Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Pharmacokinetic Investigation of Imatinib Using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry in Patients with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia

Purpose: To investigate the potential use of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) in the study of the clinical pharmacology of imatinib. Experimental Design: Six patients who were receiving imatinib (400 mg/d) as part of their ongoing treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) received a dose containing a trace quantity (13.6 kBq) of 14C-imatinib. Blood samples were collected from patients before and at various times up to 72 h after administration of the test dose and were processed to provide samples of plasma and peripheral blood lymphocytes (PBL). Samples were analyzed by AMS, with chromatographic separation of parent compound from metabolites. In addition, plasma samples were analyzed by liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LCMS). Results: Analysis of the AMS data indicated that imatinib was rapidly absorbed and could be detected in plasma up to 72 h after administration. Imatinib was also detectable in PBL at 24 h after administration of the 14C-labeled dose. Comparison of plasma concentrations determined by AMS with those derived by LCMS analysis gave similar average estimates of area under plasma concentration time curve (26 ± 3 versus 27 ± 11 μg/mL·h), but with some variation within each individual. Conclusions: Using this technique, data were obtained in a small number of patients on the pharmacokinetics of a single dose of imatinib in the context of chronic dosing, which could shed light on possible pharmacologic causes of resistance to imatinib in CML.
Crude Oil Price Dynamics and Transmission Mechanism of the Macroeconomic Indicators in Nigeria

The preoccupation of this study is to investigate the dynamic impacts of crude oil price on the economic growth of Nigeria. The technique of estimation used in this study is the structural vector autoregressive type. This method is applied to articulate the transmission mechanism of macroeconomic effects of domestic price level, economic output, money supply and volatile crude oil price in Nigeria. The study sample covers the period between 1985 and 2010. The data used are on a quarterly basis. The results of both the impulse response functions and the forecast error variance decompositions indicate that domestic shocks are responsible for a reasonable portion of crude oil price fluctuations. Although crude oil price volatility has significant positive impacts on economic output, however, money supply shocks are the main cause of gross domestic product fluctuations. This study concludes that crude oil price has very important impact on the Nigerian economy and the monetary policy is the channel through which this impact transmits.
Afebrile meningoencephalitis with transient central facial paralysis due to Toscana virus infection, south-eastern France, 2014

We report a case of meningoencephalitis caused by Toscana virus (TOSV) with central facial paralysis lasting over two days acquired in south-eastern France. The patient was not febrile either before or during the course of the disease. The diagnosis was established by both real-time RT-PCR and virus isolation with complete genome sequencing. This case emphasises the need to consider TOSV in non-febrile neurological syndromes in people living in or having travelled to the Mediterranean area.
Effective Control of Traffic Flow in ATM Networks Using Fuzzy Explicit Rate Marking. (FERM)

We describe the fuzzy explicit fate marking (FERM) traffic flow control algorithm for a class of best effort service, known as available bit rate (ABR), proposed by the ATM Forum. FERM is an explicit rate marking scheme in which an explicit rate is calculated at the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch and sent back to the ABR traffic sources encapsulated within resource management (RM) cells. The flow rate is calculated by the fuzzy congestion control (FCC) module by monitoring the average ABR queue length and its rate of change, then by using a set of linguistic rules. We use simulation to compare the steady-state and transient performance of FERM with EPRCA (a current favourite by the ATM Forum) in the presence of high priority variable bit rate (VBR) video and constant bit rate (CBR) in both a local-area network (LAN) and a wide-area network (WAN) environment. Our experiments show that FERM exhibits a robust behavior, even under extreme network loading conditions, and ensures fair share of the bandwidth for all virtual channels (VCs) regardless of the number of hops they traverse. Additionally, FERM controls congestion substantially better than EPRCA, offers faster transient response, leads to lower end-to-end delay and better network utilization.
Cluster-based loop closing detection for underwater slam in feature-poor regions

This paper reports on a novel technique to visually detect loop closings in feature-poor underwater environments in order to increase the accuracy of vision-based localization systems. The main problem of the classical visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for underwater vehicles is the lack of robust, stable and matchable features in certain aquatic environments. The presence of sandbanks, seagrass or other underwater phenomena cause the visual features to concentrate in regions heavily textured, leaving great image areas completely free of visual information. In this situation, the classical loop closing detection algorithms fail, resulting in no corrections for the SLAM system. Our novel method proposes to reinforce the loop closing detection by clustering visual keypoints present in multiple keyframes and to match features of clusters instead of features of keyframes. This new technique is assessed on the particular application of navigating an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) in marine environments colonized with seagrass or with the presence of sandbanks. Experiments conducted in several coastal zones on the Balearic Islands show a high degree of success in the visual registration of overlapping areas.
Stress-Induced Alternative Splice Forms of MDM2 and MDMX Modulate the p53-Pathway in Distinct Ways

