact, such that the simple semantic demarcations break down. Similarly, the modelling of individual pedestrians has progressed the understanding of human–structure interaction, particularly for large-amplitude lateral oscillations under crowd loading. In this paper, guided by the interaction of flutter and vortex-induced vibration in wind engineering, a framework is presented, which allows various human–structure interaction effects to coexist and interact, thereby providing a possible synthesis of previously disparate experimental and theoretical results.
TRIPLE OXYGEN ISOTOPES OF BIOMINERALS: A NEW PROXY FOR RECONSTRUCTING PALEOARIDITY, PALEOECOPHYSIOLOGY AND PALEO-CARBON-CYCLING

ii LIST OF TABLES . ix LIST OF FIGURES . x CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 CHAPTER 2: MODELING AND INTERPRETING TRIPLE OXYGEN ISOTOPE VARIATIONS IN ANIMAL BODY WATER . 7 2.
The Diversity of Fish Species in Ngwerere Stream of Chongwe District in Lusaka Province, Zambia

A study to assess the diversity of fish species, using 5 different mesh sizes of multifilament gillnets was conducted along Ngwerere stream, at sites closest to Kalimba, Diamondale and Chortonel farms. Questionnaires were also administered to randomly selected respondents. Results indicated eleven different species that were captured from the stream over a stretch of twenty Kilometres. It was clearly observed during the study that this stream could support so many fish species due to the abundance of fauna and flora. It was further observed that the cichliidae family dominated the catch with five species, followed by clarias spp and cyprinids. Among the cichlids, O. niloticus was the most dominant although the local fishers indicated that the species started to show up in 2009 after the collapse of Zambia National Service (ZNS) dam. O. niloticus, comprised 22% of the overall catch, implying that it had the potential of colonising and displacing the indigenous species in the stream. The fact that the species was hardy and a mouth brooder like many of the indigenous Oreochromis species, such that it may have started crossbreeding with other species. Furthermore, O. niloticus was perceived to be of commercial importance to the local communities because of the large size it attained in the stream. It was also observed that there was little conservation awareness among the local people. The use of mosquito nets as fishing gear had become so rampant in the area, especially during the rainy season when there were floods. This method of fishing though seemingly rewarding to those practicing it; was one of the most destructive way of fishing. Most of them believed that the fish resource was inexhaustible; therefore, any method of catching the stock could be applied as over time the fish population seemed to regenerate. The stream community was also faced with the challenge of cultivating along the banks, water poisoning through pesticides and sewerage discharges.
Pregroup Analysis of Persian Sentences

Pregroups are mathematical structures introduced by Lambek in [17] as replacement for his type categorial grammars [18], much used in Linguistics e.g. see [22]. Pregroups have been used to analyze the sentence structure of many languages, for example English [15], French [3], Arabic [2], German [16], Italian [7], Polish [19], and Japanese [6]. The mathematical and logical properties of pregroups have been studied in [4, 5, 14, 23]. In this paper, we present a pregroup analysis of Persian grammer1. We start with a brief introduction to pregroups and then analyze the Persian simple and compound sentences with simple tense verbs and explicit subjects and objects. Our references to Persian grammar are [8, 21] in English and [20, 10] in Persian. In the course of analysis, we use a reduction diagram based on the diagrammatic toolkit of compact closed categories2 originally developed in [12] and used for quantum computation in [1]. Based on these diagrams we introduce a degree of nesting, which assigns to each sentence a number that reflects the complexity of its analysis. These degrees can be used to compare the complexity of different sentences in a language and the same sentence in different languages. As further examples, we use our results to analyze one verse of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam [13, 9] and also two verses of a poem by Hafiz [11]. Extending our analysis to sentences with implicit subject and object pronouns and verbs in compound tenses constitutes future work.
Refined Geographic Distribution of the Oriental ALDH2*504Lys (nee 487Lys) Variant

