Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Initiation of Colorectal Cancer: Where do the Two Hits Hit?

It is widely believed that stem cells are of special importance for colorectal cancer initiation. The earliest event being the inactivation of both alleles of the Adenomatous Polyposis Coli (APC) gene, it is thought that the stem cells are the most likely target for these two ? rst hits. Indeed, at the ? rst glance, short-lived differentiated cells cannot sustain a mutation longenough for the second hit to occur, because of the constantapoptosis/renewal process in epithelial tissues. Using a straightforward calculation, we show that this intuitive argument is incorrect.Our model basedon the conventional view of colon cryptarchitecture, suggests thatat least one ofthe two hits mayoccur in the migrating compartment. We suggest that a possible role of differentiating cells in cancer initiation cannot be discarded simply based on the fact that theyare short–lived. More evidence is neededto understandthe cellular origins of cancer and to identify whether or not a double hit in a daughter cell can be “immortalizing”. In this study we discuss several scenarios and propose some experiments which can shed light on these questions.
Exacerbating and reversing lysosomal storage diseases: from yeast to humans

Lysosomal storage diseases (LSDs) arise from monogenic deficiencies in lysosomal proteins and pathways and are characterized by a tissue-wide accumulation of a vast variety of macromolecules, normally specific to each genetic lesion. Strategies for treatment of LSDs commonly depend on reduction of the offending metabolite(s) by substrate depletion or enzyme replacement. However, at least 44 of the ~50 LSDs are currently recalcitrant to intervention. Murine models have provided significant insights into our understanding of many LSD mechanisms; however, these systems do not readily permit phenotypic screening of compound libraries, or the establishment of genetic or gene-environment interaction networks. Many of the genes causing LSDs are evolutionarily conserved, thus facilitating the application of models system to provide additional insight into LSDs. Here, we review the utility of yeast models of 3 LSDs: Batten disease, cystinosis, and Niemann-Pick type C disease. We will focus on the translation of research from yeast models into human patients suffering from these LSDs. We will also discuss the use of yeast models to investigate the penetrance of LSDs, such as Niemann-Pick type C disease, into more prevalent syndromes including viral infection and obesity.
Accumulation of Ergopeptide Alkaloids in Symbiotic Tall Fescue Grown under Deficits of Soil Water and Nitrogen Fertilizer

The fungus Acremonium coenophialum is endophytically associated with tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreber). Within this symbiotum the fungus produces ergopeptide alkaloids, which are associated with livestock toxicoses. Environmental effects on the production of ergot alkaloids within the symbiotum are unknown. We conducted a greenhouse study of the effects of flooding, nitrogen rate during fertilization (11, 73, and 220 mg of N per pot weekly), nitrogen form (3.4 and 34 mg of N as NH4+ or NO3- per pot), and drought stress (-0.03, -0.05, and -0.50 MPa) on ergopeptide alkaloid concentrations in one genotype of nonsymbiotic and symbiotic tall fescue grown in plastic pots. It was determined that the concentration of ergovaline, the major type of ergopeptide alkaloid, was increased but was not as high as that in nonflooded controls. Total ergopeptide and ergovaline concentrations in plants receiving high (220 mg of N per pot) and low (11 mg of N per pot) levels of NH4NO3 fertilization were not affected by flooding. The form of nitrogen was important since all concentrations of NO3--N increased ergopeptide alkaloid content, as opposed to the effects of NH4+-N, which was effective only at high concentrations (34 mg of N per pot). Ergopeptide concentrations were highest in drought-stressed plants grown at -0.50 MPa and fertilized at the moderate or high N rate. The results suggest that within this genotype, ergopeptide alkaloid biosynthesis by the fungus is not appreciably affected by flooding but is greatly increased by high rates of N fertilization and moderate water deficit.
The application of telemedicine to geriatric medicine.

