Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acute phase proteins, C-reactive protein and serum amyloid A protein, as prognostic markers in the elderly inpatient.

AIM to study the clinical significance and potential utility of measuring serum amyloid A protein (SAA) compared with the classical acute phase protein, C-reactive protein (CRP). METHOD a 3 month prospective study on 66 women, mean age 83 years (range 69-106) and 33 men, mean age 84 years (range 69-95), admitted to the geriatric medicine unit at Hammersmith Hospital. CRP and SAA were determined on admission and at intervals throughout hospital stay; outcome end-points were death during the study, detection of infection, duration of admission and early re-admission to hospital after discharge. RESULTS CRP and SAA responses were highly correlated (r = 0.75, P = 0.0001). However, the SAA response was greater than that of CRP in most individuals, with a median ratio of initial SAA to CRP of 2.2 in patients with infective pathology and 1.6 in those with inflammatory pathology. Median (range) SAA on admission was 98 (0.1-940) mg/ml in patients with infection and was twice that observed in patients with other causes of inflammation, median value 50 (0.6-699) mg/l. There was no difference between median CRP on admission in patients with infection or inflammation, median value 53 (0.1-235) and 51.5 (5-246) mg/l respectively. Initial and peak levels of CRP, but not of SAA, were significantly greater in patients who subsequently died, whereas high levels of both proteins predicted length of admission and early re-admission. CONCLUSION major elevations of the serum concentrations of CRP and SAA indicated serious disease and predicted poor outcome. Measurement of SAA as well as CRP enhanced the clinical utility of monitoring the acute phase response in 7% of patients with a diagnosis of infection.
Consciousness is not inherent in but emergent from life

Reber’s theory of the cellular basis of consciousness (CBC) is right to emphasize that we should study consciousness (sentience) in its simplest form, taking its evolution into account. However, not enough evidence is presented to support CBC’s unorthodox claim that even simple, one-celled organisms are conscious. As pointed out by other commentators, the CBC seems to be based on outdated ideas about evolution and does not acknowledge that consciousness could be an evolutionary novel feature. Such emergent features are abundant in living organisms. We review our own emergentist solution, in which consciousness evolved in the elaborating nervous systems of the first vertebrates and arthropods.
A lexical approach for classifying malicious URLs

Given the continuous growth of malicious activities on the internet, there is a need for intelligent systems to identify malicious web pages. It has been shown that URL analysis is an effective tool for detecting phishing, malware, and other attacks. Previous studies have performed URL classification using a combination of lexical features, network traffic, hosting information, and other strategies. These approaches require time-intensive lookups which introduce significant delay in real-time systems. In this paper, we describe a lightweight approach for classifying malicious web pages using URL lexical analysis alone. Our goal is to explore the upper-bound of the classification accuracy of a purely lexical approach. We also aim to develop a scalable approach which could be used in a real-time system. We develop a classification system based on lexical analysis of URLs. It correctly classifies URLs of malicious web pages with 99.1% accuracy, a 0.4% false positive rate, an F1-Score of 98.7, and 0.62 milliseconds on average. Our method also outperforms similar approaches when classifying out-of-sample data.
Caveolin 1 Expression Correlates with Poor Prognosis and Focal Adhesion Kinase Expression in Gastric Cancer

Objective:Caveolin 1 gene is known as a tumor promoter or suppressor, depending on the tumor type and/or tumor stage. We aimed to investigate the clinical significance of caveolin 1 protein (Cav1) expression in gastric cancer (GC). Methods: Immunohistochemistry was performed on tissue array slides containing 405 GC specimens. The relationships between Cav1 expression and clinicopathological factors, prognosis, focal adhesion kinase expression, mucin phenotypes and p53 expression were analyzed. Results: In non-neoplastic gastric mucosa, Cav1 was not expressed in the epithelial compartment. In GC, positive staining of Cav1 was shown in 22 (5.4%) of 405 cases and was significantly higher in the advanced GC group than in the early GC group (p = 0.037). Also, it was significantly associated with advanced pTNM stage (p = 0.027) and lymph node metastasis (p = 0.018). Moreover, survival analysis showed that Cav1 expression was an independent prognostic factor of poor survival (p = 0.028). In addition, the expression of Cav1 was positively correlated with that of focal adhesion kinase (p = 0.034). Conclusions: These results indicate that the expression of Cav1 is significantly correlated with cancer progression and poor prognosis in GC. Thus, Cav1 could supplement its protein expression for the diagnosis and treatment of GC.
Hepatocellular Carcinoma (hcc) Causes Death in Patients with Cirrhosis and Is One of the Most Prevalent Malignant Tumours Effect of Pravastatin on Survival in Patients with Advanced Hepatocellular Carcinoma. a Randomized Controlled Trial

