Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Clinical Significance of Serial Serum Carcinoembryonic Antigen Values for Treating Rectal Cancer with Preoperative Chemoradiotherapy

Purpose Preoperative chemoradiotherapy is now widely accepted to treat rectal cancer; however, the prognosis for rectal cancer patients during and after chemoradiotherapy must be determined. The aim of this study was to evaluate the serial serum carcinoembryonic antigen (s-CEA) samples in patients with rectal cancer who underwent radical surgery after concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CRT). Methods This study evaluated 236 patients with rectal cancer who received preoperative CRT followed by curative surgery between June 2005 and June 2010. We measured the patient's s-CEA levels pre-CRT, post-CRT and post-surgery. Patients were classified into four groups according to their s-CEA concentrations (group 1, high, high, high; group 2, high, high, normal; group 3, high, normal, normal; group 4, normal, normal, normal). We analyzed the clinicopathologic factors and the outcomes among these groups. Results Of the 236 patients, 12 were in group 1, 31 were in group 2, 67 were in group 3, and 126 were in group 4. The 3-year disease-free survival rate in group 1 was poorer than those in group 3 (P = 0.007) and group 4 (P < 0.001). In a univariate analysis, type of surgery, clinical N stage, pathologic T or N stage, lymphovascular invasion, perineural invasion, and CEA group were prognostic factors. A multivariate analysis revealed that type of surgery, pathologic T stage, and lymphovascular invasion were independent prognostic factors; however, no statistical significance was associated with the CEA group. Conclusion High pre-CRT, post-CRT, and post-surgery s-CEA levels in patients with rectal cancer were associated with high rates of systemic recurrence and poor survival. Therefore, patients with sustained high s-CEA levels during CRT require careful monitoring after surgery.
ATPase-deficient hVPS4 impairs formation of internal endosomal vesicles and stabilizes bilayered clathrin coats on endosomal vacuoles

Epidermal growth factor receptors (EGFRs) destined for lysosomal degradation are sorted in the early endosomal vacuole into small, lumenal vesicles that arise by inward budding of the limiting membrane. We have previously shown that, before their incorporation into internal vesicles, EGFRs are concentrated in flat bilayered-clathrin coats on the endosomal vacuole. Here, we show that an ATPase-deficient mutant of hVPS4 (hVPS4EQ) increases the association of bilayered coats with endosomal vacuoles. In addition, hVPS4EQ leads to a reduction in the number of internal vesicles in early and late endosomal vacuoles, and retention of EGFRs at the limiting membrane. Interestingly, hVPS4EQ was predominantly found on non-coated regions of endosomal vacuoles, often at the rim of a coated area. In line with published data on Vps4p function in yeast, these results suggest that hVPS4 is involved in the release of components of the bilayered coat from the endosomal membrane. Moreover, our data suggest that disassembly of the coat is required for the formation of internal vesicles.
Cimetidine and Clobenpropit Attenuate Inflammation-Associated Colorectal Carcinogenesis in Male ICR Mice

Histamine and histamine receptors (Hrhs) have been identified as critical molecules during inflammation and carcinogenesis. This study was conducted to determine the effects of Hrh1-Hrh3 antagonists on inflammation-associated colorectal carcinogenesis. Male ICR mice were treated with azoxymethane (AOM, 10 mg/kg bw, i.p.) and 1.5% dextran sodium sulfate (DSS, drinking water for 7 days) to induce colorectal carcinogenesis. The mice were then fed diets containing test chemical (500 ppm terfenadine, 500 ppm cimetidine or 10 ppm clobenpropit) for 15 weeks. At week 18, feeding with the diets containing cimetidine (Hrh2 antagonist) and clobenpropit (Hrh3 antagonist/inverse agonist) significantly lowered the multiplicity of colonic adenocarcinoma. Terfenadine (Hrh1 antagonist) did not affect AOM-DSS-induced colorectal carcinogenesis. Adenocarcinoma cells immunohistochemically expressed Hrh1, Hrh2, Hrh3 and Hrh4 with varied intensities. Because clobenpropit is also known to be a Hrh4 receptor agonist, Hrh2, Hrh3 and Hrh4 may be involved in inflammation-related colorectal carcinogenesis. Additional data, including the mRNA expression of pro-inflammatory cytokines and inducible inflammatory enzymes in the colonic mucosa, are also presented.
The BBN BYBLOS Continuous Speech Recognition System

