Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the skin treated successfully with single agent cetuximab therapy

Recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the skin is a rare but difficult to treat condition. Frequently, the disease presents itself in elderly patients with poor performance status and bearing many comorbidities, thus the decision to administer systemic chemotherapy becomes difficult to make. In addition, current chemotherapeutic protocols response rates are far from satisfactory. Recently cetuximab, a chimeric antibody against epidermal growth factor receptor, is increasingly being reported as an alternative treatment. We therefore report this case of a recurrent squamous cell carcinoma of the skin in an elderly woman with poor performance status and who had an excellent clinical response to single agent cetuximab therapy with complete resolution of the disease and minimal toxicity during the course of the treatment to provide evidence for future prospective clinical trials.
Comparative Transcriptome Analysis of Leaves and Roots in Response to Sudden Increase in Salinity in Brassica napus by RNA-seq

Amphidiploid species in the Brassicaceae family, such as Brassica napus, are more tolerant to environmental stress than their diploid ancestors.A relatively salt tolerant B. napus line, N119, identified in our previous study, was used. N119 maintained lower Na+ content, and Na+/K+ and Na+/Ca2+ ratios in the leaves than a susceptible line. The transcriptome profiles of both the leaves and the roots 1 h and 12 h after stress were investigated. De novo assembly of individual transcriptome followed by sequence clustering yielded 161,537 nonredundant sequences. A total of 14,719 transcripts were differentially expressed in either organs at either time points. GO and KO enrichment analyses indicated that the same 49 GO terms and seven KO terms were, respectively, overrepresented in upregulated transcripts in both organs at 1 h after stress. Certain overrepresented GO term of genes upregulated at 1 h after stress in the leaves became overrepresented in genes downregulated at 12 h. A total of 582 transcription factors and 438 transporter genes were differentially regulated in both organs in response to salt shock. The transcriptome depicting gene network in the leaves and the roots regulated by salt shock provides valuable information on salt resistance genes for future application to crop improvement.
Inhibition of endocytosis blocks Wnt signalling to β‐catenin by promoting dishevelled degradation

Aim: The Wnt/Frizzled signalling pathway is highly conserved through evolution. Frizzled, the receptors for Wnts, have the topology of seven transmembrane spanning domain receptors. An important means of regulation of these receptors is internalization and desensitization through clathrin‐mediated endocytosis. Therefore, we investigated the effects of endocytosis inhibition on Frizzled4‐green fluorescent protein (FZD4‐GFP) localization, dishevelled levels and Wnt‐3a signalling to β‐catenin.
An Experimental Platform for Quantified Crowd

Quantified crowd, a vision in which on-body sensors of nearby people collaborate to detect various phenomena within a crowd and produce feedback, is an emerging research area. One of the issues that impedes progress in this new area is a lack of a broadly applicable experimental platform, such as the platforms that enabled research on wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by presenting such an experimental hardware-software platform. Not only does the platform introduce custom badge-form low-power devices that feature a number of sensors relevant to quantified crowd, but it also ensures that these devices can interoperate with commercial off-the-shelf smartphones, wristbands, and other devices for self-quantification. In effect, it constitutes a powerful experimental instrument, as we show in a preliminary real-world evaluation.
From individual learning to social learning – reframing HRD theory and practice

I think that we can now claim with some confidence that HRD has moved beyond describing itself as an emergent field: scholars are not so preoccupied with defining the boundaries of our intellectual pursuit as they were five years ago (for an example of the latter see the debate in Human Resource Development International, Issue 4:3). However, while our intellectual focus is no longer emergent, we have certainly not arrived at a consensus on the scope of our field of inquiry, nor on the range of theoretical frameworks and methods of inquiry that we employ. This is clearly evident in the articles that we are including in this issue of Human Resource Development International. We are including papers that encourage us to reframe the scope of our field (Carmeli and Weisberg); that call for us to adopt greater rigour in the way we develop theory (Storberg-Walker); and that challenge some of the assumptions about individual learning of professionals and managers (Tillema; DeWolfe Waddill; Sadler-Smith and Smith). Deborah DeWolfe Waddill reports on exploratory research designed to find out whether web-based instruction could be blended effectively with action learning. Her study is an evaluation of an online management development course, supported by online delivery of action learning, in terms of the overall effect upon individual learning. This is an interesting project, as web-based instruction and action-learning appear at the outset to be embedded in two different ontological assumptions about what ‘learning’ involves: the individual and cognitive versus the distributed and social. Her findings reveal that although the experience did not result in the creation of a strong learning community, surprisingly, individuals did manage to learn the principles and processes of action-learning, and report evidence of behavioural change online. Particularly interesting was the finding that the asynchronous nature of interactions encouraged programme participants to engage in reflection, and that the whole approach provided a safe environment for practice. Another area where the tensions between individual and social learning are manifest, is in the field of professional learning. The prescriptive models of continuing professional education (CPE or continuing professional development – CPD – as it is known in the UK) rest upon implicit humanistic and experiential models of learning which have the individual at the core. However, increasingly we Human Resource Development International, Vol. 9, No. 2, 153 – 155, June 2006
Fast Fuzzy Feature Clustering for Text Classification

Feature clustering is a powerful method to reduce the dimensionality of feature vectors for text classification. In this paper, Fast Fuzzy Feature clustering for text classification is proposed. It is based on the framework proposed by Jung-Yi Jiang, Ren-Jia Liou and Shie-Jue Lee in 2011. The word in the feature vector of the document is grouped into the cluster in less iteration. The numbers of iterations required to obtain cluster centers are reduced by transforming clusters center dimension from n-dimension to 2-dimension. Principle Component Analysis with slit change is used for dimension reduction. Experimental results show that, this method improve the performance by significantly reducing the number of iterations required to obtain the cluster center. The same is being verified with three benchmark datasets.
Genomic instability and histone H3 phosphorylation induction by the Ras‐mitogen activated protein kinase pathway in pancreatic cancer cells

Activating mutations in K‐Ras occur in most pancreatic cancers. We investigated whether genetic changes (K‐Ras mutations) in human pancreatic cancer cell lines altered genomic instability and epigenetic events responding to Ras‐mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling by characterizing 3 human pancreatic cancer cells lines with and without activating mutations in K‐Ras. Activation of the Ras‐MAPK pathway results in the stimulation of the histone H3 kinase, mitogen and stress activated kinase (MSK) 1, and increased phosphorylation of histone H3 at serine 10 (H3 S10ph). MSK1 and H3 S10ph have roles in neoplastic transformation. We demonstrate that the presence of a K‐Ras mutation did not correlate with elevated chromosomal aberrations or increased genomic instability. Although the levels of the epidermal growth factor receptors and MSK were similar, the Ras‐MAPK pathway was differentially induced by phorbol esters (12‐O tetradecanoylphorbol‐13‐acetate) or epidermal growth factor, with the response of this signaling pathway being cell‐type specific. This response corresponded downstream at the level of chromatin where stimuli‐induced elevation of H3 S10ph typically paralleled the increase in phospho‐extracellular signal regulated kinase 1/2. Our results present evidence that nonclonal chromosomal aberrations and epigenetic programming responding to stimulation of the Ras‐MAPK pathway may be better markers for cancer progression than the upstream mutated oncogenes. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Evaluating the energy-efficiency of the Rich Uncle key exchange protocol in WSNs

