Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Coffee Consumption and Risk of Colorectal Cancer: The Japan Collaborative Cohort Study

Background Epidemiologic studies have reported coffee consumption to be associated with various health conditions. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of coffee consumption with colorectal cancer incidence in a large-scale prospective cohort study in Japan. Methods We used data from the Japan Collaborative Cohort Study for Evaluation of Cancer Risk (JACC Study). Here, we analyzed a total of 58 221 persons (23 607 men, 34 614 women) followed from 1988 to the end of 2009. During 738 669 person-years of follow-up for the analysis of colorectal cancer risk with coffee consumption at baseline, we identified 687 cases of colon cancer (355 males and 332 females) and 314 cases of rectal cancer (202 males and 112 females). We used the Cox proportional-hazard regression model to estimate hazard ratio (HR). Results Compared to those who consumed less than 1 cup of coffee per day, men who consumed 2–3 cups of coffee per day had an HR of 1.26 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.93–1.70), and men who consumed more than 4 cups of coffee per day had an HR of 1.79 (95% CI 1.01–3.18). A statistically significant increase in the risk of colon cancer was associated with increasing coffee consumption among men (P for trend = 0.03). On the other hand, coffee consumption in women was not associated with incident risk of colon cancer. Coffee consumption was also not associated with rectal cancer incidence in men or women. Conclusions This large-scale population-based cohort study showed that coffee consumption increases the risk of colon cancer among Japanese men.
Multiple description trellis coded quantization

We present a construction of multiple description trellis coded quantizers. We use the tensor product of trellises to build a trellis which is applicable to multiple description coding. The problems of index assignment and set partitioning for the resulting trellis are considered. The Viterbi algorithm provides the best path for encoding and the design procedure utilizes a generalized Lloyd algorithm. The encoding process simultaneously generates all the transmitted sequences. Furthermore, the complexity of the scheme is almost independent of the rate. The quantizer provides remarkable performance with little encoding complexity.
The Histone Deacetylase Inhibitor ITF2357 Reduces Production of Pro-Inflammatory Cytokines In Vitro and Systemic Inflammation In Vivo

We studied inhibition of histone deacetylases (HDACs), which results in the unraveling of chromatin, facilitating increased gene expression. ITF2357, an orally active, synthetic inhibitor of HDACs, was evaluated as an anti-inflammatory agent. In lipopolysaccharide (LPS)-stimulated cultured human peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), ITF2357 reduced by 50% the release of tumor necrosis factor-α (TNFα) at 10 to 22 nM, the release of intracellular interleukin (IL-1α at 12 nM, the secretion of IL-1β at 12.5 to 25 nM, and the production of interferon-γ (IFNγ) at 25 nM. There was no reduction in IL-8 in these same cultures. Using the combination of IL-12 plus IL-18, IFNγ and IL-6 production was reduced by 50% at 12.5 to 25 nM, independent of decreased IL-1 or TNFα. There was no evidence of cell death in LPS-stimulated PBMCs at 100 nM ITF2357, using assays for DNA degradation, annexin V, and caspase-3/7. By Northern blotting of PBMCs, there was a 50% to 90% reduction in LPS-induced steady-state levels of TNFα and IFNγ mRNA but no effect on IL-1β or IL-8 levels. Real-time PCR confirmed the reduction in TNFα RNA by ITF2357. Oral administration of 1.0 to 10 mg/kg ITF2357 to mice reduced LPS-induced serum TNFα and IFNγ by more than 50%. Anti-CD3-induced cytokines were not suppressed by ITF2357 in PBMCs either in vitro or in the circulation in mice. In concanavalin-A-induced hepatitis, 1 or 5 mg/kg of oral ITF2357 significantly reduced liver damage. Thus, low, nonapoptotic concentrations of the HDAC inhibitor ITF2357 reduce pro-inflammatory cytokine production in primary cells in vitro and exhibit anti-inflammatory effects in vivo.
Effects of damping head movement and facial expression in dyadic conversation using real–time facial expression tracking and synthesized avatars

When people speak with one another, they tend to adapt their head movements and facial expressions in response to each others' head movements and facial expressions. We present an experiment in which confederates' head movements and facial expressions were motion tracked during videoconference conversations, an avatar face was reconstructed in real time, and naive participants spoke with the avatar face. No naive participant guessed that the computer generated face was not video. Confederates' facial expressions, vocal inflections and head movements were attenuated at 1 min intervals in a fully crossed experimental design. Attenuated head movements led to increased head nods and lateral head turns, and attenuated facial expressions led to increased head nodding in both naive participants and confederates. Together, these results are consistent with a hypothesis that the dynamics of head movements in dyadicconversation include a shared equilibrium. Although both conversational partners were blind to the manipulation, when apparent head movement of one conversant was attenuated, both partners responded by increasing the velocity of their head movements.
What Practitioners Think of Inter-organizational ERP Requirements Engineering Practices: Focus Group Results

Empirical studies on requirements engineering for inter-organizational enterprise resource planning ERP systems have demonstrated that the ERP vendor-provided prescriptive models for ERP roll-outs make tacit assumptions about the ERP adopter's context. This, in turn, leads to the implementation of suboptimal solutions. Specifically, these models assume that ERP implementations happen within a single company, and so they pay only scant attention to the stakeholders' requirements for inter-organizational coordination. Given this backdrop, the first author proposed 13 practices for engineering the ERP coordination requirements in previous publications. This paper reports a confirmatory study evaluating those practices. Using an online focus group, the authors collected and analyzed practitioners' feedback and their experiences to understand the extent to which the proposed practices are indeed observable. The study indicated very low variability in practitioners' perceptions regarding 12 of the 13 practices, and considerable variability in their perceptions regarding the role of modeling inter-organizational coordination requirements. The contribution of the study is twofold: 1 it adds to the body of knowledge in the sub-area of RE for ERP; and 2 it adds to the practice of using qualitative research methods in empirical RE.
Safety of recursive Horn clauses with infinite relations

A database query is said to be safe if its result consists of a finite set of tuples If a query is expressed using a set of pure Horn Clauses, the problem of determining whether it is safe is in general undecidable In this paper, we show that the problem is decidable when terms involving function symbols (including arithmetic) are represented as distinct occurrences of uninterpreted infinite predicates over which certain finiteness dependencies hold. We present a sufficient condition for safety when some monotonicity constraints also hold.
Osteogenic response to marrow aspiration: Increased serum osteocalcin and alkaline phosphatase in human bone marrow donors

It has been shown recently in experimental animals that regeneration of bone marrow after ablation is associated with enhanced osteogenic growth factor activity and a systemic increase in bone formation. To assess the possible occurrence of a similar phenomenon in humans, serum markers of bone formation, osteocalcin and alkaline phosphatase, were measured in marrow donors before the aspiration of large amounts of iliac marrow and 1 day to 5 weeks thereafter. Both osteocalcin and alkaline phosphatase showed significant increases, with peak values 1–3 and 2–4 weeks postaspiration, respectively. The absolute maximal increase in osteocalcin was significantly higher in adolescent and child donors than in adults. When evaluated together with studies on systemic changes during fracture healing and marrow regeneration, these findings suggest that marrow aspiration in humans evokes a systemic osteogenic response.
Analysis of Adaptive Incentive Protocols for P2P Networks

Incentive protocols play a crucial role to encourage cooperation among nodes in networking applications. The aim of this paper is to provide a general analytical framework to analyze and design a large family of incentive protocols. We consider a class of incentive protocols wherein peers can distributively learn and adapt their actions. Using our analytical framework, one can evaluate the expected performance gain and system robustness of a given incentive protocol. To illustrate the framework, we present three incentive policies and two learning (or adaptive) models. We show under what conditions the network may collapse (e.g., no cooperation in the system) or the incentive protocol can guarantee a high degree of cooperation. In particular, we formally show the connection between evaluating incentive protocols and evolutionary game theory so to identify robustness characteristics of an incentive policy.
Predictors of Clinical Outcome After Acute Achilles Tendon Ruptures

