Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Effects of n-3 Fatty Acids and Bexarotene on Breast Cancer Cell Progression

Breast cancer cell growth can be inhibited in vivo by retinoid X receptor (RXR) specific retinoids. In both animal and cell culture studies, omega-3 fatty acids share growth regulatory effects similar to those of RXR specific retinoids (rexinoids). One synthetic rexinoid, bexarotene (LCD 1069, Targretin), is used clinically to treat cancer patients. Of concern is that some patients are unable to tolerate high doses of such treatment drugs. We hypothesized that n-3 fatty acids and bexarotene may work synergistically to slow breast cancer cell growth. To test our hypothesis, we used MCF-7 human mammary carcinoma cells and an in vitro cell culture model. We investigated the relationship between the omega-3 fatty acids docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) alone and in conjunction with bexarotene in slowing MCF-7 cell growth. Following a 72 hr incubation with the respective treatments, bexarotene enhanced cell growth (p < 0.05) while DHA showed a strong growth inhibitory effect which was not enhanced by the addition of bexarotene (p < 0.05). EPA alone was not effective in altering cell growth (p < 0.05). Interestingly, when combined with bexarotene, EPA was more effective at slowing cell growth than when cells received EPA alone. Thus, select omega-3 fatty acids alone are more effective than bexarotene in slowing MCF-7 cell progression. However, the use of the RXR-selective retinoids may enhance the growth regulatory mechanisms of the fatty acid EPA.
Experimental Alcohol-Related Peripheral Neuropathy: Role of Insulin/IGF Resistance

The mechanisms of alcohol-related peripheral neuropathy (ALPN) are poorly understood. We hypothesize that, like alcohol-related liver and brain degeneration, ALPN may be mediated by combined effects of insulin/IGF resistance and oxidative stress. Adult male Long Evans rats were chronically pair-fed with diets containing 0% or 37% ethanol (caloric), and subjected to nerve conduction studies. Chronic ethanol feeding slowed nerve conduction in the tibial (p = 0.0021) motor nerve, and not plantar sensory nerve, but it did not affect amplitude. Histological studies of the sciatic nerve revealed reduced nerve fiber diameters with increased regenerative sprouts, and denervation myopathy in ethanol-fed rats. qRT-PCR analysis demonstrated reduced mRNA levels of insulin, IGF-1, and IGF-2 polypeptides, IGF-1 receptor, and IRS2, and ELISAs revealed reduced immunoreactivity for insulin and IGF-1 receptors, IRS-1, IRS-4, myelin-associated glycoprotein, and tau in sciatic nerves of ethanol-fed rats (all p < 0.05 or better). The findings suggest that ALPN is characterized by (1) slowed conduction velocity with demyelination, and a small component of axonal degeneration; (2) impaired trophic factor signaling due to insulin and IGF resistance; and (3) degeneration of myelin and axonal cytoskeletal proteins. Therefore, ALPN is likely mediated by molecular and signal transduction abnormalities similar to those identified in alcoholic liver and brain degeneration.
ColorBrewer.org: An Online Tool for Selecting Colour Schemes for Maps

Abstract Choosing effective colour schemes for thematic maps is surprisingly difficult. ColorBrewer is an online tool designed to take some of the guesswork out of this process by helping users select appropriate colour schemes for their specific mapping needs by considering: the number of data classes; the nature of their data (matched with sequential, diverging and qualitative schemes); and the end-use environment for the map (e.g., CRT, LCD, printed, projected, photocopied). ColorBrewer contains 'learn more' tutorials to help guide users, prompts them to test-drive colour schemes as both map and legend, and provides output in five colour specification systems.
Why is Real-World Visual Object Recognition Hard?

Progress in understanding the brain mechanisms underlying vision requires the construction of computational models that not only emulate the brain's anatomy and physiology, but ultimately match its performance on visual tasks. In recent years, “natural” images have become popular in the study of vision and have been used to show apparently impressive progress in building such models. Here, we challenge the use of uncontrolled “natural” images in guiding that progress. In particular, we show that a simple V1-like model—a neuroscientist's “null” model, which should perform poorly at real-world visual object recognition tasks—outperforms state-of-the-art object recognition systems (biologically inspired and otherwise) on a standard, ostensibly natural image recognition test. As a counterpoint, we designed a “simpler” recognition test to better span the real-world variation in object pose, position, and scale, and we show that this test correctly exposes the inadequacy of the V1-like model. Taken together, these results demonstrate that tests based on uncontrolled natural images can be seriously misleading, potentially guiding progress in the wrong direction. Instead, we reexamine what it means for images to be natural and argue for a renewed focus on the core problem of object recognition—real-world image variation.
Contemporary changes in the relief of raised bogs on the example of the Polish Carpathians

The subject of this paper is the problem of anthropogenic changes in the relief of raised bogs in mountain areas. This problem has not received a great deal of attention in the research literature. All peat bogs in the Polish part of the Orawa – Nowy Targ Basin and the Bieszczady Mountains were analysed. Special attention was paid to the remnants of peat domes and post-peat areas and the scarps separating them. This paper is based on an analysis of maps produced over the last 230 years as well as aerial photographs. Field data were also analysed as part of this research. Six phases in the development of scarps were identified. The rate of relief change was estimated and the role of exposure was assessed. Attention was paid to changes in the relief of post-peat areas that are occurring because retention ponds and drainage ditches have become more shallow due to beaver activity and the results of stream channel regulation. Special attention was also paid to the geomorphological aspects of the restoration of post-peat areas.
GAPS IN SECOND LANGUAGE SENTENCE PROCESSING

Four groups of second language (L2) learners of English from different language backgrounds (Chinese, Japanese, German, and Greek) and a group of native speaker controls participated in an online reading time experiment with sentences involving long-distance wh-dependencies. Although the native speakers showed evidence of making use of intermediate syntactic gaps during processing, the L2 learners appeared to associate the fronted wh-phrase directly with its lexical subcategorizer, regardless of whether the subjacency constraint was operative in their native language. This finding is argued to support the hypothesis that nonnative comprehenders underuse syntactic information in L2 processing.Theodore Marinis is now working at the Centre for Developmental Language Disorders and Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and Leah Roberts is at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. The research reported here was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (grant no. F/00 213B to H. Clahsen, C. Felser, and R. Hawkins), which is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Bob Borsley, Roger Hawkins, Andrew Radford, the audiences at EUROSLA 12, the 24th Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft Meeting, the 27th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, EUROSLA 13, three anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments and discussion, and Ritta Husted and Michaela Wenzlaff for helping with the data collection. We also wish to thank Ted Gibson and Tessa Warren for making their prepublication manuscript available to us.
Hormone replacement therapy and acquired resistance to activated protein C: results of a randomized, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled trial

Recent studies suggest that low‐dose oral contraceptives may cause acquired resistance to activated protein C (APC). The aims of this study were to determine whether hormone replacement therapy (HRT) may also induce acquired APC resistance and to study the effects of APC resistance on the risk of recurrent thrombosis. The patients comprised 140 females with at least one previous venous thromboembolism (VTE), who were randomized to receive continuous treatment with 2 mg 17‐β‐oestradiol and 1 mg norethisterone acetate (n = 71) or placebo (n = 69). Normalized APC sensitivity ratios (nAPCsr) were calculated by measurement of the effect of APC on thrombin generation in plasma collected at baseline and after 3 months of treatment. Of the 140 women, 121 had plasma samples collected both at baseline and after 3 months. The nAPCsr increased significantly (P < 0·001) on HRT (n = 62), both in females not carrying the factor VLeiden mutation [mean change 0·57 (95% CI 0·45–0·70), n = 50] and in females heterozygous for the factor VLeiden mutation [mean change 1·10 (0·71–1·49), n = 12], but remained unchanged on placebo (n = 59). The baseline nAPCsr as well as the increase in nAPCsr associated with HRT use was not higher in the five women who subsequently developed recurrent VTE. Free protein S and free TFPI were both important parameters for the acquired APC resistant phenotype. We conclude that HRT diminishes the efficacy by which APC downregulates in‐vitro thrombin formation in a similar fashion to that observed with low‐dose oral contraceptives, but the increase in nAPCsr alone is not sufficient to explain the increased risk of VTE associated with use of HRT.
Energy efficiency across programming languages: how do energy, time, and memory relate?

This paper presents a study of the runtime, memory usage and energy consumption of twenty seven well-known software languages. We monitor the performance of such languages using ten different programming problems, expressed in each of the languages. Our results show interesting findings, such as, slower/faster languages consuming less/more energy, and how memory usage influences energy consumption. Finally, we show how to use our results to provide software engineers support to decide which language to use when energy efficiency is a concern.
Maintainability Estimation Model for Object-Oriented Software in Design Phase (MEMOOD)

Measuring software maintainability early in the development life cycle, especially at the design phase, may help designers to incorporate required enhancement and corrections for improving maintainability of the final software. This paper developed a multivariate linear model 'Maintainability Estimation Model for Object-Oriented software in Design phase' (MEMOOD), which estimates the maintainability of class diagrams in terms of their understandability and modifiability. While, in order to quantify class diagram's understandability and modifiability the paper further developed two more multivariate models. These two models use design level object-oriented metrics, to quantify understandability and modifiability of class diagram. Such early quantification of maintainability provides an opportunity to improve the maintainability of class diagram and consequently the maintainability of final software. All the three models have been validated through appropriate statistical measures and contextual interpretation has been drawn.
UMD and USC/ISI: TREC 2010 Web Track Experiments with Ivory

Ivory is a web-scale retrieval engine we have been developing for the past two years, built around a cluster-based environment running Hadoop, the open-source implementation of the MapReduce programming model. Building on successes last year at TREC, we explored two major directions this year: more sophisticated retrieval models and large-scale graph analysis for spam detection. We describe results of ad hoc retrieval experiments with latent concept expansion and a greedily-learned linear ranking model. Although neither model is novel, our experiments provide some insight on the behavior of these two approaches at scale, on collections larger than those previously studied. We also discuss our link-based spam filtering algorithm that operated on the entire web graph of ClueWeb09. Unfortunately, results in the spam track were worse than the baseline provided by the track organizers.
On the Role of Chemistry in the Development and Behavior of the Sensitive Marine Clays of Canada and Scandinavia

The Scandinavian and Canadian experiences are reviewed and analyzed in the light of recent experiments involving the effects of added salts on the remolded shear strength and the liquid limits of two Ottawa area clays, both of which had low porewater salinity in their natural state. The response was similar to that observed in the Scandinavian marine clays where the sensitivity decreases as the salinity increases. It is concluded that the similarities relating to the influence of chemical factors are greater than previous interpretations have indicated. The precise relationship between porewater salinity and sensitivity in Leda clay appears to be unique to each sample and a broad geographic relationship should not be expected. Even short range similarities may be obscured by the generally low salinities of the Canadian marine clays and the great variability in other factors, such as texture and degree of cementation, which also affect the sensitivity.
Culture and Cognition

There is increasing interest in the nature and both environmental and cognitive origins of culturally associated differences in a range of behaviors. This special issue of Cognitive Neuroscience presents six empirical papers investigating diverse categories of potential culturally related effects as well as a review article, all of which provide timely updates of the current state of knowledge in this area.
Department of Economics and Finance Working Paper Series @bullet February 2008 the Impact of Remittances on Economic Growth and Development in Africa the Impact of Remittances on Economic Growth and Development in Africa

