Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Chimeric Multi-Human Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor-2 B Cell Epitope Peptide Vaccine Mediates Superior Antitumor Responses1

Immunotherapeutic approaches to cancer should focus on novel undertakings that modulate immune responses by synergistic enhancement of antitumor immunological parameters. Cancer vaccines should preferably be composed of multiple defined tumor Ag-specific B and T cell epitopes. To develop a multiepitope vaccine, 12 high ranking B cell epitopes were identified from the extracellular domain of the human epidermal growth factor receptor-2 (HER-2) oncoprotein by computer-aided analysis. Four novel HER-2 B cell epitopes were synthesized as chimeras with a promiscuous T cell epitope (aa 288–302) from the measles virus fusion protein (MVF). Two chimeric peptide vaccines, MVF HER-2316–339 and MVF HER-2485–503 induced high levels of Abs in outbred rabbits, which inhibited tumor cell growth. In addition, Abs induced by a combination of two vaccines, MVF HER-2316–339 and MVF HER-2628–647 down-modulated receptor expression and activated IFN-γ release better than the individual vaccines. Furthermore, this multiepitope vaccine in combination with IL-12 caused a significant reduction (p = 0.004) in the number of pulmonary metastases induced by challenge with syngeneic tumor cells overexpressing HER-2. Peptide Abs targeting specific sites in the extracellular domain may be used for exploring the oncoprotein’s functions. The multiepitope vaccine may have potential application in the treatment of HER-2-associated cancers.
Growth Inhibition and Appearance of the Membranous Structure in Escherichia coli Infected with Bacteriophage fd

Thirty-six mutants of fd, a virus that infects but does not kill Escherichia coli, were isolated; 35 mutants were categorized into six complementation groups. Abortive infection with mutants in genes 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6, but not in gene 2, produced a cessation of host cell growth, generally linked to low burst size and to the formation of aberrant intracytoplasmic membranous structures. The membranous structure was studied during infection with various phage and hosts. Appearance of the membranous structure was linked specifically to incomplete phage maturation at the cell membrane, rather than solely to the inhibition of host cell growth or to infection with mutant phage, since (i) in one host, cell growth was inhibited, but no membranous structure developed; and (ii) when antibody against virus was added to cells infected with wild-type phage, phage extrusion was inhibited, cell growth stopped, and the membranous structure once again developed.
Prevalence of Chlamydia trachomatis-Specific Antibodies before and after Mass Drug Administration for Trachoma in Community-Wide Surveys of Four Communities in Nepal

Abstract. The target end date for the global elimination of trachoma as a public health problem is 2020. As countries begin the process for submitting their dossier for the validation of elimination of trachoma as a public health problem, strategies for post-validation surveillance must be considered. Seroprevalence of antibodies against antigens from the causative bacteria Chlamydia trachomatis (Ct) in young children has been shown to reflect trachomatous inflammation–follicular (TF) rates in both endemic and previously endemic settings. However, none of these studies has directly compared age seroprevalence in the same communities before and after mass drug administration (MDA) for trachoma. Here we report a marked shift in age seroprevalence curves in four villages in Kapilvastu District, Nepal, before and after MDA. Clinical examinations were performed and blood was taken before (N = 659) and 5 years after (N = 646) MDA. Rates of TF decreased from 17.6% in ≤ 9-year-olds before MDA (N = 52) to 0% in ≤ 9-year-olds (N = 73) after MDA. Positive antibody responses to Ct in the entire population decreased from 82.1% pre-MDA to 35.8% post-MDA, whereas those among ≤ 9-year-olds decreased from 59.6% to 4.1%. These data show that the postintervention decrease in TF was reflected in a drop in anti-Ct antibody responses, suggesting that antibody responses could be useful indicators for post-validation surveillance.
Institutional Environments, Work and Human Resource Practices, and Unions: Canada versus England

This analysis of data from a 2003–2004 telephone survey of 750 Canadian and 450 English workers finds that work practices and human resource (HR) practices had important implications for unions. The effects differed by the type of practice (for example, traditional versus “new” HR), and were mediated by each country's institutional environment. For example, traditional personnel/HR practices were strongly positively related to the likelihood of union representation and strongly negatively related to workers' propensity to vote for a union in Canada, but made little difference to either of those union outcomes in England; and “alternative” work practices bore an inverse U-shaped association with union representation in Canada, versus a positive relationship with that outcome in England. In general, the Canadian findings are consistent with an adversarial dynamic, and the English findings with a more collaborative one.
Image retrieval scheme based on adaptive feature weighting

