Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of PTTG down-regulation on proliferation and metastasis of the SCL-1 cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma cell line.

AIMS To study effects of down-regulation of pituitary tumor-transforming gene (PTTG) on proliferation and metastasis ability of the SCL-1 cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (CSCC) cell line and explore related mechanisms. METHODS SCL-1 cells were divided into 3 groups (untreated, siRNA control and PTTG siRNA). Cell proliferation assays were performed using a CCK-8 kit and proliferation and metastasis ability were analyzed using Boyden chambers. In addition, expression of MMP-2 and MMP-9 was detected by r-time qPCR and Western blotting. RESULTS Down-regulation of PTTG could markedly inhibit cell proliferation in SCL-1 cells, compared to untreated and control siRNA groups (P < 0.05). Real-time qPCR demonstrated that expression levels of PTTG, MMP-2 and MMP-9 in the PTTG siRNA group were 0.8%, 23.2% and 21.3% of untreated levels. Western blotting revealed that expression of PTTG, MMP-2 and MMP-9 proteins in the PTTG siRNA group was obviously down-regulated. The numbers of migrating cells (51.38 ± 4.71) in the PTTG siRNA group was obviously lower than that in untreated group (131.33 ± 6.12) and the control siRNA group (127.72 ± 5.20) (P < 0.05), suggesting that decrease of proliferation and metastasis ability mediated by PTTG knock-down may be closely correlated with down-regulation of MMP-2 and MMP-9 expression. CONCLUSION Inhibition of PTTG expression may be a new target for therapy of CSCC.
A Comparative Study of Different Strategies for Predicting Software Quality

Various methods have been developed for improving the quality of a software product, especially for high-assurance and missioncritical software systems. One commonly used approach is software quality modeling, in which software practitioners utilize software metrics and defect data collected during the software development process to build defect prediction models that will help to find poor-quality program modules. Those modules predicted to be fault-prone will receive more inspection and testing, thereby improving their quality. Efficacy of defect prediction models is influenced by relevance between software metrics and fault data. Usually not all software metrics in data repositories contribute equally to the occurrence of faults. Choosing the most important metrics (features) prior to the model training process is needed to improve the effectiveness of defect predictors. In this paper, we study 18 filter-based feature selection techniques and evaluate their effectiveness through a case study performed on 16 different software data sets. Among the 18 techniques, six of them are standard filter-based methods, while 11 of them are threshold-based feature selection (TBFS) techniques proposed by our research team recently. The last one is based on signal to noise ratio (S2N), which is a widely used concept in electrical and communication engineering, but which is rarely used in feature selection. The experimental results demonstrate that the TBFS techniques perform similarly to the standard techniques and the S2N technique shows significantly better performance than the other 17 approaches.
Carbon Nanomaterials for Flexible Energy Storage

Flexible energy storage systems have substantial inherent advantages in comparison with many currently employed systems due to improved versatility, performance and potentially lower cost. The research within this field is currently undergoing tremendous developments as new materials, composites and large-scale assembly strategies are being developed. In this review, we summarize recent progresses toward the development of flexible electrodes based on carbonaceous nanomaterials with particular emphasis on rational electrode design. Strategies to assemble flexible electrodes, both with and without inert mechanical supports, are reviewed and compared. Depending on their composition, the flexible electrodes can be used in important energy storage systems including supercapacitors and lithium ion batteries. The trend on future developments is also analyzed.
A review of 79 thymomas: Modification of staging system and reappraisal of conventional division into invasive and non‐invasive thymoma

A clinicopathological study of surgically resected thymomas was performed using Masaoka's staging and modified Masaoka's staging systems, and the utility of these two staging systems was compared. The modification enabled adjustment for the disproportion in the number of cases between Stage I and Stage II. Analysis of survival rates, according to the tumor stage, indicated that the old classification should be reappraised, that is, division into non‐invasive and invasive thymomas, although staging may contribute to the indication for postoperative radiotherapy, especially for Stage II disease. Analysis of the cases showed a wide spectrum of aggressiveness, varying from cases showing slow progression with a relatively favorable prognosis, such as the spindle cell type, to cases with rapid progression leading to tumor death in a relatively short time, such as the epithelial cell predominant and polygonal cell type. The pathological stage at the time of first surgical resectlon would reflect the degree of aggressiveness of thymoma in many instances. Therefore, not only staging the tumor extent but also grading of its aggressiveness are needed in order to predict the prognosis of patients with thymoma. For the latter, histology and cytopathology are helpful.
An Unsupervised Semantic Tagger Applied to German

We describe an unsupervised semantic tagger, applied to German, but which could be used with any language for which a corresponding "XNet" (WordNet, GermaNet, etc.), POS tagger and morphological analyzer are available. Disambiguation is performed by comparing co-occurrence weights on pairs of semantic classes (synsets from GermaNet). Precision is around 67% at a recall of around 65% (for all ambiguous words -81% for all words at a recall of 80%). Our results show the influence of context size and of semantic class frequency in the training corpus.
The great outdoors? Exploring the mental health benefits of natural environments

There is growing evidence to suggest that exposure to natural environments can be associated with mental health benefits. Proximity to greenspace has been associated with lower levels of stress (Thompson et al., 2012) and reduced symptomology for depression and anxiety (Beyer et al., 2014), while interacting with nature can improve cognition for children with attention deficits (Taylor and Kuo, 2009) and individuals with depression (Berman et al., 2012). A recent epidemiological study has shown that people who move to greener urban areas benefit from sustained improvements in their mental health (Alcock et al., 2014). In this paper we critically review evidence indicating that such mental health benefits are associated with the so-called “restorative” properties of natural environments. In particular we focus on the claim that interaction with (or just passive perception of) natural scene content can be linked to the restoration of limited-capacity attentional resources, in comparison to similar exposure to urban or built scene content.
A simple algorithm for automated skin lesion border detection

Prompt diagnosis is the most reliable solution for an effective treatment of melanoma. There is an ongoing research for providing computer-aided imaging tools in order to support the early detection and diagnosis of malignant melanomas. The first step towards producing such a diagnosis system is the automated and accurate boundary detection of skin lesion. Therefore, the present study introduces a new, simple, and very fast algorithm that has the ability to detect effectively and automatically the border of potential melanoma. The complexity of the proposed algorithm is O(√N), and thus the execution time, is dramatically minimized.
Probabilities for separating sets of order statistics

Consider a set of order statistics that arise from sorting samples from two different populations, each with their own, possibly different distribution functions. The probability that these order statistics fall in disjoint, ordered intervals, and that of the smallest statistics, a certain number come from the first populations is given in terms of the two distribution functions. The result is applied to computing the joint probability of the number of rejections and the number of false rejections for the Benjamini–Hochberg false discovery rate procedure.
Collaborative decoding in bandwidth-constrained environments

We present a cooperative communication scheme in which a group of receivers can collaborate to decode a message that none of the receivers can individually decode. The receivers act as a virtual antenna array in which the combining must be performed over bandwidth-constrained links. The proposed approach is targeted at systems in which the cooperative information must be digitized, such as for wireless or wired links that are constrained to use digital modulation. In such systems, previously proposed schemes such as amplify-and-forward would require that a large amount of information be exchanged when there are many collaborating nodes. The approach presented in this paper, called improved least-reliable bits (I-LRB) collaborative decoding, provides a higher level of adaptation than previously proposed cooperative schemes. The I-LRB scheme utilizes reliability information and information about competing paths in soft-input, soft-output (SISO) decoders to adaptively select the amount of information that is needed to correct a particular part of a message, as well as which bits should be exchanged. Simulation results show that the proposed approach offers a significant performance advantage over a constrained-overhead, incremental form of maximal ratio combining (MRC)
Sandwich Shearography: A Technique For The Cancellation Of Unknown Rigid Body Displacements In Shearography

A new speckle-shearing interferometric method that allows the cancellation of unknown rigid body displacements in shearography is presented. The technique, referred to as sandwich shearography, combines the advantages of sandwich holography and conventional shearography, to measure displacement derivatives directly. The method involves the recording of two different speckle patterns on separate photographic plates. The plates are then sandwiched together and placed in a Fourier filtering setup, to obtain fringes depicting contours of constant strain. A method to cancel rigid body translations and rotations is described. Experimental verification of the method is presented and discussed.
The vacuum effect of femtosecond LIDT measurements on dielectric films

At ~10-7 Torr, the multiple femtosecond pulse LIDT, F(∞), is about 10% of the single pulse damage fluence for hafnia and silica films compared to ~75% at 630 Torr. The 1-on-1 LIDT is pressure independent. The decrease of F(∞) is related to the water vapor and oxygen content of the ambient gas with the former having the largest effect. The decrease of F(∞) is associated with a change in damage morphology. In air, the damage "crater" starts at the center of the beam and grow in diameter as the fluence increases. In contrast, the damage starts at random "sites" within the exposed area under vacuum. Absorbing centers are created by the removal of oxygen from predisposed sites (for example grain boundaries) on the film surfaces, producing absorbing states.
Stability of Two-Dimensional Blind Grasping under the Gravity Effect and Rolling Constraints

SUMMARY This paper aims to show a sensory-motor coordination control scheme that realizes stable pinching of rigid objects with parallel or nonparallel flat surfaces movable in 2-dimensional vertical plane by a pair of robot fingers with hemispherical ends. The proposed control signal is composed of gravity compensation for fingers, damping shaping, exertion of forces to the object from opposite directions, generation of moments for balancing of rotational moments, and regressors for estimating unknown steady-state terms, all of which neither need the knowledge of object parameters nor use any object sensing data. In other words, stable grasping can be realized by using only finger-joint sensing in a blind manner without using force sensors or tactile sensing. Stability of pinching motion with convergence to the state of force/torque balance is shown through computer simulations and is also proved theoretically.
Quadratic Conditional Lower Bounds for String Problems and Dynamic Time Warping

Classic similarity measures of strings are longest common subsequence and Levenshtein distance (i.e., the classic edit distance). A classic similarity measure of curves is dynamic time warping. These measures can be computed by simple O(n2) dynamic programming algorithms, and despite much effort no algorithms with significantly better running time are known. We prove that, even restricted to binary strings or one-dimensional curves, respectively, these measures do not have strongly subquadratic time algorithms, i.e., no algorithms with running time O(n2-ε) for any ε > 0, unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis fails. We generalize the result to edit distance for arbitrary fixed costs of the four operations (deletion in one of the two strings, matching, substitution), by identifying trivial cases that can be solved in constant time, and proving quadratic-time hardness on binary strings for all other cost choices. This improves and generalizes the known hardness result for Levenshtein distance [Backurs, Indyk STOC'15] by the restriction to binary strings and the generalization to arbitrary costs, and adds important problems to a recent line of research showing conditional lower bounds for a growing number of quadratic time problems. As our main technical contribution, we introduce a framework for proving quadratic-time hardness of similarity measures. To apply the framework it suffices to construct a single gadget, which encapsulates all the expressive power necessary to emulate a reduction from satisfiability. Finally, we prove quadratic-time hardness for longest palindromic subsequence and longest tandem subsequence via reductions from longest common subsequence, showing that conditional lower bounds based on the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis also apply to string problems that are not necessarily similarity measures.
Institute for Mathematical Physics Distribution of the Resonances and Local Energy Decay in the Transmission Problem Distribution of the Resonances and Local Energy Decay in the Transmission Problem

We study the resonances associated to the transmission problem for a strictly convex obstacle provided that the speed of propagation of the waves in the interior of the obstacle is strictly greater than the speed in the exterior. We prove that there are no resonances in a region of the form Im z ≤ C1|z| −1 , |Re z| ≥ C2 > 0. Using this we obtain some estimates on the decay of the local energy.
Ontology-Based Personalised and Context-Aware Recommendations of News Items

News@hand is a news recommender system that makes use of semantic technologies to provide several on-line news recommendation services. News contents and user preferences are described in terms of concepts appearing in a set of domain ontologies. Based on the similarities between item descriptions and user profiles, and the se-mantic relations between concepts, content-based and collaborative recommendation models are supported by the system. In this paper, we evaluate a model that personalizes the order in which news articles are shown to the user according to his long-term interest profile, and other model that reorders the news items lists taking into account the current semantic context of interest of the user. The combination of those models is investigated showing significant improvements on the experimental tasks performed.
Trust-aware Bootstrapping of Recommender Systems

Recommender Systems (RS) suggest to users items they might like such as movies or songs. However they are not able to generate recommendations for users who just registered, in fact boot-strapping Recommender Systems for new users is still an open challenge. While traditional RSs exploit only ratings provided by users about items, Trust-aware Recommender Systems let the user express also trust statements, i.e. their subjective opinions about the usefulness of other users. In this paper we analyze the relative bene-ﬁts of asking new users either few ratings about items or few trust statements about other users for the purpose of bootstrapping a RS ability to generate recommendations. We run experiments on a large real world dataset derived from the online Web community of Epin-ions.com. The results clearly indicate that while traditional RS algorithms exploiting ratings on items fail for new users, asking few trust statements to a new user is instead a very effective strategy able to quickly let the RS generate many accurate items recommendations.
Constructing New Model of Management Information System Under E-Commerce Environment (ECMIS)

At present, China enterprise management information system (MIS) is facing a new stage of development in e-commerce era. This paper discusses the new requirements of e-commerce for (MIS), the new functions and new features of MIS under e- commerce environment, so puts up forward a new framework of MIS under an e-commerce environment. Enterprise MIS should be set up in the enterprise resource planning on the basis of making full use of Internet technology, supply chain management system (SCM), customer relationship management system (CRM), business intelligence system (BIS), electronic marketing system, knowledge management systems and feedback systems(FS),and so on.
Fast m-sequence transform for quasi-backscatter sonar in fisheries and zooplankton survey applications

