Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE IMPACT OF ALTERNATIVE PERFORMANCE MEASURES ON SINGLE-PERIOD INVENTORY POLICY

While many firms and researchers have developed various supply chain solutions, there are many underlying reasons why these solutions have not been adopted in practice. Some key reasons, as articulated by Lee and Billington (1992), include organizational barriers, coordination challenges among marketing, manufacturing, and logistics, technical challenges in the area of information systems, as well as conflicting supply chain performance metrics. Other key reasons are due to alternative performance measures besides total expected relevant cost, which include sales target, product substitution, product clearance, sales per square foot, etc. In order to understand how these alternative performance measures affect the supply chain solution, we make an initial attempt to analyze how alternative measures would affect the simplest form of inventory policy, namely, the newsvendor solution. To identify various alternative measures and to explore how such order decisions are made, we conducted a simple experiment by giving a single-period inventory problem to 250 MBA students and 6 professional buyers who order fashion items. We observed that both groups select their order quantities less than the newsvendor solution and made their ordering decisions based on various specific performance metrics besides total expected cost. These observations have motivated us to analyze how these performance metrics would affect the ordering decision. Our analysis indicates that, under these performance metrics, it is rational for the decision maker to order less than the newsvendor solution.
Kinome expression profiling of human neuroblastoma tumors identifies potential drug targets for ultra high-risk patients

Neuroblastoma (NBL) accounts for >7% of malignancies in patients younger than 15 years. Low- and intermediate-risk patients exhibit excellent or good prognosis after treatment, whereas for high-risk (HR) patients, the estimated 5-year survival rates is still <40%. The ability to stratify HR patients that will not respond to standard treatment strategies is critical for informed treatment decisions. In this study, we have generated a specific kinome gene signature, named Kinome-27, which is able to identify a subset of HR-NBL tumors, named ultra-HR NBL, with highly aggressive clinical behavior that not adequately respond to standard treatments. We have demonstrated that NBL cell lines expressing the same kinome signature of ultra-HR tumors (ultra-HR-like cell lines) may be selectively targeted by the use of two drugs [suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA) and Radicicol], and that the synergic combination of these drugs is able to block the ultra-HR-like cells in G2/M phase of cell cycle. The use of our signature in clinical practice will allow identifying patients with negative outcome, which would benefit from new and more personalized treatments. Preclinical in vivo studies are needed to consolidate the SAHA and Radicicol treatment in ultra-HR NBL patients.
Nanomedicines Design: Approaches towards the Imaging and Therapy of Brain Tumours

Nanotechnology has potential to revolutionize diagnosis and therapy of diseases in the central nervous system through nanotheranostics. This simply states that a nanocarrier can be designed in an ‘all-in-one’ approach to facilitate both the functions of a diagnostic and a therapeutic drug. There are many challenges that must be overcome for these nanocarriers to become a successful design, but if resolved nanocarriers could pave the way for personalised medicine. This review highlights several new ideas behind nanotheranostics design and testing with a particular focus on cancerous tumours in the brain.
Collaborative Computation Offloading for Multiaccess Edge Computing Over Fiber–Wireless Networks

By offloading the computation tasks of the mobile devices (MDs) to the edge server, mobile-edge computing (MEC) provides a new paradigm to meet the increasing computation demands from mobile applications. However, existing mobile-edge computation offloading (MECO) research only took the resource allocation between the MDs and the MEC servers into consideration, and ignored the huge computation resources in the centralized cloud computing center. Moreover, current MEC hosted networks mostly adopt the networking technology integrating cellular and backbone networks, which have the shortcomings of single access mode, high congestion, high latency, and high energy consumption. Toward this end, we introduce hybrid fiber–wireless (FiWi) networks to provide supports for the coexistence of centralized cloud and multiaccess edge computing, and present an architecture by adopting the FiWi access networks. The problem of cloud-MEC collaborative computation offloading is studied, and two schemes are proposed as our solutions, i.e., an approximation collaborative computation offloading scheme, and a game-theoretic collaborative computation offloading scheme. Numerical results corroborate that our solutions not only achieve better offloading performance than the available MECO schemes but also scale well with the increasing number of computation tasks.
Diabetes Control: Is Vinegar a Promising Candidate to Help Achieve Targets?

Background. Renewed interest in vinegar as a glucose-lowering agent led to several small trials in the recent past. However, none of the trials could independently provide sufficient evidence. Objectives. Our review aimed to obtain reliable estimates of effects of vinegar on short-term and long-term blood glucose control. Methods. Large bibliographic databases were searched from inception to date of search without language and publication date restrictions. All clinical trials evaluating effect of vinegar on diabetes mellitus patients were eligible. Two authors independently extracted data on fasting and 2-hour postprandial blood glucose, insulin, and HbA1c levels at the various time points. MS Excel, SAS® v9.3, and RevMan v5.3 were used for data analysis. Results. Small significant reduction in mean HbA1c was observed after 8 to 12 weeks of vinegar administration: −0.39% (95% confidence interval = −0.59, −0.18; I 2 = 0%). Other long-term outcomes favored vinegar but were not significant. Short-term outcomes showed significantly lower pooled mean difference in glucose levels at 30 minutes in the vinegar group. Readings at 60, 90, and 120 minutes were lower in the vinegar group but not statistically significant. Adverse effects profile also favored the vinegar group. Conclusions. It is worthwhile to carry out carefully planned large trails to determine the efficacy and effectiveness of vinegar as an adjunct treatment modality.
The Adaptation of a Post-Acceptance Model for Information System Continuance in Recommender Systems

Recommender systems (RS) are extensively deployed to provide online users with advisory services, and the design of RS functional features has received substantial attention in academic studies. The social aspects of human-RS interactions, however, have been less explored. Furthermore, measuring user experience, though natural in a business environment, is often challenging for RS research. Therefore, this study provides the first empirical test of the adaptation of a post-acceptance model for information system continuance in the context of recommender systems. An experimental design is used and a questionnaire is developed to analysis. The results demonstrate that the proposed model is supported and the visual recommender system can indeed significantly enhance user satisfaction and continuance intention.
On the distribution of spontaneous potentials intervals in nervous transmission.

One of the main challenges in Biophysics teaching consists on how to motivate students to appreciate the beauty of theoretical formulations. This is crucial when the system modeling requires numerical calculations to achieve realistic results. In this sense, due to the massive use of software, students often become a mere users of computational tools without capturing the essence of formulation and further problem solution. It is, therefore, necessary for instructors to find innovating ways, allowing students developing of their ability to deal with mathematical modelling. To address this issue one can highlight the use of Benford's law, thanks to its simple formulation, easy computational implementation and wide possibility for applications. Indeed, this law enables students to carry out their own data analysis with use of free software packages. This law is among the several power or scaling laws found in biological systems. However, to the best of our knowledge, this law has not been contemplated in Cell Biophysics yet. Beyond its vast applications in many fields, neuromuscular junction represents a remarkable substrate for learning and teaching of complex system. Thus, in this work, we applied both classical and a generalized form of Benford's Law, to examine if electrophysiological data recorded from neuromuscular junction conforms the anomalous number law. The results indicated that nerve-muscle communications conform the generalized Benford's law better than the seminal formulation. From our electrophysiological measurements a biological scenario is used to interpret the theoretical analysis.
RATIONALITY AND EFFICIENCY: FROM EXPERIMENTATION IN (RECENT) APPLIED MICROECONOMICS TO CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

This paper investigates how foundational and conceptual issues around economic rationality, which are usually discussed with respect to economic theory, materialize into recent applied microeconomics. We concentrate on three radically different subfield of microeconomics – the economics of discrimination, development economics and the economics of insurance – to look at how the recent rise of experimental methods and behavioral economics within mainstream economics have changed the conceptual relationship between economic rationality and economic efficiency, without changing the substance of these notions. The perspective of going from applied work of microeconomics in the field to conceptual and foundational issues on rationality reveals another issue that has not been much discussed in the reflexive literature yet: how warranted is the analytical distinction made in economics among interpersonal preferences, intertemporal preferences and preferences for risk and uncertainty? We show that this issue has straightforward consequences both on both economic theory and on the real world through the policy recommendations made by microeconomists.
Diagnostics and Prognostication of Myelodysplastic Syndromes

MDS are a heterogeneous and complex group of clonal hematological neoplasms arising from a hematopoietic stem cell, and characterized by ineffective hematopoiesis, resulting in increased apoptosis in the bone marrow and peripheral cytopenia, which involves one or more lineages. Epigenetic changes are reported as ‘founder’ mutations in the case of MDS. Its incidence in the general population has been reported as five new MDS diagnoses per 100,000 people. It affects men more frequently than it does women, and its incidence increases with age. The diagnostic classification, now in use, is the one of the World Health Organization, revised in August 2016. It recognizes six distinct entities in addition to a provisional entity of childhood. In most of the cases, diagnosis is based on the morphologic quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the peripheral blood and bone marrow using basic hematological techniques. Bone marrow biopsy and flow cytometric immunophenotyping also offer support for further diagnostic elucidation, while cytogenetics and molecular genetics are presently fully integrated into prognostication, treatment processes, and decision-making.
Designing a Social Machine for the Heart Manual Service

Social machines are emerging as a focus of research within the field of informatics as they begin to become the central administrator of our everyday communications. The difficulty of applying such systems to specialised contexts, such as healthcare, calls for guidelines on how to design them, so that they become truly useful. In collaboration with the Heart Manual Department, this project is an attempt at finding suitable methods for designing social machines in a healthcare context. It suggests that adopting a participatory approach where stakeholders are active, equal participants throughout the design process leads to a more usable, likeable, and thus more successful social machine. We describe the process of designing a social machine for the Heart Manual service, in which requirements were elicited through various participatory design methods and a proof of concept evaluation was carried out with a prototype. The prototype was received largely positively and scored highly on the System Usability Scale, indicating the success of the proposed methodology.
Refactoring Kieker's I/O Infrastructure to Improve Scalability and Extensibility

Kieker supports several technologies for transferring monitoring records, including highly scalable messaging solutions. However, Kieker’s current I/O infrastructure is primarily built for point-to-point connections, making it difficult to leverage the scalability of these solutions. In this paper, we report on how we refactored Kieker’s I/O infrastructure to make better use of scalable messaging, improving extensibility along the way.
Fixed and mobile convergence with stacked modulation

We propose a stacked modulation mechanism to realize the transmission convergence of fixed broadband and wireless access networks. As an integrated solution, the direct current biased analog signal for wireless data is multiplied by the digital optical signal carrying fixed broadband service, where the low-speed analog signal becomes an envelope of the high-speed digital signal. At the receiver, the analog signal is firstly recovered with the image edge detection algorithm, after which the digital signal is recovered with the least-square algorithm. This scheme can realize fixed and mobile convergence with a single wavelength, which reduces the access network cost in terms of number of transceivers. Besides, the link capacity and spectrum efficiency are also improved. Moreover, this method is compatible with the existing access networks since the transceivers can be adopted to the scenario by turning off the unused modules. Simulation results show that in case of intensity modulation direct detection system sensitivity, penalty of only 1∼2 dB can be obtained for the 10Gbps/i passive optical network when broadband access services are favored. Meanwhile, the wireless service needs more power than the broadband service to achieve the QoT requirements, and it has a higher penalty (∼ 5 dB) compared with broadband access services.
Off-line Calibration of Robot Odometry

We represent systematic errors of a iRobot Create 2 mobile robot in a simple model for calibration. Systematic errors, which affect all samples of a robot’s odometry, or displacement calculation, render internal calculations based on electrical current driven to each wheel too noisy to be useful. We propose a calibration technique and demonstrate desirable results, reducing error overall.
Immersion and Motivation to Become Teachers: A Comparative Study

This study aims to investigate and compare the relationship between immersion and motivation in two different groups of student teachers who enrolled in an immersion programme. With a group of student teachers whose social and cultural backgrounds are different – one group is from Mainland China and one is from Hong Kong – though they both are of Chinese ethnicity and speak the same Chinese variety, the reasons behind their studying a postgraduate programme and going on an immersion can be different. The method of data collection adopted for this study was a qualitative paradigm. In-depth interviews, both pre- and post-immersion, were conducted. Participants were also encouraged to send e-mails to the researcher during immersion that reflected on their experience. Results show that Mainland participants were motivated by desires to enhance their pedagogical knowledge in EFL teaching in order to satisfy implementation constraints in their homeland. In contrast, Hong Kong participants were primarily interested in improving their language proficiency in order to satisfy the mandatory language assessment required for graduation. Both groups, however, saw cultural enrichment as their secondary reason for undertaking immersion, in that it allowed them to better understand the culture behind the language and thus become better English teachers.
Evaluating Spatial Generalization of Stacked Autoencoders in Wind Vector Determination

Unique areas in the Earth’s atmosphere may be influenced by forces that differ subtly from area to area. Using an extensive set of neural networks for assessing atmospheric conditions introduces a situation where many (perhaps millions) networks must be trained and maintained. We explore the extent to which deep learning using Stacked Autoencoders can be generalized across a spatial range of the atmosphere as a method of expanding the applicability of a network trained in a specific area of the atmosphere to the areas that surround it. As a prelude to exploring techniques for transfer learning, we demonstrate that a Stacked Autoencoder is capable of capturing some knowledge universal to this situation and make approximations of the functions that determine wind vector components.
A Distributed Indexing Method for Timeline Similarity Query

Timelines have been used for centuries and have become more and more widely used with the development of social media in recent years. Every day, various smart phones and other instruments on the internet of things generate massive data related to time. Most of these data can be managed in the way of timelines. However, it is still a challenge to effectively and efficiently store, query, and process big timeline data, especially the instant recommendation based on timeline similarities. Most existing studies have focused on indexing spatial and interval datasets rather than the timeline dataset. In addition, many of them are designed for a centralized system. A timeline index structure adapting to parallel and distributed computation framework is in urgent need. In this research, we have defined the timeline similarity query and developed a novel timeline index in the distributed system, called the Distributed Triangle Increment Tree (DTI-Tree), to support the similarity query. The DTI-Tree consists of one T-Tree and one or more TI-Trees based on a triangle increment partition strategy with the Apache Spark. Furthermore, we have provided an open source timeline benchmark data generator, named TimelineGenerator, to generate various timeline test datasets for different conditions. The experiments for DTI-Tree’s construction, insertion, deletion, and similarity queries have been executed on a cluster with two benchmark datasets that are generated by TimelineGenerator. The experimental results show that the DTI-tree provides an effective and efficient distributed index solution to big timeline data.
Epigenetic Regulation of ATP-Binding Cassette Protein A1 (ABCA1) Gene Expression: A New Era to Alleviate Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease

The most important function of high density lipoprotein (HDL) is its ability to remove cholesterol from cells and tissues involved in the early stages of atherosclerosis back to the liver for excretion. The ATP-binding cassette transporters ABCA1 and ABCG1 are responsible for the major part of cholesterol efflux to HDL in macrophage foam cells. Thus, promoting the process of reverse cholesterol transport (RCT) by upregulating mainly ABCA1 remains one of the potential targets for the development of new therapeutic agents against atherosclerosis. Growing evidence suggests that posttranscriptional regulation of HDL biogenesis as well as modulation of ABCA1 expression are under the control of several genetic and epigenetic factors such as transcription factor (TFs), microRNAs (miRNAs) and RNA-binding proteins (RBPs). These factors may act either individually or in combination to orchestrate ABCA1 expression. Complementary to our recent work, we propose an exploratory model for the potential molecular mechanism(s) underlying epigenetic signature of ABCA1 gene regulation. Such a model may hopefully provide the basic framework for understanding the epigenetic regulation of RCT and contribute to the development of novel therapeutic strategies to alleviate the burden of cardiovascular diseases (CVD).
pH regulation in glycosomes of procyclic form Trypanosoma brucei

Here we report the use of a fluorescein-tagged peroxisomal targeting sequence peptide (F-PTS1, acetyl-C{K(FITC)}GGAKL) for investigating pH regulation of glycosomes in live procyclic form Trypanosoma brucei. When added to cells, this fluorescent peptide is internalized within vesicular structures, including glycosomes, and can be visualized after 30–60 min. Using F-PTS1 we are able to observe the pH conditions inside glycosomes in response to starvation conditions. Previous studies have shown that in the absence of glucose, the glycosome exhibits mild acidification from pH 7.4 ± 0.2 to 6.8 ± 0.2. Our results suggest that this response occurs under proline starvation as well. This pH regulation is found to be independent from cytosolic pH and requires a source of Na+ ions. Glycosomes were also observed to be more resistant to external pH changes than the cytosol; placement of cells in acidic buffers (pH 5) reduced the pH of the cytosol by 0.8 ± 0.1 pH units, whereas glycosomal pH decreases by 0.5 ± 0.1 pH units. This observation suggests that regulation of glycosomal pH is different and independent from cytosolic pH regulation. Furthermore, pH regulation is likely to work by an active process, because cells depleted of ATP with 2-deoxyglucose and sodium azide were unable to properly regulate pH. Finally, inhibitor studies with bafilomycin and EIPA suggest that both V-ATPases and Na+/H+ exchangers are required for glycosomal pH regulation.
Multifunctional Hierarchical Surface Structures by Femtosecond Laser Processing

Hierarchical surface structures were fabricated on fused silica by using a fs-laser with a pulse duration τ = 300 fs and a wavelength λ = 512 nm. The resulting surface structures were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy and white light interference microscopy. The optical properties were analyzed by transmittance measurements using an integrating sphere and the wettability was evaluated by measuring the water contact angle θ. The silanization of structured fused silica surfaces with trichloro(1H,1H,2H,2H-perfluorooctyl)silane allows to switch the wettability from superhydrophilic (θ = 0°) to superhydrophobic behavior with θ exceeding 150°. It was shown that the structured silica surfaces are a suitable master for negative replica casting and that the hierarchical structures can be transferred to polystyrene. The transmittance of structured fused silica surfaces decreases only slightly when compared to unstructured surfaces, which results in high transparency of the structured samples. Our findings facilitate the fabrication of transparent glass samples with tailored wettability. This might be of particular interest for applications in the fields of optics, microfluidics, and biomaterials.