Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
How Modernization Can Also Increase Fertility [and Comments and Reply]

Industrialization, urbanization, and other associated processes of modernization generally lead to a reduction of fertility through the practice of birth control (contraception and induced abortion) and delayed age at marriage. The evidence reviewed in this paper demonstrates that these same processes may also have some fertility-increasing effects. Birth rate data for a few countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia clearly exhibit an increase in fertility in the early stages of modernization. Four factors related to modernization are found to have contributed more than others toward an increase in fertility: (1) earlier postpartum resumption of ovulation and menstruation as a result of decreased breast-feeding, (2) decline in the practice of postpartum abstinence, (3) reduction in the loss of reproductive performance of women caused by early widowhood, (4) reduction in the incidence of sterility as a result of the improved treatment of venereal diseases. Adequately nourished women have earlier menarcheal age and shorter periods of amenorrhea than undernourished women, but these differences seem to have little impact on actual fertility differentials. In addition, level of nutrition does not seem to be a major determinant of miscarriage and stillbirth. Hence, improvement in the nutrition of malnourished women is not likely to increase their fecundity/fertility significantly. In making predictions about fertility and in evaluating the fertility impact of any development or family-planning program, the fertility-increasing effects of modernization are often overlooked. This paper argues that the tendency of fertility levels to remain the same or even to rise in the short run should not necessarily be interpreted as the failure of such programs.
MUC1, MUC2, MUC4, and MUC5AC Expression in Salivary Gland Mucoepidermoid Carcinoma: Diagnostic and Prognostic Implications

We determined whether immunostaining for mucins could provide a better characterization of salivary gland mucoepidermoid carcinoma (MEC). We investigated 63 MECs by immunohistochemistry for MUC1, MUC2, MUC4, and MUC5AC. Mucin expressing cell types and labeling patterns were recorded. The results were compared with microscopic grade, tumor-associated lymphoid infiltrate, mucin expression in surrounding salivary glands, clinical features, and outcome. MUC1 and MUC4 labeled the apical membrane of glandular tumor cells and the entire membrane of intermediate, clear, and epidermoid tumor cells. MUC2 and MUC5AC were expressed in the cytoplasm of glandular, mucous, and intermediate tumor cells. In contrast to MUC1, MUC4 expression decreased with tumor grade (P < 0.01). Unlike MUC2, MUC5AC was expressed in more than 50% of high-grade tumors, including 2 cases that were not stained with Alcian blue. MUC1 and MUC5AC were associated with tumor-associated lymphoid infiltrates (P < 0.05), but not with tumor-associated lymphoid follicles. The proportions of tumors expressing mucins were 71% for MUC1, 21% for MUC2, 79% for MUC4, and 68% for MUC5AC. MUC1 and MUC5AC were more frequently expressed in tumors than in surrounding glands (P < 0.0001). MUC1 expression correlated with shorter progression-free survival (P < 0.05). In conclusion, mucin expression in MEC differs from that in salivary glands. Intermediate cells express MUC1 and MUC4 all along their cell surface and MUC2 and MUC5AC in their cytoplasm. Staining for MUC5AC in high-grade tumors can be helpful for distinguishing high-grade MEC from squamous cell carcinoma. While MUC4 is related to tumor differentiation, MUC1 expression indicates a worse prognosis.
Ge x nanowire arrays for thermoelectric power generation

0038-1101/$ see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. A http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/j.sse. 2013.01. 038 ⇑ Corresponding authors at: Department of Electri Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, London SW E-mail addresses: cbli@semi.ac. cn (C. Li), k.fobelets The output power of a discrete assembly of n-Si–p-Si1 xGex (0 6 x 6 0.4) thermoelectric generators is measured as a function of load resistance. The influence of Ge content and nanowire structures on the performance of thermoelectric devices is evaluated in measurements around room temperature. The nanowire arrays are etched using a metal induced local oxidation and etching process, based on selfassembled Ag nanoparticles and HF. The use of nanowires and SiGe with dimensions smaller than 30 lm, is beneficial for an improvement of, at least, a factor of 10 in the output power. However, better performance improvements can be obtained by optimising the thermal and electrical contact resistances at the interfaces. Optimisation of the electrical contact results in a performance boost by a factor of 25. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Identifying a New Non-Linear CSI Phase Measurement Error with Commodity WiFi Devices

