Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Platinum-based chemotherapy in triple-negative breast cancer: A meta-analysis

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) tumors do not express estrogen, progesterone or HER2/neu-receptors. There are no specific treatment guidelines for TNBC patients, however, it has been postulated that their phenotypic and molecular similarity to BRCA1-associated cancers would confer sensitivity to certain cytotoxic agents, including platinum. The aim of this meta-analysis was to evaluate the clinical outcome of breast cancer patients treated with platinum-based chemotherapy who had TNBC compared with those with non-TNBC. Electronic (MEDLINE, EMBASE and Cochrane Library databases) and manual searches were conducted throughout December 2011 to identify trials evaluating the use of platinum-based chemotherapy for patients with breast cancer. The methodological quality was assessed in accordance with the QUOROM statement. Seven studies met the eligibility criteria, with a total of 717 patients. Of these patients, 225 were TNBC patients (31%), 492 were non-TNBC patients (69%), 275 received platinum-based neo-adjuvant chemotherapy and 442 had advanced/metastatic breast cancers. The results showed that during neo-adjuvant chemotherapy, the clinical complete response (cCR) rate and the pathological complete response (pCR) rates were significantly higher for the TNBC group compared with the non-TNBC group (OR, 2.68; 95% CI, 1.69–6.57; P=0.03 and OR, 2.89; 95% CI, 1.28, 6.53; P= 0.01, respectively). However, in advanced/metastatic breast cancers, the cCR, partial response (PR) and the disease control rates for the TNBC group were not significantly different compared with the non-TNBC group. The 6-month progression-free survival (PFS) rate for the TNBC group was higher than that of the non-TNBC group in all patients (OR, 1.81; 95% CI, 1.11–2.96; P= 0.02). However, the 1- and 2-year PFS rates were not significantly different (OR, 1.42; 95% CI, 0.69–2.92; P=0.35 and OR, 1.11; 95% CI, 0.35–3.52; P= 0.85, respectively). Furthermore, the PFS rates were not significantly different between the groups in patients with advanced/metastatic breast cancer. In conclusion, platinum-based chemotherapy in the breast cancer patients with TNBC showed an improved short-term efficacy compared with the non-TNBC group during neo-adjuvant chemotherapy, but has not yet been demonstrated to have an improved effect in advanced breast cancer.
Antibiotic susceptibility in Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pyogenes in Pakistan: a review of results from the Survey of Antibiotic Resistance (SOAR) 2002-15.

OBJECTIVES To investigate changes in the antibiotic susceptibility of Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae and Streptococcus pyogenes from the Survey of Antibiotic Resistance (SOAR) in community-acquired respiratory tract infections (CA-RTIs) between 2002 and 2015 in Pakistan. METHODS This is a review based on previously published studies from 2002-03, 2004-06 and 2007-09 and also new data from 2014-15. Susceptibility was determined by Etest(®) or disc diffusion according to CLSI and pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) breakpoints. RESULTS A total of 706 isolates from CA-RTIs comprising 381 S. pneumoniae, 230 H. influenzae and 95 S. pyogenes were collected between 2002 and 2015 and tested against a range of antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance in S. pneumoniae rose steeply from 2002 to 2009, with isolates non-susceptible to penicillin and macrolides increasing from 10% to 34.1% and from 13%-14% to 29.7%, respectively. Susceptibility to amoxicillin/clavulanic acid (and by inference amoxicillin) remained between 99.4% and 100% from 2002 to 2015. Over the years, the prevalence of susceptibility to cefuroxime was 98%-100% among S. pneumoniae. Resistance in S. pneumoniae to some older antibiotics between 2007 and 2009 was high (86.8% for trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole and 57.2% for tetracycline). Between 2002 and 2015, ampicillin resistance (β-lactamase-positive strains) among H. influenzae has remained low (between 2.6% and 3.2%) and almost unchanged over the years (H. influenzae was not tested during 2004-06). For S. pyogenes isolates, macrolide resistance reached 22%; however, susceptibility to penicillin, amoxicillin/clavulanic acid and cefuroxime remained stable at 100%. CONCLUSIONS In S. pneumoniae from Pakistan, there has been a clear reduction in susceptibility to key antibiotics since 2002, but not to amoxicillin/clavulanic acid (amoxicillin) or cefuroxime. However, susceptibility in H. influenzae has remained stable. Local antibiotic susceptibility/resistance data are essential to support informed prescribing for CA-RTIs and other infections.
Can We Create Better Links by Playing Games?

