Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
First report of the genus Heterorhabditis (Nematoda: Heterorhabditidae) from continental Portugal

SummaryUntil recently, the only entomopathogenic nematode (EPN) species reported from continental Portugal, was of the genus Steinernema. Following a national survey of EPNs in continental Portugal, several natural and managed habitats have been surveyed in the southern part of the country. From 57 soil samples collected using the Galleria mellonella trapping method, three samples yielded EPN. Morphological characterization and sequence analysis of the ITS regions of ribosomal DNA allowed the identification of EPN isolates as Heterorhabditis bacteriophora, representing the first report of this genus for continental Portugal.
Importance of Local Variations in Antibiotic Consumption and Geographical Differences of Erythromycin and Penicillin Resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae

ABSTRACT A geographical analysis of how commonly prescribed oral antibiotics are quantitatively and qualitatively responsible for the different local rates of erythromycin and penicillin resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae in Spain is presented. From 1998 to 1999 a multicenter surveillance study yielded 1,684 consecutive S. pneumoniae isolates from community-acquired respiratory infections. Data on antibiotic sales in the retail market for the same period were gathered, and the corresponding defined doses per 1,000 inhabitants per day were calculated. Macrolides and β-lactams were considered separately. Macrolides were subdivided into thrice-, twice-, and once-a-day macrolides, and β-lactams were split into aminopenicillins and cephalosporins. Univariate Spearman nonparametric coefficients (R) were calculated, and variables proving to be significantly associated (P < 0.1) were entered into several multiple lineal regression models. Ample variation in both resistance rates and antibiotic consumption was seen. Multivariate analyses showed that integrated consumption of both macrolides and β-lactams accounted well for erythromycin (R2 = 0.722; P = 0.002) and penicillin (R2 = 0.706; P = 0.002) resistance. Macrolides were more important drivers for local differences in both erythromycin and penicillin resistance than β-lactams were. Consumption of once-a-day macrolides was key for local erythromycin resistance variations. Cephalosporins were slightly more important penicillin resistance drivers than aminopenicillins were.
Enhancing e-business-intelligence-service: a topic-guided text summarization framework

Text summarization is a very important function in next generation e-business-intelligence-service. While human beings have proven to be extremely capable summarizers, computer based automated abstracting and summarizing has proven to be extremely challenging tasks. The dominant approach to text summarization is selection-based, by which the most content-bearing sentences or passages are identified and selected to compose a summary. However, the results from such a process often suffer from flaws such as incoherent content and poor readability due to unclear relationships between the selected text excerpts, dangling references, and so on. In this paper, we present a process model of topic guided text summarization - TIDE. By directing the content selection process with identified topic structure of the text, the logical relation between the selected sentences is captured and better presented, which is also valuable resource for a more complete and precise understanding of text meaning in the next stage of processing.
Global output feedback tracking for nonlinear systems in generalized output-feedback canonical form

A global output feedback dynamic compensator is proposed for stabilization and tracking of a class of systems that are globally diffeomorphic into systems which axe in generalized output-feedback canonical form. This form includes as special cases the standard output-feedback canonical form and various other forms considered previously in the literature. Output-dependent nonlinearities axe allowed to enter both additively and multiplicatively. Under the assumption that a constant matrix can be found to achieve a certain property, it is shown that a reduced-order observer and a backstepping controller can be designed to achieve asymptotic tracking. For the special case of linear systems, the designed dynamic controller reduces to the standard reduced-order observer and linear controller. This is the first global output-feedback tracking results for this class of systems.
Blockade of viral interleukin-6 expression of Kaposi's sarcoma–associated herpesvirus

Kaposi's sarcoma–associated herpesvirus (KSHV), also known as human herpesvirus 8, is associated with several malignant disorders, including Kaposi's sarcoma, primary effusion lymphoma (PEL), and multicentric Castleman's disease. An early lytic gene of KSHV encodes viral interleukin-6 (vIL-6), a viral homologue of the proinflammatory cytokine and an autocrine/paracrine growth factor human IL-6. In this study, we examined the effects of suppressing vIL-6 expression in PEL cells with antisense peptide-conjugated phosphorodiamidate morpholino oligomers (PPMO). PPMO are ssDNA-analogues that have a modified backbone and enter cells readily. Treatment of PEL cells with a PPMO designed against vIL-6 mRNA led to a marked reduction in the proportion of vIL-6-positive cells detected by immunofluorescence assay. Analysis by Western blot confirmed a specific reduction in the vIL-6 protein level and showed that the reduction was dependent on the dose of vIL-6 PPMO. PEL cells treated with the vIL-6 PPMO exhibited reduced levels of cellular growth, IL-6 expression and KSHV DNA, and an elevated level of p21 protein. Treatment of PEL cells with a combination of two vIL-6 PPMO compounds targeting different sequences in the vIL-6 mRNA led to an inhibitory effect that was greater than that achieved with either PPMO alone. These results show that PPMO targeting vIL-6 mRNA can potently reduce vIL-6 protein translation and indicate that further exploration of these compounds in an animal model for potential clinical application is warranted. [Mol Cancer Ther 2008;7(3):712–20]
A linguistic multicriteria decision‐making model applied to hotel service quality evaluation from web data sources

Currently, there are a large number of hotel Web sites that develop their own seals of quality based on customer feedback. As a result, a hotel can be classified differently by various Web sites at the same time, creating confusion in the consumer perceptions about the quality of a given hotel. Moreover, there are attempts to standardize such service quality evaluation, such as the SERVQUAL instrument, which is a multiple‐item scale for measuring service quality with several dimensions. In this context, we present a two‐stage linguistic multicriteria decision‐making model to integrate the hotel guests' opinions included in several Web sites, with two objectives: on the one hand, obtaining a SERVQUAL scale evaluation value of service quality with the integrated answers of the input opinions; on the other hand, getting a SERVQUAL overall evaluation value of service quality. This model is incorporated into an opinion aggregation architecture to integrate heterogeneous data (natural language included) from various tourism Web sites. As a particular case study, we show an application example using the high‐end hotels located in Granada (Spain). © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
A role for endogenous reverse transcriptase in tumorigenesis and as a target in differentiating cancer therapy

An unexpected result emerging from completion of the genome sequencing project is that a large portion of mammalian genomes is constituted by retrotransposons. A large body of published data supports the conclusion that retrotransposons are biologically active elements and indicates that retrotransposition is an ongoing process in mammalian genomes. Retroelements can act as insertional mutagens altering the coding integrity of genes and, recently, have been found to also affect the expression of cellular genes at the epigenetic level: in this light, they are a potential threat in that these events can trigger the onset of several pathologies including cancer. Retroelement genes, and particularly the gene coding for reverse transcriptase (RT), are typically expressed at high levels in transformed cells and tumors. In recent work, we have found that drug‐mediated inhibition of the endogenous RT activity, or silencing of expression of active retrotransposons of the LINE‐1 family by RNA interference, down‐regulate cell growth and induce the activation of differentiating functions in several cancer cell lines. Moreover, the inhibition of endogenous RT activity in vivo antagonizes the growth of human tumors in animal models. In this review, we discuss newly emerging concepts on the role of retrotransposons and suggest that an abnormally high level of the RT activity that they encode may contribute to the loss of control in the proliferation and differentiation programs typical of transformed cells. In this light, RT‐coding elements may be regarded as promising targets in the development of novel, differentiation‐inducing approaches to cancer therapy. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Technical progress and economic growth

