Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Children and adults with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia have similar gene expression profiles

Abstract: Objectives: To compare the gene expression pattern in children and adults with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) in order to improve our understanding of the difference in disease biology and prognosis. Methods: The gene expression profiles in diagnostic samples from 29 children and 15 adults with ALL were analysed using the oligonucleotide chip Hu95ver2a, produced by Affymetrix. Results: Unsupervised hierarchical cluster analysis revealed that, in spite of differences in outcome, patients clustered irrespective of age, first by T‐cell or B‐precursor immunophenotype, and second by cytogenetic changes within the B‐precursor group. The expression pattern analysis allowed the reclassification of some samples into the proper cytogenetic group. We also showed that separate clustering of samples with the BCR/ABL translocation could be explained by different breakpoint regions in the BCR. No significant difference in gene expression was observed between samples with and without CDKN2A deletion within the B‐precursor group. Analysis of different age groups revealed a similarity in expression profiles when infants with the MLL translocation and adults over 40 yr of age were compared irrespective of karyotype. Conclusions: In spite of the difference in clinical outcome, the gene expression pattern in children and adults with ALL is very similar and is primarily dependent on immunophenotype and cytogenetic aberrations. However, when age groups are compared, the expression patterns of infants and adults over 40 show a remarkable similarity.
The MARS for Squat, Countermovement, and Standing Long Jump Performance Analyses: Are Measures Reproducible?

Abstract Hébert-Losier, K and Beaven, CM. The MARS for squat, countermovement, and standing long jump performance analyses: are measures reproducible? J Strength Cond Res 28(7): 1849–1857, 2014—Jump tests are often used to assess the effect of interventions because their outcomes are reported valid indicators of functional performance. In this study, we examined the reproducibility of performance parameters from 3 common jump tests obtained using the commercially available Kistler Measurement, Analysis and Reporting Software (MARS). On 2 separate days, 32 men performed 3 squat jumps (SJs), 3 countermovement jumps (CMJs), and 3 standing long jumps (LJs) on a Kistler force-plate. On both days, the performance measures from the best jump of each series were extracted using the MARS. Changes in the mean scores, intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs), and coefficients of variations (CVs) were computed to quantify the between-day reproducibility of each parameter. Moreover, the reproducibility quantifiers specific to the 3 separate jumps were compared using nonparametric tests. Overall, an acceptable between-day reproducibility (mean ± SD, ICC, and CV) of SJ (0.88 ± 0.06 and 7.1 ± 3.8%), CMJ (0.84 ± 0.17 and 5.9 ± 4.1%), and LJ (0.80 ± 0.13 and 8.1 ± 4.1%) measures was found using the MARS, except for parameters directly relating to the rate of force development (i.e., time to maximal force) and change in momentum during countermovement (i.e., negative force impulse) where reproducibility was lower. A greater proportion of the performance measures from the standing LJs had low ICCs and/or high CVs values most likely owing to the complex nature of the LJ test. Practitioners and researchers can use most of the jump test parameters from the MARS with confidence to quantify changes in the functional ability of individuals over time, except for those relating to the rate of force development or change in momentum during countermovement phases of jumps.
Medium and Long-term Power Purchase Plan Based on Bargaining Game

With pushing through energy-saving power generation dispatching in China's power grids,economic and energy-saving targets have become the most important two issues of the decision-making in medium and long-term power generation scheduling.Generally,these two goals are interrelated mutually but sometimes depart from each other.Based on the consideration of fairness,this paper proposes an optimization model aiming at optimizing the power purchase cost and the coal consumption coordinately for the medium and long-term electricity purchase plan.By introducing game theory into the dual-objective programming problem,each objective can be artificially regarded as a player in the game.Thus coordinating the two different targets can be formulated as the process of a bargaining game.Both the economic and energy-saving goals can achieve optimum in the sense of competition and cooperation,which provides that the Nash equilibrium of the bargaining game is acquired based on Nash axiom.Illustrative examples show that the method is promising in the sense of both theory and practice for the decision-making in the medium and long-term electricity purchase plan.
Purification and properties of a thermostable chitinase from Streptomyces thermoviolaceus OPC-520

A chitinase was purified from the culture filtrate of Streptomyces thermoviolaceus OPC-520. The enzyme showed a high optimum temperature (70 to 80 degrees C), a high optimum pH level (8.0 to 10.0), and heat stability. This enzyme showed high sequence homology with chitinases from Serratia marcescens QMB1466 and Bacillus circulans WL-12.
Low-Noise, Low-Jitter, High Detection Efficiency InGaAs/InP Single-Photon Avalanche Diode

