Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Forecast Errors on Early Order Commitment in a Supply Chain

Supply chain partnership involves mutual commitments among participating firms. One example is early order commitment, wherein a retailer commits to purchase a fixed-order quantity and delivery time from a supplier before the real need takes place. This paper explores the value of practicing early order commitment in the supply chain. We investigate the complex interactions between early order commitment and forecast errors by simulating a supply chain with one capacitated supplier and multiple retailers under demand uncertainty. We found that practicing early order commitment can generate significant savings in the supply chain, but the benefits are only valid within a range of order commitment periods. Different components of forecast errors have different cost implications to the supplier and the retailers. The presence of trend in the demand increases the total supply chain cost, but makes early order commitment more appealing. The more retailers sharing the same supplier, the more valuable for the supply chain to practice early order commitment. Except in cases where little capacity cushion is available, our findings are relatively consistent in the environments where cost structure, number of retailers, capacity utilization, and capacity policy are varied.
Exercise training reduces insulin resistance in postmyocardial infarction rats

Myocardial infarction (MI) induces cardiac dysfunction and insulin resistance (IR). This study examines the effects of MI‐related IR on vasorelaxation and its underlying mechanisms, with a specific focus on the role of exercise in reversing the impaired vasorelaxation. Adult male Sprague–Dawley rats were divided into three groups: Sham, MI, and MI+Exercise. MI+Exercise rats were subjected to 8 weeks of treadmill training. Cardiac contraction, myocardial and arterial structure, vasorelaxation, levels of inflammatory cytokines, expression of eNOS and TNF‐α, and activation of PI3K/Akt/eNOS and p38 mitogen‐activated protein kinase (p38 MAPK) were determined in aortas. MI significantly impaired endothelial structure and vasodilation (P < 0.05–0.01), as indicated by decreased arterial vasorelaxation to ACh and insulin. MI also attenuated the myocardial contractile response, decreased aortic PI3K/Akt/eNOS expression and phosphorylation by insulin, and increased IL‐1β, IL‐6, and TNF‐α expression and p38 MAPK activity (P < 0.05–0.01). Exercise improved insulin sensitivity in aortas, facilitated myocardial contractile response and arterial vasorelaxation to ACh and insulin, and increased arterial PI3K/Akt/eNOS activity. Moreover, exercise markedly reversed increased p38 MAPK activity and normalized inflammatory cytokines in post‐MI arteries. Inhibition of PI3K with LY‐294002, and eNOS with L‐NAME significantly blocked arterial vasorelaxation and PI3K/Akt/eNOS phosphorylation in response to insulin. In conclusion, these results demonstrate that endothelial dysfunction in response to insulin plays an important role in MI‐related IR. The reversal of IR by exercise is most likely associated with normalizing inflammatory cytokines, increasing the activation of PI3K/Akt/eNOS, and reducing the activation of p38 MAPK.
In vivo haematopoietic potential of human neural stem cells

The fetal sheep model was used to compare the in vivo haematopoietic potential of human neural stem cells (NSC) versus bone marrow (BM)‐derived haematopoietic stem cells (HSC). To this end, sheep were transplanted with either 8 × 105 NSC (n = 11) or HSC, CD34+Lin− (n = 5), and subsequently analysed for haematopoietic chimaerism. While HSC‐transplanted sheep displayed robust donor‐derived haematopoiesis starting at less than 2 months post‐transplant, NSC recipients exhibited haematopoietic engraftment at much later time points. Nevertheless, chimaerism persisted in both groups throughout the course of this study. Transplantation of secondary recipients with human CD45+/HLA‐DR+ cells from the BM of NSC primary recipients at 14 and 16 months post‐transplant demonstrated that long‐term engrafting HSC were present in these animals. At 6 months post‐transplant, both NSC‐ and HSC‐transplanted sheep were mobilised with granulocyte colony‐stimulating factor. In contrast to HSC‐transplanted animals, levels of human blood cells in peripheral blood of NSC‐transplanted sheep remained low throughout mobilisation. Our results show that, although human NSC were able to give rise to multilineage haematopoiesis in our model, the levels, timing of blood cell production and the ability to respond to cytokine mobilisation were different, suggesting that human NSCs latent haematopoietic potential is inherently different from that of true HSC.
Short-term changes in Ki-67 during neoadjuvant treatment of primary breast cancer with anastrozole or tamoxifen alone or combined correlate with recurrence-free survival.

