Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testicular sperm extraction in azoospermic patients with gonadal germ cell tumors prior to chemotherapy--a new therapy option.

BACKGROUND In view of the high cure rates in patients with testicular germ cell tumors (TGCT), increasing clinical importance is attached to protection of fertility. Long-term infertility due to cytostatic therapy may be expected in more than 50% of the patients at a cumulative dose of cisplatin > 0.6 g/m2. The standard procedure for fertility protection in cancer patients includes cryopreservation of ejaculated spermatozoa. Considering that some patients have tumor-induced azoospermia, we examined the usefulness of testicular sperm extraction before therapy. METHOD A survey of the literature served as a basis for investigating biological and clinical aspects of the impact of chemotherapy on male fertility. A study of our patient population also enabled us to explore the option of extracting sperm from the contralateral healthy testis prior to treatment in 14 azoospermic patients with testicular germ cell tumors. RESULTS We were able to successfully recover haploid germ cells in 6/14 testicular biopsies from azoospermic patients with testicular germ cell cancer prior to treatment. Maturation arrest was found in 3/14 cases and Sertoli-cell-only syndrome in the rest. None of the patients had secondary healing or a treatment delay because of the testicular biopsy. CONCLUSION Since the post-therapeutic fertility status is difficult to predict in cancer patients, we think that TESE should be regarded as a general option prior to cancer treatment and offered to azoospermic cancer patients. New guidelines should be established in this connection.
Functional Inhibitors of Acid Sphingomyelinase (FIASMAs): A Novel Pharmacological Group of Drugs with Broad Clinical Applications

Acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) is an important lipid-metabolizing enzyme cleaving sphingomyelin to ceramide, mainly within lysosomes. Acid ceramidase (AC) further degrades ceramide to sphingosine which can then be phosphorylated to sphingosine-1-phosphate. Ceramide and its metabolite sphingosine-1-phosphate have been shown to antagonistically regulate apoptosis, cellular differentiation, proliferation and cell migration. Inhibitors of ASM or AC therefore hold promise for a number of new clinical therapies, e.g. for Alzheimer’s disease and major depression on the one hand and cancer on the other. Inhibitors of ASM have been known for a long time. Cationic amphiphilic substances induce the detachment of ASM protein from inner lysosomal membranes with its consecutive inactivation, thereby working as functional inhibitors of ASM. We recently experimentally identified a large number of hitherto unknown functional inhibitors of ASM and determined specific physicochemical properties of such cationic amphiphilic substances that functionally inhibit ASM. We propose the acronym “FIASMA” (Functional Inhibitor of Acid SphingoMyelinAse) for members of this large group of compounds with a broad range of new clinical indications. FIASMAs differ markedly with respect to molecular structure and current clinical indication. Most of the available FIASMAs are licensed for medical use in humans, are minimally toxic and may therefore be applied for disease states associated with increased activity of ASM.
A Feasibility Study on the Control of a Generic Air Vehicle Using Control Moment Gyros

This paper examines feasibility and performance issues in using Control Moment Gyroscopes (CMGs) to control the attitude of a fixed-wing aircraft. The paper describes a control system structure that permits allocating control authority and bandwidth between a CMG system and conventional aerodynamic control surfaces to stabilize a vehicle with neutral aerodynamic stability. A simulation study explores the interplay between aerodynamic and CMG eects, and indicates desirable physical characteristics for a CMG system to be used for aircraft attitude control.
Effect of an Exercise Intervention on Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: A Randomized Controlled Trial

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effect of an individually tailored, motivationally matched prenatal exercise intervention on gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) and other measures of glucose intolerance among ethnically diverse prenatal care patients at increased risk for GDM. METHODS: The Behaviors Affecting Baby and You study randomized eligible women at a mean (standard deviation) of 18.2 (4.1) weeks of gestation to a 12-week individually tailored, motivationally matched exercise intervention or a comparison health and wellness intervention. The goal of the exercise intervention was to achieve the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' guidelines for physical activity during pregnancy. Diagnosis of GDM, impaired glucose tolerance, abnormal glucose screen, and screening glucose values (mg/dL) were abstracted from medical records. A sample size of 352 women (176 per group) was planned to have 80% power to detect reductions in risk of 35% or larger. RESULTS: From July 2007 to December 2012, a total of 251 (86.5%) women completed the intervention; n=124 and 127 in the exercise and comparison interventions, respectively. Based on an intention-to-treat analysis, no statistically significant differences between the intervention groups were observed; the relative odds of GDM in the exercise group was 0.61 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.28–1.32) as compared with the health and wellness comparison group. Odds ratios for impaired glucose tolerance and abnormal glucose screen were 0.68 (95% CI 0.35–1.34) and 0.86 (95% CI 0.51–1.47), respectively. The intervention had no effect on birth outcomes. CONCLUSION: In this randomized trial among ethnically diverse pregnant women at increased risk for GDM, we found that a prenatal exercise intervention implemented in the second trimester did not result in a statistically significant reduction in relative odds for GDM, impaired glucose tolerance, or abnormal glucose screen. CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov, www.clinicaltrials. gov, NCT00728377. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE: I
Cholera toxin modulates the T cell antigen receptor/CD3 complex but not the CD2 molecule and inhibits signaling via both receptor structures in the human T cell lymphoma Jurkat

