Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Experimental Oral Carcinogenesis

As the first speaker of a panel on "Investigations on Oral Neoplasia," I consider it my responsibility to set the stage for the reports of experimental oral cancer research which will follow. The title "Experimental Oral Carcinogenesis" fits well the responsibility and the privilege. Carcinogenesis is the process by which normal cells or tissues become transformed into cancer. The implication in the title is that there is a carcinogen, a substance which will transform normal to malignant cells, and that there are normal cells on which this transforming material may act. Obviously, there is not time for a complete historical review of carcinogenesis; nor is there time for a review of even the most recent work in that field. However, there have been some rather exciting new developments in the general area of carcinogenesis, and these should be viewed with the perspective of some historical background. Shimkin' has designated those agents which are capable of inducing neoplasms at will in animals as "carcinogenic agents. " These may be either chemical, physical, or living substances. A direct causative relationship between the agent employed and the neoplasm produced is not implied. All that can be said is that, in animals that are injected with certain agents or exposed to certain procedures, tumors arise in significantly higher incidence than in untreated animals. Innumerable chemical, physical, and living agents have been implicated in the carcinogenic process. As early as 1775, Sir Percival Pott2 reported that soot was the cause of cancer of the scrotum in chimney sweeps. In 1875 Von Volkman3 described industrial skin cancer contracted through contact with coal tar, and in 1876 Bell3 discovered "paraffin cancer" due to shale oil. In 1887 mineral oil was implicated as the carcinogen in "mule spinners' cancer" among the cotton spinners of Lancashire. It was not until 1915, however, that Yamagiwa and Ichikawa4 induced malignant skin tumors in the ears of rabbits by the application of coal tar, and shortly thereafter (1918) Tsutsui3 produced skin cancers in mice by painting them with a similar solution. Finally, in the early 1930's, Kennaway and Heiger5 started to describe the carcinogenic polycyclic hydrocarbons. The first, isolated in 1930, was 1,2,5,6-dibenzanthracene; later 3,4-benzpyrene was described. One of the most active carcinogenic hydrocarbons, 20-methylcholanthrene, was synthesized from bile acids. These polycyclic hydrocarbons have since been intensively studied for their carcinogenic activity by numerous workers. They are known as universal carcinogens because they induce malignant disease after topical application, after injection subcutaneously, intramuscularly, or intravenously, or after feeding. Because most of the work in carcinogenesis has been done on the skin, most is known about this form of experimental cancer. Estrogens and other hormones which have chemical structures similar to those of the afore-mentioned polycyclic hydrocarbons have also been implicated as chemical carcinogens. Thus we have two groups of related compounds, one group synthetically
Superpixel Segmentation Using Gaussian Mixture Model

Superpixel segmentation partitions an image into perceptually coherent segments of similar size, namely, superpixels. It is becoming a fundamental preprocessing step for various computer vision tasks because superpixels significantly reduce the number of inputs and provide a meaningful representation for feature extraction. We present a pixel-related Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to segment images into superpixels. GMM is a weighted sum of Gaussian functions, each one corresponding to a superpixel, to describe the density of each pixel represented by a random variable. Different from previously proposed GMMs, our weights are constant, and Gaussian functions in the sums are subsets of all the Gaussian functions, resulting in segments of similar size and an algorithm of linear complexity with respect to the number of pixels. In addition to the linear complexity, our algorithm is inherently parallel and allows fast execution on multi-core systems. During the expectation-maximization iterations of estimating the unknown parameters in the Gaussian functions, we impose two lower bounds to truncate the eigenvalues of the covariance matrices, which enables the proposed algorithm to control the regularity of superpixels. Experiments on a well-known segmentation dataset show that our method can efficiently produce superpixels that adhere to object boundaries better than the current state-of-the-art methods.
One Size Does Not Fit All: Cultural Considerations in Evidence-Based Practice for Depression

The purpose of this book, which is to identify and describe in some detail some of the leadingevidence-basedapproaches to treatingandpreventingdepression, is a laudable one and will prove useful to clinicians interested in providing state-of-the-art mental health services. And yet, the term evidence-based should be cautiously applied, given the limited research evaluating the generalizability of that evidence base to populations other than individuals from European-American middle-class backgrounds (Bernal & Scharr on-del-R io, 2001; La Roche & Christopher, 2008; Mak, Law, Alvidrez, & P erezStable, 2007; U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2001). This limitation in theresearchbase isproblematic for several reasons.First,within the United States, the demographics of the population have been rapidly changing; estimates suggest that by the year 2050 thenumber ofU.S. residentswho self-identify as European American will be below 50% of the total U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau,2008). Thesituation isevenmoreextremefromaglobalperspective, asalmost 85%of theworldpopulation livesoutsideof theUnitedStatesandEurope (seeArnett, 2008, for a discussion of the limited scope of psychological research in general). Second, there is some research that suggests that important cultural group differences may exist in the prevalence rate of depression. For example, results from both the originalNationalComorbidity Survey and themore recently completedNational Comorbidity Survey—Replication indicated that depression is less prevalent among
Influence of Bisphosphonate Treatment on Medullary Macrophages and Osteoclasts: An Experimental Study

