Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Qat Chewing and Risk of Potentially Malignant and Malignant Oral Disorders: A Systematic Review

Background: Qat (also known as Khat, Kat and Miraa) is a green-leaved plant (Catha edulis). It is a shrub indigenous to Yemen and certain parts of eastern Africa. Chewing the leaves, which have sympathomimetic and euphoric effects, has been documented in many countries and increased with worldwide migration. The effect of long-term chewing Qat on the oral cavity is unknown. Objective: A systematic review was performed to identify any associations between Qat chewing and the occurrence of potentially malignant and malignant oral disorders. Methods: Medline and the Web of Science were searched for articles published before May 2014 without limits with regard to publication date and language. Results: From a total of 890 papers identified, 17 English papers reported potentially malignant or malignant oral disorders and Qat chewing. One additional paper in Arabic language was identified from reviewing the list of references of eligible papers. It was found that exposure to Qat may be associated with potentially malignant and malignant oral disorders, but methodological issues, such as inadequate study design, sample size, selection of study subjects, clinical evaluations of outcome and limited adjustment for confounders, limit the strength of the evidence base in this area. Conclusion: The association between Qat chewing and potentially malignant and malignant oral disorders remains debatable and requires further investigations.
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance

Why do naturally talented people frequently fail to reach their potential while other far less gifted individuals go on to achieve amazing things? The secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, but a passionate persistence. In other words, grit. MacArthur Genius Award-winning psychologist Angela Duckworth shares fascinating new revelations about who succeeds in life and why. Based on her cutting-edge research, Duckworth shows how many people achieve remarkable things not just by relying on innate natural talent, but by practising what she calls grit. She then offers a Grit Formula to help anyone to become more gritty, focusing on six key factors: hope, effort, precision, passion, ritual and prioritisation. She reveals: why people who test high for talent often fail to achieve their potential, and why people who do not test high for talent often "overachieve" what others expect them to do; how grit can be learned, whatever your IQ or circumstances; why stubbornness is a key characteristic of gritty people; when to be stubborn and when giving up is the grittiest thing you can do; how gritty people found their passion, and you can find yours; how gritty experts practise, and how you can do the same in your own life; what the people who care about you can do to boost your grit when you need it most; and, how grit is cultivated in the highest-performing sports teams, companies and schools. Leaping past cliches such as 'success is all about hard work', Grit offers a fresh and motivating way to climb to heights far beyond what natural talent would predict.
Formulation of Persea americana seed extract into tablet dosage

Formulation of ethanol seed extract of Persea americana Mill (Family Lauraceae) into tablet dosage form was investigated. Formulation into tablets was done by direct compression using lactose and microcrystalline cellulose (Avicel) as directly compressible diluent and wet granulation using 4% solutions of gelatin and polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) as binders. Tablets were compressed at 10, 15 and 20 kN and later subjected to tablet quality testing procedures. The mechanical properties of the tablets were assessed using crushing strength (CS) and friability (F) and the crushing strength – friability ratio (CSFR) while drug release properties were evaluated using disintegration and dissolution times. There were statistically significant (p < 0.01) differences in the crushing strength (CS) values and drug release properties of P. americana prepared by both methods. Tablets containing Avicel produced better mechanical properties than tablets containing lactose. Tablets containing PVP as binder possessed better and more consistent release properties than tablets containing gelatin. Tablets produced by direct compression possessed better mechanical and release properties than tablets produced by wet granulation. The method of preparation of the P. americana tablets needs to be carefully selected to ensure the production of tablets with adequate bond strength and the same time release its active contents for pharmacologic action.
Reliability-aware service provisioning in NFV-enabled enterprise datacenter networks

Network Function Visualization (NFV) enables the complete decoupling of Network Functions (NFs) (e.g., firewall, intrusion detection, routing, etc.) from physical middleboxes used to implement service-specific and strictly ordered chains of these NFs. Precisely, NFV allows for dispatching NFs as plain software instances called Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) running on virtual machines hosted by one or more industry standard physical machines. This, however, introduces vulnerabilities (e.g., hard-/soft-ware failures, etc) causing the break down of the entire VNF chain. The functionality of NFV-enabled networks impose higher reliability requirements than traditional networks. This paper encloses an in-depth investigation of a reliability-aware joint VNF placement and flow routing optimization problem. This problem is formulated as a complex Integer Linear Program (ILP). A heuristic is proposed in order to overcome this ILP's complexity. Thorough numerical analysis are conducted to verify and assert the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed heuristic.
How to best assess blood pressure? The ongoing debate on the clinical value of blood pressure average and variability.

See related article, pp 1087–1093 It is half a century since high blood pressure (BP) measured in the doctor's office has been proved to be a strong predictor of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. However, it soon became clear that multiple factors can significantly affect the BP measurement result (Table 1) and may thereby have considerable impact on its prognostic ability. View this table: Table 1. Aspects of the BP Measurement That Might Influence Its Assessment Despite the intensive research with almost 120 000 PubMed papers on issues related to BP monitoring, the question “how to best assess BP” is still a matter of hot debate. Notwithstanding these difficulties, research in the field of BP monitoring has considerably refined the BP measurement procedure, by systematically addressing all factors listed in Table 1. Such improvement has included a better standardization of methods as well as the development of multiple approaches to BP quantification, aiming to more precise risk prediction. This was achieved not only by a more accurate estimation of mean BP, but also by the evaluation of different patterns of BP variation over time. Although, irrespective of the measurement methodology (Table 1), any BP value is by itself a powerful index of risk, several aspects of BP dynamics assessed by considering patterns of BP change over time have been proved to increase the prognostic ability of BP, over and above the information provided by conventional office measurements. Practicing physicians, as well as patients themselves (particularly …
Cyclooxygenase-2 mediates increased renal renin content induced by low-sodium diet.

We hypothesized that neuronal nitric oxide synthase and cyclooxygenase-2, which both exist in the renal cortex, predominantly in the macula densa, play a role in the control of renal renin tissue content. We studied the possible role of neuronal nitric oxide synthase in regulating renal renin content by using mice in which the neuronal nitric oxide synthase gene has been disrupted (nNOS-/-) compared with its two progenitor strains, the 129/SvEv and the C57BL/6, to determine if the absence of neuronal nitric oxide synthase would result in decreased renal renin content or blunt the increase observed during low sodium intake. Renal renin content from cortical slices was determined in adult mice from all three strains maintained on a normal sodium diet. Renal renin content was significantly reduced in the nNOS-/- mice compared with the 129/SvEv and the C57BL/6 mice (3.11 +/- 0.23 versus 5.66 +/- 0.50 and 7.55 +/- 1.17 micrograms angiotensin l/mg dry weight, respectively; P < .005), suggesting that neuronal nitric oxide synthase may stimulate renal renin content under basal conditions. Neither selective pharmacological inhibition of neuronal nitric oxide synthase using 7-nitroindazole or disruption of the neuronal nitric oxide synthase gene affected the increase in renal content observed during dietary sodium restriction. The influence of cyclooxygenase-2 on renal renin content through a macula densa-mediated pathway was studied using a selective cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitor, NS398, in 129/SvEv mice. A low-sodium diet increased renal renin content from 6.97 +/- 0.52 to 11.59 +/- 0.79 micrograms angiotensin l/mg dry weight (P < .005); but this increase was blocked by NS398. In addition, treatment with NS398 reduced renin mRNA in response to a low-sodium diet. Thus, increased renal renin content in response to dietary sodium restriction appears to require the induction of cyclooxygenase-2, while neuronal nitric oxide synthase appears to affect basal but not stimulated renal renin content.
University of Glasgow Terrier Team / Project Abacá at RepLab 2014: Reputation Dimensions Task

This paper describes our participation in the RepLab 2014 Reputa- tion Dimensions task. The task is a multi-class classification task where tweets relating to an entity of interest are to be classified by their reputation dimen- sion. For our participation we investigate two approaches; Firstly, we use a term's gini-index score to quantify the term's representativeness of a specific class and construct class profiles for tweet classification, and secondly, we perform tweet enrichment using a web scale corpus to derive terms representative of a tweet's class, before training a classifier with the enriched tweets. Our tweet enrichment approach performed exceedingly well, showing that this approach is effective for classifying tweets by their reputation dimensions and a promising direction for future work.
Evidence of Bovine viral diarrhea virus Infection in Three Species of Sympatric Wild Ungulates in Nevada: Life History Strategies May Maintain Endemic Infections in Wild Populations

Evidence for bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) infection was detected in 2009–2010 while investigating a pneumonia die-off in Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep (Ovis canadensis, canadensis), and sympatric mountain goats (Oreamnos americanum) in adjacent mountain ranges in Elko County, Nevada. Seroprevalence to BVDV-1 was 81% (N = 32) in the bighorns and 100% (N = 3) in the mountain goats. Serosurveillance from 2011 to 2015 of surviving bighorns and mountain goats as well as sympatric mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), indicated a prevalence of 72% (N = 45), 45% (N = 51), and 51% (N = 342) respectively. All species had antibody titers to BVDV1 and BVDV2. BVDV1 was isolated in cell culture from three bighorn sheep and a mountain goat kid. BVDV2 was isolated from two mule deer. Six deer (N = 96) sampled in 2013 were positive for BVDV by antigen-capture ELISA on a single ear notch. Wild ungulates and cattle concurrently graze public and private lands in these two mountain ranges, thus providing potential for interspecies viral transmission. Like cattle, mule deer, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep can be infected with BVDV and can develop clinical disease including immunosuppression. Winter migration patterns that increase densities and species interaction during the first and second trimester of gestation may contribute to the long term maintenance of the virus in these wild ungulates. More studies are needed to determine the population level impacts of BVDV infection on these three species.
Using syntax in large-scale audio document translation

Recently, the use of syntax has very effectively improved machine translation (MT) quality in many text translation tasks. However, using syntax in speech translation poses additional challenges because of disfluencies and other spoken language phenomena, and of errors introduced by automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we investigate the effect of using syntax in a large-scale audio document translation task targeting broadcast news and broadcast conversations. We do so by comparing the performance of three synchronous context-free grammar based translation approaches: 1) hierarchical phrase-based translation, 2) syntax-augmented MT, and 3) string-to-dependency MT. The results show a positive effect of explicitly using syntax when translating broadcast news, but no benefit when translating broadcast conversations. The results indicate that improving the robustness of syntactic systems against conversational language style is important to their success and requires future effort.
Release Factors 2 from Escherichia coli and Thermus thermophilus: structural, spectroscopic and microcalorimetric studies

Prokaryotic class I release factors (RFs) respond to mRNA stop codons and terminate protein synthesis. They interact with the ribosomal decoding site and the peptidyl-transferase centre bridging these 75 Å distant ribosomal centres. For this an elongated RF conformation, with partially unfolded core domains II·III·IV is required, which contrasts the known compact RF crystal structures. The crystal structure of Thermus thermophilus RF2 was determined and compared with solution structure of T. thermophilus and Escherichia coli RF2 by microcalorimetry, circular dichroism spectroscopy and small angle X-ray scattering. The structure of T. thermophilus RF2 in solution at 20°C is predominantly compact like the crystal structure. Thermodynamic analysis point to an initial melting of domain I, which is independent from the melting of the core. The core domains II·III·IV melt cooperatively at the respective physiological temperatures for T. thermophilus and E. coli. Thermodynamic analyses and the X-ray scattering results for T. thermophilus RF2 in solution suggest that the compact conformation of RF2 resembles a physiological state in absence of the ribosome.
Does the Stimulus Type Influence Horses’ Performance in a Quantity Discrimination Task?