We present the performance of a novel InGaAs/InP single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) with high detection efficiency and low noise thanks to the improvement of Zinc diffusion conditions and the optimization of the vertical structure. The 25-μm active-area diameter detector, operated in gated-mode with ON time of tens of nanoseconds, shows very low dark count rate (few kilo-counts per second at 225 K and 5 V of excess bias), 30% photon detection efficiency at 1550 nm, low afterpulsing, and a timing response with less than 90-ps full-width at half maximum and very fast exponential tail (time constant ~ 60 ps). Therefore, this InGaAs/InP SPAD is among the best ones ever reported in the literature.
Value of Drivers' Commuting Travel Time

Value of drivers' commuting travel time is an important parameter when implementing and appraising a road congestion pricing project.Both Logit model and Mixed Logit model whose time parameter is fixed and cost parameter has a lognormal distribution are used to estimate the value of drivers' commuting travel time by using SP data from drivers in Dalian city.The result indicates: the value of t-statistic are significant in both Logit model and Mixed Logit model;Mixed Logit model estimation has a better value of goodness-of-fit index and maximum likelihood than Logit model;Value of drivers' commuting travel time is 24.58RMB/h in Logit model estimation;Value of drivers' commuting travel time has a lognormal distribution whose parameters are 2.73 and 1.09 in Mixed Logit model.The value of drivers' commuting travel time from Mixed Logit model estimation is recommended when implementing and appraising a road congestion pricing project.
Mood Symptoms and Emotional Responsiveness to Threat in School-Aged Children

Clinical accounts of depression underscore its relation to negative emotional experiences; yet few empirical studies examine emotional experiences in adults with depression, with even less work on depression and emotion in children. Using a nonclinical sample of school-aged children (n = 89) ages 8 to 12, this study evaluated whether greater mood symptoms were associated with more or less intense emotional reactions (measured via psychophysiology, subjective report, and behavior) in response to a threat paradigm. Results indicated that greater negative mood symptoms were associated with larger startle magnitude responses during threat, increased self-reports of negative emotion, and greater likelihood of crying and stopping the paradigm prematurely.
Working Paper Series Who Gains More from Which Infrastructure in Rural People ’ s Republic of China ?

The importance of infrastructure in economic development has been increasingly recognized by governments, development institutions, and the research community. Despite a sizable literature on its efficiency and growth effects, the distributive impacts of infrastructure have been largely overlooked, with a few recent exceptions. This is regrettable, particularly given the overwhelming concern about inequality and inclusive growth all over the world. This paper will: (i) demonstrate the deficiency of conventional approaches to modelling inequality; (ii) extend the Mincer earnings function so that both growth and distributive effects of infrastructure can be evaluated; and (iii) fit the extended model to a large sample of individual-level data from rural People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the period of 1989– 2011, providing estimates of growth and the distributive impacts of specific physical infrastructures—telephone, tap water and electricity. All these infrastructures are found to promote rural income growth, helping narrow the rural–urban gap, which is the dominant component of the PRC’s overall inequality. Further, the poor are found to gain more than the rich, implying benign distributive effects of these infrastructures. In addition, males, the more experienced, the better educated, and to some extent the married benefited more than their counterparts, especially from telephones. Finally, some of these subpopulation effects have become more significant in recent years and are larger in central PRC, possibly because infrastructure helps open up more opportunities for those with better education or more experience. The empirical results are robust to different definitions of the experience variable, consideration of the mortality selection bias, reconstruction of the telephone data, and possible reverse causality. JEL Classification: D31, H52, H54 ADBI Working Paper 540 Wan and Zhang
Knowledge Economy and the Commons

Knowledge is increasingly thought of as a common good. This is exhibited in the fact that many central economies are moving towards economic paradigms where knowledge plays a fundamental role. This paper explores the confluence between both processes, asking in what ways an economic model based on the knowledge commons can open up new socioeconomic scenarios in the face of overwhelming neoliberal financialization.
Reduced Polyspermic Penetration in Porcine Oocytes Inseminated in a New In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) System: Straw IVF1

