Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Glioblastoma in the elderly.

Incidence of malignant gliomas is growing in the elderly population. Unfortunately, increasing age is one of the most important negative prognostic factors in gliomas. However, the previous nihilistic approach is progressively changing towards more active strategies. Particularly, prospective randomized studies have recently established the benefit of radiotherapy associated with concomitant and adjuvant chemotherapy by temozolomide in older patients with good functional status suffering from malignant gliomas. Chemotherapy alone may even be useful in this population, especially in patients with poor functional status. Symptomatic treatments such as corticosteroids and antiepileptic drugs may be less tolerated in this population compared to younger patients and should be used only if needed. Initial performance status, quality of life and concomitant pathologies are obviously important factors to consider before treatment onset. The willingness of the patient and his caregivers will also be the key of the therapeutic decision. In the future, it will be necessary to develop specific schedules of treatment in this population. For this reason, prospective randomized clinical trials are needed to improve the pattern of care of malignant glioma in the elderly.
An Adaptive and Wide-Range Output DC-DC Converter for Loading Circuit of Li-Ion Battery Charger

In this paper, an adaptive and wide-range output DC-DC converter designed for lithium-ion (Li-Ion) battery charger circuit is proposed. The converter operates in continuous conduction mode (CCM) to provide an output voltage in response to battery voltage and a wide-range output current to ensure that circuit requirements are met. This circuit is designed on Cadence using 0.35-um BCD technology. Simulation results show that the circuit fully operates in CCM mode with a load current from 50 mA to 1000 mA and output voltage ripple factor is less than 1 %. Furthermore, the current supplied to the load circuit responses to three types of Li-Ion rechargeable currents. The output voltage of the converter varies from 2.8 to 4.5 V corresponding to the voltage range of the battery being charged from 2.5 to 4.2 V. The average power efficiency of the converter in large load current mode (1000 mA) reaches 94 %.
Babes on the Web: Sex, Identity and the Home Page

Robert Toups' Babes on the Web pages list women's Web pages that contain a photograph, each rated on the basis of the image on a scale of one to four, 'babe-o-rama to dog-o-matic'. Babes on the Web raises questions on the construction of identity through the home page, in particular the social tools for the production of identity, and the extent to which it is possible, or desirable, to dispense with the gendered body. An analysis of women's home pages shows that while on one level the body may be dispensable in the construction of identity in cyberspace, the self is still warranted by the gendered, sexed, body at the keyboard; a body that it might not be in women's interests to dispense with.
European asset swap spreads and the credit crisis

We examine time-varying behaviour and determinants of asset swap (ASW) spreads for 23 iBoxx European corporate bond indexes from January 2006 to January 2009. The results of a Markov switching model suggest that ASW spreads exhibit regime-dependent behaviour. The evidence is particularly strong for Financial and Corporates Subordinated indexes. Stock market volatility determines ASW spread changes in turbulent periods, whereas stock returns tend to affect spread changes in calm periods. While market liquidity affects spreads only in turbulent regimes the level of interest rates is an important determinant of spread changes in both regimes. Finally, we identify stock returns, lagged ASW spread levels, and lagged volatility of ASW spreads as major drivers of the regime shifts. The results are robust in the extended sample (January 2006 to October 2013) that includes a post-crisis period.
Global and local depletion of ternary complex limits translational elongation

The translation of genetic information according to the sequence of the mRNA template occurs with high accuracy and fidelity. Critical events in each single step of translation are selection of transfer RNA (tRNA), codon reading and tRNA-regeneration for a new cycle. We developed a model that accurately describes the dynamics of single elongation steps, thus providing a systematic insight into the sensitivity of the mRNA translation rate to dynamic environmental conditions. Alterations in the concentration of the aminoacylated tRNA can transiently stall the ribosomes during translation which results, as suggested by the model, in two outcomes: either stress-induced change in the tRNA availability triggers the premature termination of the translation and ribosomal dissociation, or extensive demand for one tRNA species results in a competition between frameshift to an aberrant open-reading frame and ribosomal drop-off. Using the bacterial Escherichia coli system, we experimentally draw parallels between these two possible mechanisms.
Asymmetries in the Acquisition of Numbers and Quantifiers

