Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of surgically treated gastric cancers: a tertiary hospital experience in Turkey

OBJECTIVE: Gastric cancer (GC) is the fifth most common cancer worldwide, and in Turkey, GC is placed among the 10 most frequently seen cancers. However, analyzing the epidemiology of cancers and improving screening programs for cancers are not still the top priorities for healthcare professionals. This study aims to show distribution of GC based on stages in a tertiary hospital of Istanbul, Turkey. METHODS: All surgically treated GC cases in the General Surgery Department, between January 2009 and January 2014 were retrospectively reviewed. Data including the operation year, the demographic, clinical and histopathological parameters were recorded and statistically analyzed. RESULTS: The study group consisted of 111 patients. Seventy-four (66.66%) patients were men, and 37 (33.33%) patients were women with a mean age of 63.49±11.83 years. Stage 3 and 4 were the most frequently observed stages with 62 and 18 cases, respectively. Stage 3 was the most common stage found during the study period (p<0.05). During 5 years of the study period, GC was less frequently located on the cardia (n=31) when compared with other locations (n=75) for GC (p<0.05). CONCLUSION: Turkey’s population has generally advanced stage GC disease. New strategies are needed for achievement of early diagnosis and better outcomes.
The scientific century: securing our future prosperity

The advisory group to the report was chaired by Sir Martin Taylor FRS and included two Nobel Laureates, two former ministers of science, and leading figures from two high-tech companies. The report draws on a year of evidence gathering, analysis and consultation. It distils two urgent messages. The first is the need to place science and innovation at the heart of the UK's long-term strategy for economic growth. The second is the fierce competitive challenge we face from countries which are investing at a scale and speed that we may struggle to match. The report makes six recommendations around the long-term support and investment in science: Put science and innovation at the heart of a strategy for long-term economic growth; Prioritise investment in excellent people; Strengthen Government’s use of science; Reinforce the UK’s position as a hub for global science and innovation; Better align science and innovation with global challenges; Revitalise science and mathematics education.
Strongyloides ratti and S. venezuelensis – rodent models of Strongyloides infection

SUMMARY Strongyloides spp. are common parasites of vertebrates and two species, S. ratti and S. venezuelensis, parasitize rats; there are no known species that naturally infect mice. Strongyloides ratti and S. venezuelensis overlap in their geographical range and in these regions co-infections appear to be common. These species have been widely used as tractable laboratory systems in rats as well as mice. The core biology of these two species is similar, but there are clear differences in aspects of their within-host biology as well as in their free-living generation. Phylogenetic evidence suggests that S. ratti and S. venezuelensis are the result of two independent evolutionary transitions to parasitism of rats, which therefore presents an ideal opportunity to begin to investigate the basis of host specificity in Strongyloides spp.
A small-RNA-mediated negative feedback loop controls quorum-sensing dynamics in Vibrio harveyi

The bioluminescent marine bacterium Vibrio harveyi uses a cell‐to‐cell communication process called quorum sensing (QS) to co‐ordinate behaviours in response to changes in population density. QS is accomplished through the secretion and detection of extracellular signalling molecules called autoinducers. At the centre of the V. harveyi QS circuit are five small regulatory RNAs called Qrr1–5 which destabilize the mRNA of luxR, encoding LuxR, the master transcriptional regulator of QS target genes. Here we show that LuxR directly activates transcription of qrr2, qrr3 and qrr4, leading to the rapid downregulation of luxR. The LuxR‐binding sites in the promoters of qrr2, qrr3 and qrr4 were identified and mutated to determine the consequences of this regulatory loop on QS dynamics. Disruption of the loop delays the transition from high to low cell density, and more significantly, decreases the cell density at which the population reaches a quorum. Our results suggest that feedback is essential for optimizing the dynamics of the transitions between individual and group behaviours.
AntagomiR directed against miR-20a restores functional BMPR2 signalling and prevents vascular remodelling in hypoxia-induced pulmonary hypertension.

AIMS Dysregulation of the bone morphogenetic protein receptor type 2 (BMPR2) is a hallmark feature that has been described in several forms of pulmonary hypertension. We recently identified the microRNA miR-20a within a highly conserved pathway as a regulator of the expression of BMPR2. To address the pathophysiological relevance of this pathway in vivo, we employed antagomiR-20a and investigated whether specific inhibition of miR-20a could restore functional levels of BMPR2 and, in turn, might prevent pulmonary arterial vascular remodelling. METHODS AND RESULTS For specific inhibition of miR-20a, cholesterol-modified RNA oligonucleotides (antagomiR-20a) were synthesized. The experiments in mice were performed by using the hypoxia-induced mouse model for pulmonary hypertension and animal tissues were analysed for right ventricular hypertrophy and pulmonary arterial vascular remodelling. Treatment with antagomiR-20a enhanced the expression levels of BMPR2 in lung tissues; moreover, antagomiR-20a significantly reduced wall thickness and luminal occlusion of small pulmonary arteries and reduced right ventricular hypertrophy. To assess BMPR2 signalling and proliferation, we performed in vitro experiments with human pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells (HPASMCs). Transfection of HPASMCs with antagomiR-20a resulted in activation of downstream targets of BMPR2 showing increased activation of Id-1 and Id-2. Proliferation of HPASMCs was found to be reduced upon transfection with antagomiR-20a. CONCLUSION This is the first report showing that miR-20a can be specifically targeted in an in vivo model for pulmonary hypertension. Our data emphasize that treatment with antagomiR-20a restores functional levels of BMPR2 in pulmonary arteries and prevents the development of vascular remodelling.
Genetic consequences of Pleistocene glaciations for the tundra vole (Microtus oeconomus) in Beringia

Repeated glacial events during the Pleistocene fragmented and displaced populations throughout the northern continents. Different models of the effects of these climate‐driven events predict distinct phylogeographic and population genetic outcomes for high‐latitude faunas. The role of glaciations in (i) promoting intraspecific genetic differentiation and (ii) influencing genetic diversity was tested within a phylogeographic framework using the rodent Microtus oeconomus. The spatial focus for the study was Beringia, which spans eastern Siberia and northwestern North America, and was a continental crossroads and potential high arctic refugium during glaciations. Variation in mitochondrial DNA (cytochrome b and control region; 214 individuals) and nuclear DNA (ALDH1 intron; 63 individuals) was investigated across the Beringian region. Close genetic relationships among populations on either side of the Bering Strait are consistent with a history of periodic land connections between North America and Asia. A genetic discontinuity observed in western Beringia between members of a Central Asian clade and a Beringian clade is geographically congruent with glacial advances and with phylogeographic discontinuities identified in other organisms. Divergent island populations in southern Alaska were probably initially isolated by glacial vicariance, but subsequent differentiation has resulted from insularity. Tests of the genetic effects of postglacial colonization were largely consistent with expansion accompanied by founder effect bottlenecking, which yields reduced diversity in populations from recently deglaciated areas. Evidence that populations in the Beringian clade share a history of expansion from a low‐diversity ancestral population suggests that Beringia was colonized by a small founder population from central Asia, which subsequently expanded in isolation.
Does Spread Really Predict the Short Rate? Explaining Empirical Anomalies in the Expectations Theory

Empirical studies often find that the spread between longer and shorter rates does not have predictive power for future longer rates, violating the Expectations Theory (ET). Although the predictive power of the spread for future shorter rates is largely in accordance with the ET, especially when the forecast period is long, researchers often find this holds to varying degrees across samples (country-wise or time-wise). We show this pattern may be due to the powers of all tests depending on interest rates’ maturities and their persistency in small samples. This paper also compares the powers of tests of the ET against the under/overreaction and the time varying term premium alternatives across various maturity combinations, levels of persistency and sample sizes. Tests perform best and are comparable to each other at the shortest end of the term structure, but deteriorate as the distance between maturities of longer and shorter rates increase. However, this deterioration is of varying degrees for different tests and its speed diminishes as we depart from the shortest end. In general Lagrange multiplier and distance metric tests emerge as being the most powerful and least sensitive to interest rate maturities and their persistency.
Public Attention, Adverse Selection, and the Pricing of Stocks

We hypothesize that the degree of public attention influences the price level of stocks in a systematic way. We employ a simple discounted cash flow model with adverse selection and fixed transaction costs that determine an endogenous bid-ask-spread. In the model, rational and risk neutral investors incorporate future trading conditions into their price setting behavior. These trading conditions are driven by the degree of public attention and entail an attention-dependent impact of the bid-ask-spread on required gross returns. Specifically, given a high level of public attention a higher bid-ask-spread may negatively affect required asset returns. We argue that the model implications are consistent with empirical findings, i.e. size, book-to-market, and the momentum effect.
Dynamic Effects of Financial Openness on Economic Growth and Macroeconomic Uncertainty

