Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perovskite ceramic nanoparticles in polymer composites for augmenting bone tissue regeneration

There is increasing interest in the use of nanoparticles as fillers in polymer matrices to develop biomaterials which mimic the mechanical, chemical and electrical properties of bone tissue for orthopaedic applications. The objective of this study was to prepare poly(ϵ-caprolactone) (PCL) nanocomposites incorporating three different perovskite ceramic nanoparticles, namely, calcium titanate (CT), strontium titanate (ST) and barium titanate (BT). The tensile strength and modulus of the composites increased with the addition of nanoparticles. Scanning electron microscopy indicated that dispersion of the nanoparticles scaled with the density of the ceramics, which in turn played an important role in determining the enhancement in mechanical properties of the composite. Dielectric spectroscopy revealed improved permittivity and reduced losses in the composites when compared to neat PCL. Nanofibrous scaffolds were fabricated via electrospinning. Induction coupled plasma-optical emission spectroscopy indicated the release of small quantities of Ca+2, Sr+2, Ba+2 ions from the scaffolds. Piezo-force microscopy revealed that BT nanoparticles imparted piezoelectric properties to the scaffolds. In vitro studies revealed that all composites support osteoblast proliferation. Expression of osteogenic genes was enhanced on the nanocomposites in the following order: PCL/CT > PCL/ST > PCL/BT > PCL. This study demonstrates that the use of perovskite nanoparticles could be a promising technique to engineer better polymeric scaffolds for bone tissue engineering.
Automated polymerase chain reaction for papillomavirus screening of cervicovaginal lavages: Comparison with dot‐blot hybridization in a sexually transmitted diseases clinic population

The aim of the present study was to compare the recently developed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique with conventional dot‐blot DNA hybridization for human papillomavirus (HPV) detection. Cells were collected by cervicovaginal lavage from a study group of 109 women attending a sexually transmitted diseases clinic. Using a machine that we developed for alternation of temperature cycles, HPV was detected in 51% of patients by PCR. By dot‐blot hybridization, 44% of the patients were positive. Concordance of combined positive and negative results between PCR and dot blot was 69%. The greater sensitivity of PCR may have accounted for 19% of specimens that were PCR positive but dot‐blot negative. Unexpectedly, however, 12% of specimens were dot‐blot positive but negative by PCR, and several specimens were discordant for type of HPV. Both HPV DNA tests agreed with cytology in 41% of women, and in 33% cytology was negative in the face of positive PCR and dot blot. Concordance of cytology with just PCR was 59%, and only with dot blot was 56%. Cervicography agreed with both HPV DNA tests in 41% of patients, with PCR alone in 55%, and with dot blot alone in 58%. Biopsy results did not reveal a strong correlation between histopathological criteria of HPV infection and detection of HPV DNA by either PCR or dot‐blot hybridization. Thus the present study has shown that PCR is a slightly more sensitive indicator of HPV infection than dot‐blot hybridization. Agreement of HPV DNA results with conventional screening tests was not strong, an observation consistent with many comparative studies by others. In conclusion, PCR is slightly more sensitive than DNA hybridization for detection of HPV, it can be used in conjunction with specimen collection by gentle lavage of the cervicovaginal epithelium, and the possibility remains that it may prove suitable as a screening test.
Multi-standard/multi-band distributed VCO based on the "switched-cells tuning technique" for SDR applications

The paper introduces a new approach to design a multi-band distributed VCOs for modern TLC applications. The multi-band capability is achieved thanks to a novel tuning scheme based on the proposed "switched-cells tuning technique" able to fully exploit the potentialities of a distribute VCO. The design procedure is discussed. The simulated and measured characteristics of a first fully integrated four-band DVCO are reported, validating the capabilities of the presented approach.
The Differential Hormone-dependent Transcriptional Activation of Thyroid Hormone Receptor Isoforms Is Mediated by Interplay of Their Domains*

Human thyroid hormone nuclear receptor isoforms (TRα1 and TRβ1) express differentially in a tissue-specific and development-dependent manner. It is unclear whether these two isoforms have differential functions. We analyzed their interaction with a thyroid hormone response element with half-site binding motifs arranged in an everted repeat separated by six nucleotides (F2). Despite extensive sequence homologies, the two isoforms bound to F2 with different affinities and ratios of homodimer/monomer. Using F2-containing reporter gene, we found that the transcriptional activity of TRβ1 was ∼6-fold higher than that of TRα1. The lower activity of TRα1 was not due to differences in expression of the two isoforms because similar nuclear localization patterns were observed. To understand the structural determinants responsible for these differences, we constructed chimeric receptors in which hinge regions (domain D), hormone binding domains (domain E), and domains (D + E) were sequentially interchanged and their activities were compared. Chimeric TRs containing the domains D, E or (D + E) of TRβ1 showed increased propensities to form homodimers and mediated higher transactivation activities than TRα1. Thus, differential transactivation activities of TR isoforms are mediated by interplay of their domains and could serve as an important regulatory mechanism to achieve diversity and specificity of pleiotropic T3 effect.
The antioxidative property of melatonin against brain ischemia

ABSTRACT Introduction: This review briefly summarizes some of the large amount of data documenting the ability of melatonin to limit molecular and organ tissue damage in neural ischemia-reperfusion injury (stroke), where free radicals are generally considered as being responsible for much of the resulting tissue destruction. Area Covered: Melatonin actions that have been identified include its ability to directly neutralize a number of toxic reactants and stimulate antioxidative enzymes. Furthermore, several of its metabolites such as N1-acetyl-N2-formyl-5- methoxykynuramine (AFMK) and N1-acetyl-5-methoxykynuramine (AMF), are themselves scavengers suggesting that there is a cascade of reactions that greatly increase the efficacy of melatonin. Expert Commentary: However, the mechanisms by which melatonin is protective in such widely diverse areas of the cell and different organs are likely not yet all identified.
Punctaporonins H–M: Caryophyllene-Type Sesquiterpenoids from the Sponge-Associated Fungus Hansfordia sinuosae

Six new caryophyllene-based sesquiterpenoids named punctaporonins H–M (1–6), together with punctaporonin B (7) and humulane (8) were isolated from the fermentation broth of the sponge-derived fungus Hansfordia sinuosae. Their structures were determined by the extensive HRESIMS and NMR spectroscopic analysis, including the X-ray crystallographic data for the assignment of the absolute configurations of punctaporonins H–I (1–2). The isolated compounds were evaluated for antihyperlipidemic, cytotoxic and antimicrobial activities, and punctaporonin K (4) exhibited potent effects to reduce the triglycerides and total cholesterol in the intracellular levels.
Multiple sources: mapping the literature of palliative care

Palliative care is an increasingly important area of clinical practice and health service delivery. The heterogeneity of the patient population and the multidisciplinary nature of care draw on knowledge from many fields of clinical practice and academic enquiry. This has implications for the retrieval of evidence and literature and the spread of new knowledge in palliative care. This study shows that the CINAHL, Embase and PsycINFO bibliographic databases hold sizeable repositories of palliative care articles not indexed on Medline. It also highlights the number and range of journals publishing palliative care content. In 2005 alone, 1985 journals published 6983 items. These findings show the challenges for palliative care professionals in managing the complex evidence base for this diverse field of care and the importance of mechanisms that facilitate the identification of palliative care information. Dissemination strategies that ensure that new knowledge reaches the many audiences implicit in the range of journals publishing palliative care are also critical in supporting improvements in clinical practice and service delivery.
Regularizing AdaBoost to prevent overfitting on label noise

In this work, we have shown that AdaBoost is prone to overfitting when the training set contains mislabeled objects. We proposed that this is in part because the error estimate used to weight base classifiers and (indirectly) objects is biased in this scenario. We have shown that an unbiased estimator can prevent the overfitting, but such an estimator is not easily found when the training set is untrustworthy. To remedy this, we introduced the ValidBoost algorithm, which tries to unbias the error estimation AdaBoost makes by taking a validation set from the noisy training set. The size of the validation set increases logarithmically with the number of iterations, reaching 50% of the entire training set in the final iteration. The error ValidBoost uses is a weighted average of the default training error and this validation error, with the weight of the validation error also increasing logarithmically with the number of iterations. We have seen that ValidBoost performs well in comparison to AdaBoost and LogitBoost in the presence of label noise. Compared to Bylander & Tate’s method, a similar variant of AdaBoost also based on the use of validation sets to avoid overfitting, it performs very similar when using decision stumps as base classifiers, and slightly better when using decision trees as classifiers. Perhaps this is because we are using more training data than Bylander & Tate are and decision trees require this extra input in order for the base classifiers themselves not to overfit. The fact that ValidBoost samples a new validation set at every iteration also lead to positive effects. Whereas the other methods might stagnate or stop early because a classifier has been trained with an error above the threshold imposed by boosting, ValidBoost will have a different training set next iteration, thus no reason to stop early and a different error (possibly below the error threshold). This effect can also be seen when using non-deterministic base classifiers with AdaBoost. Because of the relative success of ValidBoost, we reasoned about its core idea and how this can be translated into other domains. Several suggestions were made for possible ways to incorporate it into bagging, neural networks or decision trees. Experiments on such an implementation in bagging (random forests specifically) showed promise, while experiments on an implementation in neural networks worked less well.
Oil Price Fluctuations and Changing Comparative Advantage

This paper attempts to quantify the effects of oil price fluctuations on revealed comparative advantage (RCA) for 36 manufacturing commodities of 167 countries over a 16-year period from 1990 to 2005. Using Zellner’s (1962) seemingly unrelated regression (SURE) model, the negative effects of oil price fluctuations on RCA vary according to objectives and model specification. Oil price fluctuations negatively affect manufacturing commodities’ RCA in 1997-2005 more than in 1990-1996 periods. The paper also found that oil price fluctuations negatively affect middle-income economies and net oil-exporting countries’ RCA more than high-income economies and net oil-importing countries.
Ranking Vectors by Means of the Dominance Degree Matrix

In multi-/many-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs), there are varieties of vector ranking schemes, including nondominated sorting, dominance counting, and so on. Usually, these vector ranking schemes in the classical MOEAs are of high computational complexity. Thus, in recent years, many researchers put emphasis on the further improvement of the computational complexity of the vector ranking schemes. In this paper, we propose the dominance degree matrix for a set of vectors and design a fast method to construct this new data structure, which requires <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${O}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>(<italic>mN</italic>log <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${N}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) comparisons on average. The dominance degree matrix is constructed based on the properties of Pareto domination, and it can convert the dominance comparison into counting the number of special element pairs. Based on the dominance degree matrix, we develop a new and efficient implementation of nondominated sorting called dominance degree approach for nondominated sorting (DDA-NS), which has an average time complexity of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${O}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>(<italic>mN</italic><inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) but only requires <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${O}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>(<italic>mN</italic>log <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${N}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) objective function value comparisons on average. Empirical results demonstrate that DDA-NS clearly outperforms six other representative approaches for nondominated sorting in most cases and DDA-NS performs well when dealing with large-size and many-objective populations. In addition, we also use the dominance degree matrix to form a new method for calculating the dominance strength for Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm (SPEA)2, which greatly improves the efficiency of the naive calculation method in SPEA2. Experiments on benchmark problems show that the Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA)-II and NSGA-III framework embedding DDA-NS and the SPEA2 framework embedding the new method of calculating the dominance strength indeed achieve the improvement of the runtime.
Intracellular pH Regulates the Production of Different Oxygen Metabolites in Neutrophils: Effects of Organic Acids Produced by Anaerobic Bacteria

The effects of short chain carboxylic acids (SCCA), namely succinic, butyric, and iso‐butyric, on neutrophil metabolic activation were assessed. SCCA induced a significant decrease in O2 ‐ recovery and chemlluminescent response in neutrophils activated with the diacylglycerol analog tetradecanoyl‐phorbol‐acetate (TPA). SCCA did not alter O2 consumption, H2O2 production, or the calorimetrically determined energy expenditure occurring during the metabolic burst. SCCA also induced a significant acidification of intracellular pH (pHi). These results are consistent with an increased divalent versus univalent O2 reduction performed by the NADPH oxidase at a more acidic intracellular pH.
Testing hypotheses about sun-climate complexity linking.

We reexamine observational evidence presented in support of the hypothesis of a sun-climate complexity linking by N. Scafetta and B. J. West, Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 248701 (2003)10.1103/PhysRevLett.90. 248701, which contended that the integrated solar flare index (SFI) and the global temperature anomaly (GTA) both follow Lévy walk statistics with the same waiting-time exponent mu approximately 2.1. However, their analysis does not account for trends in the signal, cannot deal correctly with infinite variance processes (Lévy flights), and suffers from considering only the second moment. Our analysis shows that properly detrended, the integrated SFI is well described as a Lévy flight, and the integrated GTA as a persistent fractional Brownian motion. These very different stochastic properties of the solar and climate records do not support the hypothesis of a sun-climate complexity linking.
An Empirical Analysis of Expected Stock Price Movements

THE LIVINGSTON SURVEY of economists forecasts of key economic variables has served as the data source for a number of studies investigating the forrnation and effects of expectations. Much of this work has utilized the price level predictions from the survey to proxy anticipated inflation.l This measure of expected inflation has also been analyzed by several researchers to see if it conforrns to the notion of rational expectations, with differing conclusions . 2 This paper extends the analysis of the Livingston data by examining the forecasts of common stock prices made by the individual survey participants. Since predicted movements in stock prices may play an important role in portfolio decisions and, according to Tobin's q model, real investment decisions, it seems useful to explore the characteristics of these forecasts. The paper addresses two main issues. First, are the stock price predictions in accord with rational expectation forrnation? Second, how are the respondents' expectations of stock price movements related to their forecasts of inflation and real
The impact of option introduction on the conditional return distribution of underlying securities

This paper combines several interesting econometric techniques to examine changes in the conditional return distribution of security returns following option introduction. An EGARCH model is used to characterize the return generating process. An intervention analysis is performed to determine whether the parameters of the EGARCH model shift following initial options listing. This paper finds that the conditional distribution of security returns is unaffected by option introduction. Estimation of a transfer function-noise model also shows that option introduction has no effect on conditional volatility. Copyright 1998 by MIT Press.
Coverings of commutators in profinite groups

Let $w$ be a group-word. Suppose that the set of all $w$-values in a profinite group $G$ is contained in a union of countably many subgroups. It is natural to ask in what way the structure of the verbal subgroup $w(G)$ depends on the properties of the covering subgroups. The present article is a survey of recent results related to that question. In particular we survey results on finite and countable coverings of word-values (mostly commutators) by procyclic, abelian, nilpotent, and soluble subgroups, as well as subgroups with finiteness conditions. The last section of the paper is devoted to relation of the described results with Hall's problem on conciseness of group-words.
Influences and impacts on worker productivity: An exploratory study of Videoconferencing Systems in a Global Professional Services Firm

This paper presents the research framework and early results from a study that is exploring the use of Videoconferencing Systems (VCS) and its influences and impacts on worker productivity within a professional services firm. Worker productivity is the quantity of output produced with optimum quality of work and is measured by examining the comparative resources consumption in physical and VCS enabled tasks. The theory framework is based on a combination of Media Richness Theory, Task Technology Fit Theory, and VCS concepts. The study is using a Mixed Methods Research (MMR) approach that includes a pilot and major ethnographic case studies, coupled with business process analysis; automated content analysis; and directed (vector) graph and adjacency matrix algebra to investigate the phenomenon. Some early findings show that a major capital city office of the firm is having some success with realising reduced resources consumption and increased worker productivity where VCS is implemented.
Challenges, Promising Programs, and Effective Practices in Adult and Developmental Education

This report was prepared with funds provided through a grant and cooperative agreement from the George Kaiser Family Foundation to the Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources at the University of Texas at Austin. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent the positions of the funding agencies or The University. all contributed to this paper through input on participant experiences and collaborations with education and training providers. The CareerAdvance project has been a collaboration involving many partners, who all have cooperated with project and research staff from the beginning. These partners Program, and the Tulsa Technology Center. We want to thank the staff members from all of these organizations for being helpful and collegial colleagues in this project. In addition, this paper benefited enormously from interviews and exchanges with adult education leaders, including v FOREWORD This paper is one in a series that addresses key issue areas of the CareerAdvance demonstration by The Community Action Project (CAP) of Tulsa County, Oklahoma. As a comprehensive anti‐poverty agency, CAP addresses the multiple needs of low‐ income Tulsa families by providing programs in early education, housing, and financial and tax assistance. CAP has a history of partnering with social service organizations and schools in the Tulsa area, including Family & Children's Services, local school districts, The agency is an innovator in early childhood education and has recently created a system of eight large comprehensive, high‐quality learning centers, in addition to seven smaller centers, which together serve more than 2,000 Tulsa children. Several CAP early childhood centers have been purposefully located adjacent to elementary school campuses in the Tulsa and Union public school districts in order to provide children and their families a smoother transition from pre‐kindergarten to elementary school. This co‐location also opens possibilities to serve families over expanded time frames. CAP has a demonstrated track record of successfully implementing innovative programs, testing their effectiveness, and building them to scale. In its early childhood work, CAP increased the number of children enrolled in its program by 51% over three years, growing from 1,320 to 2,000 children served. To reach this level, CAP developed strong and effective working partnerships with three local public school districts and built five new state‐of‐the‐art facilities. CAP also made remarkable strides in providing free tax preparation services to low‐ and moderate‐income Tulsa families. CAP began preparing tax returns with the …
Equity issues associated with the change of college admission tests in Chile

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to document the process of change of the admission tests in a developing country, Chile focusing on equity issues, particularly on the outcomes for test takers from marginalized groups.Design/methodology/approach – The paper deals with equity issues associated to the change in admission tests to higher education in Chile. It addresses the omission of a validity framework, the ensuing implementation problems, and the unfulfilled expectations that the new tests would increase access to higher education for marginalized groups. The paper is built as a case study, using media accounts and archival data to document the process of change.Findings – Three years after the debut of the new tests, the expected outcomes of increased access to higher education were not met. The performance gap in the admission tests between the underprivileged group of applicants from public municipal high‐schools and the applicants from private schools widened.Research limitations/implications .