For more than half a century, there have been heated debates on the sources of economic growth in developing economies. The perceived factors of economic growth have ranged from surplus labor to capital investment and technological change, foreign aid, foreign direct investment, investment in human capital, increasing returns from investment in new ideas and research and development. The positive or negative impacts of the above listed traditional sources of economic growth have been well documented in literature. Other researchers have also considered the importance of institutional factors such as the role of political freedom, political instability, voice and accountability on economic growth and development. Despite the increasing importance of remittances in total international capital flows, however, the direct or indirect relationship between remittances and economic growth has not been adequately studied. This study explores the aggregate impact of remittances on economic growth within the conventional neoclassical growth framework using an unbalanced panel data spanning from 1980 to 2004 for 37 African countries. We find that remittances boost growth in countries where the financial systems are less developed by providing an alternative way to finance investment and helping overcome liquidity constraints.
Robust control and optimal analysis of a customized robotic arm with H2 and H∞ compensators

In the field of robotics, design and control of robotic limbs is contributing towards the development and study of robots which can closely mimic human motions. In this paper, robust control of a customized robotic Gripper Arm is discussed. Stability analysis in the presence of uncertainties is carried out on a model of the Gripper, with and without the integration of H2 and H∞ compensators. The results suggest the advantage of utilizing the said compensators on the system stability, a comparison of the two techniques is also made and an optimal compensator is discussed for each model.
Effect of MiDA Intervention on Productivity of Maize Farmers in the Afram Basin of Ghana

iv LIST OF TABLES viii LIST OF APPENDICES x ACRONYMS xi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Background 1 1.2 Problem Statement 2 1.3 Objectives of the Study 5 1.4 Relevance of Study 6 1.5 Organization of the Report 7 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW 8 2.
A numerical study of the contrail‐to‐cirrus transition

A numerical 2D‐simulation of the transformation of a contrail in its vortex phase to a cirrus‐like cloud during the dispersion phase has been performed using a model that handles both wake dynamics and ice micro‐physics. The contrail is located in an environment characterized by measured profiles of wind and temperature. The ambient humidity at cruise level slightly exceeds ice‐saturation. The thermal structure of the atmosphere causes a strong vertical growth of the contrail cloud, even into a dry layer, until a stably stratified layer is reached. Thereafter the cloud expands mainly horizontally and after 30 min it eventually disappears because of entrainment of dry ambient air.
Aire-Dependent Alterations in Medullary Thymic Epithelium Indicate a Role for Aire in Thymic Epithelial Differentiation1

The prevalent view of thymic epithelial differentiation and Aire activity holds that Aire functions in terminally differentiated medullary thymic epithelial cells (MTECs) to derepress the expression of structural tissue-restricted Ags, including pancreatic endocrine hormones. An alternative view of these processes has proposed that Aire functions to regulate the differentiation of immature thymic epithelial cells, thereby affecting tissue-restricted Ag expression and negative selection. In this study, we demonstrate that Aire impacts several aspects of murine MTECs and provide support for this second model. Expression of transcription factors associated with developmental plasticity of progenitor cells, Nanog, Oct4, and Sox2, by MTECs was Aire dependent. Similarly, the transcription factors that regulate pancreatic development and the expression of pancreatic hormones are also expressed by wild-type MTECs in an Aire-dependent manner. The altered transcriptional profiles in Aire-deficient MTECs were accompanied by changes in the organization and composition of the medullary epithelial compartment, including a reduction in the medullary compartment defined by keratin (K) 14 expression, altered patterns of K5 and K8 expression, and more prominent epithelial cysts. These findings implicate Aire in the regulation of MTEC differentiation and the organization of the medullary thymic compartment and are compatible with a role for Aire in thymic epithelium differentiation.
Does immediate dentin sealing influence the polymerization of impression materials?