In this paper we describe the algorithms used in the BBN BYBLOS Continuous Speech Recognition system. The BYBLOS system uses context-dependent hidden Markov models of phonemes to provide a robust model of phonetic coarticulation. We provide an update of the ongoing research aimed at improving the recognition accuracy. In the first experiment we confirm the large improvement in accuracy that can be derived by using spectral derivative parameters in the recognition. In particular, the word error rate is reduced by a factor of two. Currently the system achieves a word error rate of 2.9% when tested on the speaker-dependent part of the standard 1000-Word DARPA Resource Management Database using the Word-Pair grammar supplied with the database. When no grammar was used, the error rate is 15.3%. Finally, we present a method for smoothing the discrete densities on the states of the HMM, which is intended to alleviate the problem of insufficient training for detailed phonetic models.
Judging Moral Issues in a Multicultural Society: Moral Reasoning and Social Dominance Orientation

People’s reactions to crimes sometimes change depending on whether the perpetrators are members of their own ingroup or an outgroup. This observation results in questions concerning how moral reasoning works in intergroup situations. In this research, we analyzed the combined effect of the nationality of the protagonist in a moral dilemma and the participant’s social dominance orientation (SDO) attitudes on the participant’s level of moral reasoning. A total of 230 Italian participants responded to two moral dilemmas taken from the Defining Issues Test, which had been modified so that one was about an Italian and the other about a Romanian. The results showed a significant interaction between the dilemma, the protagonist’s nationality, and the participant’s SDO: The P scores (postconventional reasoning) of low-SDO participants were on the same level when they were judging people of either nationality, while high-SDO participants tended to have a higher P score when judging Italians as opposed to Romanians.
Academic Procrastination, Emotional Intelligence, Academic Self-Efficacy, and GPA

Academic procrastination has been seen as an impediment to students’ academic success. Research findings suggest that it is related to lower levels of self-regulated learning and academic self-efficacy and associated with higher levels of anxiety, stress, and illness. Emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to assess, regulate, and utilize emotions and has been found to be associated with academic self-efficacy and a variety of better outcomes, including academic performance. Students with learning disabilities (LD) are well acquainted with academic difficulty and maladaptive academic behavior. In comparison to students without LD, they exhibit high levels of learned helplessness, including diminished persistence, lower academic expectations, and negative affect. This study examined the relationships among academic procrastination, EI, and academic performance as mediated by academic self-efficacy in 287 LD and non-LD students. Results indicated that the indirect effect of EI on academic procrastination and GPA was stronger in LD students than in non-LD students. In addition, results indicated that LD students scored lower than non-LD students on both EI and academic self-efficacy and higher on academic procrastination. No difference was found in GPA.
Trends in Web Characteristics

The Web is permanently changing, with new technologies and publishing behaviors emerging everyday. It is important to track trends on the evolution of the Web to develop efficient tools to process its data. For instance, Web trends influence the design of browsers, crawlers and search engines. This study presents trends on the evolution of the Web derived from the analysis of 3 characterizations performed within an interval of 5 years. The Web portion used as a case study was the Portuguese Web. Several metrics regarding site and content characteristics were analyzed.
Resolving conflict: examining ethnic‐racial and gender differences

