Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transplant-Related Mortality Following Allogeneic Hematopoeitic Stem Cell Transplantation for Pediatric Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia: 25-Year Retrospective Review

Over the last 25 years, donor source, conditioning, graft‐versus‐host disease prevention and supportive care for children undergoing hematopoeitic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) have changed dramatically. HSCT indications for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) now include high‐risk patients in first and subsequent remission. There is a large burden of infectious and pre‐HSCT morbidities, due to myelosuppressive therapy required for remission induction. We hypothesized that, despite these trends, overall survival (OS) had increased.
Discriminating between Brazilian and European Portuguese National Varieties on Twitter Texts

Twitter is one of the most used social media with users generating about 1 million messages per day. As a result of the expansion of this microblog, there is a diversity of languages used by users and many studies aimed at identifying the language of tweets. The third most used language on Twitter is Portuguese, a pluricentric language with two national standard varieties: Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese. Identifying a language variety may positively impact various Natural Language Processing tasks, but accomplishing this task is still regarded as one of the bottlenecks in this area, especially when combined with another bottleneck, language identification applied to short texts. Thus, given these challenges, this paper provides a current view on the automatic discrimination of the two main Portuguese language varieties on Twitter texts by using an acknowledged approach with different techniques and features in order to get an optimum configuration to fit our problem. Results reached 0.9271 for accuracy using an ensemble method, which combines character 6-grams and word unigrams and bigrams.
Receptor Cytoplasmic Domain of the Granulocyte Colony-Stimulating Factor Functional Differentiation Signals Mediated by Distinct Regions of the

http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary. org/content/93/11/3774.full. html Updated information and services can be found at: (3094 articles) Hematopoiesis and Stem Cells  Articles on similar topics can be found in the following Blood collections http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary. org/site/misc/rights.xhtml#repub_requests Information about reproducing this article in parts or in its entirety may be found online at: http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary. org/site/misc/rights.xhtml#reprints Information about ordering reprints may be found online at: http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary. org/site/subscriptions/index.xhtml Information about subscriptions and ASH membership may be found online at:
Open, Closed, and Mixed Networks of Queues with Different Classes of Customers

We derive the joint equilibrium distribution of queue sizes in a network of queues containing N service centers and R classes of customers. The equilibrium state probabilities have the general form: P(S) - Cd(S) $f_1$($x_1$)$f_2$($x_2$). $f_N$($x_N$) where S is the state of the system, $x_i$ is the configuration of customers at the ith service center, d(S) is a function of the state of the model, $f_i$ is a function that depends on the type of the ith service center, and C is a normalizing constant. We consider four types of service centers to model central processors, data channels, terminals, and routing delays. The queueing disciplines associated with these service centers include first-come-first-served, processor sharing, no queueing, and last-come-first-served. Each customer belongs to a single class of customers while awaiting or receiving service at a service center but may change classes and service centers according to fixed probabilities at the completion of a service request. For open networks we consider state dependent arrival processes. Closed networks are those with no arrivals. A network may be closed with respect to some classes of customers and open with respect to other classes of customers. At three of the four types of service centers, the service times of customers are governed by probability distributions having rational Laplace transforms, different classes of customers having different distributions. At first-come-first-served type service centers the service time distribution must be identical and exponential for all classes of customers. Many of the network results of Jackson on arrival and service rate dependencies, of Posner and Bernholtz on different classes of customers, and of Chandy on different types of service centers are combined and extended in this paper. The results become special cases of the model presented here. An example shows how different classes of customers can affect models of computer systems. Finally, we show that an equivalent model encompassing all of the results involves only classes of customers with identical exponentially distributed service times. All of the other structure of the first model can be absorbed into the fixed probabilities governing the change of class and change of service center of each class of customers.
Accurate Heterogeneous Communication Models and a Software Tool for Their Efficient Estimation

In this paper, we analyze the restrictions of traditional communication performance models that affect the accuracy of analytical prediction of the execution time of collective communication operations on homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters. In particular, we show that the constant and variable contributions of processors and the network are not fully separated in these models. Full separation of the contributions that have different natures and arise from different sources would lead to more intuitive and accurate models, but the parameters of such models cannot be estimated from only the point-to-point experiments, which are usually used for traditional models. The paper presents such an intuitive and accurate point-to-point model and describes a set of communication experiments sufficient for estimation of its parameters. It also presents an implementation of the new model in the form of a software tool that automates the estimation of both this model and heterogeneous extensions of traditional communication performance models. We conclude with a presentation of experimental results demonstrating that the elaborated model much more accurately predicts the execution time of different algorithms of collective operations than traditional models.
Fundamental Issues in Affective Intelligent Social Machines

