Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Musashi1 promotes tumor metastasis and is a prognostic marker for renal carcinoma.

BACKGROUND Musashi1 (MSI1) has been reported to be involved in cancer development and progression. The biologic role of MSI1 in renal cell carcinoma (RCC), however, remains unknown. METHODS Expression of MSI1 in normal kidney cells and kidney cancer cells were measured by real-time PCR. In addition, MSI1 expression in 20 paired kidney cancer and non-cancerous tissues were quantified using real-time PCR. Furthermore, the expression of MSI1 in 115 kidney cancer samples was detected to analyze the correlations between MSI1 expression and the clinicopathological features of RCC patients. The biological function of MSI1 on tumor cell invasion and migration were explored through wound healing and transwell migration assays. RESULTS MSI1 was significantly upregulated in renal cancer cells and tissues compared with normal kidney cells and tissues. High levels of MSI1 were positively associated with tumor stage (P=0.002) and distant metastasis (P=0.013) of RCC patients. Patients with higher MSI1 expression had a significantly poorer overall and recurrence-free survival time (P=0.019 and P=0.012, respectively) than patients with low MSI1 expression. Multivariate analysis showed that MSI1 overexpression was an independent prognostic indicator (P=0.009 and P=0.015, respectively) for the survival of RCC patients. Ablation of MSI1 inhibited the invasion and metastasis of renal cancer cells. CONCLUSION Our results suggest that MSI1 expression is upregulated in RCC, and that MSI1 plays an important role in promoting cell invasion and metastasis of RCC.
The Effect of Auditor Characteristics on Audit Service Quality from an Audit Client Perspective in Libya: Proposing Conceptual Framework

The recent collapse of several companies and high-profile frauds in the last two decades has called to question the integrity of the audit profession and resulted in a decline in shareholders' confidence in audit financial statement and the audit profession at large. This has called for the improvement in professional regulation and audit service quality in order to recover the confidence of investors and other users in the reliability of audited financial statement. To achieve this, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the role of individual auditor characteristics (auditor reputation, specialization, experience, and independence) on audit service quality by using a sample of all listed companies on the Libyan Stock Market (LSM). Evidence from previous studies indicated that the determinants of audit service quality should be more significant at the individual level. The technical abilities and individual characteristics of the external auditor are critical factors to improve and sustain audit service quality. This study argues that auditors with effective individual characteristics are more likely to provide high audit service quality. Keywords: audit service quality, auditor characteristics, Libya.
Co-opetition in Service Clusters with Waiting-Area Entertainment

Problem definition: Unoccupied waiting feels longer than it actually is. Service providers operationalize this psychological principle by offering entertainment options in waiting areas. A service cluster with a common space provides firms with an opportunity to cooperate in the investment for providing entertainment options while competing on other service dimensions. Academic/practical relevance: Our paper contributes to the literature by being the first to examine co-opetition in a service setting, in addition to developing a novel model of waiting-area entertainment. It also sheds new light on the emerging practice of service clusters and small-footprint retailing. Methodology: Using a queueing theoretic approach, we develop a parsimonious model of co-opetition in a service cluster with a common space. Results: By comparing the case of co-opetition with two benchmarks (monopoly and duopoly competition), we demonstrate that a service provider that would otherwise be a local monopolist can achieve higher profitability by joining a service cluster and engaging in co-opetition. Achieving such benefits, however, requires a cost-allocation scheme that properly addresses an efficiency-fairness tradeoff—the pursuit of fairness may backfire and lead to even lower profitability than under pure competition. Managerial implications: We show that as much as co-opetition facilitates resource sharing in a service cluster, it heightens price competition. Furthermore, as the intensity of price competition increases, surprisingly, service providers may opt to charge higher service fees, albeit while providing a higher entertainment level.
Complex non-profit collaboration: A Case Study of The Advocacy Initiative

In 2008 in Ireland there was a real sense that social justice advocacy, by non-profit organisations, was under threat from the state. The experience of many advocates and their organisations was that the state was actively working to silence advocacy. However there were no or few spaces where the non-profit sector (in Ireland often referred to as the community and voluntary sector) could reflect and dialogue about social justice advocacy: the threats it faced, its purpose, methodologies, effectiveness, assumptions, and legitimacy. Where spaces did exist there were low levels of trust and not always room for dissent from dominant narratives (Murphy 2014). The Advocacy Initiative was established to provide the opportunity for the sector to come to grips with these challenges and consider more deeply its advocacy function.
The Effectiveness of Acupuncture on Addiction Severity Index : A Single Case Experimental Design in a Case of Methamphetamine Abuser Patient With Trismus Syndrome

