Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Galectin-1, -3 and -9 Expression and Clinical Significance in Squamous Cervical Cancer

Galectins are proteins that bind β-galactoside sugars and provide a new type of potential biomarkers and therapeutic targets in cancer. Galectin-1, -3 and -9 have become the focus of different research groups, but their expression and function in cervical cancer is still unclear. The aim of this study was to determine the phenotype of galectin-1, -3 and -9 expressing cells and the association with clinico-pathological parameters in cervical cancer. Galectin expression was scored in tumor cells, tumor epithelium infiltrating immune cells and stromal cells in squamous cervical cancer (n = 160). Correlations with clinico-pathological parameters and survival were studied according to the REMARK recommendations. We additionally investigated whether the galectins were expressed by tumor cells, fibroblasts, macrophages and T cells. Galectin-1 and -9 were both expressed by tumor cells in 11% of samples, while 84% expressed galectin-3. Strong galectin-1 expression by tumor cells was an independent predictor for poor survival (hazard ratio: 8.02, p = 0.001) and correlated with increased tumor invasion (p = 0.032) and receiving post-operative radiotherapy (p = 0.020). Weak and positive tumor cell galectin-3 expression were correlated with increased and decreased tumor invasion, respectively (p = 0.012). Tumor cell expression of galectin-9 showed a trend toward improved survival (p = 0.087). The predominant immune cell type expressing galectin-1, -3 and -9 were CD163+ macrophages. Galectin-1 and -3 were expressed by a minor population of T cells. Galectin-1 was mainly expressed by fibroblasts in the tumor stroma. To conclude, while tumor cell expression of galectin-9 seemed to represent a beneficial response, galectin-1 expression might be used as a marker for a more aggressive anti-cancer treatment.
Examining ACE analysis reliability estimates using fault-injection

ACE analysis is a technique to provide an early reliability estimate for microprocessors. ACE analysis couples data from abstract performance models with low level design details to identify and rule out transient faults that will not cause incorrect execution. While many transient faults are analyzable in ACE analysis frameworks, some are not. As a result, ACE analysis is conservative and provides a lower bound for the reliability of a processor design. Bounding the reliability of a design is useful since it can guarantee that the given design will meet reliability goals. In this work, we quantify and identify the sources of ACE analysis conservatism by comparing an ACE analysis methodology against a rigorous fault-injection study. We evaluate two flavors of ACE analysis: a "simple" analysis and a refined analysis, finding that even the refined analysis overestimates the soft error vulnerability of an instruction scheduler by 2-3x. The conservatism stems from two key sources: from lack of detail in abstract performance models and from what we term Y-Bits, a result of the single-pass simulation methodology that is typical of ACE analysis. We also examine the efficacy of applying ACE analysis to a class of "partial coverage" error mitigation techniques. In particular, we perform a case study on one such technique and extrapolate our findings to others.
Challenges faced by Indigenous nursing students and strategies that aided their progress in the course: A descriptive study

Abstract Marked improvements in Indigenous health can be achieved by increasing the participation of Indigenous people in the health professions. Currently in Australia the participation by Indigenous people in the health professions is low and the Indigenous people of Australia continue to have poor health outcomes. This qualitative study utilised interviews with 22 Indigenous students enrolled in undergraduate nursing degrees across Australia, to explore the challenges they faced and uncover the strategies they had found helpful to their progress in the course. The findings indicate that students are challenged by financial hardship, staff insensitivity to cultural issues, discrimination, lack of Indigenous mentors, poor study skills, lack of adequate educational preparation, lack of resources, and ongoing family commitments. Strategies identified as particularly helpful to tenure within the course include specific Indigenous support units, adequate financial support, interested academics, Aboriginal Tertiary Assistance Scheme (ATAS) tutors, support from family and friends, and support from other students.
Women's Empowerment across Generations in Bangladesh

