Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plasma Platelet-Derived Growth Factor: Preliminary Study of a Potential Marker in Head and Neck Cancer

The role of growth factors in the development and spread of head and neck cancers has received little attention. Platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF) is a potent mitogen that is released normally in wound healing, but is also secreted by human malignant epithelial cells. In breast and ovarian carcinomas, elevated plasma PDGF has correlated with a poorer prognosis. This preliminary study was designed 1) to determine if PDGF is elevated in the plasma of patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck and 2) to determine whether there is any change in levels following surgical ablation. The PDGF was measured by radioimmunoassay in 18 patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma and in 12 normal controls. In the control group the mean level was 7.4 fmol/100 μL (range 2.8 to 12.5, median 7.6), in spite of the fact that PDGF is reportedly not measurable in normal subjects. The mean PDGF level in the cancer patients was 20.4 fmol/100 μL (range 4.1 to 35.7, median 20.5) and as compared to the control group was significantly elevated (median two-sample test, p < .001). Of the 20 cancer patients, only 4 had levels less than 12.5 fmol/100 μL. Moreover, 2 of these had undergone prior radiotherapy. In all cases, PDGF levels decreased significantly after surgery. These results support the importance of the further investigation of plasma PDGF levels as a potential biomarker to evaluate efficacy of treatment, possibly to aid in the detection of tumor recurrence, and even to be a potential indicator of tumor aggressiveness.
JESSICA MCCOURT Cracking the genetic code of high-performing manufacturers

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Stöldsäker insamlingsbehållare för blybatterier

Lead batteries are collected for recycling due to their containment of environmental hazardous substances, lead and acid. The current collecting system is exposed to theft due to the great amount of valuable lead within the batteries. The remains of stolen lead batteries with the lead removed have been found on the bare ground and batteries have also been found in vehicles transporting them abroad in order to be sold. As a result of theft, the recycling of lead batteries can´t be performed. On behalf of Stockholm Vatten AB, the task to develop a theft-proof container for lead batteries was given.Stockholm Vatten AB is in charge of the areas in which the containers are placed. The areas are defined as recycling centres, often placed in relation to gas stations or arranged as larger manned areas.The development process was based on a research which included visits at recycling centres and interviews. Continuous meetings with Stockholm Vatten provided fundamental information about the task. Requirements were defined in a requirement specification on which further development was based. From specified difficulties ideas were generated and put together into four concepts; Plinten, Vinkeln, Spiralen and Extern. Assessments were given from Stockholm Vatten and staff from the recycling areas. Together with different evaluation methods the general ideas from Spiralen was selected to be the basis on which the final concept was built upon.The functions and construction of Spiralen was further developed. Material and components were defined on which sizing later was made. Effort was put into the development of the theft-proof construction and the safe keeping of users. In order to ensure an easily made submit of lead batteries, focus was also put into the design arranging of components.The main function of the theft-proof container is provided by a spiral-shaped slide on which the batteries are transported upon within the container. A hatch ensures a secure hand-in and the covering sheath protects users from acid and batteries from rain and theft.The theft-proof container meets the requirements defined in the specification of requirements. With its spiral-shaped slide and sheath cover the theft-proof function is created together with a safer hand-in process which will reduce the risk of injuries. Within the developed container a greater amount of lead batteries can be collected and maintained, and thus, recycling can be guaranteed.
Demographic Diversity in the Boardroom: Mediators of the Board Diversity - Firm Performance Relationship

Whereas the majority of research on board diversity explores the direct relationship between racial and gender diversity and firm performance, this paper investigates mediators that explain how board diversity is related to firm performance. Grounded in signalling theory and the behavioural theory of the firm, we suggest that this relationship operates through two mediators: firm reputation and innovation. In a sample of Fortune 500 firms, we find a positive relationship between board racial diversity and both firm reputation and innovation. We find that reputation and innovation both partially mediate the relationship between board racial diversity and firm performance. In addition, we find a positive relationship between board gender diversity and innovation.
A Completeness Framework for Critical Success Factors of ERP Implementation Projects: A Stakeholders Perspective

The complex and integrated nature of Enterprise Resourse Planning (ERP) system is often coupled with time constraints and substantial financial commitments that inevitably make its implementation to be a highly risky undertaking . Reviews of the existing literature on the subject suggest that Critical Success Factors (CSFs) have been studied by researchers for risk aversion in ERP implementations. The review studies have often provided different listing of CSFs as per their research settings and scope. ERP projects necessitate organization wide transformation making stakeholders involvement and participation crucial for the success guarantee of the ERP project. Critical Success Factors related to stakeholders are often found in the understated position in spite of the prime contribution and difference they make to ERP implementation success story. The paper focusses on importance of identifying stakeholders’ CSFs for studying, monitoring and controlling purposes. It further attempts to provide a consolidated list of stakeholders CSFs along with proper categorization.
Insulin Stimulates Production and Secretion of Endothelin From Bovine Endothelial Cells

Endothelin, a vasoconstrictor peptide secreted from endothelial cells, has been thought to play a role in various forms of vascular disease. Diabetes mellitus is well known for its association with accelerated atherosclerosis and microvascular damage. Although the basis for the vessel insult is multifactorial, hyperinsulinemia is thought to contribute by an unknown mechanism. In this study, we sought to determine whether insulin stimulates the production and secretion of ET-1 as a possible basis for the association of hyperinsulinemia and vascular disease. We demonstrated that insulin significantly stimulates the gene expression and secretion of ET-1 from cultured BAEC, and that insulin increases ET-1 mRNA expressed in BBCEC. Insulin caused a maximal twofold inducement above control ET-1 mRNA expression in a dose-related fashion in BAEC. The increased mRNA resulted from increased transcription, as determined by nuclear run-off studies. Increased ET-1 mRNA was seen after 4 h of incubation with insulin: the peak occurred at 6–8 h and persisted for 24 h. Insulin caused as much as a fourfold stimulation of ET-1 secretion from BAEC in a dose-related fashion, including a twofold increase at a physiological concentration (10−9 M): The increase began at 1 h of incubation and continued for the entire 24-h incubation period. The insulin-induced increases in both ET-1 mRNA and ET-1 protein secretion were significantly attenuated by genistein, a tyrosine kinase inhibitor. This stimulation probably occurred through the insulin receptor, because IGF-1 had no effect on ET-1 gene expression or secretion from these cells. Actinomycin-D inhibited the stimulation of ET-1 mRNA by insulin, whereas cycloheximide caused a superinducement of insulin's effect. Rats implanted with subcutaneous insulin pellets for 10 days had markedly elevated plasma ET levels, confirming a stimulatory role for insulin in vivo, in both diabetic and normal rodents. This study suggests that circulating hyperinsulinemia might induce the production and secretion of ET-1, a powerful endogenous vasoconstrictor and mitogen for the vascular smooth muscle cell. This interaction could underlie the increased vascular disease characteristic of hyperinsulinemic diabetic states.
A highly active protein repair enzyme from an extreme thermophile: the L-isoaspartyl methyltransferase from Thermotoga maritima.

We show that the open reading frame in the Thermotoga maritima genome tentatively identified as the pcm gene (R. V. Swanson et al., J. Bacteriol. 178, 484-489, 1996) does indeed encode a protein L-isoaspartate (D-aspartate) O-methyltransferase (EC 2.1.1.77) and that this protein repair enzyme displays several novel features. We expressed the 317 amino acid pcm gene product of this thermophilic bacterium in Escherichia coli as a fusion protein with an N-terminal 20 residue hexa-histidine-containing sequence. This protein contains a C-terminal domain of approximately 100 residues not previously seen in this enzyme from various prokaryotic or eukaryotic species and which does not have sequence similarity to any other entry in the GenBank databases. The C-terminal region appears to be required for enzymatic function as no activity is detected in two recombinant constructs lacking this domain. Sedimentation equilibrium analysis indicated that the enzyme is monomeric in solution. The Km values for measured for peptide and protein substrates were found to be intermediate between those of the high-affinity human enzyme and those of the lower-affinity wheat, nematode, and E. coli enzymes. The enzyme was extremely heat stable, with no loss of activity after 60 min at 100 degreesC. Enzyme activity was observed at temperatures as high as 93 degreesC with an optimal activity of 164 nmol/min/mg protein at 85 degreesC. This activity is approximately 18-fold higher than the maximal activities of mesophilic homologs at 37 degreesC. These data suggest that the Thermotoga enzyme has unique features for initiating repair in damaged proteins containing L-isoaspartyl residues at elevated temperatures.
Mass Customization through Manufacturing Postponement Strategy: The Case of Build-A-Bear Workshop

In order to sustain in the globally competitive market, companies are continuously striving to create new value propositions for their products or services. Businesses have adopted various concepts in doing so and mass customization is one of them. Build-A-Bear Workshop has been a successful company in the toy industry and is renowned for their customized plush toys. The aim of this paper is to study how Build-A-Bear Workshop mastered mass customization to create a competitive edge in the market. The paper takes a qualitative approach in studying the case of Build-A-Bear Workshop. It shows how the company has been efficiently managing the process of customization by embracing the manufacturing postponement strategy.
Comprehensive Marketplace and Factors Affecting the Budget of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in Sri Lanka

