Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Efficacy and Effectiveness of Cochlear Implants in Deaf Children

A large body of clinical research over the last decade demonstrates that cochlear implants work and provide significant speech and language benefits to profoundly deaf adults and prelingually deaf children. The most challenging research problem today is that cochlear implants do not work equally well for everyone who has a profound hearing loss and cochlear implants frequently do not provide much benefit at all under highly degraded listening conditions. Some individuals do extremely well on traditional audiologic outcome measures with their cochlear implants when tested under benign listening conditions in the clinic and research laboratory while others have much more difficulty. However, all patients with cochlear implants uniformly have difficulty in a number of challenging perceptual domains such as: listening in noise, talking on the telephone, localizing sounds, recognizing familiar voices and different dialects, identifying environmental sounds and listening to music. The enormous variability in outcome and benefit following implantation is not surprising because none of the current generation of cochlear implants successfully restores normal hearing or supports robust speech perception and spoken language processing across all of these difficult and highly variable listening conditions. The traditional outcome measures of audiologic benefit were never designed to assess, understand or explain individual differences in speech perception and spoken language processing. In this chapter, we summarize recent findings that suggest several promising new directions for understanding and explaining variability in outcome and benefit after implantation. These results have implications for the design of new cochlear implants as well as the development of radically new approaches to intervention, training and habilitation following implantation.
Education, Labor Market, and Development: A Review of the Trends and Issues in the Philippines for the Past 25 Years

This paper comprehensively reviews the developments in the education and labor markets in the Philippines in the past 25 years. It highlights the trends on how the labor market used educated workers. It also reviews how education has contributed to national development. Furthermore, it summarizes the recommendations of several comprehensive reviews done for the sector in the last decade. Finally, it identifies research areas for the sector.
Cutting a Long Intron Short: Recursive Splicing and Its Implications

Over time eukaryotic genomes have evolved to host genes carrying multiple exons separated by increasingly larger intronic, mostly non-protein-coding, sequences. Initially, little attention was paid to these intronic sequences, as they were considered not to contain regulatory information. However, advances in molecular biology, sequencing, and computational tools uncovered that numerous segments within these genomic elements do contribute to the regulation of gene expression. Introns are differentially removed in a cell type-specific manner to produce a range of alternatively-spliced transcripts, and many span tens to hundreds of kilobases. Recent work in human and fruitfly tissues revealed that long introns are extensively processed cotranscriptionally and in a stepwise manner, before their two flanking exons are spliced together. This process, called “recursive splicing,” often involves non-canonical splicing elements positioned deep within introns, and different mechanisms for its deployment have been proposed. Still, the very existence and widespread nature of recursive splicing offers a new regulatory layer in the transcript maturation pathway, which may also have implications in human disease.
Comparing Staging Systems for Predicting Prognosis and Survival in Patients with Hepatocellular Carcinoma in Egypt

Introduction Several hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) staging systems are available. Although the European Association for Study of Liver Diseases (EASL) and American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) recommended the use of Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC), many studies in different populations revealed heterogeneous results. The aim of this study was to compare different staging systems for predicting prognosis and survival, and for stratifying HCC patients for treatment at a national referral centre for liver disease in Egypt. Methods 2000 Patients were included in this study. Baseline demographic, clinical, laboratory, and radiological data were determined at diagnosis. Patients were stratified using the Okuda, BCLC, Cancer of the Liver Italian Program (CLIP), and Japan Integrated Staging (JIS). Patients’ survival in different stages within each staging system and the validity of the system in predicting survival were compared. Results The overall survival was 15 months. The 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-year survival of the entire cohort was 56%, 34%, 25% and 15% respectively. The presence of ascites, multiple focal lesions, large tumour size >5 cm, portal vein thrombosis, extra-hepatic spread, AFP≥200 ng/ml and poor Child score were independent predictors of survival (p<0.001). All staging systems were significant in determining overall survival in univariate and multivariate analyses. BCLC was the most predictive staging system for the whole cohort (p<0.001). Among the subgroup of patients offered potentially curative therapy, BCLC was the most informative system in predicting patient survival (p<0.001). For patients with advanced HCC not amenable for specific therapy, CLIP was the best staging system for predicting prognosis (p<0.001). Conclusion BCLC staging system provided the best prognostic stratification for HCC patients. However, CLIP score has the highest stratification ability in patients with advanced HCC highlighting the importance of including AFP in best staging system.
HIV/AIDS vaccines for Africa: scientific opportunities, challenges and strategies

More than decades have already elapsed since human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was identified as the causative agent of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). The HIV has since spread to all parts of the world with devastating effects. In sub-saharan Africa, the HIV/AIDS epidemic has reached unprecedented proportions. Safe, effective and affordable HIV/AIDS vaccines for Africans are therefore urgently needed to contain this public health problem. Although, there are challenges, there are also scientific opportunities and strategies that can be exploited in the development of HIV/AIDS vaccines for Africa. The recent RV144 Phase III trial in Thailand has demonstrated that it is possible to develop a vaccine that can potentially elicit modest protective immunity against HIV infection. The main objective of this review is to outline the key scientific opportunities, challenges and strategies in HIV/AIDS vaccine development in Africa.
Improvement of delivery and live birth rates after ICSI in women aged >40 years by ovarian co-stimulation with growth hormone.

BACKGROUND Growth hormone (GH) is required for ovarian follicular development, and its administration during ovarian stimulation improves pregnancy rate in cow and sheep. Data on the use of exogenous GH in human assisted reproduction treatment are inconsistent. This prospective randomized study evaluates the usefulness of GH administration in women of >40 years undergoing ovarian stimulation for assisted reproduction treatment. METHODS One hundred women of >40 years undergoing assisted reproduction treatment were randomized between a GH treatment group and a placebo group. Assisted reproduction treatment outcomes were evaluated. RESULTS In patients of the GH treatment group, a similar number of oocytes, embryos and pregnancies was achieved as compared with the placebo group. However, the patients treated with GH suffered fewer pregnancy losses, resulting in higher delivery and live birth rates. These patients also showed higher peak serum estradiol concentration and higher concentrations of GH and estradiol in pre-ovulatory follicular fluid as compared with the placebo group. CONCLUSIONS Administration of GH during ovarian stimulation alleviates age-related decrease in assisted reproduction treatment efficiency. This effect appears to be mainly due to an improvement of oocyte developmental potential, but GH action on the uterus cannot be excluded.
Disseminate Warning Message in VANETs Based on Predicting the Interval of Vehicles

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are emerging as a new network environment for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In many applications envisaged for VANETs, traffic information needs to be disseminated to relevant vehicles during a duration of time. Here we present a model of warning message dissemination in VANETs. The idea in our model is that vehicles on a stretch of roads carry warning messages to vehicles in the opposite direction, so as to warn them regarding a dangerous situation ahead. The objective is that as much as possible of the vehicles in the opposite direction receive the warning before they reach the warning line, whereas as few messages are broadcasted as possible. In this model, we mainly use vehicles traveling in opposite direction to reduce broadcast overhead and help message delivery upstream. Furthermore, we dynamically adjust the effect distance of individual relay vehicles through predicting the interval of vehicles in one lane, thus the relay vehicles can stop broadcasting in time in order to reducing unnecessary broadcasts while keeping the warning message in the affected area. Simulations show us the quality of the proposed model by measuring how many affected vehicles are informed in time and the broadcast overhead under various conditions.
Isolated Loss of PMS2 Expression in Colorectal Cancers: Frequency, Patient Age, and Familial Aggregation

Purpose: Most colorectal cancers that have high levels of microsatellite instability (MSI-H) show loss of immunohistochemical expression of proteins that participate in the DNA mismatch repair process, most often involving MLH1 and MSH2. Less commonly, a third DNA mismatch repair protein, MSH6, may also be lost as the primary event. Rarely, tumors with MSI-H show normal expression of these three proteins. The genetic deficiency leading to the MSI-H phenotype in such cases is unknown. PMS2 is another member of the DNA mismatch repair complex. Its expression is generally lost in tumors with MLH1 loss of expression. Rarely, there is selective loss of PMS2 expression. We sought to describe the frequency and clinical correlates of selective loss of expression of PMS2 with the MSI-H tumor phenotype. Experimental Design: Two thousand seven hundred nineteen colorectal cancers from both clinic- and research-based ascertainment were studied. Tumor MSI testing and immunohistochemistry for MLH1, MSH2, MSH6, and PMS2 were conducted. Medical records were abstracted for age at diagnosis, gender, colorectal cancer site, and family history. Results: Five hundred thirty-five of the 2,719 tumors were MSI-H. Of these, 93% showed loss of expression of MLH1, MSH2, and/or MSH6. Thirty-eight showed normal expression for these proteins. PMS2 immunohistochemical staining was successful in 32 of 38 of these tumors. Of the 32, 23 showed selective loss of expression of PMS2. This was associated with young age of diagnosis and right-sided location but not with a striking family history of cancer. Conclusions: Overall, 97% of the MSI-H tumors showed loss of expression for one or more of these four mismatch repair proteins. Selective loss of expression of PMS2 was present in 72% of cases in which colorectal cancers had an MSI-H phenotype but no alteration of expression of MLH1, MSH2, and MSH6. The underlying mechanism involved cannot be determined from this study but could involve point mutations in other DNA mismatch repair genes with retention of immunohistochemical expression, somatic inactivation of PMS2, or germ line mutation of PMS2.
Monolithic Broadband Gilbert Micromixer With an Integrated Marchand Balun Using Standard Silicon IC Process

A single-ended wideband downconversion Gilbert micromixer is demonstrated in this paper using 0.35-mum SiGe BiCMOS technology. A transimpedance amplifier with resistive feedback is utilized in the IF stage while a broadband Marchand balun is employed to generate wideband differential local oscillator signals. The planar Marchand balun topology employed in this paper can generate truly balanced signals even in the presence of the lossy low-resistivity (~10 Omegamiddotcm) silicon substrate. A systematic approach to measure the frequency response of each individual stage in a Gilbert mixer is developed in this paper. This single-ended wideband mixer has the conversion gain of 15 dB, IP1dB of -19 dBm, IIP3 of -7 dBm, and the noise figure of 13 dB. The mixer works from 3.5 to 14.5 GHz
Comparison of RNA-Seq and Microarray in Transcriptome Profiling of Activated T Cells

To demonstrate the benefits of RNA-Seq over microarray in transcriptome profiling, both RNA-Seq and microarray analyses were performed on RNA samples from a human T cell activation experiment. In contrast to other reports, our analyses focused on the difference, rather than similarity, between RNA-Seq and microarray technologies in transcriptome profiling. A comparison of data sets derived from RNA-Seq and Affymetrix platforms using the same set of samples showed a high correlation between gene expression profiles generated by the two platforms. However, it also demonstrated that RNA-Seq was superior in detecting low abundance transcripts, differentiating biologically critical isoforms, and allowing the identification of genetic variants. RNA-Seq also demonstrated a broader dynamic range than microarray, which allowed for the detection of more differentially expressed genes with higher fold-change. Analysis of the two datasets also showed the benefit derived from avoidance of technical issues inherent to microarray probe performance such as cross-hybridization, non-specific hybridization and limited detection range of individual probes. Because RNA-Seq does not rely on a pre-designed complement sequence detection probe, it is devoid of issues associated with probe redundancy and annotation, which simplified interpretation of the data. Despite the superior benefits of RNA-Seq, microarrays are still the more common choice of researchers when conducting transcriptional profiling experiments. This is likely because RNA-Seq sequencing technology is new to most researchers, more expensive than microarray, data storage is more challenging and analysis is more complex. We expect that once these barriers are overcome, the RNA-Seq platform will become the predominant tool for transcriptome analysis.
Face Recognition using Image Gradient Regression Approach

This paper represents a robust face recognition system. The proposed face recognition system consist is useful in forming an effective face recognition. Proposed methodovercomes the problem of multi collinearity and also give good results in case of small sample size (SSS) problem . In Image Gradient Regression Approach (IGRA), first in preprocessing stage image is transformed by normalizing gradient of the image. Then image is converted into zero average data matrix. After preprocessing ridge regression is executed on projected data and identity is determined by calculating maximum correlation coefficient. Experiments carried out on faces94 and Pie facial databases reveal that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-theart methods and demonstrates promising abilities against face recognition.
Victor : the Web-Page Cleaning Tool

In this paper we present a complete solution for automatic cleaning of arbitr ary HTML pages with a goal of using web data as a corpus in the area of natural language processing and computational linguistics. We employ a sequence-labeling approach based on Conditional Random Fields (CRF). Every block of text in analyzed web page is assign ed a set of features extracted from the textual content and HTML structure of the page. The blocks are automatically labeled either as content segments containing main web page content, which should be preserved, or as noisy segments not suitable for further linguistic processing, which should be eliminated. O ur solution is based on the tool introduced at the CLEANEVAL 2007 shared task workshop. I n this paper, we present new CRF features, a handy annotation tool, and new evaluation metrics. Evaluation itself is performed on a random sample of web pages automatically downloaded from the Czech web domain.
Comparison of eager and quorum-based replication in a cloud environment

Most applications deployed in a Cloud require a high degree of availability. For the data layer, this means that data have to be replicated either within a data center or across Cloud data centers. While replication also allows to increase the performance of applications if data is read as the load can be distributed across replica sites, updates need special coordination among the sites and may have an adverse effect on the overall performance. The actual effects of data replication depend on the replication protocol used. While ROWAA (read-one-write-all-available) prefers read operations, quorum-based replication protocols tend to prefer write operations as not all replica sites need to be updated synchronously. In this paper, we provide a detailed evaluation of ROWAA and quorum-based replication protocols in an Amazon AWS Cloud environment on the basis of the TPC-C benchmark and different transaction mixes. The evaluation results for single data center and multi data center environments show that in general the influence of transaction coordination significantly grows with the number of update sites and a growing number of update transactions. However, not all quorum-based protocols are well suited for high update loads as they may create a hot spot that again significantly impacts performance.
Simulation of Water Age and Residence Time in New York Bight

Abstract The time scales on which river inflows disperse in the coastal ocean are relevant to a host of biogeochemical and environmental processes. These time scales are examined in a modeling study of the Hudson River plume on its entry to the New York Bight (NYB). Constituent-oriented age and residence-time theory is applied to compute two time scales: mean age, which is calculated from the ratio of two model tracers, and residence time, which is calculated using the adjoint of the tracer conservation equation. Spatial and temporal variability associated with river discharge and wind is investigated. High river discharge lowers surface water age and shortens residence time in the apex of the NYB. Easterly winds increase surface water age and extend the duration waters along the Long Island coast remain in the NYB apex. Southerly winds increase age along the New Jersey coast but drive a decrease in age of offshore surface waters and prolong the time that surface waters close to the New Jersey coast stay .
Medical care utilization and the transcendental meditation program.

&NA; This field study compared 5 years of medical insurance utilization statistics of approximately 2000 regular participants in the Transcendental Meditation (TM) program with a normative data base of approximately 600,000 members of the same insurance carrier. The benefits, deductible, coinsurance terms, and distribution by gender of the TM group were very similar to the norm, yet the TM group had lower medical utilization rates in all categories. Inpatient days per 1000 by age category were 50.2% fewer than the norm for children (0–18), 50.1% fewer for young adults (19–39), and 69.4% fewer for older adults (40+). Outpatient visits per 1000 for the same age categories were, respectively, 46.8%, 54.7%, and 73.7% fewer. When compared with five other health insurance groups of similar size and professional membership, the TM group had 53.3% fewer inpatient admissions per 1000 and 44.4% fewer outpatient visits per 1000. Admissions per 1000 were lower for the TM group than the norm for all of 17 major medical treatment categories, including ‐55.4% for benign and malignant tumors ‐87.3% for heart disease, ‐30.4% for all infectious diseases, ‐30.6% for all mental disorders, and ‐87.3% for diseases of the nervous system. However, the TM group's admission rates for childbirth were similar to the norm. The issue of self‐selection is addressed in terms of previous medical research in this area.
Social and emotional messages of smiling: An ethological approach.

Did smiling evolve as an expression of happiness, friendliness, or both? Naturalistic observation at a bowling alley (N — 1,793 balls) shows that bowlers often smile when socially engaged, looking at and talking to others, but not necessarily after scoring a spare or a strike. In a second study, bowlers (N =166 balls) rarely smiled while facing the pins but often smiled when facing their friends. At a hockey game, fans (N = 3,726 faces) smiled both when they were socially involved and after events favorable to their team. Pedestrians (TV = 663) were much more likely to smile when talking but only slightly more likely to smile in response to nice weather than to unpleasant weather. These four studies suggest a strong and robust association of smiling with a social motivation and an erratic association with emotional experience.
The wall-induced motion of a floating flexible train

We consider the dynamics of capillary attraction between an articulated train of rigid rods floating at a liquid–gas interface and a nearby wall. We then explain some of the phenomena that are a result of the strong anisotropy and the extended nature of the system, such as the lining up next to the walling in a ‘zippering’ motion that is observed and compare our results qualitatively with those of experiments.
A Distributed Scheme for Broadcast Scheduling in Duty-cycled Wireless Sensor Networks

The paper investigates the minimum-transmission broadcast problem in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks in which each sensor node alternates between active and sleeping modes during its lifetime for energy saving. We propose a scheme, Distributed Broadcast Scheduling (DiBS), to construct a broadcast backbone together with a broadcast schedule for each backbone node such that a broadcast message is disseminated to all other nodes in the network with a minimum number of transmissions. The minimization of the total number of transmissions is achieved thanks to two factors. First, the nature of wireless communications enables a sender to distribute the message to multiple nodes with a single transmission. Second, DiBS exploits such a single transmission in constructing the broadcast backbone. A set of extensive simulations is conducted to show the performance of DiBS as well as its improvement over existing ones in terms of total number of transmissions.
Better Technology, Better Plots, or Better Farmers? Identifying Changes in Productivity and Risk Among Malagasy Rice Farmers

In assessing the productivity gains of a new technology, it is often difficult to determine the extent to which observed output gains are due to the technology itself, rather than to the skill of the farmer or the quality of the plot on which the new technology is tried. This problem of attribution is especially important when technologies are not embodied in purchased inputs such as seed or machinery but result instead from changed farmer cultivation practices. Using data based on observations of farmers in Madagascar who simultaneously practice both a newly introduced and traditional rice production methods, we introduce a method for properly attributing observed productivity and risk changes among new production methods, farmers and plots by controlling for farmer and plot heterogeneity using differential production and yield risk functions. Our results help resolve several outstanding puzzling associated with observed low and incomplete uptake and high rates of disadoption of the new system of rice intensification (SRI) in spite of consistent, sharp yield increases on small farmers' fields without application of additional external inputs.