Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Psychology of Novelty-Seeking, Creativity and Innovation: Neurocognitive Aspects within a Work-Psychological Perspective

Why are some people constantly on the move towards something new, while others feel comfortable with what there is? What motivates us to seek for the new? What helps us in finding it? What leads us to transform what we find into a product that is visible to others and expose us to their judgement? Research in psychology holds fascinating insights concerning the above questions. Surprisingly, neurocognitive and neuropsychological insights that could lead to a better understanding of the processes of novelty-seeking and novelty-finding, have received little attention in the creativity and innovation literature. Especially for those working in professions where the generation of the new is the core business, it would be highly relevant to know more about those biological parameters of novelty generation and especially how they make human beings behave in professional environments. Such knowledge can not only improve human resource management in creative work settings, but also help creative professionals to better understand and manage themselves. The Novelty Generation Model (NGM) introduced in this article offers a new perspective.
Assessment of Fetal Kidney Growth and Birth Weight in an Indigenous Australian Cohort

Introduction: Indigenous Australians experience higher rates of renal disease and hypertension than non-Indigenous Australians. Low birth weight is recognized as a contributing factor in chronic disease and has been shown to increase the risk of renal failure in adulthood. A smaller kidney volume with fewer nephrons places an individual at risk of hypertension and renal failure. Indigenous Australians have fewer nephrons than non-Indigenous Australians. In this study, intrauterine fetal and kidney growth were evaluated in 174 Indigenous Australian babies throughout gestation in order to record and evaluate fetal growth and kidney size, within a population that is at high risk for chronic illness. Methods: Pregnant women that identified as Indigenous, or non-Indigenous women that were pregnant with a partner who identified as an Indigenous Australian were eligible to participate. Maternal history, smoking status, blood and urine samples and fetal ultrasounds were collected throughout pregnancy. Fetal kidney measurements were collected using ultrasound. Statistical analysis was performed using the Stata 14.1 software package. Results: 15.2% of babies were born prematurely. 44% of the mothers reported smoking in pregnancy. The median birth weight of this cohort was 3,240 g. Male fetuses had higher kidney to body weight ratios than female fetuses (P = 0.02). The birth weights of term neonates whose mothers smoked during pregnancy were lower (327 g, P < 0.001) than the birth weights of term babies from non-smoking mothers. The kidney volumes of babies whose mothers smoked were also smaller (P = 0.02), but were in proportion to body weight. Conclusion: In this cohort of Indigenous women smoking was associated with both increased number of preterm births and with a reduction in birth weights, even of term infants. Since kidney volume is a surrogate measure of nephron number and nephrogenesis is complete at birth, babies whose mothers smoked during pregnancy must have fewer nephrons than those from non-smoking mothers. Previous studies have shown that glomerular filtration rate is not related to birth weight, thus infants with smaller kidney volumes are hyperfiltering from birth and therefore are likely to be more susceptible to early onset renal disease in later life.
Morpho-Syntactic Tagging of Text in “Baoule” Language Based on Hidden Markov Models (HMM)

The label text is a very important tool for the automatic processing of language. It is used in several applications such as morphological and syntactic text analysis, index-ing, retrieval, finished networks deterministic (in which all combinations of words that are accepted by the grammar are listed) or by statistical grammars (e.g., an n-gram in which the probabilities of sequences of n words in a specific order are given), etc. In this article, we developed a morphosyntactic labeling system language “Baoule” using hidden Markov models. This will allow us to build a tagged reference corpus and rep-resent major grammatical rules faced “Baoule” language in general. To estimate the parameters of this model, we used a training corpus manually labeled using a set of morpho-syntactic labels. We then proceed to an improvement of the system through the re-estimation procedure parameters of this model.
Subcellular Redistribution Is Involved in Acute Regulation of the Brush Border Na+/H+ Exchanger Isoform 3 in Human Colon Adenocarcinoma Cell Line Caco-2