Nitrogen-containing bisphosphonates are widely used for treating diverse bone pathologies. They are anticatabolic drugs that act on osteoclasts inhibiting bone resorption. It remains unknown whether the mechanism of action is by decreasing osteoclast number, impairing osteoclast function, or whether they continue to effectively inhibit bone resorption despite the increase in osteoclast number. There is increasing evidence that bisphosphonates also act on bone marrow cells like macrophages and monocytes. The present work sought to evaluate the dynamics of preosteoclast fusion and possible changes in medullary macrophage number in bisphosphonate-treated animals. Healthy female Wistar rats received olpadronate, alendronate, or vehicle during 5 weeks, and 5-bromo-2-deoxyuridine (BrdU) on day 7, 28, or 34 of the experiment. Histomorphometric studies were performed to study femurs and evaluate: number of nuclei per osteoclast (N.Nu/Oc); number of BrdU-positive nuclei (N.Nu BrdU+/Oc); percentage of BrdU-positive nuclei per osteoclast (%Nu.BrdU+/Oc); medullary macrophage number (mac/mm2) and correlation between N.Nu/Oc and mac/mm2. Results showed bisphosphonate-treated animals exhibited increased N.Nu/Oc, caused by an increase in preosteoclast fusion rate and evidenced by higher N.Nu BrdU+/Oc, and significantly decreased mac/mm2. Considering the common origin of osteoclasts and macrophages, the increased demand for precursors of the osteoclast lineage may occur at the expense of macrophage lineage precursors.
Dialogic Reading and Child Language Growth — Combating Developmental Risk in South Africa

The issue of inadequate child cognitive stimulation requires immediate remediation given its widespread prevalence in developing countries. “Dialogic book-sharing” is now recognised as a potent means for stimulating the development of a range of important early cognitive and language skills in children; including receptive and expressive vocabulary, abstract language, the syntactic quality and complexity of sentence construction, emergent literacy skills, literal and inferential language, and oral Narrative skills. This article is a review of the current research base on sharing books with young children. It reveals widespread application of this sort of intervention in the developed world, with Programmes having been run by training individual parents or as groups in classroom settings. While implementation in poor, developing countries remains scant, there is a clear rationale for testing the applicability of dialogic reading in Africa as there is established evidence that South African children are at a clear cognitive disadvantage to their peers in developed countries. The dialogic reading programme, its components, and implementation issues are discussed with a review of the major empirical findings. It is further argued that this type of intervention poses much potential for addressing the documented loss of developmental potential in South Africa (SA).
Weak Gravitational Lensing with COSMOS: Galaxy Selection and Shape Measurements

With a primary goal of conducting precision weak-lensing measurements from space, the COSMOS survey has imaged the largest contiguous area observed by Hubble Space Telescope to date, using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). This is the first paper in a series in which we describe our strategy for addressing the various technical challenges in the production of weak-lensing measurements from COSMOS data. We first construct a source catalog from 575 ACS/WFC tiles (1.64 deg2) subsampled at a pixel scale of 0.03''. Defects and diffraction spikes are carefully removed, leaving a total of 1.2 × 106 objects to a limiting magnitude of F814W = 26.5. This catalog is made publicly available. Multiwavelength follow-up observations of the COSMOS field provide photometric redshifts for 73% of the source galaxies in the lensing catalog. We analyze and discuss the COSMOS redshift distribution and show broad agreement with other surveys to z ~ 1. Our next step is to measure the shapes of galaxies and correct them for the distortion induced by the time-varying ACS point-spread function and for charge transfer efficiency (CTE) effects. Simulated images are used to derive the shear susceptibility factors that are necessary in transforming shape measurements into unbiased shear estimators. For every galaxy we derive a shape measurement error and utilize this quantity to extract the intrinsic shape noise of the galaxy sample. Interestingly, our results indicate that intrinsic shape noise varies little with size, magnitude, or redshift. Representing a number density of 66 galaxies per arcmin2, the final COSMOS weak-lensing catalog contains 3.9 × 105 galaxies with accurate shape measurements. The properties of the COSMOS weak-lensing catalog described throughout this paper will provide key input numbers for the preparation and design of next-generation wide field space missions.
Studienreform Humanmedizin in Innsbruck