Number terms and quantifiers share a range of linguistic (syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic) properties. On the basis of these similarities, one might expect these 2 classes of linguistic expression to pose similar problems to children acquiring language. We report here the results of an experiment that explicitly compared the acquisition of numerical expressions (two, four) and quantificational (some, all) expressions in younger and older 3-year-olds. Each group showed adult-like preferences for "exact" interpretations when evaluating number terms; however they did not use the corresponding upper bounded interpretation when evaluating the quantifier some. Apparently, children follow different procedures for learning and evaluating numerals and quantifiers. These findings have implications for theories of number representation in child and adult grammars.
Formation of a hard tissue barrier after pulp cappings in humans. A systematic review.

AIM To evaluate the evidence on the formation of a hard tissue barrier after pulp capping in humans. METHODOLOGY A PubMed and CENTRAL literature search with specific indexing terms and a hand search were made. The authors assessed the level of evidence of each publication as high, moderate or low. Based on this, the evidence grade of the conclusions was rated as strong, moderately strong, limited or insufficient. RESULTS The initial search process resulted in a total of 171 publications. After reading the abstracts and hand searching the reference lists of the retrieved publications, 107 studies were retrieved in full-text and interpreted. After the interpretation, 21 studies remained and were included in the systematic review and given a level of evidence. No study had a high level of evidence, one study had moderate and 20 studies had a low level of evidence. There was heterogeneity between the studies; therefore, no meta-analysis was performed. The majority of studies on pulp capping using calcium hydroxide based materials reported formation of hard tissue bridging, studies on other pulp capping materials such as bonding agents presented inferior results. The evidence grade was insufficient. CONCLUSIONS Insufficient evidence grade does not necessarily imply that there is no effect of a pulp capping procedure or that it should not be used. Rather, the insufficient evidence underpins the need for high-quality studies.
Adapting to uncertain and evolving enterprise requirements: The case of business-driven business intelligence

Information systems today are expected to function in an increasingly dynamic world with many uncertainties. System development is seldom a linear progression from well-defined, fully-specified requirements to finished products that fully meet the initial requirements. More likely, there are ongoing cycles of exploration, design and implementation, taking into account evolving needs and capabilities, as well as lessons from earlier cycles. Existing requirements modeling and analysis techniques largely presume application settings that are stable and predictable. Can these techniques be used to support analysis in the new dynamic environment? Scenarios from the recent surge in demand for business intelligence capabilities in enterprises provide an interesting setting for examining organizational and IT responses to the challenges of high uncertainty and rapid change. In this paper, we apply existing requirements modeling techniques to these scenarios in order to uncover their inadequacies, and to identify research challenges.
The Association between Primary Endometrioid Carcinoma of the Ovary and Synchronous Malignancy of the Endometrium

Objective. Ovarian and endometrial cancers coincide rather frequently in the same patient. Few data are available on the involvement of the specific morphological subtypes. To identify histological pathways in the synchronous occurrence, a population-based study was performed in The Netherlands. Methods. Using the national pathology database (PALGA) information of ovarian cancers and of earlier or later cancer in the endometrium was obtained. 5366 Patients were identified with primary malignant epithelial or borderline malignancy. Results. In 157 cases (2.9%) a new primary malignancy in the endometrium was diagnosed (146 within 1 year). The ratio of observed versus expected number of synchronous malignancy in the endometrium was estimated at 3.6 (95% CI: 2.7–4.7). Among 460 ovarian endometrioid carcinoma patients 53 cases showed a second primary endometrial cancer; 40 out of these 53 cases (75.5%) showed at both organ sites an endometrioid adenocarcinoma. Conclusion. These findings suggest an important role for the endometrioid subtype and prompt to mechanism-based studies incorporating molecular techniques.
Differential expression of the CD44 molecule in human brain tumours

