Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Children and Grief: When a Parent Dies

This book attempts to take the findings of the Harvard Child Bereavement Study and apply them to the clinical understanding of an intervention with children who have lost a parent to death. Throughout most of the book the author has skillfully interwoven research data with quotes and vignettes of children and adolescents who were part of the study. The richness of the data is apparent not only in their presentation in this book, but also as evidenced by the many other articles they have generated. The quotes and vignettes attest to the hands-on approach of the author. Understanding of the child and of bereavement has informed the systematic approach of the investigators. Most impressive is the attention to details such as developmental level, gender of the child, gender of the deceased and living parent, family size, and sibling order, to mention only a few. Intervention is also approached in a systematic fashion, but with the approach of a clinician who has extensive experience with children and families who are bereaved. The early chapters are written in a manner that includes many quotes and vignettes about the children and families that make them come alive and well illustrate the author's points. This is equally true of the epilogue. Chapters five and six take a substantially data-oriented approach that is thorough, but inclusive enough that the reader is happy to come upon the very effective chapter-ending summaries. The latter portion of the book is devoted to intervention methods and devices. This too is comprehensive, but the reader longs for more quotes and vignettes to be able to complete the imagery of the process extending from evaluation to intervention. A word about the literature review is in order. The review is extensive both in breadth and in coverage of the evolution of work in this area over time. The reference list is extensive and should be helpful to those who would like further reading about grief in children. This is a readable and practical contribution to the clinical understanding of children who have lost a parent.
Pleckstrin Homology Domain of Akt Kinase: A Proof of Principle for Highly Specific and Effective Non-Enzymatic Anti-Cancer Target

While pharmacological inhibition of Akt kinase has been regarded as a promising anti-cancer strategy, most of the Akt inhibitors that have been developed are enzymatic inhibitors that target the kinase active site of Akt. Another key cellular regulatory event for Akt activation is the translocation of Akt kinase to the cell membrane from the cytoplasm, which is accomplished through the pleckstrin homology (PH) domain of Akt. However, compounds specifically interacting with the PH domain of Akt to inhibit Akt activation are currently limited. Here we identified a compound, lancemaside A (LAN-A), which specifically binds to the PH domain of Akt kinase. First, our mass spectra analysis of cellular Akt kinase isolated from cells treated with LAN-A revealed that LAN-A specifically binds to the PH domain of cellular Akt kinase. Second, we observed that LAN-A inhibits the translocation of Akt kinase to the membrane and thus Akt activation, as examined by the phosphorylation of various downstream targets of Akt such as GSK3β, mTOR and BAD. Third, in a co-cultured cell model containing human lung epithelial cancer cells (A549) and normal human primary lung fibroblasts, LAN-A specifically restricts the growth of the A549 cells. LAN-A also displayed anti-proliferative effects on various human cancer cell lines. Finally, in the A549-luciferase mouse transplant model, LAN-A effectively inhibited A549 cell growth with little evident cytotoxicity. Indeed, the therapeutic index of LAN-A in this mouse model was >250, supporting that LAN-A is a potential lead compound for PH domain targeting as a safe anti-cancer Akt inhibitor.
Expression of emmprin and matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) in peripheral nerve sheath tumors: emmprin and membrane-type (MT)1-MMP expressions are associated with malignant potential.

BACKGROUND Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs), including membrane-type (MT)-MMPs, correlate with biological aggressiveness in many carcinomas. However, their roles in peripheral nerve sheath tumors (PNSTs) have rarely been investigated. MATERIALS AND METHODS In this study, the immunohistochemical expression of 6 MMPs, their 3 inhibitors and emmprin, an MMP inducer, was examined in 14 schwannomas, 14 neurofibromas and 12 malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors (MPNSTs) in relation to malignant potentials. RESULTS Higher expression levels (>3+) of emmprin and MT1-MMP were noted in 83.3% and 16.7% of MPNSTs, respectively, versus none in schwannomas and neurofibromas (p<0.0001). The overall expression rate (1-4+) of MT1-MMP was 58.3% in MPNSTs versus 7.1% in both schwannomas and neurofibromas (p=0.0093). Gelatinase A (MMP-2) showed higher expression levels (>3+) in all the tumors without significant differencies. Moreover, the expression patterns of MMP-1 and gelatinase B (MMP-9) could divide PNSTs into two groups: schwannoma versus neurofibroma/MPNST. Higher expression levels (>3+) of MMP-9 were observed in 50% of schwannomas versus none in neurofibromas and MPNSTs, while those of MMP-1 were found in 35.7% of neurofibromas and 66.7% of MPNSTs versus none in schwannomas. RECK was the main inhibitor expressed in these 3 tumors, with no significant differences. CONCLUSION These results suggest that emmprin and MT1-MMP may be malignant potential-related proteins in PNSTs, and that MMP-1 and 9 may help differentiation between schwannoma and neurofibroma, especially in their plexiform types.
Breast cancer with synchronous metastases: trends in survival during a 14-year period.

PURPOSE Although new drugs were approved during the 1990s for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer, it is not clear whether their use has changed the outcome of patients in daily practice. This study sought to determine whether survival has improved over time for breast cancer patients who had metastases at diagnosis. PATIENTS AND METHODS A total of 724 patients have been treated in three French cancer centers for an initially metastatic breast cancer between 1987 and 2000; 343 were diagnosed between 1987 and 1993, and 381 were diagnosed between 1994 and 2000. Tumor characteristics, treatments, and outcomes of these patients were compared by chi(2) test, log-rank test, and Cox regression analysis. RESULTS Characteristics were not different between the patients diagnosed from 1987 to 1993 and those diagnosed from 1994 to 2000. Ten percent of patients treated from 1987 to 1994 and 58% of patients treated from 1994 to 2000 have received either a taxane or a new aromatase inhibitor. The 3-year overall survival rates were 27% for patients treated from 1987 to 1993 and 44% for patients treated from 1994 to 2000 (P <.001). The treatment period (1994 to 2000 v 1987 to 1993) was a prognostic factor in multivariate analysis (relative risk, 0.6; P <.001). CONCLUSION The survival of breast cancer patients presenting with metastases at diagnosis has improved over time. This study strongly suggests that this improvement is related to treatment.
Middle Ear Mucocele: An Unusual Complication of the Tranlabyrinthine Approach to Acoustic Neuroma

The complications of posterior fossa surgery continue to decrease in incidence as our collective experience broadens. Most complications are seen in the immediate postoperative period and the minimized by careful attentiveness to subtle changes in mental status, vital signs, and cranial nerve examination. Long-term follow-up is necessary to identify tumor recurrence, but strict imaging protocols as yet do not exist to facilitate the early identification of recurrent disease, as recurrence is very rare. We report the first case of secondary mucocele formation in the middle ear cleft following translabyrinthine excision of an intracanalicular acoustic neuroma. This complication was found in the fourth postoperative year on routine magnetic resonance imaging, which itself followed previously normal contrasted magnetic resonance imaging in the second postoperative year. The genesis of this complication and possible treatment options are discussed.
Mobile Case-Based Reasoning for Reservoir Gate Operation Decision Recommendation

Dam failure can be reduced if sufficient information can be acquired in time and quality thus minimizing the threat to life. Experiences of dam operator being part of the organizational memory can be captured and reuse for future decision-making which is the essence of case based reasoning. The emergence of wireless technology enable the integration of mobile devices with decision support system application. This paper presents a mobile case based reasoning application for reservoir gate operation recommendation aimed at reducing dam failures and down stream flooding.
Persistent human immunodeficiency virus type 1 antigenemia in children correlates with disease progression.

In a longitudinal study, human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) antigen (HIV-Ag) was measured in serum specimens from 54 children with HIV-1 infection followed for a median duration of 17 months. The persistent detection of free HIV-Ag in a group of 25 children was associated with clinical deterioration in 22 (88%) and a mortality of 52%, whereas the persistent nondetection of free HIV-Ag in a group of 18 children was associated with clinical deterioration in five (28%) and a mortality of 11% during the period of observation. Nine children had transient HIV-1 antigenemia and two children converted from HIV-Ag negative to positive during the study. Free HIV-Ag levels varied inversely with antibody reactivity to viral core proteins p24 and p17 determined by Western immunoblot, suggesting either the formation of immune complexes or a balance between viral expression and the host immune response. Five mother-infant pairs were studied for HIV-Ag expression in the perinatal period. In three of these pairs, both mother and infant were HIV-Ag negative, in one pair the mother had high levels of HIV-Ag and the infant was HIV-Ag negative. In the remaining mother-infant pair, the neonate became HIV-Ag positive but the mother was HIV-Ag negative prepartum and postpartum. These data suggest that HIV-Ag probably does not cross the placenta and that the detection of free HIV-Ag in the offspring of a HIV-1 infected mother most likely indicates viral infection. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Early Clinical Experience with Bleomycin in the United Kingdom in Series of 105 Patients

The results of treating a series of 105 patients (79 with advanced squamous cell carcinoma, 21 with advanced lymphoma, and 5 with miscellaneous tumours) with bleomycin are described. The drug was usually given as a single agent. Four patients with squamous cell carcinoma showed complete regression and there was partial regression in 25. Side effects were frequent, particularly skin changes and stomatitis; death from pneumonitis occurred in one patient.
Frequent Term Distribution Measures for Dataset Profiling

We motivate the need for dataset profiling in the context of evaluation, and show that textual datasets differ in ways that challenge assumptions about the applicability of techniques. We set out some criteria for useful profiling measures. We argue that distribution patterns of frequent words are useful in profiling genre, and report on a series of experiments with χ2 based measures on the TIPSTER collection, and on textual intranet data. Findings show substantial differences in the distribution of very frequent terms across datasets.
NBST algorithm: A load balancing algorithm in cloud computing

Cloud Computing is one of the fastest growing technologies in present day. Cloud is the metaphor used for internet and cloud computing is sharing pool of resources over internet. Count of users switching to cloud services is increasing day by day, which in turn requires better performance of cloud. One of the major challenges faced in cloud is efficient distribution of resources for serving millions of user requests in less time. Distribution of workload across multiple computing resources is known as Load balancing, its main purpose is to achieve high resource utilization and user satisfaction. Therefore, different load balancing algorithms are used in cloud in order to serve the requests from user in efficient manner. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to balance load on cloud based on arrangement of resources, according to processing speed for virtual machines and then allocating cloudlets to the resources according to their processing requirement.
Robust Exemplar Extraction Using Structured Sparse Coding

Robust exemplar extraction from the noisy sample set is one of the most important problems in pattern recognition. In this brief, we propose a novel approach for exemplar extraction through structured sparse learning. The new model accounts for not only the reconstruction capability and the sparsity, but also the diversity and robustness. To solve the optimization problem, we adopt the alternating directional method of multiplier technology to design an iterative algorithm. Finally, the effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by experiments of various examples including traffic sign sequences.
The Merging of the Senses

Bringing together neural, perceptual, and behavioral studies, The Merging of the Senses provides the first detailed review of how the brain assembles information from different sensory systems in order to produce a coherent view of the external world. Stein and Meredith marshall evidence from a broad array of species to show that interactions among senses are the most ancient scheme of sensory organization, an integrative system reflecting a general plan that supersedes structure and species. Most importantly, they explore what is known about the neural processes by which interactions among the senses take place at the level of the single cell.The authors draw on their own experiments to illustrate how sensory inputs converge (from visual, auditory, and somatosensory modalities, for instance) on individual neurons in different areas of the brain, how these neurons integrate their inputs, the principles by which this integration occurs, and what this may mean for perception and behavior. Neurons in the superior colliculus and cortex are emphasized as models of multiple sensory integrators.Barry E. Stein is Professor of Physiology and M. Alex Meredith is Associate Professor of Anatomy, both at the Medical College of Virginia, Virginia Commonwealth University.
Clinical and functional outcome of childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder 33 years later.

