Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Aberrant expression and demethylation of γ‐synuclein in colorectal cancer, correlated with progression of the disease

Recent evidence suggests that γ‐synuclein is abnormally expressed in a high percentage of tumor tissues of diversified cancer types, but rarely expressed in tumor‐matched non‐neoplastic adjacent tissues (NNAT). The molecular mechanism of CpG island demethylation may underlie aberrant γ‐synuclein expression. To fully understand the roles of aberrant γ‐synuclein expression and demethylation in the development of colorectal cancer (CRC), we examined the expression and methylation status of γ‐synuclein in 67 CRC samples, 30 NNAT samples, and five CRC cell lines as well. By using reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction (RT‐PCR), western blot, and immunohistochemistry analyses, γ‐synuclein expression was detected in both HT‐29 and HCT116 cells, and was much higher in CRC samples than in NNAT samples (P < 0.05). The demethylating agent, 5‐aza‐2¢‐deoxycytidine, can induce re‐expression of γ‐synuclein in COLO205, LoVo, and SW480 cells. Unmethylated γ‐synuclein alleles were detected in HT‐29, HCT116, and LoVo cells by nested methylation‐specific PCR, and the demethylated status of γ‐synuclein was much higher in CRC samples than in NNAT samples by real‐time quantitative methylation‐specific PCR (P < 0.05). The results of genomic bisulfite DNA sequencing further confirmed that the aberrant γ‐synuclein expression in CRC was primarily attributed to the demethylation of CpG island. The protein expression and demethylation status of γ‐synuclein in 67 CRC samples correlated with clinical stage, lymph node involvement, and distant metastasis. These findings suggest an involvement of aberrant γ‐synuclein expression and demethylation in progression of CRC, especially in advanced stages. (Cancer Sci 2008; 99: 1924–1932)
The Effect of 3 D Antenna Radiation Pattern on Narrowband MIMO Capacity : Simulation and Measurement

G. J. Foschini and M. J. Gan have been shown that the use of multiple antennas in both transmitter and receiver, called multiple input multiple output system (MIMO), linearly increases the channel capacity with the number of antennas [1]. The channel model in [2] is based on the angle of arrival (AOA). This model, however, does allow including the radiation pattern into the capacity calculation. The effect of fading correlation without antenna pattern on the MIMO capacity has been studied in [3]. It has been shown that the capacity is reduced when the fading correlation exists [3]. In this paper, we generalize the channel model so that it is able to include 3-dimention (3D) antenna pattern effect on the capacity into consideration. Having the channel model, capacity measurements are performed for omni-direction and direction antennas. The paper is organized as follows. In the next section, the proposed channel model with 3D antenna radiation pattern is discussed for both single and multiple antenna systems. Simulations of the MIMO capacity in various propagation environments are presented in section 3. Section 4 will show about field measurement and results by the MIMO test-bed. Finally, section 5 concludes the paper.
Neonatal lupus: advances in understanding pathogenesis and identifying treatments of cardiac disease

Purpose of reviewCardiac manifestations of neonatal lupus include anti-SSA/Ro-SSB/La-mediated conduction system disease and endocardial/myocardial damage resulting in cardiomyopathy. This review will focus on recent data regarding updates on the proposed pathogenesis of disease, morbidity and mortality, and preventive and treatment therapies. Recent findingsEvidence from animal models suggests that reactivity to the p200 region of the Ro52 protein, as well as antibody targeting of L-type calcium channels may be important in the development of cardiac neonatal lupus. In-vitro studies support a protective role of &bgr;-2 glycoprotein 1 (prevents anti-Ro binding to apoptotic cells) and pathologic roles of the urokinase–plasminogen activator/receptor system (leads to activation of TGF-&bgr;), and endothelin-1 secretion by macrophages in mediating tissue injury. Genetic studies highlight the fetal major histocompatibility complex in the development of disease, and a multigenerational study demonstrates that mothers of neonatal lupus children accumulate genetic risk factors preferentially from the neonatal lupus child's grandparents. Retrospective studies identify demographic and echocardiographic risk factors for morbidity and mortality and address the role of fluorinated steroids, intravenous immunoglobulin and hydroxychloroquine for prevention and treatment of disease. SummaryAnimal studies, in-vitro experiments, genetic analysis and clinical-translational research in cardiac neonatal lupus reveal novel insights and targets for therapy in this often devastating disease.
The relationship between alcohol consumption and earnings.

OBJECTIVE Previous studies of the relation between alcohol consumption and earnings have yielded contradictory results. Some studies have shown that drinking reduces income while others have shown it has no effect or increases earnings. This study uses medical findings concerning the relation between alcohol consumption and coronary artery disease to help resolve this contradiction and to establish the relationship between the two. METHOD Regression analysis is used to estimate the effects on earnings of various traditional variables such as age, education and other socioeconomic variables. Using medical findings, a concave quadratic relation between earnings and alcohol consumption is tested. This specification is based on the medical finding of the curvilinear relation between coronary artery disease (CAD) and alcohol, and the notion that CAD will result in lower earnings. The estimates are made from three large data sets. RESULTS The results show that alcohol consumption has a significant effect on income. Furthermore, these results support the hypothesis that moderate drinkers have greater earnings than either abstainers or abusers. This result holds when the effects of ex-drinkers are taken into account separately. The levels of highest earnings are consistent with the levels of lowest CAD risk (i.e., 2-3.5 drinks per day). CONCLUSIONS The results help resolve apparent contradictions found in the previous literature on earnings and alcohol consumption. It is concluded that results of previous studies depended on the sample mix of abusers, moderate drinkers and abstainers. Alcohol consumption is a significant variable in explaining earnings and the nature of this relation is a concave quadratic, similar to that found in medical studies for drinking and CAD.
Exhaustible Resource Allocation in an Overlapping Generations Economy

Abstract This paper analyzes competitive allocations of an exhaustible resource in an overlapping generations economy. Conditions are given for the existence of equilibrium extraction rules such that both extraction and investment in future stocks are increasing and continuous in the current stock. The paper then considers the time paths of equilibrium allocations and shows that there are economies where equilibrium resource extractions and prices exhibit nonclassical behavior. This is illustrated through a finite horizon example in which extractions increase and prices decrease over the entire time horizon and an infinite horizon example where there are persistent cycles in extractions and prices and multiple equilibria. The paper concludes by examining welfare issues.
The Impact of Affirmative Action on Labor Demand: A Test of Some Implications of the Le Chatelier Principle

This paper presents an alternative approach to measuring the impact of affirmative action on firms. Affirmative action is modeled as a series of hiring quotas. If the quotas are binding, then a firm subject to affirmative action will operate with greater costs of production, have less elastic demand for inputs, and be less able to substitute between most inputs. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that affirmative-action regulations significantly constrain firms' behavior. Own-wage elasticities are less elastic and most inputs are less substitutable for constrained firms. Further, affirmative action raises costs by 6.5 percent for firms subject to the program. Copyright 1992 by MIT Press.
An suggested Algorithm For partial Encryption of Compressed Images

The use of image communication has increased in recent years. When it is necessary to securely transmit data in limited bandwidth, both compression and encryption must be performed. Researchers have combined compression and encryption together to reduce the overall processing time. In this paper, new selective encryption is proposed, in which a secure encryption algorithm is used to encrypt only part of the compressed data. Only 0.0244% of the original data is encrypted, resulting in a significant reduction in encryption and decryption time. In the compression step, the advanced wavelet coding scheme, the Set Partition in Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) algorithm is used. In the encryption step, transposition cipher is applied. The proposed selective encryption scheme is fast, secure, and do not reduce the compression performance of the underlying selected compression method.
Balancing Due Process Values with Welfare Objectives in Juvenile Justice Procedure: Some Strengths and Weaknesses in the Irish Approach

This article is based on a paper delivered at the Irish Youth Justice Service Conference, ‘Best Practice for Youth Justice, Best Practice for All’, in March 2008. It examines how the tensions between welfare values and due process protections are being moderated in the context of a significant injection of welfare based reforms in the Irish juvenile justice system.The two examples used are the Garda Diversion Programme and the family conference facility in the Children Court as provided for by the Children Act 2001, as amended by Part 12 of the Criminal Justice Act 2006.The broad conclusion is that the benefits to be gained from these welfare reforms are being purchased at the cost of a dilution of judicial norms and processes.
Reducing sexual risk taking behaviors among adolescents who engage in transactional sex in post-conflict Liberia

