Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A novel cancer vaccine strategy with combined IL-18 and HSV-TK gene therapy driven by the hTERT promoter in a murine colorectal cancer model

A therapeutic vaccine against minimal residual cancer cells is needed for the treatment of patients with colorectal cancer. Several gene therapy studies have revealed that the combination of a suicide gene and cytokine gene might induce effective antitumor immunity. In this study, we constructed an interleukin (IL)-18 and herpes simplex virus-thymidine kinase (HSV-TK) expression vector driven by the human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) promoter to study the efficacy of combination gene therapy with IL-18 and the HSV-TK suicide gene. Low immunogenic colon 26 cells were used for transfection and inoculation into syngeneic BALB/c mice. Large established tumors of colon 26 transfectants expressing IL-18 and HSV-TK driven by the hTERT promoter were completely eradicated after GCV administration in syngeneic BALB/c mice. Immunohistochemical analysis at the tumor rejection sites revealed enormous infiltrations of CD8+ T lymphocytes as well as CD4+ T lymphocytes and CD11b+ monocytes. Moreover, established distant tumors were completely eradicated by vaccination with the IL-18 and HSV-TK transfectants in combination with GCV. These data suggest that the IL-18 and suicide gene therapy can elicit antitumor specific immunity. In conclusion, gene therapy with IL-18 and HSV-TK plasmid vector driven by the hTERT promoter may be useful for cancer vaccination.
Education, labour market and wage differentials in Greece

The paper investigates the relationship between the education level of employees and certain characteristics of the labour market in Greece. The paper studies male-female wage differentials depending on their education level across the wage distribution and applies a variant of the selection-adjusted Oaxaca and Blinder decomposition method to explain the components of the wage differentials. The results suggest that male- female wage differences can be identified in Greece. For high education level employees a higher unexplained portion of the wage differential is observed at the top rather than the bottom of the wage distribution; for low education level employees a higher unexplained portion of the wage differential is revealed at the bottom rather than the top of the distribution.
Integrated System for Interoperable sensors & Information sources for Common abnormal vessel behaviour detection & Collaborative identification f threat ( I 2 C )

As we face varied threats of terrorism and other lu crative criminal activities, in 2015, innovative solution s hall be set up to permanently track and monitor all type of ship t raffics, in vulnerable trading lanes and zones in order to dete ct abnormal or illicit vessel behaviour to understand and to ea rly identify threatening situations. This future generation of m aritime surveillance system must allow: • Permanent and all weather coverage of border mariti e areas. • Continuous collection and fusion of heterogeneous d ata provided by various types of sensors deployed on co ast and on mobile platforms and other information from external sources. • Supervised automatic detection of abnormal vessel behaviours (in track and performed activity) and ge nerate justified alarms. • Understanding of suspicious events and early identification of threats from series of detected spatiotemporal abnormal vessel behaviours (alarms). • Generate electronic and formatted interpretation re ports on the suspicious event to keep periodically informed decisional authorities. No equipment and information system 1 deployed are currently able to answer all these requirements. Ho wever, in the horizon of 2015 significant technical progresse s have been made in wide maritime area coverage by different se ts of sensors, heterogeneous data processing and fusion, and detection of abnormal behaviours methodology that c ould be usefully integrated together to built up an new gen eration of sea border surveillance integrated system for effic i nt security applications in high density traffics. 1 Most advanced sea surveillance operational systems in Europe are Spationav (France), S.I. V.E (Spain) and MEVAT (Finland). All these maritime surveillance systems are limited to perform traffic picture from conventional coastal radars and collected AIS data (version 2 in implementation) over only territory waters (up to 20 nautical miles from the shore). The objectives of the proposed I2C integration proj ect are: • To build up a complete test system (end to end information acquisition and processing system). • To test the system in a ways of integration of data from network of existing and new maritime surveillance s ensors and other available intelligent information sources in order to obtain optimal maritime security awareness. Integrating existing and advanced capacities demons trate, in the horizon of 2015 that actual sea surveillance sy stem can be significantly completed and upgraded with innovativ e technologies to build up operational solution to fu lfil the main sea border surveillance requirement which is to ear ly identify threats in order to timely react.
IntelliMatch : A SME-Driven Trainable Matching Engine ♣

—Data matching rules are normally the result of collective experiences and judgments of subject matter experts (SMEs). Data matching requires a clearly defined set of rules to both determine a match as well as provide a " usable " ranking between potential matches. The main objectives here are to determine the feasibility of building a trainable matching engine that can help mimic SME behaviors and to assess alternate approaches in terms of ease-of-use, accuracy, and performance. This research attempts to minimize the effort required to develop and test SME-developed rules, thereby eliminating the implementation costs associated with developing products for newer markets.
Firm Industry Affiliation and Multiple Bank Relationships

We explain the number of bank relationships a firm maintains by the number of industries it operates in, analyzing 13,570 listed firms in 18 Eastern European countries. We estimate a variety of stylized models including OLS, Tobit and negative binomial that directly accounts at once for the number of bank relationships. Controlling for many firm characteristics and accounting for all observed and unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity across firms, we find that the number of industries the firm operates in corresponds to a higher number of bank relationships, possibly because banks specialize in certain industries.
Joint Spatial Division and Multiplexing—The Large-Scale Array Regime

We propose joint spatial division and multiplexing (JSDM), an approach to multiuser MIMO downlink that exploits the structure of the correlation of the channel vectors in order to allow for a large number of antennas at the base station while requiring reduced-dimensional channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). JSDM achieves significant savings both in the downlink training and in the CSIT uplink feedback, thus making the use of large antenna arrays at the base station potentially suitable also for frequency division duplexing (FDD) systems, for which uplink/downlink channel reciprocity cannot be exploited. In the proposed scheme, the multiuser MIMO downlink precoder is obtained by concatenating a prebeamforming matrix, which depends only on the channel second-order statistics, with a classical multiuser precoder, based on the instantaneous knowledge of the resulting reduced dimensional “effective” channel matrix. We prove a simple condition under which JSDM incurs no loss of optimality with respect to the full CSIT case. For linear uniformly spaced arrays, we show that such condition is approached in the large number of antennas limit. For this case, we use Szego's asymptotic theory of Toeplitz matrices to show that a DFT-based prebeamforming matrix is near-optimal, requiring only coarse information about the users angles of arrival and angular spread. Finally, we extend these ideas to the case of a 2-D base station antenna array, with 3-D beamforming, including multiple beams in the elevation angle direction. We provide guidelines for the prebeamforming optimization and calculate the system spectral efficiency under proportional fairness and max-min fairness criteria, showing extremely attractive performance. Our numerical results are obtained via asymptotic random matrix theory, avoiding lengthy Monte Carlo simulations and providing accurate results for realistic (finite) number of antennas and users.
Circulating β1 Adrenergic Autoantibodies from Patients with Chronic Periodontitis Interact with Gingival Fibroblasts

Objectives To demonstrate the presence of circulating autoantibodies (Abs) from patients with chronic periodontitis (CP) that interacted with human gingival fibroblast membranes activating β1 adrenoceptors (β1-AR). Methods Sera and purified IgG from 25 patients with CP and 20 age-matched healthy subjects were studied by flow cytometry, ELISA and DNA synthesis. Human gingival fibroblast membranes and/or synthetic peptides with amino acid sequences identical to human β1-AR were used as antigens. Results By flow cytometry and ELISA procedures, we proved that the serum-purified IgG fraction from patients with CP reacted with the fibroblast surface and to the β1 synthetic peptide. The corresponding affinity-purified anti-β1 peptide Abs displayed agonist-like activity associated with specific receptor activation, inhibiting the DNA synthesis of human gingival fibroblasts. Conclusions This study demonstrates that β1-AR autoantibodies are elevated in patients with CP. These autoantibodies were targeted to the fibroblasts, and specifically to the β1-AR, and has receptor-like activity inhibiting DNA synthesis.
Optical Mass Estimates of Galaxy Clusters

We evaluate in a homogeneous way the optical masses of 170 nearby clusters (z ≤ 0.15). The sample includes both data from the literature and the new ESO Nearby Abell Clusters Survey (ENACS) data. On the assumption that mass follows the galaxy distribution, we compute the mass of each cluster by applying the virial theorem to the member galaxies. We constrain the masses of very substructured clusters (about 10% of our clusters) between two limiting values. After appropriate rescaling to the X-ray radii, we compare our optical mass estimates to those derived from X-ray analyses, which we compiled from the literature (for 66 clusters). We find a good overall agreement. This agreement is expected in the framework of two common assumptions: that mass follows the galaxy distribution and that clusters are not far from a situation of dynamical equilibrium, with both gas and galaxies reflecting the same underlying mass distribution. We stress that our study strongly supports the reliability of present cluster mass estimates derived from X-ray analyses and/or (appropriate) optical analyses.
Biochemical approaches to detection of herpes simplex virus type 2 in cervical carcinoma.

Summary Nucleic acid hybridization techniques are highly sensitive methods for determining the presence of herpes simplex type 2 genomes. Measurement of the rate of reassociation between labeled, purified viral DNA and DNA extracted from the tumor cells may be necessary to achieve adequate sensitivity if only a portion of the viral genome is present and if tumors contain substantial proportions of cells other than tumor cells. A large number of cervical tumors in various stages, as well as many control tissues, need to be studied to permit a decision on the involvement of herpesvirus type 2 in causing cervical carcinoma.
Protection of originating calls in handoff prioritization schemes

With the increasing popularity of wireless communication systems, customers are expecting the same quality of service (QoS), availability and performance from the wireless communication networks as the traditional wire-line networks. Currently the research work on radio channel allocation in cellular mobile systems focuses mainly on two aspects, improving the user admission capability and protecting the connection continuity for handoff calls as a QoS constraint. However, given a QoS constraint, a wireless network has to sacrifice its capacity in order to support an increase in handoff rate. In this paper, we propose and analyze a different handoff scheme which not only gives priority to handoff calls, due to importance of them from QoS standpoint, but also protects originating calls to keep system capacity at an acceptable level. In channel reservation schemes, there are some periods that reserved channels are not actively utilized. In this paper, these periods are defined as dead time. Indeed, our scheme mathematically analyzes the mean dead time. We use a system model defined by a two dimensional Markov chain which computes mathematically the performance in terms of the mean dead time, blocking probability of originating calls, forced termination probability and call incompletion probability. Results are compared with conventional predictive channel reservation (PCR) and guard channel (GC) schemes.
Rate of Interest, Money Supply, Prices and Output Interdependences in Nigeria: A Vec Approach

Recent developments, in the financial system in Nigeria have generated a renewed attention on the nexus between real and nominal economic variables. This study examined the relationship between nominal rate of interest, nominal money supply, prices and real output using quarterly data on these variables from 1980:1 to 2012:4. The study adopted a Vector Error-Correction Mechanism to test for the short - and long – run relationships and found out that nominal money supply has no contemporaneous effect on real output in Nigeria but does have significant impact on the latter in the long-run thereby refuting the money neutrality hypothesis. Consequent upon its bid to further examine these interdependences, Granger Causality tests, Impulse Response Functions and Variance Decompositions were carried out. The major findings are that nominal money supply and inflation rate are the most important endogenous variables in explaining variations and shocks to other variables like real output and inflation in Nigeria. The study recommends, inter alia, that money supply, not interest rate, should be used appropriately as an intermediate policy variable with real output being the final target and that appropriate inflation-targeting policies be put in place because of its significant role in explaining variations in long – run real output.
A systematic method for constructing time discretizations of integrable lattice systems: local equations of motion

We propose a new method for discretizing the time variable in integrable lattice systems while maintaining the locality of the equations of motion. The method is based on the zero-curvature (Lax pair) representation and the lowest-order ‘conservation laws’. In contrast to the pioneering work of Ablowitz and Ladik, our method allows the auxiliary dependent variables appearing in the stage of time discretization to be expressed locally in terms of the original dependent variables. The time-discretized lattice systems have the same set of conserved quantities and the same structures of the solutions as the continuous-time lattice systems; only the time evolution of the parameters in the solutions that correspond to the angle variables is discretized. The effectiveness of our method is illustrated using examples such as the Toda lattice, the Volterra lattice, the modified Volterra lattice, the Ablowitz–Ladik lattice (an integrable semi-discrete nonlinear Schrödinger system) and the lattice Heisenberg ferromagnet model. For the modified Volterra lattice, we also present its ultradiscrete analogue.
A Provenance Framework for Data-Dependent Process Analysis

A data-dependent process (DDP) models an application whose control flow is guided by a finite state machine, as well as by the state of an underlying database. DDPs are commonly found e.g., in e-commerce. In this paper we develop a framework supporting the use of provenance in static (temporal) analysis of possible DDP executions. Using provenance support, analysts can interactively test and explore the effect of hypothetical modifications to a DDP's state machine and/or to the underlying database. They can also extend the analysis to incorporate the propagation of annotations from meta-domains of interest, e.g., cost or access privileges. Toward this goal we note that the framework of semiring-based provenance was proven highly effective in fulfilling similar needs in the context of database queries. In this paper we consider novel constructions that generalize the semiring approach to the context of DDP analysis. These constructions address two interacting new challenges: (1) to combine provenance annotations for both information that resides in the database and information about external inputs (e.g., user choices), and (2) to finitely capture infinite process executions. We analyze our solution from theoretical and experimental perspectives, proving its effectiveness.
Advanced modelling in finance using Excel and VBA

This new and unique book demonstrates that Excel and VBA can play an important role in the explanation and implementation of numerical methods across finance. Advanced Modelling in Finance provides a comprehensive look at equities, options on equities and options on bonds from the early 1950s to the late 1990s. The book adopts a step-by-step approach to understanding the more sophisticated aspects of Excel macros and VBA programming, showing how these programming techniques can be used to model and manipulate financial data, as applied to equities, bonds and options. The book is essential for financial practitioners who need to develop their financial modelling skill sets as there is an increase in the need to analyse and develop ever more complex 'what if' scenarios.
Diffusing software-engineering methods

The problems that surround software technology transfer are examined. It is suggested that for software engineers to understand these problems, they need to identify a conceptual framework that can provide a systematic understanding of diffusion processes and to identify priority areas through which the software-engineering community can effect the successful diffusion of its innovations. E.M. Roger's framework for diffusion of innovations (The Diffusion of Innovations, Free Press, NY, 1983) is discussed, and two ways to use it, as a descriptive model or as a prescriptive model, are described. A case study is presented to illustrate the arguments. <<ETX>>
A Comparative Study of the Adsorption of Methylene Blue onto Synthesized Nanoscale Zero-Valent Iron-Bamboo and Manganese-Bamboo Composites

In this study, bamboo impregnated with nanoscale zero-valent iron (nZVI) and nanoscale manganese (nMn) were prepared by the aqueous phase borohydride reduction method and characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and PIXE analysis. The synthesized nMn-bamboo and nZVI-bamboo composites were subsequently applied to the sorption of methylene blue (MB) dye from aqueous solution. The adsorption of MB dye was investigated under various experimental conditions such as pH, contact time, initial concentration of MB dye and adsorbent dosage. The results showed that the synthesized nZVI-bamboo composite was more effective than nMn-bamboo composite in terms of higher MB dye adsorption capacity of 322.5 mg/g compared to 263.5 mg/g of nMn-bamboo composite. At a concentration of 140 mg/L MB dye, 0.02 g of nZVI-bamboo and nMn-bamboo composites resulted in 79.6% and 78.3% removal, respectively, at 165 rpm, contact time of 120 min and at a solution pH of 7.6. The equilibrium data was best represented by Freundlich isotherm model and the pseudo-second order kinetic model better explained the kinetic data for both nZVI-bamboo and nMn-bamboo composites.
Path configuration using probability distribution of delay for high-functional node network

Networks including high-functional nodes (HNs) that have recovery processes are currently being studied to improve the quality of service of live streaming. To utilize the HN recovery processes effectively, Novel Link Weight Method has been proposed as a path configuration method for HN networks, but this method sometimes configures inappropriate paths because it does not consider the interactions of link delays for link weight. Thus, we propose a path configuration method that takes into account the interactions of delay and loss among all the links on a path. Our proposed method uses the probability distribution of the link delay and convolution of the probability distribution. In a simulation, we showed that our proposed method is more suitable for path configuration for HN networks than other conventional methods.
A Comparison of Heuristics for FPGA Placement

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are digital integrated circuits (ICs) that contain configurable logic and interconnect to provide a means for fast prototyping and also for a cost-effective chip design. The innovative development of FPGAs spurred the invention of a new field in which many different hardware algorithms could execute on a single device [16]. Efficient Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools are required to compile hardware descriptions into bit-stream files that are used to configure the target FPGA to implement the desired circuits. Currently, the compile time, which is dominated by placement and routing phases, can easily take hours or even days to complete for current large (over 8-million gate) FPGAs. Within the next few years the logic capacity of FPGAs will tend to increase dramatically (up to 40-million gates) that prohibitively long compile times may adversely affect instant manufacturability of FPGAs and become intolerable to users seeking very high speed compile. This paper presents several constructive and iterative improvement placement based heuristics that significantly reduce the amount of computation time required to achieve high-quality placements, compared with VPR [9], [8]. Cluster Seed, GRASP and Partitioning based approaches prove to be excellent candidates to generate good starting points in negligible amounts of time. The effectiveness of these constructive based methods are tested by implementing several local search based methods. Meta-heuristics in the form of Tabu Search and a hybrid Simulated Annealing with short-term memory are further implemented to explore and exploit the solution space effectively.
Metabolic-Flux Profiling of the Yeasts Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Pichia stipitis

ABSTRACT The so far largely uncharacterized central carbon metabolism of the yeast Pichia stipitis was explored in batch and glucose-limited chemostat cultures using metabolic-flux ratio analysis by nuclear magnetic resonance. The concomitantly characterized network of active metabolic pathways was compared to those identified in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which led to the following conclusions. (i) There is a remarkably low use of the non-oxidative pentose phosphate (PP) pathway for glucose catabolism in S. cerevisiae when compared to P. stipitis batch cultures. (ii) Metabolism of P. stipitis batch cultures is fully respirative, which contrasts with the predominantly respiro-fermentative metabolic state of S. cerevisiae. (iii) Glucose catabolism in chemostat cultures of both yeasts is primarily oxidative. (iv) In both yeasts there is significant in vivo malic enzyme activity during growth on glucose. (v) The amino acid biosynthesis pathways are identical in both yeasts. The present investigation thus demonstrates the power of metabolic-flux ratio analysis for comparative profiling of central carbon metabolism in lower eukaryotes. Although not used for glucose catabolism in batch culture, we demonstrate that the PP pathway in S. cerevisiae has a generally high catabolic capacity by overexpressing the Escherichia coli transhydrogenase UdhA in phosphoglucose isomerase-deficient S. cerevisiae.