Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of minimal residual disease using reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction in t(8;21) acute myeloid leukemia: a multicenter study of 51 patients.

PURPOSE Most studies using various reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) techniques reported that the detection of the AML1-ETO fusion transcript was a common finding in long-term complete remission (CR) in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with t(8;21) translocation. However, larger prospective studies with interlaboratory quality control may be important to investigate more precisely the clinical usefulness of studying minimal residual disease with RT-PCR in t(8;21) AML. PATIENTS AND METHODS We collected 223 marrow samples from 51 patients with t(8;21) AML diagnosed in five centers and tested all samples by two different RT-PCR techniques (a nested technique and a one-step technique, with a sensitivity of 10(-6) and 10(-5), respectively) in two different laboratories. RESULTS Samples from 14 patients in long persistent CR (median follow-up duration, 112 months) were taken at least twice, and all were PCR-negative by both techniques. Samples were prospectively taken from 37 patients after achievement of first CR and/or second CR, before intensive consolidation treatment, and every 3 to 6 months after completion of therapy. Patients who converted to PCR negativity with the one-step technique (60%) or both techniques (48%) after CR achievement had a longer CR duration than those with persistently positive PCR results (two-sided log-rank test, P =.0001). Patients who became PCR-negative with the one-step technique before intensive consolidation (23%) had a lower relapse rate (11% v 72%) and a longer CR duration than those who remained persistently PCR-positive at that point (two-sided log-rank test, P =.0015). CONCLUSION Patients with AML with t(8;21) in long-term remission were all PCR-negative. In prospectively studied patients, a good correlation was found between negative PCR results and absence of relapse. Early negative results with the one-step RT-PCR technique, before consolidation treatment, seemed to carry an especially good prognosis, suggesting that RT-PCR analysis could help in choosing the type of consolidation therapy in patients with t(8;21) AML.
Computerized and Paper-and-Pencil Versions of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale: A Comparison of Psychometric Features and Respondent Preferences

Although the use of computerized assessment tools in educational and psychological settings has increased dramatically in recent years, limited information is available about the properties of computerized self-concept measures. The authors evaluated the characteristics of computerized and paper-and-pencil versions of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (SES)—one of the most widely used self-concept measures in educational and psychological research. Results showed that administration mode (computerized versus paper and pencil) had little effect on the psychometric properties of the SES (i.e., score magnitude, variability, and factor structure) but that the computerized version took longer and was preferred by examinees. With the exception of administration time, these results support the use of the computerized SES and its comparability to the paper-and-pencil version.
Individual Perceptions of Self-Actualization: What Functional Motives Are Linked to Fulfilling One’s Full Potential?

Maslow’s self-actualization remains a popular notion in academic research as well as popular culture. The notion that life’s highest calling is fulfilling one’s own unique potential has been widely appealing. But what do people believe they are doing when they pursue the realization of their full, unique potentials? Here, we examine lay perceptions of self-actualization. Self-actualizing, like any drive, is unlikely to operate without regard to biological and social costs and benefits. We examine which functional outcomes (e.g., gaining status, making friends, finding mates, caring for kin) people perceive as central to their individual self-actualizing. Three studies suggest that people most frequently link self-actualization to seeking status, and, concordant with life history theory, what people regard as self-actualizing varies in predictable ways across the life span and across individuals. Contrasting with self-actualization, people do not view other types of well-being—eudaimonic, hedonic, subjective—as furthering status-linked functional outcomes.
COPING STARTEGIES OF THE RELATIVES OF SCHIZOPHRENIC PATIENTS

Families caring for a member with a chronic severe mental illness like schizophrenia have to cope with a lot of burden and distress. The coping styles used by these families and their relationship to burden has not been studied in Indian families. This study aims to identify the coping styles adopted by the relatives of schizophrenic patients. 44 patients with schizophrenia and 44 relatives from an outpatient psychiatric clinic were assessed. Resignation, an emotion-focussed coping strategy, was found to be more commonly employed by the relatives, than other strategies. Majority of the relatives failed to maintain social contacts. Levels of burden and negative symptoms correlated significantly with the resignation strategy. Analysis of the coping strategies of the relatives is essential before clinical interventions with families are planned to improve the coping skills of the carers.
The Study of Risk and Returns on Investments in Information Technology

