Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
NAT2 slow acetylation and GSTM1 null genotypes increase bladder cancer risk: results from the Spanish Bladder Cancer Study and meta-analyses

Background : Many associations between common genetic polymorphisms and complex diseases have not been replicated. One of the few exceptions may be the association between NAT2 slow acetylation, GSTM1 null genotype and bladder cancer risk. However, current evidence is based on meta-analyses of relatively small studies (range 23-374 cases) with some evidence of publication Correspondence to: Montserrat García-Closas. bias and study heterogeneity. Associations between polymorphisms in other NAT and GST genes and bladder cancer risk have been inconsistent. Methods : We evaluated polymorphisms in NAT2, GSTM1, NAT1, GSTT1, GSTM3 and GSTP1 in 1,150 patients with transitional cell carcinoma of the urinary bladder and 1,149 control subjects of Caucasian origin in Spain. We also carried out meta-analyses of NAT2 , GSTM1 and bladder cancer which included more than twice the number of cases in previous reports. Findings : In our study, the relative risks of bladder cancer for subjects with deletion of one or two (null genotype) copies of the GSTM1 gene were 1.2 (95% CI 0.8-1.7) and 1.9 (1.4-2.7), respectively (p-trend=3×10 − 8 ). Compared to NAT2 rapid/intermediate acetylators, NAT2 slow acetylators had an increased overall risk of bladder cancer (1.4 (95% CI 1.2-1.7)) that was stronger for cigarette smokers than for never smokers (p-interaction = 0.008). No significant associations were found with the other polymorphisms. Meta-analyses showed that the overall association for NAT2 was robust (p=5×10 − 8 ) and case-only meta-analyses provided support for a NAT2 -smoking interaction (p-interaction=0.008). The overall association for GSTM1 also was robust (p=9×10 − 15 ) and was not modified by smoking status (p=0.86). Interpretation : The GSTM1 null genotype increases the overall risk of bladder cancer, and the NAT2 slow acetylator genotype increases risk particularly among cigarette smokers. Although relative risks are modest, these polymorphisms could account for up to 30% of bladder cancer cases because of their high prevalence. These findings provide some of the most compelling evidence to date for the role of common polymorphisms in the etiology of cancer, and illustrate the need for large and rigorous investigations to establish effects.
Beat perception in 3D: A comparative analysis between sight, sound, and touch

Beat perception (BP) is the uniquely human capacity to sense regularity in rhythmic sequences. Whether a beat is perceived or not varies according to how the rhythm is structured in time. ‘Metric simple’ (MS) rhythms, which are very regular rhythmic sequences, induce a robust sense of beat. ‘Metric complex’ (MC) rhythms, which are less regular, and ‘nonmetric’ (NM) rhythms, which are very irregular, do not induce BP. Most research on BP has focused on the auditory modality, where it has been shown that BP leads to better discrimination of rhythmic sequences. However, it is unclear whether BP can be reliably induced in the visual and tactile modalities. The purpose of this study was to examine whether BP occurs in response to auditory, tactile, and visual stimuli. Thirty-six participants performed a rhythm discrimination task. On each trial, a rhythm was presented twice followed by a subsequent rhythm. Participants were then required to indicate whether the subsequent rhythm was the same as or different from the original rhythm. Auditory rhythms were created from repeated tones. Visual rhythms were created from repeating visual stimuli. Tactile rhythms were ‘felt’ as vibrations on a loudspeaker. In each modality, MS, MC, and NM trials were randomly intermixed. Rhythm discrimination accuracy was measured to assess BP in each condition. BP was observed in both the tactile and auditory modalities, as evidenced by better discrimination in the MS than in the MC and NM conditions. However, no improvement for MS sequences was seen in the visual modality, resulting in a two-way interaction between modality and rhythm structure. Additionally, musicians showed better discrimination performance than non-musicians with MS rhythms, resulting in a significant interaction between musical experience and rhythm type. Results suggest that BP can be induced in the auditory and tactile modalities, but not in the visual modality.
Ghostor: Toward a Secure Data-Sharing System from Decentralized Trust

Data-sharing systems are often used to store sensitive data. Both academia and industry have proposed numerous solutions to protect the user privacy and data integrity from a compromised server. Practical state-of-the-art solutions, however, use weak threat models based on centralized trust—they assume that part of the server will remain uncompromised, or that the adversary will not perform active attacks. We propose Ghostor, a data-sharing system that, using only decentralized trust, (1) hides user identities from the server, and (2) allows users to detect server-side integrity violations. To achieve (1), Ghostor avoids keeping any per-user state at the server, requiring us to redesign the system to avoid common paradigms like per-user authentication and user-specific mailboxes. To achieve (2), Ghostor develops a technique called verifiable anonymous history. Ghostor leverages a blockchain rarely, publishing only a single hash to the blockchain for the entire system once every epoch. We measured that Ghostor incurs a 4–5x throughput overhead compared to an insecure baseline. Although significant, Ghostor’s overhead may be worth it for securityand privacy-sensitive applications.
THE LEADERSHIP TRANSFORMATION OF TUAN GURU HAJI MOHD YASSIN: A CASE STUDY IN JOHOR, MALAYSIA

Social audit exercise involves a process of measuring, reporting, understanding and rectifying the social fabric of society. The aim of this study was to measure the extent of Tuan Guru Haji Mohd Yassin leadership transformation. Tuan Guru Haji Mohd Yassin bin Muhammad is a figure of great influence and leadership through education of the public in Johor. He founded the AsSa'adiah Madrasah (Arabic stream school) and Mohd Yassin Secondary School in the 1960s. Tuan Guru Haji Mohd Yassin’s philosophy stressed that the distinguished leadership can be polished by achieving the rank of faith and piety to Allah (swt), in other words, muraqabah (the approach to God (swt)). The leadership of Tuan Guru is evident through his efforts to convey the teachings of Islam to the nation and aims to change the mind-set of the Malays to be literate in religion and science education in combating underdevelopment. Based on open and rational thinking, he balanced the interests of secular and religious knowledge through a sympathizing approach in social life through the delivery of religious knowledge based on Al-Quran and Al-Hadith and the ideology of Ahl-as-Sunnah wal Jamaah. The Transformational Leadership model by Bass and Avolio (1994) was adopted to measure the transformation process by submitting four leadership dimensions referred to as The Four I's. The four dimensions are idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration. All of the above dimensions were possessed by Tuan Guru Haji Mohd Yassin. The research qualitative and quantitative data was obtained. Information from the six elements of the society development namely religion, economic, social, environment, education and politics has been analysed based on The Four I's dimensions of transformational leadership since the leadership of Tuan Guru Haji Mohd Yassin to the leadership of his successors.
Apple pomace microbiome carrying fungal load against phytopathogens – Considerations regarding application in agriculture and horticulture

This experiment evaluated the taxonomic diversity of the fungal community in conventional (AP) and organic (OAP) apple pomace using high-throughput sequencing, applying fungal genetic barcodes to functional guilds. The most abundant taxonomic groups identified in both AP and OAP were the genera Aureobasidium, Cladosporium, and Alternaria, classified into the pathotroph-saprotroph-symbiotroph guild. The phenotype microarray provided insight into the role of the apple pomace fungal community in the ecosystem. It is theorized that adding apple pomace to the soil may improve the bioavailability of bioresource-based polyols. Evaluation of the antagonistic ability of the AP fungal community and Trichoderma atroviride G79/11 strain against pathogenic fungi was performed. Trichoderma G79/11 developed well on apple pomace and revealed the antagonistic mode against tested fungal plant pathogens. Therefore, it could be applied to soil as a formulation of AP with spores or AP with metaferm biopreparation.
Promoting and Assessing EFL College Students' Critical Thinking Skills through Argumentative Essay Writing

The significance of this study is heightened by the fact that critical thinking (CT) is vastly seen as a major objective of higher education and the basis for the development of learning outcomes. Thus, this quasi-experimental aims at promoting and assessing students’ critical thinking skills (CTSs) through argumentative essay-writing. It also investigates the correlation between CT and essay-writing skills. The main question addressed is: what is the effectiveness of promoting CTSs through argumentative essay-writing among English major students in terms of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, and explanation? An instructional material was designed and implemented in classroom teaching to enhance CT. The study was conducted on 98 English major male participants enrolled in an essay-writing course at Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University (PSAU), Saudi Arabia. The participants were randomly assigned to either intervention (n =49) or control (n =49) groups. Quantitative-qualitative methods were employed. Pretest and posttest were applied to both groups. The Facione and Facione (1994) CT scoring rubric was utilized for assessing CTSs. Findings revealed that CT and essay-writing skills are significantly positively correlated. Assessment of students’ essays denoted that the intervention group significantly surpassed the control in the five CTSs: "interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, and explanation" (Facione 1990, p. 8). It can be concluded that explicitly teaching CTSs through essaywriting can be effective in the development of these skills. The study recommended that further studies be implemented in different universities and also using other CT definitions and skills, and comparisons between the findings could be made.
Domain-Speciﬁc Question Answering at Scale for Conversational Systems

Answering questions from documents is a foundational building block of conversational systems. End-to-end open-domain question answering (QA) systems answer natural questions from a large collection of documents. However, the need to search for answers in a broad range of specialized domains ranging from IT infrastructure to health sciences remains a challenging problem. Many of these domains lack extensive labeled training datasets. Besides, the QA system must provide real-time responses during the dialog. In this paper, we present Mindstone, a domain-speciﬁc question answering system. This system consists of a multi-stage pipeline that employs a traditional BM25-based information retriever, RM3-based neural relevance feedback, neural ranker, and a transformer machine reading comprehension stage. Mindstone also incorporates techniques that, starting with a small labeled domain-speciﬁc dataset, use data augmentation to improve the accuracy of question answering and allow Mindstone to generalize to new domains. Mindstone greatly outperforms state-of-the-art methods for end-to-end open-domain question answering from Wikipedia articles. Our domain adaption techniques signiﬁcantly improve pipeline accuracy for new domains.
A toolbox for secondary school teachers to support imple- mentation of physical activity in the classroom

Luttikhuizen, Gonneke van (2018). Classifit! A toolbox for secondary school teachers to support implementation of physical activity in the classroom. Master’s Thesis in Education. University of Jyväskylä. Department of Education. Activity levels among adolescents are decreasing, whereas the number of young people with overweight and obesity is rising rapidly. This results in severe health problems that occur at an increasingly younger age. Schools can play a crucial role in promoting active lifestyles by implementing physical activity interventions. Due to their compulsory nature, schools can reach out to children from all different backgrounds and risk groups. Many physical activity interventions so far have been conducted in primary school environments, creating the need for an intervention designed for secondary schools. Using Educational Design Research, this study designed a Toolbox for secondary school teachers, with activities to increase the level of physical activity in classrooms. The Toolbox is a website, and consists of two parts: Powerbreaks (videos of short physical activities) and Active Learning activities (to integrate movement and academic content). Two teachers from a Swedish-language secondary school in Finland have tested the intervention, with the data collection focusing on usefulness, ease of use and motivation towards the use of ICT material. The results show that the Toolbox was found useful in increasing levels of physical activity in the classroom, easy to use because of the videos and helped teachers to offer a necessary active break for students. This suggests that practical material available online, could be a great resource for teachers to develop their active teaching methods. Further development is however necessary to ensure a continuation of these positive outcomes, as well as to address several limitations that have been found.
A Comparison of the Greek ACE-III, M-ACE, ACE-R, MMSE, and ECAS in the Assessment and Identification of Alzheimer’s Disease