This paper examines the dynamic effects of financial integration and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth and macroeconomic uncertainty. Using the pooled mean group autoregressive distributed lag approach to annual data over 1975-2007 for ninety developing countries, we find that financial integration contributes to faster economic growth and lower growth uncertainty in the long run. The evidence also shows considerable heterogeneity in the short run. In addition, we find that FDI impedes output growth but mitigates uncertainty in output and consumption growth in the long run. In the short run, FDI has an average negative effect on growth and negligible effect on growth uncertainty, but there are large cross-country differences in response to FDI integration.
New Insights for Oxidative Stress and Diabetes Mellitus

The release of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and the generation of oxidative stress are considered critical factors for the pathogenesis of diabetes mellitus (DM), a disorder that is growing in prevalence and results in significant economic loss. New therapeutic directions that address the detrimental effects of oxidative stress may be especially warranted to develop effective care for the millions of individuals that currently suffer from DM. The mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR), silent mating type information regulation 2 homolog 1 (S. cerevisiae) (SIRT1), and Wnt1 inducible signaling pathway protein 1 (WISP1) are especially justified to be considered treatment targets for DM since these pathways can address the complex relationship between stem cells, trophic factors, impaired glucose tolerance, programmed cell death pathways of apoptosis and autophagy, tissue remodeling, cellular energy homeostasis, and vascular biology that greatly impact the biology and disease progression of DM. The translation and development of these pathways into viable therapies will require detailed understanding of their proliferative nature to maximize clinical efficacy and limit adverse effects that have the potential to lead to unintended consequences.
Community financing of education : issues and policy implications in less developed countries

socio-economic factors. Under conditions of economic austerity, education has either to suffer decline in real resources, and restrict its role in development, or search for rather non-conventional methods of generating more resources. In many less developed countires, the education sector is characterized by the simultaneous existence of these phenomena. Real resources allocated to education from the public treasury declined as a proportion of Gross National Product, or of total government expenditure, and not rarely in absolute terms. This has serious implications, particularly in less developed countries, as the vast majority of the population in these countries suffer from inadequacy of basic needs in education as denoted in universal primary education and universal adult literacy. Universal secondary education is, in fact, a very distant goal for many developing countries. The quality of education in these countries is also rather lamentable. Accordingly, the need for a search for alternative methods of financing education is growing in importance. In this context, the role of communities in financing education has attracted attention of many. One in the Pergamon Comparative and International Education Series, the book under review edited by Mark Bray of the University of Hongkong, and Kevin Lillis of the University of London Institute of Education, is specifically devoted to this aspect. The book owes its origin partly to a 1985 workshop organized in Botswana by the Commonwealth Secretariat. In fact, another important outcome of the workshop was New Resources for Education: Community Management and Financing of Schools in Less Developed Countries by Mark Bray (London: Commonwealth Secretariat, 1986). The present book is an extension of the earlier work.
Principals’ Perspectives on Shared Governance Leadership 1

This article presents descriptive and conceptual findings about shared governance leadership from the perspectives of shared governance principals. Data for the study were drawn from successful principals affiliated with the League of Professional Schools (Glickman, 1993). The study describes the professional and personal socialization factors that contributed to the development of principals’ perspectives on shared leadership and the strategies and purposes that fundamentally define such perspectives.
Upper tropospheric ozone production from lightning NOx‐impacted convection: Smoke ingestion case study from the DC3 campaign

As part of the Deep Convective Cloud and Chemistry (DC3) experiment, the National Science Foundation/National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Gulfstream‐V (GV) and NASA DC‐8 research aircraft probed the chemical composition of the inflow and outflow of two convective storms (north storm, NS, south storm, SS) originating in the Colorado region on 22 June 2012, a time when the High Park wildfire was active in the area. A wide range of trace species were measured on board both aircraft including biomass burning (BB) tracers hydrogen cyanide (HCN) and acetonitrile (ACN). Acrolein, a much shorter lived tracer for BB, was also quantified on the GV. The data demonstrated that the NS had ingested fresh smoke from the High Park fire and as a consequence had a higher VOC OH reactivity than the SS. The SS lofted aged fire tracers along with other boundary layer ozone precursors and was more impacted by lightning NOx (LNOx) than the NS. The NCAR master mechanism box model was initialized with measurements made in the outflow of the two storms. The NS and SS were predicted to produce 11 and 14 ppbv of O3, respectively, downwind of the storm over 2 days. Sensitivity tests revealed that the ozone production potential of the SS was highly dependent on LNOx. Normalized excess mixing ratios, ΔX/ΔCO, for HCN and ACN were determined in both the fire plume and the storm outflow and found to be 7.0 ± 0.5 and 2.3 ± 0.5 pptv ppbv−1, respectively, and 1.4 ± 0.3 pptv ppbv−1 for acrolein in the outflow only.
Lumpable hidden Markov models-model reduction and reduced complexity filtering