The human T cell lymphoma Jurkat can be activated by stimuli directed either against the T cell antigen receptor‐CD3 antigen complex (TcR/CD3) or the CD2 molecule. Stimulation of cells via the TcR/CD3‐complex or via the CD2 molecule increases inositol phosphates and cytoplasmic free calcium. Pretreatment of Jurkat cells with cholera toxin leads to a decrease of TcR/CD3 expression on the surface of the cells, while the expression of CD2 is unaffected. In contrast to this distinct effect on the receptor expression, signaling via both pathways is inhibited by cholera toxin. The most convincing explanation for the cholera toxin‐mediated inhibition of signaling is that cholera toxin interrupts the signaling pathways at a point where both, stimulation via TcR/CD3 and via CD2, use the same route. The earliest common point of the two signaling pathways, at least in the Jurkat cell line, seems to be the CD3 complex because after its down‐regulation (and functional inactivation) both pathways of activation are interrupted.
Effect of luminal angiotensin II on rabbit proximal convoluted tubule bicarbonate absorption.

The present in vitro microperfusion study examined the effect of luminal angiotensin II on proximal convoluted tubule (PCT) volume absorption and bicarbonate transport. Neither 10-11 M, 10-10 M, nor 2 × 10-8 M luminal angiotensin II significantly affected PCT transport. When tubules were first perfused with enalaprilat to inhibit endogenous angiotensin II production, addition of 10-10 M luminal angiotensin II increased volume absorption (0.72 ± 0.08 vs. 0.86 ± 0.07 nl ⋅ mm-1 ⋅ min-1, P < 0.01) and bicarbonate transport (52.3 ± 3.7 vs. 67.9 ± 4.2 pmol ⋅ mm-1 ⋅ min-1, P < 0.01). Addition of 10-6 M losartan, an AT1 inhibitor, to the luminal perfusate inhibited volume absorption (0.95 ± 0.14 vs. 0.72 ± 0.11 nl ⋅ mm-1 ⋅ min-1, P < 0.05) and bicarbonate transport (65.0 ± 7.3 vs. 54.7 ± 9.2 pmol ⋅ mm-1 ⋅ min-1, P < 0.05). Addition of 10-4 M luminal PD-123319, an AT2 inhibitor, was without effect. In tubules perfused with 10-4 M luminal enalaprilat and 10-4 M luminal PD-123319, addition of 10-10M luminal angiotensin II in the experimental period resulted in a stimulation in volume absorption (0.61 ± 0.08 vs. 0.81 ± 0.10 nl ⋅ mm-1 ⋅ min-1, P < 0.01) and bicarbonate transport (49.9 ± 6.3 vs. 77.4 ± 14.3 pmol ⋅ mm-1 ⋅ min-1, P < 0.01). In tubules perfused with 10-6 M losartan and 10-4 M enalaprilat, addition of luminal 10-10 M angiotensin II resulted in no change in transport. These data are consistent with endogenous angiotensin II affecting PCT bicarbonate transport in vitro via luminal AT1receptors.
Image retrieval using colour and texture features of Regions Of Interest

This paper proposes a region based image retrieval system using the local colour and texture features of image sub regions. The Regions Of Interest (ROI) are roughly identified by segmenting the image into fixed partitions, finding the edge map and filling the holes in edge map. The colour and texture features of the ROIs are computed from the histograms of the quantized HSV colour space and Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) respectively. A combined colour and texture feature vector is computed for each ROI and Euclidean distance measure is used for computing the distance between the features of the query and target image. Preliminary experimental results show that the proposed method provides better retrieving result than some of the existing methods.
Alternative Certification: State Policies in the SREB States.