Transactional sex (TS) has been correlated with HIV/STD infection, pregnancy, early marriage, and sexual violence in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Few Western-based HIV prevention programs adapted for SSA have examined intervention impacts for this group. This article examines whether an HIV prevention intervention, delivered to sixth-grade students in Liberia (age range 14–17) and found to increase condom use and other mediators for the larger sample, significantly impacted sexual behaviors and mediators for those who engaged in TS. Using an attention-matched, group-randomized controlled design, four matched pairs of elementary schools in Monrovia, Liberia, were randomly assigned to an adapted eight-module HIV prevention or a general health curriculum. Nine-month impacts of the intervention on sexual risk behaviors and mediators for those who engaged in TS, when compared with other study participants, are presented. Twelve percent of our sample of sixth graders (n = 714) ever engaged in TS. The majority of females reported being promised something in exchange for sex (52%), whereas the majority of males (52%) reported being both the giver and recipient of gifts in exchange for sex. Compared with other students, those who engaged in TS reported greater increases in the number of sex partners, reported greater frequency of sexual intercourse, were more likely to try to get pregnant or someone else pregnant, and reported greater reductions in protective sexual attitudes and HIV risk perception at the nine month follow-up, in both the intervention and the control groups. Our intervention, although successful for the general in-school adolescent sample, did not impact risk behaviors or mediators for adolescents who engaged in TS. Future research should explore the complex sexual economy in which TS is embedded and consider adapting HIV prevention interventions to the needs of this high-risk group.
Peripheries and Centres

The research university is a central institution of the 21st century – providing access to global science, producing basic and applied research, and educating key leaders for academe and society. Worldwide, there are very few research universities – they are expensive to develop and support, and the pressures of massification have placed priorities elsewhere. For developing countries, research universities are especially rare, and yet they are especially important as key ingredients for economic and social progress. This article argues for the importance of research universities in developing countries and points out some of the challenges that such institutions face.
Unions in a Contrary World: The Future of the Australian Trade Union Movement

Australia once had extremely high levels of trade union participation, yet since the 1970s the number of union members has been falling dramatically. This book gives the clearest picture yet of why people do or do not belong to unions and, in a sophisticated way, examines the reasons for union decline. Uniquely, it considers both the macro and micro levels, looking at the structure of the economy and the labour market, the relations between unions and employees, the ideological dispositions people have towards unionism, the role of the state and the political and industrial strategies of unions. The author highlights the importance of structural and strategic changes in determining the direction of union membership. This book makes a major contribution to our understanding of union decline, and its implications, and presents a range of strategies for reversing this downturn.
Antenna gain evaluation based on weighting near-field measurements

Antenna gain is generally extracted from near-field measurements when the size of the measuring site (anechoic chamber or open area test site) does not meet the far-field constraints that include both distance and probe size limitation. Near-field measurements are usually performed by scanning the field on a closed surface around the antenna with a small size probe. In this paper, we show that the distance averaging method that we have previously proposed for gain evaluation in a multipath environment can also be employed for measurements in the near-field zone. We introduce an alternative technique to extract the gain by applying weighting functions on the near-field data when the size of the probe cannot be neglected compared to the wavelength. We validated our method by comparing the results to the gain measured at distances in the far-field region.
Returns to Tenure; Conceptual and Empirical Issues

Becker's (1962) seminal article on human capital drew attention to the two polar types of human capital, which he called general and specific. In this paper we consider an intermediate type of human capital which we call quasi-specific. In particular, we consider environments in which the value placed on human capital by alternative employers is high for some firms and low for others, and job search is relevant. Our analysis demonstrates that, in the presence of quasi-specific human capital, empirical estimates of returns to tenure will typically understate the specificity of the human capital in the environment. The relevance of quasi-specific human capital to Sicherman and Galor's theory of career mobility is also discussed.
Performance measures and learning

New developments in performance measurement, like the balanced scorecard or value-based performance measures, tend to improve decisions by increasing the reflection of organisation goals in these new measures. However, they are also placing greater demands on decision makers' cognitive abilities in terms of perception and interpretation. This paper picks up the question of how these developments might influence the possibilities to learn and thereby the quality of long-term decisions. As the research object – learning of cognitively restricted individuals using performance measures – exhibits a high degree of complexity and still is quite unexamined, the paper adopts an explorative approach and bases its analysis on a computer simulation. Taking into consideration the usual restrictions on the generalisability of results obtained from simulation experiments, the findings nevertheless indicate that although new trends in performance measurement aim at the improvement of decision quality and learning through measures that reflect goals better, they can actually inhibit decision makers' learning or send their learning into the wrong direction.
Whose Education for All?: The Recolonization of the African Mind

Preface, Introduction, Part I: Establishing Education Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa: A Critique 1. Whose Education for All? 2. Education Policies for Sub-Saharan Africa as Viewed by the World Bank 3. The Formulation of Educational Policies and the Coordination of Aid - Some Examples Part II: African Culture and the Content of Schooling 4. A Renewed Curriculum Dependency? 5. Education for All - In Whose Language? 6. Language of Instruction in Tanzania and Namibia Part III: A Life After Jomtien for the African Universities? 7. Globalisation for Learning - Whose Globe and What Learning? - The Role of the African Universities 8. Africanisation of the Universities of South Africa 9. Yes, Whose Education Is It?
I. PET Studies of Memory: Novel and Practiced Free Recall of Complex Narratives