Typical image features such as color, shape, and texture are used in content-based image retrieval. Retrieval which uses only one image feature has worse performance in case where the content of an image is complex or where a database contains many images. So, many approaches for integrating these features have been studied. However, the problem of these approaches is how to appropriately assign weighting of the image features at query time. In this paper, we propose a new retrieval method using adaptive image feature weighting. We perform computer simulations in test databases which consist of various kinds of images. The experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance than previous works in respect to several performance evaluations such as precision vs. recall, retrieval efficiency, and ranking measure.
Planning for global environmental change in Bangkok's informal settlements

Government agencies in cities across Asia recognise that municipalities must take steps to adapt to projected climate changes if people and places are to be kept above water. This paper focuses on planning for climate change in Bangkok because it ranks among the top 10 port cities vulnerable to climate change related flooding. It is also understood that the most devastating impacts of climate change will be suffered by the city's most vulnerable residents: the poor. Not only do impoverished people occupy physically vulnerable space, such as riverbanks, but they are also the least equipped to recover from the disruption of their livelihoods. Several scholars have identified “institutional traps” that prevent the Thai government from successfully aiding poor and marginalised flood victims in the past. These include poor coordination, lack of monitoring and evaluation, rigidity, crisis management and elite capture. Lebel, Manuta, and Garden (2011, 56) pose the crucial question: “How have individuals – from local community leaders through to national level politicians and bureaucrats – successfully influenced policy and programmes to avoid institutional traps and improve adaptive capacities to climate change? ” In this paper, we begin to address this question through examining emergent methods of “community based adaptation” and reviewing case studies of adaptation action from other vulnerable communities in the Global South. These lessons – such as overcoming institutional rigidity and avoiding elite capture – are important for Bangkok and other cities in the Global South that face many different challenges by global environmental change.
Allocation of Canadian Natural Gas to Domestic and Export Markets

Canadian natural gas is allocated to domestic and export markets using a non-linear optimization model. Efficient near-term prices are low to stimulate consumption and reduce reserves of shut in natural gas. Many near-optimal depletion paths also exist, implying greater importance of non-efficiency criteria for selecting a socially optimal depletion path. Finally, for Canadian consumption decisions through the early 1990s, the value of perfect information about future export prospects is likely small. Mistakes in allocating gas to domestic markets to that time are unlikely to cause serious losses in any of several performance measures, including producer surplus (economic rent). L'allocation du gaz naturel canadien entre le marche domestique et les marches d'exportation. On alloue le gaz naturel canadien entre les marches domestique et 6trangers a l'aide d'une modele d'optimisation non-lineaire. Les prix efficients A court terme sont bas a la fois pour stimuler la consommation et pour reduire les reserves de gaz naturel des puits fermes. On peut identifier plusieurs sentiers d'epuisement quasi-optimaux qui donnent une importance relativement plus grande aux criteres autres que l'efficacite dans la selection d'un sentier d'epuisement socialement optimal. Enfin, pour ce qui a trait aux decisions de consommation au Canada jusque dans les debuts des annees 1990, il appert que la valeur d'une information parfaite quant aux possibilites d'exportation n'est pas susceptible d'etre grande. De plus, des erreurs dans l'allocation du gaz aux marches domestiques jusqu'a ce moment-Ia ne sont pas susceptibles de causer des pertes enormes quels que soient les indicateurs de performance (y compris le surplus au producteur, i.e., la rente economique).
Unbiased estimation for response adaptive clinical trials

Bayesian adaptive trials have the defining feature that the probability of randomization to a particular treatment arm can change as information becomes available as to its true worth. However, there is still a general reluctance to implement such designs in many clinical settings. One area of concern is that their frequentist operating characteristics are poor or, at least, poorly understood. We investigate the bias induced in the maximum likelihood estimate of a response probability parameter, p, for binary outcome by the process of adaptive randomization. We discover that it is small in magnitude and, under mild assumptions, can only be negative – causing one’s estimate to be closer to zero on average than the truth. A simple unbiased estimator for p is obtained, but it is shown to have a large mean squared error. Two approaches are therefore explored to improve its precision based on inverse probability weighting and Rao–Blackwellization. We illustrate these estimation strategies using two well-known designs from the literature.
Stator Turn Fault Detection by Second Harmonic in Instantaneous Power for a Triple-Redundant Fault-Tolerant PM Drive

Fast and reliable detection of stator faults is of key importance for fail-safe and fault-tolerant machine drives in order to immediately trigger appropriate fault mitigation actions. The paper presents a detailed analytical and experimental analysis of the behavior of a closed-loop controlled permanent magnet machine drive under interturn fault conditions. It is shown that significant second harmonic components in the dq voltages, currents, instantaneous active power (IAP), and instantaneous reactive power (IRP) are generated during turn fault conditions. The analyses further show that the increase of the second harmonic in IAP and IRP during fault conditions is comparatively higher than that of voltage and current, making them ideal candidates as turn fault indicators. A turn fault detection technique based on second harmonic in IAP and IRP is implemented and demonstrated for a triple-redundant, fault-tolerant permanent magnet assisted synchronous reluctance machine drive. The effectiveness of the proposed detection technique over the whole operation region is assessed, demonstrating fast and reliable detection over most of the operating region under both motoring and generating mode.
Moderate Inflation in Poland: A Real Story

Why is moving from moderate to low inflation almost always slow or costly? This paper answers this question, based on the Polish experience. First, reflecting the transition to a market economy, Polish inflation has been marked by significant changes in relative prices. Second, as wage and price indexation takes root, the inflationary effect of shocks to relative prices is magnified. Third, lagging structural reform, including the failure to extend hard budget constraints to all sectors of the economy, makes monetary policy less effective. Reduced money supply growth with structural reform offers the best prospect for moving to low inflation.
The Wage Mobility of Minimum Wage Workers

Using longitudinal data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the authors examine the earnings mobility of workers employed at the minimum wage. Results indicate that over 60% of workers who were earning the minimum wage in the mid-1980s were earning higher wages one year later; for those with gains, the typical rise was nearly 20%. A significant minority of workers, however—most of them lacking a high school diploma or working on a part-time basis—did not advance beyond the minimum wage between the two survey dates.
LITERATURE REVIEW ON CORPORATE GOVERNANCE - FIRM PERFORMANCE RELATIONSHIP

In the matter of corporate governance reforms, an important aspect is whether the implementation of corporate governance principles and codes has a positive impact on firm performance. The literature testing the relationship between different corporate governance mechanisms and firm performance is extensive. Over time, a lot of corporate governances mechanisms were studied in relation to firm performance and the most used are: CEO duality, board size, proportion of non- executive directors, board committees, ownership structure and concentration, managers’ compensation and incentives schemes. With time, different authors began to use more comprehensive measures for corporate governance rather than a single variable or a single governance mechanism, the so called corporate governance indexes. Regarding performance there are three main approaches to firm performance in social science research: research based on market prices, accounting ratios and total factor profitability.The most used performance measures are: Tobin’s Q, return on equity, return on asset and economic value added. In our paper, we present the studies undertaken since the 1990’s regarding the relationship between different mechanisms of corporate governance and firm performance and between corporate governance index and performance for both developed and developing countries around the world. Regarding the working tools used in this theoretical research we can mention the longitudinal method, by presenting the evolution in time of empirical studies on the research topic and the comparative method used in presenting the resulys of different studies mentioned in our paper. The results of the studies are inconclusive, some studies founded a strog positive relation, others founded a negative correlation between corporate governance and firm performance, while a third category of studies didn’t found any relationship at all. We used participative observation method by issuing conclusions on the potential causes of the inconclusive results on the existence and nature of the relationship between corporate governance and firm performance.
Using Simulation and Virtual Practice in Midwifery and Nursing Education: Experiencing Self-Body-World “Differently”

The journey into the world of midwifery or nursing requires the student to attend to the intertwining of self-body-world in order to shift their knowledge of self-body-world into a client/patient-centered context. One of the teaching-learning strategies used to provide safe opportunities is the use of simulations and virtual practices. Rather than learning intimate acts of touching, or life and death decision-making in situations with actual clients/patients, students enter their learning world with rubber torsos, cloth babies, and cyber clinics. The “other” is a simulated other, not a human. How does the student shift from seeing this simulated other as object to a sense of other as subject? In our world of constant use of technology for communication and entertainment, do students shift in and out of a cyber world easily or are they more captured by the simulated experience than with the human world? Has the human world redefined itself where the intertwining of self-body-world blurs the sense of where human body ends and cyber or simulated world begins? What is the place of Bildung when engaged with a cyber other? As a result of educational challenges, including rising enrolments, limited clinical placement opportunities, and increasing risk management concerns, there has been a proliferation in the use of simulation as a teaching strategy (Fox, Damazo, 2013; Schmitt, Gilbert, Brandt, Weinstein, 2013). This has left us –the authors– wondering about the student experience of simulation. What do they learn? How do they learn? How can this learning be applied in practice?
Mean-Reverting Stochastic Processes, Evaluation of Forward Prices and Interest Rates

We consider mean-reverting stochastic processes and build self-consistent models for forward price dynamics and some applications in power industries. These models are built using the ideas and equations of stochastic differential geometry in order to close the system of equations for the forward prices and their volatility. Some analytical solutions are presented in the one factor case and for specific regular forward price/interest rates volatility. Those models will also play a role of initial conditions for a stochastic process describing forward price and interest rates volatility. Subsequently, the curved manifold of the internal space i.e. a discrete version of the bond term space (the space of bond maturing) is constructed. The dynamics of the point of this internal space that correspond to a portfolio of different bonds is studied. The analysis of the discount bond forward rate dynamics, for which we employed the Stratonovich approach, permitted us to calculate analytically the regular and the stochastic volatilities. We compare our results with those known from the literature.
Serum cortisol levels following acute experimental spinal cord injury.

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Cortisol has neuroprotective effects. We monitored the serum cortisol levels after cervical and thoracic spinal cord injury (SCI) in four groups of rats. MATERIAL AND METHODS Forty male Sprague-Dawley rats were randomized to four groups. The control group received neither laminectomy nor SCI. The sham group received laminectomy without SCI. The cervical spinal trauma group received a C5-C6 laminectomy and spinal trauma at this level. The thoracic spinal trauma group received a T6-T7 laminectomy and spinal trauma. Blood samples were drawn 2, 6, 12 and 24 hours after surgeries and assayed immediately. RESULTS The level of cortisol in the cervical spinal trauma group was highest at the second hour of the experiment and the lowest in control and sham-operated groups at the same time. At the sixth hour, cortisol levels increased in control and sham-operated groups, decreased in the cervical group and did not change in the thoracic group. At the 12th hour, cortisol levels in control and sham-operated groups decreased, but increased in thoracic and cervical groups. At the 24th hour, serum cortisol levels in thoracic and cervical groups decreased but did not change significantly in control and shamoperated animals. CONCLUSIONS Activation of endogen cortisol secretion of the organism starts immediately after the SCI injury and throughout the experiment the serum cortisol levels in neurotrauma groups remained high compared with the control and sham-operated groups. At the beginning, the level of neurological lesion (cervical or thoracic) affected differently the level of serum cortisol at a statistically significant level but this difference disappeared at the 6th hour.
Maximization of Net Revenue per Unit of Physical Output in Markov Decision Processes

A new criterion of optimality in Markov decision processes is discussed. The objective is to maximize the average net revenue per unit of physical output (or input). The criterion is relevant in some production models where a limitation is imposed on the physical output (production quota) or on an input factor (scarce resources). An obvious application is in dairy cow replacement models under milk quotas. Iterion cycles are presented for ordinary completely ergodic Markov decision processes and for hierarchic Markov processes. The consequences of the new criterion are illustrated by a numerical example. Copyright 1991 by Oxford University Press.
Partial stability and stabilization of multi-valued logical networks

This paper studies the stability and stabilization of multi-valued logical networks with respect to part of the system's states. By semi-tensor product of matrices, we first convert multi-valued logical networks into a linear discrete-time system. Then a necessary and sufficient condition for partial stability of k-valued logical networks is given. Finally, the stabilization of multi-valued logical control networks by state feedback control is investigated and the corresponding necessary and sufficient condition is obtained. An example is provided to illustrate the efficiency of the obtained results.
Economic Characteristic of Non-Profit Sport Clubs and Their Relations with Municipalities and Sport Federations

There is a running discussion about the system of financing sport from public budgets and there are opinions that the sport is not sufficiently supported. We know surprisingly little about the situation of non-profit sport clubs and to find a better support system we have to gather information about the environment of sport clubs. What do we know about relations of sport clubs with public authorities and their own sport union/federation and why do we need to know? The aim of this paper is to gather information about economic situation of sport clubs; to analyze relationships between non-profit sport clubs and municipalities/sport federations with special stress on the problem of transparency; and to discuss consequences of revealed situation We gathered data from sport clubs and performed an analysis especially for three selected sport branches (athletics, basketball, karate) and we show results of questionnaire among sport club and present examples of practice of randomly selected municipalities. We discovered a significant “failure” in the relationship between sport clubs and their own sport federations. We also showed strong dependency of sport clubs on the grants system respectively we pointed on interesting connection between grants and economic results of sport clubs. Finally we revealed not marginal problem with the transparency during grants allocation.
Towards a Platform for Urban Data Management, Integration and Processing

Smart city infrastructure includes deployment of a variety of sensors and provision of open data platforms and applications that can help improve the quality of life of the citizens. The large volumes of data generated by sensors and various Internet of Things (IoT) devices need to be harnessed to help smart city applications make informed decisions on the fly. Also, efficient management of smart city components relies on the ability to federate their data, locally process urban data streams, and utilize big data analytics to harness their governance. Data interoperability and integration is one of the most challenging problems facing smart cities today. Successful data integration is one of the keys to improved services and governance. This paper describes the architectural design of a framework that aims to deal with the integration of data across the various systems of the city, urban data analytics, and creation of value-added services. The framework relies on recent technologies for data processing including IoT, edge computing, cloud computing, data analytics, and semantic integration.