Introduction Trismus-pseudocamptodactyly syndrome (TPS) is a disorder of muscle with a limited range of motion of the hands, legs, and mouth. The most serious complications of the condition occur as a result of the limited mobility of the mouth (trismus). TPS is typically reported to be inherited in an autosomal dominant manner and is caused by mutations in the MYH8 gene. Trismus is a sympathomimetic effect of chronic methamphetamine use. Ear acupuncture (EA) is a specific type of acupuncture and is an evidence-based approach (1). The points on the ear are sympathetic, Shen Men [point on the ear, is used in the treatment of most ailments], liver, kidney and lung. Several studies have suggested that acupuncture ameliorates the effects of Methamphetamine abuse (2). However, some studies have provided contradictory results (3). Therapeutic effects of acupuncture on drug addiction are unclear, however, changes in the dopaminergic system and consequently modulation of pain can limit the effectiveness of acupuncture (4). The present study aims to examine the effects of EA on the pain scale and addiction severity index (ASI) in a chronic methamphetamine-dependent patient.
Varieties of Capital Flows: What Do We Know?

Capital flows have been the subject of acute policy concern since the Brady plan launched the emerging markets bond asset class. Their massive volume, coupled with their volatile and procyclical nature, is often associated with a variety of financial and real risks, which have changed over time. While emerging market crises in the 1990s and 2000s were inherently driven by financial dollarization and balance sheet effects, financial dollarization has receded in emerging markets and the focus has shifted to the macroeconomic effects of cross-market flows, including extended periods of exchange rate misalignment and the amplification of business cycles in a context of large and persistent terms-of-trade shocks and global liquidity swings. These conditions make it difficult to evaluate capital flows based on data mostly from the 1990s and early 2000s, and recent empirical literature is reviewed that revisits the issue with fresh data and an open mind.
Value-at-Risk Versus Non Value-at-Risk Traders

In the paper, I simulate the games with a joint presence of 95% VaR-rule and return-rule groups of agents in the game. Simulations highlighted the level of omniscience, next being the rule, which agents follow at the decision-making, and the third the presence of liquidity agents in the game. Omniscient agents make different decisions than non-omniscient agents with non-omniscient return-rule agents performed a little better than the omniscient return-rule agents did, and omniscient VaR-rule agents performed slightly better than non-omniscient VaR-rule agents did. VaR-rule agents clearly outperform return-rule agents, with omniscient return-rule agents performing the worst. The role of liquidity agents has proved to be very significant with none of the two observed performed worst in the neither case.
A Centralized Monitoring Mechanism in Virtualized Environments

Virtualization technology seals the compute and storage resources in the virtual machine to improve resource efficiency, which becomes the core support of cloud computing platform. Meanwhile, monitoring of virtual machines is also increasingly becoming an important security demand of the virtualization platform. Currently, the monitoring system of virtual machine behavior is usually deployed in the management domain on the same physical equipment of monitored virtual machine. From the perspective of system architecture, the distributed monitoring method is not conducive to a cloud platform provider for unified management of computing resources, and the monitoring behavior in the physical host of monitored virtual machine will consume a lot of limited computing and storage resources on the virtual machine server, thus occupying the limited service resources of the virtual machine. Since the observed monitoring overhead of a virtual machine lies mainly in information processing, a kind of centralized VMI mechanism (CVMI) is capable of dividing the monitoring mechanism, which acquires the status information of the virtual machine on the physical host of monitored virtual machine, and then sends information to the centralized security monitoring server, and analyzes the status information, in order to detect that the security events are operated on the centralized security monitoring server clusters. The experimental results show that, CVMI can effectively monitor the behavior of the virtual machine, and reduce the performance loss caused by introduction of performing monitoring in deployment of physical nodes of virtual machine.
****** NO T TO BE PRESENTED, COPIED, OR OTHERWISE DISSEMINATED ONLINE UNTIL LATE IN 2008 ******* Excerpt from "ODD MAN OUT: REPLY TO REVIEWERS"

Three very different re views . to which I’ll reply in turn [29,47,123]. Tw o of them, written by Paul Thagard and Jerry Feldman, engage with my book seriously . The third, by Noam Chomsky, does not. It’ s a sadly unscholarly piece, guaranteed to mislead its readers about both the tone and the content of my te xt. It’s also defamatory. But that’s par for the course: I’m not the first, and I surely shan’ t be the last, to be intemperately vilified by Chomsk y. Howev er, more on that later.
Title Watershed segmentation with boundary curvature ratio basedmerging criterion

This paper proposes to incorporate boundary curvature ratio, region homogeneity and boundary smoothness into a single new merging criterion to improve the oversegmentation of marker-controlled watershed segmentation algorithm. The result is a more refined segmentation result with smooth boundaries and regular shapes. To pursue a final segmentation result with higher inter-variance and lower intra-variance, an optimal number of segments could be self-determined by a proposed formula. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the merits of this method.
EVALUATION OF ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY OF GREEN-SYNTHESIZED MANGANESE OXIDE NANOPARTICLES AND COMPARATIVE STUDIES WITH CURCUMINANILINE FUNCTIONALIZED

