Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Natural Oncolytic Activity of Live-Attenuated Measles Virus against Human Lung and Colorectal Adenocarcinomas

Lung and colorectal cancers are responsible for approximately 2 million deaths each year worldwide. Despite continual improvements, clinical management of these diseases remains challenging and development of novel therapies with increased efficacy is critical to address these major public health issues. Oncolytic viruses have shown promising results against cancers that are resistant to conventional anticancer therapies. Vaccine strains of measles virus (MV) exhibit such natural antitumor properties by preferentially targeting cancer cells. We tested the ability of live-attenuated Schwarz strain of MV to specifically infect tumor cells derived from human lung and colorectal adenocarcinomas and demonstrated that live-attenuated MV exhibits oncolytic properties against these two aggressive neoplasms. We also showed that Schwarz MV was able to prevent uncontrollable growth of large, established lung and colorectal adenocarcinoma xenografts in nude mice. Moreover, MV oncolysis is associated with in vivo activation of caspase-3 in colorectal cancer model, as shown by immunohistochemical staining. Our results provide new arguments for the use of MV as an antitumor therapy against aggressive human malignancies.
A Novel Unequal Broadband Out‐of‐Phase Power Divider Using DSPSLs

In this paper, a novel unequal broadband out‐of‐phase power divider (PD) is presented. Double‐sided parallel‐strip lines (DSPSLs) are employed to achieve an out‐of‐phase response. Also, an asymmetric dual‐band matching structure with two external isolation resistors is utilized to obtain arbitrary unequal power division, in which the resistors are directly grounded for heat sinking. A through ground via (TGV), connecting the top and bottom sides of the DSPSLs, is used to short the isolation components. Additionally, this property can efficiently improve the broadband matching and isolation bandwidths. To investigate the proposed divider in detail, a set of design equations are derived based on the circuit theory and transmission line theory. The theoretical analysis shows that broadband responses can be obtained as proper frequency ratios are adopted. To verify the proposed concept, a sample divider with a power division of 2:1 is demonstrated. The measured results exhibit a broad bandwidth from 1.19 GHz to 2.19 GHz (59.2%) with a return loss better than 10 dB and port isolation of 18 dB.
Change in viable bacterial count during preservation of milk derived from dairy cows with subclinical mastitis and its relationship with antimicrobial components in milk

The objectives of the present study were to investigate the change in the number of viable pathogens during preservation of milk obtained from cows with subclinical mastitis and the association between the decreasing ratio of viable bacteria during preservation and the somatic cell count (SCC) and the values of lingual antimicrobial peptide (LAP), lactoferrin (LF) and lactoperoxidase (LPO). After preservation of milk at room temperature for 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 hr, the bacterial colonies in the milk were counted to determine the number of colony forming units (CFUs). Fresh skim milk was used to determine the values of LAP, LPO and LF. Bacteria were not detected in 19.4% of milk samples, and this percentage increased up to 30% after 5 hr of preservation. The number of Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus uberis in milk did not change significantly during the 5-hr incubation, whereas significant decreases were observed in the number of coliforms, coagulase-negative staphylococci, yeasts and Corynebacterium bovis. High SCC significantly decreased CFUs of S. aureus and yeast after preservation of milk for 4 to 5 hr. High LF concentration in milk was associated with decrease in CFU of S. aureus during 4-hr preservation. These results suggest that the viable counts of some pathogens in milk decreased during preservation at room temperature after collection, which may be attributed to the leukocytes and antimicrobial components present in milk.
Measurement of HIS Stock Index Futures Market Risk Based on Value-at-Risk

This paper examines the forecasting of Value-at-Risk model. We explore and compare two different possible sources of performance improvement: asymmetry in the conditional variance and fat-tailed distributions. The HIS stock index futures are studied using daily data. Our result suggest that for asset returns which exhibit fatter and volatility clustering, like the HIS stock index futures, the VaR values produced by the normal APARCH model are preferred at lower confidence level.
Soil-carbon preservation through habitat constraints and biological limitations on decomposer activity