Most of the studies conducted to examine the growth performance of many developing economies are based on the traditional neoclassical growth frameworks. This book takes an alternative path. It employs a blend of historical, neoclassical, Kaldorian, and endogenous growth frameworks to shed further light on the growth process. Whereas most cross-sectional growth analyses tend to focus only on the steady state, this volume is one of the relative few that attempt to trace the whole growth path. In doing so, it addresses a number of important factors and issues associated with economic growth, and aims to answer to one of the hardest and most fundamental questions â€“ how do we get poor developing countries on the path to sustained growth?
BAP1 germline mutation in two first grade family members with uveal melanoma

Background Uveal melanoma (UM) is the most common primary cancer of the eye in adults. About half of the patients are at risk of developing metastatic disease resulting in a poor clinical prognosis. Metastatic progression is strongly associated with loss of one chromosome 3 in the tumour (monosomy 3). The tumour suppressor gene BAP1 was found to be recurrently mutated in UM with monosomy 3. Familial UM is rare and amounts to about 0.6–6% of all patients with melanoma. However, BAP1 germline mutations have been identified in rare hereditary tumour syndromes, including cases with UM. One may assume that UM may be part of these hereditary conditions with predisposition to malignant cancers. Methods The patients underwent complete ophthalmological workup and enucleation due to UM. Microsatellite analysis was performed to determine the chromosome 3 status of the tumours. Sanger sequencing of all coding exons of the BAP1 gene was performed in blood DNA of the patients. Results Here we report on two family members (mother and son) diagnosed with UM. In both patients, a cosegregating BAP1 germline mutation (c.299 T>C) was found. The mutant BAP1 allele was retained in the tumour of the son showing monosomy 3. The son further developed urothelial carcinoma and liver metastasis, the mother was affected by the UM and cholangiocellular carcinoma. Conculsions We detected a cosegregating BAP1 germline mutation in two family members with UM. This suggests that, consistent with a classic tumour suppressor model, carriers of damaging mutations in BAP1 are predisposed to UM. However, as BAP1 germline mutations have been found to cause other cancer syndromes as well, there must be other factors that decide about the type of tumour emerging from BAP1 inactivation.
Strong Bubbles and Strict Local Martingales

In a numeraire-independent framework, we study a financial market with N assets which are all treated in a symmetric way. We define the fundamental value ∗S of an asset S as its super-replication price and say that the market has a strong bubble if ∗S and S deviate from each other. None of these concepts needs any mention of martingales. Our main result then shows that under a weak absence-of-arbitrage assumption (basically NUPBR), a market has a strong bubble if and only if in all numeraire s for which there is an equivalent local martingale measure (ELMM), asset prices are strict local martingales under all possible ELMMs. We show by an example that our bubble concept lies strictly between the existing notions from the literature. We also give an example where asset prices are strict local martingales under one ELMM, but true martingales under another, and we show how our approach can lead naturally to endogenous bubble birth.
Modeling Dependencies in Natural Languages with Latent Variables

In this thesis, we investigate the use of latent variables to model complex dependencies in natural languages. Traditional models, which have a fixed parameterization, often make strong independence assumptions that lead to poor performance. This problem is often addressed by incorporating additional dependencies into the model (e.g., using higher order N-grams for language modeling). These added dependencies can increase data sparsity and/or require expert knowledge, together with trial and error, in order to identify and incorporate the most important dependencies (as in lexicalized parsing models). Traditional models, when developed for a particular genre, domain, or language, are also often difficult to adapt to another. In contrast, previous work has shown that latent variable models, which automatically learn dependencies in a data-driven way, are able to flexibly adjust the number of parameters based on the type and the amount of training data available. We have created several different types of latent variable models for a diverse set of natural language processing applications, including novel models for part-of-speech tagging, language modeling, and machine translation, and an improved model for parsing. These models perform significantly better than traditional models. We have also created and evaluated three different methods for improving the performance of latent variable models. While these methods can be applied to any of our applications, we focus our experiments on parsing. The first method involves self-training, i.e., we train models using a combination of gold standard training data and a large amount of automatically labeled training data. We conclude from a series of experiments that the latent variable models benefit much more from self-training than conventional models, apparently due to their flexibility to adjust their model parameterization to learn more accurate models from the additional automatically labeled training data. The second method takes advantage of the variability among latent variable models to combine multiple models for enhanced performance. We investigate several different training protocols to combine self-training with model combination. We conclude that these two techniques are complementary to each other and can be effectively combined to train very high quality parsing models. The third method replaces the generative multinomial lexical model of latent variable grammars with a feature-rich log-linear lexical model to provide a principled solution to address data sparsity, handle out-of-vocabulary words, and exploit overlapping features during model induction. We conclude from experiments that the resulting grammars are able to effectively parse three different languages. This work contributes to natural language processing by creating flexible and effective latent variable models for several different languages. Our investigation of self-training, model combination, and log-linear models also provides insights into the effective application of these machine learning techniques to other disciplines.
The perseverance time of informal carers of dementia patients: validation of a new measure to initiate transition of care at home to nursing home care.

BACKGROUND Health care systems aim to involve as much informal care as possible and dementia patients prefer to stay home as long as they can. In this context, perseverance time (Pt)-the period that the informal carer indicates to be able to maintain current care if the situation remains stable-is an important concept. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to introduce the concept Pt and validate it in a sample of informal carers of dementia patients living at home. METHODS Data were collected from 223 informal carers of dementia patients. Convergent validity was assessed by looking at associations of Pt with validated instruments for measuring subjective burden (CSI, CarerQol-7D, and SRB) and happiness (CarerQol-VAS). Content validity was evaluated by performing multivariate correlations between Pt and characteristics of dementia patients, informal carers, and care situations. The Medical Ethics Committee of Utrecht MC advised positively about the study protocol. RESULTS Correlation coefficients between Pt and the measures of burden CSI, SRB, and CarerQol-VAS were -0.46, -0.63, and 0.23 (p < 0.01), respectively. Health of dementia patient, informal carer living apart from the patient, and male gender of caregiver were positively associated with Pt; need for supervision, intensity of informal care provision, and reductions in working hours and hobbies in order to be able to provide care were negatively associated. CONCLUSIONS Pt is helpful in monitoring need for support and planning the transition of care from home to nursing home. This study provides a first indication of its validity, but replication is necessary.
On the use of yearly load scenarios to estimate the volume of curtailed generation

The connection of a distributed generation (DG) unit to a distribution network may lead to current or voltage constraints: generation curtailment can be a way to solve them. In this article, we explain how a DG curtailment volume can be estimated. This volume could be used in a contract between the distribution system operator (DSO) and the owner of the DG unit. The proposed method makes use of a large number of yearly generation and load scenarios at 10-minute time steps, and calculates the volume of energy to be curtailed in each case, in order to solve the constraints over a 1-year or 3-year period. Finally, a statistical analysis is conducted to assess which volume should be chosen, in compliance with a certain value of risk. A case study is developed on a French network.
The antecedents of export performance of Brazilian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): The non-linear effects of customer orientation

This article examines the determinants of customer orientation and the quadratic effects of customer orientation on export performance. The relationship between customer orientation and export performance has been assumed to have a linear relationship, neglecting the possibility of non-linear relationships. While most studies have been conducted in developed countries, we test our model in Brazil, an emerging market economy. The findings suggest that technology intensity and competitive intensity are key determinants in explaining success in an export market. Our findings also indicate that the relationship between customer orientation and export performance is quadratic (U-shaped) rather than linear. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Antifungal Effect of Chitosan as Ca2+ Channel Blocker

The aim of this study was to investigate antifungal activity of a range of different molecular weight (MW) chitosan against Penicillium italicum. Our results demonstrate that the antifungal activity was dependent both the MW and concentration of the chitosan. Among a series of chitosan derived from the hydrolysis of high MW chitosan, the fractions containing various sizes of chitosan ranging from 3 to 15 glucosamine units named as chitooligomers-F2 (CO-F2) was found to show the highest antifungal activity against P. italicum. Furthermore, the effect of CO-F2 toward this fungus was significantly reduced in the presence of Ca2+, whereas its effect was recovered by ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid, suggesting that the CO-F2 acts via disruption of Ca2+ gradient required for survival of the fungus. Our results suggest that CO-F2 may serve as potential compounds to develop alternatives to synthetic fungicides for the control of the postharvest diseases.
Effects of Nostoc flagelliforme on Soil Physical-Chemical Properties and Microbial Community

The free-living Nostoc flagelliforme was inoculated into desert soil and ecologic effects of N. flagelliforme were studied in this paper. Results showed that the water permeability of soil decreased while the water holding capacity of soil increased as the growth of N. flagelliforme. The soil respiration and enzyme activity were markedly increased by the growth of N. flagelliforme. The CO<sub>2</sub> release quantity was 0.29 mg·g<sup>-1</sup>·h<sup>-1</sup> in the soil sample which 361ml of N. flagelliforme inoculated in, which was 2.0 times than that of control. The activity of urease, dehydrogenase, phosphatase and polyphenoloxidaze increased also because of the growth of N. flagelliforme. The maximum activities of these four enzymes were 6.03 mg·g<sup>-1</sup>·d<sup>-1</sup>, 0.45 mg·g<sup>-1</sup>·d<sup>-1</sup>, 11.66 mg·g<sup>-1</sup>·d<sup>-1</sup> and 1.77 mg·g<sup>-1</sup>·d<sup>-1</sup> respectively, which were 2.2 times, 2.1 times, 1.3 times and 1.2 times respectively than those of control. According to the DGGE result, microbial diversity of soil increased with the growth of N. flagelliforme. Four species of bacteria appear in the samples which N. flagelliforme was inoculated in. The results indicated that the N. flagelliforme had a significant effect on the soil physical-chemical properties and microbial community.
Keap1 regulates both cytoplasmic‐nuclear shuttling and degradation of Nrf2 in response to electrophiles

Background: Transcription factor Nrf2 regulates the expression of a set of detoxifying and anti‐oxidant enzyme genes. Several lines of evidence suggest that electrophiles and reactive oxygen species liberate Nrf2 from its cytoplasmic repressor Keap1 and provoke the accumulation of Nrf2 in the nucleus. To elucidate the molecular mechanisms as to how Nrf2 is activated by inducers, we examined the cytoplasmic‐nuclear shuttling and turnover of Nrf2.
Empirical assessment of whether moderate payments are undue or unjust inducements for participation in clinical trials.

BACKGROUND Paying patients to participate in clinical trials is ethically controversial. However, there has been no empirical documentation regarding whether payment represents an undue or unjust inducement. METHODS To evaluate these questions, we described hypothetical placebo-controlled trials of a new antihypertensive drug to 126 patients with mild-to-moderate hypertension recruited from hypertension and general medicine clinics at a university hospital. Using a 3 x 3, within-subjects design, we altered a risk to participation (either adverse effect rate or rate of randomization to placebo) and the payment participants would receive ($100, $1000, and $2000) and asked patients to indicate their willingness to participate (WTP) in each trial using a 6-point scale. RESULTS Clustered ordinal logistic regression models revealed that patients' WTP decreased with higher risk of adverse effects (P<.001), higher risk of being assigned to placebo (P =.02), and lower payment level (P<.001). There were no significant interactions between payment level and either risk variable, suggesting that increasing payments do not alter peoples' perceptions of risk. There was a trend toward a positive interaction between income and the influence of payment on WTP (P =.09), suggesting that payment more strongly influences WTP among wealthier people. Wealthier patients were more likely to state that payment was important in their participation decision (37% vs 20%, P =.05). CONCLUSION Although higher payment motivates research participation, we found no evidence that commonly used payment levels represent undue or unjust inducements.