This study examines levels of effectiveness as well as preferences in styles of resolving conflict among three ethnic‐racial groups (Asian, Mexican‐American, Mexican, Chicano and White) and between men and women. The goal was to test two hypotheses with respect to handling interpersonal conflict. First, Whites would show a greater preference for assertive modes of behaviour while Mexican‐Americans, Mexicans, Chicanos and Asians would favour non‐assertive modes of behaviour. Second, that men would demonstrate more assertive behaviours while women would be likely to demonstrate more non‐assertive behaviours. Data were collected from 282 Economics students (55 per cent male, 45 per cent female; 44 per cent Asian, 41 per cent White (non‐Hispanic), 15 per cent Mexican‐American, Mexican, Chicano). Both hypotheses were supported. Implications of these results and suggestions for future research are discussed.
PSaD: A Privacy-Preserving Social-Assisted Content Dissemination Scheme in DTNs

Content dissemination is very useful for many mobile applications, like instant messaging, file sharing, and advertisement broadcast, etc. In real life, for various kinds of time-insensitive contents, such as family photos and video clips, the process of content dissemination forms a delay tolerant networks (DTNs). To improve the data forwarding performance in DTNs, several social-based approaches have been proposed, most of which leverage mobile users' social information, including contact history, moving trajectory, and personal profiles as metrics to design routing schemes. However, although the social-based approaches provide better performance, the revealing of mobile users' information apparently compromises their privacy. Moreover, users' contents may only be shared with a particular group of users rather everyone in the system. In this paper, we propose the PSaD: a Privacy-preserving Social-assisted content Dissemination scheme in DTNs. We apply users' verifiable attributes to establish their social relationships in terms of identical attributes in a privacy-preserving way. Besides, to provide the confidentiality of contents, our approach enables users to encrypt contents before the dissemination process, and only allows users who have particular attributes to decrypt them. By trace-driven simulations and experiments, we show the performance, privacy preservation, and efficiency of our proposed scheme.
Playing football without a ball: language, reading and academic performance in a high-poverty school

Second language (L2) reading research suggests that there is a complex interplay between L2 proficiency, first language (L1) reading and L2 reading. However, not much is known about the effect of L1 proficiency on L1 reading, and of L1 reading on L2 reading, or vice versa, in bilingual settings when readers have few opportunities for extensive reading in their L1. The relationships between L1 (Northern Sotho) and L2 (English) proficiency and L1 and L2 reading were examined in Grade 7 learners attending a high-poverty primary school in South Africa, during the course of a year when a reading intervention programme was implemented. The effect that attention to reading and accessibility of books had on the learners' reading proficiency in both languages was examined, and the factors that predicted academic performance were analysed. When the learners were engaged in more reading, L2 reading contributed more variance to L1 reading than L1 proficiency. Reading in both languages also contributed significantly to academic performance. The study highlights the need for more cross-linguistic reading research in different educational settings.
Regional Thicknesses and Thickening of Compacted and Trabeculated Myocardial Layers of the Normal Left Ventricle Studied by Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance

Background—We used cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) to study normal left ventricular (LV) trabeculation as a basis for differentiation from pathological noncompaction. Methods and Results—The apparent end-diastolic (ED) and end-systolic (ES) thicknesses and thickening of trabeculated and compacted myocardial layers were measured in 120 volunteers using a consistent selection of basal, mid, and apical CMR short-axis slices. All had a visible trabeculated layer in 1 or more segments. The compacted but not the trabeculated layer was thicker in men than in women (P<0.01 at ED and ES). When plotted against age, the trabeculated and compacted layer thicknesses demonstrated opposite changes: an increase of the compact layer after the fourth decade at both ED and ES (P<0.05) but a decrease of the trabeculated layer. There was age-related preservation of total wall thickness at ED but an increase at ES (P<0.05). The compacted layer thickened, whereas the trabeculated layer thinned with systole, but neither change differed between sexes. With age, the most trabeculated LV segments showed significantly greater systolic thinning of trabeculated layers and, conversely, greater thickening of the compact segments (P<0.05). Total wall thickening is neither sex nor age dependent. There were no sex differences in the trabeculated/compacted ratio at ES or ED, but the ES trabeculated/compacted ratio was smaller in older (50 to 79 years) versus younger (20 to 49 years) groups (P<0.05). Conclusions—We demonstrated age- and sex-related morphometric differences in the apparent trabeculated and compacted layer thicknesses and systolic thinning of the visible trabeculated layer that contrasts with compacted myocardial wall thickening.
Looking into one's own practice: a Swedish study on gender in educational sciences