Abstract This study uses qualitative data to examine young women's relationships with their mothers and mothers-in-law to understand how these relationships foster empowerment in the younger generation or fail to do so. The data consist of ethnographic interviews with 20 triads of women – young married women, their mothers and their mothers-in-law. Findings show that the influence of empowerment across generations was greater in the sphere of economic empowerment and education than in relation to marriage and childbearing. The study illustrates how patriarchal institutions resistant to change can limit the effects of women's empowerment on the next generation.
µTIL: Mutation-based Statistical Test Inputs Generation for Automatic Fault Localization

Automatic Fault Localization (AFL) is a process to locate faults automatically in software programs. Essentially, an AFL method takes as input a set of test cases including failed test cases, and ranks the statements of a program from the most likely to the least likely to contain a fault. As a result, the efficiency of an AFL method depends on the "quality" of the test cases used to rank statements. More specifically, in order to improve the accuracy of their ranking within test budget constraints, we have to ensure that program statements are executed by a reasonably large number of test cases which provide a coverage as uniform as possible of the input domain. This paper proposes μTIL, a new statistical test inputs generation method dedicated to AFL, based on constraint solving and mutation testing. Using mutants where the locations of injected faults are known, μTIL is able to significantly reduce the length of an AFL test suite while retaining its accuracy (i.e., the code size to examine before spotting the fault). In order to address the motivations stated above, the statistical generator objectives are two-fold: 1) each feasible path of the program is activated with the same probability, 2) the sub domain associated to each feasible path is uniformly covered. Using several widely used ranking techniques (i.e., Tarantula, Jaccard, Ochiai), we show on a small but realistic program that a proof-of-concept implementation of μTIL can generate test sets with significantly better fault localization accuracy than both random testing and adaptive random testing. We also show on the same program that using mutation testing enables a 75% length reduction of the AFL test suite without decrease in accuracy.
Epibionts on the lingulate brachiopod Diandongia from the Early Cambrian Chengjiang Lagerstätte, South China

The classic Chengjiang Lagerstätte (Lower Cambrian, Atdabanian stage: Yu'anshan Formation) Yunnan, southwestern China, has yielded, besides the exceptional and often controversial soft-bodied fossils, a fauna of primitive/early lingulid brachiopods. Diandongia pista (Rong 1974) is one of the commonest and most strongly mineralized of the phosphatic brachiopods from the Lagerstätte. The shells of this species have been found to commonly serve as a basibiont host. Epibionts comprise the coeval brachiopod Longtancunella chengjiangensis and the cone-shaped cnidarian-related Archotuba conoidalis, as well as rounded smaller-sized epizoans (lesser than 2 mm). A principle morphological analysis demonstrates that the ovoid and rounded organisms that often occur along the commissure of D. pista resemble small juvenile or immature brachiopods. Epibiont-bearing shells of D. pista with soft-tissue preservation demonstrate that the host brachiopods were overgrown while alive, and provide an argument for D. pista having a semi-infaunal life style with only the slim pedicle embedded in sediment. The epibiotic association sheds direct light on the ecology of Cambrian brachiopods in soft-substrate marine environments. The Chengjiang fossils demonstrate that the Early Cambrian brachiopods, as compared with recent lingulids, occupied different and a wider spectrum of ecological niches and tiers of space.
Security and Privacy Issues as a Potential Risk for Further E- commerce Development

E-commerce security and privacy is an important issue that has been leading to negative or adverse effects on the further development and growth of e-commerce. In this paper, the reasons behind lack of customer security and privacy online are discussed; importance of adequate security and privacy measures is emphasized, and a few methods to implement the change are outlined. This article is based on a literature review that emphasizes the need for increased security and privacy measures and the importance of customers trust in developing online relations.
No difference in frontal cortical activity during an executive functioning task after acute doses of aripiprazole and haloperidol