Information Technology (IT) investments are the largest capital budgeting item among most knowledge-and technology-intensive corporations. There is significant interest among both researchers and practitioners in understanding the relationship between IT investments and stock returns. This paper examines the role of information technology investments in asset pricing and investigates whether investments in information technology (IT) innovation can yield better stock returns on a risk-adjusted basis. Specifically, we investigate the risk and returns on the investment in IT innovations among the publicly traded investment banking companies. From an investor’s perspective, can we make a better return by picking those companies that are actively engaged in IT innovations on a risk-adjusted basis? We compute the Sharpe ratio –a reward-to-risk ratio for each stock in the investment banking sector over a ten-year period from 1994 through to 2003. We adopt a multi-factor model Cahart (1997) to analyze and explain the risk and returns of the firms ranked high on IT innovations versus those firms ranked low on IT innovations. By tying the investment in IT innovations to stock market returns, we shed lights and insights on the question whether investors can gain a better return on a risk-adjusted basis by selecting those companies that are the front-runners in IT innovations.
Macrophage Depletion Impairs Corneal Wound Healing after Autologous Transplantation in Mice

Purpose Macrophages have been shown to play a critical role in the wound healing process. In the present study, the role of macrophages in wound healing after autologous corneal transplantation was investigated by depleting local infiltrated macrophages. Methods Autologous corneal transplantation model was used to induce wound repair in Balb/c mice. Macrophages were depleted by sub-conjunctival injections of clodronate-containing liposomes (Cl2MDP-LIP). The presence of CD11b+ F4/80+ macrophages, α-smooth muscle actin+ (α-SMA+) myofibroblasts, CD31+ vascular endothelial cells and NG2 + pericytes was examined by immunohistochemical and corneal whole-mount staining 14 days after penetrating keratoplasty. Peritoneal macrophages were isolated from Balb/c mice and transfused into conjunctiva to examine the recovery role of macrophages depletion on wound healing after autologous corneal transplantation. Results Sub-conjunctival Cl2MDP-LIP injection significantly depleted the corneal resident phagocytes and infiltrated macrophages into corneal stroma. Compared with the mice injected with PBS-liposome, the Cl2MDP-LIP-injected mice showed few inflammatory cells, irregularly distributed extracellular matrix, ingrowth of corneal epithelium into stroma, and even the detachment of donor cornea from recipient. Moreover, the number of macrophages, myofibroblasts, endothelial cells and pericytes was also decreased in the junction area between the donor and recipient cornea in macrophage-depleted mice. Peritoneal macrophages transfusion recovered the defect of corneal wound healing caused by macrophages depletion. Conclusions Macrophage depletion significantly impairs wound healing after autologous corneal transplantation through at least partially impacting on angiogenesis and wound closure.
Gendering the vote for populist radical-right parties

ABSTRACT Why do more men than women vote for populist radical-right (PRR) parties? And do more men than women still vote for the PRR? Can attitudes regarding gender and gender equality explain these differences (if they exist)? These are the questions that Spierings and Zaslove explore in this article. They begin with an analysis of men's and women's voting patterns for PRR parties in seven countries, comparing these results with voting for mainstream (left-wing and right-wing) parties. They then examine the relationship between attitudes and votes for the populist radical right, focusing on economic redistribution, immigration, trust in the European Union, law and order, environmental protection, personal freedom and development, support for gender equality, and homosexuality. They conclude that more men than women do indeed support PRR parties, as many studies have previously demonstrated. However, the difference is often overemphasized in the literature, in part since it is examined in isolation and not compared with voting for (centre-right) mainstream parties. Moreover, the most important reasons that voters support PRR parties seem to be the same for men and for women; both vote for the populist radical right because of their opposition to immigration. In general, there are no consistent cross-country patterns regarding gender attitudes explaining differences between men and women. There are some recurring country-specific findings though. Most notably: first, among women, economic positions seem to matter less; and economically more left-wing (and those with anti-immigrant attitudes) women also vote for the PRR in Belgium, France, Norway and Switzerland; and, second, those who hold authoritarian or nativist views in combination with a strong belief that gays and lesbians should be able to ‘live their lives as they choose’ are disproportionately much more likely to vote for PRR parties in Sweden and Norway. Despite these findings, Spierings and Zaslove argue that the so-called ‘gender gap’ is often overemphasized. In other words, it appears that populist radical-right parties, with respect to sex and gender, are in many ways simply a more radical version of centre-right parties.
Global Citizenship: A Typology for Distinguishing its Multiple Conceptions

