Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fixed Dose Rate Infusion of Gemcitabine with Oral Doxifluridine and Leucovorin for Advanced Unresectable Pancreatic Cancer: A Phase II Study

The standard beneficial chemotherapy proven for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer is a regimen containing gemcitabine. In the pregemcitabine era, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) was the standard agent. Oral 5-FU can be added to gemcitabine to improve the efficacy of chemotherapy and to provide better patient convenience. The possibility to improve efficacy of gemcitabine by fixed dose rate infusion (FDRI) was proposed in addition to combining it with 5-FU. We tried a new chemotherapy combining FDRI of gemcitabine with doxifluridine and leucovorin. Eligibility criteria were pathologically proven, chemotherapy-naïve, and metastatic or nonoperable advanced pancreatic cancer. Gemcitabine 1,000 mg/m2 was infused over 100 min (days 1, 8 and 15). Doxifluridine 200 mg/m2 t.i. d. and leucovorin 15 mg b.i. d. were given orally (days 1–21). Chemotherapy was repeated every 28 days until a patient had received 6 cycles or progression was found. Twenty-nine patients were enrolled from October 2002 to December 2004. A total of 78 cycles were given at a mean of 2.7 cycles per patient. Response could be evaluated in 26 patients. Responses were partial remission in 4/26 patients (15.4%), stable disease in 8/26 (30.8%) and progression in 14/26 (53.8%). All patients progressed except for 2 in partial remission and 2 in stable disease. Toxicities could be assessed in 23 patients. Maximal hematological toxicities greater than grade 2 were leucopenia in 3 patients (11.5%), neutropenia in 2 (7.7%), anemia in 2 (7.7%), thrombocytopenia in 1 (3.8%) and febrile neutropenia in 3 (11.5%). Maximal nonhematological grade 3 or 4 toxicities were asthenia in 1 patient (3.8%), anorexia in 1 (3.8%), vomiting in 1 (3.8%), diarrhea in 2 (7.7%), allergic reaction in 1 (3.8%), hand-foot syndrome in 1 (3.8%) and hyperbilirubinemia in 1 (3.8%). All 29 patients were dead on last follow-up. Median progression-free survival was 3.91 months in 26 evaluable patients and median overall survival was 5.59 months in all patients. Combination chemotherapy including FDRI of gemcitabine seems minimally active for patients with advanced, nonoperable pancreatic cancer. Further research to improve effectiveness of chemotherapy for advanced pancreatic cancer is mandatory.
The (Ir)Relevance of Framing Nutrition Education Messages

Persuasive health education messages can either stress the positive consequences of performing a healthy behaviour (gain-frame) or the negative consequences of not performing a healthy behaviour (loss-frame). Based on studies on topics such as sun protection and breast self-examination there is evidence that messages in different action frames may differ in persuasive effects. Three randomised controlled trials were conducted to test framing effects in nutrition education on specific nutrition-related attitudes and intentions. In study 1, effects of gain-framed and loss-framed messages were studied among 152 adult education students on attitudes and intentions related to fat, fruit and vegetable consumption. In study 2 we confronted 149 regular students with differently framed messages related to a (more or less fictive) preventive dietary behaviour that was expected to be unknown to the study population, intake of flavonoids and risk for chronic disease. The impact on attitudes and intentions to use flavonoid-enriched spreads was studied. In study 3 we studied the effects of differently framed messages on attitudes and intentions related to more immediate and more personally relevant diet nutrition behaviour: folic acid supplement use before and during pregnancy among 100 female students. No significant differences in attitudes or intentions to perform the preventive nutrition behaviours were found between the gain-frame conditions and the loss-frame conditions in all three studies. The (lack of) effects were not moderated by factors such as perceived personal relevance, credibility or novelty of the information, or the perceived importance of the topic addressed. The results of the present studies suggest that action-frame choice has a very limited impact on the effectiveness of nutrition education in changing precautionary motivation.
El sistema contributivo de pensiones como locus de rivalidad y de un nuevo pacto social en Chile