Na+/H+ exchanger isoform 3 (NHE3), an epithelial brush border isoform of the Na+/H+ exchanger gene family, plays an important role in reabsorption of Na+ in the small intestine, the colon, and the kidney. In several cell types, phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) acutely inhibits NHE3 activity by changes in V max, but the mechanism of this inhibition is unknown. We investigated the role of subcellular redistribution of NHE3 in the PMA-induced inhibition of endogenous brush border NHE3 in a model human colon adenocarcinoma cell line, Caco-2. Subcellular localization of NHE3 was examined by confocal morphometric analysis complemented with cell surface biotinylation and compared with NHE3 activity evaluated by fluorometric measurement of intracellular pH. PMA inhibited NHE3 activity by 28% (p < 0.01), which was associated with a decrease of the ratio of the brush border/subapical cytoplasmic compartment of NHE3 from ∼4.3 to ∼2.4. This translocation resulted in 10–15% of the total cell NHE3 being shifted from the brush border pool to the cytoplasmic pool. These effects were mediated by protein kinase C, since they were blocked by the protein kinase C inhibitor H7. We conclude that inhibition of NHE3 by protein kinase C in Caco-2 cells involves redistribution of the exchanger from brush border into a subapical cytoplasmic compartment, and that this mechanism contributes ∼50% to the overall protein kinase C-induced inhibition of the exchanger.
Empathic Inclination from Digital Footprints

The large amount of personal data left by users on the Internet is a valuable source of information for improving the efficacy of profiling tasks. In particular, the data collected from social media can disclose personal habits, preferences and affective traits. The study is focused on the emphatic inclination of a subject, i.e. the ability to feel and share another person’s emotions, which can be a relevant aspect to consider in retrieval or recommendation processes. To support this idea, a model was proposed to predict its level and to emphasize the correlations with explicit features that characterize the user.
Flux: a mechanism for building robust, scalable dataflows

We present techniques for robustly scaling high-throughput, 24 x 7, data-stream processing applications. Examples of such applications include intrusion or denial-of-service detection, click-stream processing, and online analysis of financial quote streams. In the TelegraphCQ project, we implement these applications using a general-purpose continuous query (CQ) engine that executes long-running dataflows. To scale the performance of these dataflows, we parallelize them across a cluster of workstations. For these critical applications, high availability, fault-tolerance, and scalability are important goals. These goals are challenging to achieve on a cluster because machines are bound to fail, and load imbalances are likely to arise. In this thesis, we develop the design of Flux, a reusable communication abstraction that enables long-running, parallel dataflows to adapt on-the-fly to these problems. Flux encapsulates mechanisms that allow a dataflow to mask failures and to automatically recover from them as they occur during execution. Flux leverages these same mechanisms to periodically rebalance a dataflow and keep it running efficiently. By encapsulating the critical, fault-tolerance and load-balancing logic into Flux, we enable its reuse in a variety of dataflow applications with little modification to existing dataflow components and interfaces. Thus, by simply constructing a parallel dataflow using Flux, an application developer can make the dataflow robust.
Epstein-Barr virus infection of human gastric carcinoma cells: implication of the existence of a new virus receptor different from CD21

Recombinant Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) with a selectable marker successfully infected the human gastric carcinoma cell lines AGS, MKN28, and MKN74. Following incubation in selective media, drug-resistant cell clones were isolated and proved to be infected with EBV. All gastric carcinoma cell clones were positive for EBNA 1 but negative for EBNA 2. LMP 1 expression was negative in most clones, but there were a few exceptions. Gastric carcinoma cells were negative for the EBV receptor CD21, and infection was not inhibited by pretreatment of cells with the anti-CD21 monoclonal antibody OKB7. The results indicate that gastric carcinoma cells are susceptible to EBV infection and that infection is mediated via a new receptor different from CD21.
Merger Control and Enterprise Competitiveness: Empirical Analysis and Policy Recommendations

