Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Data mining: a new technique in medical research.

Address all correspondence to: ××××. , Greece Received 21-09-05, Revised 20-10-05, Accepted 27-10-05 This issue hosts an article that discusses the application of Data mining techniques to the treatment of infertile men with azoospermia, and compares this procedure of categorisation into groups with the corresponding clinical categorisation. Although the dataset used was not very large, the authors have provided an interesting overview of this novel approach involving the use of Data Mining in azoospermia.
Uni Cheats Racket: A Case Study in Plagiarism Investigation

Some students cheat by buying solutions to assignments and paying other people to sit their exams. We investigated such a case in 2001, in which around thirty students appear to have obtained material from a private tutor. Some details were reported in the press during 2003 when a student and the tutor were sentenced in court. In this paper the case is reviewed. It has lessons for plagiarism management and disciplinary processes, and highlights gaps between academic perceptions of plagiarism, community attitudes, and student behaviour.
Exchange Market Pressure in Indonesia: A Univariate Markov Switching Analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyze the nature of exchange market pressure in the case of the Indonesian economy. More specifically, this paper aims to answer whether there is non-linearity or multiple equilibria in the EMPI. The paper relies on a univariate Markov Switching autoregressive model. The model estimation also incorporates procedures such as unit root test, diagnostic test and log likelihood ratio test, focusing on the period from January 1990 to September 2008. This paper found that a 2-state Markov switching AR(6) model of EMPI outperforms a linear autoregressive model in explaining the behavior of EMPI. The findings also suggest that the significant regime dependent intercept confirms the existence of a multiple-equilibria condition in the EMPI. The degree of uncertainty of EMPI in a volatile state was found to be much higher than in the stable state and there was also an inertia characteristic. Due to the inertia characteristic in the EMPI, the monetary authority should take into account the role of economic agents’ expectations in delivering monetary policy to stabilize the exchange rate following significant market pressure in the economy. This paper contributes by providing empirical evidence on the characteristics of EMPI in the context of the Indonesian economy.
Capacity Scaling of Cellular Networks: Impact of Bandwidth, Infrastructure Density and Number of Antennas

The availability of very wide spectrum in millimeter wave bands combined with large antenna arrays and ultra-dense networks raises two basic questions: What is the true value of overly abundant degrees of freedom and how can networks be designed to fully exploit them? This paper determines the capacity scaling of large cellular networks as a function of bandwidth, area, number of antennas, and base station density. It is found that the network capacity has a fundamental bandwidth scaling limit, beyond which the network becomes power-limited. An infrastructure multi-hop protocol achieves the optimal network capacity scaling for all network parameters. In contrast, current protocols that use only single-hop direct transmissions cannot achieve the capacity scaling in wideband regimes except in the special case when the density of base stations is taken to impractical extremes. This finding suggests that multi-hop communication will be important to fully realize the potential of next-generation cellular networks. Dedicated relays, if sufficiently dense, can also perform this task, relieving user nodes from the battery drain of cooperation. On the other hand, more sophisticated strategies such as hierarchical cooperation, that are essential for achieving capacity scaling in ad hoc networks, are unnecessary in the cellular context.
Optimistic Atomic Multicast

Message ordering is one of the cornerstones of reliable distributed systems. However, some ordering guarantees, such as atomic order, are expensive to implement in terms of message delays. This paper presents Optimistic Atomic Multicast, a protocol that combines reduced latency and increased throughput. Messages can be delivered optimistically in a single communication step and conservatively in three communication steps. Differently from previous optimistic group communication protocols, Optimistic Atomic Multicast does not rely on spontaneous message ordering for fast delivery. In addition to presenting Optimistic Atomic Multicast, we provide detailed performance results comparing it to other ordering protocols in both local-area and wide-area networks.
Feature selection techniques for gender prediction from blogs

