Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Surrogate end points for median overall survival in metastatic colorectal cancer: literature-based analysis from 39 randomized controlled trials of first-line chemotherapy.

PURPOSE Our aims were to determine the correlations between progression-free survival (PFS), time to progression (TTP), and response rate (RR) with overall survival (OS) in the first-line treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer (MCRC), and to identify a potential surrogate for OS. METHODS Randomized trials of first-line chemotherapy in MCRC were identified, and statistical analyses were undertaken to evaluate the correlations between the end points. RESULTS Thirty-nine randomized controlled trials were identified containing a total of 87 treatment arms. Among trials, the nonparametric Spearman rank correlation coefficient (r(s)) between differences (Delta) in surrogate end points (DeltaPFS, DeltaTTP, and DeltaRR) and DeltaOS were 0.74 (95% CI, 0.47 to 0.88), 0.52 (95% CI, 0.004 to 0.81), 0.39 (95% CI, 0.08 to 0.63), respectively. The r(s) for DeltaPFS was not significantly different from the r(s) DeltaTTP (P = .28). Linear regression analysis was performed using hazard ratios for PFS and OS. There was a strong relationship between hazard ratios for PFS and OS; the slope of the regression line was 0.54 +/- 0.10, indicating that a novel therapy producing a 10% risk reduction for PFS will yield an estimated 5.4% +/- 1% risk reduction for OS. CONCLUSION In first-line chemotherapy trials for MCRC, improvements in PFS are strongly associated with improvements in OS. In this patient population, PFS may be an appropriate surrogate for OS. As a clinical end point, PFS offers increased statistical power at a given time of analysis and a significant lead time advantage compared with OS.
Class analysis and the politics of new social movements

If progress is to be mode towards the more widespread development of class consciousness, socialist theory and practice needs to take account of class aspirations expressed through new social movements. In opposition to post Marxist’ perspectives, Wilde argues for the relevance of class analysis to an understanding of the emancipatory potential of the new social movements.
Software-managed energy-efficient hybrid DRAM/NVM main memory

This paper evaluates the viability of user-level software management of a hybrid DRAM/NVM main memory system. We propose an operating system (OS) and programming interface to place data from within the user application. We present a profiling tool to help programmers decide on the placement of application data in hybrid memory systems. Cycle-accurate simulation of modified applications confirms that our approach is more energy-efficient than state-of-the-art hardware or OS approaches at equivalent performance. Moreover, our results are validated on several candidate NVM technologies and a wide set of 14 benchmarks. The key observation behind this work is that, for the workloads we evaluated, application objects are too short-lived to motivate migration. Utilizing this property significantly reduces the hardware complexity of hybrid memory systems.
Universal Scaling Law in Long Gamma-Ray Bursts

The overwhelming diversity of long gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs), discovered after the launch of the Swift satellite, is a major obstacle to LGRB studies. Recently, it was shown that the prompt emission of LGRBs can be classified into three subclasses: Type I and Type II LGRBs, populating separate fundamental planes in a 3D space defined by the peak luminosity, the duration, and the spectral peak energy, and outliers belonging to none of these planes. Here, we show that Type I LGRBs exhibit different shapes of light curves from that of Type II LGRBs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this classification has uncovered a new scaling law concerning the light curve of Type II LGRBs, over a span of 8 orders of magnitude ranging from the prompt emission to the late X-ray afterglow one. The scaled light curve has four distinct phases. The first phase has a characteristic time-scale, while the three subsequent phases exhibit power-law behaviors with different exponents. We attempt a new interpretation in terms of the emission from an optically thick fireball propagating in the cricumstellar matter at relativistic speed, and argue that the four observed phases correspond to its hydrodynamical phases. Our classification scheme succeeds in pinning down intrinsic luminosities of Type II LGRBs through the scaling law with a sample of polymorphic GRBs. Further refinements of this scheme and scaling law will make it possible to use a subclass of LGRBs as new standard candles with the same reliability and accuracy as Type Ia supernovae in more distant universe than the light from supernovae can reach.
Reconsidering the Theory on Adolescent-Limited and Life-Course Persistent Anti-Social Behaviour

This article presents a critical review of the taxonomic theory of adolescent-limited and life-course persistent antisocial behaviour (Moffitt 1993) and its empirical evidence. This influential theory suggests that there are two qualitatively distinct types of offenders that require distinct theoretical explanations. Moreover, the empirical evidence for the typology is considered to be strong, at least by some. I discuss along three lines. First, to what extent the taxonomy should be interpreted literally. Second, whether the suggested mechanisms are likely to produce the hypothesized groups. Third, whether some of the most important empirical evidence really does support the theory. I conclude that the theoretical arguments are surprisingly unclear on key issues and that the empirical evidence is highly problematic.
Adaptive organizational changes in agent-oriented methodologies

