Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Inverse probability weighting to control for censoring in a post hoc analysis of quality-adjusted survival data from a clinical trial of temsirolimus for renal cell carcinoma

Abstract Objective: This post hoc analysis evaluated treatment-associated quality-adjusted survival (QAS) in patients randomly assigned to temsirolimus or interferon alfa (IFN-alfa), corrected for censoring using inverse probability weighting (IPW), in the Advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma (ARCC) trial. Methods: Follow-up was divided into 11 time intervals; Kaplan–Meier estimates for not being censored were estimated for each interval. The QAS for each interval was weighted by the inverse probability of not being censored in that interval. Overall treatment-associated QAS was calculated as the sum of the weighted QAS across all follow-up intervals. Differences in mean QAS between temsirolimus and IFN-alfa were evaluated with t-statistics at a two-sided α = 0.05. Results: In total, 416 patients were randomly assigned to temsirolimus (n = 209) or IFN-alfa (n = 207); 400 patients were included in this analysis. Overall weighted mean (standard deviation) QAS during progression-free survival was 111.9 (5.3) days with temsirolimus (n = 204) and 75.7 (6.3) days with IFN-alfa (n = 196). The mean weighted QAS difference of 36.2 days in favor of temsirolimus was significant (p < 0.05). Limitations: One potential limitation is that the weights developed by the Kaplan–Meier estimates did not allow for covariates to be adjusted among treatment arms. Another possible limitation is that the ARCC trial included patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma, and thus it cannot be conclusively determined how our findings would apply to patients with less advanced disease. Conclusions: Patients with poor-prognosis advanced renal cell carcinoma treated with temsirolimus had an incremental gain of 48% (36.2 days) in QAS compared with patients treated with IFN-alfa.
Interacting with Users in Social Networks: The Follow-back Problem

Imagine in a social network that an agent wants to form a connection with a target user(s) by interacting with the friends of the target(s). Because forming a connection is known as following in social networks such as Twitter, we refer to this as the followback problem. The friends of the target user(s) form a directed graph which we refer to as the “friends graph. ” The agent’s goal is to get the target to follow him, and he is allowed to interact with the target and the target’s friends. To understand what features impact the probability of an interaction resulting in a follow-back, we conduct an empirical analysis of several thousand interactions in Twitter. We build a model of the follow-back probabilities based upon this analysis which incorporates features such as the friend and follower count of the target and the neighborhood overlap of the target with the agent. We then use this model to solve the follow-back problem. We find optimal policies for simple network topologies such as directed acyclic graphs and single cycle graphs. For arbitrary directed graphs we develop heuristics based upon a graph score measure we define as the followback score. We show through simulation that these heuristic policies perform well on real Twitter graphs. Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Danelle Shah Title: Technical Staff MIT Lincoln Laboratory Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Tauhid R. Zaman Title: KDD Career Development Professor in Communications and Technology Assistant Professor of Operations Management
A basic helix–loop–helix protein with similarity to the fungal morphological regulators, Phd1p, Efg1p and StuA, controls conidiation but not dimorphic growth in Penicillium marneffei

Members of the APSES protein group are basic helix–loop–helix (bHLH) proteins that regulate processes such as mating, asexual sporulation and dimorphic growth in fungi. Penicillium marneffei is a human pathogen and is the only member of its genus to display a dimorphic growth transition. At 25°C, P. marneffei grows with a filamentous morphology and produces asexual spores from multicellular con‐idiophores. At 37°C, the filamentous morphology is replaced by yeast cells that reproduce by fission. We have cloned and characterized an APSES protein‐encoding gene from P. marneffei that has a high degree of similarity to Aspergillus nidulans stuA. Deletion of stuA in P. marneffei showed that it is required for metula and phialide formation during conidiation but is not required for dimorphic growth. This suggests that APSES proteins may control processes that require budding (formation of the metulae and phialides, pseudohyphal growth in Saccharomyces cerevisiae and dimorphic growth in Candida albicans) but not those that require fission (dimorphic growth in P. marneffei). The A. nidulansΔstuA mutant has defects in both conidiation and mating. The P. marneffei stuA gene was capable of complementing the conidiation defect but could only inefficiently complement the sexual defects of the A. nidulans mutant. This suggests that the P. marneffei gene, which comes from an asexual species, has diverged significantly from the A. nidulans gene with respect to sexual but not asexual development.
Population genetics of Manihot esculenta ssp. flabellifolia gives insight into past distribution of xeric vegetation in a postulated forest refugium area in northern Amazonia