En este estudio se realiza un diagnostico del sistema contributivo de pensiones en Chile y se formulan algunas recomendaciones de reforma, desde una perspectiva de derechos sociales que generan expectativas de satisfaccion: el objetivo primordial de un sistema de pensiones es proveer seguridad del ingreso en la vejez y las pensiones contributivas deben reflejar el ahorro realizado a lo largo de la vida laboral para garantizar que, a niveles semejantes de esfuerzo, se obtendran protecciones similares o proporcionales.
Parabolic vector bundles and equivariant vector bundles

Given a complex manifold $X$, a normal crossing divisor $D\subset X$ whose irreducible components $D_1,. ,D_s$ are smooth, and a choice of natural numbers $r=(r_1,.,r_s)$, we construct a manifold $X(D,\ur)$ with an action of a torus $\Gamma$ and we prove that some full subcategory of the category of $\Gamma$-equivariant vector bundles on $X(D,r)$ is equivalent to the category of parabolic vector bundles on $(X,D)$ in which the lengths of the filtrations over each irreducible component of $X$ are given by $r$. When $X$ is Kaehler, we study the Kaehler cone of $X(D,r)$ and the relation between the corresponding notions of slope-stability.
A Comprehensive Review of Head and Neck Cancer Rehabilitation: Physical Therapy Perspectives

Rehabilitation in relation to cancer can be preventative, restorative, supportive, and palliative. It is recognized that patients may have rehabilitation needs throughout their care pathway. The role of physiotherapy in the cancer rehabilitation is less understood and particularly in the head and neck cancer (HNC) patients. This results in various residual deformities and dysfunctions for the patients with HNC. The objective of this review is to provide detailed information regarding the problems faced after the cancer treatments and rehabilitation of patients who suffered with HNC. The fact that cancer patients are facing several months of chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy and usually major surgery, as well as the direct effect of immobility due to pain, means that muscle wasting, joint stiffness, as well as de-conditioning and fatigue are inevitable. The absence of physiotherapy intervention would be detrimental to patient care and the ability of the patient/family to cope with the effects of the disease or its treatment on their functional capacity and quality of life. Following any treatment for HNC, physical therapy may play an essential role in preventing various complications and helping patients to mitigate impairments, and restoring function of the shoulder joint, neck, and face.
A Pruning Algorithm for Training Cooperative Neural Network Ensembles

We present a training algorithm to create a neural network (NN) ensemble that performs classification tasks. It employs a competitive decay of hidden nodes in the component NNs as well as a selective deletion of NNs in ensemble, thus named a pruning algorithm for NN ensembles (PNNE). A node cooperation function of hidden nodes in each NN is introduced in order to support the decaying process. The training is based on the negative correlation learning that ensures diversity among the component NNs in ensemble. The less important networks are deleted by a criterion that indicates over-fitting. The PNNE has been tested extensively on a number of standard benchmark problems in machine learning, including the Australian credit card assessment, breast cancer, circle-in-the-square, diabetes, glass identification, ionosphere, iris identification, and soybean identification problems. The results show that classification performances of NN ensemble produced by the PNNE are better than or competitive to those by the conventional constructive and fixed architecture algorithms. Furthermore, in comparison to the constructive algorithm, NN ensemble produced by the PNNE consists of a smaller number of component NNs, and they are more diverse owing to the uniform training for all component NNs.
Finite Perfect Information Extensive Games with Generic Payoffs

In finite perfect information extensive (FPIE) games, backward induction (BI) gives rise to all pure-strategy subgame perfect Nash equilibria, and iterative elimination of weakly dominated strategies (IEWDS) may give different outcomes for different orders of elimination. Duggan recently posed several conjectures in an effort to better understand the relationship between BI and IEWDS in FPIE games. One conjecture states that the unique BI strategy profile in FPIE games with generic payoffs is guaranteed to survive IEWDS when all weakly dominated strategies are eliminated at every round. This paper exhibits a counterexample to this conjecture.
Development of a new high-throughput screening model for human high density lipoprotein receptor (CLA-1) agonists.