This paper is concerned with filtering of hidden Markov processes (HMP) which possess (or approximately possess) the property of lumpability. This property is a generalization of the property of lumpability of a Markov chain which has been previously addressed by others. In essence, the property of lumpability means that there is a partition of the (atomic) states of the Markov chain into aggregated sets which act in a similar manner as far as the state dynamics and observation statistics are concerned. We prove necessary and sufficient conditions on the HMP for exact lumpability to hold. For a particular class of hidden Markov models (HMM), namely finite output alphabet models, conditions for lumpability of all HMP representable by a specified HMM are given. The corresponding optimal filter algorithms for the aggregated states are then derived. The paper also describes an approach to efficient suboptimal filtering for HMP which are approximately lumpable. By this we mean that the HMM generating the process may be approximated by a lumpable HMM. This approach involves directly finding a lumped HMM which approximates the original HMM well, in a matrix norm sense. An alternative approach for model reduction based on approximating a given HMM by an exactly lumpable HMM is also derived. This method is based on the alternating convex projections algorithm. Some simulation examples are presented which illustrate the performance of the suboptimal filtering algorithms.
The Use of the Grounded Theory Methodology in Investigating Practitioners' Integration of COTS Components in Information Systems

This paper challenges the view that Grounded Theory is an unacceptable methodology for IS research lacking rigor and robustness. A demonstration is given of the systematic and rigorous use of the grounded theory data analysis techniques in researching the use of commercial IT components for developing and maintaining business IS. The data analysis processes of coding, conceptualizing and categorizing are shown in action and explained. The techniques of memoing, constant comparison and theoretical coding are shown step-by-step so that the grounded theory methodology can be seen as a systematic framework for IS data analysis. When the methodology is properly applied it provides the structure and rigor needed to reach meaningful conclusions from qualitative data. This research article contributes to the literature showing grounded theory as a powerful research methodology applicable to IS research.
Application Note AN 4147 Design Guidelines for RCD Snubber of Flyback

When the MOSFET turns off, a high voltage spike occurs on the drain pin because of a resonance between the leakage inductor (Llk) of the main transformer and the output capacitor (COSS) of the MOSFET. The excessive voltage on the drain pin may lead to an avalanche breakdown and eventually damage of the MOSFET. Therefore, it is necessary to add an additional circuit to clamp the voltage. In this article, some design guidelines for RCD snubber of flyback converters are presented.
What Drives Private Equity Fund Performance ?

Using a novel and comprehensive database on both US and EU private equity funds and their underlying investments, we study the drivers of private equity fund performance. First, we study whether their hedging properties are attractive enough to justify their low performance. We document that fund performance co-varies positively with both business cycles and stock-market cycles, an unattractive property. We also find that private equity funds – like hedge funds are exposed to tail risk. Second, we do not find evidence that idiosyncratic risk is priced and document that low performance is concentrated in small and inexperienced funds. JEL: G23, G24
Security of quantum protocols against coherent measurements

Andrew Chi-Chih Yao Department of Computer Science Princeton L’niversity Princeton, New Jersey (X3544 The goal of quantum cryptography is to design crypt ographic protocols whose security depends on quantum physics and little else. A serious obstacle to security proofs is the cheaters’ ability to make coherent measurements on the joint, properties of large composite states. WTith the exception of cornmtt protocols, no cryptographic primitit’es have been proved secure when coherent measurements are alIowed. In this paper we develop some mathematical techniques for analyzing probabilistic events in Hilbert spaces, and prove the security of a canonical quantum oblivious transfer protocol against coherent measurements.
Accommodation Enhances Depolarizing Inhibition in Central Neurons

Neurons in the avian cochlear nucleus are depolarized by GABAergic synaptic input. We recorded GABAergic synaptic currents using the gramicidin–perforated-patch method and found their reversal potential (Vrev) to be depolarized relative to spike threshold, which is surprising given that these inputs are inhibitory. Depolarizing IPSPs (dIPSPs) are kept below spike generation threshold by the activation of a dendrotoxin-I-sensitive, voltage-gated K+ conductance. We show experimentally that the polarity of IPSPs contributes to their efficacy; dIPSPs induce accommodation, the positive shift in spike threshold, and are therefore more strongly inhibitory than conventional, hyperpolarizing IPSPs in the same neurons. A similar inhibitory mechanism has been described in invertebrate sensory fibers and axons of dorsal root ganglion cells and may be a general means of amplifying the strength of inhibition in cases where the size of excitatory conductances greatly exceeds that of inhibitory conductances.