Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Expression of Tumor-Derived and Stromal-Derived Matrix Metalloproteinase 2 Predicted Prognosis of Ovarian Cancer

Objective To evaluate the association of tumor-derived matrix metalloproteinase 2 (MMP-2) and stromal-derived MMP-2 expression with the prognosis of patients with ovarian cancer, a meta-analysis study was performed, which was aimed to comprehensively review the evidence of MMP-2 as prognostic biomarkers in ovarian cancers. Methods All relevant studies were searched in PubMed and Web of Science until May 30, 2014. Hazard ratios (HRs) with their 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were used to assess the association between MMP-2 expression (tumor-derived or stromal-derived) and prognosis of patients with ovarian cancer. Pooled odds ratios (ORs) and their 95% CIs were used to assess the correlation of MMP-2 expression with the clinicopathological features of patients with ovarian cancer. Results A total of 965 patients in 8 studies were included in this analysis. Among them, tumor-derived and stromal-derived MMP-2 expression was detected in 7 and 5 articles, respectively. The results revealed that ovarian cancer patients with positive tumor-derived MMP-2 expression showed a worse prognosis than did the ones with negative tumor-derived MMP-2 expression (HR, 1.52; 95% CI, 1.06–2.20). However, ovarian cancer patients with positive stromal-derived MMP-2 expression had not. In addition, we also found that tumor-derived MMP-2 expression was associated with distant metastasis (absent vs present; pooled OR, 4.52; 95% CI, 1.56–13.09; P = 0.001). Conclusions These results suggested that positive tumor-derived MMP-2 expression could predict a lower overall survival rate and could be an independent dangerous prognostic factor in patients with ovarian cancer.
Combined Expression Trait Correlations and Expression Quantitative Trait Locus Mapping

Coordinated regulation of gene expression levels across a series of experimental conditions provides valuable information about the functions of correlated transcripts. The consideration of gene expression correlation over a time or tissue dimension has proved valuable in predicting gene function. Here, we consider correlations over a genetic dimension. In addition to identifying coregulated genes, the genetic dimension also supplies us with information about the genomic locations of putative regulatory loci. We calculated correlations among approximately 45,000 expression traits derived from 60 individuals in an F2 sample segregating for obesity and diabetes. By combining the correlation results with linkage mapping information, we were able to identify regulatory networks, make functional predictions for uncharacterized genes, and characterize novel members of known pathways. We found evidence of coordinate regulation of 174 G protein–coupled receptor protein signaling pathway expression traits. Of the 174 traits, 50 had their major LOD peak within 10 cM of a locus on Chromosome 2, and 81 others had a secondary peak in this region. We also characterized a Riken cDNA clone that showed strong correlation with stearoyl-CoA desaturase 1 expression. Experimental validation confirmed that this clone is involved in the regulation of lipid metabolism. We conclude that trait correlation combined with linkage mapping can reveal regulatory networks that would otherwise be missed if we studied only mRNA traits with statistically significant linkages in this small cross. The combined analysis is more sensitive compared with linkage mapping alone.
Geography of international water conflict and cooperation: Data sets and applications

The Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database provides a framework for quantitative, global‐scale explorations of the relationship between freshwater resources and international cooperation and conflict. Projects were designed to test common theories linking freshwater resources to cooperation and conflict, in particular within the context of geography and environmental security. The projects, which follow in sequence, consider three main hypotheses on the likelihood and intensity of water resource disputes. To test these hypotheses, a unique set of tools was created that links water‐specific event data with a geographic information system (GIS) that meshes biophysical, political, and socioeconomic data sets at the river basin and other scales. There are three linked data sets: (1) an event data set documenting historical water relations, including a methodology for identifying and classifying events by their intensity of cooperation/conflict; (2) a GIS data set of countries and international basins, both current and historical; and (3) a spatial data set of biophysical, socioeconomic, and political variables, linked to the GIS. This paper describes the hypotheses, the above tools created to test them, and a methodological framework for utilizing the linked event and GIS data sets, providing three projects as examples: (1) indicators of international basins at risk of political tensions, (2) relationships between internal and international hydropolitics in three geographic regions, and (3) hydroclimatological variables and international water relations.
The Effect of Implicit Preferences on Food Consumption: Moderating Role of Ego Depletion and Impulsivity