Background: Aripiprazole is an atypical antipsychotic drug that is characterized by partial dopamine D2 receptor agonism. Its pharmacodynamic profile is proposed to be beneficial in the treatment of cognitive impairment, which is prevalent in psychotic disorders. This study compared brain activation characteristics produced by aripiprazole with that of haloperidol, a typical D2 receptor antagonist, during a task targeting executive functioning. Methods: Healthy participants received an acute oral dose of haloperidol, aripiprazole or placebo before performing an executive functioning task while blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was carried out. Results: There was a tendency towards reduced performance in the aripiprazole group compared to the two other groups. The image analysis yielded a strong task-related BOLD-fMRI response within each group. An uncorrected between-group analysis showed that aripiprazole challenge resulted in stronger activation in the frontal and temporal gyri and the putamen compared with haloperidol challenge, but after correcting for multiple testing there was no significant group difference. Conclusion: No significant group differences between aripiprazole and haloperidol in frontal cortical activation were obtained when corrected for multiple comparisons. This study is registered in ClinicalTrials.gov (identifier: 2009-016222-14). 1
Towards online graph processing with spark streaming

Graph processing is one of the most important topics in big data processing. The graph architecture is suitable for distributed processing as the processing works in an iterative manner allowing parallelism. Also, the structure has proved to be suitable in representing social networks, web page indexes, and many other problems. However, graph processing introduce many problems as well. Partitioning the graph to distribute the data on multiple machines and minimizing data movement is a serious challenge. Also many of the graph algorithms have high complexity. GraphX is one of the frameworks that introduce an abstraction on top of Spark, an iterative data processing engine. However, GraphX and other novel graph abstractions still do not support processing data streams with online graphs. In this work we try to use IndexedRDD, a library to enable fine grained updates as a key-value store on top of Spark to represent a graph structure and test if it can be used as an efficient online graph storage for spark streaming. We did experiments to compare our data streaming implementation using IndexedRDD with the obvious elementary solution of using RDD transformations to join the old RDD with the new one to make a new composite RDD on each micro-batch. We also want to compare the above two with a distributed in-memory key-value store (such as Redis). The results show big advantage of using Redis over RDD transformations and IndexedRDD. However, it has some limitations such as lacking the support for property graphs. IndexedRDD, on the other hand, has shown good performance for insertions and a shortcoming in its need to rebuild the index after each data update, which add extra time on each lookup that cannot be tolerated when lookup speed is essential.
Integrating financial and physical supply chains: the role of banks in enabling supply chain integration

– The financial supply chain, running parallel to the flow of goods and information, is common to all economic supply networks, and its integration with the physical supply chain is therefore a critical and ubiquitous aspect of supply chain integration (SCI) largely ignored in the literature. This paper aims to develop a model of physical and financial SCI, which is based on a process view from both buyers' and suppliers' perspectives, and explores the role of banks in enabling SCI. , – The paper reports an exploratory study of the role of banks in improving SCI, by presenting a case study analysis of two international banks. , – The findings show that banks can support buyers and suppliers by contributing to the enablers of SCI, namely coordination, collaboration, information sharing and information visibility. , – The research is limited in that it is explorative; further studies are required in order to quantify the impact of banks' interventions on SCI. , – Improved SCI requires an understanding of the flow of physical and financial resources across supply networks. Banks can help buyers and suppliers develop a more holistic understanding of the supply chain, thus improving integration and optimising working capital. , – The paper presents a process model of physical/financial SCI which uniquely recognises the role of banks in enabling buyers and suppliers to improve SCI, synchronisation and performance.
Word Attention for Sequence to Sequence Text Understanding

Attention mechanism has been a key component in Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) based sequence to sequence learning framework, which has been adopted in many text understanding tasks, such as neural machine translation and abstractive summarization. In these tasks, the attention mechanism models how important each part of the source sentence is to generate a target side word. To compute such importance scores, the attention mechanism summarizes the source side information in the encoder RNN hidden states (i.e., h_t), and then builds a context vector for a target side word upon a subsequence representation of the source sentence, since h_t actually summarizes the information of the subsequence containing the first t-th words in the source sentence. We in this paper, show that an additional attention mechanism called word attention, that builds itself upon word level representations, significantly enhances the performance of sequence to sequence learning. Our word attention can enrich the source side contextual representation by directly promoting the clean word level information in each step. Furthermore, we propose to use contextual gates to dynamically combine the subsequence level and word level contextual information. Experimental results on abstractive summarization and neural machine translation show that word attention significantly improve over strong baselines.
Lateral mobility of L-type calcium channels in synaptic terminals of retinal bipolar cells