Objectives: The objective of the following study is to evaluate the interaction between the resin materials used in immediate dentin sealing (IDS) techniques and impression materials with two different techniques to eliminate the oxygen-inhibition layer. Materials and Methods: The occlusal dentin surface of 35 human molars was exposed. The teeth were used in two Groups: Group 1 - Impression with Express XT; Group 2 - Impression with Impregum. Groups 1 and 2 were divided into 14 subgroups: Groups 1a and 2a - Control groups; 1b and 2b - IDS with Clearfil SE Bond (CSE); 1c and 2c - IDS with CSE + additional polymerization with glycerin jelly; 1d and 2d - IDS with CSE + alcohol; 1e and 2e - IDS with CSE and Protect Liner F (PLF); 1f and 2f - IDS with CSE and PLF + additional polymerization with glycerin jelly; and 1g and 2g - IDS with CSE and PLF + alcohol. Five teeth were used in each experimental group, and the tooth surface was photographed using a digital camera. Results: Small quantity of unpolymerized impression material remained attached to the CSE or to the PLF in Groups 1b and 1e. Groups 1c and 1d prevented the interaction. Small quantity of polymerized impression material remained attached to the CSE or to the PLF for Groups 2b and 2e. The same interaction was observed for Groups 2c and 2d. For Groups 2c and 2f, no interactions were observed. Conclusion: Resin materials interacted with impression materials. The application of glycerin jelly and alcohol prevented the interaction of CSE with Express XT and PLF with Impregum; however, these treatments were not completely effective in preventing the interaction of CSE with Impregum and PLF with Express XT.
Suprasubduction-zone peridotite in the northern USA Appalachians: evidence from mineral composition

Abstract Mineral compositions of small peridotite bodies in an Ordovician collision zone of the Vermont Appalachians provide important clues to their tectonic environment of origin. The bodies have been deformed and partially serpentinized under greenschist- to lower amphibolite-facies conditions during the Ordovician and Devonian. Before serpentinization, the peridotite bodies were dunite as shown by their mineral assemblage and by their high MgO, and low Ti and Al whole-rock contents. Despite deformation and metamorphism, remnant olivine and spinel grains occur; their compositions are taken to represent conditions prior to regional metamorphic events. High Mg/(Mg+Fe) in olivine and very high Cr/(Cr+Al) in spinel indicate that the peridotites formed as highly-depleted mantle residues. The compositions are similar to those in harzburgite and dunite from some ophiolites and from fore-arc regions of subduction zones. Accordingly, the southern Vermont peridotites probably formed in a forearc, supra-subduction zone during the Early Palaeozoic. They were subsequently emplaced by obduction of the upper plate of an east-facing subduction complex.
Botryllus schlosseri: A model ascidian for the study of asexual reproduction

Botryllus schlosseri, a cosmopolitan colonial ascidian reared in the laboratory for more than 50 years, reproduces both sexually and asexually and is used as a model organism for studying a variety of biological problems. Colonies are formed of numerous, genetically identical individuals (zooids) and undergo cyclical generation changes in which the adult zooids die and are replaced by their maturing buds. Because the progression of the colonial life cycle is intimately correlated with blastogenesis, a shared staging method of bud development is required to compare data coming from different laboratories. With the present review, we aim (1) to introduce B. schlosseri as a valuable chordate model to study various biological problems and, especially, sexual and asexual development; (2) to offer a detailed description of bud development up to adulthood and the attainment of sexual maturity; (3) to re‐examine Sabbadin's ( 1955 ) staging method and re‐propose it as a simple tool for in vivo recognition of the main morphogenetic events and recurrent changes in the blastogenetic cycle, as it refers to the developmental stages of buds and adults. Developmental Dynamics 236:335–352, 2007. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A method for finding sea breeze days under stable synoptic conditions and its application to the Swedish west coast

A method for selecting sea breeze days in an archipelago was developed with special application to the West Coast of Sweden. The primary criterion for identifying a sea breeze was the occurrence of a distinct change in surface wind direction within a 24 h period. The data used in the study were gathered using hourly meteorological records from field stations situated on the West Coast. Six different filters were included in the method; each of them developed from empirical knowledge of the physical processes responsible for the occurrence of a sea breeze system. Using this method it is possible to create a data set of sea breeze days, which does not use distance to the shoreline as a necessary condition for classification. © 1998 Royal Meteorological Society.