Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
WPS-MGT-07-03 COMPLEMENTARY TECHNOLOGIES, KNOWLEDGE RELATEDNESS AND INNOVATION OUTCOMES IN HIGH TECHNOLOGY MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS

Building on research in organizational learning and technology management, this study develops and tests a knowledge-based model of acquirer-target relatedness and innovation performance in high technology mergers and acquisitions. Knowledge relatedness emphasizes both complementarity (supporting or facilitating knowledge bases) and similarity (overlapping knowledge bases). An examination of high-technology M&As provided support for theoretical arguments linking science and technology relatedness with post-merger innovation quantity and quality. Also, the interactions of technology complementarity with the product/market similarity between the acquiring and acquired firms and with acquirer diversification were found to affect innovation outcomes. The findings provide a richer understanding of the role of knowledge relatedness in post M&A innovation performance.
Small schools in rural India: ‘Exclusion’ and ‘inequity’ in hierarchical school system

Small schools have enjoyed rich traditions in the history of education. The Vedic-age gurukula small schools, an abode for children of the privileged few, followed a structured curriculum in the teaching of religion, scriptures, philosophy, literature, warfare, medicine, astrology and history. The rigvedic small schools, which were more egalitarian, opened their doors for admission to all strata of society. In medieval India small schools located in pathshalas, madrasas and informal surroundings of a village, for example, in the teacher’s house, places of worship or under a tree imparted instruction in the three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic. Peer-group learning, multipoint entry, needs based studies, adaptability to the immediate environment and adjusting school hours to suit local requirements were the chief merits of these schools. By the time the British arrived, India had a fairly widespread village based small primary school education on revenue free land. A major shift came with the East India Company’s policy of maximizing land revenue, where the Indian education system faced starvation in its financial resources, leaving small village schools in shabby dwellings with ill qualified teachers, an absence of primary facilities including a blackboard, furniture and proper seating arrangement, etc. By the 1830s the small village schools no longer stood as the vital centres of learning. Today the modern small schools in rural India are found struggling in the same way, with limited human and physical resources, low enrolment and high a incidence of teacher and student absenteeism. The present paper reviews the current status of small primary schools (grades 1 to 5 in most cases) in rural India by drawing a national picture substantiated with field observations in the villages of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in order to examine the realities on the ground and to develop an understanding of the different contexts in which small schools function. The paper recommends the recognition of the fact that small schools exist in massive numbers and cannot be allowed to struggle further and eventually perish. Sustaining these schools and improving them further has become mandatory. The Right to Education Act 2009 has brought some hope that will look seriously into the provision of minimum facilities as per the entitlements of each school and will ensure regularity of teacher attendance through specified norms.
Indigenous environmental values as human values

Abstract The claim that in natural resource management (NRM) a change from anthropocentric values and ethics to eco-centric ones is necessary to achieve sustainability leads to the search for eco-centric models of relationship with the environment. Indigenous cultures can provide such models; hence, there is the need for multicultural societies to further include their values in NRM. In this article, we investigate the environmental values placed on a freshwater environment of the Wet Tropics by a community of indigenous Australians. We discuss their environmental values as human values, and so as beliefs that guide communities’ understanding of how the natural world should be viewed and treated by humans. This perspective represents a step forward in our understanding of indigenous environmental values, and a way to overcome the paradigm of indigenous values as valued biophysical attributes of the environment or processes happening in landscapes. Our results show that the participant community holds biospheric values. Restoring these values in the NRM of the Wet Tropics could contribute to sustainability and environmental justice in the area.
MLPA screening reveals novel subtelomeric rearrangements in holoprosencephaly

Holoprosencephaly (HPE) is the most common developmental brain anomaly in human, associated with a wide spectrum of presentations. The etiology is heterogeneous, due to environmental and genetic factors. Out of 12 cytogenetic candidate loci previously reported, eight were subtelomeric, including the loci in which two of the four major HPE genes were identified (SHH and TGIF). Recently, we reported that these two genes could be mutated or microdeleted. Therefore, we hypothesized that subtelomeres screening in HPE patients could refine the known subtelomeric candidate loci and identify novel ones. In this study, 181 samples, 72 fetuses and 109 live‐born infants, with HPE and a normal karyotype, and 10 patients deleted for SHH or TGIF (3.5 Mb from telomeres) were screened for subtelomeric rearrangements using the multiplex ligation probe‐dependent amplification (MLPA) method with two kits. Quantitative PCR was performed when discrepancies were observed between these two kits. We found that known SHH and TGIF microdeletions on 7q and 18p, encompassed their subtelomeric region (3.5 Mb) and were often associated with cryptic gains. Out of the 181 samples, we detected rearrangements in known candidate HPE loci (1q, 20p, and 21q) as well as in other novel subtelomeric locations (1p, 5q, 8p, 17q, 18q, 22q, and Xq) and in the subcentromeric 15q. We also found associations between cryptic subtelomeric gain and loss that may be inherited from a parental balanced translocation, which is helpful for genetic counseling. These findings reinforce the multihit origin for HPE and contribute to the explanation of the wide phenotypic spectrum described in this developmental disorder. Hum Mutat 28(12), 1189–1197, 2007. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Learning with Graphical Models