OBJECTIVE To develop a new high-throughput screening model for human high-density lipoprotein (HDL) receptor (CD36 and LIMPII analogous-1, CLA-1) agonists using CLA-1-expressing insect cells. METHODS With the total RNA of human hepatoma cells BEL-7402 as template, the complementary DNA (cDNA) of CLA-1 was amplified by reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). Bac-to-Bac baculovirus expression system was used to express CLA-1 in insect cells. CLA-1 cDNA was cloned downstream of polyhedrin promoter of Autographa californica nuclear polyhedrosis virus (AcNPV) into donor vector pFastBac1 and recombinant pFastBac1-CLA-1 was transformed into E. coli DH10Bac to transpose CLA-1 cDNA to bacmid DNA. Recombinant bacmid-CLA-1 was transfected into Spodoptera frugiperda Sf9 insect cells to produce recombinant baculovirus particles. Recombinant CLA-1 was expressed on the membrane of Sf9 cells infected with the recombinant baculoviruses. A series of parameters of DiI-lipoprotein binding assays of CLA-1-expressing Sf9 cells in 96-well plates were optimized. RESULTS Western blot analysis and DiI-lipoprotein binding assays confirmed that CLA-1 expressed in insect cells had similar immunoreactivity and ligand binding activity as its native counterpart. A reliable and sensitive in vitro cell-based assay was established to assess the activity of CLA-1 and used to screen agonists from different sample libraries. CONCLUSION Human HDL receptor CLA-1 was successfully expressed in Sf9 insect cells and a novel high-throughput screening model for CLA-1 agonists was developed. Utilization of this model allows us to identify potent and selective CLA-1 agonists which might possibly be used as therapeutics for atherosclerosis.
A multichannel 3.5mW/Gbps/channel gated oscillator based CDR in a 0.18/spl mu/m digital CMOS technology

This article presents a very low-power clock and data recovery (CDR) circuit with 8 parallel channels achieving an aggregate data rate of 20 Gbps. A structural top-down design methodology has been applied to minimize the power dissipation while satisfying the required specifications for short-haul receivers. Implemented in a 0.18/spl mu/m digital CMOS technology, total power dissipation is 70.2mW or 3.51mW/Gbps/ch and each channel occupies 0.045/spl mu/m/sup 2/ silicon area.
HLA-B*35-Px–mediated acceleration of HIV-1 infection by increased inhibitory immunoregulatory impulses

A subset of HLA-B*35 alleles, B*35-Px, are strongly associated with accelerated HIV-1 disease progression for reasons that are not understood. Interestingly, the alternative set of B*35 subtypes, B*35-PY, have no detectable impact on HIV-1 disease outcomes, even though they can present identical HIV-1 epitopes as B*35-Px molecules. Thus, the differential impact of these alleles on HIV-1 disease progression may be unrelated to interactions with HIV-1–specific CD8+ T cells. Here, we show that the B*35-Px molecule B*3503 binds with greater affinity to immunoglobulin-like transcript 4 (ILT4), an inhibitory MHC class I receptor expressed on dendritic cells, than does the B*35-PY molecule B*3501, even though these two B*35 molecules differ by only one amino acid and present identical HIV-1 epitopes. The preferential recognition of B*3503 by ILT4 was associated with significantly stronger dendritic cell dysfunction in in vitro functional assays. Moreover, HIV-1–infected carriers of B*3503 had poor dendritic cell functional properties in ex vivo assessments when compared with carriers of the B*3501 allele. Differential interactions between HLA class I allele subtypes and immunoregulatory MHC class I receptors on dendritic cells thus provide a novel perspective for the understanding of MHC class I associations with HIV-1 disease progression and for the manipulation of host immunity against HIV-1.
Conservation of the Protein Composition and Electron Microscopy Structure of Drosophila melanogaster and Human Spliceosomal Complexes