This book examines the background to a change in the legal framework which occurred in May 2004 with the entry into force of a new Merger Regulation that for the first time explicitly recognises the possibility of an efficiency defence. European Merger Control assesses the likely impact of this new regulation, and discusses the pros and cons of the efficiency defence, how other merger control systems deal with efficiencies, how the investigation process can be organised to accommodate the analysis of efficiency gains and the main theoretical and practical problems which arise when anti-competitive effects have to be weighed against efficiency gains.
Interspeech Pathology Challenge: Investigations into Speaker and Sentence Specific Effects

In this paper, we report our experiments on Interspeech 2012 Speaker Trait Pathology challenge task [2]. Specifically, we investigate two factors that impact the acoustic properties of the utterances collected in this task. Although the task treats utterances as independent data points, multiple utterances are recorded from individual speakers. Furthermore, the utterances correspond to readings of 17 given written sentences. In one experiment, we attempt to reduce variation due to speaker through dimensionality reduction. While these experiments showed promising results on development set, the performance did not translate to the evaluation test. In another, we learn classifiers conditioned on the sentences to capture sentence-specific signatures. This approach showed improved performance over the baseline on development set and the improvement translated to marginal gains on evaluation set. These experiments demonstrates the need to pay attention to the independence assumptions while collecting and defining clinical tasks.
Wide band dual polarized probes for near and farfield measurement systems

Dual polarized probes for modern high precision measurement systems have strict requirements in terms of pattern shape, polarization purity, return loss and port-to-port isolation. A desired feature of a good probe is that the useable bandwidth should exceed that of the antenna under test so that probe mounting and alignment is performed only once during a measurement campaign. As a consequence, the probe design is a trade-off between performance requirements and the usable bandwidth of the probe. A new probe technology has been developed capable of achieving 1:4 bandwidth while maintaining the high performance of traditional probe designs [1-4]. This paper describes the new probe technology and discusses the application of these probes in spherical near field and traditional far field measurement systems.
A central limit theorem for the functional estimation of the spot volatility

Abstract In this paper we introduce a class of statistics for the functional estimation of the spot volatility in the setting of frequency observed diffusion processes which may be disturbed by microstructure noise. We show that the limit theorems for the estimation of the spot volatility and the cross spot volatility of the statistics are still valid even if we add jump processes of finite or infinite activity to the underlying diffusion process. These statistics extend the quadratic variational approach and are related to the concept of multipower variation, which is used in the problem of estimating the integrated volatility.
Orbitopalpebral repair after 835 excisions of malignant tumours

Repair of any defect in the eyelid depends on its size and position and the state of the surrounding tissues. Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common malignant tumour of the eyelids, and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC), mixed carcinomas or basosquamous cell carcinomas (BSC), and cutaneous melanomas (CM), also invade the eyelids and periocular zones. Reconstruction of the eyelids and associated orbital structures after resection requires a complete understanding of the anatomy. The adequacy of the reconstruction is judged by the quality of functional restoration and the aesthetic appearance. The purpose of this study was to document various, simple or complex reconstructive procedures that may be used after excision of malignant tumours of the eyelids and to assess the outcome of surgical treatment.
A note on using the F-measure for evaluating data linkage algorithms

Record linkage is the process of identifying and linking records about the same entities from one or more databases. Record linkage can be viewed as a classiﬁcation problem where the aim is to decide if a pair of records is a match (i.e. two records refer to the same real-world entity) or a non-match (two records refer to two diﬀerent entities). Various classiﬁcation techniques — including supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and active learning based — have been employed for record linkage. If ground truth data in the form of known true matches and non-matches are available, the quality of classiﬁed links can be evaluated. Due to the generally high class imbalance in record linkage problems, standard accuracy or misclassiﬁcation rate are not meaningful for assessing the quality of a set of linked records. Instead, precision and recall, as commonly used in information retrieval and machine learning, are used. These are often combined into the popular F-measure, which is the harmonic mean of precision and recall. We show that the F-measure can also be expressed as a weighted sum of precision and recall, with weights which depend on the linkage method being used. This reformulation reveals that the F-measure has a major conceptual weakness: the relative importance assigned to precision and recall should be an aspect of the problem and the researcher or user, but not of the particular linkage method being used. We suggest alternative measures which do not suﬀer from this fundamental ﬂaw.
Language Education and Bahamian Students' Compositions

