Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Possible Importance of β3 Integrins for Leukemogenesis and Chemoresistance in Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive bone marrow malignancy where the immature leukemia cells communicate with neighboring cells through constitutive cytokine release and through their cell surface adhesion molecules. The primary AML cells express various integrins. These heterodimeric molecules containing an α and a β chain are cell surface molecules that bind extracellular matrix molecules, cell surface molecules and soluble mediators. The β3 integrin (ITGB3) chain can form heterodimers only with the two α chains αIIb and αV. These integrins are among the most promiscuous and bind to a large number of ligands, including extracellular matrix molecules, cell surface molecules and soluble mediators. Recent studies suggest that the two β3 integrins are important for leukemogenesis and chemosensitivity in human AML. Firstly, αIIb and β3 are both important for adhesion of AML cells to vitronectin and fibronectin. Secondly, β3 is important for the development of murine AML and also for the homing and maintenance of the proliferation for xenografted primary human AML cells, and for maintaining a stem cell transcriptional program. These last effects seem to be mediated through Syk kinase. The β3 expression seems to be regulated by HomeboxA9 (HoxA9) and HoxA10, and the increased β3 expression then activates spleen tyrosine kinase (Syk) and thereby contributes to cytokine hypersensitivity and activation of β2 integrins. Finally, high integrin αV/β3 expression is associated with an adverse prognosis in AML and decreased sensitivity to the kinase inhibitor sorafenib; this integrin can also be essential for osteopontin-induced sorafenib resistance in AML. In the present article, we review the experimental and clinical evidence for a role of β3 integrins for leukemogenesis and chemosensitivity in AML.
Enhanced Biodegradation of Petroleum Hydrocarbons in Contaminated Soil

Soil samples taken from a contaminated site in Northern Quebec, Canada, exhibited a low capacity for biodegradation of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), despite a high capacity for the mineralization of aromatic hydrocarbons and a low toxicity of soil leachates as measured by Microtox assay. Toxicity assays directly performed on surface soil, including earthworm mortality and barley seedling emergence, indicated moderate to high levels of toxicity. Soil biostimulation did not improve the removal of petroleum hydrocarbons, while bioaugmentation of soil with a developed enrichment culture increased the efficiency of hydrocarbon removal from 20.4% to 49.2%. A considerable increase in the removal of TPH was obtained in a bioslurry process, enhancing the mass transfer of hydrocarbons from soil to the aqueous phase and increasing the efficiency of hydrocarbon removal to over 70% after 45 days of incubation. The addition of ionic or nonionic surfactants did not have a significant impact on biodegradation of hydrocarbons. The extent of hydrocarbon mineralization during the bioslurry process after 45 days of incubation ranged from 41.3% to 58.9%, indicating that 62.7% to 83.1% of the eliminated TPH were transformed into CO2 and water.
Asymptotically pointwise optimal procedures in sequential analysis

Abstract : After sequential analysis was developed by Wald in the forties [5], Arrow, Blackwell, and Girshick [1] considered the Bayes problem and proved the existence of Bayes solutions. The difficulties involved in computing explicitly the Bayes solutions led Wald [6] to introduce asymptotic sequential analysis in estimation. Asymptotic in his sense, as for all subsequent authors, refers to the limiting behavior of the optimal solution as the cost of observation tends to zero. Chernoff [2] investigated the asymptotic properties of sequential testing. The testing theory was developed further by Schwarz [4] and generalized by Kiefer and Sacks [3]. This paper approaches the asymptotic theory from a slightly different point of view.
Long Short-Term Memory for Japanese Word Segmentation

This study presents a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network approach to Japanese word segmentation (JWS). Previous studies on Chinese word segmentation (CWS) succeeded in using recurrent neural networks such as LSTM and gated recurrent units (GRU). However, in contrast to Chinese, Japanese includes several character types, such as hiragana, katakana, and kanji, that produce orthographic variations and increase the difficulty of word segmentation. Additionally, it is important for JWS tasks to consider a global context, and yet traditional JWS approaches rely on local features. In order to address this problem, this study proposes employing an LSTM-based approach to JWS. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art accuracy with respect to various Japanese corpora.
Correlation between speech perception and tinnitus before and after the use of hearing aids

