Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Screening of BRCA1 Mutation Using Immunohistochemical Staining with C‐Terminal and N‐Terminal Antibodies in Familial Ovarian Cancers

We examined the subcellular localization of BRCA1 proteins using immunohistochemical staining with C‐terminal (GLK‐2 antibody) and N‐terminal (Ab‐2 antibody) monoclonal antibodies in 44 familial ovarian cancers. Among these, 24 cases were associated with 13 independent germ‐line mutations of BRCA1, and loss of heterozygosity (LOH) at one or more BRCA1 microsatellite markers was found in all 21 informative tumors tested. With GLK‐2 antibody, cytoplasmic staining was observed in 15 of 16 tumors (93.8%) with mutation in exon 11, and BRCA1 staining was absent in 8 of 8 tumors (100%) with mutation in exons other than exon 11. When immunohistochemical staining was performed with Ab‐2 antibody, both nuclear and cytoplasmic staining were observed in 14 of 16 tumors (87.5%) with mutation in exon 11. Interestingly, nuclear staining was observed in 3 of 3 tumors (100%) with mutation downstream of exon 11, even though no staining was detected in 5 of 5 tumors (100%) with mutation upstream of exon 11. On the other hand, in familial ovarian cancers without BRCA1 mutations, nuclear staining or both nuclear and cytoplasmic staining was observed in 18 of 20 specimens (90%) and 20 of 20 specimens (100%) with GLK‐2 antibody and with Ab‐2 antibody, respectively. These results suggest that an immunohistochemical assay in combination with employing the C‐terminal and the N‐terminal antibodies appears to have potential as a reliable and useful technique for the screening of BRCA1 mutations, at least to predict the status of mutation, upstream or downstream of exon 11.
Chlamydia trachomatis genital tract infection of antibody-deficient gene knockout mice

The importance of antibody-mediated immunity in primary and secondary Chlamydia trachomatis genital tract infections was examined by using a definitive model of B-cell deficiency, the microMT/microMT gene knockout mouse. Vaginally infected B-cell-deficient microMT/microMT mice developed a self-limiting primary infection that was indistinguishable from infection of control C57BL/6 mice. Sera and vaginal secretions from infected mice were analyzed for anti-Chlamydia antibodies. C57BL/6 mice produced high-titered serum anti-Chlamydia immunoglobulin G2a (IgG2a), IgG2b, and IgA antibodies, and vaginal washes contained predominately anti-Chlamydia IgA. Serum and vaginal washes from infected B-cell-deficient mice were negative for anti-Chlamydia antibody. T-cell proliferation and delayed-type hypersensitivity assays were used as measures of Chlamydia-specific cell-mediated immunity and were found to be comparable for C57BL/6 and B-cell-deficient mice. Seventy days following primary infection, mice were rechallenged to assess acquired immunity. B-cell-deficient mice which lack anti-Chlamydia antibodies were more susceptible to reinfection than immunocompetent C57BL/6 mice. However, acquired immune resistance was evident in both strains of mice and characterized by decreased shedding of chlamydiae and an infection of shorter duration. Thus, this study demonstrates that cell-mediated immune responses alone were capable of resolving chlamydial infection; however, in the absence of specific antibody, mice were more susceptible to reinfection. Therefore, these data suggest that both humoral and cell-mediated immune responses were important mediators of immune protection in this model, though cell-mediated immune responses appear to play a more dominant role.
Male movements as honest cues to reproductive quality

Background: Research concerning sexual selection suggests that ornaments and traits convey information that is valuable to observers when making decisions based on adaptive problems. In the animal kingdom males perform dynamic courtship displays and females assess such displays when choosing a mate. In humans however this avenue of research is in its infancy but an emerging field of study has sought to find out if dance movements, which are thought to be courtship displays, provide observers with condition dependent information. Objectives: i) To create a methodology that records dance movements with high accuracy whilst eliminating structural cues known to influence mate choice decisions while maintaining a highly realistic human form. ii) Use this methodology to assess whether traits of interest (health, fitness, strength and age) can be detected by observers. iii) To establish if particular movements are mediating perceptions of dance quality and their condition. Methods: A cutting edge motion capture system and professional animation software was used to record dances. Each male dancer either provided information on his health status, physical fitness, strength or age. Dance animations were shown to observers and their perceptions were correlated against the traits of interest. These were also correlated against basic biomechanical characteristics to establish possible mediators. Results: It was revealed that whilst health measures were not related to dance ratings, strength measures were and these perceptions were mediated by movements of the upper body. A final study found that age was detectable by male participants and related to masculinity ratings of female raters but no biomechanical mediators were found. Conclusion: Men and women are able to derive certain quality cues from observing male dance and in some instances biomechanical characteristics mediated this relationship. This provides evidence that dance may be used in the assessment of males in the context of sexual selection.
Interactive relevance search and modeling: support for expert-driven analysis of multimodal data