The ability to understand the relation between quantities has been documented in a wide range of species. Such quantity discrimination competences are commonly demonstrated by a choice of the larger quantity or numerosity in a two-choice task. However, despite their overall success, many subjects commit a surprisingly large number of errors even in simple discriminations such as 1 vs. 3. Recently, it had been suggested that this is a result of the testing procedure. When monkeys could choose between different quantities of edible rewards, they showed low-level success. If, however, they chose between inedible items and were rewarded with edible items, their performance increased. The same held true if they chose between edible items but were rewarded with other edible items (Schmitt and Fischer, 2011). This led to the suggestion that the monkeys may not have been able to mentally separate between choice- and reward-stimuli in the initial test situation. To investigate if this response pattern can also be found in non-primate species, we replicated the experiment with 12 Icelandic horses kept at a private horse-riding school. Horses are known to discriminate between quantities up to three, but are very distantly related to primates. Unexpectedly, we found only weak evidence for quantity discrimination skills and no effect of the type of stimuli. Only some subjects reliably selected the larger quantity in some, but not all quantity pairs. These findings are not only in contrast to the previously conducted study on monkeys, but also to other studies on horses. From this, we conclude that quantity discrimination competence may only be of minor importance for horses and highlight the influence of experimental conditions on the outcome of cognitive tests.
The Changing Ecology of Tools for Live News Reporting

Broadcast news channels provide fresh, continuously updated coverage of events, in sharp competition with other news channels in the same market. The live moment is a valuable feature, and broadcasters have always relied on teams that can react quickly to breaking news and report live from the scene. Technology plays an important role in the production of live news, and a number of tools are applied by skilled actors in what can be called an ecology of tools for live news reporting. This study explores new video tools for television news, and the tinkering conducted by the reporting teams to adapt to such tools. Six journalists and photographers at broadcaster TV 2 in Norway were interviewed about their everyday work practices out in the field, and we present the findings in an analysis where six aspects of contemporary live news reporting are explored: (1) from heavy to light equipment, (2) more live news at TV 2, (3) the practice of going live, (4) the mobility of live reporters, (5) tinkering to go live, and (6) quicker pace of production. In the concluding remarks we summarize our insights about live news reporting.
Efficacy of the Additional Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy to Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy for Patients with Locoregionally Advanced Nasopharyngeal Carcinoma: a Bayesian Network Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Background: Due to the lack of studies, it remains unclear whether the additional neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NACT) to concurrent chemoradiotherapy (CCRT) is superior to CCRT alone for locoregionally advanced nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC). The main objective of this Bayesian network meta-analysis was to determine the efficacy of NACT+CCRT as compared with CCRT alone. Methods: We comprehensively searched databases and extracted data from randomized controlled trials involving NPC patients who received NACT+CCRT, CCRT, NACT+radiotherapy (RT), or RT. Overall survival (OS) with hazard ratio (HR), and locoregional recurrence rate (LRR) and distant metastasis rate (DMR) with relative risks (RRs), were concerned. Results: Nine trials involving 1988 patients were analyzed. In the network meta-analysis, there was significant benefit of NACT+CCRT over CCRT for DMR (RR=0.54, 95% credible interval [CrI]=0.27-0.94). However, NACT+CCRT had a tendency to worsen locoregional control significantly as compared with CCRT (RR =1.71, 95%CrI =0.94-2.84), and no significant improvement in OS was found (HR =0.73, 95%CrI=0.40-1.23). Conclusions: NACT+CCRT is associated with reduced distant failure as compared with CCRT alone, and whether the additional NACT can improve survival for locoregionally advanced NPC should be further explored. Optimizing regimens and identifying patients at high risk of metastasis may enhance the efficacy of NACT+CCRT.
Interoperability in Future Wireless Communications Systems : A Roadmap to 4 G