BACKGROUND Telemedicine has the potential to improve access to the specialty of geriatric medicine, particularly in rural and remote settings. While telemedicine is widely used in some specialities, this is not yet the case in geriatric medicine. OBJECTIVE To review the current literature to identify proven and potential strategies for application of telemedicine in geriatric medical practice. METHOD A comprehensive review of literature pertaining to the application of telemedicine in geriatric medicine and relevant related sub-specialties was undertaken. RESULTS A large number of small studies of limited quality, and a small number of robust studies including randomised trials, were identified. CONCLUSIONS There is evidence to suggest that a variety of telemedicine techniques can be applied effectively and safely in geriatric medicine across a variety of clinical settings. Patient satisfaction is generally reported as high. However, caution is advised due to the paucity of robust studies in the literature.
Privacy Concerns , Voluntary Disclosure of Information , and Unraveling : An Experiment

Privacy Concerns, Voluntary Disclosure of Information, and Unraveling: An Experiment by Volker Benndorf, Dorothea Kübler and Hans-Theo Normann* We study the voluntary revelation of private, personal information in a labor-market experiment with a lemons structure where workers can reveal their productivity at a cost. While rational revelation improves a worker's payout, it imposes a negative externality on others and may trigger further unraveling. Our data suggest that subjects reveal their productivity less frequently than predicted in equilibrium. A loaded frame emphasizing personal information about workers' health leads to even less revelation. We show that three canonical behavioral models all predict too little rather than too much revelation: level-k reasoning, quantal-response equilibrium, and to a lesser extent inequality aversion.
Density Maximization in Context-Sense Metric Space for All-words WSD

This paper proposes a novel smoothing model with a combinatorial optimization scheme for all-words word sense disam-biguation from untagged corpora. By generalizing discrete senses to a continuum, we introduce a smoothing in context-sense space to cope with data-sparsity resulting from a large variety of linguistic context and sense, as well as to exploit sense-interdependency among the words in the same text string. Through the smoothing, all the optimal senses are obtained at one time under maximum marginal likelihood criterion, by competitive probabilistic kernels made to reinforce one another among nearby words, and to suppress conﬂicting sense hypotheses within the same word. Experimental results conﬁrmed the superiority of the proposed method over conventional ones by showing the better performances beyond most-frequent-sense base-line performance where none of SemEval-2 unsupervised systems reached.
Supervisory Data Alignment for Text-Independent Voice Conversion

We propose new supervisory data alignment methods for text-independent voice conversion which do not need parallel training corpora. Phonetic information is used as a restriction during alignment for mapping the data from the source speaker onto the parameter space of a target speaker. Both linear and nonlinear methods are derived by considering alignment accuracy and topology preservation. For the linear alignment, we consider common phoneme clusters of the source and target space as benchmarks and adapt the source data vector to the target space while maintaining the relative phonetic positions among neighborhood clusters. In order to preserve the topological structure of the source parameter space and improve the stability of conversion and the accuracy of the phonetic mapping, a supervised self-organizing learning algorithm considering phonetic restriction is proposed for iteratively improving the alignment outcome of the previous step. Both the linear and nonlinear methods can also be applied in the cross-lingual case. Evaluation results show that the proposed methods improve the performance of alignment in terms of both alignment accuracy and stability for text-independent voice conversion in intra-lingual and cross-lingual cases.
Impact of Capital Structure on Financial Performance of the Listed Trading Companies in Sri Lanka

Capital structure is a financial tool that helps to determine ‘how do firms choose their capital structure? ’ a firms capital structure is then the composition or structure of its liabilities. In this study, an attempt has been made to analyze the Capital structure and financial performance during 2006 to 2010 (05 years) financial year of listed trading companies in Sri Lanka. For the purpose of this study, the data was extracted from the annual reports of sample companies. Correlation and multiple regression analysis are used for analysis. The results revealed there is positive relationship between capital structure and financial performance. And also capital structure is significantly impact on financial performance of the firm showed that debt asset ratio, debt equity ratio and long term debt correlated with gross profit margin(GPM), net profit margin(NPM), Return on Capital Employed(ROCE),Return on Asset (ROA) & Return on Equity(ROE )at significant level of 0.05 and 0.1
The Impact of Chemical Protective Clothing on Military Operational Performance