Existing acoustic systems commonly used in fisheries and zooplankton surveys are based on pulsed perturbation technique. This work applies binary maximum-length sequences (MLS) as periodic perturbation signals for sonar systems. Using MLS of pseudo-random nature, much higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), while keeping a similar spatial resolution as that using pulsed perturbation can be obtained. A fast algorithm, exploiting the fast Hadamard transform, is implemented for an efficient post-processing of target responses. After a brief introduction of MLS fundamentals and a fast m-sequence-based algorithm, this paper will discuss preliminary experimental results conducted in underwater environment using an experimental model.
Modelling of Low Cycle Fatigue Initiation of 316LN Based on Crystalline Plasticity and Geometrically Necessary Dislocations

Initiation of intragranular cracks during low cycle fatigue is governed by complex microstructural phenomena. Depending on the loading amplitude, number of cycles, lattice structure and/or chemical composition, different dislocation structures (veins, cells or Persistent Slip Bands) develop and induce heterogeneous localization of strain and stress in the material. For a better comprehension of crack initiation in 316LN stainless steel, low cycle fatigue tests and numerical simulations were performed. Specimens of 316LN steel with polished shallow notch were cycled with constant loading amplitude and Persistant Slip Bands were identified by SEM observations. In parallel, numerical studies were carried out with the model of cristalline plasticity CristalECP. Simulations were performed on 3D polycristalline aggregates of 316LN steel with the finite elements code Abaqus® and Cast3m®. The results show a heterogeneous localization of strain in bands. For a more precise computation of the mechanical fields and to introdruce a grain size effect, Geometrically Necessary Dislocations were introduced in CristalECP. The GNDs are directly related and computed with the lattice curvature.
Exploiting asymmetry in Booth-encoded multipliers for reduced energy multiplication

Booth Encoding is a common technique utilized in the design of high-speed multipliers. These multipliers typically encode just one operand of the multiplier, and this asymmetry results in different power characteristics as each input transitions to the next value in a pipelined design. Relative to the non-encoded input, changes on the Booth-encoded input induce more signal transitions requiring ~73% more multiplier array energy. This paper proposes low-overhead approaches to take advantage of this asymmetric behavior to reduce the energy of multiplication operations in pipelined SIMD architectures like GPUs. Compiler-based approaches that apply constant or uniform inputs to the Booth-encoded input of the multiplier can save 4.8% of multiplier energy on average. An additional 1.5% savings can be achieved with dynamic detection and steering of uniform inputs.
Text line extraction from multi-skewed handwritten documents

A text line extraction method is presented for multi-skewed handwritten document images. First the whole document image is divided into several sub-images with overlapped area, then for every sub-image, it assumes that hypothetical water flows, from both left and right sides of the image frame, face obstruction from characters of text lines. The stripes of areas left unwetted on the sub-images are labeled for extraction of text lines. Finally, touching lines are segmented by detecting the bottom edge points. The experimental results show the approach is effective and available to extract curved text lines.
Shifting the Spotlight of Attention: Evidence for Discrete Computations in Cognition

Our thoughts have a limited bandwidth; we can only fully process a few items in mind simultaneously. To compensate, the brain developed attention, the ability to select information relevant to the current task, while filtering out the rest. Therefore, by understanding the neural mechanisms of attention we hope to understand a core component of cognition. Here, we review our recent investigations of the neural mechanisms underlying the control of visual attention in frontal and parietal cortex. This includes the observation that the neural mechanisms that shift attention were synchronized to 25 Hz oscillatory brain rhythms, with each shift in attention falling within a single cycle of the oscillation. We generalize these findings to present a hypothesis that cognition relies on neural mechanisms that operate in discrete, periodic computations, as reflected in ongoing oscillations. We discuss the advantages of the model, experimental support, and make several testable hypotheses.
Surface Topography of Vinyltriethoxysilane Films Deposited on the Silicon Dioxide Substrate (0001) Investigated by Atomic Force Microscopy

The surface topography and growth behavior of self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) formed from vinyltriethoxysilane (VTES) at a constant temperature (20°C) on silicon dioxide substrates were investigated using atomic force microscopy (AFM). Two methods for silanization were introduced: vapor phase deposition and deposition from a solution. The influence of deposition conditions on the topography of silane films was also studied. The property of modified SiO2 substrates surface was characterized by static water contact angle measurements. The experimental results revealed that the silane films deposited from the solution method grew via islands, whereas this is not the case for vapor phase deposition. The roughness of the layers deposited via solution method first decreased and then increased with the VTES concentration increasing, while the roughness of the layers deposited via vapor phase increased straight. Furthermore, the adsorption types for silane being adsorbed on SiO2 substrates were also investigated. The results indicated that there were two adsorption types in both deposition processes: physisorption and chemisorption.