Positron Emission Tomography (PET) with the tracer H215O was used to measure regional cerebral blood flow in 13 healthy volunteers during two experimental memory tasks, one of which was well-practiced and the other of which was novel. The materials used for the memory tasks consisted of two complex narratives (Story A and Story B from the Wechsler Memory Scale). Natural language materials were chosen because they similate experimentally the natural learning situation and permit study of the neural mechanisms by which recall memory becomes more fluid, automatic, or "rote. " One week before the PET study, subjects were trained to perfect recall of Story A, while they were exposed to Story B only 60 s prior to PET data acquisition. Despite the substantial differences in level of familiarity (and in free recall performance), patterns of activation were quite similar; activations presumed to reflect recall in both tasks included frontal, inferior temporal, thalamic, anterior cingulate, and cerebellar regions. Many regions were smaller during recall of the familiar story, however, presumably reflecting greater neural efficiency due to practice. In addition, the novel task activated an additional left frontal region that is presumed to reflect more active encoding. The similarity and multiplicity of the activations in the two tasks suggest that the brain uses a multinodal general network for memory tasks such as free recall, while the differences suggest that some nodes in the network may be used for specific components of memory such as encoding and retrieval.
Inborn errors of metabolism: part 2: specific disorders.

1. Paul A. Levy, MD* 1. *Assistant Professor of Pediatrics and Pathology, Children's Hospital at Montefiore, Bronx, NY The following article is included online only as a second part of the article “Inborn Errors of Metabolism: Part 1. ” There is no one prototypical disorder of amino acid metabolism; each disorder has its own unique collection of symptoms. Four well-described amino acid disorders have been chosen as examples of this group. Phenylketonuria, a disorder of phenylalanine metabolism, leads to intellectual disability if untreated. Maple syrup urine disease involves an enzyme common to the degradation of the branched-chain amino acids (leucine, isoleucine, and valine). Although there are five subtypes of maple syrup urine disease, the classic form has a neonatal onset and generally progresses from poor feeding to coma and death if not treated. Tyrosinemia also has multiple subtypes. Hepatorenal tyrosinemia (type I) may present with liver failure (elevated transaminase concentrations, hyperbilirubinemia, coagulopathy, ascites, and gastrointestinal bleeding) as well as kidney involvement (tubular dysfunction) and peripheral nerve involvement (painful crises, weakness or paralysis). Type II tyrosinemia is an oculocutaneous form of the disease that has corneal lesions and skin findings. Homocystinuria, most commonly caused by cystathionine beta-synthase deficiency, presents with ocular (ectopia lentis), skeletal (marfanoid features such as dolichostenomelia and arachnodactyly), vascular (thromboembolic), and central nervous system (intellectual disability, stroke, and seizures) abnormalities. When an amino acid disorder is suspected, measurement of plasma amino acids generally is sufficient to make the diagnosis. Assessment of urine amino acids can be helpful for homocystinuria and some abnormalities of amino acid transport (cystinuria, dicarboxylic amino aciduria) that affect the kidneys and for detecting generalized amino aciduria found with some kidney disease and mitochondrial disorders. The degradation of amino acids results in their deamination, generating ammonia as the waste nitrogen. The urea cycle removes the excess ammonia by generating urea, which is eliminated in the urine. Six disorders of the urea cycle are known. …
From Differentiation to Diversity: Reforming Secondary Technical Education in Postcolonial Hong Kong

During Hong Kong's colonial period, secondary technical education to a large extent mirrored that of the British tripartite school system. However, after 156 years of colonial administration in Hong Kong, the Special Administrative Region (SAR) government carried out a revamp of education, in particular, secondary technical education. In view of the handover of Hong Kong's sovereignty to China, one could ask: Was it for political reasons that the SAR government reformed technical education, or was the reform more pragmatically oriented and geared to local needs? This study therefore aimed to determine which of these motives lay behind the changes made to secondary technical education in Hong Kong and the characteristics of such changes. This study revealed that it was because of the need to meet the socio-economic needs of Hong Kong that the existing secondary technical curriculum had to be reformed. In redefining the paradigm of technical education in the New Senior Secondary curriculum, Applied Learning was introduced as an integral part of the school curriculum and offered to all schools without any differentiation. There is no evidence to suggest that the introduction of Applied Learning was a reaction on the part of the SAR government against the colonial legacy.