Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Accuracy of subcategories A, B, C in BI-RADS 4 lesions by combined mammography and breast ultrasound findings

Subcategorizing BI-RADS category 4 lesions are usef ul to inform the level of concern for carcinoma. To determine the accuracy of BI-RADS 4 subcategories, mammographic and ultrasound images of 143 patients were independently and blindly reviewed by two radiologists and later compared with pathologic diagnosis. Sixty-eight of 143 (47%) were classified as subcategory 4A, 54 (37%) were 4B and 21 (14%) were 4C. The positive predictive value aft er consensus evaluation in subcategory 4A, 4B and 4C are 4.4%, 43.3% and 52.1%, respectively. Interob server agreement for mammographic and ultrasound descriptions varies from perfect to fair agreement. We conclude that the malignancy rate in subcategories 4B and 4C was significantly higher th an in subcategory 4A. Interobserver agreement varies from slightly lower to comparable with previ ous studies. The accuracy of mammographic and breast ultrasound interpretation can be improved by consensus evaluation in uncertain cases to reduce underestimated malignancy.
Champions Wanted: Promoting Exports in the Middle East and North Africa

While other emerging regions were thriving, MENA's aggregate export performance over the past two decades has been consistently weak. Using detailed firm-level export data from Customs administrations, this report explains why. One central finding is that the size distribution of MENA's exporting firms is suggestive of a critical weakness at the top. With the exception of the top firm, MENA's elite exporters are smaller and weaker compared to their peers in other regions. The largest exporter is alone at the top-Zidane without a team. MENA countries have failed to nurture a group of export superstars which critically contribute to export success in other regions. Part of the reason behind weak export performance is the lack of a competitive real exchange rate. The deleterious effects of an uncompetitive currency can be traced all the way down to the firm, hurting expansion at the intensive and extensive margin and preventing the emergence of export take-offs. The lack of heavy weight exporters at the top of the distribution also reflects the region's failure to push for trade and business climate reforms energetically. Finally, MENA's prevalent cronyism and corruption under pre-Arab Spring regimes (at least) confirms that business-government ties led to distortionary allocation of favors and rent dissipation by beneficiary firms, with little evidence that those firms developed into national champions or helped lift the region's export performance. The possibility of state capture in itself should call for caution when advocating any form of government intervention. In contrast, some interventions, like export promotion programs show effects on small exporters. However, because these firms are marginal in trade, such programs cannot be game changers. More broadly, the success of MENA countries in promoting export growth and diversification as well as generating jobs depends heavily on their ability to create an environment where large firms can invest and expand exports and new, efficient firms can rise to the top.
Management practices across firms and nations

We use an innovative survey tool to collect management practice data from 731 medium sized manufacturing firms in Europe and the US. We find these are strongly associated with better firm performance in terms of productivity, return on capital employed (profitability), Tobin’s Q and sales growth. We also find a surprisingly large dispersion of management practices across firms with a long ‘tail’ of poorly managed firms. This presents a dilemma - why do so many firms continue to exist while apparently deploying inferior management practices? Our analysis suggests that this is due, in part, to a combination of: (i) competition, with tougher product market competition fostering better management practices; (ii) firm age, with younger market entrants utilising better management techniques; and (iii) regulation, with stronger labour market regulation apparently inhibiting the deployment of best practice management.
Teaching Fault Tolerant FPGA Design for Aerospace Applications

Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), particularly high-density, SRAM-based FPGAs, have vastly increased in features and capabilities to the point where they are a useful, low Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) alternative to low-to-medium volume custom integrated circuit designs. In the aerospace field, however, they have been of limited use due to their high susceptibility to soft error upsets (SEUs). Recent years, however, have seen the proliferation of improved FPGA capabilities, as well as the development of new design techniques that markedly improve the reliability of FPGAs in aerospace environments. The proposed course seeks to bring these new reliability techniques out of development and into the classroom.
Possible association between autism and variants in the brain‐expressed tryptophan hydroxylase gene (TPH2)

