Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A randomised controlled trial of ablation of Barrett’s oesophagus with multipolar electrocoagulation versus argon plasma coagulation in combination with acid suppression: long term results

Background: Many modalities have been used to ablate Barrett’s oesophagus (BO). However, long term results and comparative effectiveness are unknown. Aims: Our aim was to compare the long term efficacy of achieving complete reversal (endoscopic and histological) between multipolar electrocoagulation (MPEC) and argon plasma coagulation (APC) in BO patients and assess factors influencing successful ablation. Methods: Patients with BO, 2–6 cm long, underwent 24 hour pH testing on proton pump inhibitor (PPI) therapy. Patients were then randomised by BO length to undergo ablation with MPEC or APC every 4–8 weeks until endoscopic reversal or maximal of six treatment sessions. Results: Thirty five BO patients have been followed for at least two years following endoscopic ablation, 16 treated with MPEC and 19 with APC. There was complete reversal of BO in 24 patients (69%); 75% with MPEC and 63% with APC (p = 0.49). There was no difference in the number of sessions required in the two groups. There was no difference in age, pH results, BO length, PPI dose, or hiatal hernia size between patients with and without complete reversal. One patient developed an oesophageal stricture but there were no major complications such as bleeding or perforation. Conclusions: In BO patients treated with MPEC or APC in combination with acid suppression, at long term follow up, complete reversal of BO can be maintained in approximately 70% of patients, irrespective of the technique. There are no predictors associated with achieving complete reversal of BO. Continued surveillance is still indicated in the post ablative setting. As yet, these techniques are not ready for clinical application (other than for high grade dysplasia or early oesophageal adenocarcinoma) and cannot be offered outside the research arena.
Loss analysis of rotor magnet with PWM controller switching frequency variation

When high-power Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) is operating with large stator current and high rotating speed there will be large amount of harmonics component in stator winding and deduce significant eddy current loss in rotor magnet. A detailed analytical method was proposed which calculated the eddy current loss in rotor magnet based on FFT analysis of stator current. A Finite Element Method (FEM) was founded to evaluate the relation of eddy current loss in rotor magnet and stator winding harmonics which were caused by different switching frequency. The flux densities in air gap, eddy current distribution and eddy current loss in rotor magnet were investigated. At last a testing method was applied to measuring the eddy current loss in rotor magnet which is based on testing descending of back Electromotive Force (EMF), temperature of rotor magnet. The three results have a good agreement with each other.
Un territoire littoral dans l’espace politique, économique et religieux du Sénégal. Le cas de la baie de Ouakam (Dakar)

Les zones littorales, qui regroupent une part de plus en plus importante des populations, sont soumises a la fois aux changements environnementaux globaux et a l’accroissement des pressions anthropiques regionales et locales. Ces facteurs induisent des modifications complexes et souvent mal comprises de leur fonctionnement. L’adaptation des populations senegalaises aux effets erosifs de la derive littorale, a la rarefaction des ressources halieutiques, aux pollutions domestiques et industrielles, releve d’une histoire deja longue de concurrences d’usages entre pecheries, besoins residentiels et recreatifs. Espaces d’enjeux fonciers, economico-touristiques, religieux, halieutiques, les littoraux de la ville de Dakar repondent a des logiques d’interet, d’evitements mais aussi de composition et de conflits, tous determinants pour une mise en forme politique du debat ecologique senegalais. Le cas de la baie de Ouakam, ou des personnes aux activites et interets divers se croisent sur un territoire restreint, nous permettra de mettre en evidence la marginalisation de certains usagers des spheres de decision. Nous tenterons ensuite d’analyser le rapport entretenu tant par les nouvelles structures que par les usagers, au principe de responsabilite dans cette gestion environnementale.
Photochemical activation of endosomal escape of MRI‐Gd‐agents in tumor cells