Abstract The promotion of ‘Global Citizenship’ (GC) has emerged as a goal of schooling in many countries, symbolising a shift away from national towards more global conceptions of citizenship. It currently incorporates a proliferation of approaches and terminologies, mirroring both the diverse conceptions of its nature and the socio-politico contexts within which it is appropriated. This paper seeks to clarify this ambiguity by constructing a typology to identify and distinguish the diverse conceptions of GC. The typology is based on two general forms of GC: cosmopolitan based and advocacy based. The former incorporates four distinct conceptions of GC – namely, the political, moral, economic and cultural; the latter incorporates four other conceptions – namely, the social, critical, environmental and spiritual. Subsequently, we briefly illustrate how the typology can be used to evaluate the critical features of a curriculum plan designed to promote GC in England. The typology provides a novel and powerful means to analyse the key features of the very diverse range of educational policies and programmes that promote GC.
Speech Attribute Recognition using Context-Dependent Modeling

—Speech attributes, such as places and manners of articulation are robust against cross-speaker variation and environmental distortions. They have been used in various speech processing applications such as spoken language identiﬁcation, speaker recognition and speech recognition. In this paper, we propose a method to recognize speech attributes by using a context-dependent modeling of the attributes, called bi-attributes. Experimental results on the TIMIT database show that the context-dependent modeling reduces frame classiﬁcation error by 13.2% and 16.1% relatively over the context-independent modeling for manner and place classiﬁcation, respectively. In addition, when fused with phone posteriors to improve phone recognition accuracy, the attribute context dependent modeling gives a 9.9% relative phone error rate reduction over the attribute context independent modeling.
The early postoperative course of surgical sleep apnea patients

Recent guidelines from the American Society of Anesthesiologists recommended postoperative monitoring for most patients undergoing surgery for obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). These guidelines, however, are largely based on retrospective literature and expert opinion. The appropriate level of postoperative monitoring remains controversial. Our objective was to prospectively document the early postoperative course of patients undergoing OSA surgery.
Epigenetic Activation of the Human Growth Hormone Gene Cluster during Placental Cytotrophoblast Differentiation

ABSTRACT The hGH cluster contains a single human pituitary growth hormone gene (hGH-N) and four placenta-specific paralogs. Activation of the cluster in both tissues depends on 5′ remote regulatory elements. The pituitary-specific locus control elements DNase I-hypersensitive site I (HSI) and HSII, located 14.5 kb 5′ of the cluster (position −14.5), establish a continuous domain of histone acetylation that extends to and activates hGH-N in the pituitary gland. In contrast, histone modifications in placental chromatin are restricted to the more 5′-remote HSV-HSIII region (kb −28 to −32) and to the placentally expressed genes in the cluster, with minimal modification between these two regions. These data predict distinct modes of hGH cluster gene activation in the pituitary and placenta. Here we used cell culture models to track structural changes at the hGH locus through placental-gene activation. The data revealed that this process was initiated in primary cytotrophoblasts by histone H3K4 di- and trimethylation and H4 acetylation restricted to HSV and to the individual placental-gene repeat (PGR) units within the cluster. Later stages of transcriptional induction were accompanied by enhancement and extension of these modifications and by robust H3 acetylation at HSV, at HSIII, and throughout the placental-gene regions. These data suggested that elements restricted to HSIII-HSV regions and each individual PGR might be sufficient for activation of the hCS genes. This model was tested by comparing hCS transgene expression in the placentas of mouse embryos carrying a full hGH cluster to that in placentas in which the HSIII-HSV region was directly linked to the individual hCS-A PGR unit. The findings indicate that the HSIII-HSV region and the PGR units, although targeted for initial chromatin structural modifications, are insufficient to activate gene expression and that this process is dependent on additional, as-yet-unidentified chromatin determinants.
Unsupervised Segmentation Helps Supervised Learning of Character Tagging for Word Segmentation and Named Entity Recognition

This paper describes a novel character tagging approach to Chinese word segmentation and named entity recognition (NER) for our participation in Bakeoff-4.1 It integrates unsupervised segmentation and conditional random fields (CRFs) learning successfully, using similar character tags and feature templates for both word segmentation and NER. It ranks at the top in all closed tests of word segmentation and gives promising results for all closed and open NER tasks in the Bakeoff. Tag set selection and unsupervised segmentation play a critical role in this success.
Bypassing the Traditional Leadership: Who's Minding the Store?.