WiFi technology has gained a wide prevalence for not only wireless communication but also pervasive sensing. A wide variety of emerging applications leverage accurate measurements of the Channel State Information (CSI) information exposed by commodity WiFi devices. Due to hardware imperfection of commodity WiFi devices, the frequency response of internal signal processing circuit is mixed with the real channel frequency response in passband, which makes deriving accurate channel frequency response from CSI measurements a challenging task. In this paper, we conduct an extensive empirical studies on CSI measurements and identify a non-negligible non-linear CSI phase error, which cannot be compensated by existing calibration strategies targeted at linear CSI phase errors. We conduct intensive analysis on the properties of such non-linear CSI phase errors and find that such errors are prevalent among various WiFi devices. Furthermore, they are stable along time and for different time-of-flight but related to the received signal strength indication (RSSI) of the received signal, the band frequency and the specific radios used between a transmission pair. Based on these key observations, we infer that the IQ imbalance issue in the direct-down-conversion architecture of commodity WiFi devices is the root source of the non-linear CSI phase errors. Our findings are essential to CSI-based applications and call for new practical strategies to remedy non-linear phase errors.
Iterative strengthening: an algorithm for generating anytime optimal plans

In order to perform adequately in real-world situations, a planning system must be able to find the "best" solution while still supporting anytime behavior. We have developed a method for incrementally optimizing plans called iterative strengthening that can be used in many situations where other optimization methods are not appropriate. In particular, iterative strengthening supports optimized planning within an "anytime" environment using multiple simultaneous optimizing parameters, and it can be adapted to support inadmissible heuristics and undecidable domains. <<ETX>>
Diagnosis and management of patients with acute cardiac symptoms, troponin elevation and culprit-free angiograms

Patients with acute cardiac symptoms, elevated cardiac troponin and culprit-free angiograms comprise a significant proportion of patients admitted with presumed acute coronary syndromes (ACS). International guidelines recommend that these patients receive lifelong secondary prevention under the presumption that angiographically undetectable coronary artery disease is the likeliest cause for their presentation. Recent studies using cardiac MRI suggest myocarditis to be the most common cause of these presentations. Emerging data also suggest that myocarditis presenting like an ACS may not be benign. In this article the current literature on patients presenting with acute cardiac symptoms, elevated cardiac troponins but culprit-free angiograms is reviewed, focusing on the diagnostic utility of cardiac MRI in this cohort, and the importance of diagnosing acute myocarditis. The development of higher sensitivity troponin assays will undoubtedly lead to an increase in the number of patients with presumed ACS but culprit free angiography. Robust management pathways including cardiac MRI are vital for cardiac centres dealing with these patients in order to achieve cost-effective, individualised patient care.
A New Time-domain Detection Approach with Blind Separation Based on Neural Network

In this paper a new technique is proposed for time-domain detection in energy detection. The proposed scheme is based on a independent-component analysis (ICA): blind separation of unknown source signals. This method not only improves the nicety of time-domain detection for narrow band signal and the sinusoidal signal but also reduces the power of the whole detection system.
Deep Transfer Learning for Modality Classification of Medical Images