Abstract We analyze the problem of modeling and developing multiagent systems (MASs) from the organizational theory point of view. In particular, we focus on the critical issue of adapting MASs organizations whenever changes in the structure of the MAS are required. We survey different relevant agent-oriented methodologies and discuss their suitability in dealing with adaptation in multiagent organizations. Finally, we present some critical considerations about the analyzed methodologies together with some open issues related to the process of modeling organizations for facilitating their adaptations.
A Study in Users' Physiological Response to an Empathic Interface Agent

This paper presents a novel method for evaluating the impact of animated interface agents with affective and empathic behavior. While previous studies relied on questionnaires in order to assess the user's overall experience with the interface agent, we will analyze users' physiological response (skin conductance and electromyography), which allows us to estimate affect-related user experiences on a moment-by-moment basis without interfering with the primary interaction task. As an interaction scenario, a card game has been implemented where the user plays against a virtual opponent. The findings of our study indicate that within a competitive gaming scenario, (i) the absence of the agent's display of negative emotions is conceived as arousing or stress-inducing, and (ii) the valence of users' emotional response is congruent with the valence of the emotion expressed by the agent. Our results for skin conductance could also be reproduced by assuming a local rather than a global baseline.
Development and Validation of the Cultural Competence of Program Evaluators (CCPE) Self-Report Scale

No self-report measure of cultural competence currently exists in program evaluation. Adapting items from cultural competence measures in fields such as counseling and nursing, the researchers developed the Cultural Competence of Program Evaluators (CCPE) self-report scale. The goals of this study were to validate the CCPE and to assess differences in level of cultural competence among program evaluators based on various demographic variables. The sample consisted of 174 evaluators. Principal components analyses revealed three factors of the CCPE: cultural knowledge, cultural skills, and cultural awareness. The overall alpha of the CCPE was . 88, and convergent validity was established via significant positive correlations between the CCPE and the Multicultural Counseling Inventory (MCI). Additionally, individuals who had received cultural competence training scored significantly higher on the CCPE, and receipt of cultural competence training was a significant predictor of scores on the CCPE.
A Self-Adaptive Behavior-Aware Recruitment Scheme for Participatory Sensing

Participatory sensing services utilizing the abundant social participants with sensor-enabled handheld smart device resources are gaining high interest nowadays. One of the challenges faced is the recruitment of participants by fully utilizing their daily activity behavior with self-adaptiveness toward the realistic application scenarios. In the paper, we propose a self-adaptive behavior-aware recruitment scheme for participatory sensing. People are assumed to join the sensing tasks along with their daily activity without pre-defined ground truth or any instructions. The scheme is proposed to model the tempo-spatial behavior and data quality rating to select participants for participatory sensing campaign. Based on this, the recruitment is formulated as a linear programming problem by considering tempo-spatial coverage, data quality, and budget. The scheme enables one to check and adjust the recruitment strategy adaptively according to application scenarios. The evaluations show that our scheme provides efficient sensing performance as stability, low-cost, tempo-spatial correlation and self-adaptiveness.
Cross-Language Information Retrieval by Domain Restriction Using Web Directory Structure

In this paper, we propose a cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) method based on estimating for domains of the query using hierarchic structures of Web directories. To get the most appropriate translation of the queries, we utilize the Web directories written in many different languages as multilingual corpus for disambiguating translation of the query and for estimating the domain of search results using hierarchic structures of Web directories. From experimental evaluations, we found that there is an advantage in retrieval accuracy using our proposal for disambiguating translation in CLIR system. We found that it is effective to restrict to target fields of the query using lower level merged categories in order to acquire suited translation of the query.
Cigarette smoking, N-acetyltransferase 2 genetic polymorphisms, and breast cancer risk.

