Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The bilobectomies for lung cancer.

BACKGROUND The purpose of our retrospective study is to confirm that bilobectomy is a feasible operation with an oncological value. METHODS From 1981 to 1998, 46 patients underwent bilobectomy for lung cancer. Eight upper and middle lobectomies (UML) and 38 middle and lower lobectomies (MLL) were performed. Intraoperative pneumoperitoneum was done in 11 MLL. We have considered operative mortality, postoperative complications, the persistence of drainage tubes and the length of hospital stay and the data were statistically compared with those relative to right lobectomies. Survival was estimated with the Kaplan-Meier method and the curves were compared with those of the right lobectomies and right pneumonectomies using the log-rank test. RESULTS Overall morbidity was 43.4%. Mortality was 6.5%. Mean chest tube persistence was 7.8 days and mean hospital stay was 14 days. No statistical significance was found about these data comparing the UML and MLL separately and the bilobectomies with the right lobectomies. The pneumoperitoneum done in the MLL enabled a shorter hospital stay, statistically significant, in comparison with MLL without pneumoperitoneum. The overall 5-year survival rate was 38%. Considering the I and the II stages no statistical differences in survival were found considering the right lobectomies and right pneumonectomies. CONCLUSIONS The bilobectomies can have a role in treatment of lung cancer that is equal to the other standard major resections.
A Mobile Testing Use Case with AWARE Framework and Mobile Testing Overview

The population in the world is aging and this presents many challenges in both health care and economy. Preventing or delaying the outbreak of age related diseases like Alzheimer’s disease can help in bringing down the cost in health care as early intervention could be facilitated. Novel and more e↵ective methods of both data collection and data analytics are needed to improve the performance of the systems used by elderly people and their caretakers. This paper presents a use case where a mobile questionnaire was developed within the AWARE Framework to test the e cacy of such a mobile platform in testing a group of elderly and older adults. Also presented are the results of a literary survey performed to learn about the average properties of mobile testing.
On the success probability of the two provers in one-round proof systems

The author addresses the problem of reducing the error probability of two-prover one-round proof systems, without increasing the number of provers or the number of rounds. An example, the noninteractive agreement protocol, where executing such a protocol twice in parallel does not decrease the error probability at all is constructed. Upper bounds on the error probability of specific classes of protocols are proved. As a corollary, it is shown that every NEXPTIME language has a one-round two-prover proof system with constant error probability. <<ETX>>
Host–pathogen interactions: a proteomic view

Host–pathogen interactions reflect the balance of host defenses and pathogen virulence mechanisms. Advances in proteomic technologies now afford opportunities to compare protein content between complex biologic systems ranging from cells to animals and clinical samples. Thus, it is now possible to characterize host–pathogen interactions from a global proteomic view. Most reports to date focus on cataloging protein content of pathogens and identifying virulence-associated proteins or proteomic alterations in host response. A more in-depth understanding of host–pathogen interactions has the potential to improve our mechanistic understanding of pathogenicity and virulence, thereby defining novel therapeutic and vaccine targets. In addition, proteomic characterization of the host response can provide pathogen-specific host biomarkers for rapid pathogen detection and characterization, as well as for early and specific detection of infectious diseases. A review of host–pathogen interactions focusing on proteomic analyses of both pathogen and host will be presented. Relevant genomic studies and host model systems will be also be discussed.
Antibacterial activity of microbicidal cationic proteins 1 and 2, natural peptide antibiotics of rabbit lung macrophages

Microbicidal cationic proteins 1 and 2, peptides derived from rabbit lung macrophages, were tested for bactericidal activity against various bacterial species. Both were highly active against diverse gram-positive and gram-negative organisms under conditions of near-neutral pH (between 7 and 8) and relatively low ionic strength. Susceptible species included Staphylococcus aureus, Staphylococcus epidermidis, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Listeria monocytogenes, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, Escherichia coli, and Serratia marcescens. Streptococcus agalactiae, type 1A, was less susceptible than the aforementioned organisms or S. agalactiae, type 3. Bordetella bronchiseptica, a common commensal and pathogen of the rabbit respiratory tract, was completely resistant to both peptides.
IAP Antagonists Enhance Cytokine Production from Mouse and Human iNKT Cells

IAP antagonists inhibit tumor growth in vivo primarily through augmentation of antitumor immunity. IAP antagonists were found to augment iNKT cell-mediated antitumor immunity in mice and were useful in expanding human IFNγ-producing iNKT cells ex vivo. Inhibitor of apoptosis protein (IAP) antagonists are in clinical trials for a variety of cancers, and mouse models show synergism between IAP antagonists and anti–PD-1 immunotherapy. Although IAP antagonists affect the intrinsic signaling of tumor cells, their most pronounced effects are on immune cells and the generation of antitumor immunity. Here, we examined the effects of IAP antagonism on T-cell development using mouse fetal thymic organ culture and observed a selective loss of iNKT cells, an effector cell type of potential importance for cancer immunotherapy. Thymic iNKT-cell development probably failed due to increased strength of TCR signal leading to negative selection, given that mature iNKT cells treated with IAP antagonists were not depleted, but had enhanced cytokine production in both mouse and human ex vivo cultures. Consistent with this, mature mouse primary iNKT cells and iNKT hybridomas increased production of effector cytokines in the presence of IAP antagonists. In vivo administration of IAP antagonists and α-GalCer resulted in increased IFNγ and IL-2 production from iNKT cells and decreased tumor burden in a mouse model of melanoma lung metastasis. Human iNKT cells also proliferated and increased IFNγ production dramatically in the presence of IAP antagonists, demonstrating the utility of these compounds in adoptive therapy of iNKT cells. Cancer Immunol Res; 6(1); 25–35. ©2017 AACR.
Viral DNA Polymerases

Because many viruses are readily amenable to molecular, genetic, and biochemical analyses, and because the replication of certain viruses has been the target of antiviral drug development, a wealth of information has accumulated regarding the structure, functions, properties, and regulation of eukaryotic viral DNA polymerases. Viral DNA polymerases have interesting similarities with eukaryotic cellular DNA polymerases (Wang, this volume) and fascinating differences, both of which shed light on mechanisms of polymerase function.
Cloning and expression in Escherichia coli of a xylanase gene from Bacteroides ruminicola 23

A gene coding for xylanase activity in the ruminal bacterial strain 23, the type strain of Bacteroides ruminicola, was cloned into Escherichia coli JM83 by using plasmid pUC18. AB. ruminicola 23 genomic library was prepared in E. coli by using BamHI-digested DNA, and transformants were screened for xylanase activity on the basis of clearing areas around colonies grown on Remazol brilliant blue R-xylan plates. Six clones were identified as being xylanase positive, and all six contained the same 5.7-kilobase genomic insert. The gene was reduced to a 2.7-kilobase DNA fragment. Xylanase activity produced by the E. coli clone was found to be greater than that produced by the original B. ruminicola strain. Southern hybridization analysis of genomic DNA from the related B. ruminicola strains, D31d and H15a, by using the strain 23 xylanase gene demonstrated one hybridizing band in each DNA.
Income and Child Well-Being

My topic this afternoon is the link between family income and the well-being of children. While it is easy to document the better health and higher achievement of children who have grown up in richer as opposed to poorer families, it is much harder to isolate the causal impact of income itself. Children growing up in higher income families are advantaged in many other ways, including having parents who have completed more formal schooling and are embedded in higher-status social networks, and whose genetic endowments may provide cognitive and health-related advantages. The question I seek to answer concerns the impact of income itself and takes the form of a policy thought experiment: by how much would we expect a child’s well-being to improve if that child’s family were unexpectedly given more income through, say, a more generous child allowance? In attempting to answer this question I will first discuss relevant models of child development from economics and developmental psychology and then document some of the differences in well-being between high and low income children. I will then review some of the empirical studies of the links between income and child achievement. In my review I will begin with cross-sectional evidence, move next to longitudinal studies and then consider some recent innovative studies that use natural and random-assignment experiments and instrumentalvariables methods. I will conclude with some thoughts about the policy implications of the results from these studies.
The Theoretical and Experimental Study of a Novel Two-Dimensional Magnetic Fluid Accelerometer

