Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
TRANSTHORACIC VERSUS TRANSHIATAL ESOPHAGECTOMY: COMPARATIVE STUDY REGARDING SURGICAL APPROACH IN ESOPHAGEAL CANCER

TRANSTHORACIC VERSUS TRANSHIATAL ESOPHAGECTOMY: COMPARATIVE STUDY REGARDING SURGICAL APPROACH IN ESOPHAGEAL CANCER (Abstract): BACKGROUND: Surgical resection can offer the best curative treatment for oesophageal cancer but is associated with high postoperative morbidity rates. Most common surgical approaches are transthoracic (TT) and transhiatal (TH) techniques. Transhiatal approach has the advantage of reducing the pulmonary morbidity in patients with impaired pulmonary function. AIM: The aim of this study is to compare the TT and TH approach, in terms of preoperative assessment and short term outcomes. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We performed an observational study on a prospective collected database which included all the patients diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in which surgery was performed. A detailed assessment of comorbidities was performed using several scales: Charlson and age adjusted Charlson score, physiological score of POSSUM. Postoperative complications were graded according to the Dindo-Clavien classification. RESULTS: During a 9 years period surgery was performed in 50 cases, 33 by TT approach and 17 by TH approach respectively. The mean age was 58.7 ± 2.21 years old (95% CI 56.3-61.2). Patients in the TH group had a higher Charlson score (3 vs 2, P = 0.01), age adjusted Charlson score (5 vs 4, P = 0.03) and physiological score (17 vs 15, P = 0.04). TT techniques were mainly used for middle oesophageal cancers (69.7%) and TH for lower oesophageal tumors (82.4%). The overall operative morbidity was 60% with no difference between the two groups even for minor and major complications. Pulmonary complications occurred in 23 cases (46%), cardiac complications in 5 cases (10%), anastomotic leakage in 6 cases (12%) and recurrent nerve paralysis in 6 cases (12%). Multivariate analysis showed that age adjusted Charlson score (OR = 2.77; 95%CI 1.114-6.9236) and physiological score (OR = 1.7601; 95% CI 1.2067-2.5674) were predictors for complications. CONCLUSION: In our study mortality and morbidity showed no statistical difference in relation to the surgical approach. An accurate preoperative assessment and tailoring an adequate surgical approach can limit the percentage of postoperative complications.
Planarity of data networks

A planar graph is one that can be drawn (say on a piece of paper) without any crossing links. In this paper we show, using a new data set, that data-network graphs show a surprisingly high likelihood of being planar. The data set — the Internet Topology Zoo — is a store of network data created from the information that network operators make public. As such, it includes meta-data that we could never have derived from automated network measurements. A surprising number of graphs in the Zoo are planar, many more than can be explained through the models for graph formation we tested. We speculate that planarity results from the requirement to build transparent networks that network operators can understand easily.
Hand-Drawn Maps for Robot Navigation

The goal of this work is to create a robot interface that allows a novice user to guide, control, and/or program a robot to perform some task. The assumption is that, although the user may be a domain expert in how the task should be done, he is not an expert in robotics. During the actual robot use, he should focus on the task to be done rather than worrying about the robot or the interaction modality. To address this goal, we have been investigating the use of hand-drawn route maps to transfer navigation tasks to robots. In the paper, we provide an overview and current status of ongoing work with sketches. We discuss what type of information would be useful for directing and controlling a robot and then show how this information can be extracted from a sketched route map, in the form of spatial relationships. An analysis example of a PDA-generated sketch is included. Also, preliminary results are presented which compare the analysis of a sketched map with that of a real map.
Light Regulation of the Abundance of mRNA Encoding a Nucleolin-Like Protein Localized in the Nucleoli of Pea Nuclei

A cDNA encoding a nucleolar protein was selected from a pea (Pisum sativum) plumule library, cloned, and sequenced. The translated sequence of the cDNA has significant percent identity to Xenopus laevis nucleolin (31%), the alfalfa (Medicago sativa) nucleolin homolog (66%), and the yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) nucleolin homolog (NSR1) (28%). It also has sequence patterns in its primary structure that are characteristic of all nucleolins, including an N-terminal acidic motif, RNA recognition motifs, and a C-terminal Gly- and Arg-rich domain. By immunoblot analysis, the polyclonal antibodies used to select the cDNA bind selectively to a 90kD protein in purified pea nuclei and nucleoli and to an 88-kD protein in extracts of Escherichia coli expressing the cDNA. In immunolocalization assays of pea plumule cells, the antibodies stained primarily a region surrounding the fibrillar center of nucleoli, where animal nucleolins are typically found. Southern analysis indicated that the pea nucleolin-like protein is encoded by a single gene, and northern analysis showed that the labeled cDNA binds to a single band of RNA, approximately the same size as the cDNA. After irradiation of etiolated pea seedlings by red light, the mRNA level in plumules decreased during the 1st hour and then increased to a peak of six times the 0-h level at 12 h. Far-red light reversed this effect of red light, and the mRNA accumulation from red/far-red light irradiation was equal to that found in the dark control. This indicates that phytochrome may regulate the expression of this gene.
Use of Pectinase in Preparation of Mitochondria from Tobacco-Tissue Cultures

Mitochondrial particles were isolated from tobacco cells in tissue cultures which were disintegrated with pectinase. The pectinase treatment of the tissue cultures reduced the dry weight of the particulate preparations and eliminated glutinous material, but caused little change in oxidative and phosphorylative activities. The pectinase apparently did not affect the enzymatically active sites of the particles.
Deploying virtual communities of practice as a digital tool in social work: a rapid review and critique of the literature

Abstract This paper provides a rapid review, and a critique of extant literature on the use of virtual communities of practice (VCoP) as a type of digital tool in enhancing the social work profession. VCoP are ubiquitous and well documented as increasing the deployment of evidence-based practice interventions, and offers a borderless professional interaction for social workers. To this end, a rapid review of extant literature spanning a decade (2005–2015) was conducted using four electronic databases. Only 10 articles satisfied the inclusion–exclusion criteria out of the 67 potential articles produced from the databases searched. Summary of evidence table showed that Ning, Web 2.0, WebCT, email discussion forum, LISTSERV, and government-based web platforms were mostly used as VCoP digital tools by social workers. The 10 studies amplified VCoP utilization experiences of social workers from Israel, the USA, the UK, and India. Moreover, the study revealed that two major domains of social work (educational institutions and social service agencies) mostly used VCoP. Furthermore, the merits and demerits of VCoP, and a critique of the literature are delineated.
HIV-1 Tat increases endothelial solute permeability through tyrosine kinase and mitogen-activated protein kinase-dependent pathways

Objective:HIV-1 infection is associated with alterations of several vascular endothelial functions including adhesion molecule expression, growth, and vascular permeability. The bases of these errors are not known, but might involve secretion of the HIV-1 derived transcription factor `Tat-1'. This study investigated Tat-1 mediated endothelial barrier changes and second message regulation of this phenomenon. Methods:We exposed human umbilical vein endothelial cell monolayers to Tat-1 (0–150 ng/ml) for up to 48 h and measured resulting changes in monolayer permeability. We also investigated the role of tyrosine and mitogen activated protein (MAP) kinases, and protein kinase G using the pharmacological blockers genistein, PD98059 and KT5823 respectively. Results:Tat-1 significantly reduced monolayer barrier and increased albumin permeability within 24 h. Tat-1 also stimulated tyrosine phosphorylation of multiple endothelial proteins, disorganized junctional phosphotyrosine staining and increased the number of these immunostaining structures. The increased permeability produced by Tat-1 was blocked by genistein and PD98059, but not by KT5823. Genistein and PD98059 pretreatment also prevented the changes in phosphotyrosine immunostaining produced by Tat-1 and blocked phosphorylation of several proteins including MAP kinase. Conclusion:These results suggest that HIV may dysregulate endothelial barrier through the effects of Tat-1. These blocker experiments suggest that the effects of Tat are transcription/translation-dependent. These data demonstrate that Tat increases endothelial albumin permeability in vitro through tyrosine kinase and MAP kinase, but not protein kinase G pathways.
To start practice theorizing anew: The contribution of the concepts of agencement and formativeness

The journal Organization was a precursor of the turn to practice with its 2000 Special Issue, and the burgeoning number of special issues between 2000 and 2011 testifies to the vitality of a field under construction. Nowadays, the consolidation of the field makes it possible to start to understand and spell out differences and, in so doing, to promote lines of practice theorizing with a greater internal consistency. This article contributes to the articulation of differences among various practice theories and within a practice-based theorizing inspired by the sociology of translation. It proposes two concepts—agencement and formativeness—that address two ‘blind spots’ in the conversation on the turn to practice. The first blind spot concerns how we can talk of practices as having agency and the second concerns how we can articulate knowing in practice as a ‘doing while inventing the way of doing’, that is, the creative entanglement of knowing and doing. I shall address these two ‘blind spots’ by saying that one difficulty in addressing them is created by language. Hence, if we want to turn to practice anew, we need to invent/discover/reconfigure a new vocabulary with which to shape new concepts or to circulate existing ones better.
Dialogic spaces: a critical policy development perspective of educational leadership qualifications

The critical exploration of policy development processes employed to construct leadership qualifications is the focus of this inquiry. This exploration is made through specific application of the necessary conditions of Habermasian ‘practical discourse’ to current dialogic procedures used to develop policies for principal, supervisory officer and teacher leadership qualifications. This exploratory inquiry illuminates current means of policy development and the enhancements required for the embodiment of the idealizing conditions of practical discourse. Situating practical discourse within policy development practices for educational leadership also broaches the broader question of establishing a suitable moral epistemology for educational institutions in pluralist societies. As such, the current inquiry represents an important step in the progress of educational governance with relevant implications for all regulatory institutions charged with the task of creating policy guidelines that shape educational leadership practices across highly diverse and culturally rich societies.
Distributed Compliance Monitoring of Business Processes over MapReduce Architectures

In the era of IoT, large volumes of event data from different sources are collected in the form of streams. As these logs need to be online processed to extract further knowledge about the underlying business process, it is becoming more and more important to give support to run-time monitoring. In particular, increasing attention has been turned to conformance checking as a way to identify when a sequence of events deviates from the expected behavior. Albeit rather straightforward on a small log file, conformance verification techniques may show poor performance when dealing with big data, making increasingly attractive the possibility to improve scalability through distributed computation. In this paper, we adopt a previously implemented framework for compliance verification (which provides a high-level logic-based notation for the monitoring specification) and we show how it can be efficiently distributed on a set of computing nodes to support scalable run-time monitoring when dealing with large volumes of event logs.
A P 2 P Simulation Model to Support Mobile , Scalable Nearest Neighbor Queries for Location-based Services ∗

With the increasing capabilities of mobile devices, there has been a growing interest in location-based services. Here we present MAPLE, a scalable peer-to-peer nearest neighbor (NN) query simulation system for mobile environments. MAPLE is designed for the efficient sharing of query results cached in the local storage of mobile peers. The most innovative aspect of the MAPLE model is its ability to either fully or partially compute location-dependent nearest neighbor objects on each host. Our novel verification algorithms enable a mobile host to locally determine whether the points of interest obtained from its peers are relevant to its own NN query solution set. Our simulation system emulates all aspects of the MAPLE model including the movement of mobile hosts on a road network and the launch and execution of location-based nearest neighbor queries. The simulation illustrates how cooperative data sharing and distributed processing among mobile peers results in a considerable reduction of the load on remote spatial database servers. Through its peer-to-peer topology, MAPLE exhibits great scalability: the higher the mobile host density, the more queries can be answered by peers.
FORKLIFTS IN WAREHOUSE : A LITERATURE REVIEW

Around 75 % of warehouses retrieve products manually. In these warehouses forklifts are the most expensive machines. The study pays special attention to the travelling of these machines. In order to determine potential travel distance savings, a simulation model is created. The experiments demonstrate that the travel distance of forklifts can be reduced by 27-37 % when RF-based process is implemented comparing with travel distance when paper is used in the process. Research provided herein also defines how to optimize travelling by implementing multiple-tasks approach in WMS. The presented results show that the travel distance of forklifts can be also reduced by 9 % when multiple-tasks approach is used. In addition, it is identified, how stock accuracy affects the travel distance of forklifts. The correlation between the travel distance of forklifts and stock accuracy is presented herein. (Received in February 2011, accepted in August 2011. This paper was with the author 2 months for 1 revision.)
Design of web service single sign-on based on ticket and assertion

The system that integrating the information systems by using web services should provide a unified identity authentication single sign-on scheme for heterogeneous platforms. This paper introduces the characteristics of Kerberos based single sign-on and SAML based single sign-on. A single sign-on scheme which combines the advantages of the two schemes is designed based on analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of the two schemes. The architecture and the designing approach are also presented. And an application is introduced to analysis the operating process of implementing the scheme. Finally, the security is analyzed.
Justice Judgments: Individual Self-Insight and Between- and Within-Person Consistency

We use the method of policy capturing to address three open-ended questions regarding how people judge the fairness of events. First, do people differ in how they judge whether a situation is fair or unfair; second, are fairness judgments stable within-person; and, third, how much insight do people have into how they make fairness judgments? To investigate these questions, we used the method of policy capturing and a representative design that samples situations as well as participants. Forty-nine employees rated the global fairness of 56 performance appraisals sampled from their own organization (N = 2,744 situations), and regression methods were used to infer their judgment policy from their choices. We found that people differed greatly in how they judged fairness but used quite consistent policies across similar situations. Participants also provided self-reports of their judgment policies, and comparisons of these self-reports with actual policies revealed limited levels of self-insight.
Exploring epoch-dependent stochastic residual networks

The recently proposed stochastic residual networks selectively activate or bypass the layers during training, based on independent stochastic choices, each of which following a probability distribution that is fixed in advance. In this paper we present a first exploration on the use of an epoch-dependent distribution, starting with a higher probability of bypassing deeper layers and then activating them more frequently as training progresses. Preliminary results are mixed, yet they show some potential of adding an epoch-dependent management of distributions, worth of further investigation.
All‐trans retinoic acid prevents apoptosis of human marrow CD34+ cells deprived of haematopoietic growth factors

