Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pemetrexed in advanced non-small-cell lung cancer

Importance of the field: Current therapeutic options for advanced non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) yield relatively modest improvements in survival leading to an ongoing search for new active treatment agents. In the past decade, pemetrexed has had an increasingly established role in the treatment of advanced NSCLC in both first- and second-line settings. Areas covered in this review: Currently available published data on mechanism of action, pharmacokinetics, safety and efficacy of pemetrexed in the treatment of advanced NSCLC are described. Peer-reviewed publications on the development of pemetrexed and its clinical use in NSCLC were reviewed (1995 – 2009). What the reader will gain: Pemetrexed is a multitargeted antifolate cytotoxic agent. Key Phase II and Phase III trials are described that have shown pemetrexed's efficacy in both the first- and second-line treatment of advanced NSCLC. The efficacy of pemetrexed seems to vary between squamous and nonsquamous histologies. Possible reasons for this are explored. Additionally, the potential role of pemetrexed in maintenance therapy is discussed. Take home message: Pemetrexed is an effective treatment for advanced NSCLC, with an overall favorable toxicity profile. There is growing evidence that, in patients treated with pemetrexed, nonsquamous tumors have improved outcomes compared to squamous cell tumors. Pemetrexed may also have a role in maintenance therapy for NSCLC.
Time-Evolving SED of MKN421: A Multi-Band View and Polarimetric Signatures

The most detailed temporal studies of the emission from blazars are usually done by trying to obtain a dense, simultaneous coverage of the source over a large multi-wavelenght observational campaign. Although it is well know that correlations between multi-band emission present sizeable temporal lags in their correlated variability, such properties are usually neglected in the majority of observational studies, which model the evolution of source parameters over time by either building time-averaged SEDs (when data is scarce) or considering strictly simultaneous snapshots of the source along the spectrum. By making use of the resources and large database made available through the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC), we present a novel approach to the modelling of blazar emission whereby the multi-epoch SEDs for Mkn 421 are modelled considering the temporal lags between bands (both in short and long-timescales), as obtained by a detailed cross-correlation analysis, spanning data from radio to VHE gamma-rays from 2008 to 2014. In addition to that, long-term optical polarization data is used to aid and complement our physical interpretation of the state and evolution of the source.
Responses to work intensification: does generation matter?

Work intensification can be an organisational tool to increase the productivity of an existing workforce. We investigate employee reactions to three levels of sustained extensive work intensification (long work hours over two consecutive time periods) of the two most prevalent generational groups in the labour market: Generation X and Baby Boomers. Boomers have been characterised as ‘workaholics’ who ‘live to work’, while Gen Xers are ‘slackers’ who ‘work to live’. We investigate, using a nationally representative sample of employees, whether these generational differences in work attitudes impact employee reactions (measured by employee reports of job satisfaction and work–life balance) to sustained extensive work intensification. The results show that perceptions of job satisfaction and work–life balance are reduced by sustained extensive work intensification but the differences between the two generations are minimal, suggesting that organisations do not need to tailor their employment practices to fit the work values of different generations.
Acquisition of Divested Assets and Shareholders' Wealth

The divesting of corporate assets has become quite popular. Previous studies of divestitures have found conflicting impacts upon shareholders' wealth of the buying firm. This study measures the impacts of product-line relatedn ess between the acquiring firm and the divested unit and the financia l weakness of the selling firm upon the abnormal returns to the acqui ring firm. Although the study finds that the impact of financial stre ngth of the seller is ambiguous, the purchase of related assets produ ces more wealth than does the purchase of unrelated divested units. F urther, firms which purchase related divested units have larger propo rtions of insider ownership. Copyright 1987 by American Finance Association.
Cohort Patterns in Canadian Earnings: Assessing the Role of Skill Premia in Inequality Trends