In the early 1990s, computer scientists became motivated by the idea of rendering human-computer interactions more humanlike and natural for their users in order to both address complaints that technologies impose a mechanical (sometimes even anti-social) aesthetic to their everyday environment, and also investigate innovative ways to manage system-environment complexity. With the recent development of the field of Social Robotics and particularly Human- Robot Interaction, the integration of intentional emotional mechanisms in a system's control architecture becomes inevitable. Unfortunately, this presents significant issues that must be addressed for a successful emotional artificial system to be developed. This paper provides an additional dimension to documented arguments for and against the introduction of emotions into artificial systems by highlighting some fundamental paradoxes, mistakes, and proposes guidelines for how to develop successful affective intelligent social machines.
CCL5 and CCR5 Interaction Promotes Cell Motility in Human Osteosarcoma

Background Osteosarcoma is characterized by a high malignant and metastatic potential. CCL5 (previously called RANTES) was originally recognized as a product of activated T cells, and plays a crucial role in the migration and metastasis of human cancer cells. It has been reported that the effect of CCL5 is mediated via CCR receptors. However, the effect of CCL5 on migration activity and integrin expression in human osteosarcoma cells is mostly unknown. Methodology/Principal Findings Here we found that CCL5 increased the migration and expression of αvβ3 integrin in human osteosarcoma cells. Stimulation of cells with CCL5 increased CCR5 but not CCR1 and CCR3 expression. CCR5 mAb, inhibitor, and siRNA reduced the CCL5-enhanced the migration and integrin up-regulation of osteosarcoma cells. Activations of MEK, ERK, and NF-κB pathways after CCL5 treatment were demonstrated, and CCL5-induced expression of integrin and migration activity was inhibited by the specific inhibitor and mutant of MEK, ERK, and NF-κB cascades. In addition, over-expression of CCL5 shRNA inhibited the migratory ability and integrin expression in osteosarcoma cells. Conclusions/Significance CCL5 and CCR5 interaction acts through MEK, ERK, which in turn activates NF-κB, resulting in the activations of αvβ3 integrin and contributing the migration of human osteosarcoma cells.
Observational constraints on the inflaton potential combined with flow equations in inflaton space

Direct observations provide constraints on the first two derivatives of the inflaton potential in slow-roll models. We discuss how present-day observations, combined with the flow equations in slow-roll parameter space, provide a non-trivial constraint on the third derivative of the inflaton potential. We find a lower bound on the third derivative of the inflaton potential V"'/ V > -0.2. We also show that unless the third derivative of the inflaton potential is unreasonably large, then one predicts the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r, to be bounded from below r > 3 x 10 - 6 .
What Evidence Matters to Jurors? The Prevalence and Importance of Different Homicide Trial Evidence to Mock Jurors

The present research explores how important different trial evidence is to mock jurors’ decisions. Study 1 surveys legal professionals to determine what evidence is common at homicide trials. Study 2 utilizes the list of evidence generated in Study 1 to ask mock jurors to report how important each piece of evidence would be in deciding their verdicts. The results indicate that DNA is most important to mock jurors, followed by fingerprints, the weapon, video records, crime-scene photos, gunshot residue, bodily secretions, video confession, testimony from a forensic expert, and eyewitness testimony. Study 3 utilizes a different methodology wherein mock jurors were presented with folders labeled with different evidence and asked to choose the piece of evidence they wanted to learn more about first, second, and so on. The results from Study 3 indicate again that DNA evidence is most important to mock jurors, followed by video confession evidence, eyewitness testimony, and fingerprint evidence. Implications are discussed.
Managers’ discretionary behavior, earnings management and corporate governance: An empirical international analysis*

In the present debate about corporate governance, the role played by boards of directors has become more and more relevant. Facing important incentives problems due to the separation between ownership and control, the board of directors is supposed to act, on behalf of the shareholders, as an important mechanism to monitor managers’ discretionary behavior. Among the several ways to measure discretionarity, we have focused on that one stemming from accrual decisions in order to manage earnings. The innovation of our paper relies on the use of accruals and earnings management as a measure of discretionary behavior. Accruals are understood as some means to manipulate financial statements for the sake of managers’ profit. Although, accruals are not the only instrument the managers have for earnings management, there are some characteristics of them justifying the increasing importance accruals are being given in earnings management. Based on these issues, the aim of our paper is to test the board of directors ability to monitor by using the discretionary component of earnings management as an indicator of managers’ discretionarity. Using a sample of 450 non-financial companies from 10 OECD countries, we have found empirical evidence showing the link between some board of directors features and the discretionary financial statements manipulation by managers. Specifically, and as most of the literature has pointed, our main result stresses the positive and robust impact of board size on earnings management. As far as other characteristics of boards of directors are concerned, our research does not lend conclusive support to the effect of board composition or meeting frequency on earnings management.
Write Amplification with Write Skew