Summary. The regulation of apoptosis plays a key role in haematopoiesis. It has been demonstrated that haematopoietic progenitor cells progressively undergo apoptotic cell death in the absence of appropriate growth factors. We studied the effects of pharmacological doses of all‐transretinoic acid (ATRA) on the apoptosis of human adult marrow CD34+ progenitor cells cultured for 7 d in a serum‐free medium. We quantified CD34+ cells, clonogenic progenitors and 5 week colony‐forming cells (CFC) before and after ATRA exposure. Moreover, we defined the apoptotic status of the CD34+ cell fraction by analysis of phosphatidylserine externalization (using annexin V), the relative membrane permeability to 7‐aminoactinomycin D (7AAD) and the mitochondrial membrane potential [using 3,3′‐dihexyloxacarbocyanine iodide, DiOC6(3)]. In the drastic experimental conditions used, a decrease in viable CD34+ cells, granulocyte–macrophage colony‐forming units (CFU‐GM), erythroid burst‐forming units (BFU‐E) and 5 week CFC were observed. Exposure to ATRA partially prevented the decrease in viable CD34+, without a concomitant effect on the clonogenic and more immature progenitors. ATRA‐treated CD34+ cells displayed changes in apoptotic status compared with control cultures, particularly in lower annexin V‐binding. These results were confirmed using 7AAD and DiOC6(3). Our results demonstrate that ATRA exerts a protective effect on CD34+ cells exposed to such apoptotic stress.
Sampling Enrichment toward Target Structures Using Hybrid Molecular Dynamics-Monte Carlo Simulations

Sampling enrichment toward a target state, an analogue of the improvement of sampling efficiency (SE), is critical in both the refinement of protein structures and the generation of near-native structure ensembles for the exploration of structure-function relationships. We developed a hybrid molecular dynamics (MD)-Monte Carlo (MC) approach to enrich the sampling toward the target structures. In this approach, the higher SE is achieved by perturbing the conventional MD simulations with a MC structure-acceptance judgment, which is based on the coincidence degree of small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) intensity profiles between the simulation structures and the target structure. We found that the hybrid simulations could significantly improve SE by making the top-ranked models much closer to the target structures both in the secondary and tertiary structures. Specifically, for the 20 mono-residue peptides, when the initial structures had the root-mean-squared deviation (RMSD) from the target structure smaller than 7 Å, the hybrid MD-MC simulations afforded, on average, 0.83 Å and 1.73 Å in RMSD closer to the target than the parallel MD simulations at 310K and 370K, respectively. Meanwhile, the average SE values are also increased by 13.2% and 15.7%. The enrichment of sampling becomes more significant when the target states are gradually detectable in the MD-MC simulations in comparison with the parallel MD simulations, and provide >200% improvement in SE. We also performed a test of the hybrid MD-MC approach in the real protein system, the results showed that the SE for 3 out of 5 real proteins are improved. Overall, this work presents an efficient way of utilizing solution SAXS to improve protein structure prediction and refinement, as well as the generation of near native structures for function annotation.
A COMPARISON STUDY FOR THE BER IN BROADBAND FIXED WIRELESS ACCESS SYSTEMS BASED ON USING M-QAM

An analytical model for the bit error rate with different values of M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) for broadband fixed wireless access (BFWA) is presented. The expressions/relations are derived and investigated for different values of M: 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, and 256 to evaluate conditional probability of error, bit error probability and average of the probability of error. The analyses are presented for coherent and non-coherent detection schemes and comparisons between their performances are given. The achieved results show that with keeping a fixed amount of symbols energy for all considered levels/symbols the degradation in BER is remarkable with low SNR with using non-coherent detection compared with utilizing coherent one for all M-ary values. Also, less power is needed in order to achieve the same BER with utilizing non-coherent detection method.
How I Met My Publisher: Casual and Serial Intermediaries in First-Time Authors’ Publication in the Italian Literary Field

Which cultural intermediaries are involved in the search for, and selection of, aspiring authors in the Italian book publishing industry? What do they do and why? I provide an in-depth description of cultural intermediaries involved in book production, based on a study of the Italian literary field, which has been characterised in recent years by an intense search for successful books by first-time authors. I find that two types of intermediaries are involved in the book pre-selection process: casual intermediaries who occasionally build on their position within the field to broker manuscripts between aspiring authors and publishers, and serial intermediaries who choose repeatedly to act as gatekeepers. Both types of intermediaries are rewarded with social capital, whereas serial intermediaries earn symbolic capital as well. Publishers rely on the same intermediaries for the selection of both literary and popular fiction. Cooperation among agents in the field is more common than expected.