Abstract Objective: This study aimed to adapt the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-III (ACE-III) and Mini-Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination (M-ACE) into Greek and then to examine the convergent validity against their predecessors Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination-Revised (ACE-R) and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) in a Greek population. Moreover, a primary aim was to appraise the utility of each screen by conducting a comparison of the psychometric properties of ACE-III, M-ACE, ACE-R, MMSE, and the Edinburgh Cognitive and Behavioural Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) Screen (ECAS) in detecting Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Methods: Forty patients with AD were recruited and matched with 38 controls. Bayesian Pearson’s correlation analysis was conducted to examine the convergent validity. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was implemented to appraise the sensitivity and specificity of the tests in detecting AD. Results: The ACE-III, M-ACE, and the ECAS scores robustly correlated with ACE-R and MMSE. The ACE-III and the ECAS-ALS Non-Specific score were the most sensitive and specific tools in detecting AD, closely followed by ECAS Total score and M-ACE. Only ECAS Total score correlated with the duration of disease. The ECAS scores were more resilient to ceiling effects than the other screens. M-ACE produced fewer ceiling effects than MMSE. Conclusion: The Greek ACE-III and M-ACE were successfully adapted and showed good convergent validity against their predecessors. They showed very good psychometric properties in detecting AD and may be considered in hectic clinical settings. ECAS Total score and ECAS-ALS Non-Specific showed comparable psychometric properties in the detection of AD and may be considered in polypathological clinics where motor impairments are common.
Distributed Algorithms for Data Propagation in Deeply Networked Wireless Sensor Devices

Wireless sensor networks are comprised of a vast number of ultra-small fully autonomous computing, communication and sensing devices, with very restricted energy and computing capabilities, which co-operate to accomplish a large sensing task. Such networks can be very useful in practice in applications that require ﬁne-grain monitoring of physical environment subjected to critical conditions (such as inaccessible terrains or disaster places). Very large numbers of sensor devices can be deployed in areas of interest and use self-organization and collaborative methods to form deeply networked environments. Features including the huge number of sensor devices involved, the severe power, computational and memory limitations, their dense deployment and frequent failures, pose new design and implementation aspects . The eﬃcient and robust realization of such large, highly-dynamic, complex, non-conventional environments is a challenging algorithmic and technological task . In this paper we present certain important aspects of the design, deployment and operation of distributed algorithms for data propagation in wireless sensor networks and discuss some characteristic protocols, along with an evaluation of their performance.
Proposed Methodology for Personalized Medicine in Healthcare System using Data Mining Techniques with an Emphasis on Mental Illness Disease

-Today, the Medicare system has been improved their models to achieve the best care for the patients and customized the delivery of healthcare treatment to the individuals by helping the doctors in the diagnosis of a disease. The systems are useful due to implementation of personalized medicine that is an effective way of doing treatment to a patient by considering omic data and electronic health record data while classifying the patient into subgroups based on common biological basis of diseases. This paper discusses the mental illness disease and its categorization to predict a disease based on its symptoms along with various challenges while processing data sets. There is data mining and machine learning algorithms used for feature selection and classification in order to improve the prediction performance for the specific mental illness disease are discussed to develop a new model. The proposed methodology is to develop a personalized Medicare system considering omic or Electronic Health Record (EHR) data using the best feature selection and classification mining algorithms to help the doctors to diagnose the disease at the early stage and identify the root cause for better treatment.
Leisure Time Physical Activity to Reduce Metabolic Syndrome Risk: A 10-Year Community-Based Prospective Study in Korea

Purpose Metabolic syndrome (MetS) is a major public health problem related to increased risks of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. We investigated whether recommended levels of leisure time physical activity (LTPA) decrease the risk of MetS in a community-based prospective cohort study (Ansung and Ansan cohort). Materials and Methods A total of 3910 adults (1890 men, 2020 women) without MetS examined in 2001–2002 (baseline) were included in this study and followed up from 2013 to 2014. We measured LTPA energy expenditure using the standard metabolic equivalent value [metabolic equivalent of task (MET)-h/wk]. Individuals were categorized into five groups (physically inactive, 0.1 to <7.5, 7.5 to <15.0, 15.0 to <22.5, 22.5 to <40.0, and ≥40.0 MET-h/wk). Results The mean follow-up period was 11.8 years. Among the cohort, 482 men (25.5%) and 541 women (26.8%) were diagnosed with newly developed MetS. Multivariate logistic analysis revealed a 4.4% lower MetS risk among those performing two to three times the recommended minimum of 7.5 MET-h/wk [multivariate relative risk (RR), 0.956; 95% confidence interval (CI), 0.654–1.398] and a 21.9% lower risk among those performing three to four times the physical activity minimum (multivariate RR, 0.781; 95% CI, 0.574–1.063). This association was only significant in females performing three to four times the minimum (crude RR, 0.655; 95% CI, 0.432–0.994). Conclusion We noted that physical activity at more than 2 times the recommended minimum prevents MetS. Healthcare professionals should encourage inactive adults to be physically active during their leisure time to take advantage of its health benefits.
Conversational QA for FAQs

The goal of this work is to access the large body of domain-speciﬁc information in the form of Frequently Asked Question sites via conversational Question Answering (QA) systems. Training systems for each possible application domain is unfeasible, calling for research on transfer learning of conversational QA systems. We present DoQA, a dataset for accessing Do main speciﬁc FAQs via conversational QA that contains 1,637 information-seeking dialogues on the cooking domain (7,329 questions in total). These dialogues are created by crowd workers that play the following two roles: the user who asks questions about a certain cooking topic posted in Stack Exchange, and the domain expert who replies to the questions by selecting a short span of text from the long textual reply in the original post. The expert can rephrase the selected span, in order to make it look more natural. Together with the dataset, we present results of state-of-the-art models, including transfer learning from Wikipedia QA datasets to our cooking FAQ dataset, and a more realistic scenario where the passage with the answer needs to be retrieved. Our dataset and experiments show that it is possible to access domain speciﬁc FAQs with high quality using conversational QA systems with little training data, thanks to transfer learning.
Impact of Non-Bank MicroLending

Microfinance emerged in the 1970s as a non-standard provision of microcredits to low-income people to support their entrepreneurship activities and alleviate poverty and unemployment. Yet it is astonishing that despite global recognition, there are only a few reliable papers that measure the true impact of microfinance. The first major obstacle is the lack of reliable data; the second is derived from flaws in robust methodology. Microfinance impact assessment therefore remains an arduous task as client self-selection and non-random placement of microfinance institutions challenge the robustness of results, thus invalidating the application of conventional impact evaluation techniques. The proposed project has two contributions. First, we propose a novel approach to microfinance impact assessment based on retrospective data collection for robust measures of the impact and offer an effective solution for ex-post data collection when no baseline data is available. Second, we quantify the impact of microfinance on business and welfare improvement in the case of Uzbekistan, Central Asia. Taking advantage of the unique development path of microfinance in the country, we are able to assess the viability of emerging commercial SME lending model vis-à-vis traditional group lending microfinance model whose efficiency has been criticized and revisited recently.
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization

Do futures markets have a stabilizing or destabilizing effect on commodity prices? The empirical evidence is inconclusive. We try to resolve this question by means of a learning-to-forecast experiment in which a futures market and a spot market are coupled. The strength of the coupling depends positively on the number of speculators on the futures market and negatively on storage costs and speculator risk aversion. We ﬁnd that the spot price volatility changes non-monotonically with the strength of the coupling, resulting in a stabilizing effect on spot prices for weakly coupled markets and a destabilizing effect when the coupling with the futures market is strong