Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effect of silymarin (milk thistle) on liver disease in patients with chronic hepatitis C unsuccessfully treated with interferon therapy: a randomized controlled trial.

CONTEXT The botanical product silymarin, an extract of milk thistle, is commonly used by patients to treat chronic liver disease, despite scant and conflicting evidence of its efficacy. OBJECTIVE To determine the effect of silymarin on liver disease activity in patients with chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection unsuccessfully treated with interferon-based therapy. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Multicenter, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial conducted at 4 medical centers in the United States. Participants included 154 persons with chronic HCV infection and serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels of 65 U/L or greater who were previously unsuccessfully treated with interferon-based therapy. Enrollment began in May 2008 and was completed in May 2010, with the last follow-up visit completed in March 2011. INTERVENTION Participants were randomly assigned to receive 420-mg silymarin, 700-mg silymarin, or matching placebo administered 3 times per day for 24 weeks. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES The primary outcome measure was serum ALT level of 45 U/L or less (considered within the normal range) or less than 65 U/L, provided this was at least a 50% decline from baseline values. Secondary outcomes included changes in ALT levels, HCV RNA levels, and quality-of-life measures. RESULTS After 24 weeks of treatment, only 2 participants in each treatment group (P ≥ .99) met the primary outcome measure (3.8% [95% CI, 0.5% to 13.2%] for placebo, 4.0% [95% CI, 0.5% to 13.7%] for 420-mg silymarin, and 3.8% [95% CI, 0.5% to 13.2%] for 700-mg silymarin). The mean decline in serum ALT activity at the end of treatment did not differ significantly (P = .75) across the 3 treatment groups (mean decline, -4.3 [95% CI, -17.3 to 8.7] U/L for placebo, -14.4 [95% CI, -41.6 to 12.7] U/L for 420-mg silymarin, -11.3 [95% CI, -27.9 to 5.4] U/L for 700-mg silymarin); there likewise were no significant differences in HCV RNA levels (mean change, 0.07 [95% CI, -0.05 to 0.18] log10 IU/mL for placebo, -0.03 [95% CI, -0.18 to 0.12] log10 IU/mL for 420-mg silymarin, 0.04 [95% CI, -0.08 to 0.16] log10 IU/mL for 700-mg silymarin; P = .54) or quality-of-life measures. The adverse event profile of silymarin was comparable with that of placebo. CONCLUSION Higher than customary doses of silymarin did not significantly reduce serum ALT levels more than placebo in participants with chronic HCV infection unsuccessfully treated with interferon-based therapy. TRIAL REGISTRATION clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00680342.
Nutrition and IBD: Malnutrition and/or Sarcopenia? A Practical Guide

Malnutrition is a major complication of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). This mini review is focusing on main determinants of malnutrition in IBD, the most important components of malnutrition, including lean mass loss and sarcopenia, as an emerging problem. Each one of these components needs to be well considered in a correct nutritional evaluation of an IBD patient in order to build a correct multidisciplinary approach. The review is then focusing on possible instrumental and clinical armamentarium for the nutritional evaluation.
The NF-κB Inhibitor LC-1 Has Single Agent Activity in Multiple Myeloma Cells and Synergizes with Bortezomib

Multiple myeloma remains incurable with conventional therapeutics. Thus, new treatments for this condition are clearly required. In this study we evaluated the novel NF-κB inhibitor LC-1 in multiple myeloma cell lines and plasma cells derived from multiple myeloma patients. LC-1 was cytotoxic to multiple myeloma cell lines H929, U266, and JJN3, and induced apoptosis in a dose-dependent manner with an overall LD50 of 3.6 μmol/L (±1.8) after 48 hours in culture. Primary multiple myeloma cells, identified by CD38 and CD138 positivity, had a mean LD50 for LC-1 of 4.9 μmol/L (±1.6); normal bone marrow cells were significantly less sensitive to the cytotoxic effects of LC-1 (P = 0.0002). Treatment of multiple myeloma cell lines with LC-1 resulted in decreased nuclear localization of the NF-κB subunit Rel A and the inhibition of NF-κB target genes. In addition, LC-1 showed synergy with melphalan, bortezomib, and doxorubicin (combination indices of 0.72, 0.61, and 0.78, respectively), and was more effective when cells were cultured on fibronectin. These data show that LC-1 has activity in multiple myeloma cell lines and primary multiple myeloma cells, and its ability to inhibit NF-κB seems important for its cytotoxic effects. Furthermore, LC-1–induced transcriptional suppression of survivin and MCL1 provides a potential explanation for its synergy with conventional agents. Mol Cancer Ther; 9(6); 1574–82. ©2010 AACR.
PERFECT READINGS IN RUSSIAN

