Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
[Reversion of drug-resistant hepatocellular carcinoma cell line BEL-7402/FU by sorafenib].

AIM To investigate the reversion of multidrug resistance of drug-resistant hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cell line BEL-7402/FU by sorafenib and the possible mechanisms. METHODS Flow cytometry was applied to detect the expression of rhodamine 123 (Rho123), immunohistochemistry was applied to observe the expression of P-glycoprotein (P-gp) on the cell membrane, the fluorescence quantitative PCR assay was applied to determine the changes of the multidrug-resistant gene mdr1 mRNA level and the Western blot assay was applied to test the changes of the expression level of the mdr1 gene product P-gp. RESULTS After 4 micromol/L treatment by sorafenib, Rho123 accumulation was increased by BEL-7402/FU and exocytosis was slowed down, which evidently reduced the expression of cell surface P-gp; the mdr1 mRNA level was reduced by 35.4% compared to its level prior to drug administration; the expression level of the mdr1 gene product P-gp was significantly suppressed, 14.3% fewer than that of BEL-7402/FU cells. CONCLUSION Sorafenib can inhibit the expression of the mdr1 gene product P-gp and increase the intracellular concentration of chemotherapeutic drugs, so as to reverse the multidrug resistance of HCC cells.
Capacity regions and optimal power allocation for CDMA cellular radio

The capacity region of code-division multiple access (CDMA) is determined by the set of transmission rates combined with quality-of-service (QoS) requirements which allow for a feasible power allocation scheme for n mobiles in a cellular network. The geometrical and topological properties of the capacity region are investigated in the present paper for the case of unlimited and limited power, respectively. As a central result, we show that the capacity region is convex by breaking the complicated topological structure into characteristic properties of its boundary and interior points, each of interest in itself. Based on these results, we furthermore investigate optimal power assignment schemes in the case that the demand of a community of users is infeasible. Weighted minimax and Bayes solutions are explicitly determined as appropriate means to share the capacity of a cellular network in a reasonable and fair way.
In sickness and in health: An exploration of some of the unconscious processes involved in the decision by family caregivers to place a family member with dementia in residential care

This paper explores the feelings, conscious and unconscious, evoked by the difficult decision to place a family member with dementia into residential care. In an exploratory study I interviewed five people who had made this decision with a view to exploring some of the unconscious processes involved in their decision-making. The interviews were interpreted paying attention to my understanding of the transference and my countertransference feelings and as triangulated by a psychodynamic supervision group. Intimate contact with ageing and death evokes fears about mortality and activates primitive anxieties. The progress of dementia may amplify primitive or psychotic states of functioning, particularly those involving evacuatory projection, and family carers may resort to splitting off unbearable feelings of anxiety which such projections can evoke and may contribute to their decision to look for residential care. Once placed in residential care different dynamics evolve and further difficult questions arise: how often to visit; whether and when to dispose of the person's possessions and ultimately how to grieve. The focus of this paper is, as far as it is possible, on the partner without dementia as an individual and the impact of their relative's dementia on their lives.
The life of the green shoots metaphor in the Spanish media

The green shoots metaphor is quite recent, but not completely new in financial language. It has been used by economists for more than a decade to refer to the first signs of economic recovery after a recession and it can easily be analysed as a specification of the more general, abstract metaphors the economy is a living organism or the economy is a plant. However, in 2009 the worldwide financial crisis made this metaphor spread fast and reach non-specialist language. This has been especially noticeable in the Spanish media (mostly television and general newspapers), where the expression was extensively used during the whole year 2009 to the point that, in only six months, the metaphor underwent important semantic and pragmatic changes and became a common referential phrase outside economic discourse. Using a corpus of occurrences of the expression in the Spanish non-specialist press throughout 2009, this paper analyses the short life of the metaphor in the Spanish media during 2009, from its ‘birth’ and first occurrences, to its ‘growth’ and evolution towards less comparative, more discursive, pragmatic functions, such as those of categorizing and of summarizing other people’s discourse. Finally, the arguable ‘death’ of the metaphor is considered, as findings indicate that context plays a crucial role in the actual survival of the expression, which has undergone some significant changes in its meaning
Binary de Bruijn interconnection network for a flexible LDPC/turbo decoder

This paper proposes a novel on-chip interconnection network adapted to a flexible multiprocessor LDPC/turbo decoder and based on the de Bruijn network. The main characteristics of this network -including its logarithmic diameter, scalable aggregate bandwidth, and optimized routing technique- allow it to efficiently support the communication- intensive nature of the two decoding techniques. We present a detailed hardware implementation of the routers and the network interfaces as well as the packet format and the routing algorithm. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed network, a generic RTL VHDL description has been developed and synthesized with ST CMOS 0.18 mum technology. The flexibility and the scalability of this on-chip communication network enable it to be used in the emerging multi-code applications and standards. In addition, the results obtained for a 16-processor network demonstrate a major aggregate bandwidth of 296 Gbps with a relative small area of 3.56 mm2.
A method to predict diagnostic codes for chronic diseases using machine learning techniques