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an enterprise with an extensive information system that integrates and controls all business functions and processes in the entire organization. It is an essential and popular tool for large-scale organizations and is currently extended to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). In the early days, a good demand prevailed for individual packages, such as payroll, stock control, material management, human resource management, and inventory control systems; but now it is a collection of packages as a whole system. Types and scale of business organizations have customized their products to fulfil the requirements. The complexity of the business process is a significant factor that creates a rigorous marketplace, while competitiveness among businesses leads to the expenditure of vast amounts of money to maintain such business automated systems. The objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive review of the marketplace and the endeavour to maintain ERP within the Sri Lankan domain, in comparison with the global scenario. Due to the close saturation of ERP adoptions in large enterprises, ERP vendors now focus more on SMEs. Moreover, due to globalization, partnerships, value networks, and the widespread information flow across and within SMEs currently, more SMEs are adopting ERP systems. The risks of adoption relate to the fact that SMEs have limited resources and specific characteristics that make their case different from large enterprises. This research has been based on 80 leading business organizations in Sri Lanka catering to local and foreign trade, manufacturing, commerce, banking, and hotel services.
CSR Practice on the Garments Sector: An Overall Investigation to Work Out an Effective Relationship between CSR & Accounting to Develop the Bangladeshi Garments Sector

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between CSR & accounting by analyzing some factors that would include social accounting, human resource accounting, environment accounting, tax avoidance, balanced scored card and ethical standard. The study is in a face-to-face interview with garments employee & employer. A closed-minded questionnaire was used for a face-to-face interview to collect data from employees & employers of the garments factory. To analyze data, the study has used several statistical tools such as chi-square to test research hypothesis, Centroid method to analyze variables by developing a quantitative method. Findings show that CSR has a positive relation with accounting to enhance overall factory performance. Accounting describes every slogan of CSR by defining social accounting, environment accounting, human resource accounting, tax avoidance, balanced scorecards & accounting ethics. Moreover, this is the first depth research that investigates the relation between CSR & Accounting. Garments regulatory authorities in Bangladesh, accounting regulatory authorities in Bangladesh or other developing countries may find the findings of this paper useful.
Pharmacy Data in the VA Health Care System

Recent advances in Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care data systems have greatly increased access to operational pharmacy information. This article presents a brief guide to VA pharmacy data sources: the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture files, the Pharmacy Benefits Management database, Decision Support System (DSS) National Data Extracts for inpatient and outpatient care, the planned DSS National Pharmacy Extract, DSS databases at local VA facilities, and the Non-VA Fee Basis files. Depending on the source, available data elements include patient demographics, clinical care information, characteristics of the medication and of the pre-scribing physician, and cost. Access policies are detailed for VA and non-VA researchers. Linking these sources to VA databases containing data on inpatient and outpatient ser-vices offers a comprehensive view of health care within several VA populations of general interest, including people over age 65 and those with physical and psychiatric disabilities.
Implementation and Comparison between Two Algorithms of Three-Level Neutral Point Clamped Voltage Source Inverter

This paper presents a comparison between two Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) algorithms applied to a three-level Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) Voltage Source Inverter (VSI). The first algorithm applied is the triangular-sinusoidal strategy; the second is the Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (SVPWM) strategy. In the first part, we present a topology of three-level NCP VSI. After that, we develop the two PWM strategies to control this converter. At the end the experimental results are presented. Keywords—Multilevel inverter, Space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM), triangular-sinusoidal strategy.
Functional role of gap junctions in early and delayed cardioprotection induced by nitric oxide donors and rapid cardiac pacing

s for oral presentation 1. Gönczi M, Papp R, Seprényi Gy, Végh Á. A réskapcsolatok szerepe a nitrogén-monoxid antiaritmiás hatásában. Magyar Kardiológus Társaság Kongresszusa, Balatonfüred, 2008. Cardiologia Hungarica 2008; 38: B15. 2. Gönczi M, Papp R, Seprényi Gy, Végh Á. Role of nitric oxide in the modulation of gap junction channels. XXVIII. European Section Meeting of the International Society for Heart Research (ISHR), Athens J Mol Cell Cardiol 2008; 44: 752. 3. Gönczi M, Nagy N, Végh Á. A réskapcsolatok szerepe a prekondicionálás késői antiaritmiás hatásában. Magyar Kardiológus Társaság Kongresszusa, Balatonfüred, 2009. Cardiologia Hungarica 2009; 39:A43.
Crystal structure of chondroitin AC lyase, a representative of a family of glycosaminoglycan degrading enzymes.

Glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), highly sulfated polymers built of hexosamine-uronic acid disaccharide units, are major components of the extracellular matrix, mostly in the form of proteoglycans. They interact with a large array of proteins, in particular of the blood coagulation cascade. Degradation of GAGs in mammalian systems occurs by the action of GAG hydrolases. Bacteria express a large number of GAG-degrading lyases that break the hexosamine-uronic acid bond to create an unsaturated sugar ring. Flavobacterium heparinum produces at least five GAG lyases of different specificity. Chondroitin AC lyase (chondroitinase AC, 75 kDa) is highly active toward chondroitin 4-sulfate and chondroitin-6 sulfate. Its crystal structure has been determined to 1.9 A resolution. The enzyme is composed of two domains. The N-terminal domain of approximately 300 residues contains mostly alpha-helices which form a doubly-layered horseshoe (a subset of the (alpha/alpha)6 toroidal topology). The approximately 370 residues long C-terminal domain is made of beta-strands arranged in a four layered beta-sheet sandwich, with the first two sheets having nine strands each. This fold is novel and has no counterpart in full among known structures. The sequence of chondroitinase AC shows low level of homology to several hyaluronate lyases, which likely share its fold. The shape of the molecule, distribution of electrostatic potential, the pattern of conservation of the amino acids and the results of mutagenesis of hyaluronate lyases, indicate that the enzymatic activity resides primarily within the N-terminal domain. The most likely candidate for the catalytic base is His225. Other residues involved in catalysis and/or substrate binding are Arg288, Arg292, Lys298 and Lys299.
Bayesian reconstructions with PDE image model for emission tomography

The aim of the present study was to investigate a new type of Bayesian reconstruction method which utilizes partial differential equations (PDE) image models as a prior. PDE image models are very popular in image restoration and segmentation. Our method introduces such models to emission tomography reconstruction by using Bayesian one step late (OSL) algorithm and an OS acceleration one. In a PDE based model, the image can be viewed as the solution of an evolutionary differential equation. It can be thought as a descent of an energy function which entitled us to use PDE models in Bayesian reconstruction. In this paper, three different PDE models are studied, two of them are based on anisotropic diffusion model, and another is based on a complex diffusion model. All of them have the properties of edge-preserving and denoising as the latest median root prior (MRP). We validated the effectiveness of the method using a Zubal phantom in numerical experiments and compared it to the classical MLEM and MRP reconstruction. The results show that the proposed PDE model method is better than the MLEM and the MRP reconstruction methods in visualization, bias and variance, and are more suitable for OS acceleration than MRP.
A major challenge for a generous welfare system: A heavy socio‐economic burden of chronic pain conditions in Sweden – and how to meet this challenge

In this issue of the European Journal of Pain, Gustavsson and co-workers publish an interesting and important study based on data from administrative databases from half (54%) of the 1.6 million inhabitants in the Västra Götaland region of Sweden (Gustavsson et al., 2012). These databases provided patient-level direct and indirect costs to the healthcare and welfare systems of 840,000 patients with one or more diagnoses that commonly are associated with prolonged pain, for the years 2004–2009. Costs were for direct inpatient and outpatient care, drug prescriptions, long-term (more than 15 days) sick leaves, and early retirements.
Potentiation of delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol-induced analgesia by morphine in mice: involvement of mu- and kappa-opioid receptors.

The antinociceptive effect of peripheral delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol was examined in mice previously treated with an inactive dose of morphine. The ED50 of delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol was significantly reduced by morphine, both in the tail-flick test (0.85 vs. 2.10 mg/kg) and in the hot-plate test (1.51 vs. 4.71 mg/kg and 0.73 vs. 2.47 mg/kg in jumping and paw-lick responses, respectively). The synergistic effect between morphine and delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol was partially blocked by the cannabinoid receptor antagonist, SR-141,716 A [(N-piperidino-5-(4-chlorophenyl)-1-(2,4-dichorophenyl)-4-methyl-3 -pyrazolecarboxamide, hydrochloride)], at a dose of 2 mg/kg (i.p.) as well as by the opioid receptor antagonist naloxone, at the dose of 1 mg/kg (s.c.). Such an effect was also blocked by i.t. nor-binaltorphimine (a kappa-selective opioid receptor antagonist) given at 20 micrograms/mouse as well as by beta-funaltrexamine (a mu-selective opioid receptor antagonist) at a dose of 2 nmol/mouse (i.c.v., 24 h before the test). Accordingly, the mu-opioid receptor agonist DAMGO ([D-Ala2,N-Me-Phe4,Gly-ol5]enkephalin) potentiated the effect of delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol. These data show that the synergism between morphine and delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol appears to involve cannabinoid as well as mu-supraspinal and kappa-spinal opioid receptors.
A review of health care provider payment reform in selected countries in Asia and Latin America.

To explore opportunities for research and assist in research design the Partnerships for Health Reform undertook the research for this report which reviews the current status of provider payment reform in selected Asian and Latin American countries as well as possible research questions and research approaches. Provider payment method the mechanism for transferring financial resources from the payers of health services (the government insurers and/or patients) to the providers influences providers behavior (in terms of the types amounts and quality of services they offer) and financial performance. The research found that reforms in Asia are largely national level reforms affecting the whole of the social security system reforms in Latin America tend to be less centrally driven and uniform. (authors)