This article reports on a study of gender differences in course experiences and achievement of students taking the introductory educational sciences course at Halmstad University in Sweden. Male and female students' completion rates and grades were analysed in relation to the students' grade point averages (GPAs) from upper secondary school and their experiences of the conditions for learning provided by the teachers as well as their own actorship in the course. Based on the idea that the subject of educational sciences and the characteristics of the educational context and setting are more feminine than masculine, the male students were expected to have lower completion rates and grades. A gender difference in completion rates was confirmed, in that 65% of the male and 80% of the female students completed the whole course. Male students also rated the conditions for learning provided by the teacher as well as their own actorship in the course lower than did their female peers. In order to reduce the drop‐out of male students, it is suggested that the department/teachers should pay more attention to any gendered aspects of the teaching/learning practices as well as to the educational context in general.
Complete Loss of PTEN Protein Expression Correlates with Shorter Time to Brain Metastasis and Survival in Stage IIIB/C Melanoma Patients with BRAFV600 Mutations

Purpose: Loss of function of PTEN is a frequent event in melanoma, particularly in tumors with BRAFV600 mutations. The prevalence, pathologic features, and clinical outcomes associated with PTEN loss in patients with stage IIIB/C melanoma were interrogated to improve our understanding of the clinical significance of this molecular event. Experimental Design: Archival tissue from lymphadenectomy specimens among patients (n = 136) with stage IIIB or IIIC melanoma was assessed by DNA sequencing for activating BRAF and NRAS mutations, and by immunohistochemistry for the expression of PTEN protein. Associations of these molecular aberrations with demographics, tumor characteristics, and clinical outcomes were determined. Results: The prevalence of BRAFV600 mutations (40% overall), NRAS mutations (10%), and PTEN loss (25%) did not vary by pathologic substage. BRAF/NRAS mutation status did not correlate with distant disease-free survival (DDFS) or overall survival (OS). Complete loss of PTEN expression correlated with shorter OS but not DDFS. When stratified by specific sites of distant metastasis, PTEN loss was associated with significantly shorter time to melanoma brain metastasis (MBM), but not to liver, lung, or bone metastasis. Analysis of PTEN in mutationally defined subsets showed that PTEN loss was significantly associated with OS and time to MBM in patients with BRAFV600 mutations. Conclusions: Loss of PTEN protein expression correlates significantly with decreased OS and time to MBM in stage IIIB/C melanoma patients with BRAFV600 mutations. The findings add to evidence supporting a significant role for PTEN loss and the PI3K–AKT pathway in melanoma. Clin Cancer Res; 20(21); 5527–36. ©2014 AACR.
Analysis of the Mathematical Achievement of Students in a Fashion Merchandising Course

Perceived lack of mathematical competence of students in a Fashion Merchandising course was a concern to faculty and students. Using an interdisciplinary approach, two professors, one in the Home Economics Department and one in the Mathematics Department, collaborated to determine which factors influenced performance on mathematical content and how to enhance mathematical skills. Goals of this research were to: (l) establish students' mathematical ability, (2) track their achievement during the fashion merchandising course, and (3) provide recommendations for improving student performance. Data on high school achievement (SAT scores), grades in college mathematics course, scores on a pretest and background data (i.e. age, hours of outside employment) were collected Correlation coefficients were calculated for these variables and the grade on the mathematical portion of the course. Students'progress was monitored throughout the course. The best predictor of the grade on mathematical content was the score on the pretest. The only other significant predictor was the overall grade in the course. The importance of consistently emphasizing mathematical content was found to positively aid students in their performance.
Prefrontal cortex activity is reduced in gambling and nongambling substance users during decision‐making

