Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Estrogen receptor and progesterone receptor as predictive biomarkers of response to endocrine therapy: a prospectively powered pathology study in the Tamoxifen and Exemestane Adjuvant Multinational trial.

PURPOSE The Tamoxifen and Exemestane Adjuvant Multinational (TEAM) trial included a prospectively planned pathology substudy testing the predictive value of progesterone receptor (PgR) expression for outcome of estrogen receptor-positive (ER-positive) early breast cancer treated with exemestane versus tamoxifen. PATIENTS AND METHODS Pathology blocks from 4,781 TEAM patients randomly assigned to exemestane versus tamoxifen followed by exemestane for 5 years of total therapy were collected centrally, and tissue microarrays were constructed from samples from 4,598 patients. Quantitative analysis of hormone receptors (ER and PgR) was performed by using image analysis and immunohistochemistry, and the results were linked to outcome data from the main TEAM trial and analyzed relative to disease-free survival and treatment. RESULTS Of 4,325 eligible ER-positive patients, 23% were PgR-poor (Allred < 4) and 77% were PgR- rich (Allred ≥ 5). No treatment-by-marker effect for PgR was observed for exemestane versus tamoxifen (PgR-rich hazard ratio [HR], 0.83; 95% CI, 0.65 to 1.05; PgR-poor HR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.61 to 1.19; P = .88 for interaction). Both PgR and ER expression were associated with patient prognosis in univariate (PgR HR, 0.53; 95% CI, 0.43 to 0.65; P < .001; ER HR, 0.66; 95% CI, 0.51 to 0.86; P = .002), and multivariate analyses (P < .001 and P = .001, respectively). A trend toward a treatment-by-marker effect for ER-rich patients was observed. CONCLUSION Preferential exemestane versus tamoxifen treatment benefit was not predicted by PgR expression; conversely, patients with ER-rich tumors may derive additional benefit from exemestane. Quantitative analysis of ER and PgR expression provides highly significant information on risk of early relapse (within 1 to 3 years) during treatment.
Diagnostic assessment of writing: A comparison of two rating scales

Alderson (2005) suggests that diagnostic tests should identify strengths and weaknesses in learners' use of language and focus on specific elements rather than global abilities. However, rating scales used in performance assessment have been repeatedly criticized for being imprecise and therefore often resulting in holistic marking by raters (Weigle, 2002). The aim of this study is to compare two rating scales for writing in an EAP context; one `a priori' developed scale with less specific descriptors of the kind commonly used in proficiency tests and one empirically developed scale with detailed level descriptors. The validation process involved 10 trained raters applying both sets of descriptors to the rating of 100 writing scripts yielded from a large-scale diagnostic assessment administered to both native and non-native speakers of English at a large university. A quantitative comparison of rater behaviour was undertaken using FACETS. Questionnaires and interviews were administered to elicit the raters' perceptions of the efficacy of the two types of scales. The results indicate that rater reliability was substantially higher and that raters were able to better distinguish between different aspects of writing when the more detailed descriptors were used. Rater feedback also showed a preference for the more detailed scale. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for rater training and rating scale development.
Moving Related to Separation: Who Moves and to What Distance

We address the issue of moving from the joint home on the occasion of separation. Our research question is: To what extent can the occurrence of moves related to separation, and the distance moved, be explained by ties to the location, resources, and other factors influencing the likelihood of moving of persons who separate and their ex-partners? We use data from the unique ASTRID micro database for Sweden, based on administrative information about the entire Swedish population. The methods are logistic regression analysis of moving, and OLS regression of the log-distance moved, for people from two-gender couples who separated during the period 2004–05. We find marked negative effects of local ties to parents and siblings, work, and the location in general on moving and moving distance. The results concerning resources and other factors influencing moving were less pronounced. Particularly striking was the absence of an effect of education level.
Obtaining Reliable Bit Rate Measurements in SNMP-Managed Networks

The Simple Network Management Protocol, SNMP, is the most widespread standard for Internet management. As SNMP stacks are available on most equipment, this protocol has to be considered when it comes to performance management, traffic engineering and network control. However, especially when using the predominant version 1, SNMPv1, special care has to be taken to avoid erroneous results when calculating bit rates. In this work, we evalute six off-the-shelf network components. We demonstrate that bit rate measurements can be completely misleading if the sample intervals that are used are either too large or too small. We present solutions and work-arounds for these problems. The devices are evaluated with regards to their updating and response behavior.
Fluid–structure interaction modeling of upper airways before and after nasal surgery for obstructive sleep apnea

Nasal obstruction frequently has been associated with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Although correction of an obstructed nasal airway is considered an important component in OSA treatment, the effect of nasal surgery on OSA remains controversial. Variation in airway anatomy between before and after nasal surgery may cause significant differences in airflow patterns within the upper airway. In this paper, anatomically accurate models of the interaction between upper airway and soft palate were developed from prenasal and post‐nasal surgery multidetector computed tomography data of a patient with OSA and nasal obstruction. Computational modeling for inspiration and expiration was performed by using fluid–structure interaction method. The airflow characteristics such as velocity, turbulence intensity and pressure drop, and displacement distribution of soft palate are selected for comparison. Airway resistances significantly decrease after the nasal surgery, especially in the velopharynx region because of an enlarged pharyngeal cavity and a reduced upstream resistance. Meanwhile, the decreased aerodynamic force would result in a smaller displacement of soft palates, which would lead to slight impact of the soft palate motion on the airflow characteristics. The present results suggest that airflow distribution in the whole upper airway and soft palate motions have improved following nasal surgery. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
A More Optimizer-Friendly Treatment of XQuery Store in the Presence of Side-Effects

XQuery is a functional query language for XML in which generally no order for the evaluation of sub-expressions is assumed. However, there are in fact several sources of side effects, including a subtle one caused by element constructing in the current version, data manipulation outside of the language by user-code via API, and possible future update extensions. They prevent an implementation from optimization by reordering the execution or parallel processing. In this paper, two approaches are proposed to tackle these obstacles. One is to reconsider the treatment of the store, and the other is to introduce a way to identify the portions where the updates actually take place. We believe these propositions will help the implementations perform safer optimizations.
Structure of internalising symptoms in early adulthood

Background Debate surrounds the underlying structure of internalising disorders including major depression, generalised anxiety disorder, phobias and panic disorders. Aims To model the within-time and across-time relationships of internalising symptoms, incorporating effects from generalised internalising and disorder-specific components of continuity. Method Data were gathered from a 25-year longitudinal study of a birth cohort of 953 New Zealand children. Outcome measures included DSM–IV symptom scores for major depression, generalised anxiety disorder, phobia and panic disorder at the ages of 18, 21 and 25 years. Results Structural equation modelling showed that, within-times, a common underlying measure of generalised internalising explained symptom score comorbidities. Across-time correlation of symptom scores was primarily accounted for by continuity over time in generalised internalising. However, for major depression and phobia there was also evidence of across-time continuity in the disorder-specific components of symptoms. Conclusions Internalising symptoms can be partitioned into components reflecting both a generalised tendency to internalising and disorder-specific components.
Nonviral Gene Targeting at rDNA Locus of Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells

Background. Genetic modification, such as the addition of exogenous genes to the MSC genome, is crucial to their use as cellular vehicles. Due to the risks associated with viral vectors such as insertional mutagenesis, the safer nonviral vectors have drawn a great deal of attention. Methods. VEGF, bFGF, vitamin C, and insulin-transferrin-selenium-X were supplemented in the MSC culture medium. The cells' proliferation and survival capacity was measured by MTT, determination of the cumulative number of cells, and a colony-forming efficiency assay. The plasmid pHr2-NL was constructed and nucleofected into MSCs. The recombinants were selected using G418 and characterized using PCR and Southern blotting. Results. BFGF is critical to MSC growth and it acted synergistically with vitamin C, VEGF, and ITS-X, causing the cells to expand significantly. The neomycin gene was targeted to the rDNA locus of human MSCs using a nonviral human ribosomal targeting vector. The recombinant MSCs retained multipotential differentiation capacity, typical levels of hMSC surface marker expression, and a normal karyotype, and none were tumorigenic in nude mice. Conclusions. Exogenous genes can be targeted to the rDNA locus of human MSCs while maintaining the characteristics of MSCs. This is the first nonviral gene targeting of hMSCs.
Involuntary Autobiographical Memories

Results from a diary study of involuntary memories are presented (14 subjects; 7 males, 7 females, average age 23 years). Virtually all of the recorded memories had identifiable cues. Memory access was biased towards (a) mood-congruent (b) recent and (c) distinctive (unusual) events. The memories were most frequently rated as emotionally positive and prior rehearsal was rated low. Also, the memories were found to influence current mood consonant with the emotional valence of the memories. Stressful and repetitive involuntary recollections—as they are observed in clinical settings subsequent to traumatic events—may be viewed as a malignant effect of normal mechanisms of involuntary memories.
Treat the patient not the blood test: the implications of an increase in cardiac troponin after prolonged endurance exercise

