Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Ronald S. Burt: Neighbor Networks: Competitive Advantage Local and Personal

Is there a theorist working anywhere across the organizational sciences’ landscape as bold and infl uential as Ron Burt? Whether researching psychophysics, structural equivalence, structural holes, or a host of other network-related phenomena, his ideas never fail to stir debate and controversy in the best tradition of scientifi c inquiry. Over the scope of his career, Burt has ranged across many different areas, including the invisible college of elite experts in scientifi c publishing, American manufacturing, innovation adoption, and, more recently, issues concerned with brokerage in organizations. One thing has been consistent throughout this work, however, and that has been an emphasis (unusual among structural network researchers) on the strategic intent of actors. People, companies, and other actors are seen not as the inevitable victims of structural forces, but as able (given certain circumstances) to take fate into their own hands. As he has ranged across topics from the very micro to the very macro, Burt has always recognized that relational patterns constrain the ability to act, but he has also kept a research focus on how it is possible to act despite constraint.
Medial description of gray-scale image structure by gradient-limited diffusion

The representation of object shape in grayscale images is an important precursor to many common image interpretation needs, including recognition, registration, and measurement. Typically, such computer vision tasks have required the preliminary step of image segmentation, often via the detection of object edges. This paper presents a new means of describing grayscale object shape that obviates the need for edge-finding, i.e., classifying pixels as being inside or outside of an object boundary. Instead, this technique operates directly on the image intensity distribution to produce a set of `medialness' measurements at every pixel and across multiple spatial scales that capture more global properties of object shape. The application of an orientation-sensitive, gradient-limited diffusion model provides many of the benefits of global, multiscale structural analysis while preserving the local region- insulating effects of pixels having edge-like properties. The result of this procedure is a multiscale medial axis (MMA), which represents an object at multiple and simultaneous levels of scale, and which provides several desirable properties for describing the shape of grayscale forms.
The Experience of Sleep Problems and Their Treatment in Young People at Ultra-High Risk of Psychosis: A Thematic Analysis

We view sleep disruption as a contributory causal factor in the development of psychotic experiences. Clinical trials indicate that psychological interventions targeting insomnia result in improvements in both sleep and psychotic experiences. The aim of this study was to gain the perspective of young people at ultra-high risk of psychosis on their sleep problems and associated psychological treatment. Interviews were conducted with 11 patients, aged 15–22 years, at ultra-high risk of psychosis who had received a psychological sleep intervention. Responses were analyzed using thematic analysis. Disrupted sleep timing and a lack of routine were the characteristic hallmarks of participants' sleep problems. Sleep disturbance, psychological wellbeing, and functioning had a reciprocal relationship. There were negative expectations prior to therapy, however meaningful improvements occurred in sleep, mood, and functioning. The active implementation of therapy techniques was highlighted as important. These findings indicate that the treatment of sleep problems is highly valued and has a meaningful impact on wellbeing in young people at ultra-high risk of psychosis.
Regulated nuclear accumulation of a histone methyltransferase times the onset of heterochromatin formation in C. elegans embryos

MET-2/SETDB1 and interactors LIN-65/ATF7IP and ARLE-14/ARL14EP initiate heterochromatin formation during embryogenesis. Heterochromatin formation during early embryogenesis is timed precisely, but how this process is regulated remains elusive. We report the discovery of a histone methyltransferase complex whose nuclear accumulation and activation establish the onset of heterochromatin formation in Caenorhabditis elegans embryos. We find that the inception of heterochromatin generation coincides with the accumulation of the histone H3 lysine 9 (H3K9) methyltransferase MET-2 (SETDB) into nuclear hubs. The absence of MET-2 results in delayed and disturbed heterochromatin formation, whereas accelerated nuclear localization of the methyltransferase leads to precocious H3K9 methylation. We identify two factors that bind to and function with MET-2: LIN-65, which resembles activating transcription factor 7–interacting protein (ATF7IP) and localizes MET-2 into nuclear hubs, and ARLE-14, which is orthologous to adenosine 5′-diphosphate–ribosylation factor-like 14 effector protein (ARL14EP) and promotes stable association of MET-2 with chromatin. These data reveal that nuclear accumulation of MET-2 in conjunction with LIN-65 and ARLE-14 regulates timing of heterochromatin domains during embryogenesis.
Significance of salivary biomarkers as a drug monitoring aid

