Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Human lymphoblastoid cell lines derived from individuals without lymphoproliferative disease contain the same latent forms of epstein‐barr virus dna as those found in tumor cells

The physical state of the intracellular Epstein‐Barr virus DNA was characterized in four human lymphoblastoid cell lines, F‐265, NC‐37, U‐303 L, and PG‐1, derived from individuals without lympho‐proliferative disease. For comparison, a previously investigated Burkitt lymphoma line, Raji, and a more recently established cell line of that origin, Rael, were also studied. The techniques employed were CsCl density gradient centrifugation, glycerol gradient centrifugation, and ethidium bromide‐CsCl density gradient centrifugation in combination with nucleic acid hybridization, as well as electron microscopy contour length measurements of purified circular EBV DNA. All six cell lines contained multiple copies of covalently closed circular EBV DNA‐molecules of the same size, as well as viral DNA with the properties of integrated DNA. No differences could be detected between the forms of EBV DNA present in cell lines derived from non‐malignant sources and those present in lymphoma lines.
A Phase II Trial of Erlotinib in Combination with Bevacizumab in Patients with Metastatic Breast Cancer

Purpose: To evaluate the efficacy and toxicity of erlotinib plus bevacizumab in patients with metastatic breast cancer (MBC), targeting the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR/HER1) and the vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) pathway. Experimental Design: Thirty-eight patients with MBC were enrolled and treated at two institutions with erlotinib, a small molecule EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitor (150 mg p.o. daily) plus bevacizumab, an anti-VEGF antibody (15 mg/kg i.v. every 3 weeks). Patients had one to two prior chemotherapy regimens for metastatic disease. The primary end point was response rate by Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors criteria using a Simon 2-stage design. Secondary end points included toxicity, time to progression, response duration, and stabilization of disease of ≥26 weeks. Correlative studies were done on tumor tissue, including EGFR expression and mutation analysis. Results: One patient achieved a partial response for 52+ months. Fifteen patients had stable disease at first evaluation at 9 weeks; 4 of these patients had stable disease beyond 26 weeks. Median time to progression was 11 weeks (95% confidence interval, 8-18 weeks). Diarrhea of any grade was observed in 84% of patients (grade 3 in 3%); 76% experienced grade 1 or 2 skin rash, and 18% developed hypertension (grade 3 in 11%). The level of EGFR expression was not predictive of response to therapy. Conclusions: The combination of erlotinib and bevacizumab was well-tolerated but had limited activity in unselected patients with previously treated MBC. Biomarkers are needed to identify those MBC patients likely to respond to anti-EGFR/HER1 plus anti-VEGF therapy.
The Price of Convenience: Privacy and Mobile Commerce

An effective mobile commerce typically requires a “system” that maintains a detailed and dynamically updated profile of the individual user. A remote vehicle monitoring system, for example, requires the vehicle to transmit its position (together with a range of diagnostic information such as speed) in “soft real time”. Integrated with a specific driver’s history, these data may permit the system to infer traffic congestion and reroute other drivers. More often than not, the user of the global positioning system that forms part of the navigation support is only vaguely aware of the fact that he is transmitting his own location-based information, while at the same time receiving aggregate information based on data transmitted by other users. Privacy is being exchanged for convenience. Individual “consumers” of such services must always balance costs (e.g., loss of privacy pertaining to personal location and driving speed) against benefits obtained (e.g., navigational support). We argue that the private information given up in such exchanges constitutes a significant but hidden aspect of the cost of using mobile commerce applications. The issue is examined from technical, behavioural and institutional/regulatory perspectives. A provisional general model of attitude formation and mobile commerce behaviour associated with the issue is developed and illustrated. We also introduce the concept of “price of convenience” as a metaphor to support multidisciplinary analysis of the topic, with emphasis on the manner in which private information becomes potentially public, key behaviours and the implications of such access in normative/ethical terms.
Mechanisms Underlying the Reduced Performance Measures from Using Equipment with a Counterbalance Weight System

Buddhadev, HH, Vingren, JL, Duplanty, AA, and Hill, DW. Mechanisms underlying the reduced performance measures from using equipment with a counterbalance weight system. J Strength Cond Res 26(3): 641–647, 2012—Bench press throws are commonly used in the assessment of upper-body power and are often performed on a Smith machine that uses a counterbalance weight to reduce the net load on the barbell. The use of a counterbalanced Smith machine was recently shown to reduce performance measures, but the mechanisms for this reduction have not been established. The purpose of this study was to determine the underlying physiological and biomechanical causes of the reduced performance measures found when using a counterbalanced Smith machine. Twenty-four men (mean ± SE: age, 23 ± 1 years; weight, 91.0 ± 3.5 kg; height, 178.9 ± 1.2 cm) performed Smith machine bench press throws at 30% of 1-repetition maximum under 4 conditions: (a) rebound movement and counterbalance, (b) rebound movement and no counterbalance, (c) concentric-only movement and counterbalance, and (d) concentric-only movement and no counterbalance. Peak power, peak force, and peak concentric and eccentric velocities were measured using a linear accelerometer, and peak ground reaction force was measured using a force plate. The counterbalance condition produced significantly (p < 0.05) lower peak accelerometer-based force (−21.2 and −17.0% for rebound and concentric-only bench press throws, respectively) but increased peak ground reaction force (5.3 and 3.2%). The discrepancy between changes in peak accelerometer-based force and peak ground reaction force suggests that an increase in net external load occurred during the movement. For performance testing of explosive movements, the use of a counterbalance system results in an underestimation of performance capability, likely because of an increase in the net external load during the concentric phase. Therefore, a counterbalance system should not be used for explosive movement performance testing.
Country-of-Origin and Brand Effects:

The data for this research were collected from 365 male respondents through two separate studies at two different time periods using two different formats. Results indicated that the combined effects of country of design and country of assembly cues has a stronger impact than brand name on consumer evaluation of quality and purchase value of automobiles, VCRs and shoes. Magnitude of a priori cue differentiation played a strong role in product evaluation. Favorableness of a brand or country-of-origin cues is considerably modified when a consumer is provided with additional product-related information.
Private Equity and Venture Capital Investments in Brazilian Companies in the Last 30 Years

This study presents an overview of Brazilian Private Equity and Venture Capital (PE and VC) investments in portfolio companies between 1982 and 2014. Main source of information is Private Placement Memoranda. According to our data, the majority of capital was invested in PE, and most of the deals were in late stage companies (PE type). We observe that deal size has a cyclical behavior for PE and VC, and that the cycle reflects the dynamic of the economic environment and regulatory changes. PE deals have a mean MoM of 3.4. Although 15% of the deals were total losses (or close to total losses), 18% of the deals had extraordinary performance (MoM greater than 5 times invested capital). VC deals have a mean MoM of 1.5, less than half of PE’s MoM. Total losses correspond to 39% of the deals, what is usual in the international industry, but only 5% of the deals were high performers. VC industry was basically sponsored by government resources before 2010, and our sample reflects this period. In an underdeveloped VC ecosystem, it is difficult to fund new rounds for early stage companies’ growth, and therefore to create a high number of outperformers. We expect to have higher returns for VC in future analysis, since there has been significant evolution in the Brazilian early stage ecosystem in the last three or four years.
Developmental Capacity and Chromosome Number in the Offspring of Artificially Produced Autotetraploids of Rana nigromaculata

Abstract A large number of autotetraploids of Rana nigromaculata were produced in order to assess their developmental capacity and chromosome number in their offspring. An original autotetraploid male was first produced by transplanting a nucleus from an embryo (triploid) into an unfertilized egg. Next, eggs were inseminated with sperm of the autotetraploid male, then cold-treated to obtain first-, second-, and third-generation offspring. According to an investigation of the chromosome numbers of the tadpoles by the tail-tip squash method, the three generations of offspring included many tetraploids (50–80%), as well as some diploids, triploids, hexaploids and mosaics at the early tadpole stage. In addition, several percent of the second- and third-generation offspring were found to be aneuploids. Evidently, a complete set of diploid chromosomes was not precisely transferred to all of the next-generation offspring from the sperm of the artificially produced autotetraploid males. These observations suggest that there were some abnormalities in the course of spermatogenesis in the male autotetraploid frogs.
High-Performance General Functional Regenerating Codes with Near-Optimal Repair Bandwidth

Erasure codes are widely used in modern distributed storage systems to prevent data loss and server failures. Regenerating codes are a class of erasure codes that trade storage efficiency and computation for repair bandwidth reduction. However, their nonunified coding parameters and huge computational overhead prohibit their applications. Hence, we first propose a family of General Functional Regenerating (GFR) codes with uncoded repair, balancing storage efficiency and repair bandwidth with general parameters. The GFR codes take advantage of a heuristic repair algorithm, which makes efforts to employ as little repair bandwidth as possible to repair a single failure. Second, we also present a scheduled shift multiplication (SSM) algorithm, which accelerates the matrix product over the Galois field by scheduling the order of coding operations, so encoding and repairing of GFR codes can be executed by fast bitwise shifting and exclusive-OR. Compared to the traditional table-lookup multiplication algorithm, our SSM algorithm gains 1.2 to 2 X speedup in our experimental evaluations, with little effect on the repair success rate.
eMelanoBase: An online locus‐specific variant database for familial melanoma