This paper is an extended comment on Schoorlemmer’s (1995) theory of tense in Russian, more accurately on her attempt to link aspectual structure with temporal structure. Schoorlemmer (henceforth S.) claims that tense in Russian behaves very differently from English or Dutch tense. In particular, she is forced to assume quite unorthodox temporal modifications, and the temporal behavior of Participial Passives is not clear at all. Our paper wants to restore simplicity to the issue. We think that S. ’s way of looking at the aspectual structure of Russian is basically correct but that her theory of tense runs into conceptual difficulties. These are due to Reichenbach’s (1947) tense semantics, which S. applies without modifications to Russian. Our proposal tries to retain S. ’s insights while at the same time trying to avoid the said difficulties. The claims we want to defend may be roughly summarized as follows. Though the Russian verb has no perfect morphology, it has temporal PERFECT readings, viz. the PAST PERFECT and the FUTURE PERFECT. We obtain these by the assumption that the perfective (not perfect! ) morphology licenses two different semantic aspects, viz. the relation of including an event or the relation of being after an event. Following recent practice (notably (Klein, 1994)), many linguists call these relations PERFECTIVE and PERFECT respectively. To avoid confusion, we will use Klein’s more technical terminology, which will be introduced in (40). To use a concrete example, consider the following pair of sentences:
A Survey on Accessing Data Over Cloud Environment Using Data Mining Algorithms

In today's world to access the large set of data is more complex, because the data may be structured and unstructured like in the form of text, images, videos, etc., it cannot be controlled from the internet users this is known as Big data. Useful data can be accessed through extracting from big data with the help of data mining algorithms. Data mining is a technique for determine the patterns; classify the data, clustering from the large set of data. In this paper we will discuss how large set of data can be access through data mining algorithms over cloud environment.
Solving Combat Control problem using Soft Computing approach

This paper deals with a generic solution for combat control problem which is generally addressed using conventional methods and human decision making. The aim of this paper is to develop the soft computing approach to automate the decision making process for combat control operations. The automatic combat control system design usually consists of four stages. The first stage is to select the sensor or sensors to produce the target measurements. The next stage is the preprocessing of the data and the location of regions of interest within the data (segmentation). The third design step is feature extraction and selection. The last step is the processing of the features for decision making (classification and combat). This paper deals with only combat control part which is the most challenging problem to be solved in real battle field scenario. Usually this part is being done using decisions taken by human operators. In order to automate this process, generally hard classifiers are being used for combat control operations. These hard classification approaches does not give good performance in noisy environment. A relatively new and emerging soft computing approach, which is a combination of Neural Network and Fuzzy classification techniques, is proposed for performance improvement. The algorithm developed in this paper is tested for a typical combat control problem which deals with selecting a particular weapon against a target in optimum way. The soft computing approach proposed here has demonstrated a relatively complex decision making in noisy environment, with a large number of input parameters.
Toward Convergence of Experimental Studies and Theoretical Modeling of the Chromatin Fiber*

Understanding the structural organization of eukaryotic chromatin and its control of gene expression represents one of the most fundamental and open challenges in modern biology. Recent experimental advances have revealed important characteristics of chromatin in response to changes in external conditions and histone composition, such as the conformational complexity of linker DNA and histone tail domains upon compact folding of the fiber. In addition, modeling studies based on high-resolution nucleosome models have helped explain the conformational features of chromatin structural elements and their interactions in terms of chromatin fiber models. This minireview discusses recent progress and evidence supporting structural heterogeneity in chromatin fibers, reconciling apparently contradictory fiber models.
Increased Asymmetric and Multi-Daughter Cell Division in Mechanically Confined Microenvironments