MDM2 and MDMX are the chief negative regulators of the tumor-suppressor protein p53 and are essential for maintaining homeostasis within the cell. In response to genotoxic stress and also in several cancer types, MDM2 and MDMX are alternatively spliced. The splice variants MDM2-ALT1 and MDMX-ALT2 lack the p53-binding domain and are incapable of negatively regulating p53. However, they retain the RING domain that facilitates dimerization of the full-length MDM proteins. Concordantly, MDM2-ALT1 has been shown to lead to the stabilization of p53 through its interaction with and inactivation of full-length MDM2. The impact of MDM2-ALT1 expression on the p53 pathway and the nature of its interaction with MDMX remain unclear. Also, the role of the architecturally similar MDMX-ALT2 and its influence of the MDM2-MDMX-p53 axis are yet to be elucidated. We show here that MDM2-ALT1 is capable of binding full-length MDMX as well as full-length MDM2. Additionally, we demonstrate that MDMX-ALT2 is able to dimerize with both full-length MDMX and MDM2 and that the expression of MDM2-ALT1 and MDMX-ALT2 leads to the upregulation of p53 protein, and also of its downstream target p21. Moreover, MDM2-ALT1 expression causes cell cycle arrest in the G1 phase in a p53 and p21 dependent manner, which is consistent with the increased levels of p21. Finally we present evidence that MDM2-ALT1 and MDMX-ALT2 expression can activate subtly distinct subsets of p53-transcriptional targets implying that these splice variants can modulate the p53 tumor suppressor pathway in unique ways. In summary, our study shows that the stress-inducible alternative splice forms MDM2-ALT1 and MDMX-ALT2 are important modifiers of the p53 pathway and present a potential mechanism to tailor the p53-mediated cellular stress response.
Lexical semantics and knowledge representation in multilingual sentence generation

This thesis develops a new approach to automatic language generation that focuses on the need to produce a range of different paraphrases from the same input representation. One novelty of the system is its solidly grounding representations of word meaning in a background knowledge base, which enables the production of paraphrases stemming from certain inferences, rather than from purely lexical relationships alone. The system is designed in such a way that the paraphrasing mechanism extends naturally to a multilingual generator; specifically, we will be concerned with producing English and German sentences. The focus of the system is on lexical paraphrases, and one of the contributions of the thesis is in identifying, analyzing and extending relevant linguistic research so that it can be used to handle the problems of lexical semantics in a language generation system. The lexical entries are more complex than in previous generators, and they separate the various aspects of word meaning, so that different ways of paraphrasing can be systematically related to the different motivations for saying a sentence in a particular way. One result of accounting for lexical semantics in this fashion is a formalization of a number of verb alternations, for which a generative treatment is given. While the actual choice of one paraphrase as the best-suited utterance in a given situation is not a focal point of the thesis, two dimensions of preferring a variant of a sentence are discussed: that of assigning salience to the different elements of the sentence, and that of connotational or sylistic features of the utterance. These dimensions are integrated into the system, and it can thus determine a preferred paraphrase from a set of alternatives. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, the proposed generation architecture has been implemented as a prototype, along with a domain model that serves as the background knowledge base for specifying the input to the generator. A range of generated examples is presented to show the functionality of the system.
Designing Efficient Education and Tax Policies

We study education and income tax policies in a model with endogenous selection into college. Our framework is strongly influenced by the empirical college literature and incorporates heterogenous returns and tastes for college, earnings risk (implying uncertain returns to college) and potentially borrowing constraints. We (i) calculate revenue effects of various policy reforms starting from the current system and (ii) derive conditions for optimal education and tax policies with various degrees of sophistication: optimal college subsidies for given income taxes and vice versa, jointly optimal taxes and subsidies, and optimal education dependent taxes. We estimate the relevant parameters of the model for quantitative analysis. We find that the endogeneity of the college choice has only a small impact on optimal taxes and increasing subsidies to their optimal level leads to large welfare gains. Finally, we find that for the current US policies, an increase in education subsidies is self-financing via higher tax revenue in the future; if we allow grants to condition on parental background, this effect gets even stronger and children with poor academic background should receive higher subsidies for pure efficiency reasons -- efficient policies favor social mobility.
An Automatic Greedy Summarization System at INEX 2013 Tweet Contextualization Track

