Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DDX23-Linc00630-HDAC1 axis activates the Notch pathway to promote metastasis

Emerging studies demonstrated the roles of long non-coding RNAs (LncRNAs) are being implicated in the progression of many cancers. Here we report the discovery of a critical role for the linc00630 in the development of Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancers (NSCLCs). Screening from the microarray of six paired NSCLCs and adjacent non-tumor tissues, linc00630 showed a significantly higher RNA levels in NSCLCs. With the higher level confirmed in a separate cohort 90 NSCLCs patients, overexpressed of linc00630 also positive associated with tumor size, TNM tumor stage, lymph node status positive and overall patient outcomes. Linc00630 overexpression increased cell proliferation and metastasis in vitro and in vivo whereas linc00630 silencing had opposite effects. By RNA pull-down and mass spectrometry we identified Histone deacetylases 1 (HDAC1) and DEAD-box helicase 23 (DDX23) as the linc00630-binding protein that associated with mechanism of linc00630. DDX23 can specific bind with the promoter of Linc00630 to up-regulate the RNA level and high level of linc00630 strength the protein stability of HDAC1 to regulate the downstream pathway. Our study demonstrates the effectiveness of Linc00630 oligonucleotide-based promotion of NSCLCs metastasis and proliferation, illuminating a new basis of DDX23-Linc00630-HDAC1 signal axis for understanding its pathogenicity, which could be further developed as a valuable therapeutic strategy.
How to Pay Nonfamily Managers in Large Family Firms: A Principal—Agent Model

A large number of family firms employ nonfamily managers. This article analyzes the optimal compensation contracts of nonfamily managers employed by family firms using principal—agent analysis. The model shows that the contracts should have low incentive levels in terms of short-term performance measures. This finding is moderated by nonfamily managers’ responsiveness to incentives, their level of risk aversion, and measurement errors of effort related to short-term performance. The model allows a comparison between the contracts of family and nonfamily managers. This comparison shows that the contracts of family managers should include relatively greater incentives in terms of short-term performance measures. A number of propositions regarding the compensation of nonfamily managers employed by family firms are formulated. The implications of the model for family business research and practice are discussed.
Visual Cues Enhance the Response of Lygus hesperus (Heteroptera: Miridae) to Volatiles from Host Plants

Abstract Studies were conducted to examine the behavioral response of fifth-instar and adult Lygus hesperus Knight (Heteroptera: Miridae) to odors associated with a host plant (alfalfa) when presented singly or in combination with a visual plant cue (530 nm, green light-emitting diode [LED]). Bioassays were conducted in a modified Y-tube olfactometer, where incoming air was filtered and humidified before passing through chambers that held plant/conspecific treatments. A LED, placed behind an organdy screen at the end of one arm of the Y-tube, simulated a visual plant cue. In agreement with our previous findings, fifth-instar and adult female L. hesperus were attracted to plant/conspecific odor combinations, but adult males were not. Independently, the LED also was attractive to immature and adult female L. hesperus, and for all life stages, a much larger percentage of the bugs walked to the extreme end of the Y-tube when the visual cue was present. When visual and volatile cues were presented simultaneously, responses by both immature and adult (male and female) L. hesperus were significantly enhanced. Plant/conspecific treatments that had been marginally acceptable when only volatile stimuli were available showed the greatest enhancement in response with the addition of the visual cue. Presentation of visual and volatile cues together led to a mean increase in the percentage of bugs that walked to the extreme end of the Y-tube (nymphs, 36.6%; females, 23.4%; males, 26.1%). Results are discussed in terms of stage-specific responses and how these behavioral differences will likely play a role in developing effective trapping and monitoring systems for this important pest.
A process model for identifying online customer engagement patterns on Facebook brand pages

