Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ESG Sustainability and Financial Capital Structure: Where they Stand Nowadays

This study provides a systematic literature review on the linkage between ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) sustainability and financial capital structure of companies. More specifically, we refer to both ESG sustainability performance and disclosure that literature addresses to be jointly connected to both the cost of equity and the cost of debt. We acknowledge the need to systematically categorize the current literature in order to clearly understand the motifs that guide the association between ESG sustainability and the cost of financing. After conducting a deductive search strategy based on a content analysis, we exploit 31 academics papers, in which both theoretical and empirical results were discussed. We recognize “two-speed theoretical findings”; precisely, we notice that the relation between ESG and the cost of equity is well defined by scholarly researches, whereas there are no clear-cut boundaries between ESG and cost of debt yet, that consequently need to further investigations.
Lower mechanical pressure pain thresholds in female adolescents with patellofemoral pain syndrome.

STUDY DESIGN Cross-sectional study. OBJECTIVES To compare pressure pain thresholds (PPTs) between adolescent females diagnosed with patellofemoral pain syndrome (PFPS) and gender- and age-matched controls without musculoskeletal pain. BACKGROUND PFPS is prevalent among adolescents and may be associated with reduced PPT both locally and remotely from the site of reported pain. This may indicate altered central processing of nociceptive information. However, this has never been investigated in adolescents with PFPS. METHODS Adolescents with PFPS and a comparison group without musculoskeletal pain were recruited from a population-based cohort of students from 4 upper secondary schools, aged 15 to 19 years. All 2846 students within that age range were invited to answer an online questionnaire regarding musculoskeletal pain. The students who reported knee pain were contacted by telephone and offered a clinical examination by an experienced rheumatologist, who made a diagnosis. PPTs were measured at 4 sites around the knee and 1 site on the tibialis anterior in the 57 female adolescents diagnosed with PFPS and in 22 female adolescents without musculoskeletal pain. RESULTS Adolescents with PFPS, compared to controls, had significantly lower PPTs (26%-37% [100-178 kPa]) at each of the 4 sites around the knee, suggesting localized hyperalgesia. On the tibialis anterior, adolescents with PFPS had a 33% (159 kPa) lower PPT (distal hyperalgesia) compared with controls. CONCLUSION These findings suggest that adolescent females with PFPS have localized and distal hyperalgesia. These findings may have implications for treating PFPS, as both peripheral and central mechanisms may be driving the pain. Registered at clinicaltrials.gov (NCT01438762).
Feature Extraction of Hyperspectral Images Based On LBP and RF Feature Extraction Techniques Soumya

This project deals with the feature extraction of hyperspectral images using LBP and RF based feature extraction techniques. Nowadays hyperspectral images find a wide variety of applications in the field of agriculture, eye care, mineralogy, astronomy and chemical imaging. Since hyperspectral images collect and process information from the entire EM spectrum, these images give exhaustive spectral data about the behavior of the objects. This information is used to discriminate various landscapes. Due to the high dimensionality of hyperspectral images, it is difficult to process the hyperspectral images. Feature extraction techniques are used to eliminate the dimensionality problems and reduce the computational complexity. The performance of this method is analyzed by using the quality indexes called, overall accuracy, average accuracy and kappa.
Fifteen-year survival in prostate cancer. A prospective, population-based study in Sweden.

OBJECTIVE To describe the natural history of initially untreated early-stage prostate cancer. A key secondary objective was to calculate long-term survival rates by stage, grade, and age at diagnosis. DESIGN Prospective cohort study. SETTING Population-based in 1 county of Sweden, without screening for prostate cancer. PATIENTS A group of 642 patients with prostate cancer of any stage, consecutively diagnosed between 1977 and 1984 at a mean age of 72 years with complete follow-up to 1994. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Proportion of patients who died from prostate cancer, and 15-year survival (with 95% confidence interval [CI]), corrected for causes of death other than prostate cancer. RESULTS In the entire cohort, prostate cancer accounted for 201 (37%) of all 541 deaths. Among 300 patients with a diagnosis of localized disease (T0-T2), 33 (11%) died of prostate cancer. In this group, the corrected 15-year survival rate was similar in 223 patients with deferred treatment (81%; 95% CI, 72%-89%) and in 77 who received initial treatment (81%; 95% CI, 67%-95%). The corrected 15-year survival was 57% (95% CI, 45%-68%) in 183 patients with locally advanced cancer (T3-T4) and 6% (95% CI, 0%-12%) in those 159 who had distant metastases at the time of diagnosis. CONCLUSION Patients with localized prostate cancer have a favorable outlook following watchful waiting, and the number of deaths potentially avoidable by radical initial treatment is limited. Without reliable prognostic indicators, an aggressive approach to all patients with early disease would entail substantial overtreatment. In contrast, patients with locally advanced or metastatic disease need trials of aggressive therapy to improve their poor prognosis.
Correction to Glyphosate Effects on Plant Mineral Nutrition, Crop Rhizophere Microbiota, and Plant Disease in Glyphosate-Resistant Crops

The description of work in refs 206 and 207 was incorrect. Although glyphosate was applied to fields/crops prior to wheat or barley, GR soybean was not in the rotation. Canola was one rotation crop that preceded wheat or barley, but the authors were not sure if it was GR or not (although it is likely based on the statement that the canola was sprayed with glyphosate in ref 207). The paragraph with the heading Effect of GR Soybean in Rotation with Cereals on p 10389 should read as follows: “Application of glyphosate in previous production years has been associated with increased incidence of Fusarium head blight in wheat and barley gown in minimum tillage systems in Saskatchewan, Canada.206,207 Because GR soybeans are a rotation crop with cereals, Berube et al.208 tested the effects of tillage and glyphosate treatment of GR soybean on Fusarium head blight development in subsequent plantings of wheat and barley in Quebec, Canada. There was no significant effect of treating GR soybeans with glyphosate on development of head blight and accumulation of mycotoxins in barley or wheat planted after the soybean crop. ”
Association of angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitor‐associated angioedema with transplant and immunosuppressant use

To cite this article: Byrd JB, Woodard‐Grice A, Stone E, Lucisano A, Schaefer H, Yu C, Eyler AE, Salloum NE, Brown NJ. Association of angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitor‐associated angioedema with transplant and immunosuppressant use. Allergy 2010; 65: 1381–1387.
Distinct roles of the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortex in the acquisition and performance of a cognitive skill

The purpose of the present work is to study the functional roles of two predefined regions of interest: one in the left anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that seems to reflect goal-relevant control demand, and one in the left prefrontal cortex (PFC) that reflects memory retrieval demand. Two slow event-related brain imaging experiments were conducted, adapting a cognitive skill acquisition paradigm. Experiment 1 found that both left ACC and left PFC activity increased parametrically with task difficulty. Using a slight modification of the same basic paradigm, Experiment 2 attempted to decouple retrieval and control demands over the course of learning. Participants were imaged early in training and again several days later, after substantial additional training in the task. There was a clear dissociation between activity in the left PFC and the left ACC. Although the PFC region showed a substantial decrease in activity over the course of learning, reflecting greater ease of retrieval, the ACC showed the opposite pattern of results with significantly greater activity after training, reflecting increased control demand. Moreover, the increased response in the ACC occurred when errors and latencies were smallest.
Purification of P-TEFb, a Transcription Factor Required for the Transition into Productive Elongation (*)

