Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Gli1 maintains cell survival by up-regulating IGFBP6 and Bcl-2 through promoter regions in parallel manner in pancreatic cancer cells

Background: Aberrant activation of Hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway has been reported to be related to malignant biological behavior of pancreatic cancer but its mechanism is unclear yet. Since IGF pathway and Bcl-2 family are involved in proliferation and apoptosis of pancreatic cancer cells, we hypothesize that they are possibly associated with Hh pathway. Materials and Methods: We studied the relationship of Shh-Gli1 signaling pathway with proliferation and apoptosis of pancreatic cancer cells and the regulation of transcription factor Gli1 to insulin-like growth factor binding protein 6 (IGFBP6) and Bcl-2 genes at the level of transcription. Results: Sonic hedgehog (Shh), Smoothened (Smo), patched and Gli1 were expressed in pancreatic cancer cells. Cyclopamine inhibited cell proliferation at low concentration and induced apoptosis at high concentration. Effect of RNA interference (RNAi) for Gli1 to cell survival is mainly due to proliferation inhibition though involved in apoptosis. The transcription factor Gli1 bound to promoter regions of Bcl-2 and IGFBP6 genes and the levels of IGFBP6, proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) and Bcl-2 messenger RNA (mRNA) were decreased as well as Gli1 mRNA significantly by cyclopamine or RNAi in cultured pancreatic cancer cells (p < 0.01). Finally PCNA, IGFBP6 and Bcl-2 mRNA were upregulated as well as Shh or Gli1 in pancreatic cancer tissues (p < 0.01). Conclusions: Our study reveals that Gli1 maintained cell survival by binding the promoter regions and facilitating transcription of IGFBP6 and Bcl-2 genes in a parallel manner in pancreatic cancer cells and suggests it may be one of the mechanisms of Shh-Gli1 signaling pathway in pancreatic cancer.
Sex Differences in Hemodynamic and Microvascular Mechanisms of Myocardial Ischemia Induced by Mental Stress

Objective— To investigate sex-specific vascular mechanisms for mental stress-induced myocardial ischemia (MSIMI). Approach and Results— Baseline data from a prospective cohort study of 678 patients with coronary artery disease underwent myocardial perfusion imaging before and during a public speaking stressor. The rate-pressure product response was calculated as the difference between the maximum value during the speech minus the minimum value during rest. Peripheral vasoconstriction by peripheral arterial tonometry was calculated as the ratio of pulse wave amplitude during the speech over the resting baseline; ratios <1 indicate a vasoconstrictive response. MSIMI was defined as percent of left ventricle that was ischemic and as a dichotomous variable. Men (but not women) with MSIMI had a higher rate-pressure product response than those without MSIMI (6500 versus 4800 mm Hg bpm), whereas women (but not men) with MSIMI had a significantly lower peripheral arterial tonometry ratio than those without MSIMI (0.5 versus 0.8). In adjusted linear regression, each 1000-U increase in rate-pressure product response was associated with 0.32% (95% confidence interval, 0.22–0.42) increase in inducible ischemia among men, whereas each 0.10-U decrease in peripheral arterial tonometry ratio was associated with 0.23% (95% confidence interval, 0.11–0.35) increase in inducible myocardial ischemia among women. Results were independent of conventional stress-induced myocardial ischemia. Conclusions— Women and men have distinct cardiovascular reactivity mechanisms for MSIMI. For women, stress-induced peripheral vasoconstriction with mental stress, and not increased hemodynamic workload, is associated with MSIMI, whereas for men, it is the opposite. Future studies should examine these pathways on long-term outcomes.
Removal of High‐Molecular‐Weight DNA by Carboxylated Magnetic Beads Enhances the Detection of Mutated K‐ras DNA in Urine

We have previously demonstrated that mutated DNA derived from the circulation can be detected in urine and predominantly exists as DNA fragments <1 kb. To preferentially isolate the trans‐renal DNA from urine, we developed a method using carboxylated beads to separate high‐MW (1 kb or larger) from low‐MW DNA in urine. A primer set for 18s rRNA (generating a PCR product of 872 bp) was designed and optimized for real‐time PCR quantification of high‐MW DNA templates. To evaluate the method, urine samples from 5 volunteers with no known diseases and 36 patients with various colorectal diseases were collected and tested. It was found that the average removal efficiency of high‐MW DNA from total urine DNA using carboxylated beads is 92.72%± 1.42%. Furthermore, compared with using total urine DNA, our method provides a greater ability to detect mutated K‐ras in the urine of colorectal cancer patients. The concurrence of K‐ras mutations detected in disease tissue and the corresponding urine specimen is significantly higher (P= 0.0015) when the samples were enriched in low‐MW DNA.
Effects of Team Structure on Innovation Performance： An Empirical Study

Teamwork is gaining increasing attention in a broader management research. In addition to previous research on the relationship between team structure and innovation performance, this study draws from an interesting experience-based theory advanced by Kelley and Littman (2005), which examines teams from design thinking perspective, and tests its contributions and effects on team’s innovation performance. According to Kelley and Littman any team should include the following team roles: The anthropologist, the experimenter, the cross-pollinator, the hurdler, the collaborator, the director, the experience architect, the set designer, the storyteller, and the caregiver. We develop theoretical logics to explain how team structure that includes these key team roles and competences lead to a better innovation performance, and propose pertinent hypotheses. Experimental-empirical research and quantitative analysis were used in the study. The study conducted multiple experiments on three samples: a group of foreign entrepreneurship students, a group of technical students, and an additional group of randomly selected individuals, aged between 20 and 58, with diverse backgrounds. A special approach was implemented and a new instrument was developed to evaluate individuals in teams. While the results show that team that possess the major competences proposed by Kelley and Littman are more innovative, preliminary results also show that not all team roles are equally important. Moreover, team roles should be allocated equally among members for better collaboration, member satisfaction, and quick response, and within one team, one prevailing personality is optimal in terms of innovativeness. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research and managerial practice.
Dynamic Service Composition: a Discovery-Based Approach

Service-Orientated Computing (SOC) has become a main trend in software engineering that promotes the construction of applications based on the notion of services. SOC has recently attracted the researchers' attention and has been adopted industry-wide. However, service composition that enables one to aggregate existing services into a new composite service is still a highly complex and critical task in service-oriented technology. To enhance availability of composite services, we propose a discovery-based service composition framework to better integrate component services in both static and dynamic manner, including (1) to devise a notion of service availability especially for composition; (2) to develop a dynamic service composition (DSC) pattern for addressing the issues of service availability; and (3) to extend Contract Net Protocol (ECNP) to coordinate service discovery, composition and invocation based on the composite pattern. The main benefit of the proposed approach is better availability through attaching multiple candidate services for future binding.
Vertical Migration, Orientation, Aggregation, and Fecundity of the Freshwater Mussel Lampsilis Siliquoidea

The decline in freshwater mussels makes it imperative that more information be gathered on their population status, behavior, and habitat requirements. We examined vertical migration, aggregation, and reproductive potential of captive and field populations of Lampsilis siliquoidea. Both captive populations and a field population exhibited vertical migration. This movement was strongly correlated with day length, and somewhat less strongly correlated with water temperature. While captive mussels tended to orient their siphons into the current, no pattern of orientation was detected in the field population. The field population was significantly aggregated in the fall and winter. The spatial patterning of captive mussels was random in the fall and winter, but this result may have been an artifact of the small size of the artificial streams. Weather conditions prevented data collection in the spring and, therefore, no conclusions could be drawn about the relationship between aggregation and glochidia release. The average number of glochidia (parasitic larvae) produced by individuals across a limited size range was not correlated with any maternal or marsupial properties. These results are useful for implementing qualitative sampling methods under optimum conditions and for information on the reproductive potential of Lampsilis siliquoidea.
Meanings for luxury fashion brands among young women in Finland and China

University of Tampere School of Management, Marketing Author: LAHTINEN, SONJA Title: MEANINGS FOR LUXURY FASHION BRANDS AMONG YOUNG WOMEN IN FINLAND AND CHINA Master’s Thesis: 110 pages, 5 appendix pages Date: November 2014
L 1 and L 2 Distance Effects in Learning L 3 Dutch Job

Many people speak more than two languages. How do languages acquired earlier affect the learnability of additional languages? We show that linguistic distances between speakers’ first (L1) and second (L2) languages and their third (L3) language play a role. Larger distances from the L1 to the L3 and from the L2 to the L3 correlate with lower degrees of L3 learnability. The evidence comes from L3 Dutch speaking proficiency test scores obtained by candidates who speak a diverse set of L1s and L2s. Lexical and morphological distances between the L1s of the learners and Dutch explained 47.7% of the variation in proficiency scores. Lexical and morphological distances between the L2s of the learners and Dutch explained 32.4% of the variation in proficiency scores in multilingual learners. Cross-linguistic differences require language learners to bridge varying linguistic gaps between their L1 and L2 competences and the target language.
Asset Pricing with Imperfect Competition and Endogenous Market Liquidity

This thesis studies the effects of illiquidity in financial markets on expected asset returns in a model in which illiquidity stems from the strategic trading behavior of investors. For this purpose, the traditional concept of Walrasian equilibrium prices is replaced by the concept of Nash equilibrium in demand functions. This approach allows to integrate elements from market microstructure theory into the asset pricing analysis. The main result of the thesis is that trading costs in illiquid markets are - contrary to conventional wisdom - not reflected in liquidity premia on expected asset returns; instead, asset prices and expected returns are the same as in frictionless markets. This result holds in a static context and also in a dynamic model with additional trading costs and risks. The result is driven by the detailed modeling of investors' trading behavior in the market microstructure process.
Robust Adaptive Strategies

Strategy development requires that managers predict the future in an inherently uncertain world. Many mistakenly do so on the basis of perceived historical patterns that, according to recent scientific understanding of complex systems, do not have great predictive value. Complex systems consisting of many dynamically interacting parts are difficult and often impossible to predict because they exhibit punctuated equilibrium (periods of relative quiescence interspersed with episodes of dramatic change) and path dependence (small, random changes at one point in time that lead to radically different outcomes later). What, then, is a strategist to do? Beinhocker recommends cultivating and managing populations of multiple strategies that evolve over time, because the forces of evolution acting on a population of strategies make them more robust and adaptive. Because both biological evolution and business evolution are complex adaptive systems, to better understand business strategy, managers can employ a tool that scientists use to better understand biological evolution. An imaginary grid called a fitness landscape is an aid to comprehending how evolution increases the odds of survival in nature. In general, the rules for success in fitness landscapes also apply to business problems, though their specific application differs significantly by company and situation. The lessons of fitness landscapes offer an untraditional picture of what a company needs to develop a successful strategy. Because shifting an organization to this way of thinking about strategy is not easy, a company can take six actions to reinforce the robust, adaptive mind-set: ? Invest in a diversity of strategies. Evaluate strategies as real options that may open future possibilities, and remove biases that undervalue experimentation and flexibility. Diversify strategies along three dimensions ? time frame, risk, and relatedness to current business. Ensure that the strategies include sufficiently diverse initiatives in promising areas. Check that selection pressures on the firm's population of strategies reflect those operating on the population of strategies in the marketplace. Use venture capital performance metrics.
Coronary bifurcation stenting using dedicated bifurcation stents

We report three cases of successful implantation of three different stents specially designed for bifurcation lesions, guided by intracoronary ultrasound. The BARD and AVE are true bifurcated stents for side‐branch access and the NIR‐Side Royal is a single modified NIR stent with an aperture to allow provisional bifurcation stenting. These designs introduce a new era in percutaneous management of coronary bifurcation lesions. Cathet. Cardiovasc. Intervent. 49:105–111, 2000. © 2000 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Speech Recognition Based on Student's t-Distribution Derived from Total Bayesian Framework

We introduce a robust classification method based on the Bayesian predictive distribution (Bayesian Predictive Classification, referred to as BPC) for speech recognition. We and others have recently proposed a total Bayesian framework named Variational Bayesian Estimation and Clustering for speech recognition (VBEC). VBEC includes the practical computation of approximate posterior distributions that are essential for BPC, based on variational Bayes (VB). BPC using VB posterior distributions (VB-BPC) provides an analytical solution for the predictive distribution as the Student's t-distribution, which can mitigate the over-training effects by marginalizing the model parameters of an output distribution. We address the sparse data problem in speech recognition, and show experimentally that VB-BPC is robust against data sparseness.
Early Maritime Desert Dwellers in Namaqualand, South Africa: A Holocene Perspective on Pleistocene Peopling

ABSTRACT South Africa's northern Namaqualand coastal desert is the southern extension of the Namib. Today, this region is semi-desert with patchy subsistence resources and scarce, unpredictable rainfall. Yet this ancient desert landscape possesses residues of human activity stretching back into the Middle Pleistocene, evidenced by heavily weathered surface finds, including handaxes and Victoria West cores. Such old finds in so harsh an environment raise important questions: how do human movements into this area relate to local palaeoenvironmental changes, and how has this relationship changed through time? While no dated Middle Pleistocene sites presently exist to reconstruct the earliest hominin dispersals, several late Pleistocene sites now have chronostratigraphic sequences that can be brought to bear on these questions. This article presents chronological and subsistence-settlement data for one such site, Spitzkloof A Rockshelter in northern Namaqualand's rugged Richtersveld. Humans are shown to have visited the site very sporadically between ∼50,000 and 17,000 cal BP. Unlike most of the subcontinent, the most intensive occupations occur during early Marine Isotope Stage 2, when multiple proxies suggest enhanced humidity associated with intensified winter rainfall. We examine these data using the region's better-developed Holocene archaeological record to create predictions about the earliest coastal desert dwellers.
Structured Prediction of Degree Constrained Subgraphs

Recent study of complex graphs has revealed that not all of them are made equal. Man-made and naturally-formed graphs exhibit structural regularity and have common degree distributions that differ a great deal from the random graphs of Erdos-Renyi. A coincident discovery, made in the machine learning community, is that several multivariate prediction problems can be solved with greater accuracy via structural dependencies imposed on the outputs; structured prediction. In other words, not all outputs are made equal. In this paper, we develop machine learning algorithms to enable the prediction of naturally structured graphs, a problem we call structured graph inference. Given partially observed connectivity over n observed objects, return a complementary set of directed edges connecting the objects together into a graph while satisfying topological constraints. Our model learns to predict connectivity of ordered pairs of objects within a structured prediction framework to enforce in-degree and out-degree conditions, while current methods for graph inference largely ignore global characteristics of graphs. If no connectivity constraints can be specified a priori, the model learns to predict these from the observed component of the graph. This specializes independent link prediction and relational learning to interdependent prediction of edges within a combinatorial family of graphs. We demonstrate the characteristics of the model as it learns to predict 2-dimensional geometric graphs, and subsequently analyze its performance on several structured graphs including protein-protein interation, social network and citation network graphs.
Do baby-talk words reflect biomechanical constraints on speech production?

Baby-talk words are conventionalized lexical items used in infant-directed speech. According to the Frame/Content theory, the structure of baby-talk words reflects biomechanical constraints on speech production associated with the origin of speech, a hypothesis that yields three predictions — compared to adult vocabulary, baby-talk words should exhibit (1) more canonical CV syllables, (2) more intrasyllabic CV co-occurrence patterns that minimize tongue movement, and (3) a stronger preference for intersyllabic CVC patterns with labial-vowel-coronal, rather than coronal-vowellabial, sequences. We tested these predictions in a corpus of 351 baby-talk words (e.g., choochoo) matched with their corresponding adult alternatives (e.g., train) in 10 languages. Although the results support the prediction related to canonical CV syllables, they fail to confirm the two predictions related to intrasyllabic and intersyllabic segmental sequences. Baby-talk words do not appear to be any more compliant with the proposed biomechanical constraints than adult words, except in having more canonical CV syllables.
Attribution of declining Western U.S. Snowpack to human effects

Observations show snowpack has declined across much of the western United States over the period 1950–99. This reduction has important social and economic implications, as water retained in the snowpack from winter storms forms an important part of the hydrological cycle and water supply in the region. A formal model-based detection and attribution (D–A) study of these reductions is performed. The detection variable is the ratio of 1 April snow water equivalent (SWE) to water-year-to-date precipitation (P), chosen to reduce the effect of P variability on the results. Estimates of natural internal climate variability are obtained from 1600 years of two control simulations performed with fully coupled ocean–atmosphere climate models. Estimates of the SWE/P response to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, ozone, and some aerosols are taken from multiple-member ensembles of perturbation experiments run with two models. The D–A shows the observations and anthropogenically forced models have greater SWE/P reductions than can be explained by natural internal climate variability alone. Model-estimated effects of changes in solar and volcanic forcing likewise do not explain the SWE/P reductions. The mean model estimate is that about half of the SWE/P reductions observed in the west from 1950 to 1999 are the result of climate changes forced by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, ozone, and aerosols.
The Effect of Overtime Working Hour Restrictions on Wages in Taiwan, ROC

Taiwan's Labor Standards Law (LSL) requires employers to implement overtime working hour restrictions. These restrictions have a greater effect on women, who are not allowed to work as many overtime working hours as men. This paper examines two hypotheses: First, as the hour restrictions can encourage the efficiency of workers, it will increase wages for women in the covered sector relative to others. Second, the foreign workers importation will increase the economic freedom for employers, leading to a smaller effect of hour restrictions. This paper develops a model to measure the effect of overtime hour restrictions on wage rates. Using the Manpower Utilization Survey, this paper finds that these restrictions have an apparent effect on raising the wage rates. However, the LSL will reduce the gender wage gap via the overtime restrictions. It provides the empirical evidence that the LSL may affect the gender wage gap in Taiwan. On the other hand, the effect of the hour restrictions on wages will decline as a result of the foreign worker importation.