Ego depletion has been found to moderate the effect of implicit preferences on food consumption, such that implicit preferences predict consumption only under a depleted state. The present study tested how trait impulsivity impacts the effect of implicit preferences on food consumption in a depleted condition. Trait impulsivity was measured by means of self-report and a stop signal task. Results showed that both self-reported impulsivity and behavioral impulsivity moderated the ‘depletion and then eating according to implicit preferences’ effect, albeit in different ways. Participants high in self-reported impulsivity and low in behavioral impulsivity were more vulnerable to the effect of depletion on eating. The implications of these results for extant theories are discussed. Future research is needed to verify whether or not trait impulsivity is associated with vulnerability to depletion across different self-control domains.
Novel Application of Tyramide Signal Amplification (TSA): Ultrastructural Visualization of Double-labeled Immunofluorescent Axonal Profiles

Fluorescent immunocytochemistry (FICC) allows multiple labeling approaches when enzyme-based techniques are difficult to combine, such as in double-labeling experiments targeting small-caliber axonal segments. Nevertheless, the conversion of FICC to a product visible at the electron microscopic (EM) level requires labor-intensive procedures, thus Justifying the development of more user-friendly conversion methods. This study was initiated to simplify the conversion of FICC to EM by employing the unique properties of tyramide signal amplification (TSA), which allowed the simultaneous targeting of a fluorescent tag and biotin label to the same antigenic site. Briefly, one of two antigenic sites typically co-localized in damaged axonal segments was visualized by the application of a fluorescent secondary antibody, with the other tagged via a biotinylated antibody. Next, an ABC kit was used, followed by the simultaneous application of fluorophore-tyramide and biotin-tyramide. After temporary mounting for fluorescent digital photomicroscopy, sections were incubated in ABC and reacted with diaminobenzidine before EM analysis. Double-labeling fluorescent immunocytochemistry with TSA clearly delineated damaged axonal segments. In addition, these same axonal segments yielded high-quality EM images with discrete electron-dense reaction products, thereby providing a simple and reproducible means for following fluorescent analysis with EM.
Endocrine and Cognitive Adaptations to Cope with Stress in Immature Common Marmosets (Callithrix jacchus): Sex and Age Matter

Phenotypic sex differences in primates are associated with body differentiation during the early stages of life, expressed in both physiological and behavioral features. Hormones seem to play a pivotal role in creating a range of responses to meet environmental and social demands, resulting in better reactions to cope with challenges to survival and reproduction. Steroid hormones actively participate in neuroplasticity and steroids from both gonads and neurons seem to be involved in behavioral modulation in primates. Indirect evidence suggests the participation of sexual steroids in dimorphism of the stress response in common marmosets. This species is an important experimental model in psychiatry, and we found a dual profile for cortisol in the transition from juvenile to subadult, with females showing higher levels. Immature males and females at 6 and 9 months of age moved alone from the family group to a new cage, over a 21-day period, expressed distinct patterns of cortisol variation with respect to range and duration of response. Additional evidence showed that at 12 months of age, males and females buffered the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis during chronic stress. Moreover, chronic stressed juvenile marmoset males showed better cognitive performance in working memory tests and motivation when compared to those submitted to short-term stress living in family groups. Thus, as cortisol profile seems to be sexually dimorphic before adulthood, age and sex are critical variables to consider in approaches that require immature marmosets in their experimental protocols. Moreover, available cognitive tests should be scrutinized to allow better investigation of cognitive traits in this species.
ON THE RELEVANCE OF THE DAM BREAK PROBLEM IN THE CONTEXT OF NONLINEAR SHALLOW WATER EQUATIONS

The classical dam break problem has become the de facto standard in validating the Nonlinear Shallow Water Equations (NSWE) solvers. Moreover, the NSWE are widely used for flooding simulations. While applied mathematics community is essentially focused on developing new numerical schemes, we tried to examine the validity of the mathematical model under consideration. The main purpose of this study is to check the pertinence of the NSWE for flooding processes. From the mathematical point of view, the answer is not obvious since all derivation procedures assumes the total water depth positivity. We performed a comparison between the two-fluid Navier-Stokes simulations and the NSWE solved analytically and numerically. Several conclusions are drawn out and perspectives for future research are outlined.
Gender and Food Security: Towards Gender-Just Food and Nutrition Security

This BRIDGE Cutting Edge Overview Report makes the case for a new, gender-aware understanding of food security, arguing that partial, apolitical and gender-blind diagnoses of the problem of food and nutrition insecurity is leading to insufficient policy responses and the failure to realise the right to food for all people. Showcasing effective and promising existing strategies, the report suggests that in order to truly achieve food security for all in gender equitable ways, responses need to be rights-based, gender-just and environmentally sustainable.
Exploring Diagonal Gait Using a Forward Dynamic Three-Dimensional Chimpanzee Simulation