Purpose: To assess the degree of annoyance of tinnitus through the Tinnitus Handicap Inventory (THI) and correlate it with the perception of speech using the Hearing in Noise Test (HINT) before and after the fitting of a hearing aid (HA). Methods: There were 27 patients with bilateral sensorineural hearing loss, continuous bilateral tinnitus (minimum six months) without experience of amplification. The subjects answered the anamnesis, the THI questionnaire, underwent a HINT, were fitted with hearing aids, and were again evaluated after three months. The results were statistically analyzed. Results: Pre and post THI adaptation of hearing aids indicated benefits from amplification in relation to decreased sensation of tinnitus. The pre and post HINT adaptation of hearing aids presented a significant difference. There were differences in the correlation between the THI and HINT before the fitting of the hearing aids. Conclusion: There was an improvement in the degree of tinnitus annoyance after the fitting of the hearing aids. There was no significant correlation between speech perception before and after the use of hearing aids.
On the origin of increase in substrate current and impact ionization efficiency in strained-Si n- and p-MOSFETs

Strain dependence of substrate current and impact ionization efficiency in the strained-Si n- and p-MOSFETs has been systematically investigated with the wide range of strain, by utilizing the universal relationship between the impact ionization efficiency and the electrical field in the pinch-off region. It was found that the impact ionization efficiency increased with increasing strain, leading to the drastic increase of substrate current, and that the strain dependence of impact ionization efficiency was well represented by simply using the strain dependence of the bandgap energy regardless of carrier type. This result strongly suggests that the strain-induced enhancement of impact ionization efficiency is not due to the modification of the carrier transport properties but to the narrowing of the bandgap, and presumably, the resulting decrease in threshold energy for impact ionization. It was also found that the impact ionization efficiency increased with the increase of temperature while its dependence did not exhibit distinct strain dependence. These results are attributable mainly to the temperature dependence of energy distribution function.
The Beta Policy for Continuous Control Reinforcement Learning

Recently, reinforcement learning with deep neural networks has achieved great success in challenging continuous control problems such as 3D locomotion and robotic manipulation. However, in real-world control problems, the actions one can take are bounded by physical constraints, which introduces a bias when the standard Gaussian distribution is used as the stochastic policy. In this work, we propose to use the Beta distribution as an alternative and analyze the bias and variance of the policy gradients of both policies. We show that the Beta policy is bias-free and provides significantly faster convergence and higher scores over the Gaussian policy when both are used with trust region policy optimization (TRPO) and actor critic with experience replay (ACER), the state-of-the-art onand off-policy stochastic methods respectively, on OpenAI Gym’s and MuJoCo’s continuous control environments.
MRI is the gold standard investigation for early detection , extent of involvement and management of patient in Pott ’ s spine