Purpose Efficient and precise release of glutamate from retinal bipolar cells is ensured by the positioning of L-type Ca2+ channels close to release sites at the base of the synaptic ribbon. We investigated whether Ca2+ channels at bipolar cell ribbon synapses are fixed in position or capable of moving in the membrane. Methods We tracked the movements of individual L-type Ca2+ channels in bipolar cell terminals after labeling channels with quantum dots (QDs) attached to α2δ4 accessory Ca2+ channel subunits via intermediary antibodies. Results We found that individual Ca2+ channels moved within a confined domain of 0.13–0.15 μm2 in bipolar cell terminals, similar to ultrastructural estimates of the surface area of the active zone beneath the ribbon. Disruption of actin expanded the confinement domain indicating that cytoskeletal interactions help to confine channels at the synapse, but the relatively large diffusion coefficients of 0.3–0.45 μm2/s suggest that channels are not directly anchored to actin. Unlike photoreceptor synapses, removing membrane cholesterol did not change domain size, indicating that lipid rafts are not required to confine Ca2+ channels at bipolar cell ribbon synapses. Conclusions The ability of Ca2+ channels to move within the presynaptic active zone suggests that regulating channel mobility may affect release from bipolar cell terminals.
Receiver Functions of Seismic Waves in Layered Anisotropic Media: Application to the Estimate of Seismic Anisotropy

Abstract We investigate the effect of seismic anisotropy on P -wave receiver functions, calculating synthetic seismograms for P -wave incidence on multilayered anisotropic structure with hexagonal symmetry. The main characteristics of the receiver functions affected by the anisotropy are summarized as (1) appearance of seismic energy on radial and transverse receiver functions, (2) systematic change of P -to- S ( Ps ) converted waveforms on receiver functions as ray back-azimuth increases, and (3) reversal of the Ps -phase polarity on the radial receiver function in a range of the back azimuth. Another important influence is shear-wave splitting of the Ps -converted waves and other later phases reverberated as S wave. By numerical experiments using synthetic receiver functions, we demonstrate that the waveform cross-correlation analysis is applicable to splitting Ps phases on receiver functions to estimate the seismic anisotropy of layer structure. Advantages to utilizing the Ps phases are (1) they appear more clearly on receiver functions than on seismograms and (2) they inform us about what place along the seismic ray path is anisotropic. Real analysis of shear-wave splitting is executed to the Moho-generated Ps phases that are identified on receiver functions at six seismic stations in the Chugoku district, southwest Japan. The time lags between the two arrivals of the split Ps phases are estimated at 0.2–0.7 sec, and the polarization directions of the fast arrival components are from north–south to northeast–southwest. This result is consistent with recent results of shear-wave splitting measurements and the trend of linear epicenter distributions of crustal earthquakes and active fault strikes in the Chugoku district.
Regulation of intracellular actin polymerization by prenylated cellular proteins