In this paper we present the findings of three longitudinal case studies in which a new method for conducting multimodal analysis of human behavior is tested. The focus of this new method is to engage a researcher integrally in the analysis process and allow them to guide the identification and discovery of relevant behavior instances within multimodal data. The case studies resulted in the creation of two analysis strategies: Single-Focus Hypothesis Testing and Multi-Focus Hypothesis Testing. Each were shown to be beneficial to multimodal analysis through supporting either a single focused deep analysis or analysis across multiple angles in unison. These strategies exemplified how challenging questions can be answered for multimodal datasets. The new method is described and the case studies' findings are presented detailing how the new method supports multimodal analysis and opens the door for a new breed of analysis methods. Two of the three case studies resulted in publishable results for the respective participants.
Hand occlusion with tablet-sized direct pen input

We present results from an experiment examining the area occluded by the hand when using a tablet-sized direct pen input device. Our results show that the pen, hand, and forearm can occlude up to 47% of a 12 inch display. The shape of the occluded area varies between participants due to differences in pen grip rather than simply anatomical differences. For the most part, individuals adopt a consistent posture for long and short selection tasks. Overall, many occluded pixels are located higher relative to the pen than previously thought. From the experimental data, a five-parameter scalable circle and pivoting rectangle geometric model is presented which captures the general shape of the occluded area relative to the pen position. This model fits the experimental data much better than the simple bounding box model often used implicitly by designers. The space of fitted parameters also serves to quantify the shape of occlusion. Finally, an initial design for a predictive version of the model is discussed.
Combination of Cepstral and Phonetically Discriminative Features for Speaker Verification

Most speaker recognition systems rely on short-term acoustic cepstral features for extracting the speaker-relevant information from the signal. But phonetic discriminant features, extracted by a bottle-neck multi-layer perceptron (MLP) on longer stretches of time, can provide a complementary information and have been adopted in speech transcription systems. We compare the speaker verification performance using cepstral features, discriminant features, and a concatenation of both followed by a dimension reduction. We consider two speaker recognition systems, one based on maximum likelihood linear regression (MLLR) super-vectors and the other on a state-of-the-art i-vector system with two session variability compensation schemes. Experiments are reported on a standard configuration of NIST SRE 2008 and 2010 databases. The results show that the phonetically discriminative MLP features retain speaker-specific information which is complementary to the short-term cepstral features. The performance improvement is obtained with both score domain and feature domain fusion and the speaker verification equal error rate (EER) is reduced up to 50% relative, compared to the best i-vector system using only cepstral features.
Using multi-objective design space exploration to enable run-time resource management for reconfigurable architectures

Resource run-time managers have been shown particularly effective for coordinating the usage of the hardware resources by multiple applications, eliminating the necessity of a full-blown operating system. For this reason, we expect that this technology will be increasingly adopted in emerging multi-application reconfigurable systems. This paper introduces a fully automated design flow that exploits multi-objective design space exploration to enable runtime resource management for the Molen reconflgurable architecture. The entry point of the design flow is the application source code; our flow is able to heuristically determine a set of candidate hardware/software configurations of the application (i.e., operating points) that trade off the occupation of the reconflgurable fabric (in this case, an FPGA), the load of the master processor and the performance of the application itself. This information enables a run-time manager to exploit more efficiently the available system resources in the context of multiple applications. We present the results of an experimental campaign where we applied the proposed design flow to two reference audio applications mapped on the Molen architecture. The analysis proved that the overhead of the design space exploration and operating points extraction with respect to the original Molen flow is within reasonable bounds since the final synthesis time still represents the major contribution. Besides, we have found that there is a high variance in terms of execution time speedup associated with the operating points of the application (characterized by a different usage of the FPGA) which can be exploited by the run-time manager to increase/decrease the quality of service of the application depending on the available resources1.
EFECTOS DEL EJERCICIO FÍSICO SOBRE LA MEMORIA EPISÓDICA EN ANCIANAS CHILENAS SANAS EFFECTS OF PHYSICAL EXERCISE ON THE EPISODIC MEMORY IN HEALTHY ELDERLY CHILEANS

Our objective was to analyze the effect of a regular physical activity program on the verbal and visuospatial episodic memory on mentally healthy elderly Chileans. Participated 74 elderly women without cognitive impairment – divided into an intervention group = 34 elderly women, who carried out physical activity for six months; and a control group = 40 sedentary women. We used the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT), and the Rey Complex Figure Test (RCFT) for the evaluation of the episodic memory. Analysis were performed inter- and intra-group with t student and d of Cohen to measure the effect size of t-tests. The results showed statistically significant differences in the post-test between the Intervention Group (IG) and Control Group (CG); noticing better yields in the verbal and visual episodic memory of the IG with a large size effect. It is concluded that regular physical activity increases the processing capacity, retention, and evocation of the verbal and visual episodic information in healthy elderly women.
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor: the link between amyloid-β and memory loss

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is a critical molecule for learning and memory. Brain BDNF levels correlate with cognitive status. BDNF is downregulated in Alzheimer’s disease, in age-related cognitive impairment and in a variety of other neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders exhibiting cognitive deficits. BDNF is downregulated in the Alzheimer’s disease brain by soluble, aggregated amyloid-β, acting via a pathway involving the transcription factor cAMP response element binding protein, which activates BDNF transcript IV. The complete pathway by which BDNF is downregulated is still unclear, and the diagnostic and therapeutic use of BDNF in neurodegenerative disease has not yet been exploited.
Reproductive performance of postpartum ewes treated with insulin or progesterone hormones in association with ram effect.

The reproductive performance of postpartum Santa Inês (SI) and Morada Nova (MN) ewes treated with insulin or progesterone hormones in association with ram effect was evaluated. Ewes from SI (n = 69) and MN (n = 69) breeds were randomly allocated to three groups of each breed (T1-ram effect only; T2-ram effect + insulin; T3-ram effect + progesterone). Progesterone concentrations (ηg/ml; mean ± SD) before and after introduction of rams (n = 6) were 0.51 ± 0.22 and 3.78 ± 0.68 (T1), 0.65 ± 0.21 and 3.77 ± 0.78 (T2) and 0.52 ± 0.21 and 3.84 ± 0.84 (T3) in SI ewes and 0.74 ± 0.19 and 3.71 ± 0.56 (T1), 0.70 ± 0.21 and 3.79 ± 0.75 (T2) and 0.81 ± 0.14 and 3.87 ± 0.80 (T3) in MN ewes, respectively. Thus, lower progesterone concentrations were found before the introduction of rams (p < .05). After the introduction of rams, preovulatory peaks of LH (ηg/ml) occurred at 28 (T1), 44 (T2) and 48 (T3) hr in SI ewes and at 64 (T1), 40 (T2) and 44 (T3) hr in MN ewes. The mean number of ovulations was similar between groups (p > .05), was 1.3 ± 0.51 (T1), 1.5 ± 0.54 (T2) and 1.6 ± 0.51 (T3) in SI ewes and 1.3 ± 0.51 (T1), 1.6 ± 0.51 (T2) and 1.6 ± 0.51 (T3) in MN ewes. In conclusion, the ram effect alone is effective at inducing and synchronizing oestrus in sheep under postpartum anoestrus, irrespective of hormone treatments.
Evolution of quality and patient safety in Israel.

We arrived on the ward in the morning and heard the senior physician say: ‘We need to draw blood from this patient, but because he has no veins in his hands we will need to find another place, perhaps the neck? ’ One of us approached the patient and drew blood from the jugular vein; he wanted to use a venous clamp to aid him, intending to tie it around the patient's neck. Another patient post prostate surgery had a catheter in his urinary tract. He called the nurse and complained about severe burning in his penis. The nurse calmed him down and immediately brought an antacid solution, with which she irrigated the urinary catheter. ‘The burning in the urinary tract will now pass and you will feel better’ assured the nurse. Thirty years ago these anecdotes and many others were told by us, hospital residents, as popular stories, at social gatherings. There was awareness about patient safety, but when it came to errors in treatments or in administering medications, we dealt with the subject jovially and with a sense of humor, without a need for full, organized reporting. In those days, we believed that physician safety took precedence over patient safety and that there was no real connection between quality of medicine and patient safety. We learned, and we taught the next generation, that for example, liver biopsies needed to be performed before noon because if the biopsy was performed in the afternoon and complications ensued, not all of the needed staff would be present at this time of the day in the hospital. We as physicians might then find ourselves in a …
Scheduling parallelizable tasks to minimize average response time

A <italic>parallelizable</italic> (or <italic>malleable</italic>) task is one which can be run on an arbitrary number of processors, with a task execution time that depends on the number of processors allotted to it. Consider a system of <italic>M</italic> independent parallelizable tasks which are to be scheduled without preemption on a parallel computer consisting of <italic>P</italic> identical processors. For each task, the execution time is a known function of the number of processors allotted to it. The goal is to find (1) for each task <italic>i</italic>, an allotment of processors β, and (2) overall, a non-preemptive schedule assigning the tasks to the processors which minimizes the average response time of the tasks. Equivalently, we can minimize the <italic>flow time</italic> which is the sum of the completion times of each of the tasks. In this paper we tackle the problem of finding a schedule with minimum average response time in the special case where each task in the system has sublinear speedup. This natural restriction on the task execution time means simply that the efficiency of a task decrease or remains constant as the number of processors allotted to it increases. The scheduling problem with sublinear speedups has been shown to be <inline-equation> <f> <ty><sc>NP</sc></ty></f> </inline-equation>-complete in the strong sense. We therefore focus on finding a polynomial time algorithm whose solution comes within a fixed multiplicative constant of optimal. In particular, we given algorithm which finds a schedule having a response time that is within 2 times that of the optimal schedule and which runs in O(M(M<supscrpt>2</supscrpt> + P)) time.
Book Review : The Cultural Context in Business Communication. Edited by Susanne Niemeier, Charles P. Campbell, and Rene Dirven. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998. 269 pages

1996. No wonder, therefore, that while the book is likely to make interesting and useful reading to many trainers and teachers operating in the field, there is little that would greatly fascinate us for its innovativeness or surprise us with a fresh approach to culture and business communication. In her introduction, editor Susanne Niemeier says that the aim of the volume is to &dquo;enable business negotiators or future business negotiators, or their trainers, to become aware of the different kinds of intercultural traps they may encounter when dealing with representatives of foreign cultures&dquo; (p. 2). This the volume hopes to do by shedding light particularly
Workplace and family support and work–life balance: Implications for individual psychological availability and energy at work

This study presents three studies that explore the ways in which multiple support sources (workplace and family social support) help individuals to experience work–life balance (WLB) and thereby develop a sense psychological availability and positive energy at work. We examine this serial mediation model across three population groups in Israel using time-lagged data from part-time students (sample 1), as well cross-sectional data from workers in the industrial sector (sample 2) and physicians in public hospitals (sample 3). The results indicate a complex process in which workplace and family support augment employee positive energy through WLB and psychological availability. The findings shed light on the importance of support from work and nonwork sources for the pursuit of employees to achieve balance in the spheres of work and life and suggest that the WLB helps in the development of psychological availability and augmenting employee positive energy.
Independent Evaluation of the Integrated Community Case Management of Childhood Illness Strategy in Malawi Using a National Evaluation Platform Design

We evaluated the impact of integrated community case management of childhood illness (iCCM) on careseeking for childhood illness and child mortality in Malawi, using a National Evaluation Platform dose-response design with 27 districts as units of analysis. “Dose” variables included density of iCCM providers, drug availability, and supervision, measured through a cross-sectional cellular telephone survey of all iCCM-trained providers. “Response” variables were changes between 2010 and 2014 in careseeking and mortality in children aged 2–59 months, measured through household surveys. iCCM implementation strength was not associated with changes in careseeking or mortality. There were fewer than one iCCM-ready provider per 1,000 under-five children per district. About 70% of sick children were taken outside the home for care in both 2010 and 2014. Careseeking from iCCM providers increased over time from about 2% to 10%; careseeking from other providers fell by a similar amount. Likely contributors to the failure to find impact include low density of iCCM providers, geographic targeting of iCCM to “hard-to-reach” areas although women did not identify distance from a provider as a barrier to health care, and displacement of facility careseeking by iCCM careseeking. This suggests that targeting iCCM solely based on geographic barriers may need to be reconsidered.
Passive optical network range applicable to cost-effective mobile fronthaul

In 5th generation mobile communications systems (5G), the number of small cells with centralized-radio access network (C-RAN) architecture is expected to increase greatly. Time division multiplexing-passive optical networks (TDM-PON) are promising transmission systems for networks between a baseband unit (BBU) and a remote radio head (RRH). However, there is a challenge as regards the ultra-low latency requirements of 5G including less than 1 ms for end-to-end communication, because a TDM-PON generally transmits using time division multiple access (TDMA) as a basis. In this paper, we derive the achievable latency and the number of RRHs accommodable by TDM-PON, and analyze the applicable range of a TDM-PON for mobile use. Our analysis shows that it is possible to design a PON application in accordance with the latency requirements of mobile systems.
Learning to Teach in Higher Education

Part 1: Learning and Teaching in Higher Education 1.Introduction 2.Ways if Understanding Teaching 3.What Students Learn 4.Approaches to Learning 5.Learning form the Student's Perspective 6.The Nature of Good Teaching in Higher Education 7.Theories of Teaching in Higher Education Part 2: Design for Learning 8.The Goals and Structure of a Course 9.Tecahing Strategies for Effective Learning 10.Assessing for Understanding Part 3: Evaluating and Improving the Quality of Teaching and Learning 11.Evaluating the Quality of Higher Education 12.What Does it Take to Improve Teaching?