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically test a process model (comprising of seven dimensions), for identifying online customer engagement patterns leading to recommendation. These seven dimensions are communication, interaction, experience, satisfaction, continued involvement, bonding, and recommendation. Design/methodology/approach The authors used a non-participant form of netnography for analyzing 849 comments from Australian banks Facebook pages. High levels of inter-coder reliability strengthen the study’s empirical validity and ensure minimum researcher bias and maximum reliability and replicability. Findings The authors identified 22 unique pattern of customer engagement, out of which nine patterns resulted in recommendation/advocacy. Engagement pattern communication-interaction-recommendation was the fastest route to recommendation, observed in nine instances (or 2 percent). In comparison, C-I-E-S-CI-B-R was the longest route to recommendation observed in ninety-six instances (or 18 percent). Of the eight patterns that resulted in recommendation, five patterns (or 62.5 percent) showed bonding happening before recommendation. Research limitations/implications The authors limited the data collection to Facebook pages of major banks in Australia. The authors did not assess customer demography and did not share the findings with the banks. Practical implications The findings will guide e-marketers on how to best engage with customers to enhance brand loyalty and continuously be in touch with their clients. Originality/value Most models are conceptual and assume that customers typically journey through all the stages in the model. The work is interesting because the empirical study found that customers travel in multiple different ways through this process. It is significant because it changes the way the authors understand patterns of online customer engagement.
Studies and Improvements in Automatic Classification of Musical Sound Samples

In this article we shall deal with automatic classification of sound samples and ways to improve the classification results: We describe a classification process which produces high classification success percentage (over 95% for musical instruments) and compare the results of three classification algorithms: Multidimensional Gauss, KNN and LVQ. Next, we introduce several algorithms to improve the sound database self-consistency by removing outliers: LOO, IQR and MIQR. We present our efficient process for Gradual Elimination of Descriptors using Discriminant Analysis (GDE) which improves a previous descriptor selection algorithm (Peeters and Rodet 2002). It also enables us to reduce the computation complexity and space requirements of a sound classification process according to specific accuracy needs. Moreover, it allows finding the dominant separating characteristics of the sound samples in a database according to classification taxonomy. The article ends by showing that good classification results do not necessarily mean generalized recognition of the dominant sound source characteristics, but the classifier might actually be focused on the specific attributes of the classified database. By enriching the learning database with diverse samples from other databases we obtain a more general classifier. The dominant descriptors provided by GDE are then more closely related to what is supposed to be the distinctive characteristics of the sound sources.
Individualized immunoglobulin therapy in chronic immune‐mediated peripheral neuropathies*

Despite the well‐recognized importance of immunoglobulin therapy individualization during the treatment of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP), the pathway to best achieve optimization is unknown. There are many pharmacokinetic and immunobiologic variables that can potentially influence the appropriateness of any individual therapy. Although identification of specific autoantibodies and their targets has only been accomplished in a minority of patients with CIDP, already the diagnostic and treatment implications of specific autoantibody detection are being realized. Individual variability in IgG pharmacokinetic properties including IgG catabolic rates and distribution, as well as the IgG level necessary for disease control also require consideration during the optimization process. For optimization to be successful there must be a measure of treatment response that has a clinically meaningful interpretation. There are currently available well‐defined and validated clinical assessment tools and outcome measures that are well suited for this purpose. While there remains much to learn on how best to manipulate immunopathology and immunoglobulin pharmacokinetics in the most favorable way, there currently exists an understanding of these principles to a degree sufficient to begin to develop rational and evidence‐based treatment optimization strategies.
ENHANCING WATER CYCLE MEASUREMENTS FOR FUTURE HYDROLOGIC RESEARCH

The Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc., established the Hydrologic Measurement Facility to transform watershed-scale hydrologic research by facilitating access to advanced instrumentation and expertise that would not otherwise be available to individual investigators. We outline a committee-based process that determined which suites of instrumentation best fit the needs of the hydrological science community and a proposed mechanism for the governance and distribution of these sensors. Here, we also focus on how these proposed suites of instrumentation can be used to address key scientific challenges, including scaling water cycle science in time and space, broadening the scope of individual subdisciplines of water cycle science, and developing mechanistic linkages among these subdisciplines and spatiotemporal scales.
Multiresolution texture models for brain tumor segmentation in MRI