We report a possible association between autism in our sample and a recently described brain‐expressed tryptophan hydroxylase gene (TPH2). The well‐replicated involvement of the serotonin neurotransmitter system in autism has stimulated interest in many genes in the serotonin pathway as possible candidates for mutations leading to autism susceptibility. Serotonin synthesis is controlled by the rate‐limiting enzyme tryptophan hydroxylase. A mouse study of the original tryptophan hydroxylase gene (TPH1) and the new isoform (TPH2) showed that while TPH1 is primarily expressed peripherally, TPH2 is found exclusively in brain tissue. We searched for human sequence variants in 6,467 nucleotides covering all 11 exons of TPH2, and also 248 nucleotides upstream of the start codon, and 935 nucleotides downstream of the stop codon. Eighteen variants were characterized in 88 subjects with autism studied at our two centers, and 95 unrelated control subjects. Using a model‐free association method and empirical P value estimation, two variants showed frequency differences between autism and control subjects (P = 0.01 for a T‐G variant in intron 1, and P = 0.02 for a A‐T variant in intron 4). A haplotype including these variants showed slightly increased significance (P = 0.005). Further investigation of clinical phenotypes showed a possible association between presence of the variants at these two SNPs and higher scores on the Autism Diagnostic Interview (ADI) domain describing repetitive and stereotyped behaviors (P = 0.007). We conclude that TPH2 may play a modest role in autism susceptibility, perhaps relating specifically to repetitive behaviors, pending replication of this result. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Impact of a Low Interest Rate Environment – Global Liquidity Spillovers and the Search-for-Yield

On 10 January 2013 the ECB Governing Council decided “to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged” based on an assessment of a 'contained' inflationary pressure and a weak economic activity, a contraction of real GDP in second and third quarter of 2012. Similar decisions have been taken by other leading central banks around the globe. This paper assesses and comments on several aspects of the implied low interest rate environment. It contains some general considerations with respect to the current low interest rate environment in advanced economies. It then deals with potential conflicts between monetary policy and financial stability in a low interest rate environment. Moreover, more practical implications for the necessity of supervision of pension funds and the insurance sector are derived. The paper also assesses the investment opportunities for retail investors in such an environment. Finally, we single out examples of main beneficiaries and losers from a low interest rate environment.
Financial success of organic farms in Germany

The conversion to organic farming is financially rewarding for many farmers in Germany. The majority of the organic farms make a profit above that of comparable conventional farms. A comparison of successful with less successful farms, measured by the average difference in ‘Farm Net Value Added’ to comparable conventional farm groups, highlights that the success of the conversion is less dependent on structural and site-specific factors than on the management ability of the farmers – above all in the area of marketing
Characterization of a leucine aminopeptidase of Babesia gibsoni

SUMMARY Peptidases of parasitic protozoa are currently under intense investigation in order to identify novel virulence factors, drug targets, and vaccine candidates, except in Babesia. Leucine aminopeptidases in protozoa, such as Plasmodium and Leishmania, have been identified to be involved in free amino acid regulation. We report here the molecular and enzymatic characterization, as well as the localization of a leucine aminopeptidase, a member of the M17 cytosolic aminopeptidase family, from B. gibsoni (BgLAP). A functional recombinant BgLAP (rBgLAP) expressed in Escherichia coli efficiently hydrolysed synthetic substrates for aminopeptidase, a leucine substrate. Enzyme activity of the rBgLAP was found to be optimum at pH 8·0 and at 37°C. The substrate profile was slightly different from its homologue in P. falciprum. The activity was also strongly dependent on metal divalent cations, and was inhibited by bestatin, which is a specific inhibitor for metalloprotease. These results indicated that BgLAP played an important role in free amino acid regulation.
Factors related to the achievement of the National License Examination Part 1 of medical students in Faculty of Medicine Vajira Hospital, Navamindradhiraj University