Background: In patients with an acute Achilles tendon rupture, it has not been possible to determine the superiority of a single specific treatment modality over other treatments with respect to symptoms and function. When several pertinent treatment protocols are available for an injury, it is of interest to understand how other variables, such as age, sex, or physical activity level, affect outcome to better individualize the treatment. Purpose: To investigate predictors of both symptomatic and functional outcomes after an acute Achilles tendon rupture. Study Design: Cohort study (Prognosis); Level of evidence, 2. Methods: Ninety-three patients (79 men and 14 women; mean age, 40 years) were evaluated prospectively at 3, 6, and 12 months. The main outcome measures in this study were the Achilles tendon Total Rupture Score (ATRS) for symptoms and maximum heel-rise height for function. The independent variables evaluated as possible predictors of outcome included treatment, sex, age, body mass index (BMI), physical activity level, symptoms, and quality of life. Results: Treatment, age, BMI, physical activity level, heel-rise height at 6 months, and the ATRS at 3 months were eligible for further analysis. Only male sex was included for the prediction models. The 4 different multiple linear regression models (predicting the ATRS at 6 and 12 months and heel-rise height at 6 and 12 months) were significant (P < .001-.002), and the R2 values for the models were 0.222 to 0.409. Surgical or nonsurgical treatment is a moderate predictor of symptoms and a weak predictor of heel-rise height after an acute Achilles tendon rupture. At the 6-month follow-up, surgical treatment was associated with a larger heel-rise height, but the opposite was seen at 12 months. Surgical treatment resulted in a lower degree of symptoms. Increasing age was a strong predictor of reduced heel-rise height, and an increase in age of 10 years reduced the expected heel-rise height by approximately 8%. A higher BMI was also a strong predictor of a greater degree of symptoms, and a 5-unit higher BMI predicted a reduction of approximately 10 points in the ATRS. Conclusion: The present study identified important possible predictors of outcome. Despite having a wide range of clinically relevant variables, the models had a limited ability to predict the final individual outcome. In general, the models appear to be better at predicting function than symptoms.
The Development of Responsible Environmental Citizenship: A Critical Challenge

Although this article should not be considered a research article, its content is based almost entirely on research into responsible environmental behavior. It looks at instructional practice in environmental education and some of the flaws associated with it. The research that guides successful curriculum development and instruction is briefly discussed, and inferences flowing from that research are stated and described. The article then describes what the author believes to be the critical educational components that must be in place if receivers are to become lifelong responsible decision makers in society. Following this is a discussion of what an instructional program would look like that can be predicted to lead to responsible citizenship action regarding important environmental issues.
The Impact of Ethical Climate on Job Satisfaction of Nurses

This article examines the impact of ethical climate types (shared perception of how ethical issues should be addressed and what is ethically correct behavior) on various facets of job satisfaction of nurses in a large nonprofit private hospital. The results of the study indicate that hospitals may be able to enhance job satisfaction of nurses by influencing the organization's ethical climate.
A survey on unsupervised outlier detection in high‐dimensional numerical data

High‐dimensional data in Euclidean space pose special challenges to data mining algorithms. These challenges are often indiscriminately subsumed under the term ‘curse of dimensionality’, more concrete aspects being the so‐called ‘distance concentration effect’, the presence of irrelevant attributes concealing relevant information, or simply efficiency issues. In about just the last few years, the task of unsupervised outlier detection has found new specialized solutions for tackling high‐dimensional data in Euclidean space. These approaches fall under mainly two categories, namely considering or not considering subspaces (subsets of attributes) for the definition of outliers. The former are specifically addressing the presence of irrelevant attributes, the latter do consider the presence of irrelevant attributes implicitly at best but are more concerned with general issues of efficiency and effectiveness. Nevertheless, both types of specialized outlier detection algorithms tackle challenges specific to high‐dimensional data. In this survey article, we discuss some important aspects of the ‘curse of dimensionality’ in detail and survey specialized algorithms for outlier detection from both categories. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining, 2012
Digitise This! A Quick and Easy Remote Sensing Method to Monitor the Daily Extent of Dredge Plumes

Technological advancements in remote sensing and GIS have improved natural resource managers’ abilities to monitor large-scale disturbances. In a time where many processes are heading towards automation, this study has regressed to simple techniques to bridge a gap found in the advancement of technology. The near-daily monitoring of dredge plume extent is common practice using Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) imagery and associated algorithms to predict the total suspended solids (TSS) concentration in the surface waters originating from floods and dredge plumes. Unfortunately, these methods cannot determine the difference between dredge plume and benthic features in shallow, clear water. This case study at Barrow Island, Western Australia, uses hand digitising to demonstrate the ability of human interpretation to determine this difference with a level of confidence and compares the method to contemporary TSS methods. Hand digitising was quick, cheap and required very little training of staff to complete. Results of ANOSIM R statistics show remote sensing derived TSS provided similar spatial results if they were thresholded to at least 3 mg L−1. However, remote sensing derived TSS consistently provided false-positive readings of shallow benthic features as Plume with a threshold up to TSS of 6 mg L−1, and began providing false-negatives (excluding actual plume) at a threshold as low as 4 mg L−1. Semi-automated processes that estimate plume concentration and distinguish between plumes and shallow benthic features without the arbitrary nature of human interpretation would be preferred as a plume monitoring method. However, at this stage, the hand digitising method is very useful and is more accurate at determining plume boundaries over shallow benthic features and is accessible to all levels of management with basic training.
Modulation of the ComA-Dependent Quorum Response in Bacillus subtilis by Multiple Rap Proteins and Phr Peptides

ABSTRACT In Bacillus subtilis, extracellular peptide signaling regulates several biological processes. Secreted Phr signaling peptides are imported into the cell and act intracellularly to antagonize the activity of regulators known as Rap proteins. B. subtilis encodes several Rap proteins and Phr peptides, and the processes regulated by many of these Rap proteins and Phr peptides are unknown. We used DNA microarrays to characterize the roles that several rap-phr signaling modules play in regulating gene expression. We found that rapK-phrK regulates the expression of a number of genes activated by the response regulator ComA. ComA activates expression of genes involved in competence development and the production of several secreted products. Two Phr peptides, PhrC and PhrF, were previously known to stimulate the activity of ComA. We assayed the roles that PhrC, PhrF, and PhrK play in regulating gene expression and found that these three peptides stimulate ComA-dependent gene expression to different levels and are all required for full expression of genes activated by ComA. The involvement of multiple Rap proteins and Phr peptides allows multiple physiological cues to be integrated into a regulatory network that modulates the timing and magnitude of the ComA response.
Chromogenic in situ hybridisation (CISH) should be an accepted method in the routine diagnostic evaluation of HER2 status in breast cancer

HER2 protein overexpression or gene amplification is detected in approximately 20% of breast tumours, is associated with an aggressive phenotype and is predictive of response to trastuzumab therapy. The use of chromogenic in situ hybridisation (CISH) for evaluating HER2 status routinely is recognised in much of Europe but has yet to achieve widespread acceptance in the UK. CISH analysis for HER2 status was performed on 161 breast cancer cases. Results were compared with immunohistochemistry (IHC) and dual-colour fluorescence in situ hybridisation (FISH) data. There was 100% concordance between CISH and FISH, but only 93.8% concordance between CISH and IHC. Performing CISH ‘in-house’ was found to cost approximately 50% less than the FISH/IHC protocol at the reference laboratory. It is concluded that CISH is as accurate as FISH for diagnostic purposes and is more cost-effective than the IHC/FISH regimen currently favoured in the UK.1 Recent data show that amplification of the HER-2 gene is the most reliable predictor of response to trastuzumab therapy,2 indicating that a gene-based assay, rather than a protein overexpression assay, would be the most suitable type of analysis for HER2 status in breast tumour samples. With the recent change in the licensing of trastuzumab to include its use as an adjuvant therapy (NICE 2006), it is important that patients most likely to benefit from its use are accurately identified. This change in the use of trastuzumab has increased the workload of histopathology laboratories significantly as well as creating an additional financial burden for hospital Trusts. We investigated the possibility of setting up HER2 …
The Yamabe Invariant for Non-Simply Connected Manifolds

The Yamabe invariant is an invariant of a closed smooth manifold dened using conformal geometry and the scalar curvature. Recently, Petean showed that the Yamabe invariant is non-negative for all closed simply connected manifolds of dimension 5. We extend this to show that Yamabe invariant is non-negative for all closed manifolds of dimension 5 with fundamental group of odd order having all Sylow subgroups abelian. The main new geometric input is a way of studying the Yamabe invariant on Toda brackets. A similar method of proof shows that all closed oriented manifolds of dimension 5 with non-spin universal cover, with nite fundamental group having all Sylow subgroups elementary abelian, admit metrics of positive scalar curvature, once one restricts to the \complement" of manifolds whose homology classes are \toral. " The exceptional toral homology classes only exist in dimensions not exceeding the \rank" of the fundamental group, so this proves important cases of the Gromov-Lawson-Rosenberg Conjecture once the dimension is sucien tly large.
It's a Bird. It's a Plane. It's...

Because of religious beliefs and our upbringing, my boyfriend and I are both virgins, and have decided to practice abstinence until we are married someday (to each other or someone else ? Who knows? ). Well, sometimes when we are making out, we get really into it. Our clothes always stay on, but next weekend, we are going to stay in a hotel. (He is taking me some place five hours away, so we have no choice.) Anyway, this hotel has a hot tub in the room. We will only have our bathing suits on ? is there any possibility for sperm to travel through the water? Should we use some kind of protection even though we are not going to have sex? We do not want anything to happen. This may seem very silly, and I may seem very naive, but I cannot ask anyone else, and I worry about things like this. Thank you very much.
Distinct Representations and Theta Dynamics in Dorsal and Ventral Hippocampus

Although anatomical, lesion, and imaging studies of the hippocampus indicate qualitatively different information processing along its septo-temporal axis, physiological mechanisms supporting such distinction are missing. We found fundamental differences between the dorsal (dCA3) and the ventral-most parts (vCA3) of the hippocampus in both environmental representation and temporal dynamics. Discrete place fields of dCA3 neurons evenly covered all parts of the testing environments. In contrast, vCA3 neurons (1) rarely showed continuous two-dimensional place fields, (2) differentiated open and closed arms of a radial maze, and (3) discharged similar firing patterns with respect to the goals, both on multiple arms of a radial maze and during opposite journeys in a zigzag maze. In addition, theta power and the fraction of theta-rhythmic neurons were substantially reduced in the ventral compared with dorsal hippocampus. We hypothesize that the spatial representation in the septo-temporal axis of the hippocampus is progressively decreased. This change is paralleled with a reduction of theta rhythm and an increased representation of nonspatial information.
Apprentissage procédural chez l'enfant: études développementales et cliniques

Nous avons etudie les capacites d'apprentissage procedural (verbal, moteur et cognitif) chez l'enfant normal, l'enfant avec atteinte des noyaux gris centraux et l'enfant avec trouble specifique de langage (TSDL). Les resultats mettent en evidence 1) des capacites similaires d'apprentissage procedural dans les trois domaines chez les enfants de 8 a12 ans, suggerant une invariance developpementale 2) une atteinte globale des apprentissages proceduraux chez les enfants avec pathologie des noyaux gris centraux, sans evidence de plasticite et 3) un deficit procedural verbal chez les enfants avec TSDL, associe a un deficit procedural moteur lors de la co-morbidite avec un trouble de la coordination motrice, et combine avec un deficit procedural cognitif lors de la presence de mouvements choreiformes suggestifs d'une dysfonction striatale. Les resultats chez l'enfant indiquent la presence de sous-systemes fonctionnellement distincts au sein du systeme procedural et une independance des systemes mnesiques procedural et declaratif, comme chez l'adulte.