Submit Manuscript | http://medcraveonline.com (NIH), a biomarker is an objectively measured and evaluated indicator of normal biologic processes, pathogenic processes, or pharmacologic responses to therapeutic intervention.3Amongst these, the presence of various drug metabolites in saliva in correspondence with serum concentrations generates significant interest. Salivary Biomarkers, not only provide information regarding the patient’s current prescribed medications, but can also effectively detect the presence and abuse of illegal substances.4,5
Solving the Quantum Many-Body Problem with Bohmian Trajectories

Bohmian mechanics is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that describes the motion of quantum particles with an ensemble of deterministic trajectories. Several attempts have been made to utilize Bohmian trajectories as a computational tool to simulate quantum systems consisting of many particles, a very demanding computational task. In this paper, we present a novel ab-initio approach to solve the many-body problem for bosonic systems by evolving a system of one-particle wavefunctions representing pilot waves that guide the Bohmian trajectories of the quantum particles. The method is used to study the breathing dynamics and ground state properties in a system of many interacting bosons. The precision of our method is benchmarked aginst the numerically exact multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree method for Bosons.
LJGS: Gradual Security Types for Object-Oriented Languages (Artifact)

LJGS is a lightweight Java core calculus with a gradual security type system. The calculus guarantees secure information flow for sequential, class-based, typed object-oriented programming with mutable objects and virtual method calls. An LJGS program is composed of fragments that are checked either statically or dynamically. Statically checked fragments adhere to a security type system so that they incur no run-time penalty whereas dynamically checked fragments rely on run-time security labels. The programmer marks the boundaries between static and dynamic checking with casts so that it is always clear whether a program fragment requires run-time checks. LJGS requires security annotations on fields and methods. A field annotation either specifies a fixed static security level or it prescribes dynamic checking. A method annotation specifies a constrained polymorphic security signature. The types of local variables in method bodies are analyzed flow-sensitively and require no annotation. The dynamic checking of fields relies on a static points-to analysis to approximate implicit flows. We prove type soundness and non-interference for LJGS.
Automatic Approach of Sentiment Lexicon Generation for Mobile Shopping Reviews

The dramatic increase in the use of smartphones has allowed people to comment on various products at any time. The analysis of the sentiment of users’ product reviews largely depends on the quality of sentiment lexicons. Thus, the generation of high-quality sentiment lexicons is a critical topic. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach for constructing a domain-specific sentiment lexicon by considering the relationship between sentiment words and product features in mobile shopping reviews. The approach first selects sentiment words and product features from original reviews and mines the relationship between them using an improved pointwise mutual information algorithm. Second, sentiment words that are related to mobile shopping are clustered into categories to form sentiment dimensions. At each sentiment dimension, each sentiment word can take the value of 0 or 1, where 1 indicates that the word belongs to a particular category whereas 0 indicates that it does not belong to that category. The generated lexicon is evaluated by constructing a sentiment classification task using several product reviews written in both Chinese and English. Two popular non-domain-specific sentiment lexicons as well as state-of-the-art machine-learning and deep-learning models are chosen as benchmarks, and the experimental results show that our sentiment lexicons outperform the benchmarks with statistically significant differences, thus proving the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
An EEG study of the relationship between design problem statements and cognitive behaviors during conceptual design

Abstract In the design process, different problem statements result in different problem-solving strategies. A proper problem statement is the key to effective problem-solving. Based on the characteristics of the product design process, we divided design problem statements into open-ended (OE), decision-making (DM), and constrained (CO) statements and attempted to investigate the influences of different problem statements on designers’ cognitive behaviors from three perspectives, namely divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and mental workload. Then we provided quantification description to these influences based on electroencephalography (EEG) technology. We conducted experiments on 19 participants and used the BrainProduct™ actiChamp-32 to record the EEG data. Results are as follows: (1) The higher task-related α power was found in the temporal and occipital regions in the OE task compared with that in the DM and CO tasks. The OE statement also would help designers get novel ideas by strengthening their divergent thinking. (2) In the DM and CO tasks, there was no significant difference in the impact of the brain region on convergent thinking, but activities in the left hemisphere were stronger than that in the right hemisphere. The DM and CO tasks have better performance in convergent thinking than the OE task. (3) In the CO task, the designer's mental workload is the highest and mainly related to the activation of the centroparietal and occipital regions. These findings help designers understand the design problem-solving process from the perspective of cognitive science and monitor their thinking modes in the design process so as to improve their design performance.
Physical and Sexual Violence Experienced by Male War-Affected Youth: Implications for Post-Conflict Functioning and Intimate Relationships

This study explored the association between war violence exposure during armed conflict and intimate partner violence (IPV) victimization, and the impact of positive community and family reintegration on IPV among a sample (N = 92) of war-affected male youth, post-conflict Sierra Leone. Trained Sierra Leonean researchers conducted face-to-face interviews with youth and their caregivers. Results indicate that exposure to violence during armed conflict as well as community and family reintegration were negatively associated with psychological IPV perpetration. Community reintegration was negatively associated with physical IPV. Sexual victimization was negatively associated with sexual IPV perpetration, whereas physical victimization had positive association. More research needs to be done on male war-affected youth as victims of physical, psychological, and sexual violence during conflict and the impact this has on the quality of their intimate relationships, occurrence of IPV in those relationships (as victims in addition to being perpetrators), and their community reintegration.
Ensemble Learning for Multi-Type Classification in Heterogeneous Networks

Heterogeneous networks are networks consisting of different types of objects and links. They can be found in several fields, ranging from the Internet to social sciences, biology, epidemiology, geography, finance, and many others. In the literature, several methods have been proposed for the analysis of network data, but they usually focus on homogeneous networks, where all the objects are of the same type, and links among them describe a single type of relationship. More recently, the complexity of real scenarios has impelled researchers to design methods for the analysis of heterogeneous networks, especially focused on classification and clustering tasks. However, they often make assumptions on the structure of the network that are too restrictive or do not fully exploit different forms of network correlation and autocorrelation. Moreover, when nodes which are the main subject of the classification task are linked to several nodes of the network having missing values, standard methods can lead to either building incomplete classification models or to discarding possibly relevant dependencies (correlation or autocorrelation). In this paper, we propose an ensemble learning approach for multi-type classification. We adopt the system Mr-SBC, which is originally able to analyze heterogeneous networks of arbitrary structure, within an ensemble learning approach. The ensemble allows us to improve the classification accuracy of Mr-SBC by exploiting i) the possible presence of correlation and autocorrelation phenomena, and ii) the classification of instances (which contain missing values) of other node types in the network. As a beneficial side effect, we have also that the models are more stable in terms of standard deviation of the accuracy, over different samples used for training. Experiments performed on real-world datasets show that the proposed method is able to significantly outperform the standard implementation of Mr-SBC. Moreover, it gives Mr-SBC the advantage of outperforming four other well-known algorithms for the classification of data organized in a network.
Classifying occupations using web-based job advertisements: an application to STEM and creative occupations