Introduction: National License Examination (NLE) is organized by the Consortium of Thai Medical Schools to assess the competency of medical students. Part I-NLE involves an evaluation of basic science knowledge. Our objective was to evaluate factors associated with the results of part-I NLE. Methods: Learning attitude and behavior, preparation for and attitude towards the NLE were surveyed by a questionnaire given to all third to fifth year students (in 2010) at the institution. Additional data collected were: gender, admission and aptitude tests scores, cumulative grade point average (GPA) during the first two years, and the results of part-I NLE. Association of these factors and the results of the examination were studied. Results: Mean age of 206 participants was 21.1 + 0.74 years. 55% were female 45% male. Mean aptitude and admission scores were 18.9 + 2.64 and 51.4 ± 8.75, respectively while mean of GPA was 3.0 ± 0.33. From the questionnaire: mean scores of learning behavior, preparation and attitude towards the NLE were 3.3 ± 0.40, 3.1 ± 0.57, and 3.3 ± 0.61, respectively. There were174/ 206 students who passed the NLE. Factors significantly associated with achievement were: good GPA > 3.0, good learning behaviors (score > 3.0), and good preparation for the examination (score > 3.2). Conclusions: Recent academic effort and performance (represented as GPA and behaviors in learning and preparation for the examination) were more important than remote academic background (represented as aptitude and admission scores). Medical teachers should stimulate students to have continuous effort in learning and preparation for the examination.
Unsupervised adaptation of deep neural networks for sound source localization using entropy minimization

This paper describes an unsupervised method of adapting deep neural networks (DNNs) for sound source localization (SSL). DNNs-based SSL achieves high localization accuracy for sound data that are similar to training data. However, the accuracy deteriorates if a sound source is at an unknown position in unknown reverberant environments. We solve the problem by using unsupervised adaption of the DNNs' parameters to the observed sound signals. Entropy is used as the objective function and minimized to optimize the parameters on the basis of the gradient method. Adaptation without overfitting is achieved by using 1) a parameter adaptation layer, such as linear transform network, and 2) early stopping of the parameter updates. Experimental results indicated that our method improved localization accuracy by a maximum of 20 points for unknown positions and reverberant data.
Minority HIV‐1 resistant variants in recent infection and in patients who failed first‐line antiretroviral therapy with no detectable resistance‐associated mutations in Thailand

Through the Thai National AIDS Program, approximately 200,000 patients infected with HIV are on antiretroviral (ARV) therapy. Although studies have shown low prevalence of primary HIV‐1 resistance transmission in Thailand and in Southeast Asia where subtype CRF01_AE is predominant, minority HIV‐1 drug resistance has not been studied. Two groups of patients, whose conventional genotyping results showed no drug resistance‐associated mutations, were investigated: 104 homosexual men recently infected with HIV‐1, naïve to ARV treatment and 22 first‐line non‐nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI)‐based failure patients. Pyrosequencing (PSQ) assay was developed to detect and quantify minority Y181C and M184V variants from the patients' plasma samples. The sensitivity of PSQ to detect minority Y181C and M184V variants was approximately 1%. 1/104 (0.5%) and 3/101 (3%) samples were found harboring Y181C and M184V in the group of homosexual men recently infected with HIV‐1. In patients with first‐line treatment failure, one had a minority M184V mutation (4.5%). The prevalence of Y181C and M184V minority variants in homosexual men recently infected and naïve to treatment was low in Thailand. Systematic monitoring of primary resistance transmission in Thailand and this region is essential to guide whether genotypic resistance test is required prior to commencing the first‐line highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). J. Med. Virol. 84:713–720, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The Interaction between the Aggregate Behaviour of Technical Trading Systems and Stock Price Dynamics