Future generation communication systems will provide transparent and seamless user roaming with end-to-end QoS guarantees. As a result, the interoperability of various communicating platforms emerges as a crucial necessity. This paper gives an overview of the major 4G features and explains the significance of the network interoperability aspect and its role in the development towards the 4G paradigm.
Properties of Arrangement Graphs

An arrangement graph G is the abstract graph obtained from an arrangement of lines L, in general position by associating vertices of G with the intersection points of L, and the edges of G with the line segments joining the intersection points of L. A simple polygon (respectively path) of n sides in general position, induces a set of n lines by extension of the line segments into lines. The main results of this paper are: • Given a graph G, it is NP-Hard to determine if G is the arrangement graph of some set of lines. • There are non-Hamiltonian arrangement graphs for arrangements of six lines and for odd values of n>6 lines. • All arrangements of n lines contain a subarrangement of size with an inducing polygon. • All arrangements on n lines contain an inducing path consisting of n line segments. A Java applet implementing the algorithm for determining such a path is also provided. • All arrangements on n hyperplanes in Rd contain a simple inducing polygonal cycle of size n.
On the relation between the Langmuir and thermodynamic flux equations

Despite its approximative nature, the Langmuir theory has shown to be a very successful approach to describe experimental adsorption isotherms. Langmuir kinetics is based on systems of non- interacting particles that can transfer from the gas phase to the adsorbed phase with a transition flux that depends both on the gas pressure and surface coverage. Recent molecular simulation results suggest, however, that some systems can have isotherms that are apparently Langmuirian while the kinetics are not. This remarkably result seems to question the interpretation of innumerous adsorption experiments. The observed anomalous kinetics were described by thermodynamic rate equations giving exactly the same isotherms. Unidirectional rates, as obtained from mesoscopic non- equilibrium theory, correct for the non-ideality of matter using activities instead of concentrations and seem to suggest that fluxes from phase A to another phase B only depends on the properties of phase A alone. In this article we show, however, that the theories and simulations are actually consistent when the following two points are taken into account. The first point is methodological and related to how one should count crossing events considering the presence of possible correlations. The second point is theoretical and related to the microscopic link between the Langmuir and thermodynamic rate theory. Specifically, we show how to define diffusion and activity coefficients at the border of the gas/solid interface. If both points are taken into account, there is neither a contradiction between both theories, nor with the molecular simulation results.
CONVERGENCE RATES FOR REGULARIZATION WITH SPARSITY CONSTRAINTS

Tikhonov regularization with p-powers of the weighted lp norms as penalties, with p 2 (1,2), have been employed recently in reconstruction of sparse solutions of ill-posed inverse problems. This paper shows convergence rates for such a regularization with respect to the norm of the weighted spaces by assuming that the solutions satisfy a certain smoothness (source) condition . The meaning of the latter is analyzed in some detail. Moreover, converse results are established: Linear conver gence rates for the residual, together with convergence of the approximations to the solution, can be achieved only if the solution satisfies a source condition. Further insights for the particular case of a convolution equation a re provided by analyzing the equation both theoretically and numerically.
Results and analysis for a novel 2×2 channel measurement applied in LTE-R at 2.6 GHz

To obtain more accurate features of the time-varying wireless channel in the viaduct districts along Harbin-Dalian passenger dedicated railway line, a newly proposed 2 × 2 measurement, in which m-sequence optimum pairs are modulated and transmitted, is performed at 2.6 GHz with a bandwidth of 20 MHz. In this paper, the counted statistical correlation coefficients provide sufficient proof that the lower the relevance between subchannels is, the larger users the channel can accommodate. In addition, the derived path loss model is presented and the shadow fading is fitted to lognormal distribution. Small-scale parameters such as the delay spread, the number of the resolvable multipath and K-factor are also calculated. Fading properties are speculated under viaduct scenarios in high speed railway with the extensive analytical results. This paper promotes evaluation, simulation and design of the wireless communication system based on LTE-R applicable to viaduct scenes in high speed railway.