Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Commodity Price Volatility in the Biofuel Era: An Examination of the Linkage between Energy and Agricultural Markets

Agricultural and energy commodity prices have traditionally exhibited relatively low – even negative correlation. However, the recent increases in biofuel production have altered the agriculture-energy relationship in a fundamental way. The amount of corn utilized for ethanol production in the US has increased from 5% in 2001 to over one-third by the end of the decade. This increase has drawn corn previously sold to other uses (exports, food, feed), as well as acreage devoted to other crops (e.g., oilseeds and other grains). In addition, there has been an increase in the demand for production inputs, especially fertilizers, which are heavily energy-intensive. In short, the previous “biofuel decade” has led to significant changes in the US, and indeed the global economy.
Apoptosis drives cancer cells proliferate and metastasize

Cancer has been considered to be the result of accumulated gene mutations, which result in uncontrolled cell proliferations for a long time. Cancers are also regarded to be capable of immune evasion. Furthermore, resistance to apoptosis was recognized as an important trait of cancer in the last score of years. However, there are numerous paradoxical issues in this whole set of theory. For example, there is no known set of genes of which mutations are responsible for human cancers. As for the trait of ‘resistance to apoptosis’, the fact is that cancer has increased frequency of apoptosis. The more malignant the tumour is, the more apoptosis shows. In this study, we propose a new theory that apoptosis plays a key role in the malignant progression and metastasis of cancer. The growth of tumour is the difference between tumour cell proliferation and attrition plus the hyperplastic growth of stroma. Increased and unpreventable death caused by innate or environmental factors such as ischaemia and inflammation drives the tumour cells to proliferate relentlessly, move to new lands to establish colonies. In short, increased cell death is the origin of malignancy.
Implementing Graph Query Languages over Compressed Data Structures: A Progress Report

In this short paper we present our preliminary results on implementing two-way regular-path queries (2RPQs) over a compressed representation of graph data. We report on several experiments comparing our approach with state-ofthe-art graph database engines. Our results are encouraging; although we use a naive implementation for 2RPQs, our system exhibits a competitive performance compared with other engines.
Safety and efficacy of tocotrienol supplementation for bone health in postmenopausal women: protocol for a dose–response double-blinded placebo-controlled randomised trial

Introduction Osteoporosis is a major health concern in postmenopausal women, and oxidative stress contributes to the development of bone loss. Cellular studies and ovariectomised rat model mimicking bone loss in postmenopausal women show the bone-protective effect of tocotrienols (TTs) with antioxidant capability. We aim to access the safety and efficacy of TT consumption for bone health in postmenopausal women. Methods and analysis In this 12-week randomised double-blinded placebo-controlled trial for the effects of dietary TT supplementation in postmenopausal women, postmenopausal women aged 45 years and older with at least 1 year after menopause and bone mineral density T-score at the spine and/or hip 2.5 or more below the reference values will be randomly assigned to 3 daily supplements: (1) placebo group receiving 860 mg olive oil, (2) low TT group receiving 430 mg of 70% pure TTs (containing 300 mg TT) and (3) high TT group receiving 860 mg of 70% pure TTs (600 mg TT). The primary outcome measure will be urinary N-terminal telopeptide. The secondary outcome measures will be serum bone-specific alkaline phosphatase, receptor activator of nuclear factor-κB ligand, osteoprotegerin, urinary 8-hydroxy-2’-deoxyguanosine and quality of life. At 0, 6 and 12 weeks, the following will be assessed: (1) primary and secondary outcome measures; (2) serum TT and tocopherol concentrations; (3) physical activity and food frequency questionnaires. Liver function will be monitored every 6 weeks for safety. ‘Intent-to-treat’ principle will be employed for data analysis. A model of repeated measurements with random effect error terms will be applied. Analysis of covariance, χ2 analysis and regression will be used for comparisons. Ethics and dissemination This study was approved by the Bioethics Committee of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. The findings of this trial will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in the areas of bone or nutrition and international conferences. Trial registration number NCT02058420; results.
A sliding mode control for switched systems

The paper concentrated on how to stabilize switched systems by sliding mode control. First, all subsystems of the switched system were transformed to get reduced-order sliding motions. Variable structure controllers were designed such that all subsystems of switched systems reached their own sliding surfaces. Then switching signals were chosen and sliding surfaces were designed. A sufficient condition for switched systems to be stabizable was also given int the paper. A numerical example was given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method
Association between Nutrient Intake and Metabolic Syndrome in Patients with Colorectal Cancer

The purpose of this study was to investigate the difference of nutritional status according to metabolic syndrome in colorectal cancer patients. The subjects were divided into 2 groups (metabolic syndrome group and normal group) according to the presence or absence of metabolic syndrome in 143 patients diagnosed with colorectal cancer, and their lifestyle and nutritional status were analyzed. Recall method was used for the dietary survey, and metabolic syndrome was defined as the presence of 3 or more of waist circumference, fasting blood glucose, triglyceride, high-density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol, and blood pressure. This study showed that the metabolic syndrome group had a low age, a high body mass index (BMI), and a high drinking rate. The intake of energy, protein, fat, calcium, and phosphorus was significantly higher in the metabolic syndrome group than in the normal group, and the intake of β-carotene, vitamin C, and folic acid was significantly low. The intake of cholesterol, fatty acid, saturated fatty acid, and polyunsaturated fatty acid was also higher in the metabolic syndrome group. Higher BMI, alcohol consumption, intake of fat, total fatty acid or saturated fatty acid increased the risk of metabolic syndrome, but fiber, vitamin C, or folic acid intake lowered the risk.Weight management and balanced nutritional intake should be emphasized to prevent metabolic syndrome and to improve the condition in patients with colorectal cancer.
Text – background polarity affects performance irrespective of ambient illumination and colour contrast

In a series of experiments, proofreading performance was consistently better with positive polarity (dark text on light background) than with negative polarity displays (light text on dark background). This positive polarity advantage was independent of ambient lighting (darkness vs. typical office illumination) and of chromaticity (black and white vs. blue and yellow). A final experiment showed that colour contrast (red text on green background) could not compensate for a lack of luminance contrast. Physiological measures of effort and strain (breathing rate, heart rate, heart rate variability and skin conductance level) and self-reported mood, fatigue, arousal, eyestrain, headache, muscle strain and back pain did not vary as a function of any of the independent variables, suggesting that participants worked equally hard in all experimental conditions, so that the interpretation of the primary performance measure was unlikely to be contaminated by a performance–effort trade-off.
The role of experience in demonstrative thought

Attention plays a role in demonstrative thought: it sets the targets. Visual experience also plays a role. I argue here that it makes visual information available for use in the voluntary control of focal attention. To do so I use both introspection and neurophysiological evidence from projections between areas of attentional control and NCCs. Campbell and Smithies also identify roles for experience, but they further argue that only experience can play those roles. In contrast, I argue that experience is not the only way in which visual information could be accessed for the voluntary control of attention.
Untt Working Group on Sustainable Development Financing Chapter 4 Public Support to Private Investment for Sustainable Development: Challenges and Opportunities, with Emphasis on the Environmental Pillar

ii Executive summary In order to achieve a transition to sustainable development, economies will need to be radically transformed. Businesses and households will be responsible for the bulk of the investment needed. Such a radical transformational change will require the blending of public and private, domestic and international, capital and technical assistance finance. Global capital markets representing some USD 212 trillion in financial assets should, in principle, have the size and depth to meet large investment requirements, subject to improvements in enabling policy environment to address the significant institutional constraints in specific sectors and areas. The public sector has a critical role in setting goals, building a regulatory environment including establishing clear incentives and price signals, and investing in public infrastructure in ways that also create conditions for attractive investment risk/return profiles. A wide range of public policy and financing mechanisms can be used for this purpose. Investment can be scaled up by adopting a range of risk reduction strategies. Those include reducing risks (through fostering long-term policy stability, streamlined licensing processes, local supply of expertise, etc.), direct risk-sharing (through co-investment, guarantees and insurances.), and increasing rewards (through premium prices, tax credits, etc.) compared to existing alternatives. So far, the bulk of international public funds have been used to provide subsidies to the private sector through concessional loans or grants or risk sharing mechanisms. In recent blended energy projects financed with public support, it has been found that the rate of subsidization can easily exceed 50% of the project costs — largely eliminating the risk to the private investors and almost guaranteeing them large profits for years to come. While this approach has proven effective to demonstrate green technologies and encourage early entrant investors, it is not sustainable over the longer term and cannot promote investment at the required scale. Over the longer term, mechanisms that focus on risk-mitigation rather than risk sharing/compensating can more appropriately 'crowd-in' private sector finance. However, improvement of structural conditions for investment usually takes time – one or two decades. Thus, it may still be desirable to compensate private investors for extra risks or lower returns compared to other investment opportunities during this transition. This nevertheless, should be based on a cost-effective analysis of various mixes of risk mitigation, risk sharing and compensation instruments. Such an analysis will determine the efficiency of blended finance for sustainable development The capacity of developing countries to access financial …
Novel Putative Glycosylphosphatidylinositol-Anchored Micronemal Antigen of Plasmodium falciparum That Binds to Erythrocytes