Production of full-length runoff transcripts in vitro and functional mRNA in vivo is sensitive to the drug 5,6-dichloro-1-β-D-ribofuranosylbenzimidazole (DRB). We previously proposed the existence of an activity, P-TEF (positive transcription elongation factor) that functions in a DRB-sensitive manner to allow RNA polymerase II elongation complexes to efficiently synthesize long transcripts (Marshall, N. F. and Price, D. H.(1992) Mol. Cell. Biol. 12, 2078-2090). We have fractionated nuclear extracts of Drosophila melanogaster Kc cells and identified three activities, P-TEFa, factor 2, and P-TEFb, that are directly involved in reconstructing DRB-sensitive transcription. P-TEFb is essential for the production of DRB-sensitive long transcripts in vitro, while P-TEFa and factor 2 are stimulatory. P-TEFb activity is associated with a protein comprising two polypeptide subunits with apparent molecular masses of 124 and 43 kDa. Using a P-TEFb-dependent transcription system, we show that P-TEFb acts after initiation and is the limiting factor in the production of long runoff transcripts.
Optimized segmented iterative physical optics for RCS computation of large cavities

This paper presents a numerical compression of the Segmented Iterative Physical Optics (S-IPO), known as an efficient asymptotic method for computation of Radar Cross Section (RCS) of large complex cavities. The compression is applied to interaction matrices of IPO between coupled surfaces. It is made by using the algebraic Adaptive Cross Approximation (ACA), which is known to provide a good compression and acceleration when used with dense matrices involved in rigorous numerical methods. Results show that this method highly compresses the S-IPO matrices, without damaging the RCS prediction.
Differences in the phenotypic characteristics of subjects with familial defective apolipoprotein B-100 and familial hypercholesterolemia.

Familial defective apolipoprotein B-100 (FDB) is a recently identified autosomal-dominantly inherited disorder caused by a point mutation in the apolipoprotein (apo) B gene. To determine whether the phenotypic characteristics in FDB subjects are similar to those in subjects with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH), 76 kindreds fulfilling the clinical criteria for heterozygous FH/FDB were characterized using molecular biological techniques. Allele-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) at the apoB locus was used for diagnosis or exclusion of FDB. PCR-based methods for detection of two point mutations (V408M and P664L) at the LDL receptor (LDLR) locus, cosegregation analysis using eight restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) at the LDLR locus, or the exclusion of FDB confirmed the clinical diagnosis of FH. Three kindreds were not included because of a missing cosegregation between a particular haplotype and the FH phenotype. We predicted that a similar number of kindreds would be detected in the two groups, assuming comparable prevalences of the diseases in our population and similar phenotypic characteristics. However, only nine kindreds were identified with the FDB mutation compared with 64 kindreds with FH (P < .0001). From these 73 kindreds, 28 FDB heterozygotes and 129 FH heterozygotes were compared using multivariate analysis. There were no differences between these two groups with respect to age, sex, and apoE genotype distribution, lipoprotein(a) concentrations, body mass index, blood pressure, and smoking habits. However, FDB subjects demonstrated significantly lower concentrations of total cholesterol (8.1 versus 10.2 mmol/L, P < .001), LDL cholesterol (6.3 versus 8.2 mmol/L, P < .001), and triglycerides (1.3 versus 1.8 mmol/L, P = .025) and higher concentrations of HDL cholesterol (1.4 versus 1.2 mmol/L, P = .015) than subjects with FH. In contrast to FH, female FDB subjects tended to have higher concentrations of total cholesterol (8.9 versus 7.5 mmol/L, P = .032) and LDL cholesterol (7.1 versus 5.7 mmol/L, P = .026) than FDB males. The same results regarding total and LDL cholesterol and sex differences were observed when individual data of 238 FDB and 415 FH subjects from the literature were compared. In addition, FDB subjects showed much larger total cholesterol fluctuations than FH subjects (median of intraindividual coefficients of variation: FDB, 14.5%; FH, 5.3%; P < .001). In summary, these results demonstrate that FDB subjects tend to have a milder form of hyperlipoproteinemia than FH subjects and that only a part of the subjects with FDB fulfill the established criteria for identifying FH.
Isolation and genome characterization of a novel duck Tembusu virus with a 74 nucleotide insertion in the 3′ non-translated region

During investigations into the outbreak of duck Tembusu virus (DTMUV) infection in 2011 in China, a DTMUV strain (DTMUV-AH2011) was isolated from the affected ducks. The length of the genome of the DTMUV-AH2011 strain was found to be 11,064 nucleotides and to possess 10,278 nucleotides of one open reading frame (ORF), flanked by 94 nucleotides of the 5′ non-translated region (NTR) and 692 nucleotides of the 3′ NTR. In comparison with five fully sequenced TMUV genomes, the genome of DTMUV-AH2011 had a 74 nucleotide insertion in the 3′ NTR. Comparison of the DTMUV-AH2011 fully deduced amino acid sequences with those of other Tembusu virus strains reported recently in China showed they had a highly conserved polyprotein precursor, sharing 98.9% amino acid identities, at least. The overall divergences of amino acid substitutions were randomly distributed among viral proteins except for the protein NS4B, the protein NS4B was unchanged. Knowledge of the biological characters of DTMUV and the potential role of the insertion in the 3′ NTR in RNA replication will be useful for further studies of the mechanisms of virus replication and pathogenesis.
Characteristics of Satellite-Derived Clear-Sky Atmospheric Temperature Inversion Strength in the Arctic, 1980–96

Abstract The low-level atmospheric temperature inversion is a dominant feature of the Arctic atmosphere throughout most of the year. Meteorological stations that provide radiosonde data are sparsely distributed across the Arctic, and therefore provide little information on the spatial distribution of temperature inversions. Satellite-borne sensors provide an opportunity to fill the observational gap. In this study, a 17-yr time series, 1980–96, of clear-sky temperature inversion strength during the cold season is derived from High Resolution Infrared Radiation Sounder (HIRS) data using a two-channel statistical method. The satellite-derived clear-sky inversion strength monthly mean and trends agree well with radiosonde data. Both increasing and decreasing trends are found in the cold season for different areas. It is shown that there is a strong coupling between changes in surface temperature and changes in inversion strength, but that trends in some areas may be a result of advection aloft rather than wa.
TOPICAL APPLICATION OF DUNG-CAKE ASH AS INNOVATIVE THERAPY IN SKIN WOUND HEALING IN RABBIT MODEL

Background: The pharmacologicl effects of different types of ashes containing different elements and trace elements are explainable. These effects poteintiate and help in repair and regenerative processes in rabbit skin wound. Method: For this proposes ash from buffalo dung-cake, was prepared and analyzed. The ash was applied besides Polymyxin B-Bacitracin Zinc ointment, one of the topical applications as control and the process of healing was observed for two weeks physically and histologically. Results: A significant difference between the effects in healing was observed in control and experimental. Moreover, the skin tissue repairing rate by ash is faster. Conclusion: This study confirms that the ash played a very positive role and repaired the wound within a period of 7–11 days. This consistency between ointment and ash expresses the ability of ash in healing the wounds. Hence ash could be considered as natural medicine and possesses unique properties.
Rational Design of a Potent Pan-Pim Kinases Inhibitor with a Rhodanine-Benzoimidazole Structure.

BACKGROUND/AIM The serine/threonine Pim kinases are overexpressed in various types of solid carcinomas and hematological malignancies, and contribute to regulating cell-cycle progression and cell survival. The aim of this study was to discover a novel pan-Pim kinases inhibitor with potent anti-proliferative activities against cancer cell lines. MATERIALS AND METHODS We screened a panel of small molecule compounds for their ability to inhibit Pim-1 kinase activity, and the hit compound was optimized using the docking analysis to Pim-1. We evaluated kinase-inhibition activities of the rationally-designed compound against Pim-1, 2, 3 and another five kinases. Furthermore, in order to characterize the cellular activities, both solid and hematological cancer cell lines treated with the compound were subjected to anti-proliferative assay, western blotting, FACS and apoptosis assays. RESULTS We discovered a pan-Pim kinases inhibitor, compound 1, with a rhodanine-benzylidene structure via Pim-1 inhibitor screening. Using docking analysis of compound 1 and Pim-1, we optimized it and found a potent- and selective-Pim kinases inhibitor, compound 2, with a rhodanine-benzoimidazole structure. Compound 2 inhibited Pim-1, 2, 3 with IC50 values of 16, 13, and 6.4 nM, respectively, and suppressed proliferation of solid and hematological cancer cell lines at submicromolar concentrations. In both types of cell lines, compound 2 inhibited phosphorylation of Pim signaling substrates and cell-cycle progression and induced apoptosis. CONCLUSION We identified a pan-Pim kinases inhibitor, compound 2, with a rhodanine-benzoimidazole structure. Our data suggest that compound 2 can serve as a lead to novel anticancer agents, effective in the treatment of both solid carcinomas and hematological malignancies.
Monitoring of early response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer with 1H MR spectroscopy: Comparison to sequential 2‐[18F]‐fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography

To assess the efficacy of 1H MR spectroscopy (MRS) to evaluate early responses to neoadjuvant chemotherapy in breast cancer patients, as compared to that of the standardized uptake value (SUV) in 18F‐fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET).
Regulation of p27 by S-phase kinase-associated protein 2 is associated with aggressiveness in non-small-cell lung cancer.

PURPOSE The F-box protein S-phase kinase-associated protein 2 (Skp2) is one of the positive regulators of the cell cycle that promote ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis of the cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor p27. In this study, we investigated the significance of Skp2 expression in human non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC). PATIENTS AND METHODS Clinicopathologic features and immunohistochemical expression of Skp2 and p27 proteins were studied in 138 patients with NSCLC. Survival analyses were performed using the Kaplan-Meier method and the Cox regression model. To analyze the role of Skp2 in vitro, NSCLC cells were transfected with an Skp2-expressing vector or small interfering RNA. RESULTS Skp2 was overexpressed in males, smokers, patients with squamous cell carcinomas, and patients with poorly differentiated cancers (P = .034, < .0001, < .0001, and .002, respectively). The multivariant analysis revealed that Skp2 expression is an independent prognostic factor for survival in NSCLC. An inverse relationship of Skp2 with p27 expression was observed (P = .012), and patients with both a higher expression of Skp2 and a lower expression of p27 showed a significantly unfavorable prognosis (P = .0002). In vitro ectopic expression of Skp2 in NSCLC cells reduced the protein level of p27. Conversely, induction of Skp2 siRNA increased the protein level of p27, leading to growth inhibition in NSCLC cells. CONCLUSION Skp2 overexpression is closely associated with the suppression of p27 and the aggressiveness in NSCLC. It also could be a therapeutic target in NSCLC.
Indústria cultural, música-mercadoria e fonografia no Brasil

O artigo apresenta uma reflexao teorica sobre os conceitos de Industria Cultural, uma (re) leitura mais atual, e sobre musica-mercadoria, alem do seu mapeamento. Em seguida passamos pela Industria Fonografica brasileira e finalizamos com a cultura popular – referencial-base das manifestacoes do povo. Muitas dessas manifestacoes se tornaram ao longo das estrategias comerciais e industriais fortes produtos. O artigo e resultado de uma pesquisa qualitativa no campo das Teorias e Sociologia da Comunicacao. Metodos: observacao e historico-descritivo. Tecnicas: pesquisa bibliografica, observacao.
A Click And Bricks Strategy For eGovernment

Two of the central challenges of e-government are the need for ‘joined-up’ government through agency collaboration, and the need to provide ‘citizen-centred’ government, where services and information are integrated at the point of delivery. Electronic service delivery provides the hoped for panacea to enable not only administrative efficiencies in the functions of government, but also services that are centred on the needs of the citizen. The implementation of e-government however, presents challenges regarding the achievement of inter-agency collaboration and highlights the importance of developing multiple access channels. This paper reports from an in-depth case study detailing first, the strategy the Irish government adopted for electronic service delivery and second, provides detailed analysis from the pioneering efforts of an individual county council into agency collaboration and a unique method of service provision. Two survey questionnaires conducted with staff of the county council and citizens of the county, reveal critical success factors in developing inter-agency collaboration and raise important concerns expressed by citizens into data privacy, social inclusion and the digital divide.