Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Histopathological and Immunohistochemical Characterization of Spontaneously Occurring Uterine Deciduomas in Young Adult Rats

Uterine deciduomas were found in two female virgin rats, a 15-week-old Lewis rat and a 7-week-old Sprague-Dawley rat. The firm white nodules were located at the base of unilateral uterine horns and were approximately 6 mm and 4 mm in diameter. Histopathologically, the nodules were composed of three areas, each with a distinct type of proliferating cells: large epithelioid decidual cells with round nuclei, prominent nucleoli and abundant eosinophilic cytoplasm (antimesometrial region); compact spindle-shaped cells with oval nuclei and vacuolar cytoplasm (transitional region); and pleomorphic and spiny cells with round to oval nuclei and compact eosinophilic cytoplasm (mesometrial region). These cells proliferated in sheet-like arrangements and transformed into the other types of cells located in surrounding regions. Immunohistochemically, proliferating cells in all regions were strongly positive for proliferating cell nuclear antigen. The proliferating cells were positive for vimentin, and large decidual cells were positive for common acute lymphoblastic leukemia antigen 10, a marker of uterine interstitial cells. Large decidual cells were positive for α-smooth muscle actin and desmin, suggesting differentiation into muscular cells. Progesterone receptor was expressed in all cell types; however, estrogen receptor α was not expressed in the antimesometrial region. These extremely rare tumor-like nodules represent nonneoplastic lesions referred as decidual reactions of endometrial interstitial cells, and their biological behavior is that of a space-occupying benign tumor in young rats. Our cases might provide information as a historical control in toxicity and pharmacological studies in rats.
A process-oriented approach to supporting off-site manufacture in construction projects

It is well-known that the use of off-site manufacture (OSM) techniques can assist in timely completion of a construction project though the utilisation of such techniques may have other disadvantages. Currently, OSM uptake within the Australian construction industry is limited. To successfully incorporate OSM practices within a construction project, it is crucial to understand the impact of OSM adoption on the processes used during a construction project. This paper presents how a systematic process-oriented approach may be able to support OSM utilisation within a construction project. Process modelling, analysis and automation techniques which are well-known within the Business Process Management (BPM) discipline have been applied to develop a collection of construction process models that represent the end-to-end generic construction value chain. The construction value chain enables researchers to identify key activities, resources, data, and stakeholders involved in construction processes in each defined construction phase. The collection of construction process models is then used as a basis for identification of potential OSM intervention points in collaboration with domain experts from the Australian construction industry. This ensures that the resulting changes reflect the needs of various stakeholders within the construction industry and have relevance in practice. Based on the input from the domain experts, these process models are further refined and operational requirements are taken into account to develop a prototype process automation (workflow) system that can support and coordinate OSM-related process activities. The resulting workflow system also has the potential to integrate with other IT solutions used within the construction industry (e.g., BIM, Acconex). As such, the paper illustrates the role that process-oriented thinking can play in assisting OSM adoption within the industry.
Food for Thought: The Importance of Nutrition in Sexual Selection

Sexual selection and sexual conflict are two fundamental evolutionary mechanisms that are responsible for the diversification of a range of morphological, behavioural and physiological traits in the sexes, across most animal taxa. Decades of empirical research has shown that the expression of many (if not all) of these traits is dependent on diet. Few studies have, however, provided a detailed view of how diet influences the operation of sexual selection and sexual conflict. The traditional view that nutritional resources are of a single form, namely energy or calories, has recently been challenged by the idea that it is the combination of various microand/or macronutrients that is key to trait expression and in maintaining reproductive fitness. While this established dogma is changing, more empirical studies are needed that focus on the how the intake of specific nutrients influence the expression of key traits that regulate the operation of sexual selection and sexual conflict. In this thesis I examine the role of nutrition on the operation of sexual selection and sexual conflict. To achieve this I perform a number of experiments utilising the Geometric Framework (GF) of nutrition to tease apart specific effects of two macronutrients (protein and carbohydrates) on a number of important phenotypic traits in two field cricket species; the decorated cricket Gryllodes sigillatus and the Australian black field cricket Teleogryllus commodus. I also combine the GF with conventional quantitative genetic experiments to examine the potential for the genetics of dietary choice to constrain the evolution of key traits that regulate sexual selection and sexual conflict. I start by examining the effect of protein (P) and carbohydrate (C) intake on a male sexual trait, the cuticular hydrocarbon (CHC) profile, known to be subject to strong precopulatory sexual selection in G. sigillatus. I find that diet influences the expression of male CHCs and how attractive a male is to a female. Specifically, I show that CHCs are maximized at a high intake of nutrients in a P:C ratio of 1:1.5, that female pre-copulatory choice exerts significant selection on this variation in male CHCs and that the nutritional optima for male mating success almost perfectly matched the optima for CHC expression. However, this change in CHC expression was not the only pathway for the effects of nutrient intake on male pre-copulatory attractiveness to females suggesting that other trait(s) are also important in mediating this relationship (Chapter 2). Next, I examine the effect of the intake
Javelin Diagrams: A Graphical Tool for Probabilistic Sensitivity Analysis

To demonstrate post hoc robustness of decision problems to parameter estimates, analysts may conduct aprobabilistic sensitivity analysis, assigning distributions to uncertain parameters and computing the probability of decision change. In contrast to classical threshold proximity methods of sensitivity analysis, no appealing graphical methods are available to present the results of a probabilistic sensitivity analysis. Here we introduce an analog of tornado diagrams for probabilistic sensitivity analysis, which we calljavelin diagrams. Javelin diagrams are graphical augmentations of tornado diagrams displaying both the probability of decision change and the information value associated with individual parameters or parameter sets. We construct javelin diagrams for simple problems, discuss their properties, and illustrate their realistic application via a probabilistic sensitivity analysis of a seven-parameter decision analysis from the medical literature.
Prostate Cancer Disease Characteristics at the Time of Diagnosis and Initial Treatment Offered in a Tertiary Hospital at Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)

Objectives: to describe the characteristics of newly diagnosed prostate cancer (PCa) and the initial treatments offered to patients in the most important urological center of Burkina Faso. Methods: We analyzed the data of a cohort of 168 consecutive patients with no prior history of PCa between January 2009 and December 2012. Diagnosis of PCa was based on histological analysis of transrectal prostate biopsies. Patient and disease characteristics and the initial treatment offered were taken in account. Results: The mean age at presentation was 68.59 ± 9.41 years (range 30 to 95 years). There was a 3.6-fold increase in the incidence of PCa through the four years of the study. The mean duration of symptoms prior to presentation was 11.6 ± 10.9 months. The majority of cases (86.9%) were presented as locally advanced or metastatic disease. Androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) was the first therapeutic option for 121 patients (72%) and 73 patients (43.4%) underwent ADT through bilateral orchiectomy. Only 3 patients (1.78%) underwent radical prostatectomy. Conclusion: An increase in the diagnosis of PCa in our country was observed in this study. The diagnosis of prostate cancer was usually tardive in Burkina Faso. Treatment often involves surgical ADT for socioeconomic reasons.
A Non-Symmetric Reconstruction Technique for Transcriptionally-Active Viral Assemblies

The molecular mechanisms by which RNA viruses coordinate their transcriptional activities are not fully understood. For rotavirus, an important pediatric gastroenteric pathogen, transcription occurs within a double-layered particle that encloses the viral genome. To date, there remains very little structural information available for actively-transcribing rotavirus double-layered particles, which could provide new insights for antiviral development. To improve our vision of these viral assemblies, we developed a new combinatorial strategy that utilizes currently available high-resolution image processing tools. First, we employed a 3D classification routine that allowed us to sort transcriptionally-active rotavirus assemblies on the basis of their internal density. Next, we implemented an additional 3D refinement procedure using the most active class of DLPs. For comparison, the refined structures were computed in parallel by (1) enforcing icosahedral symmetry, and by (2) using no symmetry operators. Comparing the resulting structures, we were able to visualize the continuum that exists between viral capsid proteins and the viral RNA for the first time.
LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC CONGRUENCY IN L2 PREDICTIVE GENDER PROCESSING

This article investigates how lexical and syntactic differences in L1 and L2 grammatical gender affect L2 predictive gender processing. In a visual-world eye-tracking experiment, 24 L1 Russian adult learners and 15 native speakers of German were tested. Both Russian and German have three gender classes. Yet, they differ in lexical congruency, that is, whether a noun (“house”) is assigned to the same or a different gender class. Further, gender is syntactically realized on postnominal suffixes in Russian but on prenominal articles in German. For adjectives, both Russian and German mark gender on suffixes. In predictive gender processing, we find interactions of proficiency and congruency for gender-marked articles. Advanced L2 learners show nativelike gender prediction throughout. High-intermediate learners display asymmetries according to syntactic and lexical congruency. Predictive gender processing obtains for all nouns in the (syntactically congruent) adjective condition, yet only for lexically congruent nouns in the (syntactically incongruent) article condition.
Direct virtual memory access from FPGA for high-productivity heterogeneous computing

