Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Stromal Immune Module Correlated with the Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy, Prognosis and Lymphocyte Infiltration in HER2-Positive Breast Carcinoma Is Inversely Correlated with Hormonal Pathways

Introduction HER2-positive breast cancer (BC) is a heterogeneous group of aggressive breast cancers, the prognosis of which has greatly improved since the introduction of treatments targeting HER2. However, these tumors may display intrinsic or acquired resistance to treatment, and classifiers of HER2-positive tumors are required to improve the prediction of prognosis and to develop novel therapeutic interventions. Methods We analyzed 2893 primary human breast cancer samples from 21 publicly available datasets and developed a six-metagene signature on a training set of 448 HER2-positive BC. We then used external public datasets to assess the ability of these metagenes to predict the response to chemotherapy (Ignatiadis dataset), and prognosis (METABRIC dataset). Results We identified a six-metagene signature (138 genes) containing metagenes enriched in different gene ontologies. The gene clusters were named as follows: Immunity, Tumor suppressors/proliferation, Interferon, Signal transduction, Hormone/survival and Matrix clusters. In all datasets, the Immunity metagene was less strongly expressed in ER-positive than in ER-negative tumors, and was inversely correlated with the Hormonal/survival metagene. Within the signature, multivariate analyses showed that strong expression of the “Immunity” metagene was associated with higher pCR rates after NAC (OR = 3.71[1.28–11.91], p = 0.019) than weak expression, and with a better prognosis in HER2-positive/ER-negative breast cancers (HR = 0.58 [0.36–0.94], p = 0.026). Immunity metagene expression was associated with the presence of tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). Conclusion The identification of a predictive and prognostic immune module in HER2-positive BC confirms the need for clinical testing for immune checkpoint modulators and vaccines for this specific subtype. The inverse correlation between Immunity and hormone pathways opens research perspectives and deserves further investigation.
Close-to-reality evaluation of a PID control algorithm for blood glucose regulation in diabetic Goettingen minipigs

Diabetes mellitus is a widespread metabolic disease, which currently requires manual treatment. Until now, no commercial closed-loop insulin therapy system has been presented yet due to many control restrictions. To reduce safety risks for the patients, adequate control methods should be tested in animal trials, prior to clinical studies, which can be regarded as an intermediate step between in silico and in vivo control performance evaluation. In this paper, diabetic Goettingen minipigs serve as proxy for the human metabolism. After having developed a physiological and mathematical minipig model based on preceding animal trials, this paper describes a control algorithm which has been designed with the focus on real-life application. In particular, several control restrictions and requirements are taken into consideration such as delayed insulin effect on blood glucose concentration and fast response to blood glucose rise. The control robustness is evaluated with respect to three individual minipig models simulating three meals with different glucose content. It is shown that the controller responds to the disturbances similarly as a natural pancreas. Although blood glucose undershoots could not be completely avoided, no critical blood glucose drop appeared.
Effect of Technology Enhanced Conceptual Change Texts on Students' Understanding of Buoyant Force.

In this study, the effect of technology enhanced conceptual change texts on elementary school students' understanding of buoyant force was investigated. The conceptual change texts (written forms) used in this study are proven for effectiveness and are enriched by using technology support in this study. These texts were tried out on two groups. A pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design and one control group (n=20) and one experimental group (n=20) were used. Experimental group were given the technology enhanced conceptual change texts, whereas the control group was taught in the traditional instruction. Data were collected five open-ended questions concerning buoyancy. When the results of the study were examined as to the conceptual understanding attained in the two groups, it was found that experimental group's conceptual understanding was higher than that of traditional instruction group. It is believed that these texts about "buoyant force," an often misunderstood subject in science education, are very useful class materials that can enable students to learn meaningfully.
Time-frequency analysis of myoelectric signals during dynamic contractions: a comparative study

Introduces nonstationary signal analysis methods to analyze the myoelectric (ME) signals during dynamic contractions by estimating the time-dependent spectral moments. The time-frequency analysis methods including the short-time Fourier transform, the Wigner-Ville distribution, the Choi-Williams distribution, and the continuous wavelet transform were compared for estimation accuracy and precision on synthesized and real ME signals. It is found that the estimates provided by the continuous wavelet transform have better accuracy and precision than those obtained with the other time-frequency analysis methods on simulated data sets. In addition, ME signals from four subjects during three different tests (maximum static voluntary contraction, ramp contraction, and repeated isokinetic contractions) were also examined.
Zonal variation in primary cilia elongation correlates with localized biomechanical degradation in stress deprived tendon

Tenocytes express primary cilia, which elongate when tendon is maintained in the absence of biomechanical load. Previous work indicates differences in the morphology and metabolism of the tenocytes in the tendon fascicular matrix (FM) and the inter‐fascicular matrix (IFM). This study tests the hypothesis that primary cilia in these two regions respond differently to stress deprivation and that this is associated with differences in the biomechanical degradation of the extracellular matrix. Rat tail tendon fascicles were examined over a 7‐day period of either stress deprivation or static load. Seven days of stress deprivation induced cilia elongation in both regions. However, elongation was greater in the IFM compared to the FM. Stress deprivation also induced a loss of biomechanical integrity, primarily in the IFM. Static loading reduced both the biomechanical degradation and cilia elongation. The different responses to stress deprivation in the two tendon regions are likely to be important for the aetiology of tendinopathy. Furthermore, these data suggest that primary cilia elongate in response to biomechanical degradation rather than simply the removal of load. This response to degradation is likely to have important consequences for cilia signalling in tendon and as well as in other connective tissues. © 2016 The Authors. Journal of Orthopaedic Research Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Orthopaedic Research Society. J Orthop Res 34:2146–2153, 2016.
Epigenetic boundaries of tumour suppressor gene promoters: the CTCF connection and its role in carcinogenesis

Genetic and epigenetic regulations are essential mechanisms that ensure proper early and subsequent mammalian programming of diverse cellular processes. These mechanisms affect transcriptional regulation, stem cell determination and cell cycle control, including senescence and aging. It is not surprising that perturbation of the exquisite balance between genetic and epigenetic regulation can lead to diverse diseases, including cancer. Histone covalent modifications and DNA methylation do not explain all epigenetic phenomena. We describe a previously unsuspected epigenetic factor and propose the incorporation of the 11‐zinc finger CCCTC‐binding factor, known as CTCF as a novel and multifunctional epigenetic regulator.
Performance analysis of log-normal and Rayleigh-lognormal fading channels

In this paper, the performance of log-normal and Rayleigh-lognormal fading channels are studied. Especially, The average bit error probability (ABEP) of M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation(M-QAM), M-ary Phase shift keying (M-PSK) schemes are analyzed for log-normal and Rayleigh-lognormal fading channels. The simple closed-form expressions have been derived by employing a simple accurate closed-form approximation for the expectation of the function of a normal variate. Further, the closed-form expressions of the outage probability, ergodic capacity and ε-outage Capacity over Rayleigh-lognormal fading channel are derived. Finally, the accuracy of these proposed analytical models are confirmed by simulations results.
Standing up and Speaking Out? British Muslims’ Collective Action against Islamist Extremism

ABSTRACT Under what circumstances are British Muslims more willing to participate in collective action against Islamist extremism? The study is based on a survey experiment fielded to 825 British Muslims, comparing the mobilization outcome following an appeal by the government, the Muslim Council of Britain or no appeal (control condition). We find that action appeals do affect mobilization and that the effect of action appeals on mobilization outcomes is moderated by the level of trust in the actor behind the appeal. British Muslims distinguished by their level of trust in the government and the Muslim Council of Britain react differently to action appeals from these actors. Our results are robust to the control of a range of factors previously shown to be important for mobilization to collective action and have important theoretical and practical implications for counter-extremism policy.
Do Universities or Research Institutions With a Specific Subject Profile Have an Advantage or a Disadvantage in Institutional Rankings? A Latent Class Analysis With Data From the SCImago Ranking

Using data compiled for the SCImago Institutions Ranking, we look at whether the subject area type an institution (university or research-focused institution) belongs to (in terms of the fields researched) has an influence on its ranking position. We used latent class analysis to categorize institutions based on their publications in certain subject areas. Even though this categorization does not relate directly to scientific performance, our results show that it exercises an important influence on the outcome of a performance measurement: Certain subject area types of institutions have an advantage in the ranking positions when compared with others. This advantage manifests itself not only when performance is measured with an indicator that is not field-normalized but also for indicators that are field-normalized.
Long-Term Unemployment and Recessions

This report discusses the recession that began in the United States in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009 and how this recession affected employment rates. This report analyzes the trend in long-term unemployment over the postwar period and offers explanations for its unusually high incidence during the most recent postwar recession. It compares the individual, job, and household characteristics of the long-term unemployed during the latest recession (2007-2009) with the long-term unemployed at the end of the two previous recessions (1990-1991 and 2001).
Variability of the Thermohaline Circulation in an Ocean General Circulation Model Coupled to an Atmospheric Energy Balance Model

Abstract The variability of the ocean’s thermohaline circulation in an oceanic general circulation model (OGCM) coupled to a two-dimensional atmospheric energy balance model (EBM) is examined. The EBM calculates air temperatures by balancing heat fluxes, including that from the ocean surface; air temperature and ocean circulation evolve together without imposed temperature restrictions except specification of the solar constant. The heat coupling is scale dependent such that small-scale ocean temperature anomalies are damped quickly while large-scale ones lose heat slowly by longwave emission to space. These boundary conditions are more realistic than restoring conditions even when weak coupling is used, since they allow changes in air temperature and wholesale shifts in the planetary heat balance. It is found that coupling the EBM to the OGCM increases the stability of the ocean’s thermohaline circulation. This increased stability arises from the ability of the coupled model to develop a four times great.
Gradient Hard Thresholding Pursuit for Sparsity-Constrained Optimization

Hard Thresholding Pursuit (HTP) is an iterative greedy selection procedure for finding sparse solutions of underdetermined linear systems. This method has been shown to have strong theoretical guarantee and impressive numerical performance. In this paper, we generalize HTP from compressive sensing to a generic problem setup of sparsity-constrained convex optimization. The proposed algorithm iterates between a standard gradient descent step and a hard thresholding step with or without debiasing. We prove that our method enjoys the strong guarantees analogous to HTP in terms of rate of convergence and parameter estimation accuracy. Numerical evidences show that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art greedy selection methods in sparse logistic regression and sparse precision matrix estimation tasks.
On the Design and Use of a Micro Air Vehicle to Track and Avoid Adversaries

The MAV ’08 competition focused on the problem of using air and ground vehicles to locate and rescue hostages being held in a remote building. To execute this mission, a number of technical challenges were addressed, including designing the micro air vehicle (MAV), using the MAV to geo-locate ground targets, and planning the motion of ground vehicles to reach the hostage location without detection. In this paper, we describe the complete system designed for the MAV ’08 competition, and present our solutions to three technical challenges that were addressed within this system. First, we summarize the design of our MAV, focusing on the navigation and sensing payload. Second, we describe the vision and state estimation algorithms used to track ground features, including stationary obstacles and moving adversaries, from a sequence of images collected by the MAV. Third, we describe the planning algorithm used to generate motion plans for the ground vehicles to approach the hostage building undetected by adversaries; these adversaries are tracked by the MAV from the air. We examine different variants of a search algorithm and describe their performance under different conditions. Finally, we provide results of our system’s performance during the mission execution.
Narrative support for young game designers' writing

Creating narrative-based computer games is a complex and challenging task. Narrative Threads is a suite of software tools designed to aid young people (aged 11-15) in creating their own narrative-based games as a writing development activity. A participatory design process highlighted the areas where additional support was required, and informed the iterative design of Narrative Threads. The tools are implemented as a plugin to a commercial game creation toolset, and constitute character and object design tools, a branching narrative diagramming tool and an augmented story map view. In this paper, we provide an overview of the design of the tools and describe an evaluation carried out with 14 children over a four-day workshop. The study examined tool usage patterns, and compared games created with Narrative Threads to those created using the standard toolset. The results suggest a number of ways in which dynamic external representations of story elements can support writing activities in narrative-based game creation. Young designers using Narrative Threads wrote more character dialogue, made stronger links between the conversations they wrote and wider game events, and designed more complex characters, compared to those using the standard toolset. In addition to showing how Narrative Threads can support young games designers, the results have broader implications for anyone looking to support storytelling and writing through game creation activities and tools.
Chaos Control in A 3 D Ratio-dependent Food Chain System

This paper is devoted to investigate the problem of controlling chaos in a 3D ratio-dependent food chain system. Time-delayed feedback control method is applied to suppress chaos to unstable equilibria or unstable periodic orbits. By local stability analysis, we theoretically prove the occurrences of Hopf bifurcation. Some numerical simulations are presented to support theoretical predictions. Finally, main conclusions are drawn.
A Generalized Framework for Multi-Criteria Classifiers with Automated Learning: application on FLIR Ship Imagery