This paper evaluates the energy consumption of three key exchange protocols Rich Uncle, (EC)DH-(EC)DSA and Kerberos. It aims at determining which protocol can exchange keys between two sensor nodes in the most energy-efficient way. To realistically compare the energy consumption, the protocols are implemented in TinyOS on the MICAz platform and simulated using the Avrora+ simulator. The key exchange protocols are evaluated in combination with four common duty-cycling MAC protocols. We show, that the Kerberos protocol is the key exchange protocol with the least overall energy consumption per key exchange, mostly due to the extremely cheap cryptographic operations. When compared with the ECDH-ECDSA key exchange protocol, this outweighs the additional message overhead needed for communication with the trusted third party in Kerberos. Rich Uncle fails to beat ECDH-ECDSA, even after off-loading the more expensive cryptographic operations to the Rich Uncle super nodes. Furthermore, we show that there are cross-layer effects caused by the MAC protocols that highly influence the overall energy consumption of the key exchange protocols.
Selecting Sentences for Answering Complex Questions

Complex questions that require inferencing and synthesizing information from multiple documents can be seen as a kind of topic-oriented, informative multi-document summarization. In this paper, we have experimented with one empirical and two unsupervised statistical machine learning techniques: k-means and Expectation Maximization (EM), for computing relative importance of the sentences. However, the performance of these approaches depends entirely on the feature set used and the weighting of these features. We extracted different kinds of features (i.e. lexical, lexical semantic, cosine similarity, basic element, tree kernel based syntactic and shallow-semantic) for each of the document sentences in order to measure its importance and relevancy to the user query. We used a local search technique to learn the weights of the features. For all our methods of generating summaries, we have shown the effects of syntactic and shallow-semantic features over the bag of words (BOW) features.
Monitoring proton radiation therapy with in-room PET imaging

We used a mobile positron emission tomography (PET) scanner positioned within the proton therapy treatment room to study the feasibility of proton range verification with an in-room, stand-alone PET system, and compared with off-line equivalent studies. Two subjects with adenoid cystic carcinoma were enrolled into a pilot study in which in-room PET scans were acquired in list-mode after a routine fractionated treatment session. The list-mode PET data were reconstructed with different time schemes to generate in-room short, in-room long and off-line equivalent (by skipping coincidences from the first 15 min during the list-mode reconstruction) PET images for comparison in activity distribution patterns. A phantom study was followed to evaluate the accuracy of range verification for different reconstruction time schemes quantitatively. The in-room PET has a higher sensitivity compared to the off-line modality so that the PET acquisition time can be greatly reduced from 30 to <5 min. Features in deep-site, soft-tissue regions were better retained with in-room short PET acquisitions because of the collection of 15O component and lower biological washout. For soft tissue-equivalent material, the distal fall-off edge of an in-room short acquisition is deeper compared to an off-line equivalent scan, indicating a better coverage of the high-dose end of the beam. In-room PET is a promising low cost, high sensitivity modality for the in vivo verification of proton therapy. Better accuracy in Monte Carlo predictions, especially for biological decay modeling, is necessary.
Vehicle tracking based on customized template matching

In this paper we present a template matching based vehicle tracking algorithm designed for traffic analysis purposes. The proposed approach could be integrated in a system able to understand lane changes, gate passages and other behaviours useful for traffic analysis. After reviewing some state-of-the-art object tracking techniques, the proposed approach is presented as a customization of the template matching algorithm by introducing different modules designed to solve specific issues of the application context. The experiments are performed on a dataset compound by real-world cases of vehicle traffic acquired in different scene contexts (e.g., highway, urban, etc.) and weather conditions (e.g., raining, snowing, etc.). The performances of the proposed approach are compared with respect to a baseline technique based on background-foreground separation.
Wireless network-to-network localization for measuring the spatial position and orientation of vehicles

Wireless sensor networks with local positioning capabilities allow for many interesting industrial and commercial applications [1, 2]. The majority of current sensor network positioning solutions (e.g. [3, 4]) only provides 2D or 3D position data but cannot deliver the 3D orientation of the object to be tracked. However, the measurement of the spatial orientation can enable new applications like automation of loading and unloading operations of trucks and excavators as well as direct interaction of mobile robots and other vehicles. In the current article a network based approach and system setup is introduced that allows for a precise measurement of both, the spatial position and the orientation of mobile objects. A multidimensional scaling based algorithm is applied to solve the challenging localization task. The feasibility of the approach is proved experimentally with a 5.8 GHz localization network for a vehicle localization application.
Increased serum resistin in adults with prader-willi syndrome is related to obesity and not to insulin resistance.

CONTEXT Determinants of insulin resistance in Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) are not completely understood. The discovery of several adipokines with relevant effects on insulin resistance and cardiovascular complications of metabolic syndrome offered new tools of investigation of insulin resistance in PWS. OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to measure serum resistin and mRNA in adipose tissue of patients with PWS, those with simple obesity, and healthy controls and correlate resistin levels with anthropometric and biochemical features. DESIGN Twenty-eight adult PWS patients, 29 obese patients, and 25 healthy controls were studied. Anthropometric variables were measured and fasting serum and plasma were collected for measurement of resistin, adiponectin, leptin, lipid profile, glucose, and insulin. RESULTS Serum resistin and resistin mRNA expression in adipose tissue was significantly higher in PWS patients, compared with both healthy lean controls and obese patients. Moreover, on regression analysis resistin was significantly correlated with body mass index, whereas no significant association was found between resistin and homeostasis model assessment index. A weak association between resistin and adiponectin was found in the PWS group only. However, on multivariate analysis only the correlation between resistin and body mass index remained significant. CONCLUSIONS These results support a link between circulating resistin and obesity in humans but do not support a role for resistin in human insulin resistance.
The Mitochondrial Genomes of Aquila fasciata and Buteo lagopus (Aves, Accipitriformes): Sequence, Structure and Phylogenetic Analyses

The family Accipitridae is one of the largest groups of non-passerine birds, including 68 genera and 243 species globally distributed. In the present study, we determined the complete mitochondrial sequences of two species of accipitrid, namely Aquila fasciata and Buteo lagopus, and conducted a comparative mitogenome analysis across the family. The mitogenome length of A. fasciata and B. lagopus are 18,513 and 18,559 bp with an A + T content of 54.2% and 55.0%, respectively. For both the two accipitrid birds mtDNAs, obvious positive AT-skew and negative GC-skew biases were detected for all 12 PCGs encoded by the H strand, whereas the reverse was found in MT-ND6 encoded by the L strand. One extra nucleotide‘C’is present at the position 174 of MT-ND3 gene of A. fasciata, which is not observed at that of B. lagopus. Six conserved sequence boxes in the Domain II, named boxes F, E, D, C, CSBa, and CSBb, respectively, were recognized in the CRs of A. fasciata and B. lagopus. Rates and patterns of mitochondrial gene evolution within Accipitridae were also estimated. The highest dN/dS was detected for the MT-ATP8 gene (0.32493) among Accipitridae, while the lowest for the MT-CO1 gene (0.01415). Mitophylogenetic analysis supported the robust monophyly of Accipitriformes, and Cathartidae was basal to the balance of the order. Moreover, we performed phylogenetic analyses using two other data sets (two mitochondrial loci, and combined nuclear and mitochondrial loci). Our results indicate that the subfamily Aquilinae and all currently polytypic genera of this subfamily are monophyletic. These two novel mtDNA data will be useful in refining the phylogenetic relationships and evolutionary processes of Accipitriformes.
Identification of the Human Enzymes Responsible for the Enzymatic Hydrolysis of Aclidinium Bromide