PURPOSE Neoadjuvant (preoperative) therapy for breast cancer may allow for the development of intermediate markers of treatment benefit, thereby circumventing the need for efficacy trials of adjuvant therapy, which require much larger patient numbers and longer follow-up. The aim of this study--as part of the Immediate Preoperative "Arimidex" (anastrozole), Tamoxifen, or Arimidex Combined with Tamoxifen (IMPACT) trial (n = 330)--was to test the hypotheses that changes in Ki-67 after 2 weeks and/or 12 weeks: (i) differed between treatments, (ii) predicted clinical tumor response, and/or (iii) may predict long-term outcome differences between treatments in adjuvant therapy. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN The Arimidex, Tamoxifen, Alone or in Combination (ATAC) trial compared these same agents in the adjuvant setting. Biomarkers were measured in biopsy specimens taken before and after 2 and 12 weeks of treatment. RESULTS Suppression of the proliferation marker Ki-67 after 2 and 12 weeks was significantly greater with anastrozole than with tamoxifen (P = 0.004 and P < 0.001) but was similar between tamoxifen and the combination (P = 0.600 and P = 0.912). This result closely parallels that seen for the relative recurrence-free survival with the treatments after a median follow-up of 31 months in the ATAC trial in 9,366 patients. Against expectations, apoptosis was not increased in any of the treatment arms. CONCLUSIONS The data indicate that short-term changes in proliferation in the neoadjuvant setting may be able to predict outcome during adjuvant use of the same treatments. If this can be confirmed, these findings could lead to a profound change in approaches to drug development in breast cancer. The data indicate that estrogen is not an important survival factor for human breast cancer cells.
Bushmeat hunting and extinction risk to the world's mammals

Terrestrial mammals are experiencing a massive collapse in their population sizes and geographical ranges around the world, but many of the drivers, patterns and consequences of this decline remain poorly understood. Here we provide an analysis showing that bushmeat hunting for mostly food and medicinal products is driving a global crisis whereby 301 terrestrial mammal species are threatened with extinction. Nearly all of these threatened species occur in developing countries where major coexisting threats include deforestation, agricultural expansion, human encroachment and competition with livestock. The unrelenting decline of mammals suggests many vital ecological and socio-economic services that these species provide will be lost, potentially changing ecosystems irrevocably. We discuss options and current obstacles to achieving effective conservation, alongside consequences of failure to stem such anthropogenic mammalian extirpation. We propose a multi-pronged conservation strategy to help save threatened mammals from immediate extinction and avoid a collapse of food security for hundreds of millions of people.
Efficient design of rectifying antennas for low power detection

This article is dedicated to the design of rectifying antenna for wireless energy transfer at 2.45 GHz in the special case of low input power (typically &#60;−10 dBm). As the rectifiers present an important non-linear behavior with such power levels, specific design guidelines must be respected in order to optimize the structure. Different rectifying circuits have been studied and their performances have been evaluated through the definition of a Figure of Merit. The effects of the antenna impedance have also been investigated to improve the performances. Two test-circuits have been manufactured and measured to validate the simulation results and to confirm the interest of a global design approach with such rectifying structures.
Skirts in the lab: Madame Curie and the image of the woman scientist in the feature film

Recent research has appropriately emphasized the significant role played by feature films in the creation (as well as the reflection) of popular stereotypes of the scientist. However, no particular study has yet been devoted to the depiction of women scientists in the cinema, even though it is quite clear that this presents its own distinctive features. Taking the influential Madame Curie (Mervyn LeRoy, 1943) as a starting point, this paper attempts to give a first overview of the subject.
Comments on “A New Method to Compute the 2-Adic Complexity of Binary Sequences”

We show that there is a very simple approach to determine the 2-adic complexity of periodic binary sequences with ideal two-level autocorrelation. This is the first main result by H. Xiong, L. Qu, and C. Li, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 60, no. 4, pp. 2399-2406, Apr. 2014, and the main result by T. Tian and W. Qi, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 450-454, Jan. 2010.
Role of Cognitive Distortions and Dysfunctional Attitudes in Nurses Experiencing Burnout

As a means of gathering more data to support the utility of cognitive-behavioral therapy with individuals experiencing burnout, this current study is designed to identify whether or not distorted thinking and dysfunctional attitudes are present in registered nurses who are experiencing burnout and whether or not they differ in registered nurses not experiencing burnout. A mail survey to a random sample of certified critical care registered nurses working in hospital settings was conducted. Participants provided basic demographic data and completed the Maslach Burnout Inventory, the Inventory of Cognitive Distortions, and the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale. In addition, participants completed measures of intent to leave or to stay, job satisfaction, and the work environment. A descriptive correlation design was employed. Results supported the relationship between burnout, cognitive distortions, and dysfunctional attitudes. Moreover, results demonstrate that magnification is the distortion most strongly linked with burnout. Job satisfaction, intent to leave or to stay, and various measures of the workplace environment by and large were shown to be significantly correlated with burnout, cognitive distortions, and dysfunctional attitudes. Finally, results support the validity and reliability of the Inventory of Cognitive Distortions.
Selecting girls with precocious puberty for brain imaging: validation of European evidence-based diagnosis rule.

OBJECTIVES To test the sensitivities of recently published American recommendations predicting occult intracranial lesion (OICL) in girls with central precocious puberty (CPP), and to validate a previously derived diagnosis rule predicting OICL based on age at puberty onset and estradiol (E2) level. STUDY DESIGN A retrospective, multicenter, hospital-based, cohort study was performed, including all girls with CPP seen in 7 centers in 6 European countries during given periods. American recommendations and the previously derived diagnosis rule were tested. RESULTS Girls with CPP (n=443), including 35 with OICL, were recruited. American recommendations did not identify all OICL. Previously identified independent risk factors for OICL were confirmed: age <6 years (adjusted odds ratio 20.5; 95% CI, 8.1-52.1) and E2 >45th percentile (3.0; 95% CI, 1.3-7.1). The previously derived diagnosis rule had 100% sensitivity (95% CI, 90-100): all girls with OICL had either an age <6 years or an E2 level >45th percentile. The specificity was 39% (95% CI, 34-44). CONCLUSIONS American recommendations do not seem safe to select European girls with CPP who require brain imaging. In settings where systematic brain imaging is not possible, the proposed diagnosis rule could safely help to avoid more than one third of unnecessary brain imaging.
Aggregating Electric Cars to Sustainable Virtual Power Plants: The Value of Flexibility in Future Electricity Markets

Electric vehicles will play a crucial role in balancing the future electrical grid, which is complicated by many intermittent renewable energy sources. We developed an algorithm that determines for a fleet of electric vehicles, which EV at what price and location to commit to the operating reserve market to either absorb excess capacity or provide electricity during shortages (vehicle-2-grid). The algorithm takes the value of immobility into account by using carsharing fees as a reference point. A virtual power plant autonomously replaces cars that are committed to the operating reserves and are then rented out, with other idle cars to pool the risks of uncertainty. We validate our model with data from a free float carsharing fleet of 500 electric vehicles. An analysis of expected future developments (2015, 2018, and 2022) in operating reserve demand and battery costs yields that the gross profits for a carsharing operator increase between 7-12% with a negligible decrease in car availability (<0.01%).
Active Learning with Amazon Mechanical Turk