In 1980, the Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB) Task Force on Higher Education and the Schools, composed of educational and governmental leaders from throughout the SREB region (15 states1), began the job of taking a close look at how teachers are prepared, considered the shortage of science and mathematics teachers, looked at the quality of the work force, and made 25 recommendations for change in education. Half of those recommendations were aimed at improving the quality of teachers for the region's classrooms. Questions were asked by that committee, such as:
A Formal Assessment of the Structural Similarity Index

In recent years the structural similarity index has become a de facto standard among image quality metrics. Made up of three components, this technique assesses the visual impact of changes in luminance, contrast and structure in an image. Present applications of the index include image enhancement, video compression, video quality monitoring and signal encoding. As its status continues to rise, however, so do questions about its performance. In this paper, it is shown, both empirically and analytically, that the index is directly related to the conventional, and fallible, mean squared error. This relationship raises serious questions about the credibility of the structural metric.
Ouch! Western Feminists' ‘Wounded Attachment’ to the ‘Third World Prostitute’

Abstract‘Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking.The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have con.gured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘traficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world traficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘traficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.
Pointing at Jack, Talking about Jill: Understanding Deferred Uses of Demonstratives and Pronouns

The aim of this paper is to explore the proper content of a formal semantic theory in two respects: clarifying first, which uses of expressions a formal theory should seek to accommodate, and, second, how much information the theory should contain. I explore these two questions with respect to occurrences of demonstratives and pronouns—the so–called ‘deferred’ uses—which are often classified as non–standard or figurative. I argue that, contrary to initial impressions, they must be treated as semantically identical to ordinary, perceptual uses of these expression–types, and that this finding has important repercussions for our view of the scope and limits of a semantic theory.
Global change and the future of harmful algal blooms in the ocean

The frequency and intensity of harmful algal blooms (HABs) and phytoplankton community shifts toward toxic species have increased worldwide. Although most research has focused on eutrophication as the cause of this trend, many other global- and regional-scale anthropogenic influences may also play a role. Ocean acidification (high pCO2/low pH), green- house warming, shifts in nutrient availability, ratios, and speciation, changing exposure to solar irradiance, and altered salinity all have the potential to profoundly affect the growth and toxicity of these phytoplankton. Except for ocean acidification, the effects of these individual factors on harmful algae have been studied extensively. In this review, we summarize our understanding of the influence of each of these single factors on the physiological properties of important marine HAB groups. We then examine the much more limited literature on how rising CO2 together with these other concurrent environmental changes may affect these organisms, including what is pos- sibly the most critical property of many species: toxin production. New work with several diatom and dinoflagellate species suggests that ocean acidification combined with nutrient limitation or temperature changes may dramatically increase the toxicity of some harmful groups. This obser- vation underscores the need for more in-depth consideration of poorly understood interactions between multiple global change variables on HAB physiology and ecology. A key limitation of global change experiments is that they typically span only a few algal generations, making it difficult to predict whether they reflect likely future decadal- or century-scale trends. We con- clude by calling for thoughtfully designed experiments and observations that include adequate consideration of complex multivariate interactive effects on the long-term responses of HABs to a rapidly changing future marine environment.
Situation Trait Relevance, Trait Expression, and Cross-Situational Consistency: Testing a Principle of Trait Activation

An interactionist principle of trait activation is proposed, emphasizing situation trait relevance (i.e., opportunity for trait expression) as a moderator of trait–behavior relations and cross-situational consistency (CSC). One hundred fifty-six students completed trait measures and expressed intentions in 10 scenarios targeted to each of five traits (e.g., risk taking). Trait–intention correlations within scenario sets were themselves correlated with mean situation trait relevance ratings provided by 26 proficient judges; CSCs in intentions (45 correlations per trait) were correlated with an index of shared trait relevance in situation pairs. In support of trait activation, (a) trait–intention relations for three traits were higher in more relevant situations (e.g., second-order r = .66 for risk taking) and (b) CSCs were higher in scenarios jointly high in targeted trait relevance (e.g., second-order r = .55 for risk taking). Discussion highlights applications of trait activation in diverse research domains.
Heritage Tourism in Malaysia: Fostering a Collective National Identity in an Ethnically Diverse Country

As the processes associated with globalisation swiftly erode distinct cultures and identities, it has been argued that heritage attractions have emerged as powerful communicators in developing collective national identities. Although many countries reveal histories and collective pasts that are universally representative of homogenous populations, Malaysia represents a distinctly contrasting scenario. Malaysian heritage attractions do not necessarily represent a singular population but three distinctive ethnic groups. Thus, selecting heritage attractions that appropriately represent Malaysia remains a complicated issue. Using photographs as “real-world” variables to supplement focus-group interviews, this article reveals that young Malaysians exhibit a limited understanding of religious heritage attractions and have developed identities that are highly specific to their ethnicity and own religious beliefs. However, the stories told by several respondents also show that Malaysia's ethnic- or religious-centred heritage attractions have the power to foster a simultaneous collective national identity if promoted effectively.
Counting Rate, Naming Rate, Phonological Sensitivity, and Memory Span: Major Factors in Dyslexia