We review recent experimental results on the role of soil biota in stabilizing or destabilizing soil organic matter (SOM). Specifically, we analyze how the differential substrate utilization of the various decomposer organisms contributes to a decorrelation of chemical stability, residence time, and carbon (C) age of organic substrates. Along soil depth profiles, a mismatch of C allocation and abundance of decomposer organisms is consistently observed, revealing that a relevant proportion of soil C is not subjected to efficient decomposition. Results from recent field and laboratory experiments suggest that (1) bacterial utilization of labile carbon compounds is limited by short-distance transport processes and, therefore, can take place deep in the soil under conditions of effective local diffusion or convection. In contrast, (2) fungal utilization of phenolic substrates, including lignin, appears to be restricted to the upper soil layer due to the requirement for oxygen of the enzymatic reaction involved. (3) Carbon of any age is utilized by soil microorganisms, and microbial C is recycled in the microbial food web. Due to stoichiometric requirements of their metabolism, (4) soil animals tend to reduce the C concentration of SOM disproportionally, until it reaches a threshold level. The reviewed investigations provide new and quantitative evidence that different soil C pools underlie divergent biological constraints of decomposition. The specialization of decomposers towards different substrates and microhabitats leads to a relatively longer persistence of virtually all kinds of organic substrates in the nonpreferred soil spaces. We therefore propose to direct future research explicitly towards such biologically nonpreferred areas where decomposition rates are slow, or where decomposition is frequently interrupted, in order to assess the potential for long-term preservation of C in the soil.
We Are Friends but Are We Family? Organizational Identification and Nonfamily Employee Turnover

The family-centric priorities of family firms often disadvantage nonfamily employees and make retaining them problematic. Our study posits organizational identification, or internalizing the firm's identity as one's own, as a key factor in overcoming this challenge. We adopt a social network perspective to examine the differential impact of friendships with family and nonfamily members on nonfamily employees' organizational identification and turnover. Results from a study of the nonfamily employees of a family-owned service company show that centrality in both family and nonfamily friendship networks reduces turnover, but that friendships with family members have a stronger effect. Results also show that various forms of centrality in social networks have indirect effects on turnover through organizational identification, highlighting identification's importance for retaining nonfamily employees.
Multicenter cohort study of out-of-hospital pediatric cardiac arrest*

Objectives:To describe a large cohort of children with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest with return of circulation and to identify factors in the early postarrest period associated with survival. These objectives were for planning an interventional trial of therapeutic hypothermia after pediatric cardiac arrest. Methods:A retrospective cohort study was conducted at 15 Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network clinical sites over an 18-month study period. All children from 1 day (24 hrs) to 18 yrs of age with out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and a history of at least 1 min of chest compressions with return of circulation for at least 20 mins were eligible. Measurements and Main Results:One hundred thirty-eight cases met study entry criteria; the overall mortality was 62% (85 of 138 cases). The event characteristics associated with increased survival were as follows: weekend arrests, cardiopulmonary resuscitation not ongoing at hospital arrival, arrest rhythm not asystole, no atropine or NaHCO3, fewer epinephrine doses, shorter duration of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and drowning or asphyxial arrest event. For the 0- to 12-hr postarrest return-of-circulation period, absence of any vasopressor or inotropic agent (dopamine, epinephrine) use, higher lowest temperature recorded, greater lowest pH, lower lactate, lower maximum glucose, and normal pupillary responses were all associated with survival. A multivariate logistic model of variables available at the time of arrest, which controlled for gender, age, race, and asystole or ventricular fibrillation/ventricular tachycardia anytime during the arrest, found the administration of atropine and epinephrine to be associated with mortality. A second model using additional information available up to 12 hrs after return of circulation found 1) preexisting lung or airway disease; 2) an etiology of arrest drowning or asphyxia; 3) higher pH, and 4) bilateral reactive pupils to be associated with lower mortality. Receiving more than three doses of epinephrine was associated with poor outcome in 96% (44 of 46) of cases. Conclusions:Multiple factors were identified as associated with survival after out-of-hospital pediatric cardiac arrest with the return of circulation. Additional information available within a few hours after the return of circulation may diminish outcome associations of factors available at earlier times in regression models. These factors should be considered in the design of future interventional trials aimed to improve outcome after pediatric cardiac arrest.
A measurement-based analysis of the interaction among MAC, network and application layers in wireless sensor networks

There have been a number of recent proposals for link and network-layer protocols in the sensor networking literature, each of which claims to be superior to other approaches. However, a proposal for a networking protocol at a given layer in the stack is typically evaluated in the context of a single set of carefully selected protocols at other layers, as well as a particular network topology and application workload. Because of the limited data available about interactions between different protocols at various layers of the stack, it is difficult for developers of sensor network applications to select from amongst the range of alternative sensor networking protocols. This thesis attempts to remedy this situation by evaluating the interaction between several protocols at the MAC and network layers and measuring their performance in terms of end-to-end throughput and loss on a large, real-world TinyOS and Mica2 mote-based testbed. We report on different combinations of protocols using different application workloads and power-management schemes. This thesis analyzes the effects of various services provided by the different protocols, such as link-level retransmission, neighborhood management, and link-quality estimation. Our analysis suggests some common sources of poor performance that developers may experience during real-life deployments; based on this experience, we propose a set of design principles and lessons for the designers of future interfaces and services in TinyOS. Thesis Supervisor: Samuel Madden Title: Assistant Professor
Semantic Artificial Immune Model for Fault Diagnosis