Endocytosis is a common internalization pathway for cellular labeling with MRI contrast agents. However, the entrapment of the Gd(III) complexes into endosomes results in a “quenching” of the attainable relaxivity when the number of Gd(III) complexes reaches the number of ca. 1 × 109/cell. Herein we show that the use of the newly developed photochemical internalization technique provides an efficient method for attaining the endosomal escape of GdHPDO3A molecules entrapped by pinocytosis into different kind of cells. Furthermore, it has been found that a new “quenching” limit is observed when the number of Gd‐HPDO3A complexes is ca. five times higher than the value observed for the endosome entrapped conditions. The observed behavior is explained in terms of the attainment of the conditions in which the difference in proton relaxation rates between the cytoplasmic and the extracellular compartment is higher than the exchange rate of water molecules across the cellular membrane. The experimental data points have been reproduced by using a properly designed theoretical compartment T1‐relaxation model. Magn Reson Med, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Emotional responses to peer praise in children with and without a diagnosed externalizing disorder.

For comparing externalizing and nonexternalizing children's emotional expression and appraisal of their emotional experience in response to positive peer feedback, 60 children ages 7 to 14 years (M age = 10.6), half with diagnosed externalizing disorders, were videotaped as they received positive feedback from another child and then interviewed
Longitudinal Study on the Expectations of Cloud Computing Benefits and an Integrative Multilevel Model for Understanding Cloud Computing Performance

Cloud computing, a term introduced ten years ago, has proliferated rapidly both in developed and developing economies. Benefit expectations have impacted the rapid usage increase of this technology. We investigated with a five-year longitudinal survey changes in the expectations regarding cloud computing. We also crafted an integrated multilevel model to understand how cloud expectations and cloud readiness influence cloud computing deployment and performance combined with five IT business value (ITBV) factors. We tested empirically the crafted hypotheses and the research model using survey data collected from approximately 200+200 randomly selected business and IT executives in 2014 and 2015. Empirical results confirmed that our research model explained approximately one half of cloud computing performance for both years.
High Abilities and Information Technologies: The Talento Metrópole Brazilian Program

The study presents the Brazilian experience of the Talento Metropole program, linked to the Digital Metropolis Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, located in Brazil’s Northeast. The Talento Metropole program aims to develop the interest of young people with high abilities/intellectual giftedness in scientific research, expand skills and abilities, and get creative in the fields of information technology and its interfaces, always seeking innovation and entrepreneurship. It also aims to create opportunities for the dissemination of new knowledge and to explore career opportunities related to this area, with the purpose of creatively inserting young people into the labor market and into solidary social participation. The participants are students from public and private schools, colleges and universities, aged between 13 and 21 years. The steps that comprise the structure of the program are described and characterized. In addition, the selection process for admission to the program is described, with emphasis on the stage which illustrates the development and characterization of the instrument which investigate the sources of skills and expertise subjacent to the field of information technology.
Increasing the sonoporation efficiency of targeted polydisperse microbubble populations using chirp excitation

The therapeutic use of microbubbles for targeted drug or gene delivery is a highly active area of research. Phospholipid-encapsulated microbubbles typically have a polydisperse size distribution over the 1 to 10 μm range and can be functionalized for molecular targeting and loaded with drug-carrying liposomes. Sonoporation through the generation of shear stress on the cell membrane by microbubble oscillations is one mechanism that results in pore formation in the cell membrane and can improve drug delivery. A microbubble oscillating at its resonant frequency would generate maximum shear stress on a membrane. However, because of the polydisperse nature of phospholipid microbubbles, a range of resonant frequencies would exist in a single population. In this study, the use of linear chirp excitations was compared with equivalent duration and acoustic pressure tone excitations when measuring the sonoporation efficiency of targeted microbubbles on human colorectal cancer cells. A 3 to 7 MHz chirp had the greatest sonoporation efficiency of 26.9 ± 5.6%, compared with 16.4 ± 1.1% for the 1.32 to 3.08 MHz chirp. The equivalent 2.2- and 5-MHz tone excitations have efficiencies of 12.8 ± 2.1% and 15.6 ± 1.1%, respectively, which were all above the efficiency of 4.1 ± 3.1% from the control exposure.
Association of lower airway inflammation with physiologic findings in young children with cystic fibrosis