This paper documents the pattern of change in age-earnings profiles across cohorts and evaluates its implications. Using synthetic cohorts from the Survey of Consumer Finances over the period 1971 to 1993, we show that the age-earning profiles of Canadian men have been deteriorating for more recent cohorts in comparison to older cohorts. We find this pattern for both high school and university educated workers. In no case do we find evidence that the return to gaining experience has been increasing over time, nor do we find increased within-cohort dispersion of earnings. We view these findings as conflicting with the hypothesis that increased skill-premium largely explains the observed increase in dispersion of male weekly earnings in Canada. When looking at the pattern for women, we find only minor differences in the age-earning relationships across cohorts.
An experimental study of auditor analytical review judgements

This paper provides evidence as to how five factors highlighted in the current UK auditing standard are taken into account by auditors in analytical review (AR) judgements. While the relative importance of particular cues was generally found to be consistent with the standard, certain factors were taken into account only to a marginal extent. Little evidence of configural cue usage was identified. The study also provides evidence of a tendency towards conservatism in the way auditors approach AR. The results suggest both that the potential to substitute AR for other substantive procedures may be realised only imperfectly and that the issue of configural reasoning should be addressed in the auditing standard.
Valuation of the Woopo Wetland in Korea: a contingent valuation study

A contingent valuation (CV) method was performed to estimate the conservation value of the Woopo Wetland, Ramsar site, in Korea. The CV survey was rigorously designed to comply with the guidelines for best-practiced CV studies. Respondents overall accepted the hypothetical market and were willing to pay a significant amount (2,731 to 3,960 Korean won = USD 2.10 to 3.05), on average, per household annually to conserve the wetland. These findings have important implications for efforts to consider environmental quality in policy decisions.
Nonelite Response to State-Sanctioned Terror

A LTHOUGH mass-based civil violence has long been a focus of inquiry in the social sciences, it is only recently that violence by the state against its own constituents has been accorded explicit theoretical attention as well. As Nardin (1971), Gurr (1985a), and others have noted, state-sanctioned repressive violence has more typically been treated as largely reactive rather than proactive in character, with its forms and dimensions being determined primarily by the scope and intensity of opposition violence. Recently, however, scholars have begun to question this strictly reactive image of repressive violence, as they have explored such questions as the political forms (Duvall and Stohl 1983; Sloan 1983, 1984) and empirical dimensions (Wolpin 1986; Harff 1986; Harff and Gurr 1988) of state-sanctioned terror, the socioeconomic and political conditions that are conducive to its emergence (Lopez 1984, 1986; Gurr 1985a,b, 1986; Duvall and Stohl 1983; Jackson et al. 1978), and its varied manifestations in such nations as Brazil (Krane 1983), Argentina (Pion-Berlin 1984), Guatemala (Aguilera Peralta 1980; Premo 1981), the Philippines (Zwick 1984), and South Africa (Denemark and Lehman 1984). This paper represents an attempt to add to this body of research by presenting a model of the impact of state-sanctioned terror on the political loyalty, support, and behavior of nonelites. To date, much of the research on state-sanctioned terror has focused on motivations and
Uniform design based SVM model selection for face recognition

Support vector machine (SVM) has been proved to be a powerful tool for face recognition. The generalization capacity of SVM depends on the model with optimal hyperparameters. The computational cost of SVM model selection results in application difficulty in face recognition. In order to overcome the shortcoming, we utilize the advantage of uniform design--space filling designs and uniformly scattering theory to seek for optimal SVM hyperparameters. Then we propose a face recognition scheme based on SVM with optimal model which obtained by replacing the grid and gradient-based method with uniform design. The experimental results on Yale and PIE face databases show that the proposed method significantly improves the efficiency of SVM model selection.
Assessing Project Risk

Finding the appropriate discount rate, or cost of capital, for evaluating investment projects requires an accurate estimate of project risk. This can be challenging because project risk cannot be estimated directly using the CAPM, but must instead be inferred from a set of traded securities, typically the equity betas of comparable firms in the same industry. These equity betas are then unlevered to undo the effect of comparable companies' financial leverage and obtain estimates of “asset” betas, which are then used to estimate project risk. The authors show that asset betas estimated in this way are likely to overestimate project risk. The equity returns of companies are risky not only because of their existing projects but also because of their growth opportunities. Such growth opportunities often include embedded “real options,” such as the option to delay, expand, or abandon a project. Because such real options are similar to leveraged positions in the underlying project, a company's growth opportunities are typically riskier than its existing projects. Therefore, to properly assess project risk, analysts must also unlever the asset betas derived from comparable company stock returns for the leverage contributed by their growth options. The authors derive a simple method for unlevering asset betas for growth options leverage in order to properly assess project risk. They then show that standard methods for assessing project risk significantly overestimate project costs of capital - by as much as 2–3% in industries such as healthcare, pharmaceuticals, communications, medical equipment, and entertainment. Their method should also be applied to stock return volatility to derive project volatility, an important input for determining the value of a firm's growth opportunities and the appropriate time for investing in these opportunities.
Macrophage Imaging in Central Nervous System and in Carotid Atherosclerotic Plaque Using Ultrasmall Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide in Magnetic Resonance Imaging

The long blood circulating time and the progressive macrophage uptake in inflammatory tissues of ultrasmall superparamagnetic iron oxide (USPIO) particles are 2 properties of major importance for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pathologic tissue characterization. This article reviews the proof of principle of applications such as imaging of carotid atherosclerotic plaque, stroke, brain tumor characterization, or multiple sclerosis. In the human carotid artery, USPIO accumulation in activated macrophages induced a focal drop in signal intensity compared with preinfusion MRI. The USPIO signal alterations observed in ischemic areas of stroke patients is probably related to the visualization of inflammatory macrophage recruitment into human brain infarction since animal experiments in such models demonstrated the internalization of USPIO into the macrophages localized in these areas. In brain tumors, USPIO particles which do not pass the ruptured blood-brain barrier at early times postinjection can be used to assess tumoral microvascular heterogeneity. Twenty-four hours after injection, when the cellular phase of USPIO takes place, the USPIO tumoral contrast enhancement was higher in high-grade than in low-grade tumors. Several experimental studies and a pilot multiple sclerosis clinical trial in 10 patients have shown that USPIO contrast agents can reveal the presence of inflammatory multiple sclerosis lesions. The enhancement with USPIO does not completely overlap with the gadolinium chelate enhancement. While the proof of concept that USPIO can visualize macrophage infiltrations has been confirmed in animals and patients in several applications (carotid atherosclerotic lesions, stroke, brain tumors and multiple sclerosis), larger prospective clinical studies are needed to demonstrate the clinical benefit of using USPIO as an MRI in vivo surrogate marker for brain inflammatory diseases.
Formal Modeling and Analysis of Leader Election in MANETs

The modeling and analysis of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) pose non-trivial challenges to formal methods. Time, geometry, communication delays and failures, mobility, and uniand bidirectionality can interact in unforeseen ways that are hard to model and analyze by automatic formal methods. In this work we use rewriting logic and Real-Time Maude to address this challenge. We propose a composable formal framework for MANET protocols and their mobility models that can take into account such complex interactions. We illustrate our framework by analyzing a well-studied leader election protocol for MANETs in the presence of both mobility and uniand bidirectional links.
Trends in EFQM criterion weights; the case of Denmark 1998‐2001

This paper examines the criterion weights of the EFQM excellence model. More and more research indicates that the official criterion weights from EFQM do not correspond with the way companies are working. This, of course, raises the question whether or not it makes any sense to compare companies according to an arbitrary weight structure, which has never been empirically tested? In this paper the criterion weights are estimated through the use of a factor scores regression based on confirmatory factor analysis of a number of bootstrapped samples. This estimation procedure is applied on data collected among Danish companies which responded to a self‐assessment questionnaire covering the EFQM excellence model in each of the years 1998‐2001. The overall conclusions are that the allocation of weights is fairly stable for most of the criteria except for one. The weight allocated to “People results” is significantly lower in 2001 than in 1999 and 1998.
A Genome-Wide Scan Reveals Important Roles of DNA Methylation in Human Longevity by Regulating Age-Related Disease Genes

It is recognized that genetic factors contribute to human longevity. Besides the hypothesis of existence of longevity genes, another suggests that a lower frequency of risk alleles decreases the incidence of age-related diseases in the long-lived people. However, the latter finds no support from recent genetic studies. Considering the crucial role of epigenetic modification in gene regulation, we then hypothesize that suppressing disease-related genes in longevity individuals is likely achieved by epigenetic modification, e.g. DNA methylation. To test this hypothesis, we investigated the genome-wide methylation profile in 4 Chinese female centenarians and 4 middle-aged controls using methyl-DNA immunoprecipitation sequencing. 626 differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were observed between both groups. Interestingly, genes with these DMRs were enriched in age-related diseases, including type-2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. This pattern remains rather stable after including methylomes of two white individuals. Further analyses suggest that the observed DMRs likely have functional roles in regulating disease-associated gene expressions, with some genes [e.g. caspase 3 (CASP3)] being down-regulated whereas the others [i.e. interleukin 1 receptor, type 2 (IL1R2)] up-regulated. Therefore, our study suggests that suppressing the disease-related genes via epigenetic modification is an important contributor to human longevity.
The "Virtues" of the Past: Education in the First Hundred Years of the New Republic

By the mid-nineteenth century school enrollment rates in the United States exceeded those of any other nation in the world and by the early twentieth century the United States had accomplished mass education at all levels. No country was able to close the gap until the last quarter of the twentieth century. For much of its history U.S. education was spurred by a set of 'virtues,' the most important of which were public provision by small fiscally independent districts, public funding, secular control, gender neutrality, open access, a forgiving system, and an academic curriculum. The outcomes of the virtues were an enormous diffusion of educational institutions and the early spread of mass education. America borrowed its educational institutions from Europe but added to them in ways that served to enhance competition and openness. The virtues of long ago need not be the virtues of today, and they also need not have been virtuous in all places and at all times in the past. In this essay we explore the historical origins of these virtues and find that almost all were in place in the period before the American Civil War.
TESTING FOR PURCHASING POWER PARITY AND UNCOVERED INTEREST PARITY IN THE PRESENCE OF MONETARY AND EXCHANGE RATE REGIME SHIFTS

Testing for purchasing power parity (PPP) and uncovered interest parity (UIP) has been the focus of many empirically oriented studies. While these simple economic theories of exchange rate and interest rate determination are theoretically attractive, the empirical support for these equilibrium conditions is at best mixed. Many potential reasons have been cited in the literature for the failure of such studies, ranging from market imperfections to inappropriate modelling strategies. The current state-of-the-art procedure involves testing for two cointegrating vectors in a multivariate error correction model which may be economically identified as the PPP and UIP relations. However, such a procedure does not account for policy regime shifts which distort the underlying PPP and UIP relations. In this paper, a Markov-switching vector error correction model (VECM) is considered for time series data in which monetary and exchange rate regime shifts are known to be present. Weak evidence in favour of PPP and UIP is established in a standard linear VECM, although the residuals of this model indicate that it is inappropriate in terms of functional form. The Markov-switching VECM, however, provides convincing evidence in favour of both the PPP and UIP relations and a marked improvement in the residual distributions.
Actin microfilament disrupters enhance K(ATP) channel opening in patches from guinea‐pig cardiomyocytes.