Mitochondrial aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH2) is one of the most important enzymes in human alcohol metabolism. The oriental ALDH2*504Lys variant functions as a dominant negative, greatly reducing activity in heterozygotes and abolishing activity in homozygotes. This allele is associated with serious disorders such as alcohol liver disease, late onset Alzheimer disease, colorectal cancer, and esophageal cancer, and is best known for protection against alcoholism. Many hundreds of papers in various languages have been published on this variant, providing allele frequency data for many different populations. To develop a highly refined global geographic distribution of ALDH2*504Lys, we have collected new data on 4,091 individuals from 86 population samples and assembled published data on a total of 80,691 individuals from 366 population samples. The allele is essentially absent in all parts of the world except East Asia. The ALDH2*504Lys allele has its highest frequency in Southeast China, and occurs in most areas of China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, and Indochina with frequencies gradually declining radially from Southeast China. As the indigenous populations in South China have much lower frequencies than the southern Han migrants from Central China, we conclude that ALDH2*504Lys was carried by Han Chinese as they spread throughout East Asia. Esophageal cancer, with its highest incidence in East Asia, may be associated with ALDH2*504Lys because of a toxic effect of increased acetaldehyde in the tissue where ingested ethanol has its highest concentration. While the distributions of esophageal cancer and ALDH2*504Lys do not precisely correlate, that does not disprove the hypothesis. In general the study of fine scale geographic distributions of ALDH2*504Lys and diseases may help in understanding the multiple relationships among genes, diseases, environments, and cultures.
Evaluation of salivary glucose, amylase, and total protein in Type 2 diabetes mellitus patients.

BACKGROUND Diabetes mellitus is a complex multisystem metabolic disorder characterized by a deficit in the production of insulin. The oral complications of uncontrolled diabetes mellitus are devastating. Saliva is an organic fluid that can be collected noninvasively and by individuals with limited training. These reasons create an interest in evaluating the possibility of using saliva as a diagnostic tool. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to determine, if saliva can be used as a noninvasive tool to monitor glycemic control in Type 2 diabetes. Comparative assessment of salivary (glucose, amylase, total protein levels) in patients with Type 2 diabetes and controls. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 40 individuals, 20 with Type 2 diabetes and 20 controls of age group 40-60 years were selected for the study. Diabetic status was assessed by estimating random blood glucose levels. Unstimulated saliva was collected from each participant and investigated for glucose, amylase, and total protein levels. Salivary glucose estimation was performed using glucose-oxidase method, amylase by the direct substrate kinetic enzymatic method, and total protein by pyrogallol red dye end point method. All the parameters were subjected to statistical analysis using SPSS version 20.0. RESULTS Significantly higher salivary glucose, lower amylase, and total proteins were observed in patients with Type 2 diabetes than controls. There was no significant correlation between salivary and blood glucose levels. CONCLUSION These results suggest that diabetes influences the composition of saliva. Since a significant correlation was not observed between salivary and blood glucose levels, further research is needed to determine salivary glucose estimation as a diagnostic tool for diabetes mellitus.
Randomized trial of cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, and 5‐fluorouracil with or without estrogenic recruitment in women with metastatic breast cancer

Background. The fraction of breast cancer cells undergoing DNA synthesis at any one time is relatively low, which is problematic because most chemotherapeutic agents are most effective against dividing cells. Estrogens administered in vitro and in vivo can increase breast cancer cell proliferation. A randomized clinical trial was performed to determine if estrogenic recruitment could increase the effectiveness of combination chemotherapy.
Improved capacity bounds for the binary energy harvesting channel

We consider a binary energy harvesting channel (BEHC) where the encoder has unit energy storage capacity. We first show that an encoding scheme based on block indexing is asymptotically optimal for small energy harvesting rates. We then present a novel upper bounding technique, which upper bounds the rate by lower-bounding the rate of information leakage to the receiver regarding the energy harvesting process. Finally, we propose a timing based hybrid encoding scheme that achieves rates within 0.03 bits/channel use of the upper bound; hence determining the capacity to within 0.03 bits/channel use.
Viral Strategies for Intracellular Trafficking: Motors and Microtubules

To overcome barriers to diffusion, many viruses utilize the microtubule‐associated molecular motor cytoplasmic dynein 1 to drive transport towards the nucleus of a target cell. Cytoplasmic dynein 1 generates movement towards the minus end of microtubules located at the microtubule organizing centre (MTOC), a structure that is typically in close proximity to the nucleus. Physiological cargoes for cytoplasmic dynein include membranous organelles, protein complexes and aggregates of misfolded protein. In this review, we discuss the study of microtubule‐based translocation of viruses and raise questions about the mechanisms for association with and then dissociation from cytoplasmic dynein with a goal of understanding whether viruses are seen by the intracellular trafficking machinery as functional protein complexes or misfolded protein aggregates.