Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Real-world incidence and burden of adverse events among non-metastatic prostate cancer patients treated with secondary hormonal therapies following androgen deprivation therapy

Abstract Aims: To describe the incidence and identify prognostic factors of central nervous system (CNS) adverse events (AEs) and any AEs (CNS, skin rash, or fracture) and evaluate the healthcare resource utilization (HCRU), direct medical costs, and therapy discontinuation associated with these AEs among non-metastatic prostate cancer (nmPC) patients who received secondary hormone therapies. Methods and results: nmPC patients who had initiated secondary hormonal therapy with enzalutamide, bicalutamide, or abiraterone ≥1 year after androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) were identified in the MarketScan database. Survival analyses were used to describe the incidence of CNS or any AEs. Annual HCRU and costs were compared across patient groups (CNS AE vs no CNS AE; any AE vs no AE) using propensity score weighted generalized linear models. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards models were used to identify AE predictors and compare risks of discontinuation. Results: The analysis included 532 patients who initiated secondary hormonal therapies, among whom 201 (38%) and 244 (46%) experienced a CNS AE and any AE, respectively. Median times to CNS AE and any AE from therapy initiation were 17.90 and 11.00 months, respectively. Predictors of any AE were any AE in the baseline period (≤6 months before starting therapy), Charlson Comorbidity Index (CCI) score (1 vs 0), surgical castration, and older age. Predictors of CNS AEs were CNS AE in the baseline period and CCI score (1 vs 0). CNS and any AEs were associated with significantly higher HCRU. CNS AEs were associated with significantly higher incremental total medical costs ($18,522). CNS AEs and any AEs significantly increased therapy discontinuation risk by 48% and 38%, respectively. Conclusions: AEs increase the economic burden and therapy discontinuation among nmPC patients receiving secondary hormonal therapies subsequent to ADTs. These patients should be carefully evaluated for AEs to reduce therapy discontinuation, HCRU, and direct medical costs.
Knowledge, Perception and Screening Practices Regarding Prostate Cancer Among Men in Oshodi Local Government Area, Lagos State, Nigeria

Background : It is vital to evaluate men ’ s knowledge, perception, and screening practices regarding prostate cancer to facilitate the design of the appropriate intervention. Methods: This study employed a descriptive cross-sectional design. A multi-stage sampling technique was utilized to select 380 participants. A validated semi-structured questionnaire with a Cronbach ’ s alpha score of 0.62 was used to collect information about knowledge regarding prostate cancer, perceived susceptibility, and seriousness, perceived benefits, and barriers to prevention and prevention practices. Data were analyzed using SPSS version 23 to generate mean and standard deviation while Chi-square and Pearson ’ s correlation was used to determine the relationship among variables at 0.05 level of significance. Results: The mean age of participants was 43.46±11.73 years. The majority (73.2%) of the respondents had poor knowledge regarding prostate cancer. Less than half (34.5%) of the respondents perceived themselves to be susceptible to prostate cancer. Most (75.5%) of the respondents perceived prostate cancer to be serious. Less than half (34.5%) of the respondents perceived themselves to be susceptible to prostate cancer. Few (23.4%) of the respondents had performed a prostate examination. There was a significant relationship between respondents ’ level of knowledge and screening for prostate cancer (X 2 =11.94, p=0.0039). There was a significant relationship between respondents ’ level of knowledge and their perception of prostate cancer (r=0.34, p=0.0001). Conclusions : The participants had poor knowledge regarding prostate cancer, moderate perception, and low screening practices. To improve screening practice there is a need to design health education interventions to increase knowledge and correct perception among men.
Managing the waste of over processing in healthcare using accountability through utilization reviews and information technologies

Abstract Hospital operating performance relies on the proper utilization of resources and procedures. Unfortunately, the waste of over processing through unnecessary healthcare can reduce patient flow and increase costs to patients and hospitals. This article examines two commonly used mechanisms for addressing over processing in healthcare: accountability (individual and cross-functional) through utilization reviews (critical evaluations of service decisions regarding the appropriate service at the right cost), and their interactions with healthcare information technology (HIT) infrastructure. Hierarchical regression analyses reveal insights into service flow (patient length of stay) and efficiency (operating cost per bed) using independent primary and secondary data from 250 U.S. hospitals. The analyses show contrasting results and tradeoffs. For utilization reviews, accountability focused on individuals is associated with lower cost per bed but longer length of stay, while results for cross-functional accountability are not significant. The interaction between individual accountability through utilization reviews and HIT infrastructure relates to incremental reductions in patient length of stay, suggesting a complementary relationship for managing hospital operating performance and over processing.
The Effect of Electricity Development in Indonesia on Poverty and Income Inequality