Children with severe dyslexia were slower in counting from memory and naming alternating digits and letters than those with milder reading impairment. The children most disabled also had poorer phonological sensitivity, shorter digit spans, and lower Verbal IQs, but these variables accounted for no additional variance in prediction of scores on the Wide Range Achievement Test-Revised (R = 0.89).
Multivariate Archimedean copulas, $d$-monotone functions and $\ell_1$-norm symmetric distributions

It is shown that a necessary and sufficient condition for an Archimedean copula generator to generate a $d$-dimensional copula is that the generator is a $d$-monotone function. The class of $d$-dimensional Archimedean copulas is shown to coincide with the class of survival copulas of $d$-dimensional $\ell_1$-norm symmetric distributions that place no point mass at the origin. The $d$-monotone Archimedean copula generators may be characterized using a little-known integral transform of Williamson [Duke Math. J. 23 (1956) 189--207] in an analogous manner to the well-known Bernstein--Widder characterization of completely monotone generators in terms of the Laplace transform. These insights allow the construction of new Archimedean copula families and provide a general solution to the problem of sampling multivariate Archimedean copulas. They also yield useful expressions for the $d$-dimensional Kendall function and Kendall's rank correlation coefficients and facilitate the derivation of results on the existence of densities and the description of singular components for Archimedean copulas. The existence of a sharp lower bound for Archimedean copulas with respect to the positive lower orthant dependence ordering is shown.
Fractures in Premature Infants

Fractures not related to birth trauma were diagnosed in 1.2% of preterm infants between the 24th and the 160th day of life. The clinical and radiologic findings as well as the follow-up on 12 preterm infants with one or more fractures were reviewed. Fractures occurred either in the ribs or long bones or both. Their clinical history, the radiographic appearance, and laboratory data suggest that most of the infants may have suffered from bone loss associated with low intake of calcium and phosphorus. Improving the metabolic status and removing the risk factors prevented further fractures and led to good healing.
- 1-Robust Audio Transport using mAudio

IP based groupware applications, such as net-based learning environments, rely on robust audio transport for efficient communication between users. This paper therefore gives an overview and an initial evaluation of how to achieve robust transport of real-time audio streams over Internet connections without service guarantees. Due to hardware jitter and network congestion these connections face loss, packet delay and delay variation. Audio streams are especially sensitive due their realtime characteristics, where the end result is degradation of the perceived quality. Packet loss can be repaired using receiveronly, sender-initiated or receiver-initiated techniques. Depending on the actual network condition, an optimal technique can be selected using adaptive behavior together with loss-recovery techniques in the applications. Studies have shown that loss rates up to 20% can be effectively repaired using fairly simple techniques. The paper gives initial results from subjectively evaluating audio quality and presents a research prototype called mAudio that has been used to experiment with different loss recovery techniques.
The Leurre.com Project: Collecting Internet Threats Information Using a Worldwide Distributed Honeynet

This paper aims at presenting in some depth the Leurre.com project and its data collection infrastructure. Launched in 2003 by the Institut Eurecom, this project is based on a worldwide distributed system of honeypots running in more than 30 different countries. The main objective of the project is to get a more realistic picture of certain classes of threats happening on the Internet, by collecting unbiased quantitative data in a long-term perspective. In the first phase of the project, the data collection infrastructure relied solely on low-interaction sensors based on Honeyd to collect unsolicited traffic on the Internet. Recently, a second phase of the project was started with the deployment of medium-interaction honeypots based on the ScriptGen technology, in order to enrich the network conversations with the attackers. All network traces captured on the platforms are automatically uploaded into a centralized database accessible by the partners via a convenient interface. The collected traffic is also enriched with a set of contextual information (e.g. geographical localization and reverse DNS lookups). This paper presents this complex data collection infrastructure, and offers some insight into the structure of the central data repository. The data access interface has been developed to facilitate the analysis of today's Internet threats, for example by means of data mining tools. Some concrete examples are presented to illustrate the richness and the power of this data access interface. By doing so, we hope to encourage other researchers to share with us their knowledge and data sets, to complement or enhance our ongoing analysis efforts, with the ultimate goal of better understanding Internet threats.