Wearing chemical protective clothing (CPC) while conducting military operations limits a soldier's dexterity, mobility, command and control, communications, and endurance. A series of field studies was conducted to identify mission degradations from the protective clothing on the chemically contaminated battlefield. The studies differed in complexity but had a common goal of comparing task performance and endurance of soldiers wearing the full protective ensemble versus wearing the standard military field uniform. This article summarizes 3 U.S. Army programs. One of them is called the Physiological and Psychological Effects of the NBC Environment and Sustained Operations on Systems in Combat. A review of 19 studies concerning combat, combat support, and combat service support systems shows that most military tasks can be performed satisfactorily while CPC is worn, but usually, extra time is required to perform such tasks. Higher ambient temperatures and high workloads are especially detrimental to enduran.
Sparse Bayesian Learning and the Relevance Vector Machine

This paper introduces a general Bayesian framework for obtaining sparse solutions to regression and classification tasks utilising models linear in the parameters. Although this framework is fully general, we illustrate our approach with a particular specialisation that we denote the 'relevance vector machine' (RVM), a model of identical functional form to the popular and state-of-the-art 'support vector machine' (SVM). We demonstrate that by exploiting a probabilistic Bayesian learning framework, we can derive accurate prediction models which typically utilise dramatically fewer basis functions than a comparable SVM while offering a number of additional advantages. These include the benefits of probabilistic predictions, automatic estimation of 'nuisance' parameters, and the facility to utilise arbitrary basis functions (e.g. non-'Mercer' kernels). We detail the Bayesian framework and associated learning algorithm for the RVM, and give some illustrative examples of its application along with some comparative benchmarks. We offer some explanation for the exceptional degree of sparsity obtained, and discuss and demonstrate some of the advantageous features, and potential extensions, of Bayesian relevance learning.
Regulation of the Interleukin-1-induced Signaling Pathways by a Novel Member of the Protein Phosphatase 2C Family (PP2Cε)*

Although TAK1 signaling plays essential roles in eliciting cellular responses to interleukin-1 (IL-1), a proinflammatory cytokine, how the IL-1-TAK1 signaling pathway is positively and negatively regulated remains poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the possible role of a novel protein phosphatase 2C (PP2C) family member, PP2Cε, in the regulation of the IL-1-TAK1 signaling pathway. PP2Cε was composed of 303 amino acids, and the overall similarity of amino acid sequence between PP2Cε and PP2Cα was found to be 26%. Ectopic expression of PP2Cε inhibited the IL-1- and TAK1-induced activation of mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 4 (MKK4)-c-Jun N-terminal kinase or MKK3-p38 signaling pathway. PP2Cε dephosphorylated TAK1 in vitro. Co-immunoprecipitation experiments indicated that PP2Cε associates stably with TAK1 and attenuates the binding of TAK1 to MKK4 or MKK6. Ectopic expression of a phosphatase-negative mutant of PP2Cε, PP2Cε(D/A), which acted as a dominant negative form, enhanced both the association between TAK1 and MKK4 or MKK6 and the TAK1-induced activation of an AP-1 reporter gene. The association between PP2Cε and TAK1 was transiently suppressed by IL-1 treatment of the cells. Taken together, these results suggest that, in the absence of IL-1-induced signal, PP2Cε contributes to keeping the TAK1 signaling pathway in an inactive state by associating with and dephosphorylating TAK1.
Analisis Tingkat Pendapatan Keluarga Wanita Single Parent: Studi Kasus Kelurahan Sesetan, Kecamatan Denpasar Selatan, Kota Denpasar

Women have significant roles in development, such as women as human resources in development, women as a subject in development, and women as a family builder. This study focused on how women’s role as a family builder in a single parent status. The variables used in this study are number of dependents, age, education, and employment status to be analyzed its impact on income of single parent women. This research took a place in Sesetan Village, South Denpasar with the number of samples taken were 84 samples with the purposive sampling method. The data was collected by questionnaires and interviews. Multiple linear regression analysis with quantitative and qualitative independent variables was used as the analysis technique. Based on the analysis result had found that variables of number of dependents, age, education, and employment status had a positive impact as a partial to the income of single parent women. The government’s efforts for all the kinds of women coaching are important to be developed, with the aim to the community prosperity especially single parent women who have heavier burden of life. The attention of education, health, and economy is necessary to improved to ease the burden for the families of the single parent women.
Evaluating the reliability of users as human sensors of social media security threats

While the human as a sensor concept has been utilised extensively for the detection of threats to safety and security in physical space, especially in emergency response and crime reporting, the concept is largely unexplored in the area of cyber security. Here, we evaluate the potential of utilising users as human sensors for the detection of cyber threats, specifically on social media. For this, we have conducted an online test and accompanying questionnaire-based survey, which was taken by 4,457 users. The test included eight realistic social media scenarios (four attack and four non-attack) in the form of screenshots, which the participants were asked to categorise as “likely attack” or “likely not attack”. We present the overall performance of human sensors in our experiment for each exhibit, and also apply logistic regression to evaluate the feasibility of predicting that performance based on different characteristics of the participants. Such prediction would be useful where accuracy of human sensors in detecting and reporting social media security threats is important. We identify features that are good predictors of a human sensor's performance and evaluate them in both a theoretical ideal case and two more realistic cases, the latter corresponding to limited access to a user's characteristics.
Thyroid Hormone Regulates reelin and dab1Expression During Brain Development

The reelin and dab1 genes are necessary for appropriate neuronal migration and lamination during brain development. Since these processes are controlled by thyroid hormone, we studied the effect of thyroid hormone deprivation and administration on the expression of reelin anddab1. As shown by Northern analysis, in situ hybridization, and immunohistochemistry studies, hypothyroid rats expressed decreased levels of reelinRNA and protein during the perinatal period [embryonic day 18 (E18) and postnatal day 0 (P0)]. The effect was evident in Cajal-Retzius cells of cortex layer I, as well as in layers V/VI, hippocampus, and granular neurons of the cerebellum. At later ages, however, Reelin was more abundant in the cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, and olfactory bulb of hypothyroid rats (P5), and no differences were detected at P15. Conversely, Dab1 levels were higher at P0, and lower at P5 in hypothyroid animals. In line with these results, reelin RNA and protein levels were higher in cultured hippocampal slices from P0 control rats compared to those from hypothyroid animals. Significantly, thyroid-dependent regulation of reelin anddab1 was confirmed in vivo and in vitro by hormone treatment of hypothyroid rats and organotypic cultures, respectively. In both cases, thyroid hormone led to an increase in reelin expression. Our data suggest that the effects of thyroid hormone on neuronal migration may be in part mediated through the control of reelin anddab1 expression during brain ontogenesis.
Accuracy of Time-difference-of-arrival based source localization algorithms under temperature variations

Time-differences-of-arrival measurements play a relevant role in localizing and tracking of acoustic sources. Though a huge literature has been devoted to this topic the influence of the propagation speed on the localization accuracy has been largely disregarded. The sound speed is usually supposed to be exactly known, but actually this information is far from being available in real situations, where the environment conditions are uncontrolled and might significantly change. Therefore the accuracy of the existing algorithms under temperature variations and the consequent propagation speed deviation is of interest. Two well known closed-form localization methods are reviewed under the hypothesis that the sound speed is wrongly assumed due to unknown temperature variations. After a mathematical treatment, simulation and measurement results are shown.
Indonesian automatic speech recognition system using English-based acoustic model