ABSTRACT We have identified a new Plasmodium falciparum erythrocyte binding protein that appears to be located in the micronemes of the merozoite stage of the parasite and membrane linked through a glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor. The protein is designated GPI-anchored micronemal antigen (GAMA) and was identified by applying a set of selection criteria to identify previously uncharacterized merozoite proteins that may have a role in cell invasion. The protein is also present in the proteomes of the sporozoite and ookinete micronemes and is conserved throughout the genus. GAMA contains a novel domain that may be constrained by disulfide bonds and a predicted C-terminal hydrophobic sequence that is presumably replaced by the GPI. The protein is synthesized late during schizogony, processed into two fragments that are linked by a disulfide bond, and translocated to an apical location, which is probably the micronemes. In a proportion of free merozoites GAMA can also be detected on the parasite surface. Following erythrocyte invasion the bulk of the protein is shed in a soluble form, although a short C-terminal fragment may be carried into the newly invaded red blood cell. The protein was shown to bind reversibly to erythrocytes and therefore represents a new example of a host cell binding protein.
Investigating the Business Cycle Properties of Remittances to the Caribbean

This paper investigates the business cycle properties of remittances to four Caribbean countries – Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. To extract the cyclical components, the study uses the structural time series framework proposed by Harvey (1989). Variance decompositions and impulse response functions are then employed to analyse the underlying relationships between the variables. Results suggest that remittances to Barbados and Jamaica are significantly influenced by their domestic business cycles. Meanwhile, remittances to both Dominica and Trinidad and Tobago seem to be more affected by the US business cycle than economic developments in Dominica or Trinidad and Tobago, respectively.
Mining the inner structure of the Web graph

Despite being the sum of decentralized and uncoordinated efforts by heterogeneous groups and individuals, the World Wide Web exhibits a well-defined structure, characterized by several interesting properties. This structure was clearly revealed by Broder et al (2000 Graph structure in the web Comput. Netw. 33 309) who presented the evocative bow-tie picture of the Web. Although, the bow-tie structure is a relatively clear abstraction of the macroscopic picture of the Web, it is quite uninformative with respect to the finer details of the Web graph. In this paper, we mine the inner structure of the Web graph. We present a series of measurements on the Web, which offer a better understanding of the individual components of the bow-tie. In the process, we develop algorithmic techniques for performing these measurements. We discover that the scale-free properties permeate all the components of the bow-tie which exhibit the same macroscopic properties as the Web graph itself. However, close inspection reveals that their inner structure is quite distinct. We show that the Web graph does not exhibit self similarity within its components, and we propose a possible alternative picture for the Web graph, as it emerges from our experiments.
SuperDragon

The data deluge in medical imaging processing requires faster and more efficient systems. Due to the advance in recent heterogeneous architecture, there has been a resurgence in research aimed at domain-specific accelerators. In this article, we develop an experimental system SuperDragon for evaluating acceleration of a single-particle Cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) 3D reconstruction package EMAN through a hybrid of CPU, GPU, and FPGA parallel architecture. Based on a comprehensive workload characterization, we exploit multigrained parallelism in the Cryo-EM 3D reconstruction algorithm and investigate a proper computational mapping to the underlying heterogeneous architecture. The package is restructured with task-level (MPI), thread-level (OpenMP), and data-level (GPU and FPGA) parallelism. Especially, the proposed FPGA accelerator is a stream architecture that emphasizes the importance of optimizing computing dominated data access patterns. Besides, the configurable computing streams are constructed by arranging the hardware modules and bypassing channels to form a linear deep pipeline. Compared to the multicore (six-core) program, the GPU and FPGA implementations achieve speedups of 8.4 and 2.25 times in execution time while improving power efficiency by factors of 7.2 and 14.2, respectively.
Maximum lifetime routing in wireless ad-hoc networks

Routing problems in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) have been receiving increasing attention in the last few years. Most of the proposed routing protocols concentrate on finding and maintaining routes in the face of changing topology caused by mobility or other environmental changes. More recently, power-aware routing protocols and topology control algorithms have been developed to address the issue of limited energy reserve of the nodes in ad-hoc networks. We consider the routing problem in MANET with the goal of maximizing the life time of the network. We propose a distributed routing algorithm that reaches the optimal (centralized) solution to within an asymptotically small relative error. Our approach is based on the formulation of multicommodity flow, and it allows to consider different power consumption models and bandwidth constraints. It works for both static and slowly changing dynamic networks.
Newspaper Reports and Consumer Choice: Evidence from the Do Not Call Registry

Despite annual expenditures on public relations exceeding $19.42 billion, U.S. businesses lack practical guidance about the effectiveness of publicity in mass media. Here, we assemble a rich and novel data set to gauge the impact of news reports on consumer sign-ups with the U.S. Do Not Call (DNC) Registry. Using multiple identification strategies, we found robust evidence that news reports increased consumer registrations. Specifically, a 1% increase in the number of news reports increased DNC registrations by 0.018%. The impact increased with mention of the toll-free telephone number and URL, but decreased with the length of the headline and main text. Furthermore, we found evidence that reports affect behavior through persuasion as well as information---the impact on registration was higher for reports that mentioned the number of other people registering. Finally, the impact of news reports on consumer registration was stronger in national than local newspapers and in politically neutral and Democrat than Republican newspapers. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors. This paper was accepted by Pradeep Chintagunta and Preyas Desai, special issue editors.
RF Power Amplifier IC with Low Memory Effect, Reduced Low Frequency Gain Peak and Isolated Temperature Tracking Circuitry

A highly linear wideband power amplifier IC with low memory effect for W-CDMA applications is presented utilizing Si LDMOS process technology. The IC was optimized to reduce typical low frequency gain peak often observed in LDMOS power devices. Topology of the interstage matching contributes to reduction of the electrical memory effect to specification level of maximum 2 dB imbalance over power between upper and lower Adjacent Channel Power Ratio when using II-tone wideband modulated signal. The on-chip temperature compensation circuitry tracks the active device temperature characteristic without degradation of the linearity or worsens the memory effect. The measured gain of the IC was 28.5 dB and 3-dB bandwidth of 600 MHz around 2100 MHz was achieved. The IC attained -50 dBc ACPR at 5 W output power. At power level of 45 W and IMD3 = -30 dBc (two-tone) the IC exhibited power densities in excess of 469 mW/mm, in which matching losses were included. The IC demonstrated state-of-the-art RF power performance in terms of good linearity, low memory effects, well-suppressed low frequency gain peak and temperature tracking without linearity and IMD balance degradation.
Identification and Evaluation of Plasma MicroRNAs for Early Detection of Colorectal Cancer

Background Colorectal cancer (CRC) is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers. Circulating microRNAs (miRNAs) have been suggested as potentially promising markers for early detection of CRC. We aimed to identify and evaluate a panel of miRNAs that might be suitable for CRC early detection. Methods MiRNAs were profiled by TaqMan MicroRNA Array and screened for differential expression in 5 pools of plasma samples of CRC patients (N = 50) and 5 pools of neoplasm-free controls (N = 50). Additional miRNAs were selected from a literature review. Identified candidates were evaluated in independent validation samples with respect to discrimination of CRC patients (N = 80) or advanced adenoma patients (N = 50) and neoplasm-free controls (N = 194). Diagnostic performance of the panel of miRNAs was assessed by multiple logistic regression, using bootstrap analysis to correct for over-optimism. Results Five miRNAs identified to be differentially expressed from TaqMan MicroRNA Array (miR-29a, -106b, -133a, -342-3p, -532-3p), and seven miRNAs reported to be differentially expressed in the literature (miR-18a, -20a, -21, -92a, -143, -145, -181b) were selected for validation. Nine of the twelve miRNAs (miR-18a, -20a, -21, -29a, -92a, -106b, -133a, -143, -145) were found to be differentially expressed in CRC patients and controls in the validation samples. The optimism-corrected area under the curve was 0.745 (95% confidence interval: 0.708–0.846). None of the selected miRNAs showed significant differential expression between advanced adenoma patients and neoplasm-free controls. Conclusion The identified panel of miRNAs could be of potential use in the development of a multi-marker blood based test for early detection of CRC. Impact: The study underscores the high potential of plasma miRNAs for the improvement of current offers of non-invasive CRC screening.
Health-Related Quality of Life Measurement

Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) assesses the impact of illnesses on the physical, mental and social well-being of individuals and its importance is increasingly recognized [1]. Some instruments are intended for general use, irrespective of illness and the condition of the patient. The generic instruments may often be applicable to healthy people too. Some of the earliest ones were developed initially with population surveys in mind, but later was extended to include clinical trial settings. These instruments are commonly described as Quality of Life (QoL) scales and they are measures of health status since the focus is mainly on physical symptoms. Whilst the generic QoL instruments measure QoL generally and assess the various health domains, the diabetes-specific QoL is more sensitive to changes and is specific to the disease per se [2]. There are many instruments that have been developed nowadays for survey studies as well as clinical trials [3]. The aim of this paper is to present a short review on QoL and Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL).