Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A gene expression profiling approach assessing celecoxib in a randomized controlled trial in prostate cancer.

BACKGROUND We performed a pilot study, looking at the COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib, on newly diagnosed prostate cancer patients in the neo-adjuvant setting using DNA microarray analysis. PATIENTS AND METHODS This was a single-blinded, randomized controlled phase II presurgical (radical prostatectomy) 28-day trial of celecoxib versus no drug in patients with localized T1-2 N0 M0 prostate cancer. cDNA microarray analysis was carried out on prostate cancer biopsies taken from freshly obtained radical prostatectomy samples. Results were confirmed by qPCR analysis of a selection of genes. RESULTS Multiple genes were differentially expressed in response to celecoxib treatment. Statistical analysis of microarray data indicated 24 genes were up-regulated and 4 genes down-regulated as a consequence of celecoxib treatment. Gene changes e.g. survivin, SRP72kDa, were associated with promoting apoptotic cell death, enhancement of antioxidant processes and tumour suppressor function (p73 and cyclin B1 up-regulation). CONCLUSION Celecoxib at 400 mg b.i. d. for 4 weeks perioperatively gave rise to changes in gene expression in prostate cancer tissue consistent with enhancement of apoptosis and tumour suppressor function. Given the short time interval for the duration of this study, the data are encouraging and provide a good rationale for conducting further trials of celecoxib in prostate cancer.
A fully digital PWM-based 1 to 3 GHz multistandard transmitter in 40-nm CMOS

A fully digital 1 to 3 GHz multimode transmitter is presented which contains two RF modulators: One uses baseband (BB) PWM, while the other uses RF PWM. RF PWM produces less harmonics, while BB PWM has a higher dynamic range (DR) and consumes less power. The BB PWM system satisfies the WLAN EVM limit over the whole frequency range. The RF PWM system achieves sufficient EVM for standards such as EDGE and WCDMA. Both systems support the use of multiple PAs to extend the DR using multilevel PWM.
IS MANUAL THERAPY A RATIONAL APPROACH TO IMPROVING HEALTH-RELATED QUALITY OF LIFE IN PEOPLE WITH ARTHRITIS?

Background: People with arthritic disease are advised to participate in gentle exercise on a regular basis, and pursue long-term medication regimes. Alternative therapies are also used by people with arthritis, and may sometimes be recommended by rheumatologists and other medical personnel. Alternative therapies may be divided into two types: active therapies, in which the patient takes a driving role, and passive therapies, in which the therapy cannot proceed unless driven by a therapist. Objective: To review the effectiveness of manual therapy in improving the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of people with two common arthritis conditions: Osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. Discussion: Massage, and other passive (practitioner-driven) manual therapies, have been anecdotally reported to improve health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in people with arthritis. Many manual therapists consult with patients who have arthritic diseases, receive referrals from rheumatologists, and consider the arthritic diseases to be within their field of practise. Although there is empirical evidence that manual therapy with some types of arthritis is beneficial, the level of effectiveness however is under-researched. Medical authorities are reluctant to endorse manual therapies for arthritis due to a lack of scientific evidence demonstrating efficacy, safety, and cost effectiveness.
Evolution of Supermassive Black Hole Binaries and Acceleration of Jet Precession in Galactic Nuclei

Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are expected with the hierarchical galaxy formation model. Currently, physics processes dominating the evolution of a SMBHB are unclear. An interesting question is whether we could observationally determine the evolution of SMBHBs and give constraints on the physical processes. Jet precession has been observed in many active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and is generally attributed to disk precession. In this paper we calculate the time variation of jet precession and conclude that jet precession is accelerated in SMBHB systems but decelerated in others. The acceleration of jet precession, dPpr/dt, is related to the jet precession timescale, Ppr, and the SMBHB evolution timescale, τa, as dPpr/dt ≃ − Λ (Ppr/τa) . Our calculations based on the models for jet precession and SMBHB evolution show that dPpr/dt can be as high as about –1.0, with a typical value of –0.2, and can be easily detected. We discuss the differential jet precession for NGC 1275 that has been observed in the literature. If its observed rapid acceleration of jet precession is true, the jet precession is due to the orbital motion of an unbound SMBHB with a mass ratio of q ≈ 0.76. When jets precess from ancient bubbles to the currently active jets, the separation of the SMBHB decreases from about 1.46 kpc to 0.80 kpc, with an averaged decreasing velocity of da/dt ≃ − 1.54 × 106 cm s−1 and an evolution timescale of τa ≈ 7.5 × 107 yr. However, if we assume steady jet precession for many cycles, the observations imply a hard SMBHB with a mass ratio of a q ≈ 0.21 and a separation of a ≈ 0.29 pc.
Deregulation of Bone Forming Cells in Bone Diseases and Anabolic Effects of Strontium-Containing Agents and Biomaterials

Age-related bone loss and osteoporosis are associated with bone remodeling changes that are featured with decreased trabecular and periosteal bone formation relative to bone resorption. Current anticatabolic therapies focusing on the inhibition of bone resorption may not be sufficient in the prevention or reversal of age-related bone deterioration and there is a big need in promoting osteoblastogenesis and bone formation. Enhanced understanding of the network formed by key signaling pathways and molecules regulating bone forming cells in health and diseases has therefore become highly significant. The successful development of agonist/antagonist of the PTH and Wnt signaling pathways are profits of the understanding of these key pathways. As the core component of an approved antiosteoporosis agent, strontium takes its effect on osteoblasts at multilevel through multiple pathways, representing a good example in revealing and exploring anabolic mechanisms. The recognition of strontium effects on bone has led to its expected application in a variety of biomaterial scaffolds used in tissue engineering strategies aiming at bone repairing and regeneration. While summarizing the recent progress in these respects, this review also proposes the new approaches such as systems biology in order to reveal new insights in the pathology of osteoporosis as well as possible discovery of new therapies.
Speaking rate dependent multiple acoustic models using continuous frame rate normalization

This paper proposes a method using speaking rate dependent multiple acoustic models for speech recognition. In this method, multiple acoustic models with various speaking rates are generated. Among them, the optimal acoustic model relevant to the speaking rate of test data is selected and used in recognition. To simulate the various speaking rates for the multiple acoustic models, we use the variable frame shift size considering the speaking rate of each utterance instead of applying a flat frame shift size to all training utterances. The continuous frame rate normalization (CFRN) is applied to each of training utterances to control the frame shift size. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms both the baseline and the conventional CFRN on test utterances.
Calcium Imaging of Basal Forebrain Activity during Innate and Learned Behaviors

The basal forebrain (BF) plays crucial roles in arousal, attention, and memory, and its impairment is associated with a variety of cognitive deficits. The BF consists of cholinergic, GABAergic, and glutamatergic neurons. Electrical or optogenetic stimulation of BF cholinergic neurons enhances cortical processing and behavioral performance, but the natural activity of these cells during behavior is only beginning to be characterized. Even less is known about GABAergic and glutamatergic neurons. Here, we performed microendoscopic calcium imaging of BF neurons as mice engaged in spontaneous behaviors in their home cages (innate) or performed a go/no-go auditory discrimination task (learned). Cholinergic neurons were consistently excited during movement, including running and licking, but GABAergic and glutamatergic neurons exhibited diverse responses. All cell types were activated by overt punishment, either inside or outside of the discrimination task. These findings reveal functional similarities and distinctions between BF cell types during both spontaneous and task-related behaviors.
Natural Language Dialogue Architectures for Tactical Questioning Characters

Abstract : In this paper we contrast three architectures for natural language questioning characters. We contrast the relative costs and benefits of each approach in building characters for tactical questioning. The first architecture works purely at the textual, using cross-language information retrieval techniques to learn the best output for any input from a training set of linked questions and answers. The second architecture adds a global emotional model and computes a compliance model, which can result in different outputs for different levels, given the same inputs. The third architecture works at a semantic level and allows authoring of different policies for response for different kinds of information. We describe these architectures and their strengths and weaknesses with respect to expressive capacity, performance, and authoring demands.
Fully FPGA-based system on chip solution for current control of AC machine.

This paper presents the implementation of a current control for synchronous machine using the fusion field programmable gate array (FPGA) from Actel Company. This component integrates analog peripherals such as ADC and also flash memory blocks, in a single chip. The achieved implementation allows evaluating the efficiency and the integration capacity of a true system on a chip (SoC) solution. An overview of the fusion FPGA architecture is firstly given, followed by the description of the current control algorithm. In addition, this paper presents some experimental results enabling to illustrate the benefits of this fully integrated solution.
Maturation Along White Matter Tracts in Human Brain Using a Diffusion Tensor Surface Model Tract-Specific Analysis

Previous diffusion tensor imaging tractography studies have demonstrated exponential patterns of developmental changes for diffusion parameters such as fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) averaged over all voxels in major white matter (WM) tracts of the human brain. However, this assumes that the entire tract is changing in unison, which may not be the case. In this study, a surface model based tract-specific analysis was applied to a cross-sectional cohort of 178 healthy subjects (83 males/95 females) aged from 6 to 30 years to spatially characterize the age-related changes of FA and MD along the trajectory of seven major WM tracts – corpus callosum (CC) and six bilateral tracts. There were unique patterns of regions that showed different exponential and linear rates of increasing FA or decreasing MD and age at which FA or MD levels off along each tract. Faster change rate of FA was observed in genu of CC and frontal-parietal part of superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). Inferior corticospinal tract (CST), posterior regions of association tracts such as inferior longitudinal fasciculus, inferior frontal occipital fasciculus and uncinate fasciculus also displayed earlier changing patterns for FA. MD decreases with age also exhibited this posterior-to-anterior WM maturation pattern for most tracts in females. Both males and females displayed similar FA/MD patterns of change with age along most large tracts; however, males had overall reached the FA maxima or MD minima later compared with females in most tracts with the greater differences occurring in the CST and frontal-parietal part of SLF for MD. Therefore, brain WM development has spatially varying trajectories along tracts that depend on sex and the tract.
Nonnegative Factorization and The Maximum Edge Biclique Problem

Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) is a data analysis technique based on the approximation of a nonnegative matrix with a product of two nonnegative factors, which allows compression and interpretation of nonnegative data. In this paper, we study the case of rank-one factorization and show that when the matrix to be factored is not required to be nonnegative, the corresponding problem (R1NF) becomes NP-hard. This sheds new light on the complexity of NMF since any algorithm for fixed-rank NMF must be able to solve at least implicitly such rank-one subproblems. Our proof relies on a reduction of the maximum edge biclique problem to R1NF. We also link stationary points of R1NF to feasible solutions of the biclique problem, which allows us to design a new type of biclique finding algorithm based on the application of a block-coordinate descent scheme to R1NF. We show that this algorithm, whose algorithmic complexity per iteration is proportional to the number of edges in the graph, is guaranteed to converge to a biclique and that it performs competitively with existing methods on random graphs and text mining datasets.
Ieee Computer Graphics and Applications 59 Dpfrag: Trainable Stroke Fragmentation Based on Dynamic Programming Fragmentation Method Criteria

M any computer graphics applications require approximation of digital curves using sets of prespecified geometric primitives. For example, CAD and freehand mod-eling applications require fitting Nurbs (non-uniform rational B-splines) to digital curves. Graphics applications that support sketch-based interaction typically require fitting line and arc segments to hand-drawn curves to set the stage for sketch recognition. 3 In all these applications, the goal is to find the best way to represent a digital curve using geometric primitives that collectively produce an accurate approximation. The sketch recognition community calls this problem stroke fragmentation. Stroke fragmentation methods should convert strokes into 2D geometric primitives while meeting criteria for accuracy, efficiency, and adaptability. Unfortunately, no existing method meets all these criteria. To alleviate this problem, we developed DPFrag, which has two main components. First, a dynamic-programming framework reduces the exponential runtime complexity of naive search to O(n 2), in terms of stroke length. Second, an adaptive cost function enables DPFrag to adapt to different sets of primitives, contexts, and user styles. An evaluation with five datasets showed that DPFrag met the fragmentation method criteria and was more accurate than other state-of-the art methods. Here, we look a little more closely at the fragmentation method criteria. The first criterion is high accuracy. We measure accuracy by comparing a method's fragmentations to the ground truth, which human annotators provide. The second criterion is runtime efficiency. A fragmentation system must discover an optimal solution in an acceptable time. A naive brute-force search for that solution is impractical because the number of fragmentations increases exponentially with the stroke length. The third criterion is adaptation to fragmentation preferences. What constitutes a correct fragmentation for a given stroke can be highly subjective. For example , two users might prefer different fragmentations for a particular stoke (see Figure 1). The fourth criterion is adaptation to sketching styles. Users' drawing styles vary. For instance , the level of messiness, noise, and drawing speed are subject to change. The final criterion is adaptation to specific sets of primitives. The set of primitives allowed for building fragmentations might vary across domains and applications. For example, in a scenario involving recognition of hand-drawn circuit diagrams, a set of primitives that includes helices might aid the recognition of inductor symbols. So, the set of primitives used in generating fragmentations should be easy to customize. DPFrag is an efficient, globally optimal fragmentation method that learns segmentation parameters …
Timing Executive Stock Option Awards In China Listed Corporates

Adding stock option to management compensation portfolio is an effective mechanism in aligning the interests of managers with those of shareholders. But this mechanism may be noneffective since the self-dealing opportunism of managers. This thesis analyses the managers will undertake self-dealing opportunities by choosing time and content of information disclosure to affect the exercise price of stock option. Taking the listed companies of China, which initially disclose stock option Incentive Plan as study subject, and using the events study approach to compute cumulated abnormal returns, I observe a significant decline in stock price before top executives receive the award and a significant increase in stock price shortly after the incentive plans disclosure.
Ultraviolet‐background‐induced bifurcation of galactic morphology

Based upon a novel paradigm of galaxy formation under the influence of an ultraviolet background, the evolutionary bifurcation of pre-galactic clouds is compared with observations of elliptical and spiral galaxies. The theory predicts that the dichotomy between dissipational and dissipationless galaxy formation stems from the degree of self-shielding from the ultraviolet background radiation. This is demonstrated on a bifurcation diagram of collapse epochs versus masses of pre-galactic clouds. Using the observed properties, the collapse epochs and mass are assessed for each type of galaxy. By direct comparison of the theory with observations, it turns out that the theoretical bifurcation branch successfully discriminates between elliptical and spiral galaxies. This suggests that the ultraviolet background radiation could play a profound role in the differentiation of galactic morphology into the Hubble sequence.
An Image Coding Algorithm Based on Nonredundant Contourlet Transform and Visual Characteristics

This paper presents an image coding technique based on contourlet transform. The redundancy of the contourlet transform is eliminated by switching the LP decomposition step to separable wavelet transform. The transform is then optimized through a wavelet coefficient weighting process in order to enhance the visual quality in the image domain, and with that the directional filter bank(DFB) are employed to high frequency wavelet subbands. At last, all the resulted subbands are efficiently coded with EBCOT. At the same bit rates, a gain of up to 0.3~0.6dB over JPEG2000 has been observed for standard images with directional features.
Biclustering via Sparse Singular Value Decomposition

Summary Sparse singular value decomposition (SSVD) is proposed as a new exploratory analysis tool for biclustering or identifying interpretable row–column associations within high‐dimensional data matrices. SSVD seeks a low‐rank, checkerboard structured matrix approximation to data matrices. The desired checkerboard structure is achieved by forcing both the left‐ and right‐singular vectors to be sparse, that is, having many zero entries. By interpreting singular vectors as regression coefficient vectors for certain linear regressions, sparsity‐inducing regularization penalties are imposed to the least squares regression to produce sparse singular vectors. An efficient iterative algorithm is proposed for computing the sparse singular vectors, along with some discussion of penalty parameter selection. A lung cancer microarray dataset and a food nutrition dataset are used to illustrate SSVD as a biclustering method. SSVD is also compared with some existing biclustering methods using simulated datasets.
Endogenous Money and Income Velocity in the Uk Endogenous Money and Income Velocity in the Uk

It is widely reported for many countries, including the UK, that income velocity has been highly variable around a declining trend in recent years. This paper advances the hypothesis that this is connected to the behaviour of transactions velocity which has been more stable. The connection lies with endogeneity of broad money. Briefly, we argue that the demand for credit and hence the broad money stock, is influenced by total spending in the economy, rather than spending only on newly produced goods and services. Since total spending in the economy has generally increased relative to GDP (mainly because of asset transactions) credit and money have expanded more rapidly than GDP, with the resulting fall in income velocity. Using quarterly data from 1975 to 2008, we estimate a vector error correction with income velocity as the dependent variable and the ratio of total to GDP transactions as an explanatory variable. The results show substantial support for the hypothesis.
Managerial Use of Metrics for Object-Oriented Software: An Exploratory Analysis

With the increasing use of object-oriented methods in new software development, there is a growing need to both document and improve current practice in object-oriented design and development. In response to this need, a number of researchers have developed various metrics for object-oriented systems as proposed aids to the management of these systems. In this research, an analysis of a set of metrics proposed by Chidamber and Kemerer (1994) is performed in order to assess their usefulness for practising managers. First, an informal introduction to the metrics is provided by way of an extended example of their managerial use. Second, exploratory analyses of empirical data relating the metrics to productivity, rework effort and design effort on three commercial object-oriented systems are provided. The empirical results suggest that the metrics provide significant explanatory power for variations in these economic variables, over and above that provided by traditional measures, such as size in lines of code, and after controlling for the effects of individual developers.
Identifiying Human MHC Supertypes Using Bioinformatic Methods

Classification of MHC molecules into supertypes in terms of peptide-binding specificities is an important issue, with direct implications for the development of epitope-based vaccines with wide population coverage. In view of extremely high MHC polymorphism (948 class I and 633 class II HLA alleles) the experimental solution of this task is presently impossible. In this study, we describe a bioinformatics strategy for classifying MHC molecules into supertypes using information drawn solely from three-dimensional protein structure. Two chemometric techniques–hierarchical clustering and principal component analysis–were used independently on a set of 783 HLA class I molecules to identify supertypes based on structural similarities and molecular interaction fields calculated for the peptide binding site. Eight supertypes were defined: A2, A3, A24, B7, B27, B44, C1, and C4. The two techniques gave 77% consensus, i.e., 605 HLA class I alleles were classified in the same supertype by both methods. The proposed strategy allowed “supertype fingerprints” to be identified. Thus, the A2 supertype fingerprint is Tyr9/Phe9, Arg97, and His114 or Tyr116; the A3-Tyr9/Phe9/Ser9, Ile97/Met97 and Glu114 or Asp116; the A24-Ser9 and Met97; the B7-Asn63 and Leu81; the B27-Glu63 and Leu81; for B44-Ala81; the C1-Ser77; and the C4-Asn77.