Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rising rates of colorectal cancer among younger Iranians: is diet to blame?

BACKGROUND Colorectal cancer (crc) is one of the most prevalent cancers in the world. Although the incidence of crc is currently very low in the older Iranian population compared with Western populations, young Iranians show a rising trend of crc-that is, the age-adjusted rate is close in the young Iranian population compared with the U.S. population, and the rate in older Iranians is much lower. METHODS To assess a putative relationship between diet and a rising rate of crc in younger Iranians, a combined text word and mesh heading search strategy identified relevant studies through Google Scholar and medline. RESULTS A critical look at diet among Iranians shows major issues that might be raising the risk for crc. There are also scenarios other than diet for the rise, such as the young age structure of the country. However, the actual scenario is more complex. CONCLUSIONS In Iran, crc is one of the most common incident cancers and a common cause of cancer death. Primary and secondary prevention-with attention to a healthy lifestyle, physical activity, and screening-should be enhanced in the general population.
Bothered bloggings and troubled tweets: constructions of stress and concerns for early-career academics

While recent studies suggest that stress is becoming more prominent for academics, very little research has been conducted on understanding the realities of stress for early-career academics. Through the employment of social constructionist epistemology and theory as a framework for research, our study examines how early-career academics language and construct experiences of stress and concern. We employed a constructionist thematic analysis. This involved selecting a sample of blogs and Twitter microblogs to code and identifying important themes, in relation to stress and concern. Through a preliminary analysis of blogs, we found that there were recurring concerns on work-life balance, a competitive culture that eroded collegiality and social support, and there were worries about the insecurity of work. Our analysis of Twitter tweets found a range of concerns. There were issues of health and wellbeing, being unfairly discriminated against and not recognised by senior academic staff, structural barriers in the application and access of research, publishing issues and advice in relation to accessibility of research outputs, a governmentality on the standards of academic conduct, and concerns on flexibility in relation to time and work life balance. The findings have implications for higher education institutions in the support and career development of early career academics.
A hierarchical opportunistic routing with stability information for mobile ad hoc networks

In ad hoc networks, terminals form a network with decentralized and self-organizing manners. Although this can surely extend its potentials, it also suffers from unstable and unreliable communication environments. As concerns this, a broadcast-based routing protocol called opportunistic routing (OR) has been proposed. ORs do not establish any specific route from a source terminal to a destination terminal unlike conventional unicast routing protocols. This characteristic contributes to obtain path diversity and improves end-to-end reliability with multiple forwarding paths. However, the metrics to select appropriate forwarders to a destination terminal greatly affect its performance and grasp of comprehensive terminal status still remains as an issue to be discussed. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical opportunistic routing with stability information of terminals to enable more efficient and reliable forwarding in ad hoc networks to address the issue. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed method has better performance than the conventional protocols.
A Study Of Farm-Level Input Demands Without Seed Selectivity Adjustment on Rice Farms in The Cimanuk River Basin, Jawa Barat

This paper is an attempt to analyze how a rice farmer responds to economic stimulus through allocating his resources reflected in elasticities of input demands. Specifically, in the model seed selectivity adjustment is not taken into account, that is, modern and traditional variety farmer elasticities are separately computed and then compared. The sample farmers were drawn from six desas in the area of the Cimanuk River Basin, Jawa Barat, which has been and still is currently dominated by rice farming. The results show that the own-price elasticities of demand for nitrogen fertilizer of TV (traditional variety) farmers are higher than that of MV (modern variety) farmers. These elasticities tend to decline overtime.
Survey of Wellcome researchers and their attitudes to open research

This study, commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, investigates researchers’ attitudes and behaviour towards open research, examining the sharing and reuse of research data, code, and open access publications, in order to identify practical actions the Wellcome Trust can take to remove or mitigate barriers and maximise the opportunities for practising open science. More specifically, the study gathered evidence on: · researchers’ views on various aspects of open research · current practices in open access publishing · views on future developments of publishing · current practices and experiences in data sharing and reuse · barriers to sharing and motivations for making data available · current practices and experiences in code sharing and reuse · barriers and motivations for code sharing Evidence was gathered via an online survey with 583 respondents (25.6% of invited Wellcome Trust grant holders) in July-August 2016, and focus group discussions with 22 participants in early September 2016. Respondents formed an excellent representation of the different categories of grant holders. Results were contrasted against results from a parallel survey with researchers funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as a group of social science researchers who carry out research within the context of a funder with a mandatory data sharing policy and data infrastructure to support it. Both funders have different open access publishing requirements, with Wellcome having a defined open access repository, Europe PubMed Central and grant holders expected to make their publications available within 6 months; ESRC-funded researchers are required to only make publications open access within 12 months. Also the funding models for open access, via institutional block grants and individual grants, differ. This parallel survey was carried out in August-September 2016 and received 259 responses. Both surveys provided very detailed and granular quantifiable information to test existing perceptions and knowledge about these topics for a specific research community. The detailed findings can serve as baseline evidence to develop very specific actions targeted at different groups of researchers. Survey data and focus group transcripts have been published via the UK Data service.
Pure segment selection as speaker diarization post-processing

Audio diarization is the process of assigning audio channel temporal segments to the appropriate generating source according to specific acoustic properties. Sources can be speech, music, background noise etc. Speaker diarization systems confronts the problem of segmentation and labeling of a conversation while no prior knowledge on the speakers is available. As human expert segmentation is time and money consuming; it is worthwhile to develop an automatic diarization system as a replacement to human expert segmentation for speaker recognition applications. However, diarization systems has more false detected segments than can be allowed for speaker model training. This work focuses on the reduction of the false detected segments and in the selection of "pure" segments which contains only the required speaker data. For this purpose a measure of "purity" and the methodology for the extraction of the "pure" segments are required. In this paper a pure segments selection algorithm employing an expert system decision is presented. The proposed system is based on majority vote and normalized maximum likelihood of the segments. The pure segments selection algorithm relies on the accuracy of the diarization system which is based on Self Organizing Maps (SOM) as speaker models. One hundred and eight conversations from LDC America Call Home database are used for evaluation. The proposed approach shows a DER improvement of 29% relative to the DER achieved by the original diarization system.
Evolutionary Clues to the Molecular Function of Fanconi Anemia Genes

Fanconi anemia (FA) is an autosomal recessively inherited disease with diverse clinical symptoms including developmental anomalies, predisposition to neoplasia, and a deficiency of hematopoietic stem cells resulting in progressive aplastic anemia. FA is genetically heterogeneous with at least 8 genes being implicated on the basis of functional complementation studies. To date, six FA genes are known: FANCA, FANCC, FANCD2, FANCE, FANCF and FANCG, all of which encode orphan proteins sharing no homology to each other nor to any other known protein. In addition, they do not appear to possess any domains with homology to currently known protein domains, which makes a prediction about their molecular action difficult. Studying the molecular evolution of FA genes and their products using sensitive database search methods such as PSI-BLAST may provide novel insight into the nature of the FA pathway and its relationship to hematopoiesis, embryonic development and the origin of malignancies. Preliminary results of such an approach show that at least one FA protein, FANCG, may contain a known domain, suggesting that this protein is a member of the family of tetratricopeptide repeat-containing proteins.
Extended Thiopurine Metabolite Assessment During 6‐Thioguanine Therapy for Immunomodulation in Crohn's Disease

The proposed metabolic advantage of 6‐thioguanine (6‐TG) is the direct conversion into the pharmacologically active 6‐thioguaninenucleotides (6‐TGN). The authors assessed metabolic characteristics of 6‐TG treatment in patients with Crohn's disease (N = 7) on therapy with 20 mg 6‐TG. 6‐thioguanine‐monophosphate (6‐TGMP), 6‐thioguanine‐diphosphate (6‐TGDP), and 6‐thioguanine‐triphosphate (6‐TGTP) were measured by high‐performance liquid chromatography analysis in erythrocytes. Thiopurine S‐methyltransferase activity and total 6‐TGN levels were determined by standard methods. High interindividual variance in metabolite measurements was observed. Main metabolites were 6‐TGTP (median = 531 pmol/8 × 108 red blood cells) and 6‐TGDP (median = 199 pmol/8 × 108 red blood cells). Traces of 6‐TGMP (median = 39 pmol/8 × 108 red blood cells) and 6‐TG (2 patients) could be detected. 6‐TGN levels correlated with 6‐TGTP levels (r = 0.929, P = .003) and with the sum of separate nucleotides (r = 0.929, P = .003). No correlations were established between TPMT activity (median = 13 pmol/h/107) and 6‐TG metabolites. The 1‐step metabolism of 6‐TG still leads to high interindividual variance in metabolite concentrations. Total 6‐TGN level monitoring may suffice for clinical practice.
Intracellular Localization of PNA in Human Cells upon its Introduction by Electroporation

Peptide nucleic acid (PNA) is one of the most useful DNA analogs in a wide variety of gene analysis in human cells. In order to exhibit its maximal functions, PNA must be localized to a desired place (e.g., nucleus, cytoplasm and other organelles). Here, we introduced PNAs into HeLa cells by electroporation and examined their localization at various time points. The PNA which binds to the mitochondrial COII gene was initially accumulated in the nucleus, and thereafter mostly transferred to cytoplasm. This time-dependent intracellular localization of PNA is ascribed to the breakdown of the nuclear envelope in the cell division. On the other hand, another PNA that binds to telomere repeat sequence mostly remained in the nucleus, even after the cell division occurred. The retention of this PNA in the nucleus was further enhanced when it was conjugated with Cy3.
OPEN INNOVATION AS A FACILITATOR FOR CORPORATE EXPLORATION

While open innovation is a management concept of increased attention in academia as well as in industry, studies have also shown that the implementation of open innovation can be a rather difficult and challenging process. Installed organisational structures, culture and knowledge are often portrayed as hinder for change. This study provides an in-depth case study, based on 50 interviews, of how a large pharmaceutical corporation implemented an open innovation initiative. Instead of considering existing internal knowledge and structures as problematic, these resources were rather utilised as cornerstones for value offerings in open innovation. Furthermore, employees’ engagement in open innovation resulted in a more open and dynamic climate, as well as an improved entrepreneurial image of the corporation internally as well as externally. The study contributes to the open innovation literature by advancing the understanding about the organisational implications of implementing open innovation in practice. As such, it provides valuable insights for researchers and practitioners about implementing open innovation in practice.
IT Governance in the Digital Era

As companies progressively rely on mobile, social media, cloud and big data in their business, the very nature of IT function within an organisation changes from providing reliable and cost-effective IT support to actively searching new ways to leverage technology and create customer value. For scholars and practitioners alike, the question then arises as to which extent the well-established IT governance models still apply in the new digital context and, if they no longer do, what new models can be proposed to account for the changing demands placed on IT. Through an explorative case study, this paper provides insights on emerging IT governance models within a digital enterprise. Our findings seem to suggest that the role of IT has expanded beyond a robust infrastructure provider to the one a strategy and technology partner. In order to harness the full power of IT in this capacity, companies need to make their IT department more business-aware, incentivize lateral communication and cross-functional learning, and promote integration of previously disconnected functional units.
Maternal depressive symptoms and early childhood cognitive development: a meta-analysis

Background Previous findings have been mixed regarding the relationship between maternal depressive symptoms and child cognitive development. The objective of this study was to systematically review relevant literature and to perform a meta-analysis. Method Three electronic databases (PubMed, EMBASE, PsycINFO) were searched. Initial screening was conducted independently by two reviewers. Studies selected for detailed review were read in full and included based on a set of criteria. Data from selected studies were abstracted onto a standardized form. Meta-analysis using the inverse variance approach and random-effects models was conducted. Results The univariate analysis of 14 studies revealed that maternal depressive symptoms are related to lower cognitive scores among children aged ⩽56 months (Cohen's d = −0.25, 95% CI −0.39 to −0.12). The synthesis of studies controlling for confounding variables showed that the mean cognitive score for children 6–8 weeks post-partum whose mothers had high depressive symptoms during the first few weeks postpartum was approximately 4.2 units lower on the Mental Developmental Index (MDI) of the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (BSID) compared with children with non-symptomatic mothers (B̂ = −4.17, 95% CI −8.01 to −0.32). Conclusions The results indicated that maternal depressive symptoms are related to lower cognitive scores in early infancy, after adjusting for confounding factors. An integrated approach for supporting child cognitive development may include program efforts that promote maternal mental health in addition to family economic wellbeing, responsive caregiving, and child nutrition.
Folded Planar Antenna Fed by LSE-NRD Guide at 60GHz

A technique for construction of a millimeter-wave antenna has been developed based on the high permittivity LSE-NRD guide technology. The novelty of the present technique lies in use of a simple radiator, which consists of tapered dielectric strip with the length of about a guided wavelength and has the broad radiation pattern. The folded planar antenna for the wireless LAN systems and car warning sensers has been fabricated by locating the radiator in the focal point of the cylindrical parabolic reflector. A pencil beam pattern with the half-power beam widths of 2° in H-plane and 7° in E-plane can be obtained.
Bidding Behaviour in Multi-Unit Auctions: Three Essays