Medical images are valuable for clinical diagnosis and decision making. Image modality is an important primary step, as it is capable of aiding clinicians to access required medical image in retrieval systems. Traditional methods of modality classification are dependent on the choice of hand-crafted features and demand a clear awareness of prior domain knowledge. The feature learning approach may detect efficiently visual characteristics of different modalities, but it is limited to the number of training datasets. To overcome the absence of labeled data, on the one hand, we take deep convolutional neural networks (VGGNet, ResNet) with different depths pre-trained on ImageNet, fix most of the earlier layers to reserve generic features of natural images, and only train their higher-level portion on ImageCLEF to learn domain-specific features of medical figures. Then, we train from scratch deep CNNs with only six weight layers to capture more domain-specific features. On the other hand, we employ two data augmentation methods to help CNNs to give the full scope to their potential characterizing image modality features. The final prediction is given by our voting system based on the outputs of three CNNs. After evaluating our proposed model on the subfigure classification task in ImageCLEF2015 and ImageCLEF2016, we obtain new, state-of-the-art results—76.87% in ImageCLEF2015 and 87.37% in ImageCLEF2016—which imply that CNNs, based on our proposed transfer learning methods and data augmentation skills, can identify more efficiently modalities of medical images.
Neuropsychological Assessment in Substance Abuse Treatment—Focusing on the Effects of Substances and on Neuropsychological Assessment as a Collaborative Process

Substance abuse is connected to considerable suffering and symptoms. Neuropsychological assessment supports understanding of the distress and the symptoms of the individual client and therefore is increasingly requested in substance abuse treatment. Substances, however, influence neuropsychological functions and emotional states. Therefore, assessment often needs to be postponed. Conducted at a suitable point of time, with respect to abstinence and treatment planning, assessment might provide understanding of the needs and possibilities of the client. This work contributes with suggestions on how neuropsychological assessment might be conducted in substance abuse treatment. Because the effects of substances are considerable, an overview of the effects of varying substances on neuropsychological functioning is presented. It is also suggested that assessment should be understood as a collaborative process that should support clients’ understanding of themselves.
THINGS: A STUDY

Internet of Things (IoT) has been recognized as a part of future internet and ubiquitous computing. It creates a true ubiquitous or smart environment. It demands a complex distributed architecture with numerous diverse components, including the end devices and application and association with their context. This article provides the significance of middleware system for (IoT). The middleware for IoT acts as a bond joining the heterogeneous domains of applications communicating over heterogeneous interfaces. First, to enable the better understanding of the current gap and future directions in this field a comprehensive review of the existing middleware systems for IoT is provided here. Second, fundamental functional blocks are proposed for this middleware system, and based on that feature wise classification is performed on the existing IoT-middleware. Third, open issues are analyzed and our vision on the research scope in this area is presented.
StratomeX : Enabling Visualization-Driven Cancer Subtype Analysis

Many types of cancers are known to have subtypes that derive from common biomolecular alterations. Identifying and characterizing these subtypes is important, since knowledge about the alterations in these subtypes can have serious implications on the treatment and prognosis of patients. The lack of appropriate tools, however, makes the complex process of analyzing subtypes a tedious endeavor. We present StratomeX, an application that supports analysts in identifying and characterizing cancer subtypes using interactive visualizations. StratomeX was first published at EuroVis 2012, but we expect that the BioVis community can benefit from learning about this extensible open source system.
Reply to Neutrophil‐to‐lymphocyte ratio as a bladder cancer biomarker: Assessing prognostic and predictive value in SWOG 8710