Introduction: Tuberculosis is increasing in the developing countries and re-emerging in the developed ones because of overcrowding and increase in of population. Spinal TB is the most clinically important form of extra-pulmonary tuberculosis, as it may produce serious neurological sequel due to compression of spinal cord by its excessive spread and involvement of spinal canal as a result of the disease itself, as well as the resultant deformity. Early recognition and prompt treatment are therefore necessary to minimize residual spinal deformity and or permanent neurological deficit. This retrospective study lightens and correlates the image morphology of spinal TB on MRI. Materials and methods: The study was done from January 2015 to June 2015 on 70 patients diagnosed with Tuberculosis of spine. MRI of spine was carried out in all the patients. MRI was done using a 1.5 tesla Philips system. MRI features were observed on T1W, T2W, Short tau inversion recovery (STIR) and post contrast (gadolinium) T1W sequences with sections in sagittal, coronal and axial planes. Results: This study showed that the most common clinical feature was back pain followed by deformity with most patients being afebrile. Most common vertebrae involved were dorsal followed by lumbar and the cervical with sacral being the least involved. Central type of vertebral lesion was common than paradiscal and rarely it involves posterior elements and inter vertebral disc. As compared to the other modalities soft tissue involvement, extent of lesion, type of lesion and Inter vertebral disc involvement are better visualised on MRI. Conclusion: MRI offers excellent visualization of the bone and soft tissue components of spinal tuberculosis and helps to identify disease at distant asymptomatic sites (skip lesions) before and accurately as compare to other modalities. MR imaging clearly demonstrated the extent of soft tissue Rathva A, Zala S. MRI is the gold standard investigation for early detection, extent of involvement and management of patient in Pott’s spine. IAIM, 2017; 4(1): 7-15. Page 8 involvement and its effect on the thecal sac/cord and neural foramen. It helps in early diagnosis and therefore management.
Study of the Success or Failure of Changing Freshman Engineering Technology Courses to an Online Format: Did it Work?

The Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology Department at IUPUI has gradually changed two courses from a traditional lecture / laboratory format to an online format over the past three years. Both online courses were developed with cooperation of the course coordinator and an instructional design team, and both courses have received praise as examples of excellent course design. These two courses have a different history: the digital course, the first in the digital sequence, has been regarded as a straightforward class, while the programming course is traditionally considered a difficult course. The Internet versions of these courses have been successful for some students, and very difficult for others. At first glance, statistics seem to indicate that the transition was a failure: withdrawal rates were much higher than previous classes, student complaints were up significantly, and rates of students receiving D's or F's seemed to be higher. This paper presents an analysis of the data to determine if the transition was a poor choice and a discussion of factors involved in this transition
Challenges for Rural School Leaders in a Developing Context: The Case of Solomon Islands

Thirty-eight rural school leaders in Solomon Islands responded to a questionnaire aimed at identifying their perceptions of work challenges. The data analysis points to an overwhelming percentage of school leaders feeling they face multifaceted problems in their work settings, including such challenges as untrained teachers, lack of funding, limited learning and teaching resources, and land disputes. The latter in particular is beyond the school leader’s jurisdiction; addressing it needs urgent attention from the principal stakeholder(s). Such challenges, seemingly tangential to the business of schooling, inadvertently affect the provision of good-quality education. The findings demonstrate that contextual challenges raise questions about what powers leadership at school level has to deal with some of them. The suggestion is advanced for the significant place-conscious leadership development to help address some community and cultural challenges. Implications of this paper are likely to be relevant to other similar contexts in the Pacific region and beyond.
AdS waves as exact solutions to quadratic gravity

We give an exact solution of the quadratic gravity in D dimensions. The solution is a plane-fronted wave metric with a cosmological constant. This metric solves not only the full quadratic gravity field equations but also the linearized ones which include the linearized equations of the recently found critical gravity. A subset of the solutions change the asymptotic structure of the anti-de Sitter space due to their logarithmic behavior.
A Multivariate Cumulative Sum Method for Continuous Damage Monitoring with Lamb-wave Sensors

This paper proposes a new damage monitoring method based on a multivariate cumulative sum test statistic applied to Lambwave sensing data for health monitoring in composites. The CUSUM monitoring method applied to the features extracted with Principal Components Analysis was studied to improve robustness of detection and sensitivity to small damages. The method is illustrated with measured sensor data from fatigue loading and impact tests of carbon fiber materials and the performance of the proposed CUSUM approach was compared with existing Mahalanobis distance based monitoring techniques commonly applied in the health monitoring literature. It was shown that the CUSUM approach can significantly improve the misdetection rate for monitoring gradually developing damages.
Effect of drought stress on yield, proline and chlorophyll contents in three chickpea cultivars