Objective: Poor decision‐making is a hallmark of addiction, whether to substances or activities. Performance on a widely used test of decision‐making, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), can discriminate controls from persons with ventral medial frontal lesions, substance‐dependence, and pathological gambling. Positron emission tomography (PET) studies indicate that substance‐dependent individuals show altered prefrontal activity on the task. Here we adapted the IGT to an fMRI setting to test the hypothesis that defects in ventral medial and prefrontal processing are associated with impaired decisions that involve risk but may differ depending on whether substance dependence is comorbid with gambling problems. Method: 18 controls, 14 substance‐dependent individuals (SD), and 16 SD with gambling problems (SDPG) underwent fMRI while performing a modified version of the IGT. Result: Group differences were observed in ventral medial frontal, right frontopolar, and superior frontal cortex during decision‐making. Controls showed the greatest activity, followed by SDPG, followed by SD. Conclusion: Our results support a hypothesis that defects in ventral medial frontal processing lead to impaired decisions that involve risk. Reductions in right prefrontal activity during decision‐making appear to be modulated by the presence of gambling problems and may reflect impaired working memory, stimulus reward valuation, or cue reactivity in substance‐dependent individuals. Hum Brain Mapp, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Diet‐induced obesity alters skeletal muscle fiber types of male but not female mice

Skeletal muscles are highly plastic tissues capable dramatic remodeling in response to use, disuse, disease, and other factors. Growing evidence suggests that adipose tissues exert significant effects on the basic fiber‐type composition of skeletal muscles. In the current study, we investigated the long‐term effects of a high‐fat diet and subsequent obesity on the muscle fiber types in C57 BLK/6J mice. Litters of mice were randomly assigned to either a high‐fat diet or a control group at the time of weaning, and were maintained on this diet for approximately 1 year. Single fibers were harvested from the soleus and plantaris muscles, and fiber types were determined using SDS‐PAGE. The high‐fat diet mice were significantly heavier than the control mice (39.17 ± 2.7 g vs. 56.87 ± 3.4 g; P < 0.0003), but muscle masses were not different. In male mice, the high‐fat diet was associated with a significantly lower proportion of slow, type I fibers in the soleus muscle (40.4 ± 3.5% vs. 29.33 ± 2.6%; P < 0.0165). Moreover, the proportion of type I fibers in the soleus of male mice was inversely proportional to the relative fatness of the male mice (P < 0.003; r2 = 0.65), but no association was observed in female mice. In male mice, the decline in type I fibers was correlated with an increase in type I/IIA hybrid fibers, suggesting that the type I fibers were transformed primarily into these hybrids. The reported trends indicate that type I fibers are most susceptible to the effects of obesity, and that these fiber‐type changes can be sex specific.
The McMaster model for geriatric undergraduate experience.

Undergraduate training at McMaster University medical school is based on small group tutorials and self-directed learning by the students. The undergraduate program is three years in length and had not been altered since its inception in 1969 until a new unit was added in 1985. This includes a two and a half week module involving exposure to geriatric medicine. The class of 100 students is divided into groups of six, with a tutor who is a physician, but not usually a geriatrician. Each student has the opportunity to take a history from and examine an old person. For the class, a plan was developed that involved geriatricians, geriatric psychiatrists, general internists, and family physicians who served the dual purpose of finding a pool of appropriate geriatric patients, and also provided students with experience in different settings and with elders of varied health status. These experiences were shared with other members of the class, increasing their exposure to the different issues in the limited time.
An Improvement to Mathon's Cyclotomic Ramsey Colorings

In this note we show how to extend Mathon’s cyclotomic colorings of the edges of some complete graphs without increasing the maximum order of monochromatic complete subgraphs. This improves the well known lower bound construction for multicolor Ramsey numbers, in particular we obtain R3(7) 3214.