Primates are unusual among terrestrial quadrupedal mammals in that at walking speeds they prefer diagonal rather than lateral gaits. A number of reasons have been proposed for this preference in relation to the arboreal ancestry of modern primates: stability, energetic cost, neural control, skeletal loading, and limb interference avoiding. However, this is a difficult question to explore experimentally since most primates only occasionally use anything other than diagonal gaits. An alternative approach is to produce biologically realistic computer simulations of primate gait that enable the constraints of biomechanical loading and the energetics of different modes of locomotion to be explored. In this paper we describe such a model for the chimpanzee Pan troglodytes. The simulation is able to produce spontaneous quadrupedal locomotion, and the footfall sequences generated are split between lateral and diagonal footfall sequences with no obvious energetic benefit associated with either option. However, out of 10 successful simulation runs, 5 were lateral sequence/lateral couplet gaits indicating a preference for a specific lateral footfall sequence with a relatively tightly constrained phase difference between the fore- and hindlimbs. This suggests that the choice of diagonal walking gaits in chimpanzees is not a simple mechanical phenomenon and that diagonal walking gaits in primates are selected for by multiple factors.
Palm Vein Verification Using Gabor Filter

Palm vein authentication is one of the modern biometric techniques, which employs the vein pattern in the human palm to verify the person. The merits of palm vein on classical biometric (e.g. fingerprint, iris, face) are a low risk of falsification, difficulty of duplicated and stability. In this research, a new method is proposed for personal verification based on palm vein features. In the propose method, the palm vein images are firstly enhanced and then the features are extracted by using bank of Gabor filters. Then Fisher Discriminated Analysis (FDA) is used to reduce the dimension of the features vectors. For vein pattern verification, this work uses Nearest Neighbors method. The EER of the proposed method is 0.2335%.
Joint reconstruction of correlated images from compressed images

This paper proposesa novel joint reconstruction algorithm to decode sets of correlated images from distributively compressed images. We consider a scenario where the images captured at different viewpoints are encoded independently using transform-based coding solutions (e.g., SPIHT) with a balanced rate distribution among different cameras. A central decoder jointly processes the compressed images and reconstructs an image pair by exploiting the inter-view correlation. The central decoder first estimates the underlying correlation model from the independently decoded images and it is eventually used for the joint signal recovery. The joint reconstruction is cast as a constrained convex optimization problem that reconstructs a total-variation (TV) smooth image pair that satisfies with the estimated correlation model. At the same time, we add constraints that force the reconstructed images to be as close as possible to the compressed views. We show by experiments that the proposed joint reconstruction scheme outperforms independent reconstruction in terms of image quality, for a given target bit rate.
Scheduling coprocessor for enhanced least-laxity-first scheduling in hard real-time systems

Scheduling time impact on system performance increases especially when using dynamic priority algorithms, because of the enlarged computational effort at runtime. This overhead can be reduced by using dedicated hardware that does the time consuming computations necessary for scheduling. This can be a coprocessor capable of implementing dynamic scheduling algorithms which are, until now, rarely used because of their complex computations at schedule time. One of these algorithms is Least-Laxity-First (LLF). This is an optimal scheduling methodology that allows detection of time constraint violations ahead of reaching a task's deadline, but has the disadvantage of showing poor runtime behavior in some special situations ("thrashing"). In this paper, we present a universal deterministic scheduling coprocessor that implements the newly developed Enhanced Least-Laxity-First-algorithm (ELLF) which eliminates this disadvantage of LLF. Computation time of this device is rather a matter of time resolution than of the number of tasks.
Typos to "Computing Polynomial Functions of Correlated Sources: Inner Bounds"

∼ q. For any ǫ > 0 and positive integer n, choose a sequence˜X n j (1 ≤ j ≤ l) randomly from T ǫ (n, X j) based on a uniform distribution. If y ∈ Y n is an ǫ-typical sequence with respect to Y , then
An Alternative Approach to Estimation Risk

We propose an adjustment in choosing efficient mean-variance portfolio weights that incorporates uncertainty caused by the fact that one has to rely on estimated expected returns instead of actual ones. Our adjustment follows from a classical decision theoretic argument and amounts to using a pseudo riskaversion parameter which is higher than the actual one. The adjustment to the risk-aversion parameter has a straightforward interpretation. It decreases with sample size, increases with the number of assets in the portfolio, and increases with the curvature of the mean-variance frontier. We also derive these results in the presence of short-sales constraints and time-varying expected returns. We find that the adjustments are nontrivial for international G5 country portfolios and even more important when emerging markets are included. Moreover, our adjustments compare favorably to those based on a traditional Bayesian approach to the problem. In case expected country returns are time-varying, our adjustment induces a significant reduction in the variability of portfolio weights.
SOcIAl PROTecTIOn AnD lAbOR MARkeT