Supervised classification needs large amounts of annotated training data that is expensive to create. Two approaches that reduce the cost of annotation are active learning and crowdsourcing. However, these two approaches have not been combined successfully to date. We evaluate the utility of active learning in crowdsourcing on two tasks, named entity recognition and sentiment detection, and show that active learning outperforms random selection of annotation examples in a noisy crowdsourcing scenario.
Brief Report The coherence of emotion systems: Comparing “on‐line” measures of appraisal and facial expressions, and self‐report

Recently, investigators have challenged long‐standing assumptions that facial expressions of emotion follow specific emotion‐eliciting events and relate to other emotion‐specific responses. We address these challenges by comparing spontaneous facial expressions of anger, sadness, laughter, and smiling with concurrent, “on‐line” appraisal themes from narrative data, and by examining whether coherence between facial and appraisal components were associated with increased experience of emotion. Consistent with claims that emotion systems are loosely coupled, facial expressions of anger and sadness co‐occurred to a moderate degree with the expected appraisal themes, and when this happened, the experience of emotion was stronger. The results for the positive emotions were more complex, but lend credence to the hypothesis that laughter and smiling are distinct. Smiling co‐occurred with appraisals of pride, but never occurred with appraisals of anger. In contrast, laughter occurred more often with appraisals of anger, a finding consistent with recent evidence linking laughter to the dissociation or undoing of negative emotion.
Serum hyaluronic acid is a useful marker of liver fibrosis in chronic hepatitis C virus infection

Patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection are often asymptomatic with few clinical signs of liver disease. Recognition of the presence of fibrosis or cirrhosis is difficult without liver biopsy, but with the availability of effective treatments, such as interferon, and the potential for progression to hepatoma in some cases, an accurate measure of the stage of disease is important. Serum hyaluronic acid (HA) has been identified as a potential marker of fibrosis or cirrhosis in other settings. In a prospective study in 130 chronic HCV carriers therefore, serum HA concentrations were compared with conventional liver function tests (including alanine aminotransferase (ALT), a‐glutathione‐S transferase (GST) and serum HCV RNA in order to determine which identified the stage of liver fibrosis as assessed by liver biopsy most accurately. The median HA concentrations according to the stage of fibrosis 0, 1&2, 3 and 4&5 were 17gl–1 (range 5– 37), 17gl–1 (5–80), 30gl–1 (10–105) and 350gl–1 (20–800) respectively. The median HA concentration in stage 4&5 was significantly greater than in stages 0, 1&2 or 3. Serum HA concentration rose with age, but even when adjusted for age the median HA at stage 4&5 was greater than all other groups (95% CI of difference between the medians exceeded 0). Thus, serum HA gave a sensitivity and specificity for stage 4&5 fibrosis of 85% and 88% respectively, exceeding those for ALT or GST. In contrast, serum ALT or GST levels were not correlated with the stage of fibrosis although ALT was significantly greater in the cirrhotic group when compared to the group with no fibrosis (stage 0). There was no correlation between serum HA and either the grade of inflammatory changes or serum HCV RNA. These results suggest that serum hyaluronic acid is a useful marker of liver fibrosis in patients with chronic HCV infection. It could therefore be used to monitor patients at risk of progressive fibrosis, in controlled clinical trials, as a measure of response to antifibrotic therapy and in those in whom liver biopsy is difficult or contraindicated.
Sensorimotor Synchronization with Different Metrical Levels of Point-Light Dance Movements