The goal of this paper is to identify gender of blog authors. Features such as POS tags, unigram (words+punctuations), bigrams and word classes are considered. To synthesis/rank features we are using Mutual information, Chi-square and Information gain methods. The dataset is the collection of 3227 blogs originally derived from blogs set, and among them 1679 were written by male and 1548 were written by female. The results were obtained using 10-cross fold validation. Unigram of words gave better accuracy of 78.81% in comparison with the other features. We found that chi-square is the best in ranking features. The classification is done using Multinomial Naïve Bayes Classifier, and different kernel functions of SVM such as PolyKernel, Puk, Normalized PolyKernel and RBFkernel.
Efficient virtual network isolation in multi-tenant data centers on commodity ethernet switches

Infrastructure-as-a-Service providers need to provision and isolate their tenants's virtual networks. Current network isolation solutions either suffer from limited scalability, incur encapsulation overheads, or require advanced (e.g., OpenFlow) hardware switches. We propose LANES, a system that provides isolation between billions of virtual machines using commodity Ethernet switches without encapsulation overheads. LANES virtualizes each tenant's network address space and configures rules on each server to translate (tenant) virtual addresses to (infrastructure) physical addresses. Virtual address spaces give tenants flexibility when configuring their virtual networks, and physical addresses reduce demand on infrastructure switches. We implement LANES in OpenStack, leveraging OpenStack's network description functionalities and using OpenFlow to configure Open vSwitch on infrastructure servers. Our evaluation shows LANES ensures network isolation with acceptable rule configuration latency.
Aversion to Price Risk and the Afternoon Effect

Many empirical studies of auctions show that prices of identical goods sold sequentially follow a declining path. Declining prices have been viewed as an anomaly, because the theoretical models of auctions predict that the price sequence should either be a martingale (with independent signals and no informational externalities), or a submartingale (with a¢ liated signals). This paper shows that declining prices, the afternoon effect, arise naturally when bidders are averse to price risk. A bidder is averse to price risk if he prefers to win an object at a certain price, rather than at a random price with the same expected value. When bidders have independent signals and there are no informational externalities, only the effect of aversion to price risk is present and the price sequence is a supermartingale. When there are informational externalities, even with independent signals, there is a countervailing, informational effect, which pushes prices to raise along the path of a sequential auction. This may help explaining the more complex price paths we observe in some auctions
RaceGuard: Kernel Protection From Temporary File Race Vulnerabilities

Temporary file race vulnerabilities occur when privileged programs attempt to create temporary files in an unsafe manner. "Unsafe" means "non-atomic with respect to an attacker's activities. " There is no portable standard for safely (atomically) creating temporary files, and many operating systems have no safe temporary file creation at all. As a result, many programs continue to use unsafe means to create temporary files, resulting in widespread vulnerabilities. This paper presents Race-Guard: a kernel enhancement that detects attempts to exploit temporary file race vulnerabilities, and does so with sufficient speed and precision that the attack can be halted before it takes effect. RaceGuard has been implemented, tested, and measured. We show that RaceGuard is effective at stopping temporary file race attacks, preserves compatibility (no legitimate software is broken), and preserves performance (overhead is minimal).
Supervised Topical Key Phrase Extraction of News Stories using Crowdsourcing, Light Filtering and Co-reference Normalization

Fast and effective automated indexing is critical for search and personalized services. Key phrases that consist of one or more words and represent the main concepts of the document are often used for the purpose of indexing. In this paper, we investigate the use of additional semantic features and pre-processing steps to improve automatic key phrase extraction. These features include the use of signal words and freebase categories. Some of these features lead to significant improvements in the accuracy of the results. We also experimented with 2 forms of document pre-processing that we call light filtering and co-reference normalization. Light filtering removes sentences from the document, which are judged peripheral to its main content. Co-reference normalization unifies several written forms of the same named entity into a unique form. We also needed a Gold Standard ― a set of labeled documents for training and evaluation. While the subjective nature of key phrase selection precludes a true Gold Standard, we used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to obtain a useful approximation. Our data indicates that the biggest improvements in performance were due to shallow semantic features, news categories, and rhetorical signals (nDCG 78.47% vs. 68.93%). The inclusion of deeper semantic features such as Freebase sub-categories was not beneficial by itself, but in combination with pre-processing, did cause slight improvements in the nDCG scores.
Interactive Markov Models of Optimization Search Strategies

This paper introduces a Markov model for evolutionary algorithms (EAs) that is based on interactions among individuals in the population. This interactive Markov model has the potential to provide tractable models for optimization problems of realistic size. We propose two simple discrete optimization search strategies with population-proportion-based selection and a modified mutation operator. The probability of selection is linearly proportional to the number of individuals at each point of the search space. The mutation operator randomly modifies an entire individual rather than a single decision variable. We exactly model these optimization search strategies with interactive Markov models. We present simulation results to confirm the interactive Markov model theory. We show that genetic algorithms and biogeography-based optimization perform better with the addition of population-proportion-based selection on a set of real-world benchmarks. We note that many other EAs, both new and old, might be able to be improved with this addition, or modeled with this method.
Action as an innate bias for visual learning

Babies are faced at birth with a buzzing blooming confusion of visual stimuli (1). The set of all possible images is truly enormous (2), and simple calculations suggest that only a small fraction of all possible images have ever been seen over the entire history and prehistory of mankind. Moreover, the world consists of an estimated number of 30,000 objects (3), which occur in more than 1,000 different types of scenes. How can an infant start making sense of the visual world?
Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, a Powerful Tool in Cultural Heritage

In this paper five case studies illustrating applications of NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) in the field of cultural heritage, are reported. Different issues were afforded, namely the investigation of advanced cleaning systems, the quantitative mapping of moisture in historic walls, the investigation and evaluation of restoration treatments on porous stones, the stratigraphy of wall paintings, and the detection of CO2 in lapis lazuli. Four of these case studies deal with the use of portable NMR sensors which allow non-destructive and non-invasive investigation in situ. The diversity among cases reported demonstrates that NMR can be extensively applied in the field of cultural heritage.
A Randomized Clinical Trial Evaluating Therapeutic Drug Monitoring (TDM) for Protease Inhibitor–Based Regimens in Antiretroviral-Experienced HIV-Infected Individuals: Week 48 Results of the A5146 Study

Abstract Background: We devised an open-label, randomized trial to evaluate whether therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) of protease inhibitors (PIs) and dose escalation based upon a normalized inhibitory quotient (NIQ), which integrates PI trough concentration and drug resistance, could improve virologic outcome in PI-experienced patients with treatment failure. Secondary analyses through 48 weeks are presented.Methods: Eligible HIV-infected subjects with a screening viral load of ≥1000 copies/mL initiated a new PI-based regimen at entry and had NIQ performed at week 2. Subjects with an NIQ ≤1 were randomized at week 4 to a standard-of-care (SOC) arm or TDM arm featuring PI dose escalation.Results: One hundred and eighty-three subjects were randomized. There was no significant treatment difference in change from randomization to week 48 in HIV-1 RNA [ P = . 13, median (25th, 75th percentile log10 copies/mL change): -0.03 (-0.74, 0.62) with TDM and 0.11 (-2.3, 0.82) with SOC]. In subgroup analysis, patients with ≥0.69 active PIs benefited from TDM compared to those with <0.69 active PIs ( P = .05). Conclusions: While the TDM strategy of PI dose escalation did not improve virologic response at week 48 overall, in subgroup analysis, TDM favorably impacted virologic outcome in subjects taking PI-based regimens with moderate antiviral activity.
Central Sensitization and Altered Central Pain Processing in Chronic Low Back Pain: Fact or Myth?