Write amplification is a measure of garbage collection efficiency and a key objective to minimize for NAND flash memory based solid state drives. Prior works on analytical modeling of write amplification tend to fall short of the promises to offer more insights than simulations due to their complexity. This paper derives a simple formula to predict write amplification for practical skewed write traffic, which became recently known to closely follow Zipf's law.
ESTIMATION AND MAPPING ABOVE GROUND WOODY CARBON STOCKS USING LIDAR DATA AND DIGITAL CAMERA IMAGERY IN THE HILLY FORESTS OF GORKHA , NEPAL

i Acknowledgements . ii List of figures . vi List of tables . vii List of acronyms . viii 1. INTRODUCTION . 1 1.1. Background . 1 1.2. Overview of application of remote sensing for biomass estimation . 3 1.3. Rationale and problem statement . 4 1.4. Research objectives . 5 1.5. Theoretical framework of research . 5 1.6. Concepts and Definitions . 6 1.6. 1. LIDAR and its principle . 6 1.6. 2. Point cloud . 7 1.6. 3. Crown Projection Area . 8 1.6. 4. Community Forest . 8 1.6. 5. Intermingled trees . 8 2. STUDY AREA . 9 2.1. Criteria for study area selection . 9 2.2. Overview of the study area . 9 2.2.1. Socio-economic information and demography . 10 2.2.2. Topography . 10 2.2. 3. Climate . 10 2.2. 4. Temperature . 10 2.2. 5. Rainfall . 11 2.2. 6. Vegetation . 11 3. MATERIALS AND METHODS . 13 3.1. Data Used . 13 3.1.1. Digital Camera Imagery . 13 3.1.2. LIDAR data . 13 3.1.3. Maps . 13 3.1.4. Software . 13 3.1.5. Field Equipment . 13 3.2. Image pre-processing . 14 3.2.1. Image filtering . 14 3.3. Research Method. 14
Design and development of three phase diode point clamped active front end converter

The paper presents the design, development and implementation of a Three Phase diode clamped active front-end converter in rectification mode for the power factor control and power quality improvement. Specifically this paper concentrates on the dc link capacitor balancing and maintenance of near to unity power factor of the supply. The paper also proposes an existing and popular mathematical modeling for the converter. The modulation technique used ensures minimum switching losses. Proposed scheme also has wide input range and good input side power factor.
Apriori, A Depth First Implementation

We will discuss , the depth first implementation of APRIORI as devised in 1999 (see [8]). Given a database, this algorithm builds a trie in memory that contains all frequent itemsets, i.e., all sets that are contained in at least minsup transactions from the original database. Here minsup is a threshold value given in advance. In the trie, that is constructed by adding one item at a time, every path corresponds to a unique frequent itemset. We describe the algorithm in detail, derive theoretical formulas, and provide experiments.
Attention Modulates Initial Stages of Visual Word Processing

Selective attention has the potential to enhance the initial processing of objects, their spatial locations, or their constituent features. The present study shows that this capacity to modulate initial stages of processing also applies to linguistic attributes. A cueing paradigm focused attention at different levels of word representations on a trial-by-trial basis to study the time course of attentional modulation on visual word processing by means of a high-density electrophysiology recording system. Attention to different linguistic attributes modulated components related to semantic, phonological, and orthographic stages of word processing. Crucially, the N200, associated with initial stages of orthographic decoding, was enhanced by attention to the letter pattern of words. These results suggest that top-down attention has the capacity to enhance initial perceptual stages of visual word processing and support the flexibility of attention in modulating different levels of information processing depending on task goals.
Robust endpoint detection and energy normalization for real-time speech and speaker recognition

When automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speaker verification (SV) are applied in adverse acoustic environments, endpoint detection and energy normalization can be crucial to the functioning of both systems. In low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and nonstationary environments, conventional approaches to endpoint detection and energy normalization often fail and ASR performances usually degrade dramatically. The purpose of this paper is to address the endpoint problem. For ASR, we propose a real-time approach. It uses an optimal filter plus a three-state transition diagram for endpoint detection. The filter is designed utilizing several criteria to ensure accuracy and robustness. It has almost invariant response at various background noise levels. The detected endpoints are then applied to energy normalization sequentially. Evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the string error rates in low SNR situations. The reduction rates even exceed 50% in several evaluated databases. For SV, we propose a batch-mode approach. It uses the optimal filter plus a two-mixture energy model for endpoint detection. The experiments show that the batch-mode algorithm can detect endpoints as accurately as using HMM forced alignment while the proposed one has much less computational complexity.
The Retina and Lateral Geniculate Nucleus 2.1 Physiology

Vision science seeks to understand how the visual system gathers, interprets, and represents information. The complexity of the human visual system (and the brain more generally) is challenging to analyze partly because of the difficulty in deciphering the neural code, the language in which neurons communicate. In studying neural processing, the strategy of neurophysiologists was first to study lesions and ablations, wherein areas of the brain had been damaged or removed, in order to see how perception and function were affected. In the past 40 years, the advent of single-cell recordings has made it possible to trace the physiology, anatomy and processing of each unit and cell type along a sensory stream. For Hubel and Weisel (1962), who recorded electrical signals from individual cat neurons and mapped out those cells' electrical response to spatial patterns, the goal was to understand the system's constituent parts. We have learned a great deal about the visual system from this approach. Studies of visual coding have examined the processing of individual units and they have determined the response properties of many cells in the visual system. But there remain questions about coding. How does the visual system extract useful information from visual stimuli? What evolutionary forces shaped the structure of the visual system? Simoncelli and Olshausen (2001) describe three broad factors that influence the evolution of visual systems: the uses to which the organism puts its visual system; the constraints imposed by neuronal structure and architecture; and the visual environment in which the organism lives. While the first two factors 2 are no doubt important, we examine the third factor, the environment, and we are interested specifically in the statistical structure of the visual world. This area of study has grown markedly in the past decade, with the help of physicists, computer scientists, physiologists and a host of other researchers working in an interdisciplinary context. The general strategy in answering teleological questions in biology is to assume that nature is parsimonious in its designs. Specifically, the visual system is thought to use an economical strategy to encode information. The environment has been long been implicated in the adaptations of sensory modalities (Attneave, 1954, Barlow, 1961) and the visual system in particular is thought to encode visual information using a representation that has less redundancy than the stimuli. But what are the redundant features of the visual world? And how could the visual system achieve …
Stable Region Correspondences Between Non‐Isometric Shapes

We consider the problem of finding meaningful correspondences between 3D models that are related but not necessarily very similar. When the shapes are quite different, a point‐to‐point map is not always appropriate, so our focus in this paper is a method to build a set of correspondences between shape regions or parts. The proposed approach exploits a variety of feature functions on the shapes and makes use of the key observation that points in matching parts have similar ranks in the sorting of the corresponding feature values. Our algorithm proceeds in two steps. We first build an affinity matrix between points on the two shapes, based on feature rank similarity over many feature functions. We then define a notion of stability of a pair of regions, with respect to this affinity matrix, obtained as a fixed point of a nonlinear operator. Our method yields a family of corresponding maximally stable regions between the two shapes that can be used to define shape parts. We observe that this is an instance of the biclustering problem and that it is related to solving a constrained maximal eigenvalue problem. We provide an algorithm to solve this problem that mimics the power method. We show the robustness of its output to noisy input features as well its convergence properties. The obtained part correspondences are shown to be almost perfect matches in the isometric case, and also semantically appropriate even in non‐isometric cases. We provide numerous examples and applications of this technique, for example to sharpening correspondences in traditional shape matching algorithms.
Indigenous cultural and social work practices creating inequalities among foster care adolescents in decision-making processes

Indigenous cultural as well as institutional social work practices often contribute towards the perpetuation and creation of inequalities. This article explores the experiences of South African foster care adolescents regarding participatory decision-making and the role of indigenous culture and social work practices. The theoretical framework adopted in this article is the developmental social welfare approach augmented by selected elements of the systems theory. A phenomenological study was conducted, and a major finding concluded that the cultural value system of foster adolescents, the institutional social work practices and the developmental approach are in conflict.
Automatic Sensor Placement For Complex Three-dimensional Inspection and Exploration

This paper describes an end-to-end system for positioning sensors to observe desired parts of arbitrary initially unknown three-dimensional environments. The system finds the appropriate number of sensors and their configuration using a derivative-free cooperative optimization algorithm relying on a visibility estimation cost function. The system is tested of scenarios with different types of sensors and observation tasks. The first scenario implies six degrees of freedom floating robots to inspect a broken part of the international space station, while the second scenario involves three degrees of freedom rovers gathering information on a stuck vehicle.