Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Angiopoietin-1 is inversely related to thymidine phosphorylase expression in human breast cancer, indicating a role in vascular remodeling.

PURPOSE Angiogenesis is essential for tumor growth and metastasis. It is a complex, dynamic process that is coordinated by several classes of angiogenic factors. One candidate family is the Tie2 tyrosine kinase, whose expression is restricted largely to endothelial cells. Tie2 has three known ligands, angiopoietin (Ang)-1, Ang-2, and Ang-4, that have different functional effects but play a requisite role in embryonic vessel remodeling. Because there are only limited data on the Tie2 pathway in human breast cancer, and our previous data have suggested that breast tumors establish a blood supply by vascular remodeling, we have investigated the expression of Ang-1, Ang-2, Ang-4, and Tie2 in a series of normal and neoplastic human breast tissues. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN We examined mRNA expression by reverse transcription-PCR in 6 normal and 52 malignant breast tissues and correlated expression with clinicopathological and angiogenic variables. We also examined the effect of physiological levels of estrogen on Ang expression. RESULTS Ang-1, Ang-2, Ang-4, and Tie2 were detected in 19%, 52%, 35%, and 65%, respectively, of tumor samples. There was a significant reduction in expression of tumor Ang-1 (P = 0.04), Ang-2 (P = 0.01), Ang-4 (P = 0.004), and Tie2 (P = 0.02) compared with that in normal breast tissues. There was a significant relationship in tumors between all Angs and between each ligand and Tie2. In a multivariate analysis, there were significant positive correlations between Ang-4 and estrogen receptor (P = 0.016) and a significant inverse correlation between Ang-1 and thymidine phosphorylase expression (P = 0.01). No significant associations were observed between the other members of the Ang/Tie2 gene family and patient age, tumor size, lymph node status, tumor grade, vascular invasion, tumor vascularity, vascular maturation, thymidine phosphorylase, or vascular endothelial growth factor A expression (P > 0.05 for all). The potential regulation of Ang-4 by estrogen was further investigated in vitro. Addition of physiological concentrations of 17beta-estradiol (1 nM) to hormone-free media caused no significant change in Ang-4 mRNA abundance (P = 0.75) in the estrogen receptor-positive cell line MCF-7 after either 2 or 18 h, despite demonstrating induction for the estrogen response gene pS2. CONCLUSIONS These findings suggest that the Ang/Tie2 pathway plays a significant role in human breast tumor angiogenesis but provide no initial evidence for direct regulation of the pathway by estrogen.
Support vector clustering through proximity graph modelling

Support vector machines (SVMs) have been widely adopted for classification, regression and novelty detection. Recent studies (A. Ben-Hur et al., 2001) proposed to employ them for cluster analysis too. The basis of this support vector clustering (SVC) is density estimation through SVM training. SVC is a boundary-based clustering method, where the support information is used to construct cluster boundaries. Despite its ability to deal with outliers, to handle high dimensional data and arbitrary boundaries in data space, there are two problems in the process of cluster labelling. The first problem is its low efficiency when the number of free support vectors increases. The other problem is that it sometimes produces false negatives. We propose a robust cluster assignment method that harvests clustering results efficiently. Our method uses proximity graphs to model the proximity structure of the data. We experimentally analyze and illustrate the performance of this new approach.
A Comparison of Transaction Cost, Agency, and Knowledge-Based Predictors of IT Outsourcing Decisions: A U.S.-Japan Cross-Cultural Field Study

As outsourcing evolves into a competitive necessity, managers must increasingly contend with the decision about which software development projects to outsource. Although a variety of theories have been invoked to study the initial outsourcing decision, much of this work has relied in isolation on one theoretical perspective. Therefore, the relative importance ascribed by managers to the factors from these theories is poorly understood. The majority of this work also masks interesting insights into outsourcing decisions by focusing on the information technology (IT) function rather than individual projects as the unit of analysis, where many of these decisions occur. In contrast, prior research at the project level has focused on predicting development performance in the postoutsourcing-decision phases of projects. The objective of this study is to examine the relative importance that IT managers ascribe to various factors from three complementary theories—transaction cost economics, agency theory, and knowledge-based theory—as they simultaneously consider them in their project outsourcing decisions. A secondary objective is to assess the cross-cultural robustness (United States versus Japan in this study) of such models in predicting project-level IT outsourcing decisions. We develop and test a multitheoretic model using data on 1,008 project-level decisions collected from 33 Japanese and 55 U.S. managers. Overall, our results provide novel insights into the relative importance that managers ascribe to the factors from these three theories, their complementarities and occasional contradictions, and offer new insights into the differences among U.S. and Japanese IT managers. Implications for theory and practice are also discussed.
Analysis of lightweight stream ciphers

Stream ciphers are fast cryptographic primitives to provide confidentiality of electronically transmitted data. They can be very suitable in environments with restricted resources, such as mobile devices or embedded systems. Practical examples are cell phones, RFID transponders, smart cards or devices in sensor networks. Besides efficiency, security is the most important property of a stream cipher. In this thesis, we address cryptanalysis of modern lightweight stream ciphers. We derive and improve cryptanalytic methods for different building blocks and present dedicated attacks on specific proposals, including some eSTREAM candidates. As a result, we elaborate on the design criteria for the development of secure and efficient stream ciphers. The best-known building block is the linear feedback shift register (LFSR), which can be combined with a nonlinear Boolean output function. A powerful type of attacks against LFSR-based stream ciphers are the recent algebraic attacks, these exploit the specific structure by deriving low degree equations for recovering the secret key. We efficiently determine the immunity of existing and newly constructed Boolean functions against fast algebraic attacks. The concept of algebraic immunity is then generalized by investigating the augmented function of the stream cipher. As an application of this framework, we improve the cryptanalysis of a well-known stream cipher with irregularly clocked LFSR's. Algebraic attacks can be avoided by substituting the LFSR with a suitable nonlinear driving device, such as a feedback shift register with carry (FCSR) or the recently proposed class of T-functions. We investigate both replacement schemes in view of their security, and devise different practical attacks (including linear attacks) on a number of specific proposals based on T-functions. Another efficient method to amplify the nonlinear behavior is to use a round-based filter function, where each round consists of simple nonlinear operations. We use differential methods to break a reduced-round version of eSTREAM candidate Salsa20. Similar methods can be used to break a related compression function with a reduced number of rounds. Finally, we investigate the algebraic structure of the initialization function of stream ciphers and provide a framework for key recovery attacks. As an application, a key recovery attack on simplified versions of eSTREAM candidates Trivium and Grain-128 is given.
Dynamic allocation of resources to virtual path agents

One of the major problems faced in operating large networks is the enormous amount of processing and communications overhead required for setting up and tearing down the large number of connections maintained by the network. ATM and MPLS aim at solving these problems via the Virtual Path (VP) mechanism which is used to group together the connections. When a need for setting up a connection rises, the request and its resource allocation are processed by the VP agent and not by the network, thus reducing the processing cost significantly. An important question in the design of these networks is the amount of network resources to be dynamically allocated to and held by the VP agents; too high allocation will result with bandwidth resource waste, while too low allocation will result with heavy connection set-up and tear-down processing load. In this paper we deal with this problem, and at deriving simple operational rules to determine the amount of bandwidth resources to be held by the various VP agents, while balancing between bandwidth waste and connection processing overhead. We formulate the resource allocation problem by accounting both for bandwidth utilization and for connection processing constraints. Recognizing the complexity of the problem, we use a decomposition approach in which we first analyze the single link problem and then propose to use this solution as a building block in constructing algorithms for the whole network. For the single link problem we realize that the pure problem is too complex and thus formulate an approximate model and derive the optimal allocation for it. The optimal rule is expressed as a closed-form square-root allocation. Extensive numerical examination shows that the rule proposed yields very efficient allocations. For the full network problem, we propose to capitalize on the closed form structure of the single link problem solution and use it in devising algorithms for the whole network.
Neoadjuvant sequential chemoradiotherapy versus radiotherapy alone for treatment of high-risk extremity soft tissue sarcoma: a single-institution experience

Aim of the study Patients with large and high-grade extremity soft-tissue sarcoma are at significant risk for distant metastasis and sarcoma-related death. There is no randomized trial comparing chemoradiotherapy to radiotherapy in the neoadjuvant setting for high risk extremity soft-tissue sarcoma. The aim of this study is to evaluate the outcomes of patients treated with two different modalities (neoadjuvant sequential chemoradiotherapy vs. radiotherapy alone) in a single center. Material and methods Data of 67 patients were analyzed retrospectively. Thirty-four patients received neoadjuvant sequential chemoradiotherapy (2–3 cycles of doxorubicin (75 mg/m2) and ifosfamide (6 g/m2) followed by radiotherapy of 28 Grays (Gy) administered as 8 fractions of 35 Gy) and 33 patients received radiotherapy alone. R0 resection rates and 3-year survival estimates were evaluated. Results Median follow-up time was 37 months. The estimated 3-year overall and disease-free survival rates for the whole patient group were 79% (95% CI: 67.0–86.4) and 57.9% (95% CI: 46.3–69.0), respectively. The most common side effects were nausea and leucopenia. Three-year overall, disease-free, local recurrence-free and distant recurrence-free survival rates did not differ significantly. All patients except one underwent wide excision or compartmental resection. R0 resection rate for the whole patient group was 92.5% (n = 62). Sites of progression were similar across both treatment arms. Conclusions Preoperative hypofractionated radiotherapy alone or sequentially with chemotherapy result in high rates of limb salvage and acceptable toxicity. Our study results did not show a statistically significant treatment effect regarding survival and patterns of failure.
Naïve Bayes and unsupervised artificial neural nets for Cancun tourism social media data analysis

Sentiment mining aims at extracting features on which users express their opinions in order to determine the user's sentiment towards the query object. We mine over 70 million Twitter microblogs to gain knowledge regarding tourist sentiment on the travel resort destination Cancun in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. We measure sentiment using a binary choice keyword algorithm and a multi-knowledge based approach is proposed using, Self-Organizing Maps and tourism domain knowledge in order to model sentiment. We develop a visual model to express this taxonomy of sentiment vocabulary and then apply this model to maximums and minimums in the time sentiment data. The results show practical knowledge can be extracted.
Sample Processing Impacts the Viability and Cultivability of the Sponge Microbiome

Sponges host complex microbial communities of recognized ecological and biotechnological importance. Extensive cultivation efforts have been made to isolate sponge bacteria, but most still elude cultivation. To identify the bottlenecks of sponge bacterial cultivation, we combined high-throughput 16S rRNA gene sequencing with a variety of cultivation media and incubation conditions. We aimed to determine the extent to which sample processing and cultivation conditions can impact bacterial viability and recovery in culture. We isolated 325 sponge bacteria from six specimens of Cymbastela concentrica and three specimens of Scopalina sp. These isolates were distributed over 37 different genera and 47 operational taxonomic units (defined at 97% 16S rRNA gene sequence identity). The cultivable bacterial community was highly specific to its sponge host and different media compositions yielded distinct microbial isolates. Around 97% of the isolates could be detected in the original sponge and represented a large but highly variable proportion (0.5–92% total abundance, depending on sponge species) of viable bacteria obtained after sample processing, as determined by propidium monoazide selective DNA modification of compromised cells. Our results show that the most abundant viable bacteria are also the most predominant groups found in cultivation, reflecting, to some extent, the relative abundances of the viable bacterial community, rather than the overall community estimated by direct molecular approaches. Cultivation is therefore shaped not only by the growth conditions provided, but also by the different cell viabilities of the bacteria that constitute the cultivation inoculum. These observations highlight the need to perform experiments to assess each method of sample processing for its accurate representation of the actual in situ bacterial community and its yield of viable cells.
Bethe eigenvectors of higher transfer matrices

We consider the XXX-type and Gaudin quantum integrable models associated with the Lie algebra . The models are defined on a tensor product of irreducible -modules. For each model, there exist N one-parameter families of commuting operators on , called the transfer matrices. We show that the Bethe vectors for these models, given by the algebraic nested Bethe ansatz, are eigenvectors of higher transfer matrices and compute the corresponding eigenvalues.
A survey of OH masers towards high mass protostellar objects

Context. Masers are important tracers of the early evolution of young high mass stars, but the relationship between different types of maser and the evolutionary state of the exciting source remains unclear. Aims. To determine whether OH masers are common towards candidate high mass protostellar objects. Methods. We present a survey of OH maser emission towards a sample of high mass protostellar objects made using the Nancay and GBT telescopes. Results. OH maser emission was detected towards 63 objects with 36 new detections. There are 56 star-forming regions and 7 OH/IR candidates. Nearly half of the detected sources have OH flux densities ≤1 Jy. There is no evidence that sources with OH masers have a different range of luminosities from the non-maser sources. The results of this survey are compared with previous H 2 O and class II CH 3 OH maser observations of the same objects. Some of the detected sources are only associated with OH masers and some sources are only associated with the 1720 MHz OH maser line. The velocity range of the maser emission suggests that the water maser sources may be divided into two groups. The detection rates and velocity range of the OH and Class II CH 3 OH masers support the idea that there is a spatial association of the OH and Class II CH 3 OH masers. The sources span a wide range in R, the ratio of the methanol maser peak flux to OH 1665 MHz maser peak flux, however there are only a few sources with intermediate values of R, 8 < R < 32, which has characterised previous samples. The majority of the sources are either methanol-favoured or OH-favoured. Sources which have masers of any species, OH, water or methanol, have redder [100 μm-12 μm] IRAS colours than those without masers. However, there is no evidence for different maser species tracing different stages in the evolution of these young high mass sources. Conclusions. The detection of OH masers towards 26% of a sample of 217 sources should remove any doubt about the existence of OH maser emission towards these objects or this early evolutionary stage. Previous observations which have shown that the OH maser emission from similar sources traces the circumstellar disks around the objects. This combined with the sensitivity of the OH emission to the magnetic field, make the newly detected sources interesting candidates for future follow-up at high angular resolution.
Spatial correlation and SER performance analysis of circular antenna array