Objective: Metal oxide nanoparticles are widely attracted researchers due to their potential applications in a variety of fields, especially medicinal importance. It has been shown that biofunctionalization of metal nanoparticles with the specified bioactive materials produces the significantly improved bioactive materials with the essential biological properties and advanced features. According to the reports, manganese oxide nanoparticles (MONPs) possess highly magnetic properties leads to develop for use in research and biomedical applications. In this evaluation, we focused on the synthesis of MONPs through a green methodology and their antimicrobial activity changes when functionalized with curcuminaniline derived from turmeric plants. Methods: First, curcumin has been isolated from turmeric plant (BSR-01) to synthesize curcuminaniline biomaterial. On the other hand, manganese nanoparticles are synthesized by the green synthesis method using lemon extract and curcumin. Finally, the synthesized curcuminaniline is functionalized with MONPs. The synthesized nanoparticles are characterized by ultraviolet-visible, Fourier transform infrared, scanning electron microscope and transmission electron microscopy techniques. The antimicrobial activity of the obtained nonfunctionalized and biofunctionalized nanoforms are tested against some Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacterial strains as well as fungal strains. Results: The morphological studies represented that MONPs are of eclipsed and spherical morphology with size about 50±5 nm and biofunctionalized nanoparticles are of spherical morphology with size about 50±10 nm. The antibacterial and antifungal tests revealed that biofunctionalized MONPs are exhibited significantly higher antimicrobial activity. Conclusion: This investigation clearly demonstrated that MONPs are shown significantly higher biocidal activity when biofunctionalized with modified curcumin material. This may help in the future medicinal and pharmaceutical industries to develop new inventions.
A Review Paper on DevOps: Beginning and More To Know

DevOps is one of the conceptual studies for integration of operational and development review for Infrastructure and information system. The modern develop companies face multiple challenges to meet the requirement to develop software system and maintain the software quality. DevOps is an approach that merges the traditional Software roles and works on a way to enhance communication to improve deployment frequency rate and maintain the quality of Software. Here we will see how DevOps actually was introduced as a set of rules, tools, and practices to create more efficient ways to deal with the upcoming and existing challenges related to the software development and maintain its purpose with its operational leads. DevOps is basically a model that combines practices and tools that help to elevate core values. We can say DevOps being an ideal amalgamation archetypal of current developed procedure and tools that exaggerate the beliefs of DevOps.
Cultural Heritage using Mobile Augmented Reality

The relationship between augmented reality, mobile learning, gamification and non-formal education methods provide a great potential. The AR-CIMUVE Augmented Reality for the Walled Cities of the Veneto is an original project in collaboration with Italia Nostra and other associations which deal with transmitting our cultural heritage and which teach primary and middle school children the cultural and historical importance of the Veneto’s and the surrounding territories’ walled cities. In this learning experience students will explore how our environment has developed across the ages using the mobile devices with the technical back-up of the AR App. This will allow them to see maps, examine data, 3D models and will enable them to test and improve their skills. From a pedagogical and educational point of view the emphasis is on a constructivist social-cultural approach which helps students to become active citizens more aware of their historical identity.
Response of the wake of an isolated particle to an isotropic turbulent flow

The interaction of an isolated spherical particle with an isotropic turbulent flow is considered using direct numerical simulations (DNS). The particle Reynolds number is varied from about 50 to 600 and the particle diameter is varied from about 1.5 to 10 times the Kolmogorov scale. The Reynolds number based on the Taylor microscale of the free-stream turbulent field considered here is 164. The DNS technique employed here is the first of its kind to address particle–turbulence interaction and it resolves the smallest scales in the free-stream turbulent flow and the complex vortical structures in the particle wake. The primary objective of this paper is to present new results on the effect of the free-stream turbulence on the particle wake and vortex shedding, and the modulation of free-stream turbulence in the particle wake. The parameters of the present simulations are comparable to those of the experimental study by Wu & Faeth (1994$a$, $b$), and agreement between the present computational results and the experimental measurement is demonstrated. The effect of free-stream turbulence on the mean and instantaneous wake structure is studied. The time-averaged mean wake in a turbulent ambient flow shows a lower velocity deficit and a flatter profile. However, in agreement with the experimental results of Wu & Faeth the mean wake in a turbulent flow behaves like a self-preserving laminar wake. At Reynolds numbers below about 210 the effect of free-stream turbulence is to introduce wake oscillations. For Reynolds numbers in the range 210 to 280, free-stream turbulence is observed to promote early onset of vortex shedding. The nature of the shed vortices is somewhat different from that in a uniform flow. Increasing the free-stream turbulence intensity suppresses the process of vortex shedding, and only marginally increases the wake oscillation. The modulation of free-stream turbulence in the wake is studied in terms of the distribution of kinetic energy and RMS velocity fluctuation. The free-stream energy lost in the wake is recovered faster in a turbulent ambient flow than in a uniform ambient flow. The energy of the velocity fluctuation is enhanced in the wake at low free-stream intensities, and is damped or marginally increased at higher intensities. The fluctuation energy is not equi-partitioned among the streamwise and cross-stream components. The RMS streamwise fluctuation is always enhanced, whereas the RMS cross-stream fluctuation is enhanced only at low free-stream intensities, and damped at higher intensities.
Cross-reactive and Vaccine-Induced Antibody to an Emerging Swine-Origin Variant of In fl uenza AVirus Subtype H 3 N 2 ( H 3 N 2 v )