Heterogeneous computing utilizing both CPU and FPGA requires access to data in the main memory from both devices. While a typical system relies on software executing on the CPU to orchestrate all data movements between the FPGA and the main memory, our demo presents a complementary FPGA-centric approach that allows gateware to directly access the virtual memory space as part of the executing process without involving the CPU. A caching address translation buffer was implemented alongside the user FPGA gateware to provide runtime mapping between virtual and physical memory addresses. The system was implemented on a commercial off-the-shelf FPGA add-on card to demonstrate the viability of such approach in low-cost systems. Experiment demonstrated reasonable performance improvement when compared to a typical software-centric implementation; while the number of context switches between FPGA and CPU in both kernel and user mode was significantly reduced, freeing the CPU for other concurrent user tasks.
Social Goals and Strategies in Adolescent Peer Conflict Situations

LITTLE, SARA ELIZABETH. Social Goals and Strategies in Adolescent Peer Conflict Situations. (Under the direction of Mary Elizabeth Haskett). Adolescence is a period of important physical, social, emotional, and cognitive changes. Peer relationships become more complex and diverse, and adolescents must learn to negotiate varying relationship dynamics, including conflict with their peers. Limited research has been conducted, however, to understand how adolescents manage peer conflict. In order to expand the focus of research regarding social goals and strategies in adolescent peer conflict, 230 college students in late adolescence (ages 18-21) responded to 15 hypothetical conflict scenarios. The goals late adolescents’ endorsed for peer conflicts were meaningfully related to the strategies they chose to resolve such conflicts. One-third of the sample was found to have a distinct “goal orientation” in response to the peer conflict vignettes. As expected, adolescents in this study with different goal orientations were found to favor different strategies, and they endorsed strategies consistent with their specific goal orientation. In contrast to studies with children, few significant gender differences were found between men and women in their overall preferences for goals or strategies in peer conflicts situations. However, when males’ and females’ goal and strategy preferences were analyzed across different types of relationships (i.e., best friends, roommates, and romantic partners), significant gender differences were apparent. Late adolescent males showed little difference in their endorsement of conflict goals for a best friend or romantic partner; both were equally valued whereas roommates were viewed negatively. Women, in contrast, rated their best friends with a greater sense of priority than romantic partners or roommates. Implications of the results for understanding adolescents’ conflict resolution skills with peers are discussed. SOCIAL GOALS AND STRATEGIES IN ADOLESCENT PEER CONFLICT SITUATIONS
Appearance-Related Social Comparisons: The Role of Contingent Self-Esteem and Self-Perceptions of Attractiveness

Two studies examined contingent self-esteem (CSE) and responses to appearance-related social comparisons. Study 1 was an experimental study in which women rated a series of advertisements from popular women’s magazines. Study 2 employed an event-contingent diary recording procedure. In Study 1, women who were higher in CSE and lower in self-perceptions of attractiveness (SPA) experienced greater decreases in positive affect and greater increases in negative affect following the ad-rating task. Study 2 results supported a mediation model in which women who were higher in CSE felt worse after social comparisons because they made primarily upward comparisons. Overall, results suggest that appearance-related comparisons are more distressing for those who base their self-worth on contingencies and have lower self-perceived attractiveness.
A Comparative Study between Olanzapine and Risperidone in the Management of Schizophrenia

Introduction. Since a variety of comparisons between risperidone and olanzapine have resulted in diverse outcomes, so safety and efficacy of them were compared again in a new trial. Method. Sixty female schizophrenic patients entered into one of the assigned groups for random allocation to olanzapine or risperidone (n = 30 in each group) in a double-blind, 12-week clinical trial. Scale for Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) and Scale for Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) were used as the primary outcome measures. Clinical Global Impressions-Severity Scale (CGI-S), Schedule for Assessment of Insight (SAI), and finally Simpson Angus Scale (SAS) as well were employed as secondary scales. Results. While both of olanzapine and risperidone were significantly effective for improvement of positive symptoms (P < 0.0001), as regards negative symptoms, it was so only by means of olanzapine (P < 0.0003). CGI-S and SAI, as well, were significantly improved in both of the groups. SAS increment was significant only in the risperidone group (P < 0.02). Conclusion. While both of olanzapine and risperidone were equally effective for improvement of positive symptoms and insight, olanzapine showed superior efficacy with respect to negative symptoms, along with lesser extrapyramidal side effects, in comparison with risperidone.
The identifiable victim effect: a meta-analytic review