Aclidinium bromide [LAS34273, 3R-(2-hydroxy-2,2-dithiophen-2-yl-acetoxy)-1-(3-phenoxy-propyl)1-azonia bicycle-[2.2. 2]-octane bromide], a novel, long-acting, inhaled muscarinic antagonist for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, has shown rapid hydrolysis in human and animal plasma. This process occurred both nonenzymatically (kh, 0.0075 min−1) and enzymatically. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the in vitro enzymatic hydrolysis of aclidinium in humans. Human butyrylcholinesterase was identified as the most important esterase responsible for the enzymatic hydrolysis of aclidinium from inhibition studies in human plasma with selective paraoxonase, arylesterase, carboxylesterase, acetylcholinesterase, and butyrylcholinesterase chemical inhibitors, as well as from incubations with pure human cholinesterases. Furthermore, neither human cytochrome P450 nor human serum albumin participated in the enzymatic ester cleavage of aclidinium. Butyrylcholinesterase activity in the human lung was lower than that observed in human plasma. Aclidinium was shown to inhibit competitively both human butyrylcholinesterase (Ki, 2.7 μM) and acetylcholinesterase (6.3 μM) but did not have any effect on the activity of other human esterases, as well as its hydrolysis metabolites. These results suggest that the potential for clinical interactions involving human cholinesterases is remote at clinically relevant plasma, which are less than 1 nM.
Long-Distance Scrambling via Partial Compaction

In this paper, I propose a novel analysis of long-distance scrambling constructions in Japanese that is linguistically more adequate than those previously suggested in the literature. At the heart of my proposal is the view, suggested in Yatabe (1993a), that there is a theoretically significant parallelism between long-distance scrambling in Japanese and extraposition in languages like English. I present some additional evidence for this view in Section 1, and then describe in Section 2 how the parallelism in question can be captured within a framework in which syntactic structure and linear order are mediated not via encodings of hierarchical relations but instead via order domains.
Interactive Visualization of 2-D Persistence Modules

The goal of this work is to extend the standard persistent homology pipeline for exploratory data analysis to the 2-D persistence setting, in a practical, computationally efficient way. To this end, we introduce RIVET, a software tool for the visualization of 2-D persistence modules, and present mathematical foundations for this tool. RIVET provides an interactive visualization of the barcodes of 1-D affine slices of a 2-D persistence module $M$. It also computes and visualizes the dimension of each vector space in $M$ and the bigraded Betti numbers of $M$. At the heart of our computational approach is a novel data structure based on planar line arrangements, on which we can perform fast queries to find the barcode of any slice of $M$. We present an efficient algorithm for constructing this data structure and establish bounds on its complexity.
Numerical-experimental comparison of low-g and high-g tests on a polysilicon MEMS accelerometer

In this work in-situ measurements obtained during low-g and high-g experiments (g being the gravity acceleration), carried out on a polysilicon inertial accelerometer mounted on a PCB-board, are compared with numerical simulations. Tests are carried out at accelerations ranging between 90 and 5500 g. In each test not only the shock waveform and the device response are recorded, but also the MEMS performance is checked. The shock tests are carried out on a device attached on the top of a falling cylinder in a drop testing machine, where the shock impulse is sensed by a quartz accelerometer mounted next to the tested device. The quartz accelerometer output signal is used as input for the numerical analysis at the MEMS length-scale. A three dimensional, finite element model of the packaged sensor is adopted to simulate its mechanical response in the transient regime. Therefore, a comparison with the experimentally measured output voltage of the tested MEMS allows to single out the effects of mechanical nonlinearities.
Examining the prediction of reading comprehension on different multiple‐choice tests

In this study, 180 Norwegian fifth-grade students with a mean age of 10.5 years were administered measures of word recognition skills, strategic text processing, reading motivation and working memory. Six months later, the same students were given three different multiple-choice reading comprehension measures. Based on three forced-order hierarchical multiple regression analyses, results indicated that the unique contribution of measured skills and processes to performance varied across comprehension tests. In particular, when the test consisted of a longer passage, contained a larger proportion of inferential questions and was answered without access to relevant text passages, the relative importance of word recognition skills seemed to be reduced while working memory emerged as a relatively strong, unique positive predictor of comprehension performance. These findings have important practical implications for the assessment of reading comprehension.