The magnetic fluid has been used in the accelerometers to improve the performance owing to its characteristics of fluidity and paramagnetism. In this paper, a novel 2-D magnetic fluid accelerometer is proposed. The restoring force of the accelerometer is generated by the first-order levitation of the magnetic fluid, which also keeps the inertial mass in the levitation state. A method to simulate the first-order levitation force of the magnetic fluid is proposed and it turns out to be in good agreement with the experimental result. The output of the accelerometer is theoretically and experimentally studied and the theoretical output curve is similar with the experimental curve. Besides, the experimental result shows the accelerometer has a good linearity of better than 2.45% in the x-axis and better than 1.57% in the y-axis at a range of 0-0.625 g.
A protein that binds to the regulatory region of the Escherichia coli ilvIH operon

The ilvIH operon of Escherichia coli encodes acetohydroxyacid synthase III, an isoenzyme involved in branched-chain amino acid biosynthesis. Transcription of the ilvIH operon is repressed by growing cells in the presence of leucine (C.H. Squires, M. DeFelice, S.R. Wessler, and J.M. Calvo, J. Bacteriol. 147:797-804, 1981). A protein in crude extracts of E. coli, termed the ilvIH-binding (IHB) protein, bound specifically in vitro to DNA upstream of the ilvIH operon. The binding protein, partially purified by Polymin precipitation, gel filtration, and phosphocellulose chromatography, has a native molecular weight of 43,000 and is composed of two subunits of identical size. As determined by protection against lambda exonuclease and DNase I, the protein binds within a region -190 to -260 relative to the start point of transcription. In addition, the IHB protein binds to a site between positions -100 and -40. The following evidence suggests that binding of this protein to the region upstream of ilvIH is related to the regulation of this operon by leucine. Binding of the IHB protein to the ilvIH regulatory region in vitro was reduced by leucine but not by isoleucine, valine, or threonine. In a mutant strain isolated by M.V. Ursini, P. Arcari, and M. DeFelice (Mol. Gen. Genet. 181:491-496, 1981), transcription was not repressed by leucine. A protein in extracts of this mutant strain bound to the ilvIH regulatory region, but the complex migrated through agarose gels with a mobility different from that of the complex formed by wild-type protein. Furthermore, a concentration of leucine that substantially reduced binding of the wild-type to DNA did not affect binding of the protein from the mutant strain. A simple model consistent with these findings is that transcription from the ilvIH promoter is stimulated by binding the IHB protein to one or more sites upstream of the promoter and that leucine interferes with this binding.
Cycloheximide stimulates early adenovirus transcription if early gene expression is allowed before treatment

The inhibition of protein synthesis by cycloheximide markedly stimulated adenovirus 2 early transcription (assayed in vivo and in vitro in nuclei) when the drug was added 3 h after infection of HeLa cells. The stimulation was not uniform but ranged from three- to eightfold for region 1A to 10- to 30-fold for region 2 of the adenovirus genome. The increase was complete by about 60 min after treatment. The stimulation reversed rapidly after cycloheximide was removed. Treatment with cycloheximide either before infection with wild-type adenovirus type 5 or at 3 h after infection with dl312, a mutant which fails to express early gene products in HeLa cells, both resulted in levels of transcription at or substantially below the control (infection with wild-type adenovirus without treatment). Therefore we conclude that cycloheximide treatment and previous early gene expression interact to yield the maximum levels of transcription.
Psychoanalysis, Nazism and ‘Jewish science’