Abstract The identifiable victim effect (IVE) refers to individuals’ tendency to offer greater help to specific, identifiable victims than to anonymous, statistical victims. A random-effects meta-analysis was conducted to determine the overall weighted effect of IVE. Overall, 41 studies were included. Results indicated an overall significant yet modest IVE (r = .05). In addition, findings showed that IVE appears reliable mainly when there is a single identified or a single unidentified victim, and/or when study characteristics include elements of the following: a photographed child suffering from poverty, bearing little responsibility for the need, and/or associated with monetary requests. The implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed.
Comparative genomics boosts target prediction for bacterial small RNAs

Significance This study presents a unique approach (CopraRNA, for Comparative Prediction Algorithm for sRNA Targets) towards reliably predicting the targets of bacterial small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs). These molecules are important regulators of gene expression. Their detailed analysis thus far has been hampered by the lack of reliable algorithms to predict their mRNA targets. CopraRNA integrates phylogenetic information to predict sRNA targets at the genomic scale, reconstructs regulatory networks upon functional enrichment and network analysis, and predicts the sRNA domains for target recognition and interaction. Our results demonstrate that CopraRNA substantially improves the bioinformatic prediction of target genes and opens the field for the application to nonmodel bacteria. Small RNAs (sRNAs) constitute a large and heterogeneous class of bacterial gene expression regulators. Much like eukaryotic microRNAs, these sRNAs typically target multiple mRNAs through short seed pairing, thereby acting as global posttranscriptional regulators. In some bacteria, evidence for hundreds to possibly more than 1,000 different sRNAs has been obtained by transcriptome sequencing. However, the experimental identification of possible targets and, therefore, their confirmation as functional regulators of gene expression has remained laborious. Here, we present a strategy that integrates phylogenetic information to predict sRNA targets at the genomic scale and reconstructs regulatory networks upon functional enrichment and network analysis (CopraRNA, for Comparative Prediction Algorithm for sRNA Targets). Furthermore, CopraRNA precisely predicts the sRNA domains for target recognition and interaction. When applied to several model sRNAs, CopraRNA revealed additional targets and functions for the sRNAs CyaR, FnrS, RybB, RyhB, SgrS, and Spot42. Moreover, the mRNAs gdhA, lrp, marA, nagZ, ptsI, sdhA, and yobF-cspC were suggested as regulatory hubs targeted by up to seven different sRNAs. The verification of many previously undetected targets by CopraRNA, even for extensively investigated sRNAs, demonstrates its advantages and shows that CopraRNA-based analyses can compete with experimental target prediction approaches. A Web interface allows high-confidence target prediction and efficient classification of bacterial sRNAs.
Using Meta-Learning to Initialize Bayesian Optimization of Hyperparameters

Model selection and hyperparameter optimization is crucial in applying machine learning to a novel dataset. Recently, a sub-community of machine learning has focused on solving this problem with Sequential Model-based Bayesian Optimization (SMBO), demonstrating substantial successes in many applications. However, for expensive algorithms the computational overhead of hyperparameter optimization can still be prohibitive. In this paper we explore the possibility of speeding up SMBO by transferring knowledge from previous optimization runs on similar datasets; specifically, we propose to initialize SMBO with a small number of configurations suggested by a metalearning procedure. The resulting simple MI-SMBO technique can be trivially applied to any SMBO method, allowing us to perform experiments on two quite different SMBO methods with complementary strengths applied to optimize two machine learning frameworks on 57 classification datasets. We find that our initialization procedure mildly improves the state of the art in low-dimensional hyperparameter optimization and substantially improves the state of the art in the more complex problem of combined model selection and hyperparameter optimization.
Contemporary Issues in Crime and Justice Number 118 August 2008 Public confidence in the New South Wales criminal justice system

This bulletin describes a survey of public attitudes on levels of sentencing and whether the NSW criminal justice system is achieving its various aims. Consistent with previous research, a high proportion (66%) of respondents felt that sentences imposed on convicted offenders are either ‘a little too lenient’ or ‘much too lenient’. Most were either ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ confident that the criminal justice system respects the rights of accused persons (72%) and treats them fairly (75%) but smaller proportions were ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ confident that the criminal justice system brings people to justice (54.8%), deals with cases efficiently (43.7%), deals with cases promptly (29.7%) or meets the needs of victims (34.7%). Confidence in the criminal justice system was generally found to be more prevalent among younger people, those who are better educated, those on higher incomes, those who know more about crime and criminal justice and those who reported drawing information about the justice system from broadsheet newspapers, government publications, the Internet or from educational institutions. A large proportion of the public indicated that they would like to learn more about how judges sentence offenders. The results are discussed in terms of the role of the media in the formation of public attitudes toward the criminal justice system.