Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Laguerre approximation of stable manifolds with application to connecting orbits

We present an algorithm, based on approximation by Laguerre polynomials, for computing a point on the stable manifold of a stationary solution of an autonomous system. A superconvergence phenomenon means that the accuracy of our results is much higher than the usual spectral accuracy. Both the theory and the implementation of the method are considered. Finally, as an application of the algorithm, we describe a fully spectral approximation of homo- and heteroclinic orbits.
Testable forecasts

Predictions about the future are commonly evaluated through statistical tests. As shown by recent literature, many known tests are subject to adverse selection problems and cannot discriminate between forecasters who are competent and forecasters who are uninformed but predict strategically. We consider a framework where forecasters' predictions must be consistent with a paradigm, a set of candidate probability laws for the stochastic process of interest. This paper presents necessary and sufficient conditions on the paradigm under which it is possible to discriminate between informed and uninformed forecasters. We show that optimal tests take the form of likelihood‐ratio tests comparing forecasters' predictions against the predictions of a hypothetical Bayesian outside observer. In addition, the paper illustrates a new connection between the problem of testing strategic forecasters and the classical Neyman–Pearson paradigm of hypothesis testing.
Tumor Mutational Burden as an Independent Predictor of Response to Immunotherapy in Diverse Cancers

Immunotherapy induces durable responses in a subset of patients with cancer. High tumor mutational burden (TMB) may be a response biomarker for PD-1/PD-L1 blockade in tumors such as melanoma and non–small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Our aim was to examine the relationship between TMB and outcome in diverse cancers treated with various immunotherapies. We reviewed data on 1,638 patients who had undergone comprehensive genomic profiling and had TMB assessment. Immunotherapy-treated patients (N = 151) were analyzed for response rate (RR), progression-free survival (PFS), and overall survival (OS). Higher TMB was independently associated with better outcome parameters (multivariable analysis). The RR for patients with high (≥20 mutations/mb) versus low to intermediate TMB was 22/38 (58%) versus 23/113 (20%; P = 0.0001); median PFS, 12.8 months vs. 3.3 months (P ≤ 0.0001); median OS, not reached versus 16.3 months (P = 0.0036). Results were similar when anti-PD-1/PD-L1 monotherapy was analyzed (N = 102 patients), with a linear correlation between higher TMB and favorable outcome parameters; the median TMB for responders versus nonresponders treated with anti-PD-1/PD-L1 monotherapy was 18.0 versus 5.0 mutations/mb (P < 0.0001). Interestingly, anti-CTLA4/anti-PD-1/PD-L1 combinations versus anti-PD-1/PD-L1 monotherapy was selected as a factor independent of TMB for predicting better RR (77% vs. 21%; P = 0.004) and PFS (P = 0.024). Higher TMB predicts favorable outcome to PD-1/PD-L1 blockade across diverse tumors. Benefit from dual checkpoint blockade did not show a similarly strong dependence on TMB. Mol Cancer Ther; 16(11); 2598–608. ©2017 AACR.
An Evaluation of the Need for Touch Scale and Its Relationship with Need for Cognition, Need for Input, and Consumer Response

ABSTRACT Some people cannot buy products without touching them first, believing that doing so might generate more assurance and information and reduce uncertainty. The international consumer marketing literature suggests an instrument to measure consumers’ need for touching, called Need for Touch. This article analyzes if the Need for Touch structure is empirically consistent. Based on a literature review, we suggest six hypotheses to assess the nomological, convergent, and discriminant validity of the phenomenon. Data support four assumptions in the predict direction. Need for Touch is associated with Need for Input and with Need for Cognition. Need for Touch is not associated with traditional marketing channels. The results also show the dual characterization of Need for Touch as a bidimensional construct. The moderator effect indicates that when the consumer has a higher (versus lower) Need for Touch autotelic score, the experiential motivation for shopping plays a more (versus less) important role on impulsive motivation.
Anthropogenic impact on diazotrophic diversity in the mangrove rhizosphere revealed by nifH pyrosequencing

Diazotrophs in the mangrove rhizosphere play a major role in providing new nitrogen to the mangrove ecosystem and their composition and activity are strongly influenced by anthropogenic activity and ecological conditions. In this study, the diversity of the diazotroph communities in the rhizosphere sediment of five tropical mangrove sites with different levels of pollution along the north and south coastline of Singapore were studied by pyrosequencing of the nifH gene. Bioinformatics analysis revealed that in all the studied locations, the diazotroph communities comprised mainly of members of the diazotrophic cluster I and cluster III. The detected cluster III diazotrophs, which were composed entirely of sulfate-reducing bacteria, were more abundant in the less polluted locations. The metabolic capacities of these diazotrophs indicate the potential for bioremediation and resiliency of the ecosystem to anthropogenic impact. In heavily polluted locations, the diazotrophic community structures were markedly different and the diversity of species was significantly reduced when compared with those in a pristine location. This, together with the increased abundance of Marinobacterium, which is a bioindicator of pollution, suggests that anthropogenic activity has a negative impact on the genetic diversity of diazotrophs in the mangrove rhizosphere.
The Ethics Bowl in Engineering Ethics at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez

The Ethics Bowl has proven to be an effective way to recast our students’ thinking about ethics at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM). That such opinions can use recasting is evidenced by the results of a student survey described in the University of Puerto Rico publication Dialogo (Marrero 2002) concerning whether ethics should be made into a required course. According to the students, ethics should not be required because 1) it’s too late to teach ethics by the time students reach college, 2) the preferred method of instruction in ethics classes is indoctrination which violates student autonomy, and 3) since ethical relativism is the case, ethics instruction results in those with power (teachers) imposing their views on those without power (students). The Ethics Bowl responds directly to this skepticism. Participating engineering students have discovered that they can learn about ethics by vigorously debating decision-making situations that arise in day to day practice. They have realized that ethics could be taught without indoctrination because the Ethics Bowl creates a self-teaching ethical community in which class instructors, faculty judges, and students all collaborate in advancing toward moral insight. Finally, because debating ethical issues uncovers shared principles and highlights the distinction between good and bad argumentation, our students have learned to see beyond ethical relativism. In short, the Ethics Bowl offers a clear alternative to widespread student skepticism concerning ethics. The best sign of success is that Ethics Bowl veterans have turned into ethics mentors. In the course of this paper, we will present an example of how students who participated in the Ethics Bowl helped their peers learn ethics. The general nature and structure of an Ethics Bowl competition, such as those held annually by the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, has been admirably described by its originator, Robert F.
Dysphagia and dysphonia among persons with post‐polio syndrome – a challenge in neurorehabilitation

Söderholm S, Lehtinen A, Valtonen K, Ylinen A. Dysphagia and dysphonia among persons with post‐polio syndrome – a challenge in neurorehabilitation. Acta Neurol Scand: 2010: 122: 343–349. © 2009 The Authors Journal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Munksgaard.
Ansiedade de familiares de parturientes durante o processo de parto - doi: 10.4025/cienccuidsaude.v10i3.10161

The birth process, in especial delivery time, produces different personal and collective emotions, for being a moment of transition for the family, which changes the lives of the involved subjects, and so, it can be an anxiety inducing event. Therefore, the present quantitative, exploratory, descriptive and transversal study was realized, with the aim of identifying the trait and the state of anxiety of the family members who accompany women in labor at a hospital. Collection of data was performed in an obstetric unit of a general hospital, attended by 33 family members of pregnant women during the months of March and April, 2009. A form with socio-demographic questions and the State – Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) was used. Results show that the anxiety of family members is distributed similarly in “moderate” and “high” levels. During delivery and postpartum it is possible to verify a moderate state of anxiety. However, mother and husband were more anxious than other family members during delivery. Giving birth is an experience that generates moderate and high anxiety for the family members that escort the parturient woman.
Regulation of VDR Expression in Apc-Mutant Mice, Human Colon Cancers and Adenomas

One variable that may affect the ability of vitamin D to reduce colon cancer risk is the expression of its high-affinity receptor, VDR. Here, we show that vitamin D does not reduce tumor formation in ApcΔ14/+ mice and that VDR expression is lost in the majority of the colon tumor cells. The extent of VDR loss corresponded inversely to the level of β-catenin nuclear localization and could be observed in early lesions composed of just a few crypts. Analysis of reported VDR regulators showed that the repressing class I histone deacetylases (HDAC) were significantly elevated in the tumors (up to 4-fold), whereas the VDR-activating retinoid X receptors (RXR) were downregulated (∼50%). Expression of the Slug repressor was also increased, but was found primarily in stromal cells. Analysis of epigenetically active compounds on colon cell lines and intestinal organoids showed that HDAC inhibitors were particularly adept at stimulating VDR expression. Treatment of tumor-bearing ApcΔ14/+ mice with the HDAC inhibitor panobinostat increased VDR expression in the tumors and normal mucosa. The RXR agonist bexarotene failed to activate VDR expression, indicating that RXR ligands were not limiting. Analysis of human microarray data indicated that VDR mRNA is frequently downregulated in colon adenomas, which correlated positively with RXRA expression and inversely with HDAC 2 and 8 expression. Human adenomas showed variable VDR protein expression levels, both between and within individual lesions. Determining the mechanisms of VDR regulation in colon neoplasms may significantly enhance our ability to use vitamin D as a cancer prevention agent. Cancer Prev Res; 8(5); 387–99. ©2015 AACR.
Object flow: A descriptor for classifying traffic motion

We present and evaluate a novel scene descriptor for classifying urban traffic by object motion. Atomic 3D flow vectors are extracted and compensated for the vehicle's egomotion, using stereo video sequences. Votes cast by each flow vector are accumulated in a bird's eye view histogram grid. Since we are directly using low-level object flow, no prior object detection or tracking is needed. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed descriptor by comparing it to two simpler baselines on the task of classifying more than 100 challenging video sequences into intersection and non-intersection scenarios. Our experiments reveal good classification performance in busy traffic situations, making our method a valuable complement to traditional approaches based on lane markings.
A Semi-hidden Markov modeling of a low complexity FSK-OOK in-house PLC and VLC integration

The integration of power line communication (PLC) and visible light communication (VLC) is increasingly receiving a lot of research interest with the advent of (IEEE 1901, ITUT G.9960/61) and IEEE 802.15. 7 standards for PLC and VLC respectively. In particular, there is an underlying gain that could be achieved by leveraging the existing ubiquitous power line network infrastructure to render connectivity, while we also exploit the illumination system of power-saving Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) for wireless data communication. The ubiquitous nature of these two systems makes us belief that VLC can offer a good complementary wireless data transmission technology to the existing In-House PLC in a similar manner broad-band Ethernet connections enjoys the support of Wi-Fi. This paper thus reports an implementation of a low complexity FSK-OOK In-House PLC and VLC Integration, as well as it's Second-Order Semi-Markov Model. The resulting statistical models facilitates the design and evaluation of forward error correcting codes to mitigate burst error occurrences, as well as optimizing the performance of the overall system.
Occupational solvent exposure, genetic variation in immune genes, and the risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma

Solvent exposure has been inconsistently linked to the risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). The aim of this study was to determine whether the association is modified by genetic variation in immune genes. A population-based case–control study involving 601 incident cases of NHL and 717 controls was carried out in 1996–2000 among women from Connecticut. Thirty single nucleotide polymorphisms in 17 immune genes were examined in relation to the associations between exposure to various solvents and the risk for NHL. The study found that polymorphism in interleukin 10 (IL10; rs1800890) modified the association between occupational exposure to organic solvents and the risk for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (Pfor interaction=0.0058). The results remained statistically significant after adjustment for false discovery rate. Compared with women who were never occupationally exposed to any organic solvents, women who were exposed to organic solvents at least once had a significantly increased risk for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma if they carried the IL10 (rs1800890) TT genotype (odds ratio=3.31, 95% confidence interval: 1.80–6.08), but not if they carried the AT/AA genotype (odds ratio=1.14, 95% confidence interval: 0.72–1.79). No significant interactions were observed for other immune gene single nucleotide polymorphisms and various solvents in relation to NHL overall and its major subtypes. The study provided preliminary evidence supporting a role of immune gene variations in modifying the association between occupational solvent exposure and the risk for NHL.
Query-Driven On-The-Fly Knowledge Base Construction

Today's openly available knowledge bases, such as DBpedia, Yago, Wikidata or Freebase, capture billions of facts about the world's entities. However, even the largest among these (i) are still limited in up-to-date coverage of what happens in the real world, and (ii) miss out on many relevant predicates that precisely capture the wide variety of relationships among entities. To overcome both of these limitations, we propose a novel approach to build on-the-fly knowledge bases in a query-driven manner. Our system, called QKBfly, supports analysts and journalists as well as question answering on emerging topics, by dynamically acquiring relevant facts as timely and comprehensively as possible. QKBfly is based on a semantic-graph representation of sentences, by which we perform three key IE tasks, namely named-entity disambiguation, co-reference resolution and relation extraction, in a light-weight and integrated manner. In contrast to Open IE, our output is canonicalized. In contrast to traditional IE, we capture more predicates, including ternary and higher-arity ones. Our experiments demonstrate that QKBfly can build high-quality, on-the-fly knowledge bases that can readily be deployed, e.g., for the task of ad-hoc question answering.
Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric Flux Transport (ADAPT) Model

As the primary input to coronal and solar wind models, global estimates of the solar photospheric magnetic field distribution are critical to space weather forecasting. These global magnetic maps are essential for accurate modeling of the corona and solar wind, which is vital for gaining the basic understanding necessary to improve forecasting models needed for Air Force operations. In this paper, we describe our efforts and progress toward developing the Air Force Data Assimilative Photospheric flux Transport (ADAPT) model. ADAPT incorporates the various data assimilation techniques, including an ensemble Kalman filter, with a photospheric magnetic flux transport model. The flux transport model evolves the magnetic flux on the Sun using relatively well understood transport processes when observations are not available and then updates the modeled flux with new observations using data assimilation. The data assimilation rigorously takes into account model and observational uncertainties, as well as accounting for regional correlations. The flux transport model and the data assimilation codes have been fully coupled and are now being extensively verified. After verification the model output will then be compared directly with observations (e.g., photospehric field strength and polarity, coronal hole boundaries, polar field strength, and ultimately solar wind). Anticipated outcomes of the ADAPT model include improvement in: 1) the estimation of solar corona and polar fields, 2) understanding the nature and behavior of solar super granular diffusion and meridional flows over the solar cycle, and 3) modeling and forecasting the solar wind near Earth.
An Extractive Multi-document Summarization Technique Based on Fuzzy Logic Approach

With the expansion of World Wide Web services due to the growing explosion of information during these recent years automatic summarization has become primordial to provide efficient mechanisms to resume and present effective textual information. This technology can summarize multiple or single documents to get a summary. In this paper we develop method based on Fuzzy ontology extraction technique. We focus this research only in the purpose to introduce a Multi-Document Summarization Technique for Gabonese Documents. And in the purpose to realize a comparative study between our general approach and current techniques we adopt Timestamp as the comparative method. This research approach successfully generates a summary with greater information.
The Use of Summarization Tasks: Some Lexical and Conceptual Analyses

This article reports the lexical diversity of summaries written by experts and test takers in an empirical study and then interrogates the (in)congruity between the conceptualisations of “summary” and “summarize” in the literature of educational research and the operationalization of summarization tasks in three international English language tests in relation to their task directions and assessment criteria. These analyses show that summarization is not a uniform construct; rather, it is multidimensional in terms of its purposes, functions, and practices in real-life contexts, and as a consequence not particularly well operationalized in language tests and so in need of precise definitions for specific assessment contexts. This conclusion has implications for designing summarization tasks and assessing task performance. First, clear and transparent task directions are essential to ensure that test takers and evaluators share a common understanding of a test task; test takers need to be instructed what kind of summary they are expected to produce, particularly what information to include and to exclude. Second, because summarization may well be a unique type of writing process, it is important to employ parameters different from and additional to those for independent composition writing in order to measure the quality of a summary effectively.
Occupational mobility network of the Romanian higher education graduates

Although there is a rich literature on the rate of occupational mobility, there are important gaps in understanding patterns of movement among occupations. We employ a network based approach to explore occupational mobility of the Romanian university graduates in the rst years after graduation (2003 - 2008). We use survey data on their career mobility to build an empirical occupational mobility network (OMN) that covers all their job movements in the considered period. We construct the network as directed and weighted. The nodes are represented by the occupations (post coded at 3 digits according to ISCO-88) and the links are weighted with the number of persons switching from one occupation to another. This representation of data permits us to use the novel statistical techniques developed in the framework of weighted directed networks in order to extract a set of stylized facts that highlight patterns of occupational mobility: centrality, network motifs.
Bcl-3 expression and nuclear translocation are induced by granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor and erythropoietin in proliferating human erythroid precursors.

Bcl-3 is a proto-oncogene involved in the chromosomal translocation t(14;19) found in some patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. It shares structural similarities with and is a member of the IkappaB family of proteins. In this report, involvement of Bcl-3 in hematopoietic growth factor-stimulated erythroid proliferation and differentiation was examined. In TF-1 cells, an erythroleukemia cell line, granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and erythropoietin (Epo) greatly enhanced Bcl-3 expression at both the protein and mRNA levels in association with stimulation of proliferation. Bcl-3 protein was also highly expressed in early burst-forming unit-erythroid (BFU-E)-derived erythroid precursors (day 7) and decreased during maturation (days 10 and 14), suggesting that Bcl-3 is involved in normal erythroid proliferation. In these hematopoietic cells, Bcl-3 was hyperphosphorylated. GM-CSF and Epo modulated the subcellular localization of Bcl-3. Upon stimulation of TF-1 cells with GM-CSF or Epo, the nuclear translocation of Bcl-3 was dramatically enhanced. Overexpression of Bcl-3 in TF-1 cells by transient transfection along with the NF-kappaB factors p50 or p52 resulted in significant induction of an human immunodeficiency virus-type 1 (HIV-1) kappaB-TATA-luceriferase reporter plasmid, demonstrating that Bcl-3 has a positive role in transactivation of kappaB-containing genes in erythroid cells. Stimulation with GM-CSF enhanced c-myb mRNA expression in these cells. Bcl-3 in nuclear extracts of TF-1 cells bound to a kappaB enhancer in the c-myb promoter together with NF-kappaB2/p52 and this binding activity was enhanced by GM-CSF stimulation. Furthermore, cotransfection of Bcl-3 with p52 or p50 in TF-1 cells resulted in significant activation of a c-myb kappaB-TATA-luceriferase reporter plasmid. These findings suggest that Bcl-3 may participate in the transcriptional regulation of certain kappaB-containing genes involved in hematopoiesis, including c-myb.