Supervised classification often consists in assigning a set of entities (e.g. alternatives, images, projects, subjects) into pre-defined and homogeneous categories. Categories are known a priori either by defining profiles limit between them or by a set of typical profiles (reference prototypes or elements) for each category. Ordinal Classification (or Sorting) usually refers to an order relationship between the categories, and nominal classification otherwise. Recently, a variety of classification methods–based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Operations Research (OR) techniques–have been proposed to solve classification problems [41]. Neural Networks (NN), Machine Learning (ML), Rough Sets (RS), Fuzzy Sets (FS) and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) were used for the development and the validation of these methods. This paper focuses on classification methods based on MCDA methodology. In this paper we use Multi-Criteria Classifiers (MCCs) to designate supervised classification methods based on MCDA methodology. The most MCCs are based on either outranking or multi-attribute utility approaches. Roy and Moscarola [35], Masaglia and Ostanello [24], Yu [42], Perny [31], Belacel [3] and Henriet [15] have proposed MCCs based on the outranking approach, while M.H. DIS (Multi-group Hierarchical DIScrimination) method [40] and UTADIS (UTilités Additives DIScriminantes) method and its variants ([21], [39], [10]) are typical methods based on multi-attribute utility theory. This paper focuses essentially on outranking-based nominal MCCs where there is no order relationship between the categories. These MCCs are based on concordance/discordance concepts. Limitation of outranking-based methods is due to the large number of parameters (e.g. discrimination thresholds, weights, reference alternatives, etc.) required. In MCDA context, these parameters are generally elicited using interactive approaches from the decision-maker to articulate his relational preference system: it’s the Direct Elicitation Approach (DEA). However, it is difficult for the decision-maker to provide such information in a coherent way when the number of these parameters is considerable. Indirect Elicitation Approach (IEA) or Automatic Learning Methods (ALMs) might be the solution to elicit automatically the values of these parameters based on a training set of pre-assigned examples. These two elicitation approaches will be discussed in Section 3. This paper makes three main contributions. First, we propose a generalized framework for Nominal Concordance/Discordance-based MCC (NCD-based MCCs). Second, we develop an ALM based on RealCoded Genetic Algorithm (RCGA) to estimate the parameters of NCD-based MCCs. Then we illustrate and assess the performance of the proposed approach on selected NCD-based MCCs. Even if the purpose of the comparison might be seen limited, we present exper-
Association between Fitness, Different Indicators of Fatness, and Clustered Cardiovascular Diseases Risk Factors in Portuguese Children and Adolescents

Objectives: To investigate the relationship between cardiovascular diseases risk factors, cardiorespiratory fitness and three different indicators of fatness, and investigate if these relationships are independent by each other. Methods: 491 children and adolescents were evaluated. Standardized metabolic risk scores were computed. Multiple linear regression and Univariate Analysis of Variance - GLM were used. Results: Fit youngsters presented a better profile for each of the risk factors. Belonging to the unfit category increased the risk of having high MRS. After adjustments for fatness indicators, the relationship between fitness and MRS disappeared, and obesity indicators presented significant relationship with the MRS.
Analytical study of heart disease prediction comparing with different algorithms

In data mining there are several ways, approaches to predict any disease and different researches are still going on. In this survey, we have studied several algorithms (like genetic algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Artificial Neural Network) which play very essential role in determining or predicting heart disease. Here we firstly describe the basic concepts of these three algorithms, and analyze how these algorithms helps in prediction of heart diseases.
The Effect of Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) on Breast Feeding at the Time of NICU Discharge

Background Exclusive breastfeeding is one of the most important essential components of Kangaroo Mother Care. Objective This study was performed to evaluate the effects of KMC on exclusive breastfeeding just at the time of discharge. Patients and Methods In this cross sectional study, 251 consecutive premature newborns admitted to neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) between May 2008 and May 2009 in Alzahra University Hospital in Tabriz were evaluated. All of candidate mothers were educated for KMC method by scheduled program. Standard questionnaire was prepared by focus group discussion, and mothers filled it prior to infant hospital discharge. Results In this study 157(62.5%) mothers performed kangaroo mother care (KMC group) versus 94 (37.5%) in conventional method care (CMC group). In KMC group exclusive breast feeding was 98 (62.5%) vs. 34 (37.5%), and P =. 00 in CMC group, at the time of hospital discharge. Receiving KMC, and gestational age were the only effective factors predicting exclusive breastfeeding. Our result indicated that there was a 4.1 time increase in exclusive breastfeeding by KMC, and also weekly increase in gestational age increased it 1.2 times, but maternal age, birth weight, mode of delivery, and 5 minute Apgar score had no influence on it. Conclusions KMC is more effective, and increases exclusive breast feeding successfully. It can be a good substitution for CMC (conventional methods of care). It is a safe, effective, and feasible method of care for LBWI even in the NICU settings.
The Distance and Interstellar Sight Line to GX 339–4

The distance to the black hole binary GX 339-4 remains a topic of debate. We examine high-resolution optical spectra of the Na D lines resolving the velocity structure along the line of sight. We find this to be complex, with at least nine components, mostly blueshifted, spanning a velocity range of nearly 200 km s-1. The presence of components with a large blueshift rules out a nearby location and requires that the binary be located at or beyond the tangent point, implying a lower limit to the distance of ~6 kpc. The presence of a significant redshifted component at +30 km s-1 is even more intriguing, as GX 339-4 also has a slightly positive systemic velocity, suggesting that the source, and this cloud, could be on the far side of the Galaxy, where the radial velocities due to Galactic rotation become positive again. If this is the case, we require a distance of ~15 kpc. This is less secure than the 6 kpc lower limit, however. We discuss the implications of these possible distances for the outburst and quiescent luminosities, as well as the nature of the companion star, and argue that a large distance explains these characteristics. In particular, it would explain the nondetection of the companion star during the faintest states.