Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Breast self-examination and medical examination related to breast cancer stage.

The frequency and type of breast examinations reported by 1,216 primary breast cancer patients was studied in relation to local stage of disease. No significant relationship was found between the reported frequency of breast self-examination (BSE) and stage of disease; however, annual medical examination was significantly associated with small tumor size (P less than .04) and absence of axillary lymph node metastases (P less than .001). Regardless of the frequency of any method of examination, the majority (80 per cent) of tumors were first detected by the patients. Among those who detected their lesion, a greater frequency of medical examination was associated with an earlier pathological stage of disease (P less than .001). Patients who were examined more frequently by a physician appeared to be more sensitive to clinically significant breast abnormalities. These findings underscore the importance of examiner skill in the successful use of palpation to detect breast cancer. Instruction in BSE by a health professional during periodic examinations may provide the optimal opportunity for improved proficiency in self-examination.
Death is the major fate of medial edge epithelial cells and the cause of basal lamina degradation during palatogenesis

During mammalian development, a pair of shelves fuses to form the secondary palate, a process that requires the adhesion of the medial edge epithelial tissue (MEE) of each shelf and the degeneration of the resulting medial epithelial seam (MES). It has been reported that epithelialmesenchymal transformation (EMT) occurs during shelf fusion and is considered a fundamental process for MES degeneration. We recently found that cell death is a necessary process for shelf fusion. These findings uncovered the relevance of cell death in MES degeneration; however, they do not discard the participation of other processes. In the present work, we focus on the evaluation of the processes that could contribute to palate shelf fusion. We tested EMT by traditional labeling of MEE cells with a dye, by infection of MEE with an adenovirus carrying the lacZ gene, and by fusing wild-type shelves with the ones from EGFP-expressing mouse embryos. Fate of MEE labeled cells was followed by culturing whole palates, or by a novel slice culture system that allows individual cells to be followed during the fusion process. Very few labeled cells were found in the mesenchyme compartment, and almost all were undergoing cell death. Inhibition of metalloproteinases prevented basal lamina degradation without affecting MES degeneration and MEE cell death. Remarkably, independently of shelf fusion, activation of cell death promoted the degradation of the basal lamina underlying the MEE (`cataptosis'). Finally, by specific labeling of periderm cells (i.e. the superficial cells that cover the basal epithelium), we observed that epithelial triangles at oral and nasal ends of the epithelial seam do not appear to result from MEE cell migration but rather from periderm cell migration. Inhibition of migration or removal of these periderm cells suggests that they have a transient function controlling MEE cell adhesion and survival, and ultimately die within the epithelial triangles. We conclude that MES degeneration occurs almost uniquely by cell death, and for the first time we show that this process can activate basal lamina degradation during a developmental process.
IMPACT OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT ON THE PERFORMANCE OF SMALL AND MEDIUM SCALE ENTERPRISES (SMEs) IN NIGERIA: A STUDY OF SELECTED SMEs IN DELTA STATE

The study seeks to assess the impact of Strategic Management variables on the performance of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) in order to enhance their sustainability in Nigeria. A total of 200 copies of the questionnaire were distributed to respondents and a total of 167 owners/managers completed the questionnaire. The survey method was used for the study and questionnaire was used as the measuring instrument. The Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation was used for data analysis. The results showed that among the four independent variables, external environment was most important and influential variable. The present study revealed that management can make use of different strategies and policies to improve SMEs work settings and performance, but different strategies and policies would have different performance impact on diverse SMES. It was recommended among others that entrepreneurs/managers of SMEs must adapt their structures rapidly to evolving strategies and changing environments for better SMEs performance.
An Integrated Aggregate Production Planning Model with Two-Phase Production System and Maintenance Costs

Aggregate production planning (APP) is one of the most important issues carried out in manufacturing environments which seeks efficient planning, scheduling and coordination of all production activities that optimizes the company's objectives. In this paper, we develop a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model for an integrated aggregate production planning system with closed loop supply chain and preventive maintenance. The goal is to minimize setup costs, production costs, labor costs and preventive maintenance (PM) costs and instabilities in the work force and inventory levels. Due to NP-hard class of APP, we implement genetic algorithm (GA), harmony search (HS) and vibration damping optimization (VDO) for solving this model. Additionally, the Taguchi method is conducted to calibrate the parameter of the meta-heuristics and select the optimal levels of the algorithm’s performance influential factors. Finally, computational results on a set of randomly generated instances show the efficiency of the VDO algorithm against the other metaheuristics, and this algorithm obtain good quality solutions for aggregate production planning with preventive maintenance and could be efficient for large scale problems.
An Empirical Algorithm for Estimating Agricultural and Riparian Evapotranspiration Using MODIS Enhanced Vegetation Index and Ground Measurements of ET. II. Application to the Lower Colorado River, U.S

Abstract: Large quantities of water are consumed by irrigated crops and riparian vegetation in western U.S. irrigation districts. Remote sensing methods for estimating evaporative water losses by soil and vegetation (evapotranspiration, ET) over wide river stretches are needed to allocate water for agricultural and environmental needs. We used the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) from MODIS sensors on the Terra satellite to scale ET over agricultural and riparian areas along the Lower Colorado River in the southwestern U.S., using a linear regression equation between ET of riparian plants and alfalfa measured on the ground, and meteorological and remote sensing data, with an error or uncertainty of about 20%. The algorithm was applied to irrigation districts and riparian areas from Lake Mead to the U.S./Mexico border. The results for agricultural crops were similar to results produced by crop coefficients developed for the irrigation districts along the river. However, riparian ET was only half as great as crop coefficient estimates set by expert opinion, equal to about 40% of reference crop evapotranspiration. Based on reported acreages in 2007, agricultural crops (146,473 ha) consumed 2.2 × 10
Mining and mapping halal food consumers: A geo-located Twitter opinion polarity analysis

ABSTRACT Similar to other religious behaviors, food consumption represents a hard-to-fake symbol of spirituality. The halal food market has recently witnessed a significant growth, especially in Asia-Pacific, Europe, and South America. Although social media has become a valuable source for studying the dynamics of consumer opinion, no previous studies have attempted to investigate sentiments toward halal food expressed on social media. This study fills this gap through the analysis of a random sample of 100,000 tweets dealing with halal food. To conduct the analysis, an expert-predefined lexicon of seed adjectives was used. Descriptive analysis detected a generally positive sentiment toward halal food, whereas geo-located Twitter maps showed that “religious diaspora” extensively uses digital posts to communicate about halal food. By analyzing halal food opinions expressed on social media, this research adds breadth and depth to the debate over such an underrepresented area.
Trust and Distrust Determinants of Mobile Banking Adoption in the Nigerian Banking Industry: A Study of First Bank Nigeria Limited

This study ascertains the trust and distrust determinants of mobile banking adoption in the Nigeria banking industry by specifically assessing the effect of perceived benefit, ease of usage, risk and monetary cost on customers’ intention to adopt mobile banking. To achieve these objectives, Technology Acceptance Theory was employed using a descriptive survey research design. Using a purposive sampling technique, three hundred and forty five (345) customers were selected and questionnaires distributed accordingly. Out of 345 questionnaires distributed, 325 were fully completed while 20 questionnaires were not fully completed and as a result were discarded. The reliability of the responses were checked using the Alpha Cronbach’s test. Data were analysed using descriptive statistic, Likert scale, Pearson correlation and probit regression model. The result reveals that perceived benefit and ease of usage significantly influence and determine the behavioural intention of customers to adopt mobile banking. The finding also discloses that perceived risk and monetary cost does not deter customers from adopting mobile banking. In view of the findings, banks should vehemently and continually advance the benefits of mobile banking to customers by providing a user guide which will contain abundant details on the benefits of mobile banking, especially on the logistic/transport fee associated with accessing the banking hall for customers that are far from branch location. Banks should put in more effort to improve the ease of usage by negotiating and dialoguing with software producers to design mobile banking applications that specifically meet the need of customers.
[Landmark-based statistical procrustes analysis in the examination of breast shape and symmetry].

AIM The aim of this presentation is the explanation of a mathematical analysis of a landmark-based procrustes calculation. The various components of breast symmetry and their impact on breast reconstruction have been examined. METHOD In an objective breast shape analysis asymmetries are quantified as a measure of the difference between a 3D landmark configuration of a breast and its mirror image. 10 landmarks, 4 on each side and 2 for a definition of the midline were defined. For each landmark the 3D coordinates were calculated statistically with the help of the software Programme R. Over a midline from the jugulum to the manubrium sterni, a mirror image of the breast was constructed. The data for the breast to be reconstructed and the non-operated breast from 44 patients were investigated. The statistical differences of the Procrustes analysis were used for an asymmetry score and the proportions of the individual components were calculated. These included size, location and orientation of the breast as well as the individual inherent morphological surface form data of the breast. RESULTS All 44 patients exhibited breast asymmetries and the mean asymmetry score amounted to 0.52. A calculation of the proportions of the individual components making up the asymmetry score revealed that morphological surface data made the largest contribution to the asymmetry score, closely followed by location, i. e. , positioning of the breast on the thoracic wall. In contrast, the size of the breast and its orientation were of lesser relevance. CONCLUSION When considering breast symmetry in plastic surgery, the form plays a more important role than the size as objectively calculated by the statistical procrustes analysis. Almost equally important as the form is the positioning of the breast on the thoracic wall which contributes significantly more to total breast symmetry than axial displacements.
Application of Smoothing Methods to Evaluate Treatment-Prognostic Factor Interactions in Breast Cancer Data

In breast cancer research, investigators often are interested in knowing any pattern of change in efficacy of a hormonal or chemo therapy over a continuum of a prognostic factor such as age or hormonal receptor level. Bonetti and Gelber (1) introduced a graphical method to evaluate treatment-covariate interactions by using the Cox model (23). By combining their concepts and the well-known locally weighted regression smoothing procedure, Fisher, Jeong, Bryant et al. (4) evaluated pattern of average annual recurrence rates as a continuous function of age among breast cancer patients with histologically negative lymph nodes and positive estrogen receptors. In this article, we elaborate on the combined exploratory smoothing technique to evaluate an interaction between treatment effect and hormonal receptor level among breast cancer patients with positive estrogen receptors and positive progesterone receptors. The results reveal that the patients with higher estrogen receptor level tend to benefit more from tamoxifen and the incremental benefit from adding a chemotherapy to tamoxifen tend to be greater for the patients with lower estrogen receptor level. The progesterone level does not affect the size of benefit from tamoxifen, but the benefit from the addition of the chemotherapy is greater for patients with higher progesterone level.
Nano-Scale Squids Application for Single Particle Detection and Spectroscopy

The advantages gained by a reduction in feature size towards the sub-micrometre or nanometre scale have opened the way to new applications for SQUlDs. We describe our work to employ sub-micron or nanoscale SQUIDs for single particle detection and spectroscopy using a novel inductive superconducting transition edge technique
Mitigating the risk of insider threats when sharing credentials

This thesis extends DRM schemes which address the problem of unauthorized proprietary content sharing in home networks to address the problem of unauthorized confidential content sharing in organizations. In particular it focuses on how to achieve secure content sharing between employees in a group while limiting content leakage to unauthorized individuals outside the group. The thesis discusses the main organization types, process workflow and requirements. Our main interest is in organizations which consider content sharing between groups of employees as a fundamental requirement. Achieving secure content sharing requires a deep analysis and understanding of security threats affecting such a fundamental requirement. We study and analyze one of the major threats which affect secure content sharing, which is the threat of content leakage. In this thesis we focus on content leakage which happens when authorized employees share their credentials with others not authorized to access content, thus enabling unauthorized users to access confidential content. Leaking content in this way is what we refer to as content leakage throughout this thesis. We found that to limit the content leakage threat effectively we have to split it into two main categories: internal leakage and external leakage. In the thesis we define each category, discuss the intersection between the categories, and consider how they can be realized. Next, we analyze and assess existing content protection schemes, which focus on content sharing and protection from authorized employees misusing their privileges. These mainly include Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) and Digital Rights Management (DRM) schemes. Based on the analysis we identify the weaknesses found in these schemes for mitigating the content leakage threat. Following that we develop a framework, which we use to mitigate the content leakage threat. This framework is based on the authorized domain concept which was first proposed to address DRM threats. We extend the authorized domain concept so that it consists of a group of devices owned by an organization, whose employees need to share a pool of content amongst each other, e.g. a group of individuals working on a project. In other words, we group devices and content together in a
Distortion metric for robust 3D point cloud transmission

This paper discusses using a forward error correction (FEC) algorithm to protect the transmission of progressively compressed 3D point clouds against packets loss. We design a metric to evaluate each layer's quality contribution to the decoding result of the progressively compressed model. With this metric, we minimize the expected distortion when applying an Unequal Error Protection (UEP) strategy to allocate channel bits to different layers of the model. The performance of employing UEP and Equal Error Protection (EEP) are compared with respect to the expected distortion. Experimental results show that by incorporating our distortion estimation metric with UEP, the rendering quality of a reconstructed 3D model degrades more gracefully as the packet-loss rate increases.
Strategic Challenges Confronting Leaders of a Cross-Sector Collaboration Organization Created to Improve Community Health

This article explores the strategic challenges associated with launching and managing a cross-sector collaboration that confronted Aligning Forces for Quality of South Central Pennsylvania (AF4Q-SCPA), which was established to improve health care quality in partnerships with patients, providers, employers, and community organizations. It draws upon the work of scholars from the fields of public administration, public health, organizational theory, and business strategy. It synthesizes previous contributions to create a new model called the Collaboration Cube, which links the likelihood of success of initiatives to intended outcomes and collaborative structures. With respect to methodology, it takes an inductive approach and uses the insights from the case study to offer nine generalizable propositions that readers may find relevant to collaborative organizations operating in any field. Finally, the article offers thoughts about possible lines of future research.
4-Formyl-2-nitrophenyl 4-bromobenzoate

In the title compound, C14H8BrNO5, the benzene rings form a dihedral angle of 62.90 (7)°. The central ester group is twisted away from the nitro-substituted and bromo-substituted rings by 71.67 (7) and 8.78 (15)°, respectively. The nitro group forms a dihedral angle of 7.77 (16)° with the benzene ring to which it is attached. In the crystal, molecules are linked by weak C—H⋯O interactions, forming C(12) chains which run along [001]. Halogen–halogen interactions [Br⋯Br = 3.523 (3) Å] within the chains stabilized by C—H⋯O interactions are observed.
Community-Based Priorities for Improving Nutrition and Physical Activity in Childhood

Overweight among America's youth has prompted a large response from foundations, government, and private organizations to support programmatic interventions. The architecture for many of these programs was derived from “experts,” whereas the perspective of families, and communities—those most affected and most instrumental in altering behavior—is rarely the driving force. Shaping America's Youth (SAY) was established to assess programs that target nutrition and physical activity and to promote the necessary family and community input. In a 2004 report, SAY documented how community efforts are motivated, funded, structured, and evaluated. It identified discordance between that effort and the opinions of experts. To ensure that the voices of families and communities are integrated into such local and national policies and programs, SAY initiated a unique series of 5-day-long town meetings, input from which was independently statistically analyzed. Across a range of demographics, the results indicated that participants perceive the barriers and solutions similarly. There was broad agreement that the family has primary responsibility, starting with a need to focus on improved quality and duration of family time directed at nutrition and activity. Concurrently they identified needed actions from external sources, including clear and consistent nutrition information; ready access to healthy foods; and a built environment that promotes physical activity. Rather than one-dimensional or governmental solutions, they expressed a need for community-based partnerships integrating health care, education, environment, government, and business. Although this citizen-engagement process did not identify specific actions, it defined basic steps that communities must integrate into future approaches.
Characterization of Two β-1,3-Glucosyltransferases from Escherichia coli Serotypes O56 and O152

ABSTRACT The O antigens of outer membrane-bound lipopolysaccharides (LPS) in gram-negative bacteria are oligosaccharides consisting of repeating units with various structures and antigenicities. The O56 and O152 antigens of Escherichia coli both contain a Glc-β1-3-GlcNAc linkage within the repeating unit. We have cloned and identified the genes (wfaP in O56 and wfgD in O152) within the two O-antigen gene clusters that encode glucosyltransferases involved in the synthesis of this linkage. A synthetic substrate analog of the natural acceptor substrate undecaprenol-pyrophosphate-lipid [GlcNAc-α-PO3-PO3-(CH2)11-O-phenyl] was used as an acceptor and UDP-Glc as a donor substrate to demonstrate that both wfgD and wfaP encode glucosyltransferases. Enzyme products from both glucosyltransferases were isolated by high-pressure liquid chromatography and analyzed by nuclear magnetic resonance. The spectra showed the expected Glc-β1-3-GlcNAc linkage in the products, confirming that both WfaP and WfgD are forms of UDP-Glc: GlcNAc-pyrophosphate-lipid β-1,3-glucosyltransferases. Both WfaP and WfgD have a DxD sequence, which is proposed to interact with phosphate groups of the nucleotide donor through the coordination of a metal cation, and a short hydrophobic sequence at the C terminus that may help to associate the enzymes with the inner membrane. We showed that the enzymes have similar properties and substrate recognition. They both require a divalent cation (Mn2+ or Mg2+) for activity, are deactivated by detergents, have a broad pH optimum, and require the pyrophosphate-sugar linkage in the acceptor substrate for full activity. Substrates lacking phosphate or pyrophosphate linked to GlcNAc were inactive. The length of the aliphatic chain of acceptor substrates also contributes to the activity.
A Comprehensive System-on-Chip Logic Diagnosis

This paper addresses the problem of logic diagnosis of System-on-Chip (SoC). We propose a diagnosis approach based on a matching algorithm between a set of predicted failures and the set of failures observed during the test phase. The result of the diagnosis is a ranked list of suspected nets able to explain the observed failures. Experimental results show the diagnosis accuracy of the proposed approach in terms of absolute number of suspects. Moreover, a comparison with an industrial reference tool highlights the reliability of our approach.
The relationship between cultural tourist behaviour and destination sustainability

ABSTRACT Tourism based on cultural issues is growing fast in recent years. This type of tourism promotes the diversification of demand and supply at destinations, while keeping and valuing the local culture. Improving our knowledge on cultural tourism could help to foster the sustainability of destinations. Despite efforts devoted to define the “cultural tourist”, still little is known about her/his particular behaviour. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, identifying the profile of cultural tourists versus visitors not pursuing any cultural activity. Second, and building on econometric modelling, comparing the behaviour of these two groups in terms of factors influencing expenditure and trip satisfaction. All these findings are putted in context regarding the literature on tourism sustainability.