Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Antiangiogenic and antitumor activity of anti-epidermal growth factor receptor C225 monoclonal antibody in combination with vascular endothelial growth factor antisense oligonucleotide in human GEO colon cancer cells.

Angiogenesis plays a key role in tumor growth and metastasis. The transforming growth factor alpha (TGF-alpha)-epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) autocrine pathway controls in part the production of angiogenic factors such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) in cancer cells. In this study, we have evaluated the antiangiogenic and antitumor activity of monoclonal antibody (MAb) C225, an anti-EGFR chimeric human-mouse MAb, alone and in combination with a human VEGF antisense (AS) 21-mer phosphorothioate oligonucleotide (VEGF-AS) in human GEO colon cancer cells. MAb C225 treatment determined a dose-dependent inhibition of VEGF, bFGF, and TGF-alpha production by GEO cells in vitro. Treatment with VEGF-AS caused a selective inhibition in VEGF expression by GEO cells in vitro. Treatment of immunodeficient mice bearing established, palpable GEO xenografts for 3 weeks with VEGF-AS or with MAb C225 determined a cytostatic reversible inhibition of tumor growth. In contrast, a prolonged inhibition of tumor growth was observed in all mice treated with the two agents, in combination with a significant improvement in mice survival compared with controls (P < .001), to MAb C225 (P < .001), or to VEGF-AS (P < .001) treated mice. All mice died within 4, 6, and 8 weeks after tumor cell injection in the control, VEGF-AS and MAb C225 groups, respectively. In contrast, 50% of mice treated with the combination of VEGF-AS and MAb C225 were alive at 13 weeks. Ten % of mice treated with VEGF-AS plus MAb C225 were alive at 20 weeks and had no histological evidence of GEO tumors. Immunohistochemical analysis of GEO tumor xenografts demonstrated a significant reduction of VEGF expression after treatment with VEGF-AS with a parallel reduction in microvessel count. MAb C225 treatment determined a reduction in the expression of VEGF, bFGF, and TGF-alpha with a reduction in microvessel count. Finally, a significant potentiation in inhibition of VEGF expression and little or no microvessels were observed in GEO tumors after the combined treatment with the two agents.
Patterns of Open Innovation in Open Source Software

Models of open innovation offer the promise that firms can achieve a greater return on their innovative activities and their resulting intellectual property (IP). Open innovation models stress the importance of using a broad range of sources for a firm's innovation and invention activities, including customers, rivals, academics, and firms in unrelated industries while simultaneously using creative methods to exploit a firm's resulting IP (Chesbrough, 2003a). While the use of external sources of innovation is nothing new, recently some of the most successful high-tech firms have been those that utilized open innovation rather than more traditional " vertically integrated " innovation approaches. The open innovation paradigm is often contrasted to the traditional vertical integration model where internal R&D activities lead to internally developed products that are then distributed by the firm. Consistent with Chapter 1, we define open innovation as systematically encouraging and exploring a wide range of internal and external sources for innovation opportunities, consciously integrating that exploration with firm capabilities and resources, and broadly exploiting those opportunities through multiple channels. Therefore, the open innovation paradigm therefore goes beyond simply the externalization of research and development as identified by von Hippel (1988). Rather than just a shift in the technical production of intellectual property, open innovation reflects a transformation of how firms use and manage their IP. Over the past 20 years, an increasingly popular example of open innovation has been open source software, exemplified by the Linux operating system. Open source software involves collaboration between firms, suppliers, customers or makers of related products to pool software R&D to produce a shared technology. At the same time, open source IP policies mean that this shared technology is available to potential buyers at little or no cost. 3 Together, the shared production and low cost of open source software has forced firms to reconsider the proprietary business models used by commercial software companies for the past 25 years. The essential issue for a firm's business model is, " How does the firm create value for the customer while simultaneously extracting some of that value for itself? " The rise of open source software has enabled a wave of experimentation in software business models that is ongoing even today. In this chapter, we consider how open source addresses what we identify as three management challenges of open innovation: maximizing the use of internal innovation; incorporating external innovation into the firm; and …
Generating Thematic Chinese Poetry using Conditional Variational Autoencoders with Hybrid Decoders

Computer poetry generation is our first step towards computer writing. Writing must have a theme. The current approaches of using sequence-to-sequence models with attention often produce non-thematic poems. We present a novel conditional variational autoencoder with a hybrid decoder adding the deconvolutional neural networks to the general recurrent neural networks to fully learn topic information via latent variables. This approach significantly improves the relevance of the generated poems by representing each line of the poem not only in a context-sensitive manner but also in a holistic way that is highly related to the given keyword and the learned topic. A proposed augmented word2vec model further improves the rhythm and symmetry. Tests show that the generated poems by our approach are mostly satisfying with regulated rules and consistent themes, and 73.42% of them receive an Overall score no less than 3 (the highest score is 5).
The use of traditional and modern value-based performance measures to evaluate companies’ implemented and future strategies in the Greek capital market: the case of EPS and EVA

Traditional accounting performance measures, such as EPS, ROI, ROE, have been long used by investors to evaluate companies’ implemented and future strategies. However, in recent years the appearance of shareholder value approach and its modern value-based performance measures, such as EVA and SVA, gave an incentive to investors to consider those measures as important ones to evaluate companies’ strategies. This is the first study in Greece on the practice of investment management in terms of stock market forecasting and stock selection. Our respondents come from six different groups of investors: official members of the Athens Stock Exchange (ASE), mutual funds management companies (MF), portfolio investment companies (PIC), listed companies (LC), brokers (BR), and individual investors (ININ). ASE has become one of the developed stock market centres thus, it is important for international investors to acquire a better knowledge and understanding of how investors in Greece practice their trades. Results of this study confirm the importance of traditional accounting performance measures but at the same time reveal the significant attention investors should pay on the modern value-based performance measures. For limitation reasons this study focuses only on EPS and EVA.
Procuring Complex Performance in the UK Defence Sector

Public and private organizations are transitioning from buying or selling products to procuring or selling complex, long-term integrated solutions consisting of bun-dles of interrelated products and services (Wise and Baumgartner, 1999; Davies et al., 2007). In response to an increasing demand for innovative solutions and a shortage of public funding, governments around the world are increasingly turning to public-private relationships as the principal method for delivering public sector infrastructure and associated services (Broadbent and Laughlin, 2005; Zheng et al., 2008). For instance, the UK has seen a sharp increase in so-called Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs) to deliver public sector infrastructure and associated services across sectors such as healthcare, transport and education (Ratcliffe, 2004).
FFD Variants for Virtual Machine Placement in Cloud Computing Data Centers

Virtualization technology is used to efficiently utilize the resources of a Cloud datacenter by running multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical machine (PM) as if each VM is a standalone PM. Efficient placement/consolidation of VMs into PMs can reduce number of active PMs which consequently reduces resource wastage and power consumption. Therefore, VM placement algorithms need to be optimized to reduce the number of PMs required for VM Placements. In this paper, two heuristic based Vector Bin Packing algorithms called FFDmean and FFDmedian are proposed for VM placement. These algorithms use First Fit Decreasing (FFD) technique. FFD preprocesses VMs by sorting all VMs in descending order of their sizes. Since a VM is multidimensional therefore, it is difficult to decide on its size. For this, FFDmean and FFDmedian use measures of central tendency, i.e. mean and median as heuristics, respectively, in order to estimate the size of a VM. The goal of these algorithms is to utilize the PM resources efficiently so that the number of required PMs for accommodation of all VMs can be reduced. CloudSim toolkit is used to carry out the cloud simulation and experiments. Algorithms are compared over three metrics, i.e. hosts used, power consumption and resource utilization efficiency. The results reveal that FFDmean and FFDmedian remarkably outperformed two existing algorithms called Dot-Product and L2 in all three metrics when PM resources were limited.
The Impact of Foreign Takeovers on Innovation and Productivity Performance

Recent debate has focused on how foreign direct investments and foreign take-overs may effect growth and welfare. In this study we have methodologically approximated foreign-ownership by foreign take-over and raised the question: how would a firm’s behaviour and performance have been if a foreign owner had not acquired the firm? The analysis is based on a sample of 5 186 firm-level observations in four Nordic countries, of which approximately 30 percent of the firms have foreign owners. The econometric design helps us to establish some new findings. First, no robust difference in the propensity to be innovative can be established. Second, among the group of innovative firms, foreign-owned multinationals are generally outperformed by domestic multinationals in R&D and innovation engagement. Finally, the results on labor productivity are at variance with the findings in a large number of previous comparison studies. We find that foreign take-over of firms are neutral with respect to labor productivity, and hence the issue of welfare gain and welfare drain is turned into a non-issue.
Primary prevention for alcohol misuse in young people.

BACKGROUND Alcohol misuse is a cause of concern for health services, policy makers, prevention workers, the criminal justice system, youth workers, teachers and parents. OBJECTIVES 1. To identify and summarize rigorous evaluations of psychosocial and educational interventions aimed at the primary prevention of alcohol misuse by young people. 2. To assess the effectiveness of primary prevention interventions over the longer-term (> 3 years). SEARCH STRATEGY Databases searched (no time limits): Project CORK, BIDS, PSYCLIT, ERIC, ASSIA, MEDLINE, FAMILY-RESOURCES-DATABASE, HEALTH-PERIODICALS-DATABASE, EMBASE, BIDS, Dissertation-Abstracts, SIGLE, DRUG-INFO, SOMED, Social-Work-Abstracts, National-Clearinghouse-on-Alcohol-and-Drug-Information, Mental-Health-Abstracts, DRUG-database, ETOH (all searched Feb-June 2002). SELECTION CRITERIA 1. randomised controlled and non-randomised controlled and interrupted time series designs. 2. educational and psychosocial primary prevention interventions for young people up to 25 years old. 3. alcohol-specific or generic (drugs; lifestyle) interventions providing alcohol outcomes reported. 4. alcohol outcomes: alcohol use, age of alcohol initiation, drinking 5+ drinks on any one occasion, drunkeness, alcohol related violence, alcohol related crime, alcohol related risky behaviour. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Stage 1: All papers screened by one reviewer against inclusion criteria. Stage 2: For those papers that passed Stage 1, key information was extracted from each paper by 2-3 reviewers. MAIN RESULTS 20 of the 56 studies included showed evidence of ineffectiveness. No firm conclusions about the effectiveness of prevention interventions in the short- and medium-term were possible. Over the longer-term, the Strengthening Families Program (SFP) showed promise as an effective prevention intervention. The Number Needed to Treat (NNT) for the SFP over 4 years for three alcohol initiation behaviours (alcohol use, alcohol use without permission and first drunkeness) was 9 (for all three behaviours). One study also highlighted the potential value of culturally focused skills training over the longer-term (NNT=17 over three-and-a-half years for 4+ drinks in the last week). REVIEWER'S CONCLUSIONS 1. Research into important outcome variables needs to be undertaken. 2. Methodology of evaluations needs to be improved. 3. The Strengthening Families Programme needs to be evaluated on a larger scale and in different settings. 4. Culturally-focused interventions require further development and rigorous evaluation. 5. An international register of alcohol and drug misuse prevention interventions should be established and criteria agreed for rating prevention intervention in terms of safety, efficacy and effectiveness.
Cloning and Expression of clt Genes Encoding Milk-Clotting Proteases from Myxococcus xanthus 422

ABSTRACT The screening of a gene library of the milk-clotting strain Myxococcus xanthus 422 constructed in Escherichia coli allowed the description of eight positive clones containing 26 open reading frames. Only three of them (cltA, cltB, and cltC) encoded proteins that exhibited intracellular milk-clotting ability in E. coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, and Pichia pastoris expression systems.
Self-Medication Practices That Alter the Efficacy of Selected Cardiac Medications

This article focuses on selfmedication practices that have recently been documented to have adverse effects on the efficacy of selected cardiac medications: ACE inhibitors, calcium channel blockers, anticoagulants, platelet aggregation inhibitors, nicotinic acid, and statins. When performing a comprehensive medication assessment or patient teaching this information is essential.
Lack of direct endotoxin-induced vasoactive effects on isolated skeletal muscle arterioles.

Septic shock continues to be a major cause of mortality in the intensive care unit. This study was conducted to determine if endotoxin exerts a direct effect on the major determinant of peripheral vascular resistance, skeletal muscle arterioles. First order cremasteric arterioles were isolated from male Sprague-Dawley rats, cannulated with glass micropipettes, superfused in physiologic saline solution, and allowed to achieve spontaneous basal tone in the absence of intraluminal flow. Phenylephrine responsiveness was assessed before and after exposure to 2.5 micrograms/mL Salmonella enteritidis endotoxin (ET) for 1-2 h. There was no change in either basal diameter (91 +/- 5 microns before ET and 98 +/- 5 microns after ET) or phenylephrine responsiveness. In vivo exposure to ET (15 mg/kg) resulted in no change in basal tone at 1 h, however increased tone was observed in arterioles harvested after 4 h of systemic ET (43 +/- 4% without ET and 57 +/- 3% with, p < .05). To determine if upstream conduit vessels released factors responsible for the vasodilation of skeletal muscle arterioles, isolated cannulated cremasteric arterioles were connected in series to a 1 cm segment of aorta and superfused without and with 2.5 micrograms/mL ET. An increase in basal diameter was observed in arterioles from 94 +/- 14 microns before ET to 120 +/- 17 microns after ET (p < .05). These studies demonstrate that ET has no direct effect on isolated cannulated skeletal muscle arterioles, and that a vasodilating substance not consistent with nitric oxide is released from the upstream arterial bed.
Postprocessing Synthetic Speech With a Complex Cepstrum Vocoder for Spoofing Phase-Based Synthetic Speech Detectors

State-of-the-art speaker verification systems are vulnerable to spoofing attacks. To address the issue, high-performance synthetic speech detectors (SSDs) for existing spoofing methods have been proposed. Phase-based SSDs that exploit the fact that most of the parametric speech coders use minimum-phase filters are particularly successful when synthetic speech is generated with a parametric vocoder. Here, we propose a new attack strategy to spoof phase-based SSDs with the objective of increasing the security of voice verification systems by enabling the development of more generalized SSDs. As opposed to other parametric vocoders, the complex cepstrum approach uses mixed-phase filters, which makes it an ideal candidate for spoofing the phase-based SSDs. We propose using a complex cepstrum vocoder as a postprocessor to existing techniques to spoof the speaker verification system as well as the phase-based SSDs. Once synthetic speech is generated with a speech synthesis or a voice conversion technique, for each synthetic speech frame, a natural frame is selected from a training database using a spectral distance measure. Then, complex cepstrum parameters of the natural frame are used for resynthesizing the synthetic frame. In the proposed method, complex cepstrum-based resynthesis is used as a postprocessor. Hence, it can be used in tandem with any synthetic speech generator. Experimental results showed that the approach is successful at spoofing four phase-based SSDs across nine parametric attack algorithms. Moreover, performance at spoofing the speaker verification system did not substantially degrade compared to the case when no postprocessor is employed.
Perception of 3-D Surfaces from 2-D Contours

Inference of 3-D shape from 2-D contours in a single image is an important problem in machine vision. The authors survey classes of techniques proposed in the past and provide a critical analysis. They show that two kinds of symmetries in figures, which are known as parallel and skew symmetries, give significant information about surface shape for a variety of objects. They derive the constraints imposed by these symmetries and show how to use them to infer 3-D shape. They also discuss the zero Gaussian curvature (ZGC) surfaces in depth and show results on the recovery of surface orientation for various ZGC surfaces. >
Managing our way to higher service-sector productivity.

In the two decades following World War II, U.S. productivity grew at an annual rate of 3%. But since the beginning of the 1970s, it has grown at only about 1%. Had the earlier rate been sustained, the gross domestic product would now be about $11 trillion instead of about $6.5 trillion. That extra $4.5 trillion per year in economic output would have had a profound impact on a wide range of social and economic problems. What is preventing a productivity revival in the U.S. economy? Clearly not the manufacturing sector, which has rebounded since the early 1980s. The service sector, on the other hand, has seen productivity growth rates stagnate during the same period. Why? Michael van Biema and Bruce Greenwald believe that the usual explanations are incomplete and have resulted in some serious misconceptions. The authors point out the limitations of those explanations and offer one of their own. They lay the blame in two places: the ineffectiveness of many service-sector managers at improving productivity and the inherent complexity of the sector itself. The authors argue that the problem is not a lack of resources; rather, it is that service sector companies operate below their potential. If managers focused on putting the existing technologies, labor force, and capital stock to work, rapid productivity growth would follow. Although the service sector is complex, the authors believe that managers would do well to apply the same tools, techniques, and policies that have been so effective in manufacturing sector. Doing so would help them keep their eye on the ball - the efficiency of basic operations.
ValueSpace : winning the battle for market leadership : lessons from the world's most admired companies

In the tradition of the bestselling "The Discipline of Market Leaders, business professors and consultants Banwari Mittal and Jagdish N. Sheth describe a dynamic new value-based approach to achieving market dominance they call ValueSpace--the space that great companies create to deliver their customers the greatest value. Based on the findings of an in-depth study for the prestigious Marketing Science Institute of the top 10 companies on Fortune's Most Admired Companies list, Mittal and Sheth show that value is the "missing link" in achieving enduring customer loyalty, and that the three main components of customer value are performance, price, and service. With the help of fascinating case studies from UPS, 3M, Caterpillar, Xerox, Fossil, and other "most admireds," "Value Space explains why and how companies in all business sectors that excel at delivering customer value are invariably the market leaders. It outlines a complete program for achieving long-term success by more effectively managing the 9 organizational processes that drive performance, price, and service.
Influence of Aging, Training and Acute Physical Exercise on Plasma Glutathione and Lipid Peroxides in Man*

In trained (long-distance runners) and untrained volunteers aged 22 to 57 years, basal plasma glutathione (GSH) concentration decreased significantly with increasing age. In most age groups basal GSH concentration of oxidized glutathione (GSSG) and lipid peroxides (LPO) was not influenced either by age or by training. Following acute physical exercise (bicycle ergometric test), which was maximal for each person and thus different in trained and untrained persons, plasma GSH, GSSG, and LPO concentrations were not changed at all in untrained volunteers. In trained persons, however, GSH concentration was significantly decreased by about 30%. Surprisingly, we observed a decrease in plasma LPO content by about 40%. GSSG content was not altered. The comparison with some physical-physiological parameters indicates that the changes in GSH and LPO concentrations depend on the extent of acute physical exercise rather than on previous training. Alterations of GSH and LPO in plasma could be of physiologic significance.
Longitudinal Evidence That Increases in Processing Speed and Working Memory Enhance Children's Reasoning

As children develop, their information-processing speed (PS) increases, and they retain more information in working memory (WM); these changes have been hypothesized to drive age-related improvements in reasoning and problem solving. For example, in Fry and Hale’s (1996) cascade model, developmental change in PS increases the functional capacity of WM, which in turn facilitates reasoning. Studies have shown that developmental increases in PS and WM during childhood and adolescence predict developmental improvements in inductive reasoning (Fry & Hale, 1996) and in accuracy on arithmetic word problems (Kail & Hall, 1999). However, although these findings are consistent with the cascade model, they provide relatively weak support because they are based on concurrent correlations derived from cross-sectional studies. The present work was designed to provide a stronger test of the cascade model using longitudinal evidence.