Collapse after prolonged endurance exercise is common and usually benign. This case study reports a triathlete who suffered a vaso-vagal associated collapsed after exercise. Misdiagnosis of myocardial injury in the presence of elevated cardiac troponins and ECG anomalies led to inappropriate management and highlights the difficulty in treating the collapsed athlete following arduous exercise.
A secure database encryption scheme

The need to protect the database is growing especially in this age of e-commerce. Many conventional database security systems are bugged with holes that can be used by attackers to penetrate the database. No matter what degree of security is put in place, sensitive data in database are still vulnerable to attack. To avoid the risk posed by this threat, database encryption has been recommended. However encrypting all of database item greatly degrades the performance of the database system. As an optimal solution this paper presents a database encryption scheme that provides maximum security, whilst limiting the added time cost of encryption and decryption.
On Routing Flexibility of Wormhole-Switched Priority-Preemptive NoCs

Flit-level preemptions via virtual channels have been proposed as one viable method to implement priority-preemptive arbitration policies in NoC routers, and integrate NoCs in the hard real-time domain. In recent years, researchers have explored several aspects of priority-preemptive NoCs, such as different arbitration techniques, different priority assignment methods (where applicable) and different workload mapping approaches, all with the common objective to use interconnect mediums more efficiently. Yet, the impact of different routing techniques on such a model is still an unexplored topic. Motivated by this reality, in this work we study the effects of routing flexibility on wormhole-switched priority-preemptive NoCs.
Design of a biomimetic robotic octopus arm

This paper reports the rationale and design of a robotic arm, as inspired by an octopus arm. The octopus arm shows peculiar features, such as the ability to bend in all directions, to produce fast elongations, and to vary its stiffness. The octopus achieves these unique motor skills, thanks to its peculiar muscular structure, named muscular hydrostat. Different muscles arranged on orthogonal planes generate an antagonistic action on each other in the muscular hydrostat, which does not change its volume during muscle contractions, and allow bending and elongation of the arm and stiffness variation. By drawing inspiration from natural skills of octopus, and by analysing the geometry and mechanics of the muscular structure of its arm, we propose the design of a robot arm consisting of an artificial muscular hydrostat structure, which is completely soft and compliant, but also able to stiffen. In this paper, we discuss the design criteria of the robotic arm and how this design and the special arrangement of its muscular structure may bring the building of a robotic arm into being, by showing the results obtained by mathematical models and prototypical mock-ups.
Maternal Rejection of the Young Child: Present Status of the Clinical Syndrome

This article reviews severe disorders of the mother-infant relationship involving emotional rejection of the infant in the first year of its life. Infants exposed to their mother’s hatred and rage may suffer far-ranging and long-term disadvantages, and are at risk of maltreatment. Diagnosis, therapy and research have been hampered by the lack of recognition of this clinical syndrome in the classifications. The imminent revision of these classificatory systems must include them.
Genes directly controlled by CtrA, a master regulator of the Caulobacter cell cycle

Studies of the genetic network that controls the Caulobacter cell cycle have identified a response regulator, CtrA, that controls, directly or indirectly, one-quarter of the 553 cell cycle-regulated genes. We have performed in vivo genomic binding site analysis of the CtrA protein to identify which of these genes have regulatory regions bound directly by CtrA. By combining these data with previous global analysis of cell cycle transcription patterns and gene expression profiles of mutant ctrA strains, we have determined that CtrA directly regulates at least 95 genes. The total group of CtrA-regulated genes includes those involved in polar morphogenesis, DNA replication initiation, DNA methylation, cell division, and cell wall metabolism. Also among the genes in this notably large regulon are 14 that encode regulatory proteins, including 10 two-component signal transduction regulatory proteins. Identification of additional regulatory genes activated by CtrA will serve to directly connect new regulatory modules to the network controlling cell cycle progression.
A meta-model based approach to the description of resources and skills

The management of intra- and inter-organizational business processes is a significant issue that influences company’s success. Many business processes are not fully automated and require human interaction. Therefore, responsibilities for tasks have to be assigned by workflow management systems. Common resource models allow the selection of resources according to their roles, thus neglecting competences and skills. In this article we present an extensible resource meta-model that allows the modeling of resources including their competences, skills and knowledge. Furthermore we propose the usage of these criteria to enable a more flexible assignment of resources to tasks. In particular our approach fosters the alignment of business process modeling and human resource planning. This combination facilitates several opportunities on both sides and offers potential for enhanced scheduling of adequate resources in comparison to pure role based decisions.
Spatially Varying Autoregressive Processes

