Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
End-of-neoadjuvant treatment circulating microRNAs and HER2-positive breast cancer patient prognosis: An exploratory analysis from NeoALTTO

Background The absence of breast cancer cells in surgical specimens, i.e., pathological complete response (pCR), is widely recognized as a favorable prognostic factor after neoadjuvant therapy. In contrast, the presence of disease at surgery characterizes a prognostically heterogeneous group of patients. Here, we challenged circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) at the end of neoadjuvant therapy as potential prognostic biomarkers in the NeoALTTO study. Methods Patients treated within the trastuzumab arm (i.e., pre-operative weekly trastuzumab for 6 weeks followed by the addition of weekly paclitaxel for 12 weeks; post-operative FEC for 3 cycles followed by trastuzumab up to complete 1 year of treatment) were randomized into a training (n= 54) and testing (n= 72) set. RT-PCR-based high-throughput miRNA profile was performed on plasma samples collected at the end of neoadjuvant treatment of both sets. After normalization, circulating miRNAs associated with event free survival (EFS) were identified by univariate and multivariate Cox regression model. Results Starting from 23 circulating miRNAs associated with EFS in the training set, we generated a 3-circulating miRNA prognostic signature consisting of miR-185-5p, miR-146a-5p, miR-22-3p, which was confirmed in the testing set. The 3-circulating miRNA signature showed a C-statistic of 0.62 (95% confidence interval [95%CI] 0.53-0.71) in the entire study cohort. By resorting to a multivariate Cox regression model we found a statistical significant interaction between the expression values of miR-194-5p and pCR status (p.interaction =0.005) with an estimate Hazard Ratio (HR) of 1.83 (95%CI 1.14- 2.95) in patients with pCR, and 0.87 (95%CI 0.69-1.10) in those without pCR. Notably, the model including this interaction along with the abovementioned 3-circulating miRNA signature provided the highest discriminatory capability with a C-statistic of 0.67 (95%CI 0.58-0.76). Conclusions Circulating miRNAs are informative to identify patients with different prognosis among those with heterogeneous response after trastuzumab-based neoadjuvant treatment, and may be an exploitable tool to select candidates for salvage adjuvant therapy.
Shallow cirrus convection – a source for ice supersaturation

The origin and persistence of high ice supersaturation is still not well understood. In this study, the impact of local dynamics as source for ice supersaturation inside cirrus clouds is investigated. Nucleation and growth of ice crystals inside potentially unstable layers in the tropopause region might lead to shallow convection inside (layered) cirrus clouds due to latent heat release. The intrinsic updraught inside convective cells constitutes a dominant but transient source for ice supersaturation. A realistic case of shallow cirrus convection is investigated using radiosonde data, meteorological analyses and large-eddy simulations of cirrus clouds. The simulations corroborate the existence of ice supersaturation inside cirrus clouds as a transient phenomenon. Ice supersaturation is frequent, but determined by the life cycle of convective cells in shallow cirrus convection. Cirrus clouds driven by shallow cirrus convection are mostly not in thermodynamic equilibrium; they are usually in a subsaturated or supersaturated state.
Perceiving Persistence Under Change and Over Structure

We explored the hypothesis that to perceive an event is to detect an invariant specific to the style of change and an invariant specific to the object undergoing the style of change-the reciprocal invariants of transformation and structure, respectively. Events were defined by seven geometric transformations that produced a variety of styles of change over different objects. In Experiment 1, we examined the generative and abstract aspects of transformational invariants. An event was presented as a sequence of static samples and examined in interpolation and extrapolation tasks. The transformational invariant proved sufficiently generative and abstract to specify a unique style of change. In Experiment 2, we found that types of change and types of objects interacted, which implies that certain styles of change are more compatible with certain object structures. In Experiment 3, we found that the structural invariant was reliably detectable but that the degree to which structural properties were preserved d.
Radar interferometry technique and anisotropy of the echo power distribution: First results

The theory of radar interferometry developed in the companion paper [ Van Baelen and Richmond, this issue] is applied to a set of measurements obtained with the middle and upper atmosphere (MU) radar in order to demonstrate the technique and to test the theory. The variations with respect to Doppler frequency of the coherencies and phases of the signals cross-correlated between receiver pairs depend on the amplitude and direction of the wind in the manner predicted by the theory. The horizontal wind derived by the interferometric technique agrees quite well with the so-called apparent velocity obtained by cross-correlating signals in the time domain from different receiver pairs, and under our experimental conditions the latter estimate has been determined to be a good representation of the true wind, in spite of slight tendencies to overestimate the wind amplitude. The vertical wind derived by the interferometric technique shows significant differences with the Doppler wind obtained from a vertically pointing antenna, but these differences disappear when the Doppler wind is corrected for the off-zenith distribution of the received power. An examination of the mean angle-of-arrival of the received signal reveals that there is a tendency for the angle to approach, though not attain, perpendicularity with the three-dimensional wind vector, and perhaps also to tend to be perpendicular to isentropes in the crosswind direction. A postset beam steering analysis of several examples of data illustrates the behavior of the angular distribution of received power in time and space. When the signal-to-noise ratio is large, there is a tendency for the power to be fairly isotropic with respect to zenith angle, but highly distorted patterns can be encountered when the signal is weaker. There appears to be a tendency for the patterns to vary relatively slowly over time, but strong variations in altitude are observed in passing from one 300-m range gate to the next. The direction of most intense received power does not necessarily correspond to the direction of mean angle-of-arrival of the signal as determined by interferometry.
Efficiency of Managers as Role Models: A Social Learning Theory Perspective

This systematic literature review aimed to analyze and synthesize studies that indicated the importance of behavioral observation in the organizational context. Based on Social Learning Theory and by considering relevant recent findings and theories, the impact of managers as role models for employees is researched and analyzed. The importance of this topic is to determine ways that learning and enhancing performance in the workplace can be applied for people management development. The literature for theory was numerous, however studies on the particular topic were limited and not expanded in the organizational context. The key message of this review is that the impact of managers and leaders can be positive and progressive both for the employees and for the organization.
Audit Features in Auditor’s Independence in the Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria

The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of audit features such as audit firm size, audit firm rotation, audit tenure, and audit market competition on the auditor's independence of the Deposit Money Bank (DMB) listed in the Nigeria Exchange Group. The data on the auditor's independence, the likelihood of engaging big4 audit firm, the likelihood of audit firm rotation, audit tenure, and audit market competition were derived from the annual reports of the 13 Deposit Money Banks in Nigeria for 7 years. The panel data regression was the method of data analysis. The results of the data analyses revealed a positive and significant relationship between auditor's independence and each of the following: the likelihood of rotating audit firms, audit tenure, and audit market competition. Conversely, this study found a non-significant relationship between auditor's independence and the likelihood of engaging big4 audit firms. Therefore, the study recommends that the regulators of the firms in the banking sectors should encourage audit firm rotations coupled with fixed but long audit tenure, and discourage the current practices of concentrating audit engagement in the sector to the big4 audit firms.
Examining Care Burden, Social Support, and Loneliness in Parents of Children with Cerebral Palsy

Background: In studies examining parents' burden of care, social support and loneliness, either mothers were studied only, or mothers that made up the majority of the sample were studied. It is thought that fathers as well as mothers are involved in the care of their children and are affected by the negative consequences of this process. Objective: This study was conducted to investigate care burden, social support, and loneliness in parents of children with cerebral palsy (CP). Methodology: This study was carried out as a descriptive study with parents of 178 children with CP for whom both parents could be reached. The Descriptive Information Form, Burden Interview, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), and UCLA Loneliness Scale were used as data collection tools. Results: It was determined that the care burden for mothers was higher than the care burden for fathers and that mothers’ perceived social support and loneliness levels were lower. In addition, it was determined that there was no significant correlation between the care burden, social support, and loneliness levels of mothers and fathers. As a result of the structural equation model, it was determined that the social support of the parents had a significant effect on the care burden (β = -0.105; p <0.05) and their loneliness (β=0.40; p<0.05). Conclusions: Healthcare professionals should encourag parents to share the care burden and cope with loneliness by shouldering equal responsibilities within the scope of family-centred care.
Deepening and broadening the field: introduction to Research Handbook on Nonprofit Governance

Governance has in many respects become the new management. Just as management succeeded administration from the 1960s onwards (Grey, 1999), so governance has replaced management as the label for steering practices and the distribution of authority in organizations, nation states, politics and various other subfields of society. In this introductory chapter, we will weave the contributions to this Handbook together with prior research into the governance ‘story’ of the 2020s, and thereby discuss the ways in which the Research Handbook on Nonprofit Governance covers and advances the field. We structure this chapter as follows. First, we review governance definitions and the development of the nonprofit governance concept. Then we map the field of nonprofit governance through a focus on organizing contexts, environmental contexts and constituencies, and we consider some of the governance practices that emerge within them. Next, we examine the governance theory–practice nexus by sketching out the theoretical perspectives considered by the Handbook’s contributors. We conclude by indicating some of the lacunae that remain.
Covid-19 and the Performance of Small and Medium-Scale Businesses in Benin City, Nigeria

This study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the performance of businesses in Benin City. The study adopts a quantitative research technique using a data collection method through the administration of a structured questionnaire. Findings from the analysis indicate that the COVID- 19 pandemic’s effect includes: loss of competent staff resulting from a reduction in staff salary, low revenue or income generation, lack of patronage, and lack of sincerity on the part of the government to re- duce the prevalence of the pandemic. The study recommends that government, NGOs and organisations should introduce a well-monitored and structured palliative scheme, poverty alleviation programs, reduced interest rates, relaxed loans and deferred tax payments. Finally, there should be an Adoption of an E-Business model for businesses.
Research on Road Environmental Sense Method of Intelligent Vehicle Based on Tracking Check

Environment perception is the premise for intelligent vehicles to drive safely and stably. Despite the rapid development of road detection technology based on visual images, it is still challenging to robustly identify road areas in visual images due to the influence of illumination changes and noise. In order to solve this problem, we introduce a new optimized lidar and camera sensor fusion method for road environment sensing of intelligent vehicles. In road boundary detection based on laser data, a median point filtering method of ordered pole cloud is proposed. A method of boundary search, boundary seed point growth and obstacle clustering is proposed to identify road boundary. In the lane line classification based on visual image, a lane line search classification method is proposed, which can effectively classify lane lines and extract single lane lines. On the basis of the optimization of sensors, several constraint conditions are proposed based on the fusion of the two data, and the location of missing lane lines is predicted by using the road information identified by lidar and image, and the lane lines are identified again. Finally, a large number of experiments are carried out on kitti-Road benchmark data set, and a test platform is built to verify the results of the identification method proposed in this paper in rainy day, cloudy day, night and other special scenarios. Experimental results show that this method is superior to existing methods.
Sequence-to-Sequence Recurrent Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Estimation and Prediction Using Connected Probe Vehicle Data

Traffic estimation is imperative for conducting fundamental transportation engineering tasks such as transportation planning and traffic safety studies. Additionally, traffic prediction is vital for many data-driven intelligent transportation system applications. Most traffic estimation and prediction methods rely on infrastructure-based sensors to collect traffic parameters. However, infrastructure-based data collection can be costly and time consuming to set up and maintain. Additionally, the spatial distribution of the collected traffic data is limited by the location of the deployed hardware sensors. Probe vehicle data can be used to overcome these limitations. Traffic modeling for estimation and prediction is a complex task due to the stochastic nonlinear spatiotemporal dependencies exhibited by traffic parameters. In this paper, a deep learning-based sequence-to-sequence architecture called Seq2seq GCN-LSTM was proposed to estimate and predict network-wide traffic volume and speed. The proposed method utilizes short-term historical traffic data collected from a low-penetration rate probe vehicle fleet to estimate and predict traffic parameters up to 60-minutes ahead. The method utilizes Graph Convolutional Networks for spatial dependency extraction and Long Short-Term Memory networks to model temporal dependencies. The proposed method generated superior traffic results compared to the baseline models. Additionally, the model demonstrated robustness against perturbations caused by the low rate. Furthermore, the probe vehicle penetration rate was varied to test its effect on the proposed method’s modeling capability. The model was able to maintain traffic volume and speed estimation and prediction performance within a reasonable margin of error using penetration rates as low as 1.5% and 0.5%, respectively.
Decentralized Time and Energy-Optimal Control of Connected and Automated Vehicles in a Roundabout With Safety and Comfort Guarantees

We consider the problem of controlling Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) traveling through a roundabout so as to jointly minimize their travel time, energy consumption, and centrifugal discomfort while providing speed-dependent and lateral roll-over safety guarantees, as well as satisfying velocity and acceleration constraints. We first develop a systematic approach to determine the safety constraints for each CAV dynamically, as it moves through different merging points in the roundabout. We then derive the unconstrained optimal control solution which is subsequently optimally tracked by a real-time controller while guaranteeing that all constraints are always satisfied. Simulation experiments are performed to compare the controller we develop to a baseline of human-driven vehicles, showing its effectiveness under symmetric and asymmetric roundabout configurations, balanced and imbalanced traffic rates, and different sequencing rules for CAVs.
Do Automated Vehicles Reduce the Risk of Crashes–Dream or Reality?