In this study we discuss different types of texture features such as Fractal Dimension (FD) and Multifractional Brownian Motion (mBm) for estimating random structures and varying appearance of brain tissues and tumors in magnetic resonance images (MRI). We use different selection techniques including KullBack — Leibler Divergence (KLD) for ranking different texture and intensity features. We then exploit graph cut, self organizing maps (SOM) and expectation maximization (EM) techniques to fuse selected features for brain tumors segmentation in multimodality T1, T2, and FLAIR MRI. We use different similarity metrics to evaluate quality and robustness of these selected features for tumor segmentation in MRI for real pediatric patients. We also demonstrate a non-patient-specific automated tumor prediction scheme by using improved AdaBoost classification based on these image features.
Trellis Tone Modulation Multiple-Access for Peer Discovery in D2D Networks

In this paper, a new non-orthogonal multiple-access scheme, trellis tone modulation multiple-access (TTMMA), is proposed for peer discovery of distributed device-to-device (D2D) communication. The range and capacity of discovery are important performance metrics in peer discovery. The proposed trellis tone modulation uses single-tone transmission and achieves a long discovery range due to its low Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR). The TTMMA also exploits non-orthogonal resource assignment to increase the discovery capacity. For the multi-user detection of superposed multiple-access signals, a message-passing algorithm with supplementary schemes are proposed. With TTMMA and its message-passing demodulation, approximately 1.5 times the number of devices are discovered compared to the conventional frequency division multiple-access (FDMA)-based discovery.
Secure Key Storage Using State Machines

In hardware implementations of cryptographic systems, secret keys are commonly stored in an on-chip memory. This makes them prone to physical attacks, since the location of a memory on a chip in usually easy to spot. We propose to encode secret keys using a state machine which can be concealed in the rest of the logic on a chip. We present an heuristic algorithm which constructs a minimal state machine for a given set of secret keys. We show that, by using m-ary encoding, we are able to construct state machines which are smaller than the ones constructed using binary encoding. The presented algorithm is feasible for storing up to 1 Mbits of random data.
On topographic controls of soil hydraulic parameter scaling at hillslope scales

Most upscaling efforts for soil hydraulic parameters developed thus far have opted to ignore the effect of topography in their derivation of effective parameter values. This approach, which considers a flat terrain with no lateral flows, is reasonable as long as the coarser support dimensions are of the order of a few hundred meters. In such a scenario, the upscaled characteristics of the parameters are governed predominantly by the texture and structure of the soil in the domain. However, when upscaling fine‐scale hydraulic parameter data to much larger extents (hillslope scales and beyond), topography plays a bigger role and can no longer be ignored. Efforts to model hydrologic processes and phenomena, with particular emphasis on those occurring in the unsaturated zone, are conducted at various scales. We present here a study to isolate the influence of topographic variations on the effective, upscaled soil hydraulic parameters under different hillslope configurations. The power‐averaging operator algorithm was used to aggregate fine‐scale soil hydraulic parameters to coarser resolutions. Hydrologic scenarios were simulated using HYDRUS‐3D for four different topographic configurations under different conditions to test the validity of the upscaled soil hydraulic parameters. The outputs from the simulations (fluxes and soil moisture states) were compared across multiple scales for validating the effectiveness of the upscaled soil hydraulic parameters. It was found that the power‐averaging algorithm produced reasonably good estimates of effective soil hydraulic parameters at coarse scales. Further, a probable threshold dimension beyond which the topography dominates the soil hydraulic property variation was analyzed. On the basis of only the topography, the scaling algorithm was able to capture much of the variation in soil hydraulic parameters required to generate equivalent flows and soil moisture states in a coarsened domain.
The atypical mitogen-activated protein kinase ERK3 is essential for establishment of epithelial architecture