Applying artificial immune system to fault diagnosis is a new development direction in artificial intelligence, but the traditional artificial immune mode could not reasonably reflect the semantic similarity in the complexity problem space. For issues of semantic description of fault diagnosis, this paper introduces group cooperative mechanism of lymphocyte with a semantic tag to artificial immune system, thus solves the problem of semantic logical reasoning of fault knowledge. This paper presents a semantic-based artificial immune diagnosis model; designs an immune negative selection diagnostic in semantic environment; utilizes new coevolutionary algorithm diagnostic; and diagnoses fault in large electromechanical devices. The experimental results show that the method used in this paper has higher classification accuracy compared with the traditional artificial immune diagnostics, at the same time, verified expression capacity of semantic-based lymphocytes, which can provide more valuable diagnostic information.
EFFECTS OF JUDICIAL TRANSFORMATION FRAMEWORK (2012-2016) ON THE PERFORMANCE OF THE JUDICIARY IN KENYA

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the transformation of the judiciary (using Business Process Reengineering as a proxy) improved the performance of Judiciary in Kenya. A review of the literature showed that there is scanty information on how the Public Sector could improve on service delivery by implementing BPR, especially in developing economies. The study targeted a population of 320, drawn from Judicial Officers, Judicial Staff, and advocates in stations within Nairobi and Kiambu Counties. Quota sampling method was used to sample the population. Data was collected through structured questionnaires. Descriptive statistics was used to define the study variables particularly the sample profile. Pearson correlation coefficient was used to determine the level of significance of related variables, Chi-Square test to ascertain the existence of a significant association between variables and Regression analysis to determine the predictive power of BPR on the performance of the Judiciary. The results of the study showed a significant effect of the implementation of BPR on the performance of the Judiciary. In conclusion, the successful implementation of BPR was found to be premised on the recruitment of visionary top leadership, and change of organizational focus. To that extent, the need to have an organizational wide commitment is inevitable.
Identification of top relevant temporal expressions in documents

Temporal information is very common in textual documents, and thus, identifying, normalizing, and organizing temporal expressions is an important task in IR. Although there are some tools for temporal tagging, there is a lack in research focusing on the relevance of temporal expressions. Besides counting their frequency and verifying whether they satisfy a temporal search query, temporal expressions are often considered in isolation only. There are no methods to calculate the relevance of temporal expressions, neither in general nor with respect to a query. In this paper, we present an approach to identify top relevant temporal expressions in documents using expression-, document-, corpus-, and query-based features. We present two relevance functions: one to calculate relevance scores for temporal expressions in general, and one with respect to a search query, which consists of a textual part, a temporal part, or both. Using two evaluation scenarios, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Efficient interpretation using quickening

Just-in-time compilers offer the biggest achievable payoff performance-wise, but their implementation is a non-trivial, time-consuming task affecting the interpreter's maintenance for years to come, too. Recent research addresses this issue by providing ways of leveraging existing just-in-time compilation infrastructures. Though there has been considerable research on improving the efficiency of just-in-time compilers, the area of optimizing interpreters has gotten less attention as if the implementation of a dynamic translation system was the "ultima ratio" for efficiently interpreting programming languages. We present optimization techniques for improving the efficiency of interpreters without requiring just-in-time compilation thereby maintaining the ease-of-implementation characteristic that brought many people to implementing an interpreter in the first place.
Mapping Input Technology to Ability

INTRODUCTION As Europe becomes greyer and thus more reliant on health support, smart healthcare applications will play an increasingly important role in day-to-day life. These technologies will both deliver significant improvements in health care and simultaneously have higher requirements of user interactivity. This will involve both careful and attentive presentations of information and appropriate and efficient affordances for user input. Key to the use of these technologies is the ability of the end-users to communicate their needs, wants and internal states both to the support systems and with the technology itself. From this perspective we can assert accessibility as a parameter in health care system design. In a larger context, more than just interacting with health care systems and providers is the issue of accessibility in an increasingly ‘wired’ world. So accessibility to computers implies providing support for disabled to communicate needs and internal states to supporting aids – both via persons and directly with environments. In this case environments could mean both health support systems and Quality of Living (QOL) environmental controls. Looking to the near future, smart healthcare will need to be situated in the context of independent living in environments of ambient intelligence (AmI) (Aarts, 2002), and although AmI research incorporates many novel forms of interaction ranging from gesture to speech recognition, there will continue to be a need for end users to also use more traditional forms of interaction in the forms of screens, keyboards and pointing devices. A rough mapping can be made between computer input and motoric ability and output and sensory ability. Because of this basic division it can become too easy to focus on one or the other set of adaptations to solve accessibility problems of specific persons. Unfortunately, and especially often in persons with developmental disabilities and those experiencing the decline of abilities that accompanies aging, sensory and motoric disabilities often manifest in comorebidity 1 . Because of this, the range of needs and abilities is very large, thus an end user in need of accommodation becomes a universe of one (Erikson, 1958) such that no ‘standard’ solution exists on the shelf. This makes the choosing and integration of AT into an individuals life an especially
Practice and Discussion on a New Teaching Mode of “Case Guide Learning” in Basic of Database Application

