Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Occult Primary Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Objective Cancer of an unknown primary (CUP) squamous cell carcinoma metastatic to cervical lymph nodes is a challenging problem for the treating physician. Our aim is to determine if identification of the primary tumor is associated with improved oncologic outcomes and/or tumor characteristics including human papilloma virus (HPV) status. Study Design Retrospective, matched-pairs analysis contrasting 2 cohorts based upon discovery of primary lesion. Setting Tertiary teaching hospital. Subjects and Methods Records of 136 patients initially diagnosed as carcinoma of unknown primary were retrospectively reviewed (1980-2010) and divided into 2 cohorts based on discovery of the primary lesion. Primary outcome measures were overall survival and time to recurrence according to Kaplan-Meier analysis. A nested subset of 22 patients in which the primary was discovered were matched to 22 patients remaining undiscovered according to nodal stage and age. Results Discovered lesions were more likely to exhibit HPV positivity (P < .001). Matched-pairs analyses demonstrated that discovery of the primary was associated with better overall survival (HR = 0.125; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.019-0.822; P = .030). Discovery of the primary was associated with improved cause-specific survival (HR = 0.142; 95% CI, 0.021-0.93; P = .0418) and disease-free survival (HR = 0.25; 95% CI, 0.069-0.91; P = .03). Conclusion HPV positivity is associated with discovery of the primary tumor. Discovery of the primary lesion is associated with improved overall survival, cause-specific survival, and disease-free survival in patients initially presenting as CUP in matched-pair and cohort comparison analyses.
The role of age, environmental and occupational factors on semen density.

UNLABELLED The problem of effect of the environment on human reproduction has been in the focus of researchers' interest for many years. OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between semen density in males with reproduction problems, and their age, living and working conditions. MATERIAL AND METHOD The study covered 224 males with reproduction problems. The study had a prospective character and was conducted in three stages - the first stage was carried out using the questionnaire devised by the authors; the second and the third stages consisted in the examination and evaluation of male semen density. Statistical analysis was used to search for the relationship between these groups and variables adopted in the study, i.e. age, occupation performed, place of residence, self-reported housing conditions and material standard, reporting by the males in the study of arduousness of work or health hazards perceived by the males examined, and duration of employment in such conditions. RESULTS The males in the study were divided into three groups according to their semen density. Group I (20 × 10(6) mln/ml or more) included 62 (27.7%) respondents, Group II (below 20 × 10(6) mln/ml) covered 121 males (54.0%), while Group III (only single spermatozoa or none) - 41 males (18.3%). Male semen density are significantly correlated with men's ages and jobs as well as the general evaluations of the jobs held by the men (p<0.05). No significant relationship is observed between living conditions, arduous work conditions and occupational hazards as perceived by males, or duration of employment in such conditions, and male semen density (p>0.05). CONCLUSIONS The results obtained encourage continuation of the studies and cover a larger group of males with reproduction problems.
Comparison of the dental arch changes in patients with different malocclusions.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To evaluate the pre-treatment and post-treatment dental arch changes in both upper and lower arches in orthodontic patients treated with extraction of first premolar teeth. SUBJECTS AND METHODS Measurements were made on casts of 50 post treated cases in the age group of 12-30 years for individual tooth measurements, width of the arches (inter-incisal, inter-canine, inter-premolar and inter-molar) arch length (both right and left sides, anterior segment, posterior segment and total arch length for both for the maxillary and mandibular dental casts. STATISTICAL ANALYSIS USED Kolmogorov-Smirnov test for Normality, Regression Analysis was done as variables were tested and proved to follow normality. Statistical software Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 18 (SPSS Inc.; Chicago, Illinois, USA) was used for data analysis. Descriptive statistics and paired t-tests were used to compare the changes in the Class I and Class II div 1 groups. RESULTS There was a significant increase in the inter-incisor and inter-canine width post-treatment in the Class I and Class II div 1 subjects in the upper arch but no significant change in inter-incisor width in the lower arch in class I subjects. A significant decline in the inter-molar arch width in both the groups were seen. The inter-premolar arch width declined significantly in Class I cases while it increased significantly in Class II div 1 subjects. There was a significant increase in anterior arch length and a significant decrease in posterior arch length in all subjects. CONCLUSIONS The findings of this original clinical research should significantly help the orthodontists in orthodontic treatment planning in patients requiring extractions of premolars.
Financial restatements among Malaysian listed companies: Do corporate governance and ownership matter?