Angestosen durch ein liberales Rahmengesetz und veranderte Erwartungen der Gesellschaft an die Arztausbildung, und aufgenommen von einer Fakultat, die deutlichen Veranderungen zustimmte, erfolgte die Planung eines neuen Humanmedizincurriculums mit hoch gesetzten Zielen. Hier sollen Rekrutierung der Mitwirkenden, Auswahl und Abstimmung der Ausbildungsziele und deren Umsetzung in einer von wechselnden Rahmenbedingungen gepragten Implementierungsphase diskutiert werden. Zur Analyse der Starken und Schwachen des Kontexts, Inhalts und Prozesses der Reform werden die von BLAND et al. definierten Erfolgskriterien fur curriculare Reformprojekte in der Medizin herangezogen. 01.12. 2008 | Wolfgang M. Prodinger (Innsbruck)
An Analysis of Overshadowing and Blocking

In classical aversive conditioning experiments, rats do not always learn about all aspects of a compound stimulus predicting shock. A strong stimulus may overshadow a weaker one; and pretraining on one component may block learning about a second component. These results have been explained either by appealing to a notion of selective attention, or by assuming that learning about one component is a function of prior response strength to the entire compound of which it forms a part. In Experiment I, overshadowing was demonstrated on the first trial of conditioning, i.e. before either component had acquired any response strength. In Experiment II, pretraining on one component resulted in complete failure to learn about a second component during compound training, but did not prevent additional learning about the first component. Both results were interpreted as supporting an attentional analysis of blocking and overshadowing.
Prediction, Postdiction, and Perceptual Length Contraction: A Bayesian Low-Speed Prior Captures the Cutaneous Rabbit and Related Illusions

Illusions provide a window into the brain’s perceptual strategies. In certain illusions, an ostensibly task-irrelevant variable influences perception. For example, in touch as in audition and vision, the perceived distance between successive punctate stimuli reflects not only the actual distance but curiously the inter-stimulus time. Stimuli presented at different positions in rapid succession are drawn perceptually toward one another. This effect manifests in several illusions, among them the startling cutaneous rabbit, in which taps delivered to as few as two skin positions appear to hop progressively from one position to the next, landing in the process on intervening areas that were never stimulated. Here we provide an accessible step-by-step exposition of a Bayesian perceptual model that replicates the rabbit and related illusions. The Bayesian observer optimally joins uncertain estimates of spatial location with the expectation that stimuli tend to move slowly. We speculate that this expectation – a Bayesian prior – represents the statistics of naturally occurring stimuli, learned by humans through sensory experience. In its simplest form, the model contains a single free parameter, tau: a time constant for space perception. We show that the Bayesian observer incorporates both pre- and post-dictive inference. Directed spatial attention affects the prediction-postdiction balance, shifting the model’s percept toward the attended location, as observed experimentally in humans. Applying the model to the perception of multi-tap sequences, we show that the low-speed prior fits perception better than an alternative, low-acceleration prior. We discuss the applicability of our model to related tactile, visual, and auditory illusions. To facilitate future model-driven experimental studies, we present a convenient freeware computer program that implements the Bayesian observer; we invite investigators to use this program to create their own testable predictions.
Estudio sobre diferencias de género en las competencias y las estrategias educativas para el desarrollo del pensamiento computacional

Computational thinking is a competence that should be included in the training of every student of different educational stages, from the lower to the higher stages. However, there are fewer women that choose in their post-secondary education careers related to computer science. Therefore, this article analyzes the main initiatives of teaching the computational thinking, and also the gender gap in computer education. In order to know strategies of computational thinking and the gender differences which were found; it has been made a study about the opinions of teachers, judges, referees and volunteers of the national educational robotics competition FLL (First Lego League), whom was held in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 2015. The results indicate that although there are more male presence in the tournament, there are no significant gender differences in the skills related to programming and learning computational thinking, because boys and girls learn and process information fairly.
Development of cross-language lexical influence

Bilinguals are often not fully monolingual-like in either language. With respect to the lexicon, recent research demonstrates that their naming patterns for common household objects tend to converge on a common pattern for the two languages. The present study investigates the developmental trajectory of naming of common household objects in Dutch/French bilingual and monolingual children. First, we investigated whether bilingual word diversity for a set of household objects is limited by the demands of learning two languages. We found that children lag behind monolingual controls in terms of vocabulary at young ages, but that they catch up later, ending with as diverse a set of names in each language as the monolinguals. Second, we investigated how the convergence in the adult bilingual lexicon manifests itself over the course of development. We found that naming patterns converge with age following a similarity-driven strategy, a pattern also seen for the monolinguals. However, language-specific exceptions to the similarity principle are acknowledged from age 10 onward by monolinguals, but only from age 14 onward in bilinguals. At all ages, bilinguals show more convergence than monolinguals, and the difference is largest for adults. Together our results indicate that acquisition of naming patterns by bilinguals starts off more or less following the early stages of monolinguals, with separate naming patterns in the two languages, but convergence dominates the later developmental path to a larger extent for bilinguals than for monolinguals.
Bloodstream Infections in Hospitalized Children: Epidemiology and Antimicrobial Susceptibilities