According to the organizers, the aim of the 2013 INEX Tweet Contextualization Track is: “. given a tweet, the system must provide some context about the subject of the tweet, in order to help the reader to understand it. This context should take the form of a readable (and short) summary, composed of passages from [. ] Wikipedia. ” We present an automatic greedy summarizer named REG applied to the INEX 2013 task. REG summarizer uses a greedy optimization algorithm to weigh the sentences. The summary is obtained by concatenating the relevant sentences, weighed in the optimization step. The results show that the REG system (using original tweets with a manual processing) do not perform very well on INEX 2013 contextualization track.
A Bio-Mimetic Joint Motion Planning for Humanoid Fingers: Practical Analysis

This paper implements a bio-mimetic joint motion planning strategy for robotic finger manipulations and shows its practical effectiveness in typical finger motions. The main feature of the proposed approach is to utilize an empirical model approximately made by the function of human finger motion for planning the joint trajectory of a robotic finger. In fact, the empirical model coordinates an interphalangeal motion in a robotic finger. By employing the joint motion planning method, it is possible to assign an adequate initial finger configuration and also plan effectively its real-time joint configurations during an operation. The practical merits of the motion planning strategy for finger operations will be discussed by experimental works.
Web4WeB e-collaboration tools

This paper introduces and compares two innovative tools aimed at enhancing the collaborative work of the researchers and professionals from the West Balkan countries in the Semantic Web field. The first tool, the Alfresco system, is a version controlled content repository designed in REST architectural style and based on a set of document management and collaboration services. The Alfresco workflow engine enables organization and automation of the process activities. The second tool, the Semantic MediaWiki portal, is a semantic collaboration tool and knowledge management system that leverages the latest Semantic Web (SW) technologies and standards. By using semantic annotations, it enriches the Web contents with semantics and makes the knowledge explicit. Thus, it provides structured access to information and accurate and precise knowledge retrieval. This paper discusses the customization of these tools and their utilization in the Web Technologies for West Balkan countries (Web4WeB) project.
Action , Imagery , & the N 400

A framework is developed for the total human response to all potentially meaningful sensory stimulation within the window of 40 to 220ms post-onset. The framework is intended explain the temporal invariance of the N400 ERP component (Kutas & Federmeier 2011), which is not a deadline for the 'binding' of a preliminary semantic representation (Federmeier & Laszlo 2009), but for anticipating needed system-wide change in preparation for conscious control in action. The pre-N400, 40 to 220ms window includes Hebbian-like affective responses (Barrett & Bar 2009), recapitulation of sensory information, selection of LSF object and scene analogs (Fenske et al. 2006), guidance from scripts, and 'proxy percepts'. Proxy percepts are offered as an alternative to simulation. I illustrate the framework with a moment-bymoment scenario of a whale watcher smelling, hearing, and seeing 'a blow'. In conclusion, I argue that Noe's (2004) theory of virtual presence has use for proxy percepts and that proxy percepts offer an understanding of eye saccades more parsimonious than Grush's (2004) emulation account.
Substrate Recognition and Specificity of Double-Stranded RNA Binding Proteins

Recognition of double-stranded (ds) RNA is an important part of many cellular pathways, including RNA silencing, viral recognition, RNA editing, processing, and transport. dsRNA recognition is often achieved by dsRNA binding domains (dsRBDs). We use atomistic molecular dynamics simulations to examine the binding interface of the transactivation response RNA binding protein (TRBP) dsRBDs to dsRNA substrates. Our results explain the exclusive selectivity of dsRBDs toward dsRNA and against DNA–RNA hybrid and dsDNA duplexes. We also provide corresponding experimental evidence. The dsRNA duplex is recognized by dsRBDs through the A-form of three duplex grooves and by the chemical properties of RNA bases, which have 2′-hydroxyl groups on their sugar rings. Our simulations show that TRBP dsRBD discriminates dsRNA- from DNA-containing duplexes primarily through interactions at two duplex grooves. The simulations also reveal that the conformation of the DNA–RNA duplex can be altered by dsRBD proteins, resulting in a weak binding of dsRBDs to DNA–RNA hybrids. Our study reveals the structural and molecular basis of protein–RNA interaction that gives rise to the observed substrate specificity of dsRNA binding proteins.
The SP2 SCOPES Project on Speech Prosody