Probabilistic graphical models are being used widely in artiicial intelligence, for instance, in diagnosis and expert systems, as a uniied qualitative and quantitative framework for representing and reasoning with probabilities and independencies. Their development and use spans several elds including artiicial intelligence, decision theory and statistics, and provides an important bridge between these communities. This paper explains how these models can be extended to machine learning, neural networks, knowledge discovery, and knowledge reenement. This provides a uniied framework that combines lessons learned from the connec-tionist, artiicial intelligence, and statistical communities, and provides a smooth transition between the inference found in diagnostic and model-based systems and that found in learning systems. This also ooers a set of principles for developing a learning toolbox , or more ambitiously , a learning compiler, whereby a learning or discovery system can be compiled from speciications. Many of the popular learning algorithms can be compiled in this way from graphical speciications. While in a sense this paper is a multidisciplinary review of learning, the main contribution here is the presentation of the material within the unifying framework of graphical models, and the observation that, as a result, the process of developing learning algorithms can be partly automated.
A Deep Multicolor Survey. V. The M Dwarf Luminosity Function

We present a study of M dwarfs discovered in a large-area, multicolor survey. We employ a combination of morphological and color criteria to select M dwarfs to a limiting magnitude in V of 22, the deepest such ground-based survey for M dwarfs to date. We solve for the vertical disk stellar density law and use the resulting parameters to derive the M dwarf luminosity and mass functions from this sample. We find that the stellar luminosity function peaks at MV ∼ 12 and declines thereafter. Our derived mass function for stars with M < 0.6 M⊙ is inconsistent with a Salpeter function at the 3 σ level; instead, we find that the mass function is relatively flat for 0.6 M⊙ > M > 0.1 M⊙.
Computing reliability and message delay for Cooperative wireless distributed sensor networks subject to random failures

One of the most compelling technological advances of this decade has been the advent of deploying wireless networks of heterogeneous smart sensor nodes for complex information gathering tasks. A wireless distributed sensor network (DSN) is a self-organizing , ad-hoc network of a large number of cooperative intelligent sensor nodes. Due to the limited power of sensor nodes, energy-efficient DSN are essentially multi-hop networks. The self-organizing capabilities, and the cooperative operation of DSN allow for forming reliable clusters of sensors deployed near, or at, the sites of target phenomena. Reliable monitoring of a phenomenon (or event detection) depends on the collective data provided by the target cluster of sensors, and not on any individual node. The failure of one or more nodes may not cause the operational data sources to be disconnected from the data sinks (command nodes or end user stations). However, it may increase the number of hops a data message has to go through before reaching its destination (and subsequently increase the message delay). In this paper, we focus on two related problems: computing a measure for the reliability of DSN, and computing a measure for the expected & the maximum message delay between data sources (sensors) & data sinks in an operational DSN. Given an estimation of the failure probabilities of the sensors, as well as the intermediate nodes (nodes used to relay messages between data sources, and data sinks), we use a probabilistic graph to model DSN. We define the DSN reliability as the probability that there exists an operating communication path between the sink node, and at least one operational sensor in a target cluster. We show that both problems are #P-hard for arbitrary networks. We then present two algorithms for computing the reliability, and the expected message delay for arbitrary networks. We also consider two special cases where efficient (polynomial time) algorithms are developed. Finally, we present some numerical results that demonstrate some of the applications of our algorithms.
Transgenic Overexpression of Locally Acting Insulin-Like Growth Factor-1 Inhibits Ubiquitin-Mediated Muscle Atrophy in Chronic Left-Ventricular Dysfunction

Metabolic abnormalities develop in various chronic diseases and lead to progressive catabolism with decrements in the skeletal musculature that result in muscle atrophy. We investigated pathways of skeletal muscle proteolysis using an experimental model of chronic left-ventricular dysfunction. Skeletal muscle atrophy developed in wild-type mice 12 weeks following myocardial infarction accompanied by an increase in total protein ubiquitination and enhanced proteasome activity, activation of Foxo transcription factors, and robust induction of the ubiquitin-protein ligase atrogin-1/MAFbx. Further studies identified skeletal muscle myosin as a specific target of ubiquitin-mediated degradation in muscle atrophy. In contrast, transgenic overexpression of a local isoform of insulin-like growth factor-1 prevented muscle atrophy and increased proteasome activity, inhibited skeletal muscle activation primarily of Foxo4, and blocked the expression of atrogin-1/MAFbx. These results suggest that skeletal muscle atrophy occurs through increased activity of the ubiquitin–proteasome pathway. The inhibition of muscle atrophy by local insulin-like growth factor-1 provides a promising therapeutic avenue for the prevention of skeletal muscle wasting in chronic heart failure and potentially other chronic diseases associated with skeletal muscle atrophy.
Analyzing the impact of process variations on parametric measurements: Novel models and applications

In this paper we propose a novel statistical framework to model the impact of process variations on semiconductor circuits through the use of process sensitive test structures. Based on multivariate statistical assumptions, we propose the use of the expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate any missing test measurements and to calculate accurately the statistical parameters of the underlying multivariate distribution. We also propose novel techniques to validate our statistical assumptions and to identify any outliers in the measurements. Using the proposed model, we analyze the impact of the systematic and random sources of process variations to reveal their spatial structures. We utilize the proposed model to develop a novel application that significantly reduces the volume, time, and costs of the parametric test measurements procedure without compromising its accuracy. We extensively verify our models and results on measurements collected from more than 300 wafers and over 25 thousand die fabricated at a state-of-the-art facility. We prove the accuracy of our proposed statistical model and demonