Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Impact of XRCC2 Arg188His Polymorphism on Cancer Susceptibility: A Meta-Analysis

Background Association between the single nucleotide polymorphism rs3218536 (known as Arg188His) located in the X-ray repair cross complementing group 2 (XRCC2) gene and cancer susceptibility has been widely investigated. However, results thus far have remained controversial. A meta-analysis was performed to identify the impact of this polymorphism on cancer susceptibility. Methods PubMed and Embase databases were searched systematically until September 7, 2013 to obtain all the records evaluating the association between the XRCC2 Arg188His polymorphism and the risk of all types of cancers. We used the odds ratio (OR) as measure of effect, and pooled the data in a Mantel-Haenszel weighed random-effects meta-analysis to provide a summary estimate of the impact of this polymorphism on breast cancer, ovarian cancer and other cancers. All the analyses were carried out in STATA 12.0. Results With 30868 cases and 38656 controls, a total of 45 case-control studies from 26 publications were eventually included in our meta-analysis. No significant association was observed between the XRCC2 Arg188His polymorphism and breast cancer susceptibility (dominant model: OR = 0.94, 95%CI = 0.86–1.04, P = 0.232). However, a significant impact of this polymorphism was detected on decreased ovarian cancer risk (dominant model: OR = 0.83, 95%CI = 0.73–0.95, P = 0.007). In addition, we found this polymorphism was associated with increased upper aerodigestive tract (UADT) cancer susceptibility (dominant model: OR = 1.51, 95%CI = 1.04–2.20, P = 0.032). Conclusion The Arg188His polymorphism might play different roles in carcinogenesis of various cancer types. Current evidence did not suggest that this polymorphism was directly associated with breast cancer susceptibility. However, this polymorphism might contribute to decreased gynecological cancer risk and increased UADT cancer risk. More preclinical and epidemiological studies were still imperative for further evaluation.
The gender gap in intergenerational mobility: Evidence of educational persistence in Brazil

This paper employs mobility matrices, univariate regressions and multivariate econometric techniques based on the recently published nationally representative household survey (PNAD-2014) from Brazil to investigate the relevance of the gendered patterns in the intergenerational transmission of educational attainment between parents and their descendants. The empirical evidence from these three different approaches is absolutely unanimous: In Brazil there is a significant variation in degree of mobility across genders, with a higher mobility level for daughters than for sons. The reason for this gender gap in mobility lies in the chances of attaining the educational levels: regardless of the educational background of the parents, females have a lower chance of remaining without school certificate and a greater probability to achieve a tertiary education. The results of this paper point out also that the educational attainment of children is strongly associated with the education of their most educated parent, regardless of their gender and this correlation is higher for female than for male. Concerning the evolution of the persistence in education over time, the findings indicate for both sexes a significant increase in intergeneration mobility over the last decades. However this positive evolution is much more modest when the relative deviation in education across generations is excluded from the investigation. Finally, this study has demonstrated that parental occupation levels and individual characteristics (race, locality of residence and year of birth) also have a statistically significant effect on the prospects for mobility.
Effects of lithium on the proliferation and migration of neuroblasts in the rostral migratory stream in adult mice

The discovery of neurogenesis in adult brains opened the possibility of cellular therapy strategies for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease. Neurogenesis in the adult brain occurs in two areas: subgranular zone of the hippocampus and subventricular zone (SVZ) of the lateral ventricles. Neurons that originate from the SVZ migrate to the olfactory bulb (OB) through the rostral migratory stream (RMS). In Alzheimer’s disease, there is a progressive neuronal dysfunction and degeneration, resulting in brain atrophy and cognitive impairments including olfactory dysfunction. Several studies have demonstrated that pharmacological treatment with lithium exerts positive effects on adult neurogenesis, and one pathway seems to be the modulation of factors that regulate the migration of neuroblasts. The objective of this study was to investigate whether treatment with lithium promotes the increase of migratory neuroblasts using as parameter the RMS. Adult male C57BL/6 mice were divided into control and lithium-treated groups. The animals were treated for 6 weeks and, at four different time points, i.e., 10 days, 7 days, 3 days and 1 day before the end of treatments, they received an injection of BrdU (cell proliferation marker). The animals were sacrificed by perfusion fixation and the brains were immunohistochemically labeled for BrdU for analysis of migrating neuroblasts in the RMS. The results showed that the number of BrdU cells in the RMS was not significantly different between the two groups, suggesting that lithium, alone, is not capable of increasing the number of neuroblasts migrating from the SVZ to the OB.
Inpainting in Color Images Based on Stochastic Model with Bayesian

This paper introduces a novel approach, i.e. block oriented – restoration, based on a family of Full Range Autoregressive (FRAR) model to restore the information lost, and this adopts the Bayesian approach to estimate the parameters of the model. The Bayesian approach, by combining the prior information and the observed data known as posterior distribution makes inferences. The loss of information caused is due to errors in communication channels, through which the data are transmitted. Even if there is loss of a single bit in a block, it causes loss in the whol block and the impact may reflect on its consecutive blocks. In the proposed technique, such damaged blocks are identified, and to restore it a priori information is searched and extracted from undamaged regions of the image; this information and the pixels in the neighboring region of the damaged block are utilized to estimate the parameters. The estimated parameters are employed to recover the damaged block. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of the linear dependency of the neighboring pixels of the damaged block and takes them as source to predict the pixels of the damaged block. The restoration is performed at two stages: first, the lone blocks are restored; second, the contiguous blocks are restored. It produces very good results and is comparable with other existing schemes.
Rapid Design of Special-Purpose Pipeline Processors with FPGAs and its Application to Computational Fluid Dynamics

This paper presents a framework for rapid development of FPGA based custom processors based on floating-point calculation units. The framework consists of a fully parameterized floating-point library, an easy-to-use pipeline generator and an interface generator for memory and I/O-modules. The performance of this approach is shown for the implementation of an SPH-algorithm.
Employees’ Perception on Performance Appraisal and Their Work Outcomes in Nepalese Service Sector

This paper examines the employees’ perception on performance appraisal and their work outcomes in Nepalese service sector. The aim of this paper is to aid service sectors in Nepal to evaluate their existing performance appraisal systems, by identifying the perceived satisfaction of employees towards their current performance appraisal process. It can provide and promote excellent feedback towards their employees thus enhancing employees’ work performance, affective commitment, employee engagement while reducing employee turnover intentions. This paper emphasized on one independent variable employees’ perception of performance appraisal and four dependent variables work performance, affective commitment, employee engagement and turnover intention. The data are collected from the questionnaire and were analyzed and interpreted through the help of different statistical tools. The result highlighted that there is significant (positive) relationship of performance appraisal with work performance, affective commitment and employee engagement and a (negative) relationship between performance appraisal and turnover intention.
Recursive Stratified Sampling: A New Framework for Query Evaluation on Uncertain Graphs

Uncertain graph management has been recognized as an important research topic in recent years. In this paper, we first introduce two types of query evaluation problems on uncertain graphs, named expectation query evaluation and threshold query evaluation. Most previous solutions for these problems are based on naive Monte-Carlo (<italic>NMC </italic>) sampling, which typically result in large variances. To reduce the variance of <italic>NMC</italic>, we propose two efficient estimators, called <italic>RSS-I</italic> and <italic>RSS-II</italic> estimators, based on the idea of recursive stratified sampling (<italic>RSS</italic>). To further reduce the variances of <italic>RSS-I</italic> and <italic>RSS-II</italic>, we propose a recursive <italic>cut-set</italic> based stratified sampling estimator for a particular kind of query evaluation problem. We show that all the proposed estimators are unbiased and their variances are significantly smaller than that of <italic>NMC</italic>. Moreover, the time complexity of all the proposed estimators are the same as that of <italic>NMC</italic> under a mild assumption. In addition, we develop an elegant graph simplification technique to further improve the accuracy and running time of our estimators. We also apply the proposed estimators to three different uncertain graph query evaluation problems. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed estimators, and the results show the accuracy, efficiency, and scalability of our estimators.
Basic Study for Human Brain Activity Based on the Spatial Cognitive Task

Recently, there is a need to develop a new assist system which acts for car driving and wheelchair for the elderly and disability person as the population grows older. In terms of developing a new system, examining human spatial recognition has important implications. And so, we pay attention to spatial perception, especially left and right ones and differences in brain activity between right and left perception. The final goal of our research measuring brain activity is to contribute to developing of welfare robots with functions that are responsive like human. So, we have performed experiments for investigating human spatial perception by measuring brain blood flow when subjects perform driving tasks. In previous experiment, we measured brain activity when T-junctions were shown to subjects using driving movies. In this time, we performed experiment in which brain activities were measured during actual car driving. We are reporting on these analysis result and comparison result between virtual one and actual one. Keywordsspatial cognitive task; NIRS; determing direction
Macrophages and fibrosis in adipose tissue are linked to liver damage and metabolic risk in obese children

Obesity in childhood is associated with an inflammatory state in adipose tissue and liver, which elevates risk for diabetes and liver disease. No prior study has examined associations between pathologies occurring in adipose tissue and liver to identify elements of tissue damage associated with type 2 diabetes risk. This study sought to determine whether inflammation and fibrosis in abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (SAT) in obese/overweight children (BMI‐z 2.3 ± 0.76) was related to the extent of observed liver disease or type 2 diabetes risk.
tability analysis for defining management strategies in abandoned mountain andscapes of the Mediterranean basin

The semi-natural landscapes of Mediterranean mountains underwent a remarkable land abandonment in the past decades. These large perturbation-dependent landscapes then evolved into new meta-stable states to balance human pressures and natural components with a general pattern homogenisation and several consequences on landscape services. These areas need effective management strategies to conserve a wide functionality allowing, at the same time, the sustainable development of population. Lack of resources and achievable restoration goals often hamper these objectives to be reached. In this paper, a study of pattern change is proposed using five landscape metrics and a stability analysis of features derived from land cover maps in order to investigate their magnitude and rate of change in a mountain municipality of central Italy between two separate time periods (1954–1985 and 1985–1999). A Kappa statistic (Kappa Index of Agreement), a Markov chain model and a Kruskal–Wallis test were employed. The results showed that shape and size of woodlands, open areas and buildings patches were significantly changed during the second period (1985–1999), with a concurrent abrupt reduction in the rate of change for each land cover, confirming that a new meta-stable state of equilibrium between human land use and natural processes of secondary succession was being approached. A discussion of management strategies for such equilibrium is therefore proposed to contribute to the development of effective conservation actions for the semi-natural landscapes of Mediterranean Basin. The presented approach aims to stimulate the inclusion of stability analysis into the planning and ed lan management of abandon
SAR calculations for titanium bar-implant subjected to microwave radiation

The paper describes the assessment of exposure of a six-year-old male patient with a titanium bar implanted after Nuss procedure to microwave radiation with frequency of 2.45 GHz. The local SAR concentrations inside the boy's trunk for two variants of plane wave polarizations with regard to the titanium implant have been considered. It was demonstrated that an analyzed concave bar-implant poses no danger during occupational and environmental exposures according to current safety standards.
Robust method for texture synthesis-by-analysis based on a multiscale Gabor scheme

We propose a new texture synthesis-by-analysis method inspired by current models of biological early vision and based on a multiscale Gabor scheme. The analysis stage starts with a log-polar sampling of the estimated power spectral density of the texture by a set of 4 by 4 Gabor filters, plus a low-pass residual (LPR). Then, for each channel, we compute its energy and its two (X,Y) bandwidths. The LPR is coded by five parameters. In addition, the density function of the original texture is also estimated and compressed to sixteen values. Therefore, texture is coded by only 69 parameters. The synthesis method consists of generating a set of 4 by 4 synthetic channels (Gabor filtered noise signals). Their energies and bandwidths are corrected to match the original features. These bandpass filtered noise signals are mixed into a single image. Finally, the histogram and LPR frequencies of the resulting texture are modified to fit the original values. We have obtained very satisfactory results both with highly random textures and with some quasi-periodic textures. Compared to previous methods, ours has other important advantages: high robustness (stable, non iterative and fully automatic), high compactness of the coding, and computational efficiency.
Research on the Temporal Model in Video Compression

In video compression, eliminating the temporal redundancy is very important. In this paper, the technique of eliminating the temporal redundancy is studied, including the temporal model in MPEG video standard and an efficient method: Motion Compensated Temporal Filtering (MCTF). The theory of these two techniques is explained, the performances of them are compared in temporal scalability, and some suggestions are presented to improve the efficiency of MCTF. Experimental results show that MCTF can implement the temporal scalability very well, when bit-rates achieves 400kbps and the average PSNR achieves 39dB, which means that the reconstructed sequence is perfect.
A nested variational time discretization for parametric Willmore flow

A novel variational time discretization of isotropic and anisotropic Willmore flow combined with a spatial parametric finite element discretization is applied to the evolution of polygonal curves and triangulated surfaces. In the underlying natural approach for the discretization of gradient flows a nested optimization problem has to be solved at each time step. Thereby, an outer variational problem reflects the time discretization of the actual Willmore flow and involves an approximate L2-distance between two consecutive time steps and a fully implicit approximation of the Willmore energy. The mean curvature needed to evaluate the integrant of the latter energy is replaced by the time discrete, approximate speed from an inner, fully implicit variational scheme for mean curvature motion. To solve the resulting PDE constrained optimization problem at every time step duality techniques from PDE optimization are applied. Computational results underline the robustness of the new scheme, in particular with respect to large time steps, and show applications to surface restoration and blending.
Operational Aspects of the Evolved Signalling Behaviour in a Group of Robots with Different Sensory Capabilities : Coordinated Motion and Cooperation

This paper tackles the issue of designing homogeneous neuro-controllers with artificial evolution in order to control groups of robots that differ in terms of sensory capabilites. In order to accomplish a common goal, the agents have to complement the partial “view” they have of the environment. The results obtained prove that the agents are capable of cooperating and coordinating their actions in order to carry out a navigation task. The paper also describes operational aspects of the evolved behaviour. In particular, analyses of the sound signalling behaviour show that the robots employ the sound to remain close to each other at a safe distance with respect to the risk of collisions. Spatial discrimination of the sound sources is achieved by exploiting a rotational movement which amplifies intensity differences between the two sound sensors.
Insight from Nunavut Educators Using Appreciative Inquiry

The purpose of this paper is to document some successful features of public schools within Nunavut, according to the personal experiences of a group of 14 principals, vice-principals, and teachers. At the start of this paper, I explained my research positionality, depicting my personal history and background related to this study. From a total of 24 individual interviews, three themes surfaced: culturally vibrant programs, the array of professional development offered to educators, and student self-pride and involvement in school activities. To conceptualize the findings, I applied the 4-D cycle of appreciative inquiry (i.e., Discovery, Dream, Design, and Destiny) and explained how effective change can emerge within a school system. Appreciative inquiry is a change process of identifying what is working well, deciphering why it is working well, and emulating more of those positive attributes. L’objectif de cet article est de documenter quelques-unes des caractéristiques des écoles publiques au Nunavut qui - selon les expériences personnelles d’un groupe de 14 personnes composé de directeurs, directeurs adjoints et d’enseignants - sont les mieux réussies. Je commence par expliquer mon positionnement comme chercheuse, évoquant ainsi mon histoire et mes antécédents personnels par rapport à cette étude. Trois thèmes ressortent des 24 entrevues individuelles : des programmes dynamiques sur le plan culturel, des possibilités en matière de développement professionnel pour les enseignants, et l’orgueil des élèves et leur et la participation aux activités scolaires. Pour présenter les résultats, j’ai appliqué la démarche des 4D de l’enquête appréciative (c.-à-d. découverte, devenir, décision, déployer) et j’ai expliqué comment le changement peut véritablement avoir lieu au sein d’un système scolaire. L’enquête appréciative est un processus de changement qui consiste à identifier les éléments qui fonctionnent bien, comprendre les raisons de leur efficacité et imiter davantage de ces aspects positifs.
UNIVERSITY OF CANTERBURY CHRISTCHURCH , NEW ZEALAND Piety and Profits : Stock Market Anomaly during the Muslim Holy Month

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Observed by more than 1.5 billion Muslims, Ramadan is one of the most celebrated religious rituals in the world. We investigate stock returns during Ramadan for 14 predominantly Muslim countries over the years 1989-2007. The results show that stock returns during Ramadan are almost nine times higher and less volatile than during the rest of the year. No discernible difference in trading volume is recorded. We find these results consistent with a notion that Ramadan positively affects investor psychology, as it promotes feelings of solidarity and social identity among Muslims world-wide, leading to optimistic beliefs that extend to investment decisions. JEL Classifications: G12, G14
Verbal stigmatization from family: How does that affect Latino men who have sex with men?

A secondary analysis investigated the influences of verbal stigmatization from family members on the psychological well-being of Latino homosexual males. A model was proposed to explain effects of being exposed to labeling stigma messages that supported both Stigma Communication Model and Revised Labelling Theory. Results showed exposure to verbal stigma messages, especially those with labeling and name calling, was associated with low self-esteem, perceived social support, and highly stigmatized beliefs. Such effects were also related to one’s emotion reactions, especially the feeling of shame, toward verbal stigmatization. Implications for interpersonally communicated stigma messages in general and further study directions were discussed.