Spatial fading correlation is one of the impairments practical multiple antenna array have to cope with. Therefore, in this paper, the effect of fading correlation on symbol error rate (SER) performance of MPSK with maximal ratio combining (MRC) is investigated for uniform circular antenna array (UCA). The performance evaluation uses the known expression for the SER of M-ary PSK in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) as the conditional probability, then averages it over the density function for the combined symbol signal to noise ratio (SNR). Results show that, for circular array, decrease in the radius is equivalent to decrease in SNR and increase in SER
A Note on Hedging in ARCH and Stochastic Volatility Option Pricing Models

Recently, Duan (1995) proposed a GARCH option pricing formula and a corresponding hedging formula. In a similar ARCH‐type model for the underlying asset, Kallsen and Taqqu (1994) arrived at a hedging formula different from Duan's although they concur on the pricing formula. In this note, we explain this difference by pointing out that the formula developed by Kallsen and Taqqu corresponds to the usual concept of hedging in the context of ARCH‐type models. We argue, however, that Duan's formula has some appeal and we propose a stochastic volatility model that ensures its validity. We conclude by a comparison of ARCH‐type and stochastic volatility option pricing models.
Segmenting Images on the Tensor Manifold

In this note, we propose a method to perform segmentation on the tensor manifold, that is, the space of positive definite matrices of given dimension. In this work, we explicitly use the Riemannian structure of the tensor space in designing our algorithm. This structure has already been utilized in several approaches based on active contour models which separate the mean and/or variance inside and outside the evolving contour. We generalize these methods by proposing a new technique for performing segmentation by separating the entire probability distributions of the regions inside and outside the contour using the Bhattacharyya metric. In particular, this allows for segmenting objects with multimodal probability distributions (on the space of tensors). We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by segmenting various textured images using the structure tensor. A level set based scheme is proposed to implement the curve flow evolution equation.
Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology Open Access Exogenous Estradiol Enhances Apoptosis in Regressing Post-partum Rat Corpora Lutea Possibly Mediated by Prolactin

Background: In pregnant rats, structural luteal regression takes place after parturition and is associated with cell death by apoptosis. We have recently shown that the hormonal environment is responsible for the fate of the corpora lutea (CL). Changing the levels of circulating hormones in post-partum rats, either by injecting androgen, progesterone, or by allowing dams to suckle, was coupled with a delay in the onset of apoptosis in the CL. The objectives of the present investigation were: i) to examine the effect of exogenous estradiol on apoptosis of the rat CL during post-partum luteal regression; and ii) to evaluate the post-partum luteal expression of the estrogen receptor (ER) genes.
Application of TextRank Algorithm for Credibility Assessment

In this article we examine the use of TextRank algorithm for identifying web content credibility. TextRank has come to be a widely applied method for automated text summarization. In our research we apply it to see how well does it fare in recognizing credible statements from a given corpus. So far, research into use of NLP algorithms in credibility assessment was focused more on extracting the most informative statements, or dealing with recognizing the relation between claims within a document. In our paper, we use a collection of 100 websites reviewed by human subjects in regard to their credibility, therefore allowing us to check the algorithm's performance in this task. The data collected showed that the TextRank algorithm can be used for recognizing credibility on the level of aggregated statement credibility.
Automatic Learning of Repair Strategies for Web Services

The process of repairing Web Service failures may be connected to the nature of the fault that caused the error generating the failure. The selection strategy for composed services repair may be drawn from an analysis on temporal behavior of the fault, assessing if fault is transient, intermittent or permanent. The repair process strictly depends on the permanence type of faults, as substitution is applied with permanent faults, while retry is chosen with transient faults and the retry period is to be determined. In this paper we propose a methodology and a tool for learning the repair strategies of Web Services to automatically select repair actions. This methodology is able to incrementally learn its knowledge of repairs, as faults are repaired. Thus, it is at runtime possible to achieve adaptability according to the current fault features and to the history of the previously performed repair actions. This learning technique and the strategy selection are based on a Bayesian classification of faults in permanent, intermittent and transient, followed by a comparative analysis between current fault features and previously classified faults features which suggests which repair strategy has to be applied. Therefore, this methodology includes the ability to learn autonomously both model parameters, which are useful to determine the fault type, and repair strategies which are successful and proper for a particular fault.
Fril + + for Machine Learning

Machine learning is one of the successful application areas of fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic, which provide soft, and thus tolerant, way of partitioning attribute domains. Theoretical results have shown that there is no (fuzzy) machine learning algorithm that is the best for all tasks. Therefore, for a particular task, it is very useful to have a tool to compare different algorithms in order to select appropriate ones, and to aid in the development of new algorithms, especially by combining existing ones. This paper describes a system using Fril++, a fuzzy objectoriented logic programming language, which provides such a comparison workbench and development platform for fuzzy machine learning.