Several provinces in Indonesia are still experiencing a crisis and the distribution of electricity is not evenly distributed. This is thought to be one of the causes of poverty and income inequality in several regions. Therefore, research on this matter is very important because electricity is a basic infrastructure whichis an important aspect in encouraging community economic activity as well as a tool that helps alleviate poverty and income inequality. This study used a simultaneous panel model, analyzed using the Two-Stage Least Square (TSLS) method, and used data from 31 provinces in Indonesia in 2010-2015. The results showed that electrification had a positive impact on economic growth. On the other hand, economic growth has a negative impact on poverty levels. However, an increase in electrification is actually indicated by an increase in income inequality in this study. So it can be concluded that economic growth is not enjoyed equally by people with low electrification ratios, but only by certain groups. The implication is that policies implemented to alleviate poverty and income inequality through increasing economic growth must pay attention to equal distribution of electricity, especially in areas based on labor-intensive industries, so that they are also able to attract investment and increase access to education.
Institutional Partnership Model of Cassava Sustainable Agribusiness in Lampung Province

The research objective was to analyze a partnership institutional model that ensures the sustainability of cassava agribusiness in Lampung Province. The research was conducted in Central Lampung District using a case study at PT. ABC and survey methods to 131 cassava farmers taken purposively. The analysis used is descriptive qualitative. The result of this research is that the sustainable cassava agribusiness partnership institution was carried out in horizontal coordination between the cassava farmer institution and the tapioca factory so that the problems of farmers and factories can be resolved such as good selling price of cassava and continuous factory capacity.
Noise in indoor swimming pools: Insights from a survey and acoustic measurements

Indoor swimming pools are supposed to be a place to exercise, recreate and enjoy free time. However, many indoor swimming pools show a deficit in appropriate acoustics which can have negative effects on employees and guests. For instance, in previous work surveying sports teachers, acoustics was the ambient condition rated as least satisfying and insufficient speech intelligibility was reported which can be fatal when it comes to security aspects. The presented work contributes to this topic by surveying over 140 employees working in indoor swimming pools and combining these results with room acoustic measurements. Results include the identification of most annoying noise sources, overall satisfaction with ambient conditions and noise-induced health effects among others. Selected results from room acoustic measurements (e.g. sound level, reverberation time) in different indoor swimming pools complement the presentation in order to evaluate the current state of acoustics in indoor swimming pools both subjectively and objectively.
Secure Information Flow for Concurrent Programs with Expressive Synchronization

—Practical enforcement of secure information ﬂow in concurrent programs remains notoriously difﬁcult. An underex-plored reason is that concurrent programs rely on a wide variety of synchronization primitives, which can leak information. However, the existing literature on security for concurrent programs has focused on a small set of such primitives. This paper studies how channel-like synchronization primitives can leak information and describes enforcement mechanisms to prevent such leaks. Out of this study, we provide two technical contributions. First, we introduce a simple, novel analysis that bans memory races and channel contention that otherwise lead to timing channels. This analysis repurposes security labels for information ﬂow control to be used also as capabilities for accessing resources. Compared with the fractional capabilities technique used by prior work, our analysis supports a signiﬁcantly simpler inference procedure at a small expense in expressivity. Second, we generalize the security deﬁnition of observational determinism as ﬁrst proposed by Zdancewic and Myers [24] to allow for a limited amount of observable nondeterminism while ensuring this cannot leak information. This security condition is designed for a synchronization primitive whose behavior is inherently non-deterministic. We integrate these technical contributions into a type system and soundness result for a concurrent language with dynamically created threads.
A new elasmobranch fauna from the early Miocene of Sharbithat (Sultanate of Oman) reveals the teeth of an ancient fantail stingray

Here we describe a new elasmobranch assemblage consisting of isolated dental material from the Aquitanian near-shore marine deposits of the Shuwayr and Warak formations at Sharbithat, in eastern Sultanate of Oman. The faunal composition clearly indicates affinities to other early Miocene elasmobranch-bearing localities worldwide. This assemblage is predominantly composed of large and common pelagic sharks as well as teeth attributable to a new species of fantail stingray, Taeniurops tosii, as old as the oldest undisputable fossil records of Taeniurops. The study of this fossil assemblage presented here improves the knowledge of the ancient elasmobranchs that frequented the eastern Arabian coasts during the closure of the Neotethys and the birth of the Arabian Sea. DOI: 10.1344/GeologicaActa2022.20. 2
EMOCA: Emotion Driven Monocular Face Capture and Animation