Just like links are the backbone of the traditional World Wide Web, they are an equally important element in the Data Web. There exist a variety of automated tools, which are able to create a high number of links between RDF resources by using heuristics. However, without manual verification of the created links, it is difficult to ensure high precision and recall. In this article, we investigate whether game based approaches can be used to improve this manual verification stage. Based on the VeriLinks game platform, which we developed, we describe experiments using a survey and statistics collected within a specific interlinking game. Using three different link tasks as examples, we present an analysis of the strengths and limitations of game based link verification.
Establishment of a Rescue System for Canine Distemper Virus

ABSTRACT Canine distemper virus (CDV) has been rescued from a full-length cDNA clone. Besides Measles virus (MV) andRinderpest virus, a third morbillivirus is now available for genetic analysis using reverse genetics. A plasmid p(+)CDV was constructed by sequential cloning using the Onderstepoort vaccine strain large-plaque-forming variant. The presence of a T7 promoter allowed transcription of full-length antigenomic RNA by a T7 RNA polymerase, which was provided by a host range mutant of vaccinia virus (MVA-T7). Plasmids expressing the nucleocapsid protein, the phosphoprotein, and the viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, also under control of a T7 promoter, have been generated. Infection of HeLa cells with MVA-T7 and subsequent transfection of p(+)CDV plus the helper plasmids led to syncytium formation and release of infectious recombinant (r) CDV. Comparison of the rescued virus with the parental virus revealed no major differences in the progression of infection or in the shape and size of syncytia. A genetic tag, consisting of two nucleotide changes within the coding region of the L protein, has been identified in the rCDV genome. Expression by rCDV of all the major viral structural proteins has been demonstrated by immunofluorescence.
Is there a relationship between the performance in a chronometric mental-rotations test and salivary testosterone and estradiol levels in children aged 9-14 years?

The consistent gender differences favoring males in some spatial abilities like mental rotation have raised the question of whether testosterone or other gonadal hormones contribute to these differences--especially because such gender differences seem to appear mainly from the age of puberty on. Studies generally suggest that spatial ability is facilitated by moderately high testosterone levels (i.e., levels that are relatively high for females and relatively low for males). However, the role of sex steroids for mental-rotation performance of (pre-) pubertal children has not been the focus of research, yet. In our study, the relationships between different aspects of mental-rotation performance (accuracy, reaction time, rotation speed) and salivary testosterone and estradiol levels were investigated. Subjects were 109 children (51 boys and 58 girls) aged between 9 and 14 years (M = 11.41, SD = 1.74). They performed a chronometric mental-rotations test, in which the stimuli consisted of three-dimensional drawings of Shepard and Metzler cube figures. In addition, saliva samples were gathered for the analysis of free testosterone and estradiol levels. Results showed a significant gender difference in reaction time and rotational speed in favor of boys, and a significant age, but no gender difference in testosterone and estradiol levels. We found no significant relationships between hormonal levels and any measure of mental-rotation performance.
Public Policy, Price Shocks, and Civil War in Developing Countries

Those who study the role of agriculture in the political economy of development focus on government policy choices on the one hand and the impact of price shocks on the other. We argue that the two should be studied together. We find that civil unrest (Granger) causes government policies, pushing governments in poor and medium income countries to shift relative prices in favor of urban consumers. We also find that while civil wars are related to food price shocks, when government policy choices are taken into account, the relationship disappears. We thus learn two things: Policies that placate urban consumers may inflict economic costs on governments, but they confer political benefits. And when estimating the relationship between price shocks and political stability, equations that omit the policy response of governments are misspecified.
Lack of Cross-Scale Linkages Reduces Robustness of Community-Based Fisheries Management

Community-based management and the establishment of marine reserves have been advocated worldwide as means to overcome overexploitation of fisheries. Yet, researchers and managers are divided regarding the effectiveness of these measures. The “tragedy of the commons” model is often accepted as a universal paradigm, which assumes that unless managed by the State or privatized, common-pool resources are inevitably overexploited due to conflicts between the self-interest of individuals and the goals of a group as a whole. Under this paradigm, the emergence and maintenance of effective community-based efforts that include cooperative risky decisions as the establishment of marine reserves could not occur. In this paper, we question these assumptions and show that outcomes of commons dilemmas can be complex and scale-dependent. We studied the evolution and effectiveness of a community-based management effort to establish, monitor, and enforce a marine reserve network in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Our findings build on social and ecological research before (1997–2001), during (2002) and after (2003–2004) the establishment of marine reserves, which included participant observation in >100 fishing trips and meetings, interviews, as well as fishery dependent and independent monitoring. We found that locally crafted and enforced harvesting rules led to a rapid increase in resource abundance. Nevertheless, news about this increase spread quickly at a regional scale, resulting in poaching from outsiders and a subsequent rapid cascading effect on fishing resources and locally-designed rule compliance. We show that cooperation for management of common-pool fisheries, in which marine reserves form a core component of the system, can emerge, evolve rapidly, and be effective at a local scale even in recently organized fisheries. Stakeholder participation in monitoring, where there is a rapid feedback of the systems response, can play a key role in reinforcing cooperation. However, without cross-scale linkages with higher levels of governance, increase of local fishery stocks may attract outsiders who, if not restricted, will overharvest and threaten local governance. Fishers and fishing communities require incentives to maintain their management efforts. Rewarding local effective management with formal cross-scale governance recognition and support can generate these incentives.
Towards an Interactive Humanoid Companion with Visual Tracking Modalities

The idea of robots acting as human companions is not a particularly new or original one. Since the notion of “robot” was created, the idea of robots replacing humans in dangerous, dirty and dull activities has been inseparably tied with the fantasy of human-like robots being friends and existing side by side with humans. In 1989, Engelberger (Engelberger, 1989) introduced the idea of having robots serving humans in everyday environments. Since then, a considerable number of mature robotic systems have been implemented which claim to be servants, personal assistants (see a survey in Fong et al., 2003). The autonomy of such robots is fully oriented towards navigation in human environments and/or human-robot interaction.Interaction is facilitated if the robot behaviour is as natural as possible. Two aspects of this are important. The first is to facilitate tasks, which involve direct physical cooperation between humans and robots. The second issue is that robot independent movements must appear familiar and predictable to humans. Furthermore, in order to be more effective towards a seemingly interaction, a similar appearance to humans is an important requirement. These considerations initiated probably the design of humanoid robots. One can mention here commercial robots like QRIO by Sony as well as prototypes like Alpha (Bennewitz et al., 2005), Robox (Siegwart et al., 2003), Minerva (Thrun et al., 2000) or Mobot (Nourbakhsh et al., 2003). These systems addressed various aspects of human-robot interaction designed by a programmer. This includes all or parts of situation understanding, recognition of the human partner, understanding his intention, and coordination of motion and action and multi-modal communication. Such systems are able to communicate with its a non-expert user in a human-friendly intuitive way by employing the bandwidth of human communication and interaction modalities, typically through H/R interfaces, speech or gestures recognition. It is an evident fact that gestures are natural and rich means, which humans employ to communicate with each other, especially valuable in environments where the speech-based communication may be garbled or drowned out. Communicative gestures can represent either acts or symbols. This includes typically gestures recognition for interaction between humans and robots e.g. waving hands for good-bye, acting hello, and gestures recognition for directions to humanoid e.g. pointing out, stop motion. Unfortunately, a few of the
Sharing Buffer Pool Memory in Multi-Tenant Relational Database-as-a-Service

Relational database-as-a-service (DaaS) providers need to rely on multi-tenancy and resource sharing among tenants, since statically reserving resources for a tenant is not cost effective. A major consequence of resource sharing is that the performance of one tenant can be adversely affected by resource demands of other co-located tenants. One such resource that is essential for good performance of a tenant's workload is buffer pool memory. In this paper, we study the problem of how to effectively share buffer pool memory in multi-tenant relational DaaS. We first develop an SLA framework that defines and enforces accountability of the service provider to the tenant even when buffer pool memory is not statically reserved on behalf of the tenant. Next, we present a novel buffer pool page replacement algorithm (MT-LRU) that builds upon theoretical concepts from weighted online caching, and is designed for multi-tenant scenarios involving SLAs and overbooking. MT-LRU generalizes the LRU-K algorithm which is commonly used in relational database systems. We have prototyped our techniques inside a commercial DaaS engine and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution.
Ultrasonic evaluation of mechanical properties of thick, multilayered, filament-wound composites

A preliminary investigation is conducted to define capabilities and limitations of ultrasonic and acousto-ultrasonic measurements related to mechanical properties of filament wound graphite/epoxy composite structures. The structures studied are segments of filament wound cylinders formed of multiple layers of hoop and helical windings. The segments consist of 24 to 35 layers and range from 3.02 to 3.34 cm in wall thickness. The resultant structures are anisotropic, heterogeneous, porous, and highly attenuating to ultrasonic frequencies greater than 1 MHz. The segments represent structures to be used for space shuttle booster cases. Ultrasonic velocity and acousto-ultrasonic stress wave factor measurement approaches are discussed. Correlations among velocity, density, and porosity, and between the acousto-ultrasonic stress wave factor and interlaminar shear strength are presented.
Combination therapy of established cancer using a histone deacetylase inhibitor and a TRAIL receptor agonist