Rapid technological, social and economic change is having significant impacts on the nature of jobs. In fast-changing environments it is crucial that policymakers have a clear and timely picture of the labour market. Policymakers use standardised occupational classifications, such as the Office for National Statisticsâ€™ Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) in the UK to analyse the labour market. These permit the occupational composition of the workforce to be tracked on a consistent and transparent basis over time and across industrial sectors. However, such systems are by their nature costly to maintain, slow to adapt and not very flexible. For that reason, additional tools are needed. At the same time, policymakers over the world are revisiting how active skills development policies can be used to equip workers with the capabilities needed to meet the new labour market realities. There is in parallel a desire for more granular understandings of what skills combinations are required of occupations, in part so that policymakers are better sighted on how individuals can redeploy these skills as and when employer demands change further. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of complementing traditional occupational classifications with more flexible methods centred around employersâ€™ characterisations of the skills and knowledge requirements of occupations as presented in job advertisements. We use data science methods to classify job advertisements as STEM or non-STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and creative or non-creative, based on the content of ads in a database of UK job ads posted online belonging to Boston-based job market analytics company, Burning Glass Technologies. In doing so, we first characterise each SOC code in terms of its skill make-up; this step allows us to describe each SOC skillset as a mathematical object that can be compared with other skillsets. Then we develop a classifier that predicts the SOC code of a job based on its required skills. Finally, we develop two classifiers that decide whether a job vacancy is STEM/non-STEM and creative/non-creative, based again on its skill requirements.
Biallelic WRN Mutations in Newly Identified Japanese Werner Syndrome Patients

Werner syndrome (WS) is a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by systemic accelerated aging. It is caused by pathogenic variants of the WRN gene that encodes a nuclear helicase. In this report, we describe 4 newly identified WS cases among those referred to the Japanese Werner Consortium, Chiba University, Japan. All 4 cases were compound heterozygotes of the Japanese founder mutation, c.3139-1G>C, and a novel null pathogenic variant, c.1587G>A, c.2448+1G>A, or c.3233+1G>T, or an amino acid substitution variant, c.1720G>A, p.Gly574Arg. These 3 null pathogenic variants were not previously described. The p.Gly574Arg was previously reported in a European patient, and the identification of the second p.Gly574Arg case, with classical WS features, further confirmed the pathogenic nature of this variant. For the case with c.3233+1G>T, we determined the phase of 2 disease-causing mutations and demonstrated that they are on different chromosomes. This assay would be particularly important for those cases with ambiguous clinical diagnosis.
Dual regulatory role of CCNA2 in modulating CDK6 and MET‐mediated cell‐cycle pathway and EMT progression is blocked by miR‐381‐3p in bladder cancer

Emerging evidence has elucidated that microRNAs (miRNAs) transcribed from miRNA cluster at DLK‐DIO3 imprinted domain are involved in various cancers. However, as one member of this cluster, the underlying mechanisms and functions of miR‐381‐3p in bladder cancer (BCa) still remains elusive. Here we demonstrate that the hypermethylated status of upstream maternally expressed gene 3 divergent methylation region reduces the expression of miR‐381‐3p in BCa by bisulfite‐sequencing PCR. In vitro and in vivo experiments indicate that overexpression of miR‐381‐3p significantly inhibits cell proliferation via inducing G1 phase arrest and migration via down‐regulating MET and CCNA2 induced EMT progression. CDK6/CCNA2/MET are all identified as the direct targets of miR‐381‐3p by bioinformatics analysis and dual‐luciferase reporter assay. Furthermore, inhibition of CCNA2 mediated by miR‐381‐3p as the crucial biregulator not only participates in the proliferation regulation with CDK6 in cell cycle but also modulates the EMT progression via ROCK/AKT/β‐catenin/SNAIL pathway, which establishes an EMT circuit combined with miR‐381‐3p/MET/AKT/GSK‐3β/SNAIL pathway, and SNAIL is the last confocal target to induce EMT progression. To conclude, we propose 2 novel regulatory circuits mediated by miR‐381‐3p in BCa, which may assist in the development of more effective therapies against BCa in the future. —Li, J., Ying, Y. , Xie, H. , Jin, K. , Yan, H. , Wang, S. , Xu, M. , Xu, X. , Wang, X. , Yang, K. , Zheng, X. , Xie, L. Dual regulatory role of CCNA2 in modulating CDK6 and MET‐mediated cell‐cycle pathway and EMT progression is blocked by miR‐381‐3p in bladder cancer. FASEB J. 33, 1374–1388 (2019). www.fasebj. org
Association between dietary fiber intake and risk of ovarian cancer: a meta-analysis of observational studies

Objective To evaluate the associations between dietary fiber intake and ovarian cancer risk. Methods A literature survey was conducted by searching the PubMed, Web of Science, and Wanfang Med Online databases up to March 1st, 2018. The effect of dietary fiber intake on ovarian cancer risk was evaluated by calculating relative risks with 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) using Stata 12.0 software. Results A total of 17 articles with 149,177 participants including 7609 ovarian cancer patients were included in this analysis. The summarized relative risk for ovarian cancer in participants with the highest compared with the lowest fiber intake was 0.760 (95%CI=0.702–0.823), with no significant between-study heterogeneity (I2=12.4%). Subgroup analysis according to study design demonstrated positive associations in both cohort studies and case-control studies. Moreover, the results were consistent among populations from America, Europe, and Asia. No publication bias was found by Egger’s test or funnel plots. Conclusion This meta-analysis concluded that a high intake of dietary fiber could significantly reduce the risk of ovarian cancer compared with a low fiber intake.
Standardization of CTC AR‐V7 PCR assay and evaluation of its role in castration resistant prostate cancer progression

Castration resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) represents the most aggressive status of this neoplastic disease, also characterized by the absence of biomarkers predictive of clinical outcome. New drugs as abiraterone or enzalutamide, affecting androgen receptor pathway at different levels, inhibit the proliferative advantage of prostate cancer cells with important long term benefits. Despite the advantages of this second‐generation androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), resistance mechanisms, primitive or acquired, often develop. The existence of androgen receptor (AR) splice variants (AR‐Vs), in particular AR‐V7 expression detected in circulating tumor cells (CTCs), represents an example of acquired resistance, as evidenced in preclinical and clinical studies. Recent studies also have suggested the role of AR‐V7 as a prognostic biomarker in mCRPC. In this field, hot topics are the methodology used to isolate CTC and the assay for AR‐V7 measurement. Our study aims to develop a standardized operating procedure (SOP) to evaluate AR‐V7 in CRPC.
Brief Motivational Interviewing Intervention to Reduce Alcohol and Marijuana Use for At-Risk Adolescents in Primary Care

Objective: The primary care (PC) setting provides a unique opportunity to address adolescent alcohol and other drug (AOD) use. Method: We conducted a randomized controlled trial in 4 PC clinics from April 2013 to November 2015 to determine whether a 15-min brief motivational interviewing (MI) AOD intervention, delivered in PC, reduced alcohol and marijuana use and consequences. Adolescents ages 12–18 who came for an appointment during the 2.5-year study period were asked to be in the study and screened using the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism Screening Guide. Those identified as at risk were randomized to the CHAT intervention or usual care (UC). Adolescents completed 4 web-based surveys at baseline and 3, 6, and 12 months postbaseline. Results: The sample (n = 294) was 58% female and 66% Hispanic, 17% Black, 12% White, 5% multiethnic or other, with an average age of 16 years. Compared to UC adolescents, CHAT adolescents reported significantly less perceived peer use of alcohol and marijuana at 3 months (alcohol: p < .0001; marijuana p = .01) and 6 months (alcohol: p = .04; marijuana p = .04). CHAT adolescents also reported marginally fewer negative alcohol consequences experienced at 6 months (p = .08). At 12 months, compared to UC, CHAT adolescents reported less perceived peer alcohol (p = .04) and marijuana (p < .01) use and fewer negative consequences from alcohol (p = .03) and marijuana (p = .04) use. Conclusions: A brief MI intervention delivered in PC reduced negative consequences from alcohol and marijuana use 1 year later. Findings emphasize that adolescents can benefit from PC interventions that briefly and effectively address both alcohol and marijuana use.