Expression of the CD44 molecule was examined in a variety of human brain tumours, brain metastases and normal brain. Immunohistological staining with several CD44 antibodies demonstrated differential expression of the CD44 molecule among different brain tumour types. CD44 was strongly expressed in high‐grade gliomas and weakly expressed in meningiomas, medulloblastomas and normal brain. Northern blot analysis revealed the presence of 3 major CD44 mRNAs of 1.6, 2.2, and 5.0 kb in glioblastomas and a mRNA of 5.6 kb in meningiomas. CD44 expression was also detected by flow cytometric analysis on cultured cells derived from a variety of human brain tumours including glioblastomas and meningiomas.
Current Status of Targeted Therapy for Advanced Renal Cell Carcinoma

The treatment of metastatic renal cell carcinoma (mRCC) has recently evolved from being predominantly cytokine-based treatment to the use of targeted agents, which include sorafenib, sunitinib, bevacizumab (plus interferon alpha [IFN-α]), temsirolimus, everolimus, pazopanib, and most recently, axitinib. Improved understanding of the molecular pathways implicated in the pathogenesis of RCC has led to the development of specific targeted therapies for treating the disease. In Korea, it has been 5 years since targeted therapy became available for mRCC. Thus, we now have broader and better therapeutic options at hand, leading to a significantly improved prognosis for patients with mRCC. However, the treatment of mRCC remains a challenge and a major health problem. Many questions remain on the efficacy of combination treatments and on the best methods for achieving complete remission. Additional studies are needed to optimize the use of these agents by identifying those patients who would most benefit and by elucidating the best means of delivering these agents, either in combination or as sequential single agents. Furthermore, numerous ongoing research activities aim at improving the benefits of the new compounds in the metastatic situation or their application in the early phase of the disease. This review introduces what is currently known regarding the fundamental biology that underlies clear cell RCC, summarizes the clinical evidence supporting the benefits of targeted agents in mRCC treatment, discusses survival endpoints used in pivotal clinical trials, and outlines future research directions.
Recognizing the Danger Signs and Health Seeking Behaviour of Mothers in Childhood Illness in Karachi, Pakistan

Introduction: Maternal behaviour regarding child health care has been recognized as an important social and anthropological factor explaining high mortality rates among children under five years of age. Delays in seeking appropriate health care is known to be the largest risk behaviour which contribute large number of child deaths in developing countries especially in Pakistan. Mothers are mostly responsible for their child health, however, the importance of knowledge among mothers while in identifying the danger sign in their child are very imperative for preventing their illness. Method: A cross sectional study was conducted in an urban setting in Karachi city. The objective of study was to assess the knowledge of mother's regarding danger signs in their child illness and their care seeking behavior with aims to improve the neonatal and child health in Pakistan. Results: The majority of respondent mothers (81.5%) were literate, housewives (90%). Regarding child care the mothers are responsible for the immediate needs of their child. In the context of breast feeding and immunization of the infants, majority of the mothers were aware of practicing early initiation and uses of colostrum because of its importance. Although a large proportion of mothers (90.1%) sought 'appropriate' care for childhood illness, generally care was sought from private doctors (69.4%) instead of government medical practitioners. Conclusion: Study concluded that the Health seeking behviour of mothers has been found appropriate, however, their knowledge regarding the danger signs and illness of their children was reported low. It is recommended that some urgent awareness intervention by the policy makers for reducing the child death should be given to increase their knowledge on the danger sign of child diseases in Pakistan.
Design of a spike event coded RGT microphone for neuromorphic auditory systems

This paper presents the design of a spike event coded resonant gate transistor microphone system for neuromorphic auditory applications. The microphone system employs an array of resonant gate transistors (RGT) to transduce acoustic input directly into bandpass filtered analog outputs. The bandpass filtered analog outputs are encoded as spike time events by a spike event coder and are then transmitted asynchronously by using the Address Event Representation (AER) protocol. The microphone system is designed to receive external inputs in the spike time domain to actively control the RGT response, a feature not present in other MEMS microphone systems implemented so far. System level simulations showing the response of the RGT sensor model and its spike event coded response are presented.
Modeling Routing in Smartphones-based wireless networks using evolving graphs

The increasing penetration of smartphones, i.e., smart devices with multiple sensing and communication interfaces, creates the possibility to build novel types of networks. Wireless adaptors are, after the terminal screen, the strongest source of power consumption. It is therefore common for a node to occasionally turn off the networking device to save energy. The effect of the presence of nodes in the off-state must therefore be thoroughly evaluated. We propose an analytical model based on evolving graphs. Our proposal provides an exhaustive evaluation of an ideal routing protocol whose aim is to determine the worst case conditions when adopting a device switching-off strategy to save energy. The complexity of our algorithm is demonstrated to be O(nT2), n being the number of nodes, and T being the width of the time interval studied. We also show, through experimental results, that routing protocols for SWN must deal with 2 issues: a low percentage of delivered packets and with long paths.
POLVM: Parallel optimized live VM migration

Live VM migration is a very dominant tool for cluster administrators, allowing parting of hardware and software considerations, consolidating clustered hardware into a single coherent management domain and facilitates fault management, load balancing. Live Migration is a planned scenario. In live migration move a running virtual machine from one host to another host with no perceived downtime for the VM. During migration there maintain TCP connections of the guest OS. VM is not aware of the migration and is considered as black box. Current system is based on future load prediction mechanism. VM resource allocation and optimized migration is done on this factor. During this VM migration, there is no suitable criteria for unique identification and location of VM that means which VM is migrated and where to be migrated. POLVM is based on a Cloud Booster Algorithm. In this system VM resource allocation mechanism carried out through by considering both Node weights and future prediction. To produce a better approach for solving the problem of VM resource migration in a cloud computing environment, this paper demonstrates Adaptive Genetic Algorithm based on VM resource migration strategy to accomplish system load balancing.
Glucocorticoids stimulate resorption in fetal rat parietal bones in vitro

The effect of glucocorticoids on bone resorption was examined in a serum‐free mineralizing organ culture system derived from 20 day fetal rat parietal bones. Bone resorption was assessed by prelabeling the fetal rats in utero with 45Ca and determining the daily release of 45Ca into the medium of cultured bones. During the first 24 h of treatment a transient stimulation of bone resorption was found; 4.5 ± 0.3% of the total 45Ca was released into the medium with 1 nM corticosterone and 4.1 ± 0.2% with 10 nM corticosterone compared to 2.9 ± 0.2% in control bones. Treatment with 1 and 10 nM dexamethasone for 24 h also showed an increase in 45Ca release compared to control bones. During the same time period 45Ca release was 6.9 ± 1.4% with 10 nM parathyroid hormone. At later time points 100 and 1000 nM corticosterone inhibited 45Ca release, but 1 and 10 nM corticosterone values were similar to controls. At 24 h the number of osteoclasts per mm2 tissue in bone lacunae was significantly elevated with 1–100 nM corticosterone and 10 nM parathyroid hormone compared to control bones. In control bones 0.10 ± 0.05 osteoclasts per mm2 of tissue were found, but 0.59 ± 0.21 osteoclasts per mm2 were seen with 10 nM corticosterone and 1.50 ± 0.34 with 10 nM parathyroid hormone. An additional assay of bone resorption, the release of lysosomal β‐glucuronidase into the medium was also elevated in glucocorticoid and parathyroid hormone‐treated cultures. During 0–24 h, the medium from 10 nM parathyroid hormone‐treated bones contained elevated levels of β‐glucuronidase activity, 7.5 ± 0.7 versus 6.0 ± 0.4 μg/ml in the control bones and, during 24–48 h, 10.5 ± 0.8 versus 7.7 ± 0.6 μg/ml of phenolphthalein in the controls. With 10 nM corticosterone there was a significant increase of 10.0 ± 0.5 μg/ml released at 24–48 h, but high concentrations of glucocorticoids decreased β‐glucuronidase release. We conclude that corticosterone can cause a transient increase in bone resorption by increasing osteoclast number and activity in bone.
Effect of baseline glomerular filtration rate on renal function following stenting for atherosclerotic renal artery stenosis