Danuta M. Skowronski, Naveed Z. Janjua, Gaston De Serres, Dale Purych, Vladimir Gilca, David W. Scheifele, Marc Dionne, Suzana Sabaiduc, Jennifer L. Gardy, Guiyun Li, Nathalie Bastien, Martin Petric, Guy Boivin, and Yan Li British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, University of British Columbia, and Vaccine Evaluation Centre, Child and Family Research Institute; Vancouver; Institut National de Santé Publique du Québec, Laval University, and Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Québec, Québec City; BC Biomedical Laboratories, Surrey; and National Microbiology Laboratory, Winnipeg, Canada
A knot characterization and 1-connected nonnegatively curved 4-manifolds with circle symmetry

We classify nonnegatively curved simply connected 4-manifolds with circle symmetry up to equivariant diffeomorphisms. The main problem is rule out knotted curves in the singular set of the orbit space. As an extension of this work we classify all knots in S^3 which can be realized as an extremal set with respect to an inner metric on S^3 which has nonnegative curvature in the Alexandrov sense.
On the slow draining of a gravity current moving through a layered permeable medium

We examine the gravitational dispersal of dense fluid through a horizontal permeable layer, which is separated from a second underlying layer by a narrow band of much lower permeability. We derive a series of analytical solutions which describe the propagation of the fluid through the upper layer and the draining of the fluid into the underlying region. The model predicts that the current initially spreads according to a self-similar solution. However, as the drainage becomes established, the spreading slows, and in fact the fluid only spreads a finite distance before it has fully drained into the underlying layer. We examine the sensitivity of the results to the initial conditions through numerical solution of the governing equations. We find that for sources of sufficiently large initial aspect ratio (defined as the ratio of height to length), the solution converges rapidly to the initially self-similar regime. For longer and shallower initial source conditions, this convergence does not occur, but we derive estimates for the run-out length of the current, which compare favourably with our numerical data. We also present some preliminary laboratory experiments, which support the model.
Human motion capture using Kinect and third party sensors

The paper describes an applicable solution combining advantages of the Kinect device and properties of appropriable third party sensors. The elaborated solution allows tracking of a human arm along with recognition of basic hand gestures. This way it may be possible to remotely control a manipulator or a robotic arm performing some actions determined by a user's hand. The Kinect is mainly used to preliminary calibrate the system and for verification purposes. The system was designed using kinematics-based approach with rigid transformation combining rotations and translations. Matrix transformation operators were exchanged by dual quaternions as quaternions are native for the used devices. Additionally, as this is not a trivial mathematical tool, the machinery of dual quaternions has been introduced and its implementation is given.
On the Production of Skills and the Birth-Order Effect

First-born children tend to outperform their younger siblings on measures such as cognitive exams, wages, educational attainment, and employment. Using a framework similar to Cunha and Heckman (2008) and Cunha, Heckman, and Schennach (2010), this paper finds that differences in parents’ investments across siblings can account for more than one-half of the gap in cognitive skills among siblings. The study’s framework accommodates for endogeneity in parents’ investments, measurement error, missing observations, and dynamic impacts of parental investments.
Sim2Real Learning of Vision-Based Obstacle Avoidance for Robotic Manipulators

—Obstacle avoidance for robotic manipulator operating in an unstructured environment is a challenging task for deep reinforcement learning. It requires an accurate scene simulator to achieve model adaption from simulation to the real world. However, realistic scene modeling is difﬁcult and time-consuming. To improve such sim-to-real model adaption, we propose a uniﬁed representation of obstacles and targets in both simulated and real worlds based on 3D bounding boxes. Such abstract representation is invariant to the shape and appearance of objects, thus unifying the scene representation for both worlds. Consequently, models trained in the simulated world can be effectively generalized to unseen scenes and unseen objects in the real world. This allows us to design a vision-based obstacle avoidance method that trains a Soft-Actor Critic (SAC) model in a simulator and directly applies the learned control policy in the real world. Our method achieves better performance and generation to unseen targets and dynamic scenes compared to state-of-the-art techniques.