OBJECTIVE To determine if N-acetyltransferase 2 (NAT2) polymorphisms result in decreased capacity to detoxify carcinogenic aromatic amines in cigarette smoke, thus making some women who smoke more susceptible to breast cancer. DESIGN Case-control study with genetic analyses. DNA analyses were performed for 3 polymorphisms accounting for 90% to 95% of the slow acetylation phenotype among whites. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS White women with incident primary breast cancer (n=304) and community controls (n=327). RESULTS Neither smoking nor NAT2 status was independently associated with breast cancer risk. There were no clear patterns of increased risk associated with smoking by NAT2 status among premenopausal women. In postmenopausal women, NAT2 strongly modified the association of smoking with risk. For slow acetylators, current smoking and smoking in the distant past increased breast cancer risk in a dose-dependent manner (odds ratios [95% confidence intervals] for the highest quartile of cigarettes smoked 2 and 20 years previously, 4.4 [1.3-14.8] and 3.9 [1.4-10.8], respectively). Among rapid acetylators, smoking was not associated with increased breast cancer risk. CONCLUSIONS Our results suggest that smoking may be an important risk factor for breast cancer among postmenopausal women who are slow acetylators, demonstrate heterogeneity in response to carcinogenic exposures, and may explain previous inconsistent findings for cigarette smoking as a breast cancer risk factor.
Activin A Induces Langerhans Cell Differentiation In Vitro and in Human Skin Explants

Langerhans cells (LC) represent a well characterized subset of dendritic cells located in the epidermis of skin and mucosae. In vivo, they originate from resident and blood-borne precursors in the presence of keratinocyte-derived TGFβ. Ιn vitro, LC can be generated from monocytes in the presence of GM-CSF, IL-4 and TGFβ. However, the signals that induce LC during an inflammatory reaction are not fully investigated. Here we report that Activin A, a TGFβ family member induced by pro-inflammatory cytokines and involved in skin morphogenesis and wound healing, induces the differentiation of human monocytes into LC in the absence of TGFβ. Activin A-induced LC are Langerin+, Birbeck granules+, E-cadherin+, CLA+ and CCR6+ and possess typical APC functions. In human skin explants, intradermal injection of Activin A increased the number of CD1a+ and Langerin+ cells in both the epidermis and dermis by promoting the differentiation of resident precursor cells. High levels of Activin A were present in the upper epidermal layers and in the dermis of Lichen Planus biopsies in association with a marked infiltration of CD1a+ and Langerin+ cells. This study reports that Activin A induces the differentiation of circulating CD14+ cells into LC. Since Activin A is abundantly produced during inflammatory conditions which are also characterized by increased numbers of LC, we propose that this cytokine represents a new pathway, alternative to TGFβ, responsible for LC differentiation during inflammatory/autoimmune conditions.
High School Order and Academic Achievement

In contrast to public opinion, the relationship between school order and achievement is neither simple nor certain. While research shows that individuals who misbehave perform poorly in school, it has not made clear why. Further, the evidence on order and achievement at the school level is even more limited. One inference drawn here is that failure to distinguish order as a product of coercion from order as a manifestation of self-discipline may result both in the failure of research to clarify the relationship between order and achievement and in the failure of schools to foster their highest purposes.
On-the-fly dynamic reprogramming mechanism for increasing the energy efficiency and supporting multi-experimental capabilities in WSNs

Remote reprogramming capabilities are one of the major concerns in WSN platforms due to the limitations and constraints that low power wireless nodes poses, especially when energy efficiency during the reprogramming process is a critical factor for extending the battery life of the devices. Moreover, WSNs are based on low-rate protocols in which as greater the amount of data is sent, the more the possibility to lose packets during the transmitting process is. In order to overcome these limitations, in this work a novel on-the-fly reprogramming technique for modifying and updating the application running on the wireless sensor nodes is designed and implemented, based on a partial reprogramming mechanism that significantly reduces the size of the files to be downloaded to the nodes, therefore diminishing their power/time consumption. This powerful mechanism also addresses multi-experimental capabilities because it provides the possibility to download, manage, test and debug multiple applications into the wireless nodes, based on a memory map segmentation of the core. Being an on-the-fly reprogramming process, no additional resources to store and download the configuration file are needed.
Assessing the Value of eBay Listing Features

We used machine learning to access the value of additional features sellers can use to highlight their eBay item listings. The set of features a user can add to their listing includes subtitles, extra photos, a pop up photo view of an item, a ―listing designer‖, and a bold listing of their item in search results. As eBay fixes the costs for these features, we implemented a price-prediction scheme to determine which listing features add most value to an item and identified the relative importance of specific features in price determination. Motivation
An Assessment of the Levels of Job Motivation and Satisfaction as Predictors of Job Performance of Library Personnel in Nigerian Universities

This study investigated the levels of motivation, job satisfaction and job performance of library personnel in government and privately-owned universities in North-Central, Nigeria. Three research questions were raised. Survey research method was employed. The study covers six states, namely Benue, Kogi, Kwara, Nasarawa, Niger, Plateau States and Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja. Survey method tested the relationships among variables thereby making generalizations about the library phenomenon. The target population for the study consisted of librarians and library officers in fully-operational universities in North-Central Nigeria. The entire population of librarians and library officers were adopted. Two sets of modified instruments: Motivational Factors Job Satisfaction Questionnaire (MFJSQ) and Job Performance Questionnaire (JPQ) were used for data collection. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the responses from the respondents. Above all, descriptive statistics of mean and standard deviation was used to answer the three research questions on the levels of motivation, job satisfaction and job performance of library personnel. Findings showed moderate level of motivation and job satisfaction respectively while there was high level of job performance of library personnel. The study recommended that the management of universities in the North-Central Nigeria should take note of the following areas: adequate job design, description and employees’ participation in decision making/leadership training, recognition and in-service training programme for library personnel. Other recommendation include: encouragement for library personnel to enhance job commitment and to be more predispose to critical thinking in order to be able to solve library related problems.
A novel MEMS LTCC switch matrix

A novel planar 4/spl times/4 switch matrix using microelectromechanical system (MEMS) switches and low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) substrate is presented for the first time. Together a 9-layer LTCC substrate and 32 MEMS switches are integrated to create a non-blocking 4/spl times/4 switch matrix functionality with excellent RF performance up to 7 GHz. An accurate model for predicting the interconnect circuit and switch matrix RF performance up to 20 GHz is also presented.
Using grammar-based genetic programming to determine characteristics of multiple infections and environmental factors in the development of allergies and asthma

In recent decades asthma and allergies had great increase worldwide, being currently a serious global health problem. The causes of these disorders are unknown, but the most accepted hypothesis is that improving hygiene and reducing infections may be the main cause of this increase. Both asthma and allergies are complex diseases with strong environmental influence, so the use of versatile tools such as genetic programming can be important in the understanding of those conditions. We applied genetic programming to data obtained from 1296 children. Data related to chronic viral infections and environmental factors were used to classify in asthmatic and non-asthmatic, IgE and SPT in order to assess allergy. For asthma, viral infections were not relevant while for IgE and SPT they were. The use of genetic programming is shown to be a powerful tool to help understand those conditions.
Degrees of Freedom of Rank-Deficient MIMO Interference Channels

We characterize the degrees of freedom (DoF) of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) interference channels with rank-deficient channel matrices. For the two-user rank-deficient MIMO interference channel, we provide a tight outer bound to show that the previously known achievable DoF in the symmetric case is optimal and generalize the result to fully asymmetric settings. For the K-user rank-deficient interference channel, we improve the previously known achievable DoF and provide a tight outer bound to establish optimality in symmetric settings. In particular, we show that for the K-user rank-deficient interference channel, when all nodes have M antennas, all direct channels have rank D0, all cross channels are of rank D, and the channels are otherwise generic, the optimal DoF value per user is min(D0, M - (min(M, (K - 1)D)/2)). Notably for interference channels, the rank-deficiency of direct channels does not help and the rank deficiency of cross-channels does not hurt. The main technical challenge is to account for the spatial dependences introduced by rank deficiencies in the interference alignment schemes that typically rely on the independence of channel coefficients.
Health Disclosure Laws and Health Information Exchanges

Health information exchanges (HIEs) are expected to facilitate collaboration between healthcare entities and improve efficiency and quality of care through enhanced information sharing capabilities. Privacy concerns have been consistently cited as one of the primary challenges to HIE development and adoption. Currently, it is unclear how privacy laws – in particular, legislation restricting the disclosure of health records – have impacted the adoption of HIEs intended to facilitate sharing of health information. This study explores the landscape of health privacy legislation at the State level and examines the impact of variations in such privacy and confidentiality laws across the United States on the
Behavioral Escape Avoidance Coping in African-American Men Who Have Sex with Men

The purpose of this exploratory study was to investigate differences between African-American men who have sex with men (MSM) who use behavioral escape avoidance coping responses and those who do not. In particular, we investigated differences in the African-American MSM in our study on psychosocial factors such as internalized homonegativity, exploration phase sexual identity, and the importance of race/ethnicity identity to self-concept; and we investigated the association of these factors on the likelihood of the use of behavioral escape avoidance coping responses. Eighty-three African-American MSM completed our online assessment tool. Chi-square tests and modified Poisson regression were used to test our hypotheses. Our results revealed significant differences in the internalized homonegativity, exploration phase sexual identity, and in the importance of race/ethnicity identity to self-concept for the men in this study who endorsed behavioral escape avoidance coping responses compared to those who did not endorse behavioral escape avoidance coping responses.