Abstract High incidence of polyspermy is still a major problem in the in vitro fertilization (IVF) of porcine oocytes matured in vitro. This study was designed to examine whether embryo cryopreservation straws can be used to conduct IVF in porcine oocytes. The efficiency of this system was further compared with traditional microdrop IVF. Immature oocytes were aspirated from antral follicles and matured in vitro. After maturation, oocytes were inseminated either in straws or in microdrops with frozen-thawed boar spermatozoa. For straw IVF, sperm concentration and the presence of air columns between insemination segment and oil column were examined. Sperm-oocyte binding and cortical granules (CGs) before and after sperm penetration were examined by confocal microscopy. When various sperm concentrations were used for IVF in the straws with air columns, it was found that 5 × 106 cells/ml of sperm concentration was the optimal concentration; a high penetration rate (94.0%) and normal fertilization (oocytes with both male and female pronuclei) rate (38.2%) were obtained. Increasing sperm concentration to 10 × 106 cells/ml increased polyspermic penetration (61.9%) without affecting sperm penetration (86.9%). Reducing sperm concentration to 1 × 106 cells/ml reduced polyspermic penetration (25.6%), but sperm penetration rate (69.9%) was also reduced. When IVF was conducted in the straws with or without air columns, and in the microdrops, it was found that sperm penetration in the straws with air columns (96.5%) was significantly (p < 0.05) higher than that in the straws without air columns (81.7%) and in the microdrop (72.9%). However, the incidence of polyspermic penetration in the straws with air columns (34.2%) and without air columns (36.6%) was significantly (p < 0.05) lower than that (52.4%) in the microdrops. The number of spermatozoa bound to the oocytes was increased gradually in the straws but not in the microdrops in which more spermatozoa bound to the oocytes soon after insemination. CG exocytosis was more complete and faster in the oocytes inseminated in the straws than in the microdrops. These findings indicate that IVF of porcine oocytes in the straws provides a better condition in which more oocytes are fertilized normally than that in the microdrop IVF.
Load balanced and energy efficient cluster head election in Wireless Sensor Networks

Even though clustering algorithms provide energy efficiency into large-scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), but uneven load balancing still occurs in general. Not only does this problem will not distribute energy consumption and balancing traffic loads equally within network, but this problem further makes the network cannot stay alive much longer due to short-lived cluster heads. The cluster heads which are responsible for most activities including inter-cluster and intra-cluster communications will highly consume energy more than the other types of nodes. Consequently, this study presents a cluster head election called Grid Sectoring base-on distribution of load balancing and energy consumption over both uniform and non-uniform deployment. The study partitions a squared-grid area into equal-sized clusters in order to equal number of member nodes. Along with the selection of cluster heads located nearest to a center of their clusters will equally distribute load balancing even more. Further, not only the results verified that the proposed algorithm could distribute load balancing with energy efficiency better than LEACH, ACHS, and EACHS, but the results also implied that the proposed could extend the network performance and the network lifetime even more.
Mucosal sulfhydryl compounds evaluation by in vivo electron spin resonance spectroscopy in mice with experimental colitis

Background: Sulfhydryl (SH) compounds are essential in maintaining mucosal integrity in the gastrointestinal tract. A decrease in colonic mucosal SH compounds affects the redox status of the mucosa, resulting in vulnerability to further attacks. Therefore, there is a strong need for in vivo evaluation of SH compounds in the colonic mucosa. Aims: The aim of the current study was to establish a method of evaluating levels of SH compounds in the colonic mucosa of live animals before and after induction of colitis. Methods: Murine experimental colitis was induced by instillation of trinitrobenzene sulphonic acid (TNBS) dissolved in 50% ethanol into the colon via the anus. For evaluation of mucosal SH compounds in the colon, 3-carbamoyl-2,2,5,5-tetramethylpyrrolidine-1-oxyl (carbamoyl-PROXYL), a stable nitroxide radical, was instilled into the colonic lumen of live mice and the spin clearance rate was measured by L-band electron spin resonance (ESR) spectroscopy. Results: Morphological study showed that mucosal damage was severe one or two days after TNBS instillation. The colonic mucosa started to regenerate at four days, and looked normal at seven days, after induction of colitis. The spin clearance rate of carbamoyl-PROXYL decreased significantly at 0.5, 1, 2, and 4 days after induction of colitis compared with mice before TNBS instillation. Surprisingly, although the colonic mucosa looked normal seven days after TNBS administration, the spin clearance rate still remained significantly slow. The spin clearance rate returned to normal 14 days after induction of colitis. The change in in vivo spin clearance rate was consistent with the time dependent change in mucosal reduced glutathione, a major component of SH compounds. Conclusion: The spin clearance rate obtained by L-band ESR spectroscopy in combination with carbamoyl-PROXYL can give an estimate of the level of colonic mucosal SH compounds in live animals and is useful for evaluating the mucosal defence system against oxidative stress.
Essays on banking sector’s dynamics, expectations, preferences and impact

The dissertation consists of four chapters that represent separate papers in the area of banking sector. The first chapter explores the impact of the new policy mix adopted by the CBRT after the global financial crisis on credit growth volatility, which is closely monitored as one of the key indicators for financial stability in Turkey. The second chapter employs a new unique database and introduces new uncertainty and disagreement measures for the long-term inflation and real rate expectations. The third chapter investigates the factors that affect the banking sector’s reserve maintenance pattern within the reserve requirement maintenance period with the use of bank level data. The final chapter focuses on the impact of banking sector indicators on the sovereign risk premium of countries with different levels of development and current account balance structure, and during periods with different global risk perceptions.
Improving Content-Invariance in Gated Autoencoders for 2D and 3D Object Rotation

Content-invariance in mapping codes learned by GAEs is a useful feature for various relation learning tasks. In this paper we show that the content-invariance of mapping codes for images of 2D and 3D rotated objects can be substantially improved by extending the standard GAE loss (symmetric reconstruction error) with a regularization term that penalizes the symmetric cross-reconstruction error. This error term involves reconstruction of pairs with mapping codes obtained from other pairs exhibiting similar transformations. Although this would principally require knowledge of the transformations exhibited by training pairs, our experiments show that a bootstrapping approach can sidestep this issue, and that the regularization term can effectively be used in an unsupervised setting.
UPCASE - A Method for Self-Assessing the Capability of the Usability Process in Small Organizations

Designing usable products is important to provide a competitive edge through user satisfaction. A first step to establish or improve a usability process is to perform a process assessment. As this may be costly, an alternative for organizations seeking for lighter assessments, especially small organizations, may be self-assessments. They can be carried out by an organization on its own to assess the capability of its process. Although there are specific assessment methods to assess the usability process, none of them provides a self-assessment method considering the specific characteristics of small organizations. The objective of this research is to propose a method for self-assessing the capability of the usability process in small organizations. The method consists of a usability process reference model, a measurement framework, an assessment model, and a self-assessment process supported by an online tool. Based on systematic mapping studies on usability capability/maturity models and software process self-assessment methods, we identified the specific requirements of such a method. The UPCASE method was systematically developed using a multi-method approach based on the ISO/IEC TR 29110 and ISO/TR 18529 standard. The method has been applied and evaluated with respect to its reliability, usability, comprehensibility and internal consistency through a series of case studies. First results indicate that the method may be reliable. Feedback also indicates that the method is easy to use and understandable even for non-software process improvement experts. The UPCASE method is a first step to the self-assessment of the usability process in small organizations supporting the systematic establishment and improvement of the usability process contributing to the improvement of the usability of their software products.
Design of Combinational Circuits by Cyclic Combinational Method for Low Power VLSI

In modern scenario as we are going for low power VLSI design, an useful technique is to design the combinational part of any circuit in cyclic way. Combinational circuits are generally considered as acyclic structured. However, cyclic loops can be introduced in combinational circuits. The main aim of cyclic circuit is to introduce structural feedback & to avoid the logical feedback in order to get combinational primary output. The study of cyclic circuit includes functional analysis i.e. to determine what values will appear, the timing analysis which determine when these values will appear and the area, as a measure of the number of transistors in the final fabrication. The objective of the study is to design & verification of different combinational circuits in cyclic combinational method by optimizing the area, power and delay. Detailed study of circuit model, its functional and temporal behavior, Synthesis of circuit using cyclic combinational method, Simulation of circuit using standard simulator, Analysis framework including area, power, timing consideration are studied in this work.
The retinal projection to the superior colliculus in the cat: A quantitative study with HRP

The projections of cat retinal ganglion cells to the superior colliculus (SC) were examined using the method of retrograde axonal transport of horseradish peroxidase (HRP). Several injections of HRP were made in a single SC after the visual projection to the injection sites had been established physiologically. The HRP injections resulted in a homogeneous distribution of labelled ganglion cells in whole mount preparations of the retinae of both eyes. In the eye contralateral to the injected colliculus, ganglion cells with a crossed projection were labelled in both nasal and temporal retina; in the ipsilateral eye, ganglion cells with uncrossed projection were labelled only in the temporal retina. Analysis of the counterstained retinal whole mounts indicated that at least 50% of all ganglion cells in the nasal retina and 26% in the temporal retina have a crossed projection to SC, and that 24% of all ganglion cells of the temporal retina have an uncrossed projection to the SC.
Effectiveness of information skills training and mediated searching: qualitative results from the EMPIRIC project.

OBJECTIVES To explore library staff and health professionals' views on the effectiveness of information skills training and librarian mediated searching as methods of providing information for patient care. This is the second article describing the Effective Methods of Providing InfoRmation for patIent Care (EMPIRIC) project. The first paper, in a previous issue of this journal (Brettle et al. The costs and effectiveness of information skills training and mediated searching: quantitative results for the EMPIRIC project. Health Information and Libraries Journal 2006, 23, 239-247) describes the quantitative results. METHODS A questionnaire survey to library staff and health professionals in the North West. Data was collected on perceptions of services, satisfaction and service usage. Statistical data were analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and qualitative data using thematic analysis. RESULTS Both information skills training and mediated searches are perceived by library staff and health professionals to be effective. There is strong support for mediated searches carried out on behalf of the health professional and information skills training to enable them to carry out their own searches. The results provide insights into the effectiveness of the services and the factors that make them effective. CONCLUSIONS Evidence and stakeholders views support the provision of both information skills training and mediated search services. Both services are valued by users who see them as complementary methods of obtaining information depending on their needs at different times.