A proportion of melanoma‐prone individuals in both familial and non‐familial contexts has been shown to carry inactivating mutations in either CDKN2A or, rarely, CDK4. CDKN2A is a complex locus that encodes two unrelated proteins from alternately spliced transcripts that are read in different frames. The alpha transcript (exons 1α, 2, and 3) produces the p16INK4A cyclin‐dependent kinase inhibitor, while the beta transcript (exons 1β and 2) is translated as p14ARF, a stabilizing factor of p53 levels through binding to MDM2. Mutations in exon 2 can impair both polypeptides and insertions and deletions in exons 1α, 1β, and 2, which can theoretically generate p16INK4A‐p14ARF fusion proteins. No online database currently takes into account all the consequences of these genotypes, a situation compounded by some problematic previous annotations of CDKN2A‐related sequences and descriptions of their mutations. As an initiative of the international Melanoma Genetics Consortium, we have therefore established a database of germline variants observed in all loci implicated in familial melanoma susceptibility. Such a comprehensive, publicly accessible database is an essential foundation for research on melanoma susceptibility and its clinical application. Our database serves two types of data as defined by HUGO. The core dataset includes the nucleotide variants on the genomic and transcript levels, amino acid variants, and citation. The ancillary dataset includes keyword description of events at the transcription and translation levels and epidemiological data. The application that handles users' queries was designed in the model‐view‐controller architecture and was implemented in Java. The object‐relational database schema was deduced using functional dependency analysis. We hereby present our first functional prototype of eMelanoBase. The service is accessible via the URL www.wmi. usyd.edu. au:8080/melanoma.html. Hum Mutat 21:2–7, 2002. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
A desert ant's memory of recent visual experience and the control of route guidance

Insects such as desert ants learn stereotyped visual routes between their nests and reliable food sites. Studies here reveal an important control element for ensuring that the route memories are used appropriately. They find that visual route memories can be disengaged, so that they do not provide guidance, even when all appropriate visual cues are present and when there are no competing guidance cues. Ants were trained along a simple route dominated by a single isolated landmark. If returning ants were caught just before entering the nest and replaced at the feeder, then they often interrupted the recapitulation of their homeward route with a period of apparent confusion during which the route memories were ignored. A series of experiments showed that this confusion occurred in response to the repetition of the route, and that the ants must therefore maintain some kind of a memory of their visual experience on the current trip home. A conceptual model of route guidance is offered to explain the results here. It proposes how the memory might act and suggests a general role for disengagement in regulating route guidance.
Verb Valency Descriptors for a Syntactic Treebank

An essential component of Language Engineering (LE) tools are verb class descriptors that provide information about the relations of the predicates to their arguments. The production of computationally tractable language resources necessitates the assignment of types of predicate-argument relations to a great variety of verb-centered structures: it is necessary to define not only the initial, canonical valency frame of a great number of verb lexemes, but also the diathesis alternations, which reflect the real-life usage of verbs. This paper describes the implementation of descriptors of the valency properties of Bulgarian verbs used in the production of a syntactic treebank of Bulgarian. The descriptors are based on available LE resources for Bulgarian: a verb subcategorization model implemented in the lexical data base that is used; a chunk grammar that recognizes verb form patterns. Predictive models are built and applied in a grammar that annotates grammatical relations inferred from the combination of morphosyntactic and shallow syntactic processing cues. The real significance of this particular processing is the resolution, in relation to the valency properties of many verbs, of the discrepancy or the contradiction between the verb lexicon specifications and the verb syntagmatic realization.
A universal color image quality metric

We extend a recently introduced universal grayscale image quality index to the perceptually decorrelated color space. The resulting color image quality index quantifies the distortion of a processed color image relative to its original version. We evaluated the new color image quality metric through observer experiments in which subjects ranked images according to perceived distortion. The metric correlates strongly with human perception and can therefore be used to assess the performance of color image coding and compression schemes, color image enhancement algorithms, synthetic color image generators, and color image fusion schemes.
Population pharmacokinetic study of teicoplanin in severely neutropenic patients