Epithelia contribute to physical barriers that protect internal tissues from the external environment and also support organ structure. Accordingly, establishment and maintenance of epithelial architecture are essential for both embryonic development and adult physiology. Here, using gene knockout and knockdown techniques along with gene profiling, we show that extracellular signal–regulated kinase 3 (ERK3), a poorly characterized atypical mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK), regulates the epithelial architecture in vertebrates. We found that in Xenopus embryonic epidermal epithelia, ERK3 knockdown impairs adherens and tight-junction protein distribution, as well as tight-junction barrier function, resulting in epidermal breakdown. Moreover, in human epithelial breast cancer cells, inhibition of ERK3 expression induced thickened epithelia with aberrant adherens and tight junctions. Results from microarray analyses suggested that transcription factor AP-2α (TFAP2A), a transcriptional regulator important for epithelial gene expression, is involved in ERK3-dependent changes in gene expression. Of note, TFAP2A knockdown phenocopied ERK3 knockdown in both Xenopus embryos and human cells, and ERK3 was required for full activation of TFAP2A-dependent transcription. Our findings reveal that ERK3 regulates epithelial architecture, possibly together with TFAP2A.
Reply to Comments on “Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition”

Reply by the current authors to the comments made by Thomas E. Nichols and Jean-Baptist Poline; Tal Yarkoni; Matthew D. Lieberman, Elliot T. Berkman, and Tor D. Wager; Nicole A. Lazar ; Martin A. Lindquist and Andrew Gelman, and Lisa Feldman Barrett on the original article.
Catheter-based left atrial appendage closure

E-mail: ketlun@ous-hf.no Department of Cardiology Oslo University Hospital, Rikshospitalet He had the idea for the manuscript, was responsible for the study design, applied for approval and has been in charge of data collection, analysis and interpretation, literature searches, and drafting and revision of the manuscript. Ketil Lunde (born 1967), PhD, senior consultant and specialist in cardiology. The author has completed the ICMJE form and reports the following conflicts of interest: He has received lecture honoraria from St. Jude Medical (unrelated to atrial appendage closure).
Costs and effectiveness of pharmacist-led group medical visits for type-2 diabetes: A multi-center randomized controlled trial

Objectives The effectiveness and costs associated with addition of pharmacist-led group medical visits to standard care for patients with Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is unknown. Methods Randomized-controlled-trial in three US Veteran Health Administration (VHA) Hospitals, where 250 patients with T2DM, HbA1c >7% and either hypertension, active smoking or hyperlipidemia were randomized to either (1) addition of pharmacist-led group-medical-visits or (2) standard care alone for 13 months. Group (4–6 patients) visits consisted of 2-hour, education and comprehensive medication management sessions once weekly for 4 weeks, followed by quarterly visits. Change from baseline in cardiovascular risk estimated by the UKPDS-risk-score, health-related quality-of-life (SF36v) and institutional healthcare costs were compared between study arms. Results After 13 months, both groups had similar and significant improvements from baseline in UKPDS-risk-score (-0.02 ±0.09 and -0.04 ±0.09, group visit and standard care respectively, adjusted p<0.05 for both); however, there was no significant difference between the study arms (adjusted p = 0.45). There were no significant differences on improvement from baseline in A1c, systolic-blood-pressure, and LDL as well as health-related quality-of-life measures between the study arms. Compared to 13 months prior, the increase in per-person outpatient expenditure from baseline was significantly lower in the group visit versus the standard care arm, both during the study intervention period and at 13-months after study interventions. The overall VHA healthcare costs/person were comparable between the study arms during the study period (p = 0.15); then decreased by 6% for the group visit but increased by 13% for the standard care arm 13 months post-study (p<0.01). Conclusions Addition of pharmacist-led group medical visits in T2DM achieved similar improvements from baseline in cardiovascular risk factors than usual care, but with reduction in the healthcare costs in the group visit arm 13 months after completion compared to the steady rise in cost for the usual care arm. Trial registration NCT00554671 ClinicalTrials.gov
Thresholding-based sampling and signal reconstruction from multiple noisy observations