In their letter, Dolan and McMillan raise several important points. First, many studies have concluded that the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) is a cancer biomarker. Second, the majority of studies analyzed NLR as a dichotomized variable. In contrast, we kept NLR in its continuous form; our study found no evidence that NLR is prognostic or predictive of survival in patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer. Guidelines recommend analyzing variables in their continuous form. The statistical shortcomings of dichotomization, including the risk of spurious findings, have been shown elsewhere in detail. Furthermore, a continuous variable can be split at many different cutpoints; this inflates researcher degrees of freedom and may raise issues of multiple comparisons. We appreciate the opportunity to highlight these concerns regarding the existing NLR literature. Therefore, our study kept NLR as a continuous variable. Analytic checks supported the modeling assumptions of this approach (eg, a linear functional relationship and proportional hazards). However, for the sake of transparency, we present here the results using dichotomized NLR at the thresholds of 3 and 5, as per the request of Dolan and McMillan. In multivariable models adjusted for age, sex, tumor T category, and treatment arm, NLR was neither prognostic for overall survival (hazard ratio [HR], 1.32 [95% confidence interval (95% CI), 0.97-1.79; P 5.07] for a cutpoint 3 and HR, 1.17 [95% CI, 0.76-1.81; P 5.46] for a cutpoint 5) nor predictive of the benefit from neoadjuvant chemotherapy (HR, 0.97 [95% CI, 0.56-1.70; P 5.92] for a cutpoint 3 and HR, 0.63 [95% CI, 0.291.38; P 5.25] for a cutpoint 5). We note that, in this case, the threshold for statistical significance would be below the traditional level of . 05 due to multiple comparisons. In short, the dichotomized results do not change our study’s conclusions. FUNDING SUPPORT No specific funding was disclosed.
Labor, Class, and the International System.

Economists in Government An International Comparative Study A.W. COATS, editor The first systematic study of the function of economists in government in international comparative terms. Britain, A.W. Coats; Australia, A. Petridis; India, S. Ambirajan; Norway, Trond Bergh, U.S.A. , William J. Barber; Israel, Ephraim Kleiman; Hungary, Egon Kemenes; Japan, Ryutaro Komiya and Kozo Yamamato; Italy, Franco Ferraresi and Giuseppe Ferrari; Brazil, Paulo Roberto Haddad. Published also as Fall 1981 issue of History of Political EconomyIntroduction and Index have been added for book version January 1982 373 pp. $19.75
Medical Contraindications to Implant Therapy: Part II: Relative Contraindications

Systemic conditions and habits influence dental implant survival to varying degrees. Illnesses that impair the normal healing cascade worsen surgical success. The mere presence of a disease, however, does not necessarily preclude implant therapy or affect significantly long-term outcomes. Certain disorders, when controlled, or other situations allow implant survival rates that match those in health. This paper reviews these relative contraindications, which include adolescence, aging, osteoporosis, smoking, diabetes, positive interleukin-1 genotype, human immunodeficiency virus positivity, cardiovascular disease, and hypothyroidism.
Implementing Anycast Services in Ad Hoc networks connected to IPv6 networks

This paper proposes a communication model of implementing an Anycast service in an Ad Hoc network which is connected to IPv6 networks where IPv6 nodes can obtain an Anycast service provided by the Ad hoc network. In this model when an Anycast mobile member in an Ad hoc network moves it can keep the existing communications with its corresponding nodes to continue providing the Anycast service with a good quality of service to IPv6 nodes. This model creates a new kind of IPv6 address auto-configuration scheme which does not need the address duplication detection. This paper deeply discusses and analyzes the model and the experimental data prove its validity and efficiency.
Characterization of erythrocyte aggregation with ultrasound.

Ultrasound is a sound wave with frequencies above the audible range. When an acoustic wave propagates through an inhomogeneous media such as biological tissues, it is diverted by reflection and refraction from tissue interfaces, by scattering if the size of the interfering particles is much smaller than the ultrasound wavelength (λ), or absorbed by the medium and converted into heat. Scattering of ultrasound by blood is almost entirely due to the erythrocytes because they are much more numerous than the slightly larger leukocytes, and significantly larger and more numerous than platelets. With most clinical instruments, the frequency of the acoustic waves is in a range of 2 to 30 MHz. The wavelengths corresponding to these frequencies are smaller than the size of a red blood cell (RBC). When an incident ultrasound beam is scattered by RBCs, the scattered power can be measured at any scattering angle between 0 and 360◦ [10]. Scattering measurements are made with one transducer for backscattering at 180◦ or by two transducers for other angular measurements [11].
Design of Compact and Auto-Compensated Single-Layer Chipless RFID Tag

This paper presents a new radio frequency identification (RFID) chipless tag that is highly compact and potentially low-cost. This tag has a lot of advantages, such as being fully printable on products since no ground plane is needed for fabrication. The actual issue of the chipless tag family having a single layer, that is, their detuning effect, is compensated for the first time by a correction technique based on the use of a sensing resonator. The design is based on multiple λ/4 coplanar strip-line resonators where resonant frequencies can be shifted by setting an additional short circuit at particular locations. An accurate model is proposed to easily link the footprint of the structure to the resonant frequency. Considering a frequency resolution of 50 MHz for the reading system and a tag dimension of 15 × 20 mm2, 9 b can be encoded in the frequency band 2.0-5.5 GHz. Several experimental results validate the proposed design as well as its implementation in a realistic application and environment.
Nestin expression and reactive phenomena in the mouse cochlea after kanamycin ototoxicity

Following injury to the adult mammalian cochlea, hair cells cannot be spontaneously replaced. Nonetheless, the postnatal cochlea contains progenitor cells, distinguished by the expression of nestin, which are able to proliferate and form neurospheres in vitro. Such resident progenitors might be endowed with reparative potential. However, to date little is known about their behaviour in situ following hair cell injury. Using adult mice and ex vivo cochlear cultures, we sought to determine whether: (i) resident cochlear progenitors respond to kanamycin ototoxicity and compensate for it; and (ii) the reparative potential of cochlear progenitors can be stimulated by the addition of growth factors. Morphological changes of cochlear tissue, expression of nestin mRNA and protein and cell proliferation were investigated in these models. Our observations show that ototoxic injury has modest effects on nestin expression and cell proliferation. On the other hand, the addition of growth factors to the injured cochlear explants induced the appearance of nestin‐positive cells in the supporting cell area of the organ of Corti. The vast majority of nestin‐expressing cells, however, were not proliferating. Growth factors also had a robust stimulatory effect on axonal sprouting and the proliferative response, which was more pronounced in injured cochleae. On the whole, our findings indicate that nestin expression after kanamycin ototoxicity is related to tissue reactivity rather than activation of resident progenitors attempting to replace the lost receptors. In addition, administration of growth factors significantly enhances tissue remodelling, suggesting that cochlear repair may be promoted by the exogenous application of regeneration‐promoting substances.
Superoxide dismutase and lipid-bound sialic acid in sera from children with cancers and juvenile chronic arthritis

Both experimental and epidemiological studies suggest that patients with autoimmune and other chronic inflammatory diseases are more prone to develop cancer. The aim of the present investigation is to find some typical differences between the content of lipid-bound sialic acid (LSA) and the activity of superoxide dismutase (SOD) in sera from children with neoplastic diseases and juvenile chronic arthritis (JCA). Our results show 30% lower SOD activity in the sera from children with cancer compared with the sera from children with JCA. LSA levels 102% and 166% higher than in children with JCA were observed in the sera from children with blood and solid cancers, respectively. The relation LSA/SOD is about fivefold higher in children with cancers. A negative correlation (r=0.720, P<0.001) exists between LSA and SOD in sera from children with cancers. No such correlation was established in the group of children with JCA. We suppose that such differentiation disappears in the beginning of neoplastic process during prolonged therapy of autoimmune diseases. From our findings SOD and LSA appear to be putative markers of malignant disease with potential usefulness not only in JCA but also in other conditions associated with an increased risk of neoplastic development.
System-Level Verification of Embedded Operating Systems Components

The increasing complexity of embedded operating systems is pushing their design to System-Level, leading to the convergence between software and hardware. In such scenario, it is highly desirable to verify system properties formally, regardless of whether their components are going to be implemented in software or hardware. In this paper, we introduce an approach to verify functional correctness and safety properties of embedded operating system components formally and at System-Level. In order to demonstrate our approach, we present a scheduler of an embedded operating system showing that such scheduler follows its specification regardless of the domain it is instantiated. The verified code was subsequently compiled using GCC yielding a software instance and using CatapultC yielding a hardware instance of the scheduler.