In this paper the author offers a partial examination of the troubled history of psychoanalysis in Germany during the Nazi period. Of particular interest is the impact on psychoanalysis of its ‘Jewish origins’‐something denigrated by the Nazis but reclaimed by more recent Jewish and other scholars. The author traces the rapid decline of the pre‐Nazi psychoanalytic institutions under the sway of a policy of appeasement and collaboration, paying particular attention to the continuation of some forms of psychoanalytic practice within the ‘Göring Institute’. He suggests that a feature of this history was the anti‐Semitism evidenced by some non‐Jewish psychoanalysts, which revealed an antagonism towards their own positioning as followers of the ‘Jewish science’.
The impact of care-giving on care-givers: factors associated with the psychological well-being of people supporting a dementing relative in the community.

The aim of this paper is to present findings concerning a variety of factors expected to influence, either directly or indirectly as mediators, the psychological well-being of persons caring for a dementing relative in the community. The sample included both co-resident and non-resident supporters and the data were collected via a semi-structured interview. Only sex of dependant, sex of supporter, satisfaction with help from relatives, blood/role relationship, duration of care, frequency of visits from a home help and community nurse were significantly correlated with supporters' morale and mental health. The directions of these correlations were, however, not always as expected, e.g. the longer the duration of care-giving the higher the supporters' morale and the better the supporters' mental health. It was interesting to find that level of impairment and help from family and friends were not significantly associated with morale and mental health of supporters.
Estimating sampling error of evolutionary statistics based on genetic covariance matrices using maximum likelihood

We explore the estimation of uncertainty in evolutionary parameters using a recently devised approach for resampling entire additive genetic variance–covariance matrices (G). Large‐sample theory shows that maximum‐likelihood estimates (including restricted maximum likelihood, REML) asymptotically have a multivariate normal distribution, with covariance matrix derived from the inverse of the information matrix, and mean equal to the estimated G. This suggests that sampling estimates of G from this distribution can be used to assess the variability of estimates of G, and of functions of G. We refer to this as the REML‐MVN method. This has been implemented in the mixed‐model program WOMBAT. Estimates of sampling variances from REML‐MVN were compared to those from the parametric bootstrap and from a Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach (implemented in the R package MCMCglmm). We apply each approach to evolvability statistics previously estimated for a large, 20‐dimensional data set for Drosophila wings. REML‐MVN and MCMC sampling variances are close to those estimated with the parametric bootstrap. Both slightly underestimate the error in the best‐estimated aspects of the G matrix. REML analysis supports the previous conclusion that the G matrix for this population is full rank. REML‐MVN is computationally very efficient, making it an attractive alternative to both data resampling and MCMC approaches to assessing confidence in parameters of evolutionary interest.
Comparative Study on Sentence Boundary Prediction for German and English Broadcast News

We present a comparative study on sentence boundary prediction for German and English broadcast news that explores generalization across different languages. In the feature extraction stage, word pause duration is firstly extracted from word aligned speech, and forward and backward language models are utilized to extract textual features. Then a gradient boosted machine is optimized by grid search to map these features to punctuation marks. Experimental results confirm that word pause duration is a simple yet effective feature to predict whether there is a sentence boundary after that word. We found that Bayes risk derived from pause duration distributions of sentence boundary words and non-boundary words is an effective measure to assess the inherent difficulty of sentence boundary prediction. The proposed method achieved F-measures of over 90% on reference text and around 90% on ASR transcript for both German broadcast news corpus and English multi-genre broadcast news corpus. This demonstrates the state of the art performance of the proposed method.
TGF‐β triggers HBV cccDNA degradation through AID‐dependent deamination