Abstract Objective. Percutaneous transluminal renal artery angioplasty and stenting (PTRAS) is one treatment option for atherosclerotic renal artery stenosis (ARAS). However, factors predicting the outcome remain controversial. This study investigated the effect of the baseline glomerular filtration rate (GFR) on renal function after PTRAS in patients with ARAS. Material and methods. Patients who underwent PTRAS due to significant ARAS (luminal narrowing ≥ 60%) were enrolled. The patients were divided into control (n = 57; estimated GFR (eGFR) ≥ 60 ml/min/1.73 m2) and chronic renal failure (CRF) groups (n = 53; eGFR < 60 ml/min/1.73 m2), according to the baseline eGFR. Results. The mean age at the time of PTRAS was 62 ± 9 years, and the mean duration of follow-up was 50 ± 26 months. There was a significant decrease in eGFR after PTRAS in the control group, whereas the CRF group showed no significant change in eGFR. The percentage change in eGFR was negatively correlated with the baseline eGFR (r = –0.274, p = 0.004). Multivariate linear regression revealed that only baseline eGFR predicted the change in eGFR (p = 0.032). Conclusions. PTRAS was more effective at preserving renal function in patients with moderately impaired renal function. Thus, baseline GFR may indicate the expected renal function outcome after PTRAS.
Improving stroke outcome: the benefits of increasing availability of technology.

INTRODUCTION A decision analysis was performed to explore the potential benefits of interventions to improve the outcome of patients admitted to hospital with a stroke, in the context of the technology available in different parts of the world. METHODS The outcome of death or dependency was used with a six-month end-point. RESULTS Four settings were identified that would depend on the resources available. The proportion of stroke patients who were dead or dependent at six months was 61.5% with no intervention at all. Setting 4, with the only intervention being the delayed introduction of aspirin, produced a 0.5% absolute improvement in outcome (death or dependency), and the addition of an organized stroke unit (Setting 3) produced the largest incremental improvement, of 2.7%. Extra interventions associated with non-urgent computed tomography and thus the ability to avoid anticoagulation or aspirin for those with a haemorrhagic stroke (Setting 2), and immediate computed tomography scanning to allow the use of thrombolytics in non-haemorrhagic stroke (Setting 1), produced only small incremental benefits of 0.4% in each case. DISCUSSION To reduce the burden of illness due to stroke, efforts at primary prevention are essential and likely to have a greater impact than even the best interventions after the event. In the absence of good primary prevention, whatever is possible must be done to reduce the sequelae of stroke. This analysis provides a rational basis for beginning the development of clinical guidelines applicable to the economic setting of the patient.
UPSR-like p-cycles: A new approach to dual failure protection

Most approaches to improve dual failure restorability characteristics of p-cycle designs remain within the paradigm of shared protection. In this paper we investigate a novel p-cycle-based dedicated protection architecture, somewhat resembling UPSR rings, called “UPSR-like p-cycles”, that could be used to enable high levels of dual failure restorability for select services. We develop a fast and efficient method for designing networks protected by UPSR-like p-cycles based on Integer Linear Programming (ILP) methods. We show that UPSR-like p-cycles are able to take advantage of the mesh network topology to closely approach the efficiency limit for dedicated protection, and demonstrate a failure reaction policy that is able to provide greatly improved dual failure restorability for straddler-routed demands.