In the future, the role of the human factor in the driving processes is expected to decrease continuously. At the same time, based on the global trends, the role of computer-supported decision systems and artificial intelligence (AI)-based control solutions increases in relation to driving processes, which carries a significant safety-enhancing potential. To assess the possible social benefits of automated vehicle systems objectively, it is necessary to analyze the possible negative effects in detail as well. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to present a statistical survey of crashes involving automated vehicles today in order to identify and evaluate the factors that are relevant in the crashes. The analyzed data showed that when the autopilot mode was turned off and the human driver made the control decisions, the severity of crashes on straight roads was greater at $\alpha \,\,=0.1$ significance level than when the vehicle was in autopilot mode and the vehicle system made the control decisions. In addition, if the $\alpha $ significance level is 0.2, then crashes on plain terrain, during the day, or in the speed range of 80–100 km/h are generally less serious for vehicles driven in autopilot mode than for vehicles with autopilot mode turned off. In light of the considerations above, it is also important to emphasize that this paper only investigates crash severity given occurrence but not the probability of occurrence itself.
Locus of Control Theory, Productivity, Job Satisfaction, and Procrastination: A Systematic Literature Review in the Organizational Context of the 21st Century

Locus of control theory, which was developed by Rotter, suggests that there are two main types of peoples’ behaviors when attributing their failure or success of their life events: external locus of control and internal. The way that individuals act is determined by their expectations of their specific behaviors and the value that they add to these expectations. For instance, people who fit in the internal category are more likely to attribute their life events to their own behaviors, skills, and attitudes, while people who fit in the external category, tend to attribute their acts to fate, chance, and other exterior factors that are out of their control. The aim of this systematic literature review was to define the fundamental concept of LOC theory, to investigate major findings of the theory in accordance with LOC and procrastination, job satisfaction, and performance and lastly, to discuss the practical use of the theory in the organizational context.
Real-Time Traffic Density Estimation: Putting on-Coming Traffic to Work

Estimating highway traffic density in real-time is an important goal of Intelligent Transportation Systems. The main contribution of this work is to propose a simple and entirely V2V-based methodology to estimate, in real-time, traffic density based on data collected by moving observers in co-directional and on- coming traffic. To estimate traffic density in a privacy-preserving manner, our methodology uses tallies consisting of the number of times a vehicle is passed by other vehicles, minus the number of times it passes other vehicles. As it turns out, keeping tallies is a non-trivial task since vehicles are allowed to vary their speed in arbitrary ways and, as a result, the same two vehicles may pass each other any number of times. We provide a detailed proof of correctness of our methodology; to assess its accuracy, we have performed extensive simulations and sensitivity analyses using SUMO-generated synthetic traffic traces over a wide range of penetration rates and traffic flows.
Detection of mutations involved in fluoroquinolone resistance in Mycoplasma gallisepticum positive field samples from broiler chicken flocks in Ecuador

The aim of this study was to determine the occurrence of mutations in the quinolone resistance-determining regions (QRDRs) of the genes gyr A and par C in M. gallisepticum positive field samples from broiler flocks in Ecuador. DNA was extracted from 24 M. gallisepticum PCR-positive samples from 22 commercial broiler flocks. The genes gyr A and par C were amplified by PCR. PCR products were sequenced by Sanger technology to analyze the genetic characteristics. To identify the mutations involved in fluoroquinolone resistance (FQR), the sequences obtained were processed and analyzed using the tools Geneious R11, BLASTn, MAFFT, ExPASy MBWS, and BioEdit. All samples had mutations in both gyrA and parC genes, resulting in changes at amino acid positions Ser-83→Ile and Ile-157→Val in GyrA, and Ser-80→Trp in ParC. In addition, a change at position His-59→Tyr in GyrA was also found in one sample. The results showed that alterations in both genes have been commonly linked to FQR in mutants of other Mycoplasma species, including M. gallisepticum . This is the first study on M. gallisepticum positive samples from chickens in Ecuador which revealed the occurrence of mutations resulting in amino acid changes previously linked to FQR.
A new finite-element method simulation model for computing AC loss in roll assisted biaxially textured substrate YBCO tapes

This paper presents a new finite-element simulation model for computing the electromagnetic properties and AC losses in systems of YBCO (yttrium barium copper oxide) conductors on roll assisted biaxially textured substrates (RABiTS). In this model, the magnetic field dependent permeability and ferromagnetic loss of the substrates in RABiTS YBCO tapes are taken into account. The simulations were employed to simulate the AC loss in stacks of two parallel connected YBCO tapes. The simulation results are compared with the experimental data to check the validity of the simulation model. The result reveals an effective way of significantly reducing AC loss in YBCO tapes by stacking two RABiTS YBCO coated conductors with the appropriate relative tape orientation.