With the issuance of Corporate Governance Code in 2000 in Malaysia, it is expected that corporate governance has played an important role ensuring the reliability of financial statements.This study seeks to examine the nature financial restatements in Malaysia.It also seeks to investigate whether the corporate governance characteristics are associated with financial restatement. Using the restated financial statements during the period of 2002 to 2005 matched with a control group of non-restating firms, the results show that the primary reason for misstating the accounts is to inflate earnings. The nomination committee of the firms that restated is less independent and managerial ownership and the logistic regression analysis indicates that the extent of ownership by outside blockholders is able to constrain managers from misstating accounts.The results also show that firms with high level of debts (an indicator of the presence of debt covenants) are more likely to commit in financial misstatement.The research is significant as it provides evidence on the role of corporate governance, especially the ownership by outside blockholders in Malaysia.This shows that outside blockholders is effective in disciplining managers so that the accounts so prepared are not misleading.This study does not support the move by Malaysian Government to require companies audit committee to be wholly independent.It is suggested that the more important thing is to have audit committee members who understand accounting and the related standards.
Board Monitoring and Access to Debt Financing

Board monitoring should affect a firm's access to debt financing because it improves firm performance and the board is ultimately responsible for the firm's debt. In this study, we show empirically that access to debt financing indeed benefits in two ways from board monitoring: directly from the monitoring and indirectly from improvement in performance. The methodological challenge is in separating the two effects from each other and from those of other drivers of debt financing.
Estimation of the proportion of triploids in populations with diploid and triploid individuals.

Populations with diploid and triploid individuals co-occur in various plant and animal species, but detecting their relative frequencies is problematic. Microsatellite markers can be used to detect triploids that have three distinct alleles at a given locus, but cannot identify triploids that are partially or fully homozygous (i.e., possessing two or three copies of the same allele). Detection of partially homozygous triploids is sometimes possible with allozymes if no dosage compensation occurs. However, the inference of triploidy from uneven band intensities is not always reliable, making it difficult to estimate the actual proportion of triploids in a population. We present an iterative mathematical procedure for estimating the overall proportion of triploids from allozyme and microsatellite data. This method also estimates corrected allele frequencies by accounting for potentially hidden cases of homozygosity occurring in triploid individuals with multiple copies of an allele.
PITUITARY-ADRENAL FUNCTION IN THE RAT AFTER GONADECTOMY AND GONADAL HORMONE REPLACEMENT.

Gonadectomy in male rats impaired growth but increased pituitary and adrenal weight and adrenal RNA and DNA content. Pituitary ACTH content increased also. Testosterone replacement lowered both ACTH content and adrenal weight to control levels. Estradiol administration increased pituitary ACTH without a further increment in adrenal weight. Gonadectomy and adrenalectomy together increased pituitary ACTH content compared with adrenalectomy alone. Under these conditions, testosterone replacement reduced pituitary ACTH and estradiol administration increased it further. Plasma corticosterone (Cpd. B) concentrations in castrated males at rest, after stress or after ACTH injection did not differ from those observed in intact controls. Biological half-life in vivo was shortened and hepatic inactivation of steroid in vitro was increased. Steroid production by adrenal slices in vitro was diminished by castration, and the output of steroid in adrenal venous blood also decreased. Increased steroid secretion was produ.
Sleep disturbance and neurobehavioral performance among postpartum women.

STUDY OBJECTIVES Sleep disturbances cause neurobehavioral performance and daytime functioning impairments. Postpartum women experience high levels of sleep disturbance. Thus, the study objective was to describe and explore the relation between neurobehavioral performance and sleep among women during the early postpartum period. DESIGN Longitudinal field-based study. PARTICIPANTS There were 70 primiparous women and nine nulliparous women in a control group. INTERVENTIONS None. METHODS AND RESULTS During their first 12 postpartum weeks, 70 primiparous women wore continuous wrist actigraphy to objectively monitor their sleep. Each morning they self-administered the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) to index their neurobehavioral performance. Nine nulliparous women in a control group underwent the same protocol for 12 continuous weeks. Postpartum PVT mean reciprocal (1/RT) reaction time did not differ from that of women in the control group at postpartum week 2, but then worsened over time. Postpartum slowest 10% 1/RT PVT reaction time was significantly worse than that of women in the control group at all weeks. Despite improvements in postpartum sleep, neurobehavioral performance continued to worsen from week 2 through the end of the study. Across the first 12 postpartum weeks, PVT measures were more frequently associated with percent sleep compared with total sleep time, highlighting the deleterious consequences of sleep disruption on maternal daytime functioning throughout the early postpartum period. CONCLUSIONS Worsened maternal neurobehavioral performance across the first 12 postpartum weeks may have been influenced by the cumulative effects of sleep disturbance. These results can inform future work to identify the particular sleep profiles that could be primary intervention targets to improve daytime functioning among postpartum women, and indicate need for further research on the effectiveness of family leave policies. The time when postpartum women return to control-level daytime functioning is unknown.
Bridging the gap for destination extreme sports: A model of sports tourism customer experience