This is an overview of a Joint Research Project within the Scientific co-operation between Eastern Europe and Switzerland (SCOPES) Program of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS) and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). Within the SP2 SCOPES Project on Speech Prosody, in the course of the following two years, the four partners aim to collaborate on the subject of speech prosody and advance the extraction, processing, modeling and transfer of prosody for a large portfolio of European languages: French, German, Italian, English, Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian. Through the intertwined four research plans, synergies are foreseen to emerge that will build a foundation for submitting strong joint proposals for EU funding.
Early school leaving: a crisis in secondary schooling in Tonga

Early school leaving : a crisis in secondary schooling in Tonga This thesis explores the extent of early school leaving from one AngUcan and four Catiiolic high schools m Tonga. The 'early school leavers' were the students who left secondary schooling before completUig what is refored to as 'gaieral education' (Forms 1 to 5). In other words, t h^ were the ones who left secondary schooling before sitting the Tonga School Catificate Examination. It is argued here that the extent of early school leaving is much greater than the early school leavers themselves because it includes the 'unsuccessful completers', the students who actually compld:ed their 'general education' but were unsuccessful wUh the Tonga School Catificate Exanunation. The early school leavCTS and the unsuccessful compldo's togetho" make up about 90 per cent of the secondary school population in Tonga. In this sense, secondary school education in Twiga is "successful" for about 10 per ceait of the total secondary school population. The udy also seeks to gauge the causes of early school leavmg by the use of a conceptual model which is based on a 'systems analysis' framework (Coombs, 1985). The possible systems that could impact positively on students to dtharemain at school or negatively to leave prematurely are grouped under the two parallel systems of 'SchooUng' and 'CommunUy'. Each of these two systems operate at the macro, meso and the micro level. At the macro level of the 'SchooUng Systems' is found tiie Government or the Church School Controlling Authority. The Government or the Church Education Department operates at meso level whUe the mdividual schools are found m the nuCTO level. At the maCTo level of the 'Community Systems', on the other hand, is found the Tongan culture whose umbreUa encompasses the economic, social and poUtical systems. The village
Working Paper Series* Department of Economics Optimal Policy and (the Lack Of) Time Inconsistency: Insights from Simple Models Optimal Policy and (the Lack Of) Time Inconsistency: Insights from Simple Models Pierre-daniel Sarte ‡

In the standard neoclassical model with a representative agent, a benevolent planner who can commit to future policies will, if feasible, levy a single confiscatory tax on capital in the initial period and commit never to set positive taxes thereafter. We show that this policy, which allows for the disposal of distortional taxes entirely, can arise even when sequential governments are unable to credibly promise future tax rates, regardless of how public expenditures are determined. We suggest that Markov-perfect distortional tax rates emerge more naturally in an overlapping generations setting. In that setting, an intergenerational distribution concern arises that limits the degree to which the initial old generation is taxed, in effect creating an endogenous upper limit on initial capital income taxes. Furthermore, this intergenerational objective reintroduces time inconsistency as a policy issue since, in a Markov-perfect equilibrium, taxes are set to equate marginal utilities of consumption across generations regardless of the implications for capital income tax rates. Unlike a Ramsey planner, at each date, sequential governments in a Markov-perfect equilibrium consider the past as sunk and, therefore, treat capital income taxes as non-distortionary. their comments. The views expressed herein are the authors' and do not necessarily represent those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond or the Federal Reserve System. Any errors are our own.
Self-organisation of sensor networks using genetic algorithms

In this paper we propose a reduced-complexity Genetic Algorithm (GA) for optimisation of multihop sensor networks. The goal of the system is to generate optimal number of sensor clusters with Cluster-Heads (CHs). It results in minimisation of the power consumption of the sensor system while maximising the sensor objectives (coverage and exposure). The GA is used to adaptively create various components such as cluster-members, CHs and next-cluster. These components are then used to evaluate the average fitness of the system based on the sequence of communication links towards the sink. In addition, the mechanism supports dynamically changing coverage, task requirements, failures, incremental redeployment and reconfiguration.