ABSTRACT Comprehensive proteomics analyses of spliceosomal complexes are currently limited to those in humans, and thus, it is unclear to what extent the spliceosome's highly complex composition and compositional dynamics are conserved among metazoans. Here we affinity purified Drosophila melanogaster spliceosomal B and C complexes formed in Kc cell nuclear extract. Mass spectrometry revealed that their composition is highly similar to that of human B and C complexes. Nonetheless, a number of Drosophila-specific proteins were identified, suggesting that there may be novel factors contributing specifically to splicing in flies. Protein recruitment and release events during the B-to-C transition were also very similar in both organisms. Electron microscopy of Drosophila B complexes revealed a high degree of structural similarity with human B complexes, indicating that higher-order interactions are also largely conserved. A comparison of Drosophila spliceosomes formed on a short versus long intron revealed only small differences in protein composition but, nonetheless, clear structural differences under the electron microscope. Finally, the characterization of affinity-purified Drosophila mRNPs indicated that exon junction complex proteins are recruited in a splicing-dependent manner during C complex formation. These studies provide insights into the evolutionarily conserved composition and structure of the metazoan spliceosome, as well as its compositional dynamics during catalytic activation.
Sentiment analysis on microblog data based on word embedding and fusion techniques

People often use social platforms to state their views and desires. Twitter is one of the most popular microblog service used for this purpose. In this study, we propose a new approach for automatically classifying the sentiment of microblog messages. The proposed approach is based on utilizing robust feature representation and fusion. We make use of word embedding technique as the feature representation and the Support Vector Machine as the classifier. In our approach, we first calculate statistical measures from word embedding representations and fuse them using different combinations. Learning is performed using these fused features and tested on the Turkish tweet dataset. Results show that the proposed approach significantly reduces the dimension of tweet representation and enhances sentiment classification accuracy. Best performance is attained by the proposed Dvot fusion technique with an accuracy of %80.05.
Dish comment summarization based on bilateral topic analysis

With the prosperity of online services enabled by Web 2.0, huge amount of human generated commentary data are now available on the Internet, covering a wide range of domains on different products. Such comments contain valuable information for other customers, but are usually difficult to utilize due to the lack of common description structure, the complexity of opinion expression and fast growing data volume. Comment-based restaurant summarization is even more challenging than other types of products and services, as users' comments on restaurants are usually mixed with opinions on different dishes but attached with only one overall evaluation score on the whole experience with the restaurants. It is thus crucial to distinguish well-made dishes from other lousy dishes by mining the comment archive, in order to generate meaningful and useful summaries for other potential customers. This paper presents a novel approach to tackle the problem of restaurant comment summarization, with a core technique on the new bilateral topic analysis model on the commentary text data. In the bilateral topic model, the attributes discussed in the comments on the dishes and the user's evaluation on the attributes are considered as two independent dimensions in the latent space. Combined with new opinionated word extraction and clustering-based representation selection algorithms, our new analysis technique is effective to generate high-quality summary using representative snippets from the text comments. We evaluate our proposals on two real-world comment archives crawled from the most popular English and Chinese online restaurant review web sites, Yelp and Dianping. The experimental results verify the huge margin of advantage of our proposals on the summarization quality over baseline approaches in the literature.
Oral Fluid Testing during 10 Years of Rubella Elimination, England and Wales

Surveillance of rubella in England and Wales has included immunoglobulin M testing of oral (crevicular) fluid from reported case-patients since 1994. The need for laboratory confirmation to monitor rubella elimination is emphasized by poor sensitivity (51%, 95% confidence interval 48.9%–54.0%) and specificity (55%, 95% confidence interval 53.7%–55.6%) of the clinical case definition. During 1999–2008, oral fluid from 11,709 (84%) of 13,952 reported case-patients was tested; 143 (1.0%) cases were confirmed and 11,566 (99%) were discarded (annual investigation and discard rate of clinically suspected rubella cases was 2,208/100,000 population). Incidence of confirmed rubella increased from 0.50 to 0.77/1 million population when oral fluid testing was included. Oral fluid tests confirmed that cases were more likely to be in older, unvaccinated men. Testing of oral fluid has improved ascertainment of confirmed rubella in children and men and provided additional information for assessing UK progress toward the World Health Organization elimination goal.
Analysis of Borna Disease Virus Trafficking in Live Infected Cells by Using a Virus Encoding a Tetracysteine-Tagged P Protein

ABSTRACT Borna disease virus (BDV) is a nonsegmented, negative-stranded RNA virus characterized by noncytolytic persistent infection and replication in the nuclei of infected cells. To gain further insight on the intracellular trafficking of BDV components during infection, we sought to generate recombinant BDV (rBDV) encoding fluorescent fusion viral proteins. We successfully rescued a virus bearing a tetracysteine tag fused to BDV-P protein, which allowed assessment of the intracellular distribution and dynamics of BDV using real-time live imaging. In persistently infected cells, viral nuclear inclusions, representing viral factories tethered to chromatin, appeared to be extremely static and stable, contrasting with a very rapid and active trafficking of BDV components in the cytoplasm. Photobleaching (fluorescence recovery after photobleaching [FRAP] and fluorescence loss in photobleaching [FLIP]) imaging approaches revealed that BDV components were permanently and actively exchanged between cellular compartments, including within viral inclusions, albeit with a fraction of BDV-P protein not mobile in these structures, presumably due to its association with viral and/or cellular proteins. We also obtained evidence for transfer of viral material between persistently infected cells, with routing of the transferred components toward the cell nucleus. Finally, coculture experiments with noninfected cells allowed visualization of cell-to-cell BDV transmission and movement of the incoming viral material toward the nucleus. Our data demonstrate the potential of tetracysteine-tagged recombinant BDV for virus tracking during infection, which may provide novel information on the BDV life cycle and on the modalities of its interaction with the nuclear environment during viral persistence.
A simple model for DNA denaturation

Following Poland and Scheraga, we consider a simplified model for the denaturation transition of DNA. The two strands are modeled as interacting polymer chains. The attractive interactions, which mimic the pairing between the four bases, are reduced to a single short-range binding term. Furthermore, base-pair misalignments are forbidden, implying that this binding term exists only for corresponding (same curvilinear abscissae) monomers of the two chains. We take into account the excluded-volume repulsion between monomers of the two chains, but neglect intrachain repulsion. We find that the excluded-volume term generates an effective repulsive interaction between the chains, which decays as 1/rd − 2. Due to this long-range repulsion between the chains, the denaturation transition is first order in any dimension, in agreement with previous studies.
Real and Monetary Convergence within the European Union and between the European Union and Candidate Countries: A Rolling Cointegration Approach

We use rolling cointegration to measure the convergence of base money, M2, the consumer price index and industrial output between two reference countries, Germany and France, and recent EU members and some transition economy candidates. Counties that recently joined the EU exhibit time-varying cointegration with the reference countries over much of the 1980-2000 sample period. Cointegration for the transition economies was comparable for M2 and prices, but less so for monetary policy and industrial output. This suggests that a peg to the Euro upon accession is feasible for the East European candidates, but the benefits of joining the Euro zone are as yet limited.
Heat transfer and large scale dynamics in turbulent Rayleigh-Bénard convection

The progress in our understanding of several aspects of turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection is reviewed. The focus is on the question of how the Nusselt number and the Reynolds number depend on the Rayleigh number Ra and the Prandtl number Pr, and on how the thicknesses of the thermal and the kinetic boundary layers scale with Ra and Pr. Non-Oberbeck-Boussinesq effects and the dynamics of the large scale convection roll are addressed as well. The review ends with a list of challenges for future research on the turbulent Rayleigh-Benard system.
Supergravity & Generalised Geometry

We present generalised geometry as a natural mathematical language within which to expressing supergravity theories, by virtue of the ability it provides to composite the metric g and B field into a single object. We motivate this via the roots of supergravity in supersymmetry, before detailing the most tractable case of interest; the NS sector of type II supergravity. The important quantities and field equations are summarised, before we outline the relevant extended objects within the theory; the Dabholkar Harvey fundamental string and the NS 5 brane. The structure of generalised geometry is then investigated, with a view to the most useful facets in this context, before the novel tools provided by generalised geometry are outlined. It is hoped that this work can provide a clear and concise basis for further developments in this area. Chapter