Rhythm perception and synchronization have been extensively investigated in the auditory domain, as they underlie means of human communication such as music and speech. Although recent studies suggest comparable mechanisms for synchronizing with periodically moving visual objects, the extent to which it applies to ecologically relevant information, such as the rhythm of complex biological motion, remains unknown. The present study addressed this issue by linking rhythm of music and dance in the framework of action-perception coupling. As a previous study showed that observers perceived multiple metrical periodicities in dance movements that embodied this structure, the present study examined whether sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) to dance movements resembles what is known of auditory SMS. Participants watched a point-light figure performing two basic steps of Swing dance cyclically, in which the trunk bounced at every beat and the limbs moved at every second beat, forming two metrical periodicities. Participants tapped synchronously to the bounce of the trunk with or without the limbs moving in the stimuli (Experiment 1), or tapped synchronously to the leg movements with or without the trunk bouncing simultaneously (Experiment 2). Results showed that, while synchronization with the bounce (lower-level pulse) was not influenced by the presence or absence of limb movements (metrical accent), synchronization with the legs (beat) was improved by the presence of the bounce (metrical subdivision) across different movement types. The latter finding parallels the “subdivision benefit” often demonstrated in auditory tasks, suggesting common sensorimotor mechanisms for visual rhythms in dance and auditory rhythms in music.
Differential Contributions of the Left and Right Inferior Parietal Lobules to Number Processing

We measured cerebral activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging at 3 Tesla while eight healthy volunteers performed various number processing tasks known to be dissociable in brain-lesioned patients: naming, comparing, multiplying, or subtracting single digits. The results revealed the activation of a circuit comprising bilateral intraparietal, prefrontal, and anterior cingulate components. The extension and lateralization of this circuit was modulated by task demands. The intraparietal and prefrontal activation was more important in the right hemisphere during the comparison task and in the left hemisphere during the multiplication task and was intensely bilateral during the subtraction task. Thus, partially distinct cerebral circuits with the dorsal parietal pathway underlie distinct arithmetic operations.
Retinoids regulate the anterior expression boundaries of 5′ Hoxb genes in posterior hindbrain

We describe the regulatory interactions that cause anterior extension of the mouse 5′ Hoxb expression domains from spinal cord levels to their definitive boundaries in the posterior hindbrain between embryonic day E10 and E11.5. This anterior expansion is retinoid dependent since it does not occur in mouse embryos deficient for the retinoic acid‐synthesizing enzyme retinaldehyde dehydrogenase 2. A retinoic acid response element (RARE) was identified downstream of Hoxb5 and shown to be essential for expression of Hoxb5 and Hoxb8 reporter transgenes in the anterior neural tube. The spatio‐temporal activity of this element overlaps with rostral extension of the expression domain of endogenous Hoxb5, Hoxb6 and Hoxb8 into the posterior hindbrain. The RARE and surrounding sequences are found at homologous positions in the human, mouse and zebrafish genome, which supports an evolutionarily conserved regulatory function.
Haptic aesthetic value of the golden section.

The study re-examined the finding that blind and sighted subjects haptically perceiving various rectangular proportions, including the golden section, preferred the square as most pleasing. While rectangular preferences of congenitally blind subjects questioned the existence of the golden section as a haptically satisfying figure, the preferences of late blind and sighted subjects generally confirmed the haptic aesthetic value of the golden section. The results thus indicated that the haptic perception of the golden rectangle as aesthetically pleasing is contingent on contact with the visual world.
A concentration-dependent endocytic trap and sink mechanism converts Bmper from an activator to an inhibitor of Bmp signaling

Bmper, which is orthologous to Drosophila melanogaster crossveinless 2, is a secreted factor that regulates Bmp activity in a tissue- and stage-dependent manner. Both pro- and anti-Bmp activities have been postulated for Bmper, although the molecular mechanisms through which Bmper affects Bmp signaling are unclear. In this paper, we demonstrate that as molar concentrations of Bmper exceed Bmp4, Bmper dynamically switches from an activator to an inhibitor of Bmp4 signaling. Inhibition of Bmp4 through a novel endocytic trap-and-sink mechanism leads to the efficient degradation of Bmper and Bmp4 by the lysosome. Bmper-mediated internalization of Bmp4 reduces the duration and magnitude of Bmp4-dependent Smad signaling. We also determined that Noggin and Gremlin, but not Chordin, trigger endocytosis of Bmps. This endocytic transport pathway expands the extracellular roles of selective Bmp modulators to include intracellular regulation. This dosage-dependent molecular switch resolves discordances among studies that examine how Bmper regulates Bmp activity and has broad implications for Bmp signal regulation by secreted mediators.