Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chemically-Induced Cancers Do Not Originate from Bone Marrow-Derived Cells

Background The identification and characterization of cancer stem cells (CSCs) is imperative to understanding the mechanism of cancer pathogenesis. Growing evidence suggests that CSCs play critical roles in the development and progression of cancer. However, controversy exists as to whether CSCs arise from bone marrow-derived cells (BMDCs). Methodology and Principal Findings In the present study, n-nitrosodiethylamine (DEN) was used to induce tumor formation in female mice that received bone marrow from male mice. Tumor formation was induced in 20/26 mice, including 12 liver tumors, 6 lung tumors, 1 bladder tumor and 1 nasopharyngeal tumor. Through comparison of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) results in corresponding areas from serial tumor sections stained with H&E, we determined that BMDCs were recruited to both tumor tissue and normal surrounding tissue at a very low frequency (0.2–1% in tumors and 0–0.3% in normal tissues). However, approximately 3–70% of cells in the tissues surrounding the tumor were BMDCs, and the percentage of BMDCs was highly associated with the inflammatory status of the tissue. In the present study, no evidence was found to support the existence of fusion cells formed form BMDCs and tissue-specific stem cells. Conclusions In summary, our data suggest that although BMDCs may contribute to tumor progression, they are unlike to contribute to tumor initiation.
Properties of Cast-In-Place Concrete and Precast Concrete Blocks Incorporating Waste Glass Powder

This paper deals with studies on the use of waste glass powder as an effective ingredient in concrete. Studies on cement pastes including mechanical property tests and thermal analysis were used to understand the influence of the glass powder on the cement hydration process and to arrive at an optimal dosage range. Cast-in-place concrete and block mix- tures were proportioned with varying dosages of glass powder, and tests for mechanical properties, alkali-silica reaction, and water absorption were carried out. The use of fly ash as a cement replacement material was also adopted in one of the concrete mixtures to compare the performance of glass powder and fly ash in concrete. Though the complete effect of ce- ment dilution was not overcome by the chosen dosage of glass powder, the strength results were comparable to that of control concrete. Moisture intake results of glass powder modified concrete mixtures showed lower total water absorption as well as sorptivity than the control concrete when cured for a longer duration. The expansion due to alkali-silica reaction was also lower for the glass powder modified mixtures. For the concrete block mixtures, it was found that moist curing the blocks after initial steam curing was beneficial in strength improvement. Replacement of 10% cement with glass pow- der was found to result in equal or higher compressive strengths of the blocks. In regions where glass powder is locally available, its use as a cement replacement material presents an efficient waste management option, without compromising concrete performance.
Compositional Memory for Visual Question Answering

Visual Question Answering (VQA) emerges as one of the most fascinating topics in computer vision recently. Many state of the art methods naively use holistic visual features with language features into a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) module, neglecting the sophisticated interaction between them. This coarse modeling also blocks the possibilities of exploring finer-grained local features that contribute to the question answering dynamically over time. This paper addresses this fundamental problem by directly modeling the temporal dynamics between language and all possible local image patches. When traversing the question words sequentially, our end-to-end approach explicitly fuses the features associated to the words and the ones available at multiple local patches in an attention mechanism, and further combines the fused information to generate dynamic messages, which we call episode. We then feed the episodes to a standard question answering module together with the contextual visual information and linguistic information. Motivated by recent practices in deep learning, we use auxiliary loss functions during training to improve the performance. Our experiments on two latest public datasets suggest that our method has a superior performance. Notably, on the DARQUAR dataset we advanced the state of the art by 6$\%$, and we also evaluated our approach on the most recent MSCOCO-VQA dataset.
Political and Economic Perspectives of the EU Eastern Enlargement

The eastern enlargement of the European Union provides Austria with the opportunity to expand to the fullest its political and economic relations with neighbouring countries. For Austria's economy, the enlargement would open new avenues of economic development, but it would impose also greater adjustment costs than for the EU countries as a whole. However, the degree to which the economic potential will be reached depends on political factors, in particular on the reform of the EU institutions and on the specific conditions attached to membership. Furthermore, it is difficult to predict how the enlargement to the east will play out because it is unclear how the economies of transition will develop if they cannot join the Union within a reasonable time frame.
Household Saving and Permanent Income in Canada and the United Kingdom

Recent theoretical research in open-economy macroeconomics has emphasized the connection between a country's current account and the intertemporal savings and investment choices of its households, firms, and governments. In this paper, we assess the empirical relevance of the permanent income theory of household saving, a key building block of recent theoretical models of the current account. Using the econometric approach of Campbell (1987), we are able to reject the theory on quarterly aggregate data in Canada and the United Kingdom. However, we also assess the economic significance of these statistical rejections by comparing the behavior of saving with that of an unrestricted vector autoregressive (VAR) forecast of future changes in disposable labor income. If the theory is true, saving should be the best available predictor of future changes in disposable labor income. We find the correlation between saving and the unrestricted VAR forecast to be extremely high in both countries. The results suggest that the theory provides a useful description of the dynamic behavior of household saving in Canada and Britain.
D-dimer testing to determine the duration of anticoagulant therapy

Purpose of review The optimal duration of oral anticoagulation after a first idiopathic venous thromboembolism is uncertain. Recent prospective observational studies show that D-dimer levels have a predictive value for the risk of recurrence. D-dimer testing may help in assessing the individual need for prolonged anticoagulation. Recent findings The recently published Prolong study investigated 608 patients with a first unprovoked venous thromboembolism who had received oral anticoagulation for at least 3 months. D-dimer testing was performed 1 month after anticoagulation withdrawal. Patients with normal D-dimer (n = 385) did not resume anticoagulation. Patients with abnormal D-dimer were randomized to resume (n = 103) or not resume (n = 120) anticoagulation. All patients were followed for an average of 1.4 years. Study outcomes occurred in 6.2% of patients with normal D-dimer, and in 15.0% and 2.9% of those with abnormal D-dimer who were allocated to stop or to resume anticoagulation, respectively. Summary Patients with an abnormal D-dimer measured 1 month from anticoagulation withdrawal have a significant incidence of recurrent venous thromboembolism which is reduced by resumption of anticoagulation. The risk of recurrence in patients with normal D-dimer is significantly lower. D-dimer testing can be used to regulate the duration of anticoagulation.
Intensity of recreational physical activity in different life periods in relation to breast cancer among women in the region of Western Pomerania

Background Recreational physical activity has been consistently associated with lower breast cancer risk, but there is a need to study the intensity and duration of activity that are critical to reduce the risk. The aim of this study was to examine the influence of moderate and vigorous intensity of recreational physical activity performed at different age periods on breast cancer risk. Material and methods The case-control study included 858 women with histological confirmation of invasive breast cancer and 1085 women free of any cancer diagnosis, residents of the region of Western Pomerania, aged 28–79 years. The frequency, duration and intensity of lifetime household, occupational and recreational physical activity, sociodemographic characteristics, reproductive factors, family history of breast cancer, current weight and height, and lifestyle habits were measured using a self-administered questionnaire. Unconditional logistic regression analyses were applied to estimate odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs). The risk estimates were controlled for potential risk factors and lifetime household and occupational activities. Results We found a risk reduction for recreational activity done early in life (age periods 14–20, 21–34, 35–50 years), particularly at ages 14–20 and 21–34 years, regardless of intensity. Active women engaging in more than 4.5 hours per week of moderate activity during ages 14–20 years had, on average, a 36% lower risk (OR = 0.64, 95% CI: 0.45–0.89) than women who were never or rarely active. For the women who reported 4.5 hours per week of vigorous activity during this period we found about 64% risk reduction (OR = 0.36, 95% CI: 0.26–0.51). For the period after 50 years of age, recreational activity of moderate or vigorous intensity was not significantly associated with the risk. Conclusions Recreational physical activity of moderate or vigorous intensity done during adolescence, early and middle adulthood, particularly at ages 14–20 and 21–34 years, is associated with significantly decreased breast cancer risk.
NAACL-HLT 2012 WLM 2012: Will We Ever Really Replace the N-gram Model? On the Future of Language Modeling for HLT Workshop Notes

In spite of their well known limitations, most notably their use of very local contexts, n-gram language models remain an essential component of many Natural Language Processing applications, such as Automatic Speech Recognition or Statistical Machine Translation. This paper investigates the potential of language models using larger context windows comprising up to the 9 previous words. This study is made possible by the development of several novel Neural Network Language Model architectures, which can easily fare with such large context windows. We experimentally observed that extending the context size yields clear gains in terms of perplexity and that the n-gram assumption is statistically reasonable as long as n is sufficiently high, and that efforts should be focused on improving the estimation procedures for such large models.
Volatility Forecast Combinations using Asymmetric Loss Functions

The paper deals with the problem of model uncertainty in forecasting volatility using forecast combinations and a flexible family of asymmetric loss functions that allow for the possibility that an investor would attach different preferences to high vis-a-vis low volatility periods. Using daily as well as 5 minute data for US and major international stock market indices we provide volatility forecasts by minimizing the Homogeneous Robust Loss function of the Realized Volatility and the combined forecast. Our findings show that forecast combinations based on the homogeneous robust loss function significantly outperform simple forecast combination methods, especially during the period of the recent financial crisis.
Induction Heating Appliance With a Mobile Double-Coil Inductor