Building an automatic speech recognizer (ASR) means that one has to provide the acoustic model, language model and lexicon for the intended language, which is also applied for Indonesian ASR. Unfortunately, providing acoustic model for a certain language is quite expensive, unlike the language model and the lexicon. This is because one has to record many utterances from several speakers to build a speaker independent ASR. In our research, we attempted to build an Indonesian ASR without providing the Indonesian acoustic model directly. Instead, we made use English acoustic model and mapped English phoneme into Indonesian one. There are 39 English phonemes and 29 Indonesian phonemes. For special Indonesian phoneme with no corresponding English phoneme, we tried to make estimation such as “ny” is mapped into “n” and “y”. There are 9,509 Indonesian words equipped with corresponding English phoneme. The English acoustic model size is 5,523 KB and the Indonesian language model is built from 405 KB. By customizing Sphinx (a Hidden Markov Model based ASR tool) with Indonesian lexicon and Indonesian language model, the Indonesian ASR has been built. The goal of this paper is to compare the system's accuracy with existing Indonesian ASR that use Indonesian acoustic model.
Interactions of cold stress and Pasteurella haemolytica in the pathogenesis of pneumonic pasteurellosis in calves: changes in pulmonary function.

Thirteen healthy neonatal Holstein calves were cold stressed twice by hosing with cold water for 20 minutes, 12 hours between hosings. Measurements of the pattern of ventilation [tidal volume (VT), respiratory frequency (f), minute ventilation (VMIN), and functional residual capacity (FRC)], gas exchange properties of the lungs [alveolar ventilation (VA), oxygen uptake (VO2), CO2 production (VCO2), dead space ventilation (VD), dead space/tidal volume ratio (VD/VT), arterial oxygen tension (PaO2), arterial CO2 tension (PaCO2) and alveolar-arterial oxygen difference (AaDO2)] and of the mechanical properties of the pulmonary system [dynamic compliance (Cdyn), pulmonary resistance (RL), and total respiratory system resistance (RRS)] were taken. Calves responded to chilling by increasing VO2 and VCO2 necessitating an increase in VA. This was accomplished by increasing VT with reciprocal decreases in f so that VMIN remained constant. There was no change in Cdyn, RL, or AaDO2. Seven of these 13 calves were then exposed to intratracheal inoculation of 2 X 10(9) organisms of Pasteurella haemolytica, the remaining calves serving as controls. Within 1 hour, calves exposed to P haemolytica had increased VMIN, f, VD/VT, and VD. There was a decrease in PaO2 associated with increased AaDO2, but no change in PaCO2, Cdyn or RL. By 3 hours after inoculation, there were pronounced changes in PaO2 and AaDO2, and Cdyn was reduced below base-line values. By 12 hours after inoculation, calves infected with P haemolytica had increased RL and RRS and PaCO2, in addition to the previously mentioned changes. Data from Pasteurella-exposed calves indicate that gas exchange impairment and peripheral lung injury occur rapidly and that increases in airway resistance develop relatively late in the disease. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
INVESTIGATING THE PROBLEMS FACED BY THE TEACHERS IN DEVELOPING ENGLISH WRITING SKILLS

Teaching English writing skills involves developing linguistic and communicative competence of the learner which is quite a challenging task. Many factors hinder the process of teaching and learning these skills. Most of the students of public sector institutes do not perform well in English writing tasks and ultimately face average or poor results in academics. The purpose of this study is to highlight the problems which hinder the teachers in developing English writing skills. Government sector institutes of district Sargodha are the focus of this study. These institutes contain students from both rural and urban areas. The Population of this study comprises 9 English language teachers. The data has been collected through the tool of structured interviews. The collected data has been analyzed descriptively. This study is not only to point out the problematic factors but also suggest some remedial measures to improve the situation. The research findings and suggestions would facilitate the teachers and the concerning authorities to improve the ELT situation in public sector institutes.