Essays in Economic Behaviour in Multi-Unit Auctions Rebecca Elskamp University of Guelph, 2016 Advisor: Professor Alan Ker This thesis contains three essays on the topic of multi-unit auctions. The first essay develops and experimentally tests multi-unit auction theory to identify the effects of “scaling up” multi-unit auction environments on individual bidding behaviour. A uniquely tractable environment is developed that leads to the construction of uniform auctions of different scales, where the prediction is that risk neutral bidders’ bids on the last unit they demand are independent of scale. Two main effects were observed in the experimental data. Regardless of scale, bidders were found to bid more aggressively than predicted by the theory. Secondly, small scale effects were observed, as bids were more aggressive in the small scale relative to the larger scale treatment. The theoretical consequences of risk aversion, joy of winning, and anticipated regret are analyzed to explain these deviations from predictions. The second essay examines the effect of two simultaneous policy changes, implemented in the Ontario dairy quota auction, to determine whether these changes were successful in achieving performance goals. Results of a series of regression models indicate that these two policy changes had no effect on clearing prices. Rather, these two policy changes were found to significantly reduce revenue from quantity purchased, total quantity transferred and total quantity offered. The combination of a significant reduction in bid prices and individual quantity demanded, paralleled by an increase in individual quantity offered appears to have been the underlying mechanisms, in terms of individual bidding/offering behaviour, through which the these two policies failed to meet performance goals. The third essay provides empirical evidence on how economic agents converge to optimality. Learning direction theory is applied to bidding behaviour from the Ontario dairy quota auction, following a change in pricing rule from uniform to discriminatory. Two dimensions of bidding behaviour are examined at the individual bidder level, bid prices and number of price-quantity bid pairs. Adjustments in bidding behaviour are broadly consistent with the ex-post rationality. Experience acquired under the discriminatory pricing rule is found to have diminishing effects on adjustments made to bidding behaviour, consistent with bidders converging towards optimality.
Noise properties of ideal memristors

This work investigates how the presence of thermal noise influences the response of simple networks incorporating an ideal memristor. First we study how a single noiseless memristor modulates noise at its input and how it manifests at its output. Then we extend our analysis to a generic resistor-memristor and capacitor-memristor network. The results reported are based on strong assumptions regarding the type of noise and the instantaneous linearity of the memristor networks, and should be viewed only as trend indicators.
Automating Aggregation for Software Quality Modeling

Software Quality model is a well-accepted way for assessing high-level quality characteristics (e.g., maintainability) by aggregation from low-level metrics. Aggregation method in a software quality model denotes how to aggregate low-level metrics to high-level quality characteristics. Most of the existing quality models adopt the weighted linear aggregation method. The main drawback of weighted linear method is that it suffers from a lack of consensus in how to decide the correct weights. To address this issue, we present an automated aggregation method which adopts a kind of probabilistic weight instead of the subjective weight in previous aggregation methods. In particular, we leverage a topic modeling technique to estimate the probabilistic weight by learning from a software benchmark.In this manner, our approach can enable automated quality assessment by using the learned probabilistic relationship without manual effort. To evaluate the effectiveness of proposed aggregation approach, we conduct an empirical study on assessing one typical high-level quality characteristic (i.e., maintainability) which is regarded as an important characteristic defined in ISO 9126. The achieved results on 10 open source projects with totally 269 versions show that our method can reveal maintainability well and it outperforms a weighted linear aggregation method baseline in most of the projects.
The relationship between the practice of transformational leadership and a high-performance culture

The primary aim of this study was to determine the relationship between the practice of transformational leadership and a high-performance culture.The study hypothesized a positive relationship between transformational leadership and a high-performance culture. It also examined the predictive value of transformational leadership behaviours to the different dimensions of a high-performance culture. The survey included a sample of 209 leaders fromvarious South African organisations. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ5X Form 5X) was completed by these leaders and their subordinates. The High-performance Culture Questionnaire was completed by the subordinates only. Findings indicated positive correlations between transformational leadership and a highperformance culture. Furthermore, differences were found to exist in the predictive value of transformational leadership behaviours to the various dimensions of a high-performance culture. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings were discussed.
Determinants of Child Survival Chances in Rural Ethiopia

In a country like Ethiopia that has poor social conditions and more than 50% of its population illiterate and under the poverty line, the level of communicable diseases is found to be the highest magnitude (CIA World Fact book, 2009). So the importance of this study is to reveal the effect of socioeconomic, environmental, demographic and health related variables on child mortality in rural Ethiopia. The data set used originates from the demographic and health survey (DHS) conducted in Ethiopia 2005. The analysis was conducted using Cox proportional hazards model which analyses the effects of covariates on child mortality and other statistical methods. The study shows that source of drinking water, birth order number, sex of child, breast feeding status, wealth index of household, father’s education, mother’s education and family size have significant contribution on child mortality. Since educated parents have enough Knowledge on how to care their children, parents should be educated as well as mothers should be encouraged to breast feed their children. Furthermore, marriage at the right age is recommended and integrated child care and family planning programs are paramount. Government should improve society services like providing clean water which contributes to better children health status.