The teicoplanin pharmacokinetics (PK) of 30 febrile and severely neutropenic patients (polymorphonuclear count, < 500/mm3) with hematologic malignancies were compared with those determined for five healthy volunteers (HV). Neutropenic patients were given piperacillin combined with amikacin, and teicoplanin was added to the regimen the day fever developed in patients suspected of having a staphylococcal infection or 48 h later. Teicoplanin was given intravenously at a dosage of 6 mg/kg of body weight at 0, 12, and 24 h and once a day thereafter. Five to eleven blood samples per patient were collected. Teicoplanin concentrations were measured by liquid chromatography. A bicompartmental model was fitted to the data by a nonlinear mixed-effect-model approach. Multiple-linear regression analysis was applied in an attempt to correlate PK parameters to nine covariates. The mean trough concentrations of teicoplanin 48 h after the onset of treatment and 24 h after the last injection (last trough) +/- standard deviations were 8.8 +/- 4.1 and 17.5 +/- 13.5 mg/liter, respectively. A significant increase was noted in the mean rate of elimination clearance of teicoplanin in neutropenic patients compared with that of HV (0.86 versus 0.73 liter/h, P = 0.002), as was the case with rates of distribution clearance (5.89 versus 4.94 liter/h, P = 0.002); the mean half-life of distribution was significantly shorter in patients than in HV (0.43 versus 0.61 h, P = 0.002). In contrast, the volumes of the central compartment (ca. 5.8 liters for both groups), the volumes of distribution at steady state (HV, 37.6 liters; patients, 55.9 liters), and the elimination half-lives (HV, 39.6 h; patients, 52.7 h) were not significantly different between HV and neutropenic patients. Interindividual variabilities of rates of clearance (coefficient of variation [CV], 43%) and elimination half-lives (CV, 56%) were mainly explained by the variabilities among rates of creatinine clearance. Interindividual variabilities of the volumes of the central compartment (CV, 33%) and the volumes of distribution at steady state (CV = 51%) were correlated to interindividual variabilities among numbers of leukocytes and the ages of patients, respectively. On the basis of the population PK model of teicoplanin, simulations were made to optimize the dosing schedule. A supplemental 6 mg/kg dose of teicoplanin at 36 h resulted in a trough concentration at 48 h of 16.0 +/- 4.5 mg/liter, with only 7% of patients having a trough concentration of less than 10 mg/liter, compared with 46% of patients on the usual schedule.
Racial/ethnic disparities, social support, and depression: examining a social determinant of mental health.

OBJECTIVE We examined the risk of depression as it relates to social support among individuals from African American, Caribbean black, and non-Hispanic White backgrounds. METHODS 6,082 individuals participated in the national survey of American life (NSAL), a nationally representative, psychiatric epidemiological, cross-sectional survey of household populations. The survey is designed to explore racial and ethnic differences in mental disorders. NSAL survey questions were used as a proxy for social support. Logistic regression analysis was used to examine the correlates between having a DSM-IV diagnosis of major depressive disorder in the past year, demographic variables, and social support. RESULTS African American race/ethnicity was associated with decreased odds of depression when compared to non-Hispanic whites, even when controlling for social support variables and demographics (OR = 0.51, 95% CI = 0.43-0.60). We found a three-fold increase in risk of depression among individuals who reported feeling "not very close at all" with family members compared to those who reported feeling "very close" to family (OR = 3.35, 95% CI = 1.81-6.19). CONCLUSIONS These findings reinforce previous research documenting the important relationship between social support and depression, and perhaps should lead us to reexamine the individualistic models of treatment that are most evaluated in United States. The lack of evidence-based data on support groups, peer counseling, family therapy, or other social support interventions may reflect a majority-culture bias toward individualism, which belies the extensive body of research on social support deficits as a major risk factor for depression.
Time-Varying Fund Manager Skill

The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards skill as an immutable attribute of the manager or the fund. We show that many measures of skill, such as returns, alphas, and measures of stock-picking and market-timing, appear to vary over the business cycle. We argue that skill is a general cognitive ability that is applied to different tasks, such as picking stocks or market timing. Using tools from the rational inattention literature, the theory shows that the relative value of these tasks varies cyclically. It generates indirect predictions for the dispersion and returns of fund portfolios that distinguish this explanation from others and which are supported by the data. In turn, these findings offer useful evidence to support the notion of rational attention allocation.
Innovation with imported technology in a dynamic global economy: the case of Korean industry

With more international trade, business, and technology, the World Trade Organization will promote the world economy toward globalized markets, more consolidation and greater efficiency in production. That is, national boundaries signify much less than they used to in terms of the flow of technology. Having the changing position of technology policy in Japan and the United States, Korea has to comply with the new situation of global economy, reformulate its technology policy, and promote its technological collaboration with the United States. In the era of global competition, Korea can no longer rely on technology and R&D imports. It has to evolve its own R&D institutions, reformulate its technology policy and re-engineer its corporations. In Korea, the government has deliberately and directly undertaken a very active policy towards creating a climate conducive to enhancing science and technology for catching-up high technology. This paper examines the ways in which Korea’s industrial innovation has been undertaken from imported technology. Korea with a modern educational system and a strong internal scientific and engineering community, can promote its own technological innovation complemented by technological transfer. As a medium-level-tech country, Korea might actively involve US investment as a partner so as to facilitate joint ventures of R&D and production.