As the microenvironment of a cell changes, associated mechanical cues may lead to changes in biochemical signaling and inherently mechanical processes such as mitosis. Here we explore the effects of confined mechanical environments on cellular responses during mitosis. Previously, effects of mechanical confinement have been difficult to optically observe in three-dimensional and in vivo systems. To address this challenge, we present a novel microfluidic perfusion culture system that allows controllable variation in the level of confinement in a single axis allowing observation of cell growth and division at the single-cell level. The device is capable of creating precise confinement conditions in the vertical direction varying from high (3 µm) to low (7 µm) confinement while also varying the substrate stiffness (E = 130 kPa and 1 MPa). The Human cervical carcinoma (HeLa) model with a known 3N+ karyotype was used for this study. For this cell line, we observe that mechanically confined cell cycles resulted in stressed cell divisions: (i) delayed mitosis, (ii) multi- daughter mitosis events (from 3 up to 5 daughter cells), (iii) unevenly sized daughter cells, and (iv) induction of cell death. In the highest confined conditions, the frequency of divisions producing more than two progeny was increased an astounding 50-fold from unconfined environments, representing about one half of all successful mitotic events. Notably, the majority of daughter cells resulting from multipolar divisions were viable after cytokinesis and, perhaps suggesting another regulatory checkpoint in the cell cycle, were in some cases observed to re-fuse with neighboring cells post-cytokinesis. The higher instances of abnormal mitosis that we report in confined mechanically stiff spaces, may lead to increased rates of abnormal, viable, cells in the population. This work provides support to a hypothesis that environmental mechanical cues influences structural mechanisms of mitosis such as geometric orientation of the mitotic plane or planes.
An Improvement to Sliding Garbage Collection

Garbage collection algorithms are divided into three main categories, namely mark-and-sweep, mark-and-compact, and copying collectors. The collectors in the mark-and-compact category are frequently overlooked, perhaps because they have traditionally been associated with greater cost than collectors in the other categories. Among the compacting collectors, the sliding collector has some advantages in that it preserves the relative age of objects. The main problem with the traditional sliding collector by Haddon and Waite [4] is that building address-forwarding tables is costly. We suggest an improvement to the existing algorithm that reverses the order between building the forwarding table and moving the objects. Our method improves performance of building the table, making the sliding collector a better contestant for young generations of objects (nurseries).
Using Frontier Analysis to Evaluate Company Performance

The measurement of performance is critical to nearly all managerial disciplines. Yet little is known about the aggregation characteristics of the components of performance and how our notion of a ‘good performing firm’ relates to what we use as a dependent variable. In this paper we propose an approach to the measurement of performance that uses the logic of frontier analysis and the technique of data envelopment analysis. The approach is shown to be a reasonable representation of the multidimensional nature of performance and is shown to replicate, effectively, the components that strategic management scholars typically consider when discussing performance. It is also shown to be superior to the simpler alternatives based on traditional approaches to performance measurement.
Neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes of the rat cerebral cortex originate from separate progenitor cells: an ultrastructural analysis of clonally related cells

The diverse array of neurons and glia in the mammalian cerebral cortex arises from proliferating cells of the ventricular zone that surrounds the lateral ventricles of the developing brain. A fundamental but unresolved question is whether the individual cells of the ventricular zone are committed to producing progeny of only one particular phenotype or whether they generate progeny of more than one phenotype. We have begun to address this question by asking if individual cells of the ventricular zone generate exclusively neurons or glia at the onset of cortical neurogenesis in the rat. To assess the phenotypes of cells derived from a common progenitor cell, retroviral-mediated gene transfer was used to introduce the reporter gene, Escherichia coli beta- galactosidase, into ventricular zone cells at embryonic day 15 or 16. We used histochemistry to reveal beta-galactosidase-expressing cells in the mature rat cerebral cortex. Isolated clusters of beta-galactosidase- expressing cells, presumably clones, were identified in serial sections. Since the histochemical reaction product is electron dense, each cell could be examined at the ultrastructural level and assigned definitively to one of the major classes of cells in the cerebral cortex on the basis of well-established morphological criteria. This approach overcomes the problems of cell type identification encountered with light microscopy, where it is not always possible to distinguish between different cell phenotypes. We found that virtually all clones contained cells of exclusively one type: either all astrocytes, all oligodendrocytes, or all neurons. Furthermore, each particular cell type exhibited a different pattern and intensity of staining. The neuronal clones, with one exception, were composed of either all pyramidal cells (projection neurons), or all nonpyramidal cells (interneurons). The size and composition of neuronal clones did not seem related to their position in the cerebral cortex. Collectively, our observations indicate that separate progenitor cells exist for pyramidal neurons, nonpyramidal neurons, astrocytes, and oligodendrocytes. The striking phenotypic homogeneity in the clones arising from individual progenitor cells suggests that by the onset of cortical neurogenesis, at least some lineage restrictions have already occurred among the precursor cell population. Thus, our results suggest that lineage may play a pivotal role in determining some of the functionally important phenotypic attributes of cells in the cerebral cortex.
Characterization of LEDGF/p75 Genetic Variants and Association with HIV-1 Disease Progression

Background As Lens epithelium-derived growth factor (LEDGF/p75) is an important co-factor involved in HIV-1 integration, the LEDGF/p75-IN interaction is a promising target for the new class of allosteric HIV integrase inhibitors (LEDGINs). Few data are available on the genetic variability of LEDGF/p75 and the influence on HIV disease in vivo. This study evaluated the relation between LEDGF/p75 genetic variation, mRNA expression and HIV-1 disease progression in order to guide future clinical use of LEDGINs. Methods Samples were derived from a therapy-naïve cohort at Ghent University Hospital and a Spanish long-term-non-progressor cohort. High-resolution melting curve analysis and Sanger sequencing were used to identify all single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the coding region, flanking intronic regions and full 3′UTR of LEDGF/p75. In addition, two intronic tagSNPs were screened based on previous indication of influencing HIV disease. LEDGF/p75 mRNA was quantified in patient peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) using RT-qPCR. Results 325 samples were investigated from patients of Caucasian (n = 291) and African (n = 34) origin, including Elite (n = 49) and Viremic controllers (n = 62). 21 SNPs were identified, comprising five in the coding region and 16 in the non-coding regions and 3′UTR. The variants in the coding region were infrequent and had no major impact on protein structure according to SIFT and PolyPhen score. One intronic SNP (rs2737828) was significantly under-represented in Caucasian patients (P<0.0001) compared to healthy controls (HapMap). Two SNPs showed a non-significant trend towards association with slower disease progression but not with LEDGF/p75 expression. The observed variation in LEDGF/p75 expression was not correlated with disease progression. Conclusions LEDGF/p75 is a highly conserved protein. Two non-coding polymorphisms were identified indicating a correlation with disease outcome, but further research is needed to clarify phenotypic impact. The conserved coding region and the observed variation in LEDGF/p75 expression are important characteristics for clinical use of LEDGINs.
ReliefF for estimation and discretization of attributes in classi(cid:12)cation, regression, and ILP problems

Instead of myopic impurity functions, we propose the use of Reli-efF for heuristic guidance of inductive learning algorithms. The basic algoritm RELIEF, developed by Kira and Rendell (Kira and Rendell, 1992a;b), is able to e(cid:14)ciently solve classi(cid:12)cation problems involving highly dependent attributes, such as parity problems. However, it is sensitive to noise and is unable to deal with incomplete data, multi-class, and regression problems (continuous class). We have extended RELIEF in several directions. The extended algorithm ReliefF is able to deal with noisy and incomplete data, can be used for multiclass problems, and its regressional variant RReliefF can deal with regression problems. Another area of application is inductive logic programming (ILP) where, instead of myopic measures, ReliefF can be used to estimate the utility of literals during the theory construction.
Housing Change in East and Central Europe: Integration or Fragmentation?

Contents: Introduction: housing in post-Communist Europe - issues and agendas. Comparative Perspectives on Housing Reforms: Housing reforms and market performance, Robert M. Buckley and Sasha Tsenkova Housing in South-Eastern Europe, IvA! n Tosics and JA^3zsef HegedA s Privatization and rent deregulation in Eastern Europe, Andrew Roberts The private rented sector - evidence from Budapest and Sofia, Stuart Lowe Comparative perspectives on urban housing conditions, IvA! n Tosics. The Social Housing Sector: 'Social' rental housing in the Czech Republic now and tomorrow, Martin Lux The prospects for social housing in Slovakia, Elena SzolgayovA! The impact of property restitution on housing development in East Germany, Birgit Glock and Carsten Keller Housing a 'Nation of Home Owners' - reforms in Bulgaria, Alle Elbers and Sasha Tsenkova Housing markets and empowerment of tenants in Slovenia, Srna Mandic. Housing Market Responses - Case Studies: Housing challenges and policy responses: the case of Riga, Sasha Tsenkova An emerging private rental market in Ljubljana, Richard Sendi The new housing market in Tirana, Luan Deda Housing markets and family incomes, Judit Szekely Housing policy matters: the reform path in Central and Eastern Europe, Sasha Tsenkova Bibliography Index.
The Demand for Local Public Services in Sweden

This paper analyzes the composition of municipal expenditures in Sweden by estimating a demand system for local public services, in which tax revenue collection is treated as endogenous. The estimation is based on the QAIDS specification. The empirical application uses panel data for the period 1998-2005 and for six local public services. The results show that the point estimates of all income elasticities except one are positive, and that none of them significantly exceeds one. Furthermore, the point estimates of the own-price elasticities are negative and less than one in absolute value for all services.
2-Bit Comparator Using Different Logic Style of Full Adder

-In this paper a new design of comparator is described with the help of Full adder which are the basic building block of ALU and ALU is a basic functioning unit of the microprocessors and DSP. In the world of technology it has become essential to develop various new design methodologies to reduce the power and area consumption. In this paper comparator are developed using various design of full adder. This will reduce the power of the comparator design. The proposed comparator has been designed using DSCH 3.1 and Microwind 3.1 at 120 nm technologies. The developed comparator with show an improvement of 25.14% in power.
Inequality and inequity in health care use among older people in the United Kingdom

An area that remains relatively unexamined in the literature on older people is horizontal equity in health care service use. The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent of income-related inequity in the use of GP, inpatient, outpatient and dentist services among individuals aged 65 and older in the UK between 1997 and 2003 using data from the BHPS. The probability of GP, outpatient, dentist or inpatient service use between 1997 and 2003 was predicted using multiple random effects logistic regression panel models and income-related horizontal inequity was calculated. An inequity index that is equal to zero implies that after controlling for differences in need across income groups, individuals have equal probability of service use, regardless of income. The results indicate that individuals on lower income are significantly more likely to visit a GP, or use outpatient and inpatient care than the better-off, while the reverse is seen for dental care. After adjusting for differences in need with income, horizontal inequity is found favouring those on higher income for all service areas, particularly outpatient and dental care.
Slotted patch antennas with EBG structure for ISM band

A slotted patch antenna is designed with Electromagnetic Band gap (EBG) structures inside patch for ISM band. The performance parameters of the presented antenna are then compared with the slotted patch antenna and slotted patch antenna with EBG structure inside patch. It is realized that the bandwidth requirement is fulfill than the normal patch antenna, with reduction in back lobe. This antenna is operating in the frequency band 2.4GHz. to 2.48 GHz which is one of the most usable bandwidth regions for wireless applications such as Wi-Fi outdoor, WLAN, and many more. The proposed antenna achieves return loss -39dB. Built in FR-4 material.