Histone deacetylase inhibitors (HDACi) and agents such as recombinant tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) and agonistic anti-TRAIL receptor (TRAIL-R) antibodies are anticancer agents that have shown promise in preclinical settings and in early phase clinical trials as monotherapies. Although HDACi and activators of the TRAIL pathway have different molecular targets and mechanisms of action, they share the ability to induce tumor cell-selective apoptosis. The ability of HDACi to induce expression of TRAIL-R death receptors 4 and 5 (DR4/DR5), and induce tumor cell death via the intrinsic apoptotic pathway provides a molecular rationale to combine these agents with activators of the TRAIL pathway that activate the alternative (death receptor) apoptotic pathway. Herein, we demonstrate that the HDACi vorinostat synergizes with the mouse DR5-specific monoclonal antibody MD5-1 to induce rapid and robust tumor cell apoptosis in vitro and in vivo. Importantly, using a preclinical mouse breast cancer model, we show that the combination of vorinostat and MD5-1 is safe and induces regression of established tumors, whereas single agent treatment had little or no effect. Functional analyses revealed that rather than mediating enhanced tumor cell apoptosis via the simultaneous activation of the intrinsic and extrinsic apoptotic pathways, vorinostat augmented MD5-1-induced apoptosis concomitant with down-regulation of the intracellular apoptosis inhibitor cellular-FLIP (c-FLIP). These data demonstrate that combination therapies involving HDACi and activators of the TRAIL pathway can be efficacious for the treatment of cancer in experimental mouse models.
The Elusive Concept of Localization Economies: Towards a Knowledge-Based Theory of Spatial Clustering

A number of possible advantages of industry agglomeration—or spatial clustering—have been identified in the research literature, notably those related to shared costs for infrastructure, the build-up of a skilled labour force, transaction efficiency, and knowledge spillovers leading to firm learning and innovation. We identify two shortcomings of existing research on the clustering phenomenon. First, the abundance of theoretical concepts and explanations stands in sharp contrast with the general lack of work aimed at validating these mechanisms empirically and the contradictory evidence found in recent empirical work in the field. Second, there is still a lack of a unified theoretical framework for analyzing spatial clustering. In an attempt to remedy the latter shortcoming, this paper investigates the nature of the cluster from a knowledge-creation or learning perspective. We argue for the need to establish a specific theory of the cluster where learning occupies centre stage. The basic requirements for such a theory of the cluster are discussed. Two main components of such a theory are identified: it must explain the existence of the cluster on the one hand and its internal organization on the other.
Tap control for headphones without sensors

A tap control technique for headphones is proposed. A simple circuit is used to detect tapping of the headphone shell by using the speaker unit in the headphone as a tap sensor. No additional devices are required in the headphone shell and cable, so the user can use their favorite headphones as a controller while listening music. A prototype is implemented with several calibration processes to compensate the differences in headphones and users' tapping actions. Tests confirm that the user can control a music player by tapping regular headphones.
Routing games : From egoism to altruism

The paper studies the routing in the network shared by several users. Each user seeks to optimize either its own performance or some combination between its own performance and that of other users, by controlling the routing of its given flow demand. We parameterize the degree of cooperation which allows to cover the fully non-cooperative behavior, the fully cooperative behavior, and even more, the fully altruistic behavior, all these as special cases of the parameter's choice. A large part of the work consists in exploring the impact of the degree of cooperation on the equilibrium. Our first finding is to identify multiple Nash equilibria with cooperative behavior that do not occur in the non-cooperative case under the same conditions (cost, demand and topology). We then identify Braess like paradox (in which adding capacity or adding a link to a network results in worse performance to all users) in presence of user's cooperation. We identify another type of paradox in cooperation scenario: when a given user increases its degree of cooperation while other users keep unchanged their degree of cooperation, this may lead to an improvement in performance of that given user. We then pursue the exploration and carry it on to the setting of Mixed equilibrium (i.e. some users are non atomic-they have infinitesimally small demand, and other have finite fixed demand). We finally obtain some theoretical results that show that for low degree of cooperation the equilibrium is unique, confirming the results of our numerical study.
Reliability-aware design for nanometer-scale devices

Continuous transistor scaling due to improvements in CMOS devices and manufacturing technologies is increasing processor power densities and temperatures; thus, creating challenges to maintain manufacturing yield rates and reliable devices in their expected lifetimes for latest nanometer-scale dimensions. In fact, new system and processor microarchitectures require new reliability-aware design methods and exploration tools that can face these challenges without significantly increasing manufacturing cost, reducing system performance or imposing large area overheads due to redundancy. In this paper we overview the latest approaches in reliability modeling and variability-tolerant design for latest technology nodes, and advocate the need of reliability- aware design for forthcoming consumer electronics. Moreover, we illustrate with a case study of an embedded processor that effective reliability-aware design can be achieved in nanometer-scale devices through integral design approaches that covers modeling and exploration of reliability effects, and hardware-software architectural techniques to provide reliability-enhanced solutions at both microarchitectural- and system-level.
Factors affecting media coverage of species rediscoveries

John Zablocki,∗ ¶ Siddharth Arora,‡§ and Maan Barua†§ ∗The Nature Conservancy, 915 E. Bonneville Ave, Las Vegas, NV, 89101, U.S.A. †School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY, U.K. ‡Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, Andrew Wiles Building, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG, U.K. §Somerville College, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6HD, U.K.