Abstract This longitudinal study proposes a conceptual model of sports tourism customer experience in the context of a mountain-biking extreme sport camp. Customer experience is conceptualised as a three-dimensional framework consisting of five dimensions: hedonic pleasure, personal progression, social interaction, efficiency and surreal feeling. Using the means–end approach in 89 semi-structured interviews with clients of a mountain-biking camp, conducted over three years, the authors identified hedonic pleasure and personal progression as the two core experiences valued by customers. The core experience generates surreal feelings, incomparable and memorable evaluations of the overall experience. Social interaction facilitates the core experience, while efficiency enables the core experience. Existing marketing management frameworks lack empirical investigation and social science frameworks fail to take a holistic view; our framework bridges the gap between social science and marketing literatures by exploring, testing and incorporating both streams empirically. Implications for practitioners' customer insight processes and future research directions are discussed.
Characterization of Clonal Complexity in Tuberculosis by Mycobacterial Interspersed Repetitive Unit-Variable-Number Tandem Repeat Typing

ABSTRACT In recent years, the application of molecular tools has shown us that clonal complexity in infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis is not anecdotal. Exogenous reinfections, mixed infections, compartmentalization, and microevolution are different aspects of this issue. The detection and characterization of clonal variants of M. tuberculosis by standard genotyping methods is laborious and frequently requires expertise. Our aim was to evaluate a new genotyping PCR-based method for M. tuberculosis, mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit-variable-number tandem repeat typing (MIRU-VNTR), as a potential tool to simplify and optimize the clonal analysis of tuberculosis. MIRU-VNTR was able to detect mixed clonal variants in vitro, even for clones at low ratios (1:99). This technique was prospectively applied to search for cases infected by more than one clone. Clonal variants within the same host were detected in 3 out of 115 cases (2.6%), including cases with clones which were indistinguishable by restriction fragment length polymorphism or spoligotyping. In one case, coinfecting clonal variants differed in antibiotic susceptibilities. MIRU-VNTR was applied to cases with proven polyclonal infection, and it succeeded in detecting the coinfecting strains and proved useful in confirming cases of compartmentalized infection. MIRU-VNTR is a simple, rapid, and sensitive method which could facilitate and optimize the identification and characterization of clonal complexity in M. tuberculosis infection.
Sources of Business Information and Means of Access Used by SMEs in Uganda: The Case of Northern Uganda. By

This article is a result of part of the doctoral study Business Information Systems Design for Uganda’s Economic Development: The Case of SMEs in Northern Uganda. The study was conducted in 2005/06 to identify the sources of business information used by small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs), rate these sources according to their usefulness in meeting the information needs of SMEs, determine the means of access to business information, and propose appropriate sources and means of access to business information for consideration in the design of a business information system (BIS). It was assumed that northern Uganda is lagging behind because of a lack of appropriate strategies for empowering SMEs as an engine of economic growth, including using information as a catalyst for socio-economic transformation. Through the use of a descriptive design, the study identified and recommended the business information sources necessary for SMEs and the appropriate means that should be adopted in order for a BIS to enable SMEs in northern Uganda to access relevant business information. The article has six sections. Section one provides an introduction, an overview of SMEs in Uganda, and a situational analysis of Uganda’s economic development, especially northern Uganda. Section two covers a brief general literature review while section three delineates the methodology applied. Section four presents the findings that are discussed in section five. Strategic interventions are proposed in section six. To enable access to various business information sources using various means, one of the key recommendations is the adoption of Internet-based services with the integration of an interactive business planner, an online small business workshop, the business start-up assistant, info-guides, an e-mail service, and Talk to BIS services.
Real-time Deep Video Deinterlacing

Interlacing is a widely used technique, for television broadcast and video recording, to double the perceived frame rate without increasing the bandwidth. But it presents annoying visual artifacts, such as flickering and silhouette "serration," during the playback. Existing state-of-the-art deinterlacing methods either ignore the temporal information to provide real-time performance but lower visual quality, or estimate the motion for better deinterlacing but with a trade-off of higher computational cost. In this paper, we present the first and novel deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) based method to deinterlace with high visual quality and real-time performance. Unlike existing models for super-resolution problems which relies on the translation-invariant assumption, our proposed DCNN model utilizes the temporal information from both the odd and even half frames to reconstruct only the missing scanlines, and retains the given odd and even scanlines for producing the full deinterlaced frames. By further introducing a layer-sharable architecture, our system can achieve real-time performance on a single GPU. Experiments shows that our method outperforms all existing methods, in terms of reconstruction accuracy and computational performance.
Present-Day Crustal Deformation in China Constrained by Global Positioning System Measurements

Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements in China indicate that crustal shortening accommodates most of India's penetration into Eurasia. Deformation within the Tibetan Plateau and its margins, the Himalaya, the Altyn Tagh, and the Qilian Shan, absorbs more than 90% of the relative motion between the Indian and Eurasian plates. Internal shortening of the Tibetan plateau itself accounts for more than one-third of the total convergence. However, the Tibetan plateau south of the Kunlun and Ganzi-Mani faults is moving eastward relative to both India and Eurasia. This movement is accommodated through rotation of material around the eastern Syntaxis. The North China and South China blocks, east of the Tibetan Plateau, move coherently east-southeastward at rates of 2 to 8 millimeters per year and 6 to 11 millimeters per year, respectively, with respect to the stable Eurasia.
The Determinants Of Financial Leverage Of SMEs In Mauritius

The key aim of this paper is to test the relevance of the different financing theories for explaining capital structure choice in the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) sector in Mauritius. One of the areas of financial theory that has worried much of academicians and professionals is debt policy decisions in firms due to the limited study in this field. Three of the most relevant theories of capital structure are explored, namely the Trade Off Theory, the Agency Theory and the Pecking Order Theory (POH). Hence, in order to shed more light over this issue, an empirical analysis has been carried out over a panel data sample of 25 firms of SMEs for the period 2002-2008, using quantitative analysis. The panel data methodology is used to test empirical hypotheses and controls for firm heteroskecedasticity and corrects for autocorrelation among the variables that are involved. The findings show that some theories are not in line as such with the results obtained from the analysis as the POH. However, some of the Capital Structure Theories are considered important in determining financial leverage of SMEs in Mauritius like agency costs involved, information asymmetry problems, liquidity and cash flow problems. The main implication of this study is to understand the position of SME in Mauritius in terms of their debt and its importance and contribution to the National Income.
Conflict Resolution vs. Conflict Escalation in Online Markets

Many online markets encourage traders to make good after an unsatisfactory transaction by offering the opportunity of withdrawing negative reputational feedback in a conflict resolution phase. Motivated by field evidence and guided by theoretical considerations, we use laboratory markets with two-sided moral hazard to show that this option, contrary to the intended purpose, produces an escalation of conflict in the form of strategically distorted reputation information and less trust and trustworthiness in the trading phase. The detrimental impact is mitigated by buyers who refuse to give feedback strategically, even when it comes at a cost to themselves. It is also mitigated in markets with one-sided moral hazard.
Managerial Categorization of Competitors: Using Old Maps to Navigate New Environments

The authors empirically examine differences between automatic and controlled processing by executives in an increasingly dynamic industry. The results suggest that cognitive inertia affects judgments in both modes, but the effect is stronger with automatic processing. Specifically, the authors conducted two studies examining executives' cognitive maps of competitive positioning. First, they explored differences in ways strategists categorize competitors in a cross-sectional field study conducted during a period of significant environmental upheaval. They found that managers relied on cognitive maps that reflected obsolete industry boundaries rather than configurations representative of the deregulated marketplace. Hence, managers must be mindful to incorporate new information proactively from many sources and to actively discard old, automatic maps in order to develop reliable maps for changing environments. In a second study, managerial competitive schemas of competitive positioning were compared longitudinally across three research projects conducted in the financial intermediary industry. An eight-year time frame provided a unique opportunity to explore the content of mental models in an industry undergoing an accelerating rate of change. The longitudinal results indicate that change creates diversity of thought across managers in the same environment. Managers at competing firms are therefore apt to view competition quite differently in turbulent environments. Implications of the study findings for strategic decision making, consensus and conflict, and organizational learning and executive succession in turbulent environments are discussed. Issues are identified that warrant further research.