1. To determine whether actin filament networks are associated with the regulation of ATP‐sensitive K+ (K(ATP)) channel activity, single channel currents were measured in the inside‐out configuration, and cytoskeletal disrupters applied to the internal side of patches excised from guinea‐pig ventricular myocytes. 2. Treatment of patches with DNase I (10‐200 micrograms ml(‐1)), which forms complexes with G‐actin and prevents actin filament formation, antagonized the ATP‐induced inhibition of K(ATP) channels. 3. In the absence of ATP, DNase I did not increase K(ATP) channel activity. 4. When denatured by boiling or co‐incubated with purified actin subunits (200 mu g ml(‐1)), DNase I(100 mu g ml(‐1)) did not antagonize the ATP‐induced inhibition of K(ATP) channels. 5. The DNase I‐induced decrease in the sensitivity of K(ATP) channels towards ATP‐induced inhibition was partially restored by addition of purified actin subunits (200 micrograms ml(‐1)). 6. Cytochalasin B (10 microM), another actin filament disrupter, but neither taxol nor nocodazole (30‐100 microM), two antimicrotubule agents, enhanced K(ATP) channel activity in the presence of ATP. 7. Hence, actin filament disrupters can attenuate the ATP‐dependent inhibitory gating of K(ATP) channels. This suggests that subsarcolemmal actin filament networks may be associated with the regulation of cardiac K(ATP) channels.
ECG based algorithm for detecting ventricular arrhythmia and atrial fibrillation

As per the report of statistics sudden cardiac deaths affects about 30 percent of the population all around the world. In most cases these deaths are due to arrhythmias including ventricular tachycardia or ventricular fibrillation and atrial fibrillation. Ventricular arrhythmia is an abnormal ECG rhythm that occurs in the ventricles of the heart and is responsible for 75 to 85 percent of sudden deaths in persons with heart problems unless treated within seconds. Similarly, atrial fibrillation occurs due to abnormal ECG rhythm occurring in the upper chambers of the heart and causes the heart to quiver. These deaths occur due to hypertension and other cardiac related issues. Sudden deaths due to arrhythmia also occur in individuals who do not have high risk profiles. When a person is diagnosed with arrhythmia, patient is left with only few seconds to die. Long term ECG monitoring is the standard criterion for the diagnosis of arrhythmia, which is time consuming. So, detection and analysis of arrhythmia is vital as it has become one of the major causes of cardiac deaths. The project illustrates a simple algorithm for the detection of arrhythmia using a unique set of ECG features. Databases of the ECG signal recordings from the MIT physionet ATM, sampled at 250 Hz were used to evaluate the performance of algorithm. The algorithm presented in this paper provides a computationally efficient solution for the detection of ventricular arrhythmia and atrial fibrillation. This makes it ideal for a wide range of machine diagnosis application in biomedical field.
Empirical Testing Of Different Alternative Proxy Measures For Firm Size

This paper examines the relationship among total sales revenue, total assets, book value of equity, and market value of equity for different economic sectors and timeperiods. Five statistical tools are used to examine the relationship among the different proxies of size of the firm for the period 1999-2002. Our study shows that the relationships among the four measures of the size of the firm are not the same for the different economic sectors and are not stable over time for each economic sector. Our results suggest that the use of the four measures interchangeably as a proxy for the firm size may not be appropriate.
Improving read performance via selective Vpass reduction on high density 3D NAND flash memory

3D NAND flash memory has been well developed due to its high density and decreasing cost compared with planar flash. However, one issue for 3D NAND flash, which has not been well solved, is its worse read disturb. The worse read disturb of 3D NAND flash stems from its much more word lines in a block. In this case, it receives much more read operations, leading to increased read disturb. Previous work proposed to relax the read disturb on planar flash through reducing the pass-through voltage, Vpass, on the unread word lines. However, this is not viable for 3D NAND flash with the increased number of word lines in a block. In this work, a new read disturb reduction scheme is proposed for 3D NAND flash. First, a read error model is presented, which demonstrates that selective Vpass reduction is a viable approach. Then, a read-hotness aware Vpass reduction scheme is proposed to improve performance without violating the reliability requirement. Simulation shows that the proposed scheme achieves encouraging performance improvement.