We develop a class of models for processes indexed in time and space that are based on autoregressive (AR) processes at each location. We use a Bayesian hierarchical structure to impose spatial coherence for the coefficients of the AR processes. The priors on such coefficients consist of spatial processes that guarantee time stationarity at each point in the spatial domain. The AR structures are coupled with a dynamic model for the mean of the process, which is expressed as a linear combination of time-varying parameters. We use satellite data on sea surface temperature for the North Pacific to illustrate how the model can be used to separate trends, cycles, and short-term variability for high-frequency environmental data. This article has supplementary material online.
Route oscillations in I-BGP with route reflection

We study the route oscillation problem [16, 19] in the Internal Border Gateway Protocol (I-BGP)[18] when route reflection is used. We propose a formal model of I-BGP and use it to show that even deciding whether an I-BGP configuration with route reflection can converge is an NP-Complete problem. We then propose a modification to I-BGP and show that route reflection cannot cause the modified protocol to diverge. Moreover, we show that the modified protocol converges to the same stable routing configuration regardless of the order in which messages are sent or received.
Perceptions of Stress and Coping During Preparations for the 1999 Women's Soccer World Cup Finals

The ability to cope with competitive stress is an integral part of elite sport performance. The purposes of this investigation were to identify and examine players’ perceptions of sources of stress and coping strategies prior to the 1999 soccer world cup finals. Using a case study approach (Stake, 2000), members of a women’s national soccer team (n = 10) participated in this investigation. Through the process of inductive data analysis, main sources of stress were categorized into the following four main themes: coaches, demands of international soccer, competitive stressors, and distractions. Participants used several types of strategies based on a range of problem-focused, emotion-focused, appraisal-reappraisal, and avoidance coping styles to deal with these stressors. The main coping themes identified were reappraisal, use of social resources, performance behaviors, and blocking. Athletes implemented different coping strategies depending on the stressors they encountered. The widest range of coping res.
Power in Transition: An Interdisciplinary Framework to Study Power in Relation to Structural Change

This article conceptualizes power in the context of long-term process of structural change. First, it discusses the field of transition studies, which deals with processes of structural change in societal systems on the basis of certain presumptions about power relations, but still lacks an explicit conceptualization of power. Then the article discusses some prevailing points of contestation in debates on power. It is argued that for the context of transition studies, it is necessary to develop an interdisciplinary framework in which power is explicitly conceptualized in relation to change. Subsequently, such a framework is presented, with reference to existing literature on power. Starting with a philosophical and operational definition of power, a typology is developed of the different ways in which power can be exercised, explicitly including innovative power and transformative power. Finally, the presented power framework is applied to transition studies, redefining pivotal transition concepts in terms of power and formulating hypotheses on the role of power in transitions. By doing so, the article not only offers an interdisciplinary framework to study power in the context of transition studies, but also contributes to power debates more generally by including innovation and transformation as acts of power, and thereby proposes a re-conceptualization of the relation between power and structural change.
Hong Kong children's understanding of television advertising

This study examines Chinese children's understanding and comprehension of television advertising. A quota sample of 448 children made up of 32 girls and 32 boys from kindergartens and grades 1-6, were personally interviewed in May 1998. The results indicated that children in grade 2 (aged 7-8 years) were beginning to understand what advertising was and were aware of the persuasive intention of television advertising. Over one-third of older children from grade 4 understood that television stations carried advertising for money. Like children in the West, the main reason for liking and disliking commercials depended on their entertainment element. An understanding of television advertising, recall of brands from slogans and comprehension of advertising content were consistently related to the cognitive development of children. Brand recognition from liked and disliked commercials was strong. Comprehension of the key messages of advertising content varied greatly by children's cognitive development and the style of presentation. Ethical issues and public opinions of Hong Kong consumers regarding advertising to children were discussed.
The effects of consumer knowledge on responses to event sponsorships

Research into consumer responses to event sponsorships has grown in recent years. However, the effects of consumer knowledge on sponsorship response have received little consideration. Consumers' event knowledge is examined to determine whether experts and novices differ in information processing of sponsorships and whether a sponsor's brand equity influences perceptions of sponsor-event fit. Six sponsors (three high equity/three low equity) were paired with six events. Results of hypothesis testing indicate that experts generate more total thoughts about a sponsor-event combination. Experts and novices do not differ in sponsor-event congruence for high-brand-equity sponsors, but event experts perceive less of a match between sponsor and event for low-brand-equity sponsors. (C) 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.