Posttranslational modification by covalent attachment of polyisoprene intermediates to a carboxyterminal CAAX-box motif is required for the biologic function of proteins such as p21ras, the supergene family of ras-related proteins, nuclear lamins, and subunits of heterotrimeric G- proteins. Cells grown in the presence of lovastatin, which inhibits HMG- CoA reductase and prevents synthesis of intermediates required for protein prenylation, develop a round, refractile morphology. Our data indicate that this is due to the selective loss of actin cables without gross changes in the microtubular lattice or intermediate filament structure. Microinjection of a competitive peptide inhibitor of protein prenyltransferases into the cytoplasm of cells induces an identical change in morphology with loss of actin cables. Mevalonate (MVA) reverses the lovastatin-induced morphologic change by inducing a rapid repolymerization of actin cables with coincident reversion to the flat morphology. Furthermore, microinjection of farnesyl-pyrophosphate or geranylgeranyl-pyrophosphate into lovastatin-treated cells also results in rapid morphologic reversion. The morphologic reversion induced by MVA requires the presence of serum, and is independent of extracellular calcium. The addition of cycloheximide to the growth medium prevents lovastatin-induced loss of actin cables, and causes morphologic reversion of lovastatin-treated cells by a mechanism that is independent of MVA. A1F4- induces morphologic reversion in a manner indistinguishable from MVA. These data indicate that prenylated protein(s) play a critical role in regulating the state of intracellular actin, and that GGPP can rescue the lovastatin-induced morphologic phenotype in the absence of upstream intermediates of cholesterol biosynthesis. We have begun to dissect the signaling events that mediate this pathway.
Diet, wheeze, and atopy in school children in Menorca, Spain

Epidemiological studies have shown inverse associations of asthma symptoms with fish, vegetable, and fruit intake. We evaluated the association between several dietary factors with wheeze and atopy among children in Menorca, a Spanish Mediterranean island. A cross‐sectional analysis was performed on 460 children at age 6.5 yr. Parents completed a questionnaire on the child's respiratory and allergic symptoms, and a 96‐item food frequency questionnaire. Children underwent skin prick tests with six common aeroallergens. The average daily intake was relatively high for fruits (177 g) and fish (54 g), and moderate for vegetables (59 g). A high consumption (>40 g/day) of fruity vegetables (tomatoes, eggplants, cucumber, green beans, zucchini) was found to have beneficial effect on current wheeze [odds ratio (OR), 0.38; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.15–0.95, p < 0.05], and atopic wheeze with a significant decreasing trend when intake was increased (OR, 0.19; 95% CI, 0.04–0.95, p for trend = 0.04). No other fruits or vegetables were significantly associated with wheeze or atopy prevalence. An inverse association was found between a fish intake ≥60 g/day and atopy (OR, 0.43; 95% CI, 0.21–0.90, p < 0.05). The associations remained significant after adjustment for energy intake and maternal diet during pregnancy. Our results support a potential protective effect of fruity vegetables and fish intake during childhood on wheeze and atopy respectively.
Nonsense-Mediated mRNA Decay Impacts MSI-Driven Carcinogenesis and Anti-Tumor Immunity in Colorectal Cancers

Nonsense-mediated mRNA Decay (NMD) degrades mutant mRNAs containing premature termination codon (PTC-mRNAs). Here we evaluate the consequence of NMD activity in colorectal cancers (CRCs) showing microsatellite instability (MSI) whose progression is associated with the accumulation of PTC-mRNAs encoding immunogenic proteins due to frameshift mutations in coding repeat sequences. Inhibition of UPF1, one of the major NMD factors, was achieved by siRNA in the HCT116 MSI CRC cell line and the resulting changes in gene expression were studied using expression microarrays. The impact of NMD activity was also investigated in primary MSI CRCs by quantifying the expression of several mRNAs relative to their mutational status and to endogenous UPF1 and UPF2 expression. Host immunity developed against MSI cancer cells was appreciated by quantifying the number of CD3ε-positive tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). UPF1 silencing led to the up-regulation of 1251 genes in HCT116, among which a proportion of them (i.e. 38%) significantly higher than expected by chance contained a coding microsatellite (P<2×10−16). In MSI primary CRCs, UPF1 was significantly over-expressed compared to normal adjacent mucosa (P<0.002). Our data provided evidence for differential decay of PTC-mRNAs compared to wild-type that was positively correlated to UPF1 endogenous expression level (P = 0.02). A negative effect of UPF1 and UPF2 expression on the host's anti-tumor response was observed (P<0.01). Overall, our results show that NMD deeply influences MSI-driven tumorigenesis at the molecular level and indicate a functional negative impact of this system on anti-tumor immunity whose intensity has been recurrently shown to be an independent factor of favorable outcome in CRCs.