An induction heating appliance designed to uniformly heat up metallic plates is studied in this paper. It consists of one planar inductor with two concentric coils attached to a mechanism, which allows moving the inductor under the plate while heating. This system is a possible solution for the growing concept of flexible induction cooking hobs, improving their performance in flexibility and in thermal distribution in the pans. With different combinations of motion and the selective activation of the inductor coils, any pan can be uniformly heated regardless its size or position on the hob. In this paper, we develop a thermal model to analyze the temperature distribution obtained in the pans for each diameter and strategy used. The model is solved using finite differences, and it is validated with experimental measurements. From the calculations, the best strategy for each pan diameter is obtained.
Handwriting development, competency, and intervention

Failure to attain handwriting competency during the school‐age years often has far‐reaching negative effects on both academic success and self‐esteem. This complex occupational task has many underlying component skills that may interfere with handwriting performance. Fine motor control, bilateral and visual–motor integration, motor planning, in‐hand manipulation, proprioception, visual perception, sustained attention, and sensory awareness of the fingers are some of the component skills identified. Poor handwriting may be related to intrinsic factors, which refer to the child's actual handwriting capabilities, or extrinsic factors which are related to environmental or biomechanical components, or both. It is important that handwriting performance be evaluated using a valid, reliable, standardized tool combined with informal classroom observation and teacher consultation. Studies of handwriting remediation suggest that intervention is effective. There is evidence to indicate that handwriting difficulties do not resolve without intervention and affect between 10 and 30% of school‐aged children. Despite the widespread use of computers, legible handwriting remains an important life skill that deserves greater attention from educators and health practitioners.
Metaphor as Categorization: A Connectionist Implementation

A key issue for models of metaphor comprehension is to explain how, in some metaphorical comparison "A is B," only some features of B are transferred to A. The features of B that are transferred to A depend both on A and on B. This is the central thrust of Black's (1979) well-known interaction theory of metaphor comprehension. However, this theory is somewhat abstract, and it is not obvious how it may be implemented in terms of mental representations and processes. In this article, we describe a simple computational model of online metaphor comprehension that combines Black's interaction theory with the idea that metaphor comprehension is a type of categorization process (Glucksberg & Keysar, 1990, 1993). The model is based on a distributed connectionist network depicting semantic memory (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1986). The network learns feature-based information about various concepts. A metaphor is comprehended by applying a representation of the first term (A) to the network storing knowledge of the second term (B), in an attempt to categorize it as an exemplar of B. The output of this network is a representation of A transformed by the knowledge of B. We explain how this process embodies an interaction of knowledge between the 2 terms of the metaphor, how it accords with the contemporary theory of metaphor stating that comprehension for literal and metaphorical comparisons is carried out by identical mechanisms (Gibbs, 1994), and how it accounts for existing empirical evidence (Glucksberg, McGlone, & Manfredi, 1997) and generates new predictions. In this model, the distinction between literal and metaphorical language is one of degree, not of kind.
Blind adaptive code-constrained constant modulus algorithms for CDMA interference suppression in multipath channels

A code-constrained constant modulus (CCM) design criterion for linear receivers is investigated for direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) in multipath channels based on constrained optimization techniques. A computationally efficient recursive least squares (RLS) type algorithm for jointly estimating the parameters of the channel and the receiver is developed in order to suppress multiaccess (MAI) and inter-symbol interference (ISI). An analysis of the method examines its convergence properties and simulations under nonstationary environments show that the novel algorithms outperform existent techniques.
Partial liquid ventilation with small volumes of FC 3280 increases survival time in experimental ARDS.

The aim of this study was to determine the prolonged effects of sequential doses of a highly purified perfluorocarbon (FC 3280) on gas exchange and survival time in experimental acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). The study was prospective, randomized and controlled. Twelve pigs (body weight 30 +/- 5 (mean +/- SD) kg) were surfactant-depleted by repetitive lung lavages, reducing arterial oxygen tension (Pa,O2) to 6.9 +/- 1.6 kPa (52 +/- 12 mmHg) (mean +/- SD) at an inspired oxygen fraction (Fi,O2) of 1.0. They were then randomized to receive partial liquid ventilation by sequential intratracheal application of 7.5 mL.kg-1 FC 3280 at 30 min intervals to a cumulative dose of 15 mL.kg-1 (treatment group), or to receive no further treatment (control group). Haemodynamics and gas exchange were assessed at 30 min intervals after instillation, and hourly afterwards in both groups until death. In the treatment group, Pa,O2 was 8.9 +/- 4.4 kPa (67 +/- 33 mmHg) after 7.5 mL.kg-1 FC 3280 and 14.1 +/- 9.9 kPa (106 +/- 74 mmHg) after 15 mL.kg-1 FC 3280 (NS). In the control group, gas exchange remained unchanged. Haemodynamics were stable in the treatment group and deteriorated in the control group. Peak airway pressures and dynamic compliance were not significantly affected in the treatment group. Mean survival time was 8.2 +/- 4.5 h in the treatment group and 1.8 +/- 1.4 h in the control group (p < 0.05). Upon histological examination, both study groups were not significantly different in total lung injury scores. We conclude that partial liquid ventilation with small volumes of FC 3280 provides improvement in gas exchange and increases survival time in experimental acute respiratory distress syndrome.
Improved Contact Predictions Using the Recognition of Protein Like Contact Patterns

Given sufficient large protein families, and using a global statistical inference approach, it is possible to obtain sufficient accuracy in protein residue contact predictions to predict the structure of many proteins. However, these approaches do not consider the fact that the contacts in a protein are neither randomly, nor independently distributed, but actually follow precise rules governed by the structure of the protein and thus are interdependent. Here, we present PconsC2, a novel method that uses a deep learning approach to identify protein-like contact patterns to improve contact predictions. A substantial enhancement can be seen for all contacts independently on the number of aligned sequences, residue separation or secondary structure type, but is largest for β-sheet containing proteins. In addition to being superior to earlier methods based on statistical inferences, in comparison to state of the art methods using machine learning, PconsC2 is superior for families with more than 100 effective sequence homologs. The improved contact prediction enables improved structure prediction.
Exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation improves hemodynamic responses after coronary artery bypass graft surgery

BACKGROUND: Cardiovascular disorders are an important public health problem worldwide. They are also the leading cause of mortality and morbidity. Therefore, American Heart Association proposed cardiac rehabilitation program as an essential part of care for cardiac patients to improve functional capacity. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of cardiac rehabilitation program on functional status and some hemodynamic responses in patients after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. METHODS: Thirty two patients were selected for this study. All patients underwent cardiac surgery two months before admission. They were allocated to two groups. While the rehabilitation group (n =17, mean age: 62 ± 12 years) completed the cardiac rehabilitation program for two months, the reference group (n = 15, mean age: 58.5 ± 12.5 years) did not have any supervised physical activity during this period. Cardiac rehabilitation program consisted of exercise, nutritional, psychological consultation and risk factor management. At the beginning of the study, functional capacity of patients was evaluated by exercise test, 6-minute walking test and echocardiography. Functional capacity was evaluated for a second time after two months of cardiac rehabilitation. Data were analyzed by SPSS15. For comparing the mean of outcomes, Mann-Whitney test and Wilcoxon signed ranks test were used. RESULTS: As a result of cardiac rehabilitation, a significant improvement was observed in the distance walked in the rehabilitation group (P < 0.01) compared to the reference group (P = 0.33). It also caused a significant development in hemodynamic responses to exercise such as resting and maximum systolic and diastolic blood pressure, resting and maximum heart rate, ejection fraction and rate pressure product. CONCLUSION: Cardiac rehabilitation significantly improves functional capacity and some hemodynamic responses post coronary artery bypass grafting. Therefore, patients need to be referred to rehabilitation units.
Separating inner and outer contributions in gravitational lenses using the perturbative method

This paper presents a reconstruction of the gravitational lens SL2S02176-0513 using the singular perturbative method presented in Alard 2007, MNRAS Letters, 382, 58 and Alard, C. , 2008, MNRAS, 388, 375. The ability of the perturbative method to separate the inner and outer contributions of the potential in gravitational lenses is tested using SL2S02176-0513. In this lens, the gravitational field of the central galaxy is dominated by a nearby group of galaxies located at a distance of a few critical radius. The perturbative functionals are re-constructed using local polynomials. The polynomial interpolation is smoothed using Fourier series, and numerically fitted to HST data using a non-linear minimization procedure. The potential inside and outside the critical circle is derived from the reconstruction of the perturbative fields. The inner and outer potential contours are very different.The inner contours are consistent with the central galaxy, while the outer contours are fully consistent with the perturbation introduced by the group of galaxies. The ability of the perturbative method to separate the inner and outer contribution is confirmed, and indicates that in the perturbative approach the field of the central deflector can be separated from outer perturbations. The separation of the inner and outer contribution is especially important for the study of the shape of dark matter halo's as well as for the statistical analysis of the effect of dark matter substructures.