Objective:The purpose of this narrative review is to analyze the available literature concerning central sensitization and altered central pain processing in patients with chronic low back pain (LBP). Methods:Literature was screened using several electronic search databases. Additional literature was obtained by reference tracking and expert consultation. Studies evaluating central pain processing in conservatively treated patients with chronic LBP were included. Results:Results of studies examining the responsiveness to various stimuli in patients with chronic LBP are conflicting. Some studies in patients with chronic LBP have demonstrated exaggerated pain responses after sensory stimulation of locations outside the painful region, while other studies report no differences between patients and healthy subjects. Studies examining the integrity of the endogenous pain inhibitory systems report unaltered activity of this descending inhibitory system. In contrast, studies analyzing brain structure and function in relation to (experimentally induced) pain provide preliminary evidence for altered central nociceptive processing in patients with chronic LBP. Finally, also psychosocial characteristics, such as inappropriate beliefs about pain, pain catastrophizing, and/or depression may contribute to the mechanisms of central sensitization. Conclusions:It tempting to speculate that ongoing nociception is associated with cortical and subcortical reorganization and may play an important role in the process of the chronification of LBP. Future prospective research should explore to what extent these changes are reversible and if this reversibility is associated with improved functioning of patients.
Note added in proof

Usually 10 pmol of DNA were restricted with a given endonuclease. The fragments were dephosphorylated and labelled with ['y-32P]ATP and polynucleotide kinase as described (Hrisse et al., 1980). To separate the two labelled ends, fragments were denatured at 920C in 30% dimethyl sulfoxide and fractionated in a polyacrylamide gel (Maxam and Gilbert, 1980). 5'-labelled single-stranded fragments were recovered from the gel and subjected to chemical degradation with reagents specific for G, AG, CT, C and AC. The enzymatic method of Sanger et al. (1977) was also used. To this end the PstI fragment was digested with HaeIII, or FnuDII or partially digested with Bal3 1. Products were fractionated on polyacrylamide or agarose gels and subcloned in the SmaI site of vector Ml3mp9. After transformation of JM10I E. coli cells, white plaques were used to make templates which were sequenced using the M13 sequencing kit of Amersham. As a result of this, both strands were independently analyzed several times. All restriction sites used as starting points were analyzed as interval sites within overlapping fragments. Figure 1 summarizes the sequencing strategy and indicates the sites of restriction used for these analyses.
Conservation of structure and mechanism within the transaldolase enzyme family

Transaldolase (Tal) is involved in the central carbon metabolism, i.e. the non‐oxidative pentose phosphate pathway, and is therefore a ubiquitous enzyme. However, Tals show a low degree in sequence identity and vary in length within the enzyme family which previously led to the definition of five subfamilies. We wondered how this variation is conserved in structure and function. To answer this question we characterised and compared the Tals from Bacillus subtilis, Corynebacterium glutamicum and Escherichia coli, each belonging to a different subfamily, with respect to their biochemical properties and structures. The overall structure of the Tal domain, a (β/α)8‐barrel fold, is well conserved between the different subfamilies but the enzymes show different degrees of oligomerisation (monomer, dimer and decamer). The substrate specificity of the three enzymes investigated is quite similar which is reflected in the conservation of the active site, the phosphate binding site as well as the position of a catalytically important water molecule. All decameric enzymes characterised so far appear to be heat stable no matter whether they originate from a mesophilic or thermophilic organism. Hence, the thermostability might be due to the structural properties, i.e. tight packing, of these enzymes.
Polycystin-1 Activates the Calcineurin/NFAT (Nuclear Factor of Activated T-cells) Signaling Pathway*

Regulation of intracellular Ca2+ mobilization has been associated with the functions of polycystin-1 (PC1) and polycystin-2 (PC2), the protein products of the PKD1 and PKD2 genes. We have now demonstrated that PC1 can activate the calcineurin/NFAT (nuclear factor of activated T-cells) signaling pathway through Gαq -mediated activation of phospholipase C (PLC). Transient transfection of HEK293T cells with an NFAT promoter-luciferase reporter demonstrated that membrane-targeted PC1 constructs containing the membrane proximal region of the C-terminal tail, which includes the heterotrimeric G protein binding and activation domain, can stimulate NFAT luciferase activity. Inhibition of glycogen synthase kinase-3β by LiCl treatment further increased PC1-mediated NFAT activity. PC1-mediated activation of NFAT was completely inhibited by the calcineurin inhibitor, cyclosporin A. Cotransfection of a construct expressing the Gαq subunit augmented PC1-mediated NFAT activity, whereas the inhibitors of PLC (U73122) and the inositol trisphosphate and ryanodine receptors (xestospongin and 2-aminophenylborate) and a nonspecific Ca2+ channel blocker (gadolinium) diminished PC1-mediated NFAT activity. PC2 was not able to activate NFAT. An NFAT-green fluorescent protein nuclear localization assay demonstrated that PC1 constructs containing the C-tail only or the entire 11-transmembrane spanning region plus C-tail induced NFAT-green fluorescent protein nuclear translocation. NFAT expression was demonstrated in the M-1 mouse cortical collecting duct cell line and in embryonic and adult mouse kidneys by reverse transcriptase-PCR and immunolocalization. These data suggest a model in which PC1 signaling leads to a sustained elevation of intracellular Ca2+ mediated by PC1 activation of Gαq followed by PLC activation, release of Ca2+ from intracellular stores, and activation of store-operated Ca2+ entry, thus activating calcineurin and NFAT.
Inhibition of Prostate Cancer Osteoblastic Progression with VEGF121/rGel, a Single Agent Targeting Osteoblasts, Osteoclasts, and Tumor Neovasculature

Purpose: A hallmark of prostate cancer (PCa) progression is the development of osteoblastic bone metastases, which respond poorly to available therapies. We previously reported that VEGF121/rGel targets osteoclast precursors and tumor neovasculature. Here we tested the hypothesis that targeting nontumor cells expressing these receptors can inhibit tumor progression in a clinically relevant model of osteoblastic PCa. Experimental Design: Cells from MDA PCa 118b, a PCa xenograft obtained from a bone metastasis in a patient with castrate-resistant PCa, were injected into the femurs of mice. Osteoblastic progression was monitored following systemic administration of VEGF121/rGel. Results: VEGF121/rGel was cytotoxic in vitro to osteoblast precursor cells. This cytotoxicity was specific as VEGF121/rGel internalization into osteoblasts was VEGF121 receptor driven. Furthermore, VEGF121/rGel significantly inhibited PCa-induced bone formation in a mouse calvaria culture assay. In vivo, VEGF121/rGel significantly inhibited the osteoblastic progression of PCa cells in the femurs of nude mice. Microcomputed tomographic analysis revealed that VEGF121/rGel restored the bone volume fraction of tumor-bearing femurs to values similar to those of the contralateral (non–tumor-bearing) femurs. VEGF121/rGel significantly reduced the number of tumor-associated osteoclasts but did not change the numbers of peritumoral osteoblasts. Importantly, VEGF121/rGel-treated mice had significantly less tumor burden than control mice. Our results thus indicate that VEGF121/rGel inhibits osteoblastic tumor progression by targeting angiogenesis, osteoclastogenesis, and bone formation. Conclusions: Targeting VEGF receptor (VEGFR)-1- or VEGFR-2–expressing cells is effective in controlling the osteoblastic progression of PCa in bone. These findings provide the basis for an effective multitargeted approach for metastatic PCa. Clin Cancer Res; 17(8); 2328–38. ©2011 AACR.
68Ga-Based Radiopharmaceuticals: Production and Application Relationship

The contribution of 68Ga to the promotion and expansion of clinical research and routine positron emission tomography (PET) for earlier better diagnostics and individualized medicine is considerable. The potential applications of 68Ga-comprising imaging agents include targeted, pre-targeted and non-targeted imaging. This review discusses the key aspects of the production of 68Ga and 68Ga-based radiopharmaceuticals in the light of the impact of regulatory requirements and endpoint pre-clinical and clinical applications.