Healthcare in simplest form is all about diagnosis and prevention of disease or treatment of any injury by a medical practitioner. It plays an important role in providing quality life for the society. The concern is how to provide better service with less expensive therapeutically equivalent alternatives. Machine Learning techniques (ML) help in achieving this goal. Healthcare has various categories of data like clinical data, claims data, drugs data and hospital data. This paper focuses on clinical and claims data for studying 11 chronic diseases such as kidney disease, osteoporosis, arthritis etc. using the claims data. The correlation between the chronic diseases and the corresponding diagnostic tests is analyzed, by using ML techniques. An effective conclusion on various diagnostics for each chronic disease is made, keeping in mind the clinical relevance.
A single-machine scheduling problem with learning effect, deterioration and non-monotonic time-dependent processing times

One of the most common objectives in single-machine scheduling problems is the minimisation of total tardiness. Due to the non-deterministic polynomial-time hard nature of this problem, different heuristic and metaheuristic algorithms have been employed to solve it. In this article, an integer programming model with non-monotonic time-dependent job processing times is developed in which deterioration and learning considerations are incorporated simultaneously. A hybrid genetic algorithm-tabu search (GA-TS) approach is employed to solve the problem. Also, to improve the performance of the GA, Taguchi method is used for parameter tuning. Lastly, in an attempt to validate the proposed model, different test problems are generated randomly and solved by both the hybrid GA-TS and an optimisation software, and thereafter a comparison is performed between the results obtained by them. According to the results, the developed approach has potential to yield near-optimum solutions in large-sized problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that considers non-monotonic time-dependent processing times, deterioration and learning effect simultaneously in a single-machine scheduling problem with the objective of total tardiness minimisation.
Characterizing Chord, Kelips and Tapestry algorithms in P2P streaming applications over wireless network

In the last few years, there is a tendency of shifting P2P applications toward multimedia services, especially P2P streaming applications. The reason behind this is the clear advantages of flexibility, efficiency and self-scalability of P2P networks, which greatly reduce the infrastructure cost of service providers. However, supporting P2P streaming over wireless environment is a very challenging task due to the intermittent nature of wireless link and the energy-saving mechanisms of mobile devices. As a result, the P2P streaming over wireless will be largely different from wired P2P application due to the high frequency of node joining & leaving the network, namely churn rate. Since most of third generation of P2P applications implement distributed hash table algorithm (DHT), it is crucial to deeply investigate and improve DHTs in order to adapt them in the harsh wireless environments. Our study use simulation approach to characterize and compare the performance of three popular DHT algorithms Chord, Kelips and Tapestry under high churn rate. The major contribution of this paper is the identification of the most important parameters of DHTs to their performance and the comparisons between these mechanisms under extreme conditions of wireless environment. We observed several interesting behaviors of DHTs including: 1) Tapestry works better than Chord and Kelips in terms of successful lookup rate at very high churn rate less than 120s but Chord achieves the best performance among three DHTs when churn rate is more than 300s. 2) Tapestry performance is more sensitive to RTT than Kelips and Chord. 3) Both Chord and Tapestry shows high scalability under high churn (except for some extreme cases when Chord fails at very high churn rate). 4) Churn rate strongly affects to the successful lookup ratio, but shows very slight effect on medium lookup latency of all three protocols. 5) We also found Chord is inferior to the two other DHT in terms of performance optimization.
Reconstructing Technologies as Social Practice

This article provides an overview of a research program developed over the past 20 years to explore relations between everyday practices and technology design and use. The studies highlighted reflect three interrelated lines of inquiry: (a) critical analyses of technical discourses and practices, (b) ethnographies of work and technologies-in-use, and (c) design interventions. Starting from the premise that technologies can be assessed only in their relations to the sites of their production and use, the authors reconstruct technologies as social practice. A central problem for the design of artifacts then becomes their relation to the environments of their intended use. Through ethnographies of the social world, the analyses focus on just how social/material specificities are assembled together to comprise our everyday experience.
Utilities of dentin regeneration among insured and uninsured adults.

OBJECTIVES This population-based study measured utilities (preferences measured under conditions of uncertainty) of dentin regeneration (DR), a potential new therapy, root canal therapy (RCT), and extraction (EXT). METHODS A representative sample of dentate adults (aged 18-69 years) was randomly selected from the Detroit area. A computer program was used to administer the standard gamble (SG) method and record utility score (US) for treatment options of a tooth with reversible pulpitis using the SG method. For the SG method, two anchor states were used: filled tooth with full oral health and filled tooth with severe and continuous pain leading to EXT. Additional data were obtained using a self-administered questionnaire. RESULTS Out of the 807 adults who resided in 446 screened and selected households, a final sample of 630 adults who resided in 368 households were interviewed. The mean US for DR with 75 and 95% success rates were 72.5 and 86.2 (on a 0-100 scale), respectively. The US for RCT and immediate EXT were 75.6 and 31.3, respectively. Eleven per cent of the adults valued DR with 95% success probability higher than a simple filling with full oral health for life. There were no statistically significant differences in the average US of DR between insured and uninsured adults. Factors such as gender, race, education, income and insurance status, experiences with EXTs or root canal treatment, regularity of dental visits, quality of life, and quality of oral health were not significantly associated with the scores of DR. There was, however, a small but significant interaction between race and dental insurance, and race and gender. CONCLUSION This population-based study found that DR was highly preferred to other standard treatment options.
The Development of Word Definitions in Children

Many studies have dealt with the development of word definition in children. An account of the earlier studies is given by Feifel & Lorge [1]; the later ones, by a number of investigators. As a rule, researchers have studied American or European middle- and upper-class children who were age four and older. They have usually asked children to define words with which they were all familiar. In all the studies, researchers have found qualitative differences between the types of definition used by younger and older children; these have been attributed to differences in their conceptual thinking. Younger children define words nonabstractly (using mainly functional and descriptive definitions, repetition, pointing, and examples) whereas children age nine and older more frequently define abstractly.
Non‐Self‐Adjoint Differential Operators

A description is given of methods that have been used to analyze the spectrum of non‐self‐adjoint differential operators, emphasizing the differences from the self‐adjoint theory. It transpires that even in cases in which the eigenfunctions can be determined explicitly, they often do not form a basis; this is closely related to a high degree of instability of the eigenvalues under small perturbations of the operator. 2000 Mathematics Subject Classification 34L05, 35P05, 47A10, 47A12.
Biochemical and Molecular Analysis of Staphylococcus aureus Clinical Isolates from Hospitalized Patients

Staphylococcus aureus is opportunistic human as well as animal pathogen that causes a variety of diseases. A total of 100 Staphylococcus aureus isolates were obtained from clinical samples derived from hospitalized patients. The presumptive Staphylococcus aureus clinical isolates were identified phenotypically by different biochemical tests. Molecular identification was done by PCR using species specific 16S rRNA primer pairs and finally 100 isolates were found to be positive as Staphylococcus aureus. Screened isolates were further analyzed by several microbiological diagnostics tests including gelatin hydrolysis, protease, and lipase tests. It was found that 78%, 81%, and 51% isolates were positive for gelatin hydrolysis, protease, and lipase activities, respectively. Antibiogram analysis of isolated Staphylococcus aureus strains with respect to different antimicrobial agents revealed resistance pattern ranging from 57 to 96%. Our study also shows 70% strains to be MRSA, 54.3% as VRSA, and 54.3% as both MRSA and VRSA. All the identified isolates were subjected to detection of mecA, nuc, and hlb genes and 70%, 84%, and 40% were found to harbour mecA, nuc, and hlb genes, respectively. The current investigation is highly important and informative for the high level multidrug resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections inclusive also of methicillin and vancomycin.
Techno- and Ethnocentrism in Organizational Studies: Comment and Speculation Prompted by Ronen and Shenkar

The article presents a response to the 1985 article “Clustering Countries on Attitudinal Dimensions,” by S. Ronen and O. Shenkar. The author states that the article presents a misleading claim that many areas of Africa have not been studied, and provides a list of studies that prove that research has been done in Africa. The author discusses further general concerns: technocentrism and ethnocentrism in organizational studies. The author gives examples of why he believes countries are only interested in organizational research originating from their own researchers.
Fast determination of the optimal rotational matrix for macromolecular superpositions

Finding the rotational matrix that minimizes the sum of squared deviations between two vectors is an important problem in bioinformatics and crystallography. Traditional algorithms involve the inversion or decomposition of a 3 × 3 or 4 × 4 matrix, which can be computationally expensive and numerically unstable in certain cases. Here, we present a simple and robust algorithm to rapidly determine the optimal rotation using a Newton‐Raphson quaternion‐based method and an adjoint matrix. Our method is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than conventional inversion/decomposition methods, and it should be particularly useful for high‐throughput analyses of molecular conformations. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2010
Early clinical experience with networked system for promoting patient self-management.

OBJECTIVE To gain early experience with a networked system designed to assess a patient's adherence to oral medication and physiologic metrics in an ambulatory, at-home setting. STUDY DESIGN Prospective, observational studies. MATERIALS AND METHODS This networked system for patient self-management consists of ingestible markers and a wearable, personal monitor. When a marker is ingested, it communicates to a monitor that time-stamps the ingestion and identifies the marker as unique. The monitor also records heart rate and activity. Data from third-party monitoring equipment (eg, sphygmomanometer, weight scale) can be integrated into the system. Collected data are summarized for patient and physician review. Directly observed ingestion (DOI) of placebo tablet markers was used to assess the system's technical performance. Markers were also coencapsulated with drugs to capture at-home adherence. A performance criterion of <95% was set as the objective for system performance. RESULTS A total of 111 subjects ingested 7144 ingestible markers; 3298 were DOIs. The system's positive detection accuracy and negative detection accuracy in detecting ingested markers were 97.1% and 97.7%, respectively. It differentiated 100% of multiple drugs and doses taken simultaneously by type and by dose. Medication adherence was >85%. The most common adverse effect was mild skin rash from the monitor's electrodes. No definitive marker-related adverse effects were reported. CONCLUSION The system appears to be safe and effective in capturing and integrating adherence and physiologic data. Efforts are under way to enhance system functionalities and refine user interfaces. By providing context-rich information, this system may enhance patient-provider collaboration.
Stored placental blood for unrelated bone marrow reconstitution.

Bone marrow transplantation (BMT) is indicated for selected genetic and hematologic diseases and for hematopoietic reconstitution in cases of iatrogenic or accidental ablation of BM. ’-5 Additionally, allogeneic BMT may contribute to the therapy of leukemia through graft-versus-leukemia effects (GVL), which are associated with, but possibly independent of, chronic graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). 6-15 HLA identical sibling donors offer the best graft compatibility, but HLAidentical unrelated donors may also provide acceptable grafts.16 Hence, the organization, in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, of large registries of HLA-typed individuals who volunteer to donate BM for recipients lacking HLAidentical sibling donors. 17-20 Placental blood, as an alternative source of hematopoietic stem cells for BM reconstitution, has recently been shown to yield successful sibling-donor placental blood “grafts” in ~ h i l d r e n . ~ ’ ~ ~ Since, furthermore, the numbers of stem/progenitor cells in placental blood25-2s are in the range associated with successfully transplanted adult BM,29-31 placental blood has the potential to overcome some of the limitations of the current system of registries for unrelated marrow donor procurement, “Banks” of cryopreserved placental bloods would not depend, for example, on the recruitment and continued collaboration of large numbers of volunteer potential donors and on compensating for the unavoidable attrition caused by retired volunteers. Systematic studies of the feasibility of using banked placental blood for BM reconstitution of unrelated recipients on a large scale seem, therefore, timely and warranted. At least three such studies have been proposed, including our This report examines the issues confronting the establishment of a panel of HLA-typed and fully tested placental blood units and the evaluation of their efficacy in transplantation, contrasted with the registry system of volunteer potential donors.
Regulation of Intercellular Tight Junctions by Zonula Occludens Toxin and Its Eukaryotic Analogue Zonulin

Abstract: The intestinal epithelium represents the largest interface between the external environment and the internal host milieu and constitutes the major barrier through which molecules can either be absorbed or secreted. There is now substantial evidence that tight junctions (tj) play a major role in regulating epithelial permeability by influencing paracellular flow of fluid and solutes. Tj are one of the hallmarks of absorptive and secretory epithelia. Evidence now exists that tj are dynamic rather than static structures and readily adapt to a variety of developmental, physiological, and pathological circumstances. These adaptive mechanisms are still incompletely understood. Activation of PKC either by Zonula occludens toxin (Zot) or by phorbol esters increases paracellular permeability. Alteration of epithelial tj is a recently described property for infectious agents. Clostridium difficile toxin A and B and influenza and vesicular stomatitis viruses have been shown to loosen tj in tissue culture monolayers. Unlike what occurs after the Zot stimulus, these changes appear to be irreversible and are associated with destruction of the tj complex. On the basis of this observation, we postulated that Zot may mimic the effect of a functionally and immunologically related endogenous modulator of epithelial tj. We were able to identify an intestinal Zot analogue, which we named zonulin. It is conceivable that the zonulins participate in the physiological regulation of intercellular tj not only in the small intestine, but also throughout a wide range of extraintestinal epithelia as well as the ubiquitous vascular endothelium, including the blood‐brain barrier. Disregulation of this hypothetical zonulin model may contribute to disease states that involve disordered intercellular communication, including developmental and intestinal disorders, tissue inflammation, malignant transformation, and metastasis.