Basic of database application is one of basic and important computer courses in finance colleges. However, the effectiveness of the course is not desirable because there are large amount of knowledge in classes and students are acquired to resolve problems by using comprehensive knowledge. A new teaching mode of "case guide learning" is proposed in the paper. Case guide learning (CGL) is a teach method that student is center and active learning. Furthermore, how to choose a good case and carry out heuristic discussion are expounded in detail. At the same time, we intensify effectiveness of case using classroom online, proposed a new teaching system that composed of classroom online and offline. The practice shows that this kind of new teaching method has gained better teaching results.
Personality Characteristics of Evangelical Missionaries as Measured by the MMPI

Profiles of 827 evangelical missionaries were analyzed with t tests and ANOVAs for differences between the means of the missionary sample and the norm and between the means of persevering and nonpersevering missionaries. Sex, age, educational level, and year in which the MMPI was taken were also considered as independent variables. The results of the comparison between the means of the missionary sample and the norm were significant on all of the MMPI subscales. The mean differences between persevering and non-persevering missionaries were significant on subscales L, F, Pt, and Cn. The statistical results suggested that the missionaries presented themselves in the most favorable light, were emotionally stable, and strong leaders. They tended to be visionary people who struggled against the difficulties they encountered in the field.
Non-abelian brane worlds: the heterotic string story

We discuss chiral supersymmetric compactifications of the SO(32) heterotic string on Calabi-Yau manifolds equipped with direct sums of stable bundles with structure group U(n). In addition we allow for non-perturbative heterotic five-branes. These models are S-dual to type I compactifications with D9- and D5-branes, which by themselves are mirror symmetric to general intersecting D6-brane models. For the construction of concrete examples we consider elliptically fibered Calabi-Yau manifolds with SU(n) bundles given by the spectral cover construction. The U(n) bundles are obtained via twisting by line bundles. We present a four-generation Pati-Salam and a three-generation Standard-like model.
Control of Gastric H,K-ATPase Activity by Cations, Voltage and Intracellular pH Analyzed by Voltage Clamp Fluorometry in Xenopus Oocytes

Whereas electrogenic partial reactions of the Na,K-ATPase have been studied in depth, much less is known about the influence of the membrane potential on the electroneutrally operating gastric H,K-ATPase. In this work, we investigated site-specifically fluorescence-labeled H,K-ATPase expressed in Xenopus oocytes by voltage clamp fluorometry to monitor the voltage-dependent distribution between E1P and E2P states and measured Rb+ uptake under various ionic and pH conditions. The steady-state E1P/E2P distribution, as indicated by the voltage-dependent fluorescence amplitudes and the Rb+ uptake activity were highly sensitive to small changes in intracellular pH, whereas even large extracellular pH changes affected neither the E1P/E2P distribution nor transport activity. Notably, intracellular acidification by approximately 0.5 pH units shifted V0.5, the voltage, at which the E1P/E2P ratio is 50∶50, by −100 mV. This was paralleled by an approximately two-fold acceleration of the forward rate constant of the E1P→E2P transition and a similar increase in the rate of steady-state cation transport. The temperature dependence of Rb+ uptake yielded an activation energy of ∼90 kJ/mol, suggesting that ion transport is rate-limited by a major conformational transition. The pronounced sensitivity towards intracellular pH suggests that proton uptake from the cytoplasmic side controls the level of phosphoenzyme entering the E1P→E2P conformational transition, thus limiting ion transport of the gastric H,K-ATPase. These findings highlight the significance of cellular mechanisms contributing to increased proton availability in the cytoplasm of gastric parietal cells. Furthermore, we show that extracellular Na+ profoundly alters the voltage-dependent E1P/E2P distribution indicating that Na+ ions can act as surrogates for protons regarding the E2P→E1P transition. The complexity of the intra- and extracellular cation effects can be rationalized by a kinetic model suggesting that cations reach the binding sites through a rather high-field intra- and a rather low-field extracellular access channel, with fractional electrical distances of ∼0.5 and ∼0.2, respectively.