By tradition, the leading association of scholars in the field of foreign lan guages and literatures is the Modern Language Association, and under its umbrella, ADFL functions as an association for departments, focusing at tention on "matters of language program administration" (Welles 1). In this way, the MLA has built into its structure a recognition that the administra tion of departments calls for special attention, that administrators of depart ments need their own seminars and publications in addition to the scholarly meetings and journals that otherwise provide MLA members with venues for discussion.
Impact of International Education on Students' Attitude toward English as Lingua Franca

English has long been widely used as a lingua franca (ELF) for intercultural communication and inevitably evolved into various varieties due to its nativisation and localization in different contexts. Its recognition and acceptance, accordingly, are crucial for successful intercultural communication, a goal of international education in higher educational settings. Much research on ELF or world Englishes has been conducted and has findings related to attitudes toward the sociolinguistic reality due to the use of ELF. However, sporadic studies have been conducted on attitudes towards ELF of the students in settings where international education of different forms are provided, and none has been done to compare impacts of these forms on students' ELF attitudes. Therefore, the study introduced in this paper aimed to investigate ELF attitudes of students studying in two types of programs in the same university, one type (the first type) with English as instructional means for all courses and to local students and their international classmates and the other (the second type) with English used only in the 4-year English classes. Questionnaire data were collected and analyzed statistically. Results of the study show significant differences in attitudes of the two groups and have implications for the international education to students in higher educational settings.
Using the search conference for planning a merger participatively

This paper presents the theory and practice of search conferences, illustrated with the case study of a recent merger. Increasingly, business leaders want to engage with their workforces and stakeholders in together deciding what they want to achieve and how to get there. Leaders see participative strategic planning as a significant opportunity, although hitherto the lack of techniques for large group involvement has been a blockage. Search conferences ‐ whether with staff, managers, suppliers or customers ‐ offer a tried and tested process for co‐operating together effectively. They enable the maximum use of human resources, commitment, learning and flexibility so that innovation is unlocked. Originally invented by Eric Trist and Fred Emery of the Tavistock Institute in the 1960s, the basis of the search conference is in open systems theory and active, adaptive planning.
The myths surrounding people with albinism in South Africa and Zimbabwe

The myths associated with albinism in South Africa and Zimbabwe have a profound influence on the lives of people with the condition, from the moment of their birth until their death. The beliefs and superstitions surrounding the condition affect family life and interfere with access to education, employment and marriage. Drawing on a common interest in albinism, specialist research interests, and recent multi-disciplinary studies and research carried out in South Africa and Zimbabwe, we examine these myths and trace their impact on the lives of people with albinism. We trace the actuality of living with the condition in parts of present-day southern Africa, as reported in the first-hand accounts of people with albinism. We compare attitudes to albinism in different cultures and groups, and suggest ways in which the myths that have surrounded people with albinism for so long, which frequently have very negative connotations, can be challenged by a more scientific and culturally neutral explanation.
Software Entropy in Agile Product Evolution

As agile software development principles and methods are being adopted by large software product organizations it is important to understand the role of software entropy. That is, how the maintainability of a system may degrade over time due to continuous change. This may on one side affect the ability to act agile in planning and development. On the other side, an agile process may affect growth of entropy. We report from a case study of a successful software product line organization that has adopted the agile development method Evo, showing how agility and entropy are negatively related. We conclude this study by suggesting a two-step approach to manage entropy while maintaining process agility. First, the system needs to be restructured to establish a level of manageable entropy, and then, that the agile process must be complemented with continuous semi-automated quality monitoring and refactoring support.
THE PARTNERKA - WHAT IS IT, AND WHY SHOULD YOU CARE?

Scareware, ‘Canadian Pharmacy’ spam, adult sites, comment spam on forums and blogs – we’ve seen these plaguing our web and email experience over the past few years. What links them together? What makes them grow in volume and complexity? Who is behind them? What business model drives their profi ts to millions of dollars annually? The answer is hundreds of well-organized affi liate networks. They’re known as ‘partnerka’ in Russia, where they form a booming business, yet exist in other places as well. Thousands of affi liates, each calling themselves a ‘webmaster’, work day and night to drive as much user traffi c to their partners’ stores as possible. The stores sell fake watches, fake anti-virus software, fake pills and fake love – the webmasters get their commission, making thousands of dollars per day. This presentation will expose their economic model, as well as describe the most popular Russian ‘partnerka’ networks and their relation to spam and malware. It will reveal some ‘insider’ statistics and information, show the tools used for ‘black SEO’ (search engine optimizations), and explain its terminology and techniques.
Running away from home: understanding visitor experiences and behaviour at sport tourism events

Existing sport tourism research has been subject to claims of lacking coherence, theoretical underpinning and empirical support. This paper addresses these issues through an examination of a group of distance runners participating in the Cyprus International Four-day Challenge. Using the concepts of ‘serious leisure’ and social identification, the behaviours of this group of sport tourists are described and explained. The key finding was the strength of identification that participants had with the activity, and the nature of the event itself, which made this identity much more salient than other identities during the course of the event. This sense of identification was used to explain the unique ethos of the group, the use of significant personal effort, the perseverance of participants, the durable benefits obtained by the runners and the career structure associated with this social world. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.