HCC has a dismal 5-year survival rate, and there is no effective chemotherapy. Signal transduction inhibitors, including farnesyl transferase inhibitors and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) kinase inhibitors, have been developed as anti-cancer agents The activity of 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl coenzyme A (HMG-CoA) reductase, the rate-limiting enzyme of cholesterol biosynthesis, has been positively correlated with mammalian cell growth (Kandutsch and Chen, 1979). Mevalonic acid, produced by HMG-CoA reductase, regulates cell growth independent of cholesterogenesis: Ras p21 and lamins A and B undergo covalent modification at the carboxyl terminus by meval-onate-derived farnesyl isoprenoid (Goldstein and Brown, 1990). HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors exhibit cytostatic activity possibly as signal transduction inhibitors, when added to proliferating cells in culture or in vivo (Goldstein et al, 1979; Habenicht et al, 1980; Maltese et al, 1985). Decreased farnesyl isoprenoid formation by these inhibitors could lead to suppression of tumour growth by interfering with the function of Ras p21. However, there are no report on whether such inhibitors have potential in cancer patients. In this study, we tested whether administration of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor would contribute to the survival of patients with advanced HCC. We administered pravastatin (40 mg day –1), for which the liver has a high affinity, to HCC patients in a randomized controlled trial after transcatheter arterial emboliza-tion (TAE) (Charnsagavej et al, 1983; Yamada et al, 1983; Stefanini et al, 1995) and oral 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) as standard treatment. Patients The cohort comprised 91 consecutive patients with unresectable advanced HCC who were younger than 70 years old (Figure 1); 71 patients were male and 20 were female. The mean age was 62 (ranging from 39 to 70). The diagnosis of cirrhosis was confined by biochemical data and ultrasonography (US). The histologic diagnosis of underlying liver disease was carried out in 47 patients by US-guided liver biopsy. The diagnosis of HCC was based on clinical features and findings from US, computed tomography, and hepatic arteriography. Tumour stage (I–IV) was determined according to the criteria of the Primary Liver Cancer Study Group of Japan: stage I, a single tumour ≤2 cm in its greatest dimension without vascular invasion; stage II, a single tumour <2 cm in its greatest dimension with vascular invasion, or multiple tumours Summary Chemotherapy is not effective for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). HMG-CoA redutase inhibitors have cytostatic activity for cancer cells, but their clinical usefulness is unknown. To investigate whether pravastatin, a potent HMG-CoA reductase inhibitor, prolongs survival in …
The effect of stereotype threat on women's mathematical performance and motivation

Stereotype threat theory (STT) asserts that targets of negative stereotypes experience a performance-interfering evaluative threat, which arises from a pressure to disconfirm the relevant stereotype. In the present research, it was hypothesised that women would be paradoxically buffered from stereotype threat under conditions in which they acquiesced to the femalemathematics stereotype, by i) expecting men to outperform women, and ii) not aspiring to perform as well as men. Two studies tested the stereotype acquiescence hypothesis. Study 1 showed that women low in self-perceived mathematical ability were more likely than mathematically confident women to acquiesce to the female-mathematics stereotype, but were protected from stereotype threat effects on performance. In Study 2, women exhibited stereotype threat effects when told there was a slight gender difference in mathematics, but not when told there was a large difference. These findings provide evidence for the stereotype acquiescence hypothesis and, in so doing, provide support for STT’s assertion that stereotype threat’s effects on performance are not the result of an internalization of negative stereotypes, but a motivation to disconfirm them.
Pricing Stocks with Yardsticks and Sentiments

Human decision making by professionals trading daily in the stock market can be a daunting task. It includes decisions on whether to keep on investing or to exit a market subject to huge price swings, and how to price in news or rumors attributed to a specific stock. The question then arises how professional traders, who specialize in daily buying and selling large amounts of a given stock, know how to properly price a given stock on a given day? Here we introduce the idea that people use heuristics, or "rules of thumb", in terms of "yard sticks" from the performance of the other stocks in a stock index. The under- /over-performance with respect to such a yard stick then signifies a general negative/positive sentiment of the market participants towards a given stock. Using empirical data of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, stocks are shown to have daily performances with a clear tendency to cluster around the measures introduced by the yard sticks. We illustrate how sentiments, most likely due to insider information, can influence the performance of a given stock over period of months, and in one case years.
Automatic Moderation of Comments in a Large On-line Journalistic Environment

On-line journalistic sites publish several news and stories every day. Readers of these sites may comment a story, and, as a consequence, a single story might receive thousands of comments. The quality of these comments may vary a lot, from spams to truly useful information. Separating good from bad comments is the primary goal of comment moderation. In this paper we address the problem of automatic moderation of comments in a large journalistic Web site. Participants of the site may interact with each other, constituting a large social network. We propose a classification technique which combines underlying implicit patterns in the comments’ content with patterns hidden in the social network, and then uses the result for automatic moderation. We evaluate our proposed technique using a real collection of comments collected from the Slashdot forum. We compared the proposed technique against traditional ones, such as decision trees and SVMs. We observed that the proposed technique is very effective for scoring comments, reaching more than 96% of accuracy. Classifying comments seems to be a more complex task, and the proposed technique achieves almost 67% of accuracy. Further, the proposed technique is very fast, being able to classify and score hundreds of comments per minute.
Differing contribution of thiopurine methyltransferase to mercaptopurine versus thioguanine effects in human leukemic cells.

Thioguanine and mercaptopurine are prodrugs requiring conversion into thiopurine nucleotides to exert cytotoxicity. Thiopurine S-methyltransferase (TPMT), an enzyme subject to genetic polymorphism, catabolizes thiopurines into inactive methylated bases, but also produces methylthioguanine nucleotides and methylmercaptopurine nucleotides from thioguanine and mercaptopurine nucleotides, respectively. To study the effect of TPMT on activation versus inactivation of mercaptopurine and thioguanine, we used a retroviral gene transfer technique to develop human CCRF-CEM cell lines that did (TPMT+) and did not (MOCK) overexpress TPMT. After transduction, TPMT activities were 14-fold higher in the TPMT+ versus the MOCK cell lines (P < 0.001). TPMT+ cells were less sensitive to thioguanine than MOCK cells (IC(50) = 1.10+/- 0.12 microM versus 0.55 +/- 0.19 microM; P = 0.02); in contrast, TPMT+ cells were more sensitive to mercaptopurine than MOCK cells (IC(50) = 0.52 +/- 0.20 microM versus 1.50 +/- 0.23 microM; P < 0.01). The lower sensitivity of TPMT+ versus MOCK cells to thioguanine was associated with lower thioguanine nucleotide concentrations (917 +/- 282 versus 1515 +/- 183 pmol/5 x 10(6) cells; P = 0.01), higher methylthioguanine nucleotide concentrations (252 +/- 34 versus 27 +/- 10 pmol/5 x 10(6) cells; P = 0.01), less inhibition of de novo purine synthesis (13 versus 95%; P < 0.01), and lower deoxythioguanosine incorporation into DNA (2.0 +/- 0.6% versus 7.2 +/- 2.0%; P < 0.001). The higher sensitivity of TPMT+ cells to mercaptopurine was associated with higher concentrations of methylmercaptopurine nucleotide (2601 +/- 1055 versus 174 +/- 77 pmol/5 x 10(6) cells; P = 0.01) and greater inhibition of de novo purine synthesis (>99% versus 74%; P < 0.01) compared with MOCK cells. We conclude that methylation of mercaptopurine contributes to the antiproliferative properties of the drug, probably through inhibition of de novo purine synthesis by methylmercaptopurine nucleotides, whereas thioguanine is inactivated primarily by TPMT.
Naloxone Therapy During Focal Cerebral Ischemia Evaluation in a Primate Model