The Guianas have often been proposed as a forest refugium; however, this view has received little testing. Studies of population genetics of forest taxa suggest that the central part of French Guiana remained forested, while the southern part (currently forested) may have harboured more open vegetation. Insights into the population structure of species restricted to non‐forested habitats can help test this hypothesis. Using six microsatellite loci, we investigated the population genetics of French Guianan accessions of Manihot esculenta ssp. flabellifolia, a taxon restricted to coastal savannas and to rocky outcrops in the densely forested inland. Coastal populations were highly differentiated from one another, and our data suggest a recent colonization of these savannas by M. esculenta ssp. flabellifolia in a west‐to‐east process. Coastal populations were strongly differentiated from inselberg populations, consistent with an ancient separation of these two groups, with no or low subsequent gene flow. This supports the hypothesis that the central part of the region may have remained forested since the Last Glacial Maximum, impeding the establishment of Manihot. Contrary to coastal populations, inselberg Manihot populations were strikingly homogeneous at a broad spatial scale. This suggests they were connected until recently, either by a large continuous savanna area or by smaller, temporary disturbed areas shifting in space.
Exploiting syntactic and semantic relationships between terms for opinion retrieval

Opinion retrieval is the task of finding documents that express an opinion about a given query. A key challenge in opinion retrieval is to capture the query-related opinion score of a document. Existing methods rely mainly on the proximity information between the opinion terms and the query terms to address the key challenge. In this study, we propose to incorporate the syntactic and semantic information of terms into a probabilistic model to capture the query-related opinion score more accurately. The syntactic tree structure of a sentence is used to evaluate the modifying probability between an opinion term and a noun within the sentence with a tree kernel method. Moreover, WordNet and the probabilistic topic model are used to evaluate the semantic relatedness between any noun and the given query. The experimental results over standard TREC baselines on the benchmark BLOG06 collection demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, in comparison with the proximity-based method and other baselines. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Renaissance of 224Ra for the treatment of ankylosing spondylitis: clinical experiences

Radium (224Ra) is commercially available again for the treatment of ankylosing spondylitis. Twenty patients suffering from ankylosing spondylitis were treated with weekly intravenous (i.v.) injections of 1 MBq 224Ra for 10 weeks. Therapeutic effect was measured by C-reactive protein (CRP), erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) and full blood count, as well as a completion of the Bath ankylosing spondylitis functional index (BASFI) questionnaire. Follow-up was done after three and six months. At the end of the treatment course pain and movement restrictions had improved subjectively in 12 out of 20 patients. These patients were also able to discontinue or reduce their analgesic or anti-inflammatory medications. Subjective improvement was well correlated with a reduction of CRP by 45% and BASFI by 73%. At the six-month follow-up, ten patients reported a lasting improvement, whereas two had suffered a relapse. A late therapeutic response after three months was seen in a single patient only. Patients who did not respond to radium had lower initial levels of acute-phase reactants and peripheral joint involvement. Only mild side-effects, e.g. temporary worsening of pain, were observed. Leukocytes and platelets reversibly decreased by 25%, respectively. It is concluded that 224Ra is an effective and safe treatment for ankylosing spondylitis.
A universal optimization strategy for ant colony optimization algorithms based on the Physarum-inspired mathematical model

Ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithms often fall into the local optimal solution and have lower search efficiency for solving the travelling salesman problem (TSP). According to these shortcomings, this paper proposes a universal optimization strategy for updating the pheromone matrix in the ACO algorithms. The new optimization strategy takes advantages of the unique feature of critical paths reserved in the process of evolving adaptive networks of the Physarum-inspired mathematical model (PMM). The optimized algorithms, denoted as PMACO algorithms, can enhance the amount of pheromone in the critical paths and promote the exploitation of the optimal solution. Experimental results in synthetic and real networks show that the PMACO algorithms are more efficient and robust than the traditional ACO algorithms, which are adaptable to solve the TSP with single or multiple objectives. Meanwhile, we further analyse the influence of parameters on the performance of the PMACO algorithms. Based on these analyses, the best values of these parameters are worked out for the TSP.
l-Asparagine–l-tartaric acid (1/1)

In the title compound, C4H8N2O3·C4H6O6, the amino acid molecule exists as a zwitterion and the carboxylic acid in an un-ionized state. The tartaric acid molecules are linked into layers parallel to the ab plane by O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds. The amino acid molecules are also linked into layers parallel to the ab plane by N—H⋯O and C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds. The alternating tartaric acid and amino acid layers are linked into a three-dimensional framework by N—H⋯O and O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds.
A wavelet-based panel unit-root test in the presence of an unknown structural break and cross-sectional dependency, with an application of purchasing power parity theory in developing countries

ABSTRACT This article introduces two different non-parametric wavelet-based panel unit-root tests in the presence of unknown structural breaks and cross-sectional dependencies in the data. These tests are compared with a previously suggested non-parametric wavelet test, the parameteric Im-Pesaran and Shin (IPS) test and a Wald type of test. The results from the Monte Carlo simulations clearly show that the new wavelet-ratio tests are superior to the traditional tests both in terms of size and power in panel unit-root tests because of its robustness to cross-section dependency and structural breaks. Based on an empirical Central American panel application, we can, in contrast to previous research (where bias due to structural breaks is simply disregarded), find strong, clear-cut support for purchasing power parity (PPP) in this developing region.
A New Control Approach for Shunt Hybrid Active Power Filter to Compensate Harmonics and Dynamic Reactive Power with Grid Interconnection

The grid interconnection of renewable energy source is a popular issue in the electric utilities. Different types of converter topology in grid interconnection have been improved by researchers to improve power quality and efficiency of the electrical system. The main contribution of this paper is that shunt hybrid active power filter (SHAPF) with a DC-DC converter at dc link is to provide interconnection between renewable source and grid with linear dynamic loads. The other contribution of this paper is to present a novel control strategy for reactive power compensation and harmonics elimination in industrial networks using a hybrid active power filter as a combination of a three phase, two level voltage source converter connected in parallel with single tuned LC passive filter. In proposed control method, reactive power compensation is achieved successfully with perceptible amount. Besides, the performance results of harmonic compensation are satisfactory. Theoretical analyses and simulation results are obtained from an actual industrial network model in PSCAD. The simulation results are presented for proposed system in order to demonstrate that the harmonic compensation performance meets the IEEE-519 standard.
An additional patient with mycophenolate mofetil embryopathy: Cardiac and facial analyses

We describe an infant male of Cambodian background who has typical craniofacial features of mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) embryopathy and a complex congenital heart defect (CHD) (double outlet right ventricle, mitral atresia, pulmonic stenosis, and total anomalous pulmonary venous return). Together with four case reports and the 20 patients included in two recent reviews, we report 24 (19 affected, five normal) patients with this pattern of anomalies. Eight (33%) have a CHD, most commonly, conotruncal or aortic arch defects (6/8, 75%). This would support the hypothesis that disturbance of cranial neural crest migration occurs in exposed infants, and may predict which additional anomalies will be observed in the future. We also attempted to score the severity of the facial anomalies in each MMF patient using a system created by plastic surgeons for patients with hemifacial microsomia. This classification had modest utility in comparing severity and correlating facial to extracranial defects. The findings are viewed with caution because of the preliminary methodology. Finally, since several exposed infants have been reported to be minimally affected, we remind clinicians to be sensitive to the potential mild expression of the effects of this teratogen. This awareness may influence clinical management of apparently normal MMF‐exposed individuals. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Child labour in China

We present the first systematic study on child labour in China. Child labour is not a negligible social phenomenon in China; about 7.74% of children aged from 10 to 15 were working in 2010, and they worked for 6.75 hours per day on average, and spent 6.42 hours less per day on study than other children. About 90% of child labourers were still in school and combined economic activity with schooling. Our results show that child labour participation is positively associated with school dropout rate. A child living in a rural area is more likely to work. Compared with place of residence, the gender of a child is less important. The educational level of the household head and its interaction with the gender of the household head seem to be unimportant. However, household assets per capita and household involvement in non-agricultural activities are negatively related to the incidence of child labour. A child from a household with more adults is less likely to work. The prevalence of child labour in China exhibits significant regional variations. The child labour incidence is correlated with the development level of each region: the Western region has the highest percentage of child labour, followed by the Eastern and Central region.
Clasper gland morphology and development in Potamotrygon magdalenae (Elasmobranchii: Potamotrygonidae)

Clasper gland morphology and development in Potamotrygon magdalenae and its relation with the acquisition of reproductive maturity is described in males of different developmental stages (embryos, neonates, juveniles, and reproductively active and resting adults). The glands are subcutaneous masses in the proximal base of each clasper. They are partially bilobate organs with a ventral groove that bears a row of papillae. Glands tend to be asymmetric, the left gland has a larger size, a trend that has been observed in other organs of elasmobranchs. Glands are formed by radially organized tubular secretory units lined with a simple columnar epithelium with basal nuclei and granular eosinophilic cytoplasm; vascularized loose connective tissue surrounds the gland units. The gland is covered by two layers of striated muscle tissue in circular and longitudinal arrangement. The clasper glands begin to develop in neonates and their secretory activity begins in juveniles. The active secretion of the clasper gland is observed in mature males, it includes glycoproteins and sulfated mucopolysaccharides. The size of the glands has a positive and direct relationship with body size, measured as disc width. Significant differences in clasper gland size were found between mature (active and resting) and immature (neonates and juveniles) males, suggesting that the acquisition of the sexual maturity involves the increase in the size of the gland due to a highly augmented secretory activity. Therefore, clasper glands are clearly associated with the reproductive activity of males and their secretion should have an endocrine control as other sexual secondary organs. J. Morphol. 278:369–379, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Inactivation of kupffer cells after prolonged donor fasting improves viability of transplanted hepatic allografts

Data from recent studies suggest that donor fasting imparts a beneficial effect on the viability of transplanted hepatic allografts. Because starvation may temporarily inactivate Kupffer cells, and because these cells are the likely mediators of liver injury after prolonged preservation‐reperfusion, the purpose of this study is to establish a link between improved organ viability and Kupffer cell inactivation caused by donor allograft fasting. In an in vivo rat liver transplant model, 48 hours of donor fasting (1) improved allograft viability, (2) significantly decreased Kupffer cell phagocytosis, and (3) significantly decreased cytokine (tumor necrosis factor [TNF]) production postrevascularization. These data validate work from previous studies demonstrating that donor fasting improves allograft viability and furthermore support our previous research implicating activation of Kupffer cells as a causative agent of cold ischemia‐preservation injury. (HEPATOLOGY 1995; 22:1236–1242.).
Sisters in Social Justice: Do Counselors and Social Workers Advocate Differently?

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to explore a panel of experts’ opinions concerning potential features distinguishing social justice advocacy in counseling from social work. The experts in the area of social justice counseling came to consensus on issues concerning social justice and professional identity. The panelists concluded that distinguishing the two professions is counterproductive to the mission of helping professions. Several expert responses addressed the integration of social justice advocacy into the professional identity of counseling, including use of professional guidelines and education strategies.
Resistance to TNF-Induced Cytotoxicity Correlates with an Abnormal Cleavage of Cytosolic Phospholipase A21

To investigate the mechanism underlying the absence of arachidonic acid (AA) release by TNF in TNF-resistant cells, we first performed comparative analysis of phospholipid pools in both TNF-sensitive (MCF7) and their equivalent resistant cells (C1001). Quantification and incorporation studies of [3H]AA indicated that TNF-resistant cells were not depleted in AA. Furthermore, distribution of this fatty acid in different phospholipid pools was similar in both sensitive cells and their resistant counterparts, ruling out a defect in phospholipid pools. Since phospholipase A2 (PLA2) are the main enzymes releasing free AA, we investigated their relative contribution in the acquisition of cell resistance to TNF-induced cell death and AA release. For this purpose, we used two PLA2 inhibitors, methylarachidonyl fluorophosphate (MAFP) and bromoenol lactone (BEL), which selectively and irreversibly inhibit the cytosolic PLA2 (cPLA2) and the Ca2+-independent PLA2, respectively. Although a significant inhibitory effect of MAFP on both TNF-induced AA release and PLA2 activity in MCF7 was observed, BEL had no effect. The inhibitory effect of MAFP on cPLA2 activity correlated with an inhibition of TNF-induced cell death. Western blot analysis revealed that TNF induced a differential cleavage of cPLA2 in TNF-sensitive vs TNF-resistant cells. Although the p70 (70-kDa) form of cPLA2 was specifically increased in TNF-sensitive cells, a cleaved form, p50 (50 kDa), was selectively observed in TNF-resistant C1001 cells in the presence or absence of TNF. These findings suggest that the acquisition of cell resistance to this cytokine may involve an abnormal cPLA2 cleavage.
Divergent Roles of CAAX Motif-signaled Posttranslational Modifications in the Regulation and Subcellular Localization of Ral GTPases*

Background: The highly related small GTPases RalA and RalB exhibit distinct functions in cancer cell processes. Results: Posttranslational modifications signaled by the C-terminal CAAX motif contribute to Ral isoform differences in subcellular localization, activation, and protein stability. Conclusion: Modifications catalyzed by RCE1, ICMT, and protein palmitoyl acyltransferase cause Ral isoform-specific functional consequences. Significance: Inhibitors of CAAX motif modifications will have complex consequences on Ral GTPase regulation. The Ras-like small GTPases RalA and RalB are well validated effectors of RAS oncogene-driven human cancer growth, and pharmacologic inhibitors of Ral function may provide an effective anti-Ras therapeutic strategy. Intriguingly, although RalA and RalB share strong overall amino acid sequence identity, exhibit essentially identical structural and biochemical properties, and can utilize the same downstream effectors, they also exhibit divergent and sometimes opposing roles in the tumorigenic and metastatic growth of different cancer types. These distinct biological functions have been attributed largely to sequence divergence in their carboxyl-terminal hypervariable regions. However, the role of posttranslational modifications signaled by the hypervariable region carboxyl-terminal tetrapeptide CAAX motif (C = cysteine, A = aliphatic amino acid, X = terminal residue) in Ral isoform-selective functions has not been addressed. We determined that these modifications have distinct roles and consequences. Both RalA and RalB require Ras converting CAAX endopeptidase 1 (RCE1) for association with the plasma membrane, albeit not with endomembranes, and loss of RCE1 caused mislocalization as well as sustained activation of both RalA and RalB. In contrast, isoprenylcysteine carboxylmethyltransferase (ICMT) deficiency disrupted plasma membrane localization only of RalB, whereas RalA depended on ICMT for efficient endosomal localization. Furthermore, the absence of ICMT increased stability of RalB but not RalA protein. Finally, palmitoylation was critical for subcellular localization of RalB but not RalA. In summary, we have identified striking isoform-specific consequences of distinct CAAX-signaled posttranslational modifications that contribute to the divergent subcellular localization and activity of RalA and RalB.