The covalently closed circular DNA (cccDNA) of hepatitis B virus (HBV) is a viral center molecule for HBV infection and persistence. However, the cellular restriction factors of HBV cccDNA are not well understood. Here, we show that TGF‐β can induce nuclear viral cccDNA degradation and hypermutation via activation‐induced cytidine deaminase (AID) deamination activity in hepatocytes. This suppression by TGF‐β is abrogated when AID or the activity of uracil‐DNA glycosylase (UNG) is absent, which indicates that AID deamination and the UNG‐mediated excision of uracil act in concert to degrade viral cccDNA. Moreover, the HBV core protein promotes the interaction between AID and viral cccDNA. Overall, our results indicate a novel molecular mechanism that allows cytokine TGF‐β to restrict viral nuclear cccDNA in innate immunity, thereby suggesting a novel method for potentially eliminating cccDNA.
Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma Presenting with Cavernous Sinus Involvement, Trigeminal Neuralgia and Middle Ear Effusion

and analyzed an unusual case of NPC (Nasopharyngeal carcinoma) where the patient had initial clinical features of cavernous sinus involvement followed by trigeminal neuralgia and middle ear dysfunction. In the present case, the initial involvement of the cavernous sinus resulted in the left sided third nerve involvement. Later on, the extension of the tumor in and around the trigeminal ganglion resulted in facial pain. Up to that point in time, a possibility of cavernous sinus lesion was considered and this caused a delay in the diagnosis. In accordance with the literature, this case illustrates that the tumor is difficult to diagnose during the early stages for multiple reasons, including: the non-specicity of the initial symptoms, and the difficulty of examining the postnasal space.
ALLOCATION AND ASSIGNMENT IN HIGH-LEVEL SYNTHESIS FOR SELF-TESTABLE DATA PATHS

This paper describes a technique and program for automatically synthesizing a self-testable data path structure given a scheduled data flow description of a design. The resulting data path structure is combinationally self-testable when the registers are reconfigured as either pseudo-random pattern generators or parallel signature analyzers. The synthesis procedure consists of first mapping the data flow description onto a register conflict graph. The nodes of the graph are then colored using a node coloring algorithm that is guided by design implementation costs such as interconnection area and multiplexer size. Finally, the colored graph is mapped to hardware. A simple constraint imposed on the conflicl. graph guarantees combinational self-testability of the data path. In addition, new methods for mapping the data flow description to the conflict graph are incorporated to allow the procedure maximum flexibility in synthesizing arr efficient hardware implementation.
Female sex and higher drug dose as risk factors for late cardiotoxic effects of doxorubicin therapy for childhood cancer.

BACKGROUND Late cardiotoxic effects of doxorubicin are increasingly a problem for patients who survive childhood cancer. Cardiotoxicity is often progressive, and some patients have disabling symptoms. Our objective was to identify risk factors for late cardiotoxicity. METHODS We examined echocardiograms from 120 children and adults who had received cumulative doses of 244 to 550 mg of doxorubicin per square meter of body-surface area for the treatment of acute lymphoblastic leukemia or osteogenic sarcoma in childhood, a mean of 8.1 years earlier. Measurements of blood pressure and left ventricular function, contractility (measured as the stress-velocity index), end-diastolic posterior-wall thickness, end-diastolic dimension, mass, and afterload (measured as end-systolic wall stress) were compared with sex-specific values from a cohort of 296 normal subjects. RESULTS All echocardiographic measurements were abnormal at follow-up a minimum of two years after the end of therapy, with more frequent and severe abnormalities in female patients. In a multivariate analysis, female sex and a higher cumulative dose of doxorubicin were associated with depressed contractility (P < or = 0.001), and there was an interaction between these two variables. Independent and significant associations were found between a higher rate of administration of doxorubicin and increased afterload (P < or = 0.001), left ventricular dilatation, and depressed left ventricular function; between a higher cumulative dose and depressed left ventricular function (P < or = 0.001); between a younger age at diagnosis and reduced left-ventricular-wall thickness and mass and increased afterload; and between a longer time since the completion of doxorubicin therapy and reduced left-ventricular-wall thickness and increased afterload (P < or = 0.001). CONCLUSIONS Female sex and a higher rate of administration of doxorubicin were independent risk factors for cardiac abnormalities after treatment with doxorubicin for childhood cancer; the prevalence and severity of abnormalities increased with longer follow-up.