Conflicting reports have appeared in the literature regarding the effect of the opiate antago- nist naloxone on ischemic neurologic deficits. We report the results of a study using naloxone in our model of focal cerebral ischemia in the awake primate. A total of 14 adult baboons were subjected to six-hour occlusion of the left middle cerebral artery (MCA). Seven animals served as controls and seven received treatment with naloxone (5 mg/kg) beginning 30 min after MCA occlusion and continuing until two hours after reperfuslon. All animals developed profound hemiparesis and homonymous hemianopsia within seconds of inflating the MCA occluder. Acutely, therapy with naloxone partially reversed ischemic neurologic deficits in five of the seven treat- ment animals. Within minutes of receiving the loading dose of naloxone, responding animals were more alert and demonstrated improvements in motor function. Naloxone did not affect mortality: Three animals in the treatment group and two in the naloxone group died secondary to malignant intracranial pressure within 48 hours of the ischemic episode. In animals surviving the ischemic insult however, treatment with naloxone significantly improved neurologic outcome at 10 days (P < 0.05). Neuropathologic examinations in these dnimals revealed amelioration, of ischemic tissue damage, with three of the five suffering only small focal areas of infarction. (All control animals suffered large infarts.of the MCA territory.) Our results verify that naloxone can reverse ischemic deficits, and more importantly may improve the outcome from focal ischemic insults. Stroke Vol 15, No 4, 1984
Women, Wealth and Mobility

The extent of and changes in inter-generational mobility of wealth are central to understanding dynamics of wealth inequality but hard to measure. Using estate tax returns data, we observe that the share of women among the very wealthy (top 0.01%) in the United States peaked in the late 1960s, reaching almost 50%. Three decades on, women's share had declined to one third, a return to pre-war levels. We argue that this pattern mirrors the relative importance of inherited vs. self-made wealth in the economy and thus the gender-composition of the wealthiest may serve as a proxy for inter-generational wealth mobility. This proxy for "dynastic wealth'' suggests that wealth mobility in the past century decreased until the 1970s and rose thereafter, a pattern consistent with technological change driving long term trends in income inequality and mobility. Greater wealth mobility in recent decades is also consistent with the simultaneous rise in top income shares and relatively stable wealth concentration.
Social summarization: does social feedback improve access to speech data?

We extend the notion of social tagging to construct social summaries of complex multimedia materials. Our system allows students to apply time-indexed multimedia tags such as handwritten annotations or photos to different parts of lecture recordings. These tags can be used to straightforwardly access different parts of the lecture. The social component of the interface presents information about which tags are most frequently accessed by others: allowing students to infer those parts of the lecture of most interest to others. We demonstrate the utility of the approach in a 6 week fieldwork study. Social summaries are used much more than corresponding systems that do not provide social information. In addition, social tool use was correlated with high course marks.
Toward a Semantic Web service technology roadmap

Semantic Web services pledge the automation of core Web service tasks such as discovery, selection, composition, and execution. They are supposed to enable seamless interoperation between systems, whereby human intervention is kept at a minimum. Nevertheless, semantic Web services have not yet been adopted by the industry. Within the scope of this work, we discuss the correspondence of the viewpoints of experts from academia and industry with respect to current challenges and the latest achievements in the field of Semantic Web service research. Our primary objective is to identify technology locks between industrial needs and research activities. Additionally, we take a first step toward the production of a technology roadmap with respect to Semantic Web services. The discourse is based on the findings of a comprehensive Delphi study which was conducted in early 2007. In order to also assess Semantic Web services in an organizational context, we occasionally focus on the technologypsilas application as basis of integration architectures.
Promoter-proximal transcription factor binding is transcriptionally active when coupled with nucleosome repositioning in immediate vicinity