CONTEXT Prospective studies of childhood attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have not extended beyond early adulthood. OBJECTIVE To examine whether children diagnosed as having ADHD at a mean age of 8 years (probands) have worse educational, occupational, economic, social, and marital outcomes and higher rates of ongoing ADHD, antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), substance use disorders (SUDs), adult-onset psychiatric disorders, psychiatric hospitalizations, and incarcerations than non-ADHD comparison participants at a mean age of 41 years. DESIGN Prospective, 33-year follow-up study, with masked clinical assessments. SETTING Research clinic. PARTICIPANTS A total of 135 white men with ADHD in childhood, free of conduct disorder, and 136 men without childhood ADHD (65.2% and 76.4% of original cohort, respectively). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Occupational, economic, and educational attainment; marital history; occupational and social functioning; ongoing and lifetime psychiatric disorders; psychiatric hospitalizations; and incarcerations. RESULTS Probands had significantly worse educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes; more divorces; and higher rates of ongoing ADHD (22.2% vs 5.1%, P < .001), ASPD (16.3% vs 0%, P < .001), and SUDs (14.1% vs 5.1%, P = .01) but not more mood or anxiety disorders (P = .36 and .33) than did comparison participants. Ongoing ADHD was weakly related to ongoing SUDs (ϕ = 0.19, P = .04), as well as ASPD with SUDs (ϕ = 0.20, P = .04). During their lifetime, probands had significantly more ASPD and SUDs but not mood or anxiety disorders and more psychiatric hospitalizations and incarcerations than comparison participants. Relative to comparisons, psychiatric disorders with onsets at 21 years or older were not significantly elevated in probands. Probands without ongoing psychiatric disorders had worse social, but not occupational, functioning. CONCLUSIONS The multiple disadvantages predicted by childhood ADHD well into adulthood began in adolescence, without increased onsets of new disorders after 20 years of age. Findings highlight the importance of extended monitoring and treatment of children with ADHD.
A Granular-based Approach for

A key issue when mining web information is the labeling problem: data is abundant on the web but is unlabelled. In this thesis, we address this problem by proposing i) a novel theoretical granular model that structures categorical noun phrase instances as well as semantically related noun phrase pairs from a given corpus representing unstructured web pages with a variant of Tolerance Rough Sets Model (TRSM), ii) a semi-supervised learning algorithm called Tolerant Pattern Learner (TPL) that labels categorical instances as well as relations. TRSM has so far been successfully employed for document retrieval and classification, but not for learning categorical and relational phrases. We use the ontological information from the Never Ending Language Learner (Nell) system. We compared the performance of our algorithm with Coupled Bayesian Sets (CBS) and Coupled Pattern Learner (CPL) algorithms for categorical and relational labeling, respectively. Experimental results suggest that TPL can achieve comparable performance with CBS and CPL in terms of precision.
Discussion of Nested Sampling for Bayesian Computations by John Skilling

The ingredients to a Bayesian analysis comprise the sampling model {Pθ : θ ∈ Ω} for the response X, the prior Π for the parameter θ, and the observed value X = x. This is equivalent to specifying the joint model Pθ ×Π for (X, θ) and the observed value X = x. In many situations we may also have a loss function but we ignore this here as it is not material to our discussion. We refer to Pθ ×Π as the Bayesian model. The Bayesian model and the data comprise the full information available and we ask how this information is to be used in carrying out a statistical analysis. The joint model can be factored as Pθ × Π = M × Π (· |X) where M is the marginal prior predictive for X and Π (· |X) is the posterior for θ. The principle of conditional probability then says that probability statements about θ, that are initially based on the prior Π, should instead be based on the observed posterior Π (· |X = x) . What then, is the role of M in a statistical analysis? If our goal is inference about θ, then it might seem that we can ignore M and proceed directly to work with Π (· |X = x) . This may seem even preferable if it is
A modified proportional guidance law for homming missiles by using of nonlinear filters

In this paper two nonlinear estimation techniques, i.e. particle filter (PF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF), are used for estimation of the states of a passive homming missile. The estimated states including the range between missile and target are used as the elements of proportional navigation guidance (PNG) law. Previous methods such as extended Kalman filter (EKF), measurements based on line of sight angle and its rate of change have demonstrated some difficulties due to limitations of extended Kalman filter as well as unobservability of the states of the system. Besides, in the paper the problem of observability of states of the system is investigated and unobservability of some of the states of this system is resolved by proposing a new measurable variable which can be used in real implementations of such missiles. The performances of these two nonlinear estimation techniques are compared with that of extended Kalman filter from root mean square error point of view by Monte-Carlo simulations. The computational complexity and the question that the algorithms are realizable or not are also considered in this study.
Estimates of Small-Stock Betas are Often Very Distorted by Outliers

The mounting evidence of outlier generating heavy-tailed or mixture distribution functions for equity returns motivates the search for estimation procedures robust toward outlying data points. This paper introduces such an estimator and presents a detailed comparison with the classical ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator using historical monthly equity returns data from the CRSP database. The results show that the two estimates differ significantly for a non-trivial fraction of the equities studied. Furthermore, such behavior occurs primarily for firms with small market capitalization. The results of our study suggest that robust estimates of beta may be of considerable value as a complement to the standard OLS beta estimates. R. DOUGLAS MARTIN is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Washington and Chief Scientist of the Data Analysis Products Division of MathSoft, Inc, both in Seattle, WA. (Email: doug@statsci.com). TIM SIMIN is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Finance and Business Economics, School of Business, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. (Email: tsimin@u.washington.edu).
Conditional Fas-Associated Death Domain Protein (FADD):GFP Knockout Mice Reveal FADD Is Dispensable in Thymic Development but Essential in Peripheral T Cell Homeostasis1

Fas-associated death domain protein (FADD)/mediator of receptor-induced toxicity-1 is required for signaling induced by death receptors such as Fas. In earlier studies, FADD-deficient mice died in utero, and a FADD deficiency in embryonic stem cells inhibited T cell production in viable FADD−/−→RAG-1−/− chimeras. To analyze the temporal requirement of FADD in the development and function in the T lineage, it is necessary to establish viable mutant mice producing detectable FADD-deficient T cells. We generated mice that express a functional FADD:GFP fusion gene reconstituting normal embryogenesis and lymphopoiesis in the absence of the endogenous FADD. Efficient T cell-specific deletion of FADD:GFP was achieved, as indicated by the presence of a high percentage of GFP-negative thymocytes and peripheral T cells in mice expressing Lck-Cre or CD4-Cre. Sorted GFP-negative thymocytes and peripheral T cells contained undetectable levels of FADD and were resistant to apoptosis induced by Fas, TNF, and TCR restimulation. These T cell-specific FADD-deficient mice contain normal thymocyte numbers, but fewer peripheral T cells. Purified peripheral FADD-deficient T cells failed to undergo extensive homeostatic expansion after adoptive transfer into lymphocyte-deficient hosts, and responded poorly to proliferation induced by ex vivo TCR stimulation. Furthermore, deletion of FADD in preactivated mature T cells using retrovirus-Cre resulted in no proliferation. These results demonstrate that FADD plays a dispensable role during thymocyte development, but is essential in maintaining peripheral T cell homeostasis and regulating both apoptotic and proliferation signals.