This study analyses the interaction between the aggregate trading behaviour of technical models and stock price fluctuations in the S&P 500 futures market. It examines 2,580 widely used trading systems based on 30-minutes prices. The sample comprises trend-following as well as contrarian models. It shows that technical trading exerts an excess demand pressure on the stock market. This is because technical models produce clusters of trading signals that are on the same side of the market, either buying or selling. Initial stock price changes triggered by news are strengthened by a sequence of trading signals produced by trend-following models. Once 90 percent of the models have signalled a particular position, stock prices tend to move in the direction congruent with the position-holding of the models. This phenomenon has to be attributed to the transactions of non-technical traders, perhaps amateurs. Once price movements lose their momentum, contrarian technical models contribute to reversals of the trend.
Grandstanding in the UK Venture Capital Industry

This paper speaks to the hypothesis that young venture capital firms take companies public earlier than older venture firms in order to establish a reputation and successfully raise capital for new funds. Consistent with the extant literature, evidence from a sample of 85 IPOs on the LSE over the period 1992-99 suggests that companies backed by young venture firms are indeed younger at IPO than those backed by more established firms, and young venture firms have shorter board representation. There is little evidence to suggest greater underpricing for young VCF investments, nor do young VCFs hold relatively small equity stakes. Older VCFs raise larger follow on funds, but there is no significant differential in timing of those funds. Overall, this study suggests that there is insufficient evidence as yet to unambiguously support the significance of grandstanding as a feature of the UK venture capital industry.
Changes in the levels of glutathione after cellular and cutaneous damage induced by squalene monohydroperoxide

Squalene monohydroperoxide (Sq‐OOH), the initial product of ultraviolet‐peroxidated squalene, was used to investigate the effect of peroxidative challenge upon the glutathione contents in rabbit ear skin and primary‐cultured fibroblasts derived from rabbit ear skin. The cellular reduced glutathione (GSH) contents decreased during 30‐minute incubations in vitro with Sq‐OOH, and oxidized glutathione (GSSG) was formed concomitantly, indicating that Sq‐OOH had a potential for GSH‐depleting activity in vitro. When Sq‐OOH was applied topically to the skin in vivo, only GSSG contents increased significantly within 30 minutes. Moreover, pretreatment with the GSH depletors, DL‐buthionine sulfoximine (BSO) and diethyl maleate (DEM), could potentiate the cytotoxicity and comedogenicity induced by Sq‐OOH. These findings suggest that the endogenous antioxidant, glutathione, is quite sensitive to Sq‐OOH and may be an important material for protecting cells and/or tissues against the oxidative stress induced by Sq‐OOH treatment. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Biochem Mol Toxicol 15:150–158, 2001
Does Brand Licensing Increase a Licensor's Shareholder Value?

This study examines 171 brand licensing announcements and subsequent changes in the licensor firms' shareholder values using the event study method. We find that although brand licensing announcements lead to positive abnormal returns on average, nearly 44% of the announcements in our sample are followed by negative abnormal returns. We argue that investors react more favorably to a brand licensing announcement when they believe i the brand has greater ability to stimulate licensee product sales and thus generate higher royalties for the licensor and ii the licensor firm has greater ability to limit licensee opportunism and thus limit brand dilution and its adverse effect on sales of other products marketed under the brand name. In line with our hypotheses related to a brand's ability to stimulate licensee product sales, the study's findings suggest that investors react more favorably to announcements involving brands with greater brand fit and greater brand breadth. However, investors appear to react less favorably to announcements involving brands with higher advertising investments. In line with our hypotheses related to a licensor firm's ability to limit licensee opportunism, the study's findings suggest that investors react more favorably to announcements involving larger licensors; however, investors' reactions do not appear to be influenced by licensor firms' licensing experience. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta, marketing.
F‐18 FDG PET/CT quantization parameters as predictors of outcome in patients with diffuse large B‐cell lymphoma

We evaluated the prognostic significance of standardized uptake value (SUVmax), metabolic tumor volume (MTV), and total lesion glycolysis (TLG) obtained by F‐18 FDG PET/CT (PET/CT) in patients with diffuse large B‐cell Lymphomas (DLBCL) presenting intermediate IPI score.
Do Managers Cut Dividends Because They 'Have To'?

I find that the decision to cut dividends is caused by the depletion of financial slack. Moreover, (i) firms facing higher costs of external finance are more likely to reduce dividends to prevent excessive reliance on external finance, (ii) managers are concerned with restricting debt levels, not preserving cash balances, and (iii) after the emergence of repurchases, managers have become less hesitant to cut dividends to preserve financial slack and restore financial flexibility. One novel implication of these findings is that managers treat the savings from dividend cutbacks as a form of internal finance and are willing to incur the cost of cutting dividends by trading it off against the marginal cost of external finance.
Paraquat application and respiratory health effects among South Korean farmers

Objectives Paraquat is commonly used worldwide as major herbicide. The objective of this study was to investigate the association among farmers between occupational paraquat exposure and respiratory health effects. Methods A cross-sectional survey of health effects related to an oil spill was conducted in South Korea from 2008 to 2009. For this analysis, a total of 2882 full-time farmers were selected from the overall sample. Data collection included an interviewer-administered questionnaire and spirometry testing. Logistic regression analysis and linear regression analysis were performed to evaluate the relationship between paraquat exposure and respiratory health outcomes after adjustment for potential confounders. Results The risks of self-reported physician-diagnosed asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and allergic rhinitis were non-significantly increased among paraquat-applying farmers compared with non-paraquat-applying farmers. Although the results of a pulmonary function test fell within normal limits, a decline in forced vital capacity and forced expiratory volume in one second was apparent among paraquat-applying farmers compared with non-paraquat-applying farmers. Forced vital capacity (β=−5.20, p<0.001) and forced expiratory volume in one second (β=−1.89, p=0.010) significantly decreased with each unit increase in years of paraquat application. Paraquat-applying farmers showed a significant exposure–response relationship between restrictive ventilatory defects and paraquat application years (p trend=0.015) or lifetime days of application (p trend=0.007). Conclusions Our findings suggest a possible association between paraquat application and adverse respiratory health effects among farmers.
Occurrence of HLA‐DR Reactive Microglia in Alzheimer's Disease

Sensitive immunohistochemical procedures were used to detect reactive microglia (macrophages) positive for HLA-DR in postmortem tissue in cases of Alzheimer’s disease. ’ In gray matter, these macrophages were concentrated in areas of senile plaque formation (FIG. 1A). They were also found in white matter, such as the anterior commissure, which presumably carries axons of degenerating cortical neurons (FIG. 1 B). Double immunostaining with antibodies to HLA-DR and glial fibrillary acidic
PET in the Diagnosis of Neuroendocrine Tumors

Abstract: For general oncological imaging, positron emission tomography (PET) using [18F]fluoro‐deoxy‐glucose (FDG) has evolved as a powerful functional imaging modality. Unfortunately, FDG‐PET has not been as advantageous for imaging gastropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors, and only tumors with high proliferative activity and low differentiation have shown an increased FDG uptake. Therefore, the 11C‐labeled amine precursors L‐dihydroxyphenylalanine and 5‐hydroxy‐L‐tryptophan (5‐HTP) were developed for PET imaging of these tumors. Because of the higher tumor uptake of the latter tracer in a study of patients with endocrine pancreatic tumors, 11C‐5‐HTP was chosen for further evaluation. In comparative studies of patients with carcinoids and endocrine pancreatic tumors, 5‐HTP‐PET proved better than CT and somatostatin receptor scintigraphy for tumor visualization, and many small, previously overlooked lesions were diagnosed by 11C‐5‐HTP‐PET. The strong correlation found during medical treatment between the changes in the transport rate constant at repeated PET and those of U‐HIAA indicates the possible use of 11C‐5‐HTP‐PET also for therapy monitoring. By premedication of patients with Carbidopa orally before PET examination, in order to block the aromatic amino acid decarboxylase enzyme, the decarboxylation rate of 11C‐5‐HTP was decreased, leading to a higher tumor uptake and a considerably lower urinary radioactivity concentration.