Previous studies have analyzed patterns of transcription, transcription factor (TF) binding or mapped nucleosome occupancy across the genome. These suggest that the three aspects are genetically connected but the cause and effect relationships are still unknown. For example, physiologic TF binding studies involve many TFs, consequently, it is difficult to assign nucleosome reorganization to the binding site occupancy of any particular TF. Therefore, several aspects remain unclear: does TF binding influence nucleosome (re)organizations locally or impact the chromatin landscape at a more global level; are all or only a fraction of TF binding a result of reorganization in nucleosome occupancy and do all TF binding and associated changes in nucleosome occupancy result in altered gene expression? With these in mind, following characterization of two states (before and after induction of a single TF of choice) we determined: (i) genomic binding sites of the TF, (ii) promoter nucleosome occupancy and (iii) transcriptome profiles. Results demonstrated that promoter-proximal TF binding influenced expression of the target gene when it was coupled to nucleosome repositioning at or close to its binding site in most cases. In contrast, only in few cases change in target gene expression was found when TF binding occurred without local nucleosome reorganization.
OOV Proper Name retrieval using topic and lexical context models

Retrieving Proper Names (PNs) specific to an audio document can be useful for vocabulary selection and OOV recovery in speech recognition, as well as in keyword spotting and audio indexing tasks. We propose methods to infer and retrieve OOV PNs relevant to an audio news document by using probabilistic topic models trained over diachronic text news. LVCSR hypothesis on the audio news document is analysed for latent topics, which is then used to retrieve relevant OOV PNs. Using an LDA topic model we obtain Recall up to 0.87 and Mean Average Precision (MAP) of 0.26 with only top 10% of the retrieved OOV PNs. We further propose methods to re-score and retrieve rare OOV PNs, and a lexical context model to improve the target OOV PN rankings assigned by the topic model, which may be biased due to prominence of certain news events. Re-scoring rare OOV PNs improves Recall whereas the lexical context model improves MAP.
Plano de parto: ferramenta para o empoderamento de mulheres durante a assistência de enfermagem

Aim: to reflect upon the importance of the birth plan in nursing care, aiming at women’s autonomy. Method: This is a reflective text about the use of the Birth Plan during nursing care and also about women empowerment. Results: The birth plan centralizes women's right to information and to her decision-making, which makes her the protagonist of her own childbirth. Thus, it provides respect to the bioethical principle of autonomy and to women's decisions, contributing to their empowerment in the process of getting pregnant and giving birth. Final considerations: In this study, the importance of using the birth plan by the nursing staff as an instrument of women's empowerment is evidenced. The birth plan is a tool that should be used, aiming at the quality assurance of a harmless and humanized nursing care for women
IDSaaS: Intrusion Detection System as a Service in Public Clouds

In a public cloud computing environment, consumers cannot always just depend on the cloud provider's security infrastructure. They may need to monitor and protect their virtual existence by implementing their own intrusion detection capabilities along with other security technologies within the cloud fabric. Intrusion Detection as a Service (IDSaaS) targets security of the infrastructure level of a public cloud (IaaS) by providing intrusion detection technology that is highly elastic, portable and fully controlled by the cloud consumer. A prototype of IDSaaS is described.
Ownership Choices of Indian Direct Investors: Do FDI Determinants Differ between Joint Ventures and Wholly Owned Subsidiaries?

Using count data on Indian joint ventures (JVs) and wholly owned subsidiaries (WOS), we present an empirical analysis of foreign direct investment (FDI)-related ownership choices and their relation with host country characteristics and indicators of transaction costs. Our Negative Binomial regression models offer only weak support for the bargaining perspective, according to which JVs should be more likely if the host countries were particularly attractive in terms of market access or resource endowments. Geographical and cultural distance has ambiguous effects on the choice between JVs and WOS. The composition of FDI projects tends to shift towards WOS where investment risks are contained by bilateral treaties and better control of corruption. JEL Classification: F21