An Apartheid-driven spatial mismatch between workers and jobs leads to high job search costs for people living in rural areas of South Africa—costs that many young people cannot pay. In this article, the authors examine whether the arrival of a social grant—specifically a generous state-funded old-age pension given to men and women above prime age—enhances the ability of young men in rural areas to seek better work opportunities elsewhere. based on eight waves of socioeconomic data on household living arrangements and household members’ characteristics and employment status, collected between 2001 and 2011 at a demographic surveillance site in kwazulu-natal, the authors find that young men are significantly more likely to become labor migrants when someone in their household becomes age-eligible for the old-age pension. but this effect applies only to those who have completed high school (matric), who are on average 8 percentage points more likely to migrate for work when their households become pension eligible, compared with other potential labor migrants. The authors also find that, upon pension loss, it is the youngest migrants who are the most likely to return to their sending households, perhaps because they are the
Expression Profile of IL-35 mRNA in Gingiva of Chronic Periodontitis and Aggressive Periodontitis Patients: A Semiquantitative RT-PCR Study

Background. Proinflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines play a key role in the pathogenesis of periodontal diseases. Secretion of bioactive IL-35 has been described by T regulatory cells (Tregs) and is required for their maximal suppressive activity. Tregs are involved in the modulation of local immune response in chronic periodontitis patients. Objective. Hence, the present study was aimed to investigate the expression of IL-35 mRNA in chronic periodontitis and aggressive periodontitis patients. Materials and Methods. The present study was carried out in 60 subjects, which included 20 chronic periodontitis patients, 20 aggressive periodontitis patients, and 20 periodontally healthy controls. IL-35 mRNA expression in gingival tissue samples of all subjects was semiquantitatively analyzed using Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR). Results. The present study demonstrated the expression of IL-35 mRNA in gingival tissues of all the three groups. IL-35 mRNA expression was highest in chronic periodontitis subjects (6.87 ± 2.32) as compared to the aggressive periodontitis group (4.71 ± 1.43) and least seen in healthy patients (3.03 ± 1.91). Conclusion. The increased expression of IL-35 in chronic and aggressive periodontitis suggests its possible role in pathogenesis of periodontitis. Future studies done on large samples with intervention will strengthen our result.
Plasmonics—A Route to Nanoscale Optical Devices

The further integration of optical devices will require the fabrication of waveguides for electromagnetic energy below the diffraction limit of light. We investigate the possibility of using arrays of closely spaced metal nanoparticles for this purpose. Coupling between adjacent particles sets up coupled plasmon modes that give rise to coherent propagation of energy along the array. A point dipole analysis predicts group velocities of energy transport that exceed 0.1c along straight arrays and shows that energy transmission and switching through chain networks such as corners (see Figure) and tee structures is possible at high efficiencies. Radiation losses into the far field are expected to be negligible due to the near-field nature of the coupling, and resistive heating leads to transmission losses of about 6 dB/lm for gold and silver particles. We analyze macroscopic analogues operating in the microwave regime consisting of closely spaced metal rods by experiments and full field electrodynamic simulations. The guiding structures show a high confinement of the electromagnetic energy and allow for highly variable geometries and switching. Also, we have fabricated gold nanoparticle arrays using electron beam lithography and atomic force microscopy manipulation. These plasmon waveguides and switches could be the smallest devices with optical functionality.
Success Factors in Community-Based Tourism in Thailand: The Role of Luck, External Support, and Local Leadership

Abstract The dominant narrative regarding tourism in Thailand centers on the various negative social and environmental consequences of rapid growth, but in the midst of this explosive expansion of conventional tourism, a less recognized story has recently emerged. Due to the efforts of researchers, environmental activists, non-governmental organizations, and public officials, community-based tourism (CBT) has become in the past decade an important component of the domestic tourism market, and signifies trends that are more encouraging than those associated with more conventional forms of tourism in Thailand. While it is true that some rural communities in Thailand struggle to plan, initiate, and sustain CBT projects, it is nevertheless possible, with the right combination of circumstances, to pursue successful CBT. The paper explores the emergence of CBT in Thailand, and examines the case study of Mae Kampong, a village in the Northern Thai province of Chiang Mai that is renowned nationally as a showcase CBT community. Using data and observations gathered during more than 30 research or study-tour visits to Mae Kampong, this paper argues that fortunate geographical conditions, external support, and transformational leadership represent the most important determinants of success for CBT in Thailand.