Background: Bloodstream infection is a major cause of morbidity and mortality. Much of our understanding of the epidemiology and resistance patterns of bloodstream infections comes from studies of hospitalized adults. Methods: We evaluated the epidemiology and antimicrobial resistance of bloodstream infections occurring during an 11-year period in a large, tertiary care children’s hospital in the US. All positive blood cultures were identified retrospectively from clinical microbiology laboratory records. We excluded repeat positive cultures with the same organism from the same patient within 30 days and polymicrobial infections. Results: We identified 8196 unique episodes of monomicrobial bacteremia in 5508 patients. Overall, 46% were community onset, 72% were Gram-positive bacteria, 22% Gram-negative bacteria and 5% Candida spp. Coagulase negative Staphylococcus was the most common isolated organism. ESKAPE pathogens (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter spp.) accounted for 20% of episodes. No S. aureus isolate was resistant to vancomycin or linezolid, and no increase in vancomycin minimum inhibitory concentration among methicillin-resistant S. aureus was observed during the study period. Clinically significant increases in vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, ceftazidime-resistant P. aeruginosa or carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae were not observed during the study period; however, rates of methicillin-resistant S. aureus increased over time (P < 0.01). Conclusions: Gram-positive and ESKAPE organisms are leading causes of bacteremia in hospitalized children. Although antimicrobial resistance patterns were favorable compared with prior reports of hospitalized adults, multicenter studies with continuous surveillance are needed to identify trends in the emergence of antimicrobial resistance in this setting.
The Effects of Team-Skills Training on Transactive Memory and Performance

The existence of effective transactive memory systems in teams has been found to enhance task performance. Methods of developing transactive memory are therefore an important focus of research. This study aimed to explore one such method, the use of a generic team-skills training program to develop transactive memory and subsequent task performance. Sixteen three-member teams were all trained to complete a complex collaborative task, prior to which half the teams (n = 8) completed a team-skills training program. Results confirmed that those teams that had been trained to develop a range of team skills such as problem-solving, interpersonal relationships, goal setting, and role allocation evidenced significantly higher team skill, transactive memory, and performance than those that were not trained in such skills. Results are discussed with reference to the wider transactive memory literature and the mechanisms through which team-skills training could facilitate the more rapid development of transactive memory.
Constitutive and UV-inducible synthesis of photoprotective compounds (carotenoids and mycosporines) by freshwater yeasts

Twelve yeasts isolated from lakes of Northwestern Patagonia, Argentina, belonging to eight genera ( Sporobolomyces , Sporidiobolus , Rhodotorula , Rhodosporidium , Cystofilobasidium , Cryptococcus , Torulaspora , and Candida ) were analysed for their ability to produce photoprotective compounds. For this purpose, three laboratory experiments were performed to study the effect of photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) and PAR in combination with UV radiation (PAR + UVR) on the production of carotenoids and mycosporines. The synthesis of carotenoid compounds was clearly stimulated in six out of nine red yeast strains tested upon exposure to PAR or PAR + UVR; however, the latter conditions produced a stronger response than PAR alone. The increase in carotenoids in the red strains under PAR + UVR irradiation showed a negative exponential relationship with their basal carotenoid content, suggesting that cells with higher constitutive levels of carotenoids are less responsive to induction by PAR + UVR. Three red yeasts, Rhodotorula minuta , Rh. pinicola , and Rhodotorula sp. , and the colourless Cryptococcus laurentii produced a UV-absorbing compound when exposed to PAR or PAR + UVR. This compound showed an absorption maximum at 309–310 nm and was identified as mycosporine-glutaminol-glucoside (myc–glu–glu). In these strains, exposure to PAR or PAR + UVR resulted in elevated concentrations of both carotenoids and myc–glu–glu. This is the first report on the production of mycosporines by yeasts. All strains that developed under PAR + UVR were able to synthesise carotenoids either constitutively or in response to PAR exposure, and a few of them also produced myc–glu–glu when exposed to PAR. Collectively, our results suggest that the presence of carotenoids, either alone or in combination with mycosporines, are required for sustaining growth under exposure to PAR + UVR in the freshwater yeast strains studied.
FACTS solutions for voltage stability problems in a large metropolitan area

The purpose of this paper is to apply and assess the performance of FACTS controllers for dynamic voltage support: Dynamic VAR (D-VAR/spl trade/) and advanced static compensator (STATCOM), in a large metropolitan area. To determine the heat location for these controllers, modal analysis and time-domain simulations are used. A good correlation was found between the two techniques. Performance is discussed with only D-VAR/spl trade/ in place, only STATCOM's in place, and a combination of the two.