Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estradiol induces proliferation of keratinocytes via receptor‐ mediated mechanisms

In this study, we investigated the effects of estradiol on the proliferation of neonatal keratinocytes, the expression of estrogen receptor isoforms, and the signaling mechanisms by which estradiol mediates cell growth. We demonstrate that estradiol binds neonatal keratinocytes with high affinity (Kd=5.2nM) and limited capacity (Bmax of 14.2fmol/mg of protein), confirming the presence of estrogen binding sites. Using specific antibodies, we demonstrate that keratinocytes express both estrogen receptor (ER)‐α and ER‐β. At physiological concentrations, estradiol up‐regulates the level of ER‐α receptors in keratinocytes and induces keratinocyte proliferation. The proliferative effect of estradiol requires the availability of functional estrogen receptors, as it is abrogated by anti‐estrogen administration. Estradiol effect on keratinocyte proliferation is most likely mediated in part by activation of a nongenomic, membrane‐ associated, signaling pathway involving activation of the extracellular signal regulated kinases 1 and 2 and in part by the genomic signaling pathway through activation of nuclear receptors.
Measuring the Performance of a Protected Infant Industry: The Case of Brazilian Microcomputers

Until the beginnings of the Collor presidency in 1990, the Brazilian government strongly protected domestic producers of electronics goods. Using hedonic methods, the authors analyze systematic evidence of the performance of the Brazilian microcomputer industry and compare it with international standards. Their analysis highlights rapid rates of advance in Brazil but lower rates than potential international competition. Technical frontiers typically lagged price/performance practices in international markets by at least three years and by as much as five. Foregone buyer surplus due to protection had to be quite high, approaching 20 percent of domestic expenditure on microcomputers. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.
Brief Report: Circulating Cytokine Profiles and Antineutrophil Cytoplasmic Antibody Specificity in Patients With Antineutrophil Cytoplasmic Antibody–Associated Vasculitis

To evaluate circulating cytokine profiles in patients with antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody–associated vasculitis (AAV), classified by antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA) specificity (proteinase 3 ANCA [PR3‐ANCA] versus myeloperoxidase ANCA [MPO‐ANCA]) or by clinical diagnosis (granulomatosis with polyangiitis [GPA] versus microscopic polyangiitis [MPA]).
Kinematic evaluation of gait in dogs with cranial cruciate ligament rupture.

OBJECTIVE Noninvasive, computer-assisted, three-dimensional kinematic gait analysis was used to describe lameness in a chronic model of cranial cruciate ligament rupture (CCLR) in dogs. DESIGN Hind limb lameness was evaluated prior to and at 1, 3, and 6 months after transection of the cranial cruciate ligament. ANIMALS Seven clinically normal large dogs. PROCEDURE Dynamic flexion and extension angles and angular velocities were calculated for the coxofemoral, femorotibial, and tarsal joints. Distance and temporal variables were determined. Essential Fourier coefficients were used to develop mean flexion extension curves for all joints and to compare changes in movement that developed with CCLR over time. RESULTS Each joint had a characteristics pattern of flexion and extension movement that changed with CCLR. The femorotibial joint angle was more flexed throughout stance and early swing phase of stride and failed to extend in late stance. Angular velocity of the femorotibial joint was damped throughout stance phase, with extension velocity almost negligible. The coxofemoral and tarsal joint angles, in contrast to the femorotibial joint angle, were extended more during stance phase. These changes were documented as differences noted in the essential Fourier coefficients. Stride length and frequency also varied significantly after CCLR. CONCLUSIONS Cranial cruciate ligament rupture affects movement of the coxofemoral and tarsal joints, as well as the femorotibial joint, in gait. A pattern of joint movement may be discerned in which the coxofemoral and tarsal joints compensate for the dysfunction of the femorotibial joint. CLINICAL RELEVANCE Methods were developed that will improve objective evaluation of CCLR and its treatment in dogs.
Terahertz Electro-Optic Sampling in Thick ZnTe Crystals Below the Reststrahlen Band With a Broadband Femtosecond Laser

The method of electro-optic (EO) sampling of terahertz (THz) pulses in thick EO crystals leads to waveform distortions due to effects of phase mismatch, dispersive propagation, and absorption. In this paper, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that EO sampling with a broadband femtosecond (fs) laser could significantly eliminate these distortions below the Reststrahlen band. Our simulation results show that the oscillations and dips in the signals of EO response function of thick crystals are smoothed out by the broadband spectrum of the femtosecond laser. In the experiment, we use a laser with a bandwidth of 100 nm and a low temperature GaAs photoconductive antenna to generate typical THz pulses (0.1–3 THz). The measurement results confirm that a $\langle {110} \rangle $-oriented 3-mm-thick ZnTe crystal is an attractive EO material for sampling THz pulse below 3 THz and agree with simulation results. This technique is particularly useful in areas where a large time window is needed, for example in the THz time-domain spectroscopy system.
HOW THE MEDIA FRAME POLITICAL CORRUPTION: EPISODIC AND THEMATIC FRAME STORIES FOUND IN ILLINOIS NEWSPAPERS

Across the country increasing attention has been paid to political corruption, which means the abuse of public office for private gain (Blake & Martin, 2006). Incidents of political corruption have rocked Illinois for over one hundred years. According to the recent report by Dick Simpson (2012) of the University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois is the third most corrupt state in America, and corruption costs Illinois residents about $500 million each year. This appears more shocking considering that most international measures of corruption rank the United States among the lowest 10 percent of corrupt countries worldwide (Glaeser & Goldin, 2004). Public corruption has been a serious problem for Illinois politics for a century and a half. Even before Governor Blagojevich tried to sell a vacant U.S. Senate seat, the people of the state had to hear continuously about outrageous political corruption scandals (Gradel, Simpson and Zimelis, 2009). Since 1972, there have been three governors before Blagojevich, two members of Congress, nineteen Cook County judges, thirty Chicago Aldermen, and various other statewide officials who were convicted of public corruption. Altogether there have been more than 1,000 public officials and businessmen convicted of public corruption since 1970. This level of continuing corruption causes us to ask many questions, including how to set up and implement a comprehensive anti-corruption strategy across the state. 3 Although there have been many attempts to account for the prevalence of corruption in Illinois, this paper focuses on the media coverage of political corruption. For a long time, it has been recognized that having news organizations which actively cover politics is indispensable to maintaining a healthy democracy (Snyder & Stromberg, 2010). Scholars often believe the media lead people to be informed, and informed citizens, in turn, are better able to hold public officials accountable. The media are especially expected to play a major role in preventing and fighting corruption by serving as watchdogs and mobilizing popular opinion against corruption. The media exert their influence over public opinion by publicizing political corruption affairs (Giglioli, 1996). For instance, coverage of the Watergate scandal symbolically demonstrated the potential of the media to expose political corruption to the public (Fuszara, 1999). A large number of people are still distrustful about whether the media are playing their basic roles in revealing corruption and suggesting rational and practical solutions. This doubt may be inextricably related to the special way the media deal with corruption issues. …
Countering cross‐border VAT fraud: the Bulgarian experience

This paper draws on the experience of Bulgaria in identifying the types and modus operandi of VAT frauds with a focus on the abuse of tax credit. It analyses the elements of tax design conducive to such abuses and discusses the possible solutions in the light of the international and domestic experience and the capacity of the tax administration. It offers a critical analysis of the Bulgarian anti-fraud device the VAT account, as well as the various alternative policy and administrative measures proposed or applied as barriers to VAT abuse, including the policy proposals in the domain of commercial registration and price controls on business transactions. The study concludes that the possible solutions should be sought along the lines of optimizing risk management techniques and especially the implementation of the principle of joint responsibility rather than through tighter control at entry or on the conduct of business.
Statistical features and voxel-based morphometry for alzheimer's disease classification

Alzheimer's disease causes progressive decline in the mental abilities that usually starts with memory loss and ends with cognitive and behavioral disorders. Studying the biomarkers found in structural MRI can help detecting early changes in the brains of people at high risk for developing alzheimer's disease. This work presents an image analysis technique for the prediction of alzheimer's disease. The technique combines texture features extracted from gray level co-occurrence matrix and voxel-based morphometry neuroimaging analysis to classify alzheimer's disease patients by the means of support vector machine classifier. Feature selection using entropy is applied to overcome the curse of dimensionality. The proposed technique is applied on gray matter tissues, and managed successfully to achieve accuracy of 88% for differentiating between alzheimer's disease patients and normal controls.
Stem-like Cancer Cells Are Inducible by Increasing Genomic Instability in Cancer Cells

The existence of cancer stem cells (CSCs) or stem-like cancer cells (SLCCs) is regarded as the cause of tumor formation and recurrence. However, the origin of such cells remains controversial with two competing hypotheses: CSCs are either transformed from tissue adult stem cells or dedifferentiated from transformed progenitor cells. Compelling evidence has determined the chromosomal aneuploidy to be one of the hallmarks of cancer cells, indicating genome instability plays an important role in tumorigenesis, for which CSCs are believed to be the initiator. To gain direct evidence that genomic instability is involved in the induction of SLCCs, we utilized multiple approaches to enhance genomic instability and monitored the percentage of SLCC in cultured cancer cells. Using side population (SP) cells as a marker for SLCC in human nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) and CD133 for human neuroblastoma cells, we found that DNA damage inducers, UV and mitomycin C were capable of increasing SP cells in NPC CNE-2 and neuroblastoma SKN-SH cells. Likewise, either overexpression of a key regulator of cell cycle, Mad2, or knock down of Aurora B, an important kinase in mitosis, or Cdh1, a key E3 ligase in cell cycle, resulted in a significant increase of SP cells in CNE-2. More interestingly, enrichment of SP cells was observed in recurrent tumor tissues as compared with the primary tumor in the same NPC patients. Our study thus suggested that, beside transformation of tissue stem cells leading to CSC generation, genomic instability could be another potential mechanism resulting in SLCC formation, especially at tumor recurrence stage.
Scaling Databases through Trusted Hardware Proxies

Trusted execution environments (TEEs) allow asserting the integrity of previously untrusted third parties using novel hardware features. Unlike previous approaches to trusted computing, they have become readily available on most consumer devices sold today. This opens up the possibility for many novel applications, where not only the server, but also clients are equipped with trusted hardware. This work presents a mechanism to run trusted proxies on clients in order to offload large parts of the workload from a database server. We show that none of the integrity and confidentiality guarantees provided by the database are weakened as a result this mechanism. Evaluation shows that we can improve throughput by at least an order of magnitude, when the database server itself runs in a TEE. Further we can improve performance by a factor of two, even in the case where the server is not limited by a TEE.
Recovering Weak Signal using Nakagami Fading Wireless Channel with Multiuser Diversity

Propagation of new wireless technologies has regenerated an interest on the digital modulation system, analysis and implementation of suboptimal receiver designs that provide poor performance when the order of diversity is large. In this proposed system propose a new creation for causing the Nakagami Fading channel(NFC) which possess random and different fading figure m for each sub channel with Multiuser diversity is used to producing an acceptable average Signal to Noise Ratio(SNR) and best statistical reducing outage probability(Pout) or Bit Error Rate (BER) of multipath fading effect. The diversity is produced by the depolarization of the transmitted signal by reflection, diffraction, and scattering in the channel of Nakagami Fading channels. The result of this proposed system, a novel simple and high efficient generation method is developed to scrutinize an excellent accuracy in wireless media. Key-Words: Multipath Fading; Nakagami Fading Channel; Fading Figure; Multiuser Diversity; Outage Probability
Evidence About Auditor-Client Management Negotiation Concerning Client's Financial Reporting

We develop a model of auditor-client accounting negotiation, using the elements of negotiation examined in the behavioral negotiation literature, elaborated to include accounting contextual features indicated in the accounting literature and suggested by interviews with senior practitioners. We use a questionnaire structured according to the model to describe the elements, contextual features and associations between the two groups in a sample of real negotiations chosen by 93 experienced audit partners. The paper demonstrates important aspects of the sampled accounting negotiations and makes suggestions for further empirical and model development research.
Multicenter Phase II Study of Oxaliplatin, Irinotecan, and S-1 as First-line Treatment for Patients with Recurrent or Metastatic Biliary Tract Cancer

Purpose Although gemcitabine plus cisplatin has been established as the standard first-line chemotherapy for patients with advanced biliary tract cancer (BTC), overall prognosis remains poor. We investigated the efficacy of a novel triplet combination of oxaliplatin, irinotecan, and S-1 (OIS) for advanced BTC. Materials and Methods Chemotherapy-naive patientswith histologically documented unresectable or metastatic BTC were eligible for this multicenter, single-arm phase II study. Patients received 65 mg/m2 oxaliplatin (day 1), 135 mg/m2 irinotecan (day 1), and 40 mg/m2 S-1 (twice a day, days 1-7) every 2 weeks. Primary endpoint was objective response rate. Targeted exome sequencing for biomarker analysis was performed using archival tissue. Results In total, 32 patients were enrolled between October 2015 and June 2016. Median age was 64 years (range, 40 to 76 years), with 24 (75%) male patients; 97% patients had metastatic or recurrent disease. Response rate was 50%, and median progression-free survival and overall survival (OS) were 6.8 months (95% confidence interval [CI], 4.8 to 8.8) and 12.5 months (95% CI, 7.0 to 18.0), respectively. The most common grade 3-4 adverse events were neutropenia (32%), diarrhea (6%), and peripheral neuropathy (6%). TP53 and KRAS mutations were the most frequent genomic alterations (42% and 32%, respectively), and KRAS mutations showed a marginal relationship with worse OS (p=0.07). Conclusion OIS combination chemotherapy was feasible and associated with favorable efficacy outcomes as a first-line treatment in patients with advanced BTC. Randomized studies are needed to compare OIS with gemcitabine plus cisplatin.
I Read but Don't Agree: Privacy Policy Benchmarking using Machine Learning and the EU GDPR

With the continuing growth of the Internet landscape, users share large amount of personal, sometimes, privacy sensitive data. When doing so, often, users have little or no clear knowledge about what service providers do with the trails of personal data they leave on the Internet. While regulations impose rather strict requirements that service providers should abide by, the defacto approach seems to be communicating data processing practices through privacy policies. However, privacy policies are long and complex for users to read and understand, thus failing their mere objective of informing users about the promised data processing behaviors of service providers. To address this pertinent issue, we propose a machine learning based approach to summarize the rather long privacy policy into short and condensed notes following a risk-based approach and using the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aspects as assessment criteria. The results are promising and indicate that our tool can summarize lengthy privacy policies in a short period of time, thus supporting users to take informed decisions regarding their information disclosure behaviors.
Exploring residents’ reactions to and use of parent feedback in a pediatric emergency department: A grounded theory study

Abstract Background: Competency-based medical education (CBME) involves workplace-based assessment. In pediatrics, patients’ parents can participate in this assessment and generate feedback for residents. Prior to routinely collecting parent feedback, it is important to investigate residents’ perspectives on it. Aim: To explore residents’ reactions to and use of written parent feedback. Methods: Using a grounded theory approach, we interviewed residents who received written parent feedback at the mid- and end-points of a pediatric emergency training rotation. Results: Twenty-five residents participated. The residents reacted positively to the feedback. They thought that it complements educators’ feedback, can elucidate parents’ perspectives and needs, and is something that residents want and need. Although the residents thought that non-specific negative parent feedback is not useful, they believed non-specific positive and constructive parent feedback to be encouraging and useful. They delineated how they use non-specific positive parent feedback to boost their self-confidence and reassure themselves that parents perceive their clinical practices as appropriate. They also elucidated how they use constructive parent feedback to understand what is important to parents, become aware of their own behaviors, and modify their clinical practices. Conclusions: The findings encourage educators in pediatrics to include parents in resident assessment, especially in the CBME era.
Value Creating Networks: Organizational Issues and Challenges

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide examples of evaluating value‐creating networks and to address the organizational issues and challenges of a network orientation.Design/methodology/approach – Value network analysis was first developed in 1993 and was adapted in 1997 for intangible asset management. It has been applied from shopfloor work groups to business webs and economic regions. It draws from a theory base of living systems, knowledge management, complexity theory, and intangible asset management.Findings – The paper provides an overview of a value network analysis method and examples and insights from its practical application.Research limitations/implications – The paper does not provide a detailed comparative analysis with social network analysis, but rather looks forward to where interest in social networks may evolve into continuing concentration on value‐creating networks.Practical implications – Value network analysis provides an opportunity to overcome the “split” in business m.
Compartmented Mode Workstation: Prototype Highlights

The primary goal of the MITRE compartmented mode workstation (CMW) project was to articulate the security requirements that workstations must meet to process highly classified intelligence data. As a basis for the validity of the requirements developed, a prototype was implemented which demonstrated that workstations could meet the requirements in an operationally useful manner while still remaining binary compatible with off-the-shelf software. The security requirements not only addressed traditional security concerns but also introduced concepts in areas such as labeling and the use of a trusted window management system. The CMW labeling paradigm is based on associating two types of security labels with objects: sensitivity levels and information labels. Sensitivity levels describe the levels at which objects must be protected. Information labels are used to prevent data overclassification and also provide a mechanism for associating with data those markings that are required for accurate data labeling, but which play no role in access control decisions. The use of a trusted window manager allows users to easily operate at multiple sensitivity levels and provides a convenient mechanism for communicating security information to users in a relatively unobtrusive manner. >
Quantitative Doppler Analysis Using Conventional Color Flow Imaging Acquisitions

Interleaved acquisitions used in conventional triplex mode result in a tradeoff between the frame rate and the quality of velocity estimates. On the other hand, workflow becomes inefficient when the user has to switch between different modes, and measurement variability is increased. This paper investigates the use of power spectral Capon estimator in quantitative Doppler analysis using data acquired with conventional color flow imaging (CFI) schemes. To preserve the number of samples used for velocity estimation, only spatial averaging was utilized, and clutter rejection was performed after spectral estimation. The resulting velocity spectra were evaluated in terms of spectral width using a recently proposed spectral envelope estimator. The spectral envelopes were also used for Doppler index calculations using in vivo and string phantom acquisitions. In vivo results demonstrated that the Capon estimator can provide spectral estimates with sufficient quality for quantitative analysis using packet-based CFI acquisitions. The calculated Doppler indices were similar to the values calculated using spectrograms estimated on a commercial ultrasound scanner.