As 3D facial avatars become more widely used for communication, it is critical that they faithfully convey emotion. Unfortunately, the best recent methods that regress parametric 3D face models from monocular images are unable to capture the full spectrum of facial expression, such as subtle or extreme emotions. We find the standard reconstruction metrics used for training (landmark reprojection error, photometric error, and face recognition loss) are insufficient to capture high-fidelity expressions. The result is facial geometries that do not match the emotional content of the input image. We address this with EMOCA (EMOtion Capture and Animation), by introducing a novel deep perceptual emotion consistency loss during training, which helps ensure that the reconstructed 3D expression matches the expression depicted in the input image. While EMOCA achieves 3D reconstruction errors that are on par with the current best methods, it significantly outperforms them in terms of the quality of the reconstructed expression and the perceived emotional content. We also directly regress levels of valence and arousal and classify basic expressions from the estimated 3D face parameters. On the task of in-the-wild emotion recognition, our purely geometric approach is on par with the best image-based methods, highlighting the value of 3D geometry in analyzing human behavior. The model and code are publicly available at https://emoca.is. tue.mpg. de.
Employees’ R eaction to G ender P ay T ransparency: an O nline E xperiment

The aim of pay transparency measures is to make pay systems less opaque and to reduce the gender pay gap. To investigate the behavioural implications of pay transparency measures, we ran an incentivized online experiment focused on the effects on employees’ performance, provision of extra effort and actions to correct pay disparities. We found that pay transparency, as devised in our experiment, does not disrupt the provision of effort by employees, but it does interfere with the provision of extra effort, discouraging employees to work beyond the minimum required. We found that although the total number of requests for compensation did not significantly change, pay transparency increased grounded requests and decreased unjustified ones. Our evidence also shows that employees are more sensitive to lower relative wage with respect to own gender, rather than gender pay gap. However, men managers who are confronted with a predominantly male manager composition react positively to reinforce it, while a dominance of female managers composition triggers a negative reaction. We discuss potential policy implications of these findings and argue that more research should be carried out to better understand the efficiency of transparency measures, with a particular interest on gender reference groups, as well as both horizontal and vertical comparisons.
BMI1 promotes spermatogonial stem cell maintenance by epigenetically repressing Wnt10b/β-catenin signaling

The self-renewal of spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) requires a special microenvironment and is strictly controlled. Previously, we identified BMI1 as a key regulator of spermatogenesis in a knock-out mouse model. However, the mechanisms by which BMI1 regulates SSC maintenance remain largely unknown. Herein, we show that BMI1 is essential for SSC maintenance. BMI1 directs the transcriptional repression of target genes by increasing H2AK119ub and reducing H3K4me3 in SSCs. Furthermore, BMI1 inhibition resulted in the transcriptional activation of Wnt10b and thereby promoted the nuclear translocation of β-catenin in SSCs. Importantly, the suppression of Wnt/β-catenin signaling restored both the cytoplasmic expression of β-catenin and SSC maintenance in BMI1-deficient SSCs. Finally, we demonstrated that Wnt/β-catenin signaling was also involved in BMI1-mediated SSC maintenance in vivo. Altogether, our study not only reveals a novel mechanism for BMI1 in the process of SSC maintenance, but also provides a potential new strategy for treating male infertility.
BiDAF Pro Max for Question Answering System

As one of the ultimate goals of natural language processing, machine comprehension (MC) can be assessed by answering one or multiple questions with a chunk of text. In order to improve the performance of our model on SQuAD 2.0, we explore different embedding operations (character embeddings, token features), attention mechanism (iterative reattention) and output prediction structures (conditioning prediction) based on the baseline model, compared with QANet. Our results show that token features signiﬁcantly improve the prediction by raising F1 score and EM score by >10; the iterative attention mechanism could further improve the model, achieving F1=81.65 and EM=77.89 on dev examples, F1=76.63 and EM=73.27 on test examples.
Meta-Learning and Data Augmentation for Robust Question Answering

Question Answering systems has proved success in answering in-domain queries. However, it suffers from poor generalizations in out-of-distribution contexts. In this paper, we use both data augmentation and meta-learning to address this problem. Starting from a DistilBERT baseline, we provide an ablation study of 4 data augmentation methods and 3 data split variations of the reptile algorithm in improving OOD generalizability. Among all augmentations, random deletion performs the best (F1 = 57.54, EM = 39.15 on test leaderboard). For meta-learning, using our tweak of adding different data in each iteration under the Even Split data split produces the best results, an F1 score 57.99 and an EM score 41.33 on the test leaderboard.
by Coexpression of CD80 1-Mediated T Cell Suppression Is Overcome Tumor Cell Programmed Death Ligand

Programmed death ligand 1 (PDL1, or B7-H1) is expressed constitutively or is induced by IFN- g on the cell surface of most human cancer cells and acts as a “molecular shield” by protecting tumor cells from T cell-mediated destruction. Using seven cell lines representing four histologically distinct solid tumors (lung adenocarcinoma, mammary carcinoma, cutaneous melanoma, and uveal melanoma), we demonstrate that transfection of human tumor cells with the gene encoding the costimulatory molecule CD80 prevents PDL1-mediated immune suppression by tumor cells and restores T cell activation. Mechanistically, CD80 mediates its effects through its extracellular domain, which blocks the cell surface expression of PDL1 but does not prevent intracellular expression of PDL1 protein. These studies demonstrate a new role for CD80 in facilitating antitumor immunity and suggest new therapeutic avenues for preventing tumor cell PDL1-induced immune suppression. The Journal of Immunology , 2011, 186: 6822– 6829.
Farnesol, a Quorum-Sensing Molecule of Candida albicans Triggers the Release of Neutrophil Extracellular Traps

The efficient growth of pathogenic bacteria and fungi in the host organism is possible due to the formation of microbial biofilms that cover the host tissues. Biofilms provide optimal local environmental conditions for fungal cell growth and increased their protection against the immune system. A common biofilm-forming fungus—Candida albicans—uses the quorum sensing (QS) mechanism in the cell-to-cell communication, which determines the biofilm development and, in consequence, host colonization. In the presented work, we focused on the ability of neutrophils—the main cells of the host’s immune system to recognize quorum sensing molecules (QSMs) produced by C. albicans, especially farnesol (FOH), farnesoic acid (FA), and tyrosol (TR), with emphasis on the neutrophil extracellular traps (NETs) formation in a process called netosis. Our results showed for the first time that only farnesol but not farnesolic acid or tyrosol is capable of activating the NET production. By using selective inhibitors of the NET signaling pathway and analyzing the activity of selected enzymes such as Protein Kinase C (PKC), ERK1/2, and NADPH oxidase, we showed that the Mac−1 and TLR2 receptors are responsible for FOH recognizing and activating the reactive oxygen species (ROS)-dependent netosis pathway.
Impact of Technological Progress and Industrial Structure Distortion on Energy Intensity in China

Abstract The paper measures the industrial structure distortion (ISD) index by region in China from 1978 to 2016 using data on employment and output shares of the three industries. It also analyzes the impact of ISDs by region on energy intensity using a spatial panel model. The results show that since the reform and opening up, the ISD index by region has declined significantly, with the lowest index in the eastern region, the medium one in the central region and the highest in the western region. The estimated results of the spatial econometric model indicate that there is a significant inter-regional dependence of energy intensity in China; there is a significant indirect effect of ISD, despite no significant direct effect on energy intensity; in terms of total effect, ISD is an important factor inhibiting the decline of energy intensity. The results also unveil that higher energy prices and foreign trade are positive factors declining energy intensity, while FDI worsens energy intensity and R&D spending has no significant positive impact on curbing energy intensity. In order to reduce energy intensity, China should work to eliminate the micro cause of ISDs, promote the transfer of agricultural labor, establish a market-oriented mechanism for energy price formation, and enhance the efficiency of R&D spending.
Fixed Point Results for Generalized ðα, ψÞ-Contraction Mapping in Rectangular b-Metric Spaces

In this paper, we introduce generalized ðα, ψÞ-contraction mappings in the setting of rectangular b-metric spaces and established existence and uniqueness of fixed points for the mappings introduced. Our results extend and generalize related fixed point results in the existing literature. We derive some consequences and corollaries from our obtained results. Also, we provide examples in support of our main findings. Furthermore, we determined a solution to an integral equation by applying our obtained results.
Prognostic factors in endometrial carcinoma – a single-center study

Summary Endometrial cancer (EC) is the fourth most common cancer in women in Croatia and the second most common gynecological malignancy with the trend of increasement in incidence. The aim of this single-centre study was to analyze ECs clinical and pathological characteristics and to assess the correlation between risk factors and the reccurence of the disease. We retrospectively reviewed medical records of 174 women that were diagnosed with endometrial cancer between January 2011 and May 2015. Among the women that were diagnosed ECs in the patohistologic specimen, histologic subtype, grade, cancer stage, depth of myometrial tumor invasion, presence of lymph-vascular space involvement (LVSI), lower uterine segment or surface cervical glandular involvement were documented. In addition, women’s age, BMI, number of successful deliveries and comorbidities (diabetes mellitus and hypertension) were obtained and incorporated in the statistical analysis. We demonstrated a strong corellation between higher tumor grade, deeper myometrial invasion, presence of lymphovascular space invasion and disease reccurence in our cohort. Due to rapid increasement in incidence, further education, increasement of public awareness, measures for prevention, diagnostic procedures and advances in therapy are imperative to decrease the overall morbidity and mortality rate.