The relationship between lower airway markers of inflammation and infection with physiologic findings is poorly understood in young children with cystic fibrosis (CF). The goal of this study was to evaluate the association of bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) markers of infection and inflammation, including mediators linked to airway remodeling, to infant lung function values in young children with CF undergoing clinically indicated bronchoscopy.
Superior Students: Family Size, Birth Order and Intellectual Ability

Charles J. Pulvino & Paul E. Lupton University of Minnesota In the past decade the scores of students participating in the American College Testing Program have declined at an average annual rate of approximately three percent (Munday, 1976). Interpretations based on this decline has led ACT personnel to two conclusions; that either there has been a definite change in the population of test takers or that those students taking tests are academically less well prepared. Inferences that can be drawn from these two possibilities are that high school teachers are not preparing students as well as they once did or that students have less capability in test taking. Studies by Zajonc (1976) and Zajonc and Markus (1975) would offer more credance to the latter hypothesis. In these studies, a model of confluence has been developed in which it is
AXaaS: Case for acceleration as a service

The ubiquity and the range of utility of "smart" devices is ever increasing. Device limitations have lead developers to leverage cloud-offloading to gain performance for their applications. As users become aware of the expanding utility of their devices through these powerful applications, they tend to demand more from them. However, developers' intent on providing state-of-the-art applications will undoubtedly hit performance barriers for emerging products due to the inherently high latency of the prevailing mobile-cloud architecture. This paper proposes a new type of service architecture called AXaaS (Acceleration as a Service) that will empower developers to satisfy user demand for greater application performance and fully realize new computationally-intensive applications that would be otherwise impossible or impractical. While Telecom Service Providers (TSP) already provide data and bandwidth services, we introduce a new paradigm in which the TSP may charge subscribers for computational acceleration of complex applications by outsourcing computational tasks to larger cloud operators. We provide an exposition of the performance potential of such a service by examining its theoretical impact upon an open-source-based Face Recognition application. We also examine a sample instantiation of cloud resources via Amazon Web Services, and estimate the return on investment for a TSP implementing AXaaS. We find the TSP-side ROI to be quite favorable, which means that AXaaS is a viable new aaS alternative.
Feature Decay Algorithms for Fast Deployment of Accurate Statistical Machine Translation Systems

We use feature decay algorithms (FDA) for fast deployment of accurate statistical machine translation systems taking only about half a day for each translation direction. We develop parallel FDA for solving computational scalability problems caused by the abundance of training data for SMT models and LM models and still achieve SMT performance that is on par with using all of the training data or better. Parallel FDA runs separate FDA models on randomized subsets of the training data and combines the instance selections later. Parallel FDA can also be used for selecting the LM corpus based on the training set selected by parallel FDA. The high quality of the selected training data allows us to obtain very accurate translation outputs close to the top performing SMT systems. The relevancy of the selected LM corpus can reach up to 86% reduction in the number of OOV tokens and up to 74% reduction in the perplexity. We perform SMT experiments in all language pairs in the WMT13 translation task and obtain SMT performance close to the top systems using significantly less resources for training and development.
2-Amino-4-methylpyridinium 2-hydroxy-3,5-dinitrobenzoate

In the anion of the title molecular salt, C6H9N2 +·C7H3N2O7 −, the two nitro groups are twisted from the attached benzene ring with dihedral angles of 27.36 (10) and 4.86 (11)°. The anion is stabilized by an intramolecular O—H⋯O hydrogen bond, which generates an S(6) ring motif. In the crystal, the cations and anions are linked by N—H⋯O and C—H⋯O interactions and are further consolidated by C—H⋯π interactions, to generate a three-dimensional network. A short O⋯N contact of 2.876 (2) Å also occurs.
Compiler code transformations for superscalar-based high-performance systems

A set of compiler transformations designed to increase instruction-level parallelism is described. The effectiveness of these transformations is evaluated using 40 loop nests extracted from a range of supercomputer applications. This evaluation shows that increasing execution resources in superscalar/VLIW node processors yields little performance improvement unless loop unrolling and register renaming are applied. It also reveals that these two transformations are sufficient for DOALL loops. However, more advanced transformations are required in order for serial and DOACROSS loops to fully benefit from the increased execution resources. The results show that the six additional transformations studied satisfy most of this need. <<ETX>>
Robust estimation of curvature information from noisy 3D data for shape description

We describe an effective and novel approach to infer sign and direction of principal curvatures at each input site from noisy 3D data. Unlike most previous approaches, no local surface fitting, partial derivative computation of any kind, nor oriented normal vector recovery is performed in our method. These approaches are noise-sensitive since accurate, local, partial derivative information is often required, which is usually unavailable from real data because of the unavoidable outlier noise inherent in many measurement phases. Also, we can handle points with zero Gaussian curvature uniformly (i.e., without the need to localize and handle them first as a separate process). Our approach is based on Tensor Voting, a unified, salient structure inference process. Both the sign and the direction of principal curvatures are inferred directly from the input. Each input is first transformed into a synthetic tensor A novel and robust approach based on tensor voting is proposed for curvature information estimation. With faithfully inferred curvature information, each input ellipsoid is aligned with curvature-based dense tensor kernels to produce a dense tensor field. Surfaces and crease curves are extracted from this dense field, by using an extremal feature extraction process. The computation is non-iterative, does not require initialization, and robust to considerable amounts of outlier noise as its effect is reduced by collecting a large number of tensor votes. qualitative and quantitative results on synthetic as well as real and complex data are presented.
Tumour inflammasome-derived IL-1β recruits neutrophils and improves local recurrence-free survival in EBV-induced nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Inflammasomes sense infection and cellular damage and are critical for triggering inflammation through IL‐1β production. In carcinogenesis, inflammasomes may have contradictory roles through facilitating antitumour immunity and inducing oncogenic factors. Their function in cancer remains poorly characterized. Here we show that the NLRP3, AIM2 and RIG‐I inflammasomes are overexpressed in Epstein‐Barr virus (EBV)‐associated nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC), and expression levels correlate with patient survival. In tumour cells, AIM2 and RIG‐I are required for IL‐1β induction by EBV genomic DNA and EBV‐encoded small RNAs, respectively, while NLRP3 responds to extracellular ATP and reactive oxygen species. Irradiation and chemotherapy can further activate AIM2 and NLRP3, respectively. In mice, tumour‐derived IL‐1β inhibits tumour growth and enhances survival through host responses. Mechanistically, IL‐1β‐mediated anti‐tumour effects depend on infiltrated immunostimulatory neutrophils. We show further that presence of tumour‐associated neutrophils is significantly associated with better survival in NPC patients. Thus, tumour inflammasomes play a key role in tumour control by recruiting neutrophils, and their expression levels are favourable prognostic markers and promising therapeutic targets in patients.
Curve-Skeleton Properties, Applications, and Algorithms

Curve-skeletons are thinned 1D representations of 3D objects useful for many visualization tasks including virtual navigation, reduced-model formulation, visualization improvement, animation, etc. There are many algorithms in the literature describing extraction methodologies for different applications; however, it is unclear how general and robust they are. In this paper, we provide an overview of many curve-skeleton applications and compile a set of desired properties of such representations. We also give a taxonomy of methods and analyze the advantages and drawbacks of each class of algorithms.
Carbonate Hydroxyapatite and Silicon-Substituted Carbonate Hydroxyapatite: Synthesis, Mechanical Properties, and Solubility Evaluations

The present study investigates the chemical composition, solubility, and physical and mechanical properties of carbonate hydroxyapatite (CO3Ap) and silicon-substituted carbonate hydroxyapatite (Si-CO3Ap) which have been prepared by a simple precipitation method. X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy, and inductively coupled plasma (ICP) techniques were used to characterize the formation of CO3Ap and Si-CO3Ap. The results revealed that the silicate (SiO4 4−) and carbonate (CO3 2−) ions competed to occupy the phosphate (PO4 3−) site and also entered simultaneously into the hydroxyapatite structure. The Si-substituted CO3Ap reduced the powder crystallinity and promoted ion release which resulted in a better solubility compared to that of Si-free CO3Ap. The mean particle size of Si-CO3Ap was much finer than that of CO3Ap. At 750°C heat-treatment temperature, the diametral tensile strengths (DTS) of Si-CO3Ap and CO3Ap were about 10.8 ± 0.3 and 11.8 ± 0.4 MPa, respectively.
VAR2CSA and protective immunity against pregnancy-associated Plasmodium falciparum malaria

SUMMARY People living in areas with stable transmission of P. falciparum parasites acquire protective immunity to malaria over a number of years and following multiple disease episodes. Immunity acquired this way is mediated by IgG with specificity for parasite-encoded, clonally variant surface antigens (VSA) on the surface of infected erythrocytes (IEs). However, women in endemic areas become susceptible to P. falciparum infection when they become pregnant, particularly for the first time, regardless of previously acquired protective immunity. This conundrum was resolved when it was observed that the selective placental accumulation of IEs that characterizes pregnancy-associated malaria (PAM) is caused by an immunologically and functionally unique subset of VSA (VSAPAM) that is only expressed by parasites infecting pregnant women, and that protective immunity to PAM is mediated by IgG with specificity for VSAPAM. In this review we summarize the research leading to the identification of the distinctly structured PfEMP1 variant VAR2CSA as the dominant PAM-type VSA and as the clinically most important target of the protective immune response to placental P. falciparum infection.
Television and Video Game Exposure and the Development of Attention Problems

OBJECTIVES: Television viewing has been associated with greater subsequent attention problems in children. Few studies have examined the possibility of a similar association between video games and attention problems, and none of these has used a longitudinal design. METHODS: A sample of 1323 middle childhood participants were assessed during a 13-month period by parent- and child-reported television and video game exposure as well as teacher-reported attention problems. Another sample of 210 late adolescent/early adult participants provided self-reports of television exposure, video game exposure, and attention problems. RESULTS: Exposure to television and video games was associated with greater attention problems. The association of television and video games to attention problems in the middle childhood sample remained significant when earlier attention problems and gender were statistically controlled. The associations of screen media and attention problems were similar across media type (television or video games) and age (middle childhood or late adolescent/early adult). CONCLUSIONS: Viewing television and playing video games each are associated with increased subsequent attention problems in childhood. It seems that a similar association among television, video games, and attention problems exists in late adolescence and early adulthood. Research on potential risk factors for attention problems should be expanded to include video games in addition to television.
Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science

As this book makes clear, current use of data structures such as frames, scripts, and stereotypes in psychology, artificial intelligence, and all the other disciplines now grouped together as Cognitive Science develop ideas already explored by Husserl who believed that the analysis of mental representations was the proper subject of philosophy, psychology, and other disciplines that deal with the mind.This new anthology will serve as an ideal introduction to phenomenology for analytic philosophers, both as a text and as the single most useful source book on Husserl for cognitive scientists.Hubert L. Dreyfus is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. He is author of the best-selling and controversial book, What Computers Can't Do. Harrison Hall, who has collaborated with Dreyfus on much of the book, is on the philsophy faculty at the University of Delaware. An MIT Press/Bradford Book.