Drought stress is one of the major abiotic stresses in agriculture worldwide. This study was carried out to investigate the effect of drought stress on proline content, chlorophyll content, photosynthesis and transpiration, stomatal conductance and yield characteristics in three varieties of chickpea (drought tolerant Bivaniej and ILC482 and drought sensitive Pirouz). A field experiment with four irrigation regimes was carried out in a randomized complete block design with three replications. Treatments included control (no drought), drought stress imposed during the vegetative phase, drought stress imposed during anthesis and drought stress during the vegetative phase and during anthesis. All physiological parameters were affected by drought stress. Drought stress imposed during vegetative growth or anthesis significantly decreased chlorophyll a, chlorophyll b and total chlorophyll content. Proline accumulation was higher in ‘ILC482’ than in ‘Pirouz’ both under control and drought stress conditions. Photosynthesis, transpiration, stomatal conductance and yield were higher but sub-stomatal CO 2 concentration was lower under drought stress conditions than under control conditions. The results showed that mesophyll resistance is the basic determinate of rate of phototosynthesis under drought stress conditions. Under drought conditions the drought tolerant variety ‘Bivaniej’ gave the highest yield whereas the drought sensitive variety ‘Pirouz’ gave the lowest yield. Drought stress at anthesis phase reduced seed yield more severe than that on vegetative stage.
The Predictive Power of Price Patterns

Using two sets of data, including daily prices (open, close, high and low) of all S&P 500 stocks between 1992 and 1996, we perform a satistical test of the predictive capability of candlestick patterns. Out-of-sample tests indicate statistical significance at the level of 36 standard deviations from the null hypothesis, and indicate a profit of almost 1% during a two-day holding period. An essentially non-parametric test utilizes standard definitions of three-day candlestick patterns and removes conditions on magnitudes. The results provide evidence that traders are influenced by price behaviour. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scientific test to provide strong evidence in favour of any trading rule or pattern on a large unrestricted scale.
Modeling of Resonant Surface Wave Excitation in a Large CCP Reactor

Low-pressure plasmas produced in capacitively coupled plasma (CCP) reactors are used extensively in the plasma processing industry. Although the physics of small scale CCP reactors operated under low pressure is fairly well understood, larger scale CCP reactors constructed to meet the industrial needs often exhibit surprising behavior in experiments, which affects discharge parameters of importance to the industrial applications. This can be explained by the resonant excitation of surface modes that a CCP reactor can support. Limitations of the drift-diffusion approximation in description of the surface mode phenomena in low-pressure plasmas are discussed. It is shown that a particular class of the surface modes can be adequately modeled using the electrostatic approximation if the finite electron inertia is taken into account. Continuing a previous work [1], the present study demonstrates how such modes are triggered and how they affect the radial plasma density profile uniformity. This is done by using a self-consistent 2d3v electrostatic implicit PIC/MCC code. It is shown that in highly collisional plasmas, the nonuniformities caused by the modes disappear due to the large mode damping.
Interaction between the Outflow and the Core in IRAM 04191+1522

We have carried out mapping observations of the molecular core associated with the young Class 0 protostar, IRAM 04191+1522, in the CH3OH (JK = 2K-1K) and C34S (J = 2-1) lines, using the 45 m telescope at Nobeyama Radio Observatory. Our observations have revealed that there is a condensation associated with the protostar, elongated in the east-west direction mostly perpendicular to the axis of the associated CO outflow. Its size and mass are estimated to be 0.07 × 0.04 pc and 2.3 M☉, respectively, from the CH3OH data. In addition to the elongated envelope, two compact (~0.03 pc) condensations were found in the CH3OH line at the southern edge of the elongated envelope, where the blueshifted CO outflow emerging from the protostar is located. In contrast to the elongated envelope, those compact CH3OH condensations show much larger line width (up to 2.0 km s-1), with centroid velocities blueshifted by ~0.8 km s-1. The compact condensations have momenta (~0.06 M☉ km s-1) comparable to that of the blueshifted molecular outflow. In addition, they are gravitationally unbound, and most probably will dissipate eventually. These results suggest that the compact condensations are probably formed in the course of interaction between the outflow and the ambient gas surrounding the protostar and that such interaction may cause dissipation of a part of the ambient gas. No drastic, localized enhancement of the CH3OH abundance is, however, observed toward the compact condensations, implying that there seems to be no significant shock heating at the compact condensations, in spite of the interaction with the outflow. This may be because the CO outflow velocity (<10 km s-1) is too low to cause effective heating to release CH3OH on dust grains into the gas phase.
A Graph Cut Approach to Artery/Vein Classification in Ultra-Widefield Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy

The classification of blood vessels into arterioles and venules is a fundamental step in the automatic investigation of retinal biomarkers for systemic diseases. In this paper, we present a novel technique for vessel classification on ultra-wide-field-of-view images of the retinal fundus acquired with a scanning laser ophthalmoscope. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that a fully automated artery/vein classification technique for this type of retinal imaging with no manual intervention has been presented. The proposed method exploits hand-crafted features based on local vessel intensity and vascular morphology to formulate a graph representation from which a globally optimal separation between the arterial and venular networks is computed by graph cut approach. The technique was tested on three different data sets (one publicly available and two local) and achieved an average classification accuracy of 0.883 in the largest data set.
Multi-Objective Optimization for EGCS Using Improved PSO Algorithm

In order to improve the comprehensive service level of elevator group control system (EGCS), several dynamic performance indices should be considered including average waiting time (AWT), average riding time (ART), average service time (AST), the average number of stops (ANS) and the average long waiting percent (ALWP), etc. Therefore the elevator group control is a multi-objective optimization problem that is hard to deal with. To solve this problem, an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm (IPSO) is proposed in the paper. The multi-objective (MO) optimization problem is transferred as a version of traveling salesman problem (TSP), which is dealt with by finding the optimum Hamilton cycles. The simulation results show the validity of the proposed method.
Point Decisions for Interval-Identified Parameters

This paper focuses on a situation where the decision-maker prefers to make a point-decision when the object of interest is interval-identified. Such a situation frequently arises when the interval-identified parameter is closely related to an optimal policy decision. To obtain a reasonable decision, this paper slices asymptotic normal experiments into subclasses corresponding to localized interval lengths, and finds a local asymptotic minimax decision for each subclass. Then, this paper suggests a decision that is based on the subclass minimax decisions, and explains the sense in which the decision is reasonable. One remarkable aspect of this solution is that the optimality of the solution remains intact even when the order of the interval bounds is misspecified. A small sample simulation study illustrates the solution’s usefulness.
The Effect of Dietary Silver Nanoparticles and Inorganic Selenium Supplementation on Performance and Digestive Organs of Broilers during Starter Period

This trial was carried out to investigate the effect of combination silver nanoparticles (SNPs) and inorganic selenium (ISe) on performance traits, digestive and visceral organs of broilers during starter stage (from 1 to 21 days of broiler ages). A total of 300 one-day male broiler (Ross-308) were distributed in five groups 75 birds with four times any treatment and 15 birds in each pen. Experimental diets were: T1- control (basal diet); T2- 25 mg SNPs+ 0.2 mg ISe; T325 mg SNPs+ 0.4 mg ISe; T4- 50 mg SNPs + 0.2 mg ISe and T5- 50 mg SNPs + 0.4 mg ISe. Birds accessed to feed and water throughout study. Results indicated the combination of SNPs and ISe had not significantly effected on performance traits such as live body weight (P>0.05), feed intake (P>0.05) and feed conversion rate (G/F) (P>0.05) compared with control. As well as the highest body weight observed in T1 birds (control group) at the end of study (21 d). Relative weight of liver and small intestine were higher (P<0.05) in birds fed diet inclusion of SNPs and ISe than control. In conclusion, finding current research suggested that none of combination levels of SNPs and ISe not only no improve growth performance but also may be to have some negative effects on the overall health of broiler chickens.