The problem of sampling and recovering bandlimited signals in the presence of noise is studied. A new signal acquisition technique, which collects multiple sets of thresholded signal's samples acquired at the Nyquist sampling rate, is proposed. The exact formula for mean integrated squared error of the proposed scheme is established. The obtained results show that the proposed technique gives better reconstruction accuracy than the common method using oversampling and post-filtering. Moreover, in most cases, the proposed scheme reduces the amount of data required for representation and reconstruction of signal. As a result, it provides the reduced data storage.
The Impact of Cetuximab Plus AKT- or mTOR- Inhibitor in a Patient-Derived Colon Cancer Cell Model with Wild-Type RAS and PIK3CA Mutation

Background: Anti-EGFR therapies have been recommended for advanced colorectal cancer (CRC) with wild-type RAS and PIK3CA mutation. However, PIK3CA mutations are a poor prognostic marker and a negative predictor of response to anti-EGFR therapies in RAS wild-type CRC. Therefore, new and advanced treatment strategies are needed for personalized medical treatment of patients with wild-type RAS and PIK3CA mutation. Methods: Patient-derived tumor cells were collected from the ascites of a refractory colon cancer patient with wild-type RAS and PIK3CA mutation. We performed a cell viability assay for cetuximab, AZD5363 (AKT inhibitor), and everolimus (mTOR inhibitor) using PDCs. We also evaluated combinations of cetuximab plus AZD5363 or everolimus in a cell viability assay. Results: Based on cellular proliferation by MTT assay, tumor cells were significantly inhibited by 1uM cetuximab (control vs. cetuximab, mean growth = 100.0% vs 58.07%, p = 0.0103), 1uM AZD5363 (control vs. AZD5363, mean growth = 100.0% vs 58.22%, p = 0.0123), and 1uM everolimus (control vs. everolimus, mean growth = 100.0% vs 52.17%, p = 0.0011). Tumor cell growth was more profoundly reduced by combinations of cetuximab plus AZD5363 (control vs. cetuximab plus AZD5363, mean growth = 100.0% vs 25.00%, p < 0.0001) or everolimus (control vs. cetuximab+everolimus, mean growth = 100.0% vs 28.24%, p < 0.0001). Conclusions: Taken together, these results indicate that RAS wild-type and PIK3CA mutant PDCs originating from CRC are considerably inhibited by treatment with cetuximab plus AZD5363 or everolimus, with downregulation of the AKT and ERK pathways. These combinations may be considered as new options for advanced CRC patients with wild-type RAS and PIK3CA mutation in the context of clinical trials.
Does copy number variation of APOL1 gene affect the susceptibility to focal segmental glomerulosclerosis?

Abstract Background: APOL1 risk variants (G1 and G2) are associated with increased susceptibility to focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) in African population. However, the two risk mutations were not found in Chinese FSGS patients. In this study, we explored the association between the copy number variation (CNV) of APOL1 gene and FSGS. Methods: APOL1 copy number variations were detected by quantitative real-time PCR with TaqMan probes and compared between 133 FSGS patients and 123 controls. The association between CNV of APOL1 gene and clinical parameters was also investigated. Results: The distribution of APOL1 CNV did not show significant difference between FSGS patients and controls. The creatinine and proteinuria in the high copy number group (CN ≥ 3) were higher than the other two groups, but the difference was not significant (p > .05). The FSGS pathological types were different among the three groups. Conclusion: There was no significant difference in the distribution of APOL1 gene copy variants between FSGS patients and normal controls, and there was no significant correlation between the APOL1 gene CNV and the FSGS patients’ clinical manifestations. APOL1 CNVs may be not associated with susceptibility to FSGS.