The teaching of Standard English (SE) composition in the Bahamas is not without its challenges in the context of the sociolinguistic situation. Many Bahamian students' Standard English compositions exhibit "interference" from vernacular Bahamian, either Bahamian English Creole or Bahamian Dialect. In this study, I attempt to clarify issues of Creole/dialect interference in the Standard English writing of college-based English compositions providing some linguistic explanations for many of the so-called "errors of grammar" in the compositions of Bahamian students. In order to fulfill the linguistic needs of all Bahamian students and to ensure greater success in Standard English performance in the Bahamian public schools, I propose that language educators consider TESD - Teaching English as a Second or Other Dialect -- for the Bahamian context. However, TESD would dictate a re-examination of our present language education methodologies and our linguistic assumptions about the acquisition of Standard English conventions by the Bahamian school age population. Moreover, I attempt to answer two major questions about the frequency and distribution patterns of the "errors of grammar" and non-standard features recurrent in students' expository compositions. I also explore possible linguistic factors that can account for such distribution. Furthermore, by analyzing specific samples of college-based compositions from The College of The Bahamas, my preliminary results indicate considerable levels of linguistic interference from vernacular Bahamian, especially within the SE lexicon.
Biphasic activation of p 21 ras by endothelin-1 sequentially activates the ERK cascade and phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase

Endothelin-1 (ET-1) induces cell proliferation and differentiation through multiple G-protein-linked signaling systems, including p21ras activation. Whereas p21ras activation and desensitization by receptor tyrosine kinases have been extensively investigated, the kinetics of p21ras activation induced by engagement of G-protein-coupled receptors remains to be fully elucidated. In the present study we show that ET-1 induces a biphasic activation of p21ras in rat glomerular mesangial cells. The first peak of activation of p21ras, at 2–5 min, is mediated by immediate association of phosphorylated Shc with the guanosine exchange factor Sos1 via the adaptor protein Grb2. This initial activation of p21ras results in activation of the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) cascade. We demonstrate that ET-1 signaling elicits a negative feedback mechanism, modulating p21ras activity through ERKdependent Sos1 phosphorylation, findings which were confirmed using an adenovirus MEK construct. Subsequent to p21ras and ERK deactivation, Sos1 reverts to the non-phosphorylated condition, enabling it to bind again to the Grb2/Shc complex, which is stabilized by persistent Shc phosphorylation. However, the resulting secondary activation of p21ras at 30 min does not lead to ERK activation, correlating with intensive, ET-1-induced expression of MAP kinase phosphatase-1, but does result in increased p21ras-associated phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase activity. Our data provide evidence that ET-1-induced biphasic p21ras activation causes sequential stimulation of divergent downstream signaling pathways.
Glucose Transport During Cell Cycle in IM9 Lymphocytes

Hexose uptake of the transformed lymphocyte cell line IM9 was analysed with respect to kinetics, responsiveness to insulin and insulin-like growth factor I and to cell cycle dependency. We found a Km of 0.76 mM and a Vmax of 14.9 nMol/min/mg protein for 2-deoxy-D-[3H]glucose uptake. This Km is in accordance with the values described for the erythrocyte type and the brain type glucose transporter. Hexose uptake of IM9 lymphocytes was not altered by physiological concentrations of insulin or IGF I. We investigated the 2-deoxy-D-[3H]glucose transport in cells, enriched in the different cell cycle phases by counterflow elutriation. The results were calculated for hypothetical pure fractions. Hexose uptake per cell is more than doubled during the S-phase and returns in G2-cells to the basal value of G1-phase.
Ant queens increase their reproductive efforts after pathogen infection

Infections with potentially lethal pathogens may negatively affect an individual's lifespan and decrease its reproductive value. The terminal investment hypothesis predicts that individuals faced with a reduced survival should invest more into reproduction instead of maintenance and growth. Several studies suggest that individuals are indeed able to estimate their body condition and to increase their reproductive effort with approaching death, while other studies gave ambiguous results. We investigate whether queens of a perennial social insect (ant) are able to boost their reproduction following infection with an obligate killing pathogen. Social insect queens are special with regard to reproduction and aging, as they outlive conspecific non-reproductive workers. Moreover, in the ant Cardiocondyla obscurior, fecundity increases with queen age. However, it remained unclear whether this reflects negative reproductive senescence or terminal investment in response to approaching death. Here, we test whether queens of C. obscurior react to infection with the entomopathogenic fungus Metarhizium brunneum by an increased egg-laying rate. We show that a fungal infection triggers a reinforced investment in reproduction in queens. This adjustment of the reproductive rate by ant queens is consistent with predictions of the terminal investment hypothesis and is reported for the first time in a social insect.
Induction of tubuloreticular inclusions in human lymphoma cells (Raji line) related to S-phase treatment with halogenated pyrimidines.

Summary Formation of tubuloreticular inclusions (TRI) within the endoplasmic reticulum was initiated in human lymphoma cells (Raji line) by exposure of synchronized cultures to 5-bromo-2′-deoxyuridine (BUdR) for all or portions of a single S phase. The TRI were detected by electron microscopy as early as 36 hr after addition of 260 µm BUdR. By 72 hr, thin-section counts of TRI reached a maximum at circa 30% of cell cross-sections, which was estimated to represent no less than one TRI per two whole cells. Although the numbers of TRI depended upon the concentration of halogenated pyrimidine, cell division was not prerequisite to their appearance, and exposure of the cells to BUdR for repeated cycles of DNA synthesis did not increase the maximal level. These results were consistent with a unifilar dominance and modified regulation of gene expression, rather than transcription of an altered DNA. Raji cells exposed to equimolar thymidine as controls to each experiment, as well as untreated Raji cells, were uniformly negative for TRI. A relation of TRI induction to metabolism of BUdR was indicated by competitive inhibition with thymidine and lack of response in a subline selected for BUdR resistance. There was no evidence for previously postulated relationships of TRI to myxovirus infection or IgG production. In vitro induction of TRI can serve as an experimental model for further investigations into the significance of TRI found in lymphocytes of patients with systemic immune diseases or neoplasms.
Poster - Thur Eve - 14: The effect of fluence and detector size on image quality in multi-projection compton scatter tomography.

PURPOSE To assess how radiation dose and size of energy sensitive detectors affects image quality in multi-projection Compton scatter tomography. METHODS AND MATERIALS A Compton scatter tomography system was simulated in Maltab. The system consists of a point source generated x-ray fan beam and energy sensitive photon counting detectors, placed along a line with the source outside the periphery of the primary beam. Single scattered photons from a low contrast phantom simulating breast tissues were simulated. Simulation parameters are dose-limited and closely matched to typical breast CT. Poisson distributed noise was added to simulate quantum noise. RESULTS We have successfully reconstructed electron density images in a clinical fan-beam breast CT system, in the presence of noise. The reconstruction illustrates accurate spatial alignment of the structures of interest in the phantom. The increase in MSE due to noise was ∼11%. The optimal detector size of 2 × 2 mm2 is a trade off between the increased noise, that is present when smaller detector sizes are used, and the blurring of the image that occurs as larger detectors are employed. CONCLUSIONS For breast CT dose of 4-12 mGy, the optimal detector size for a Compton scatter reconstruction using 360 projections and 1000 eV energy resolution was found to be 2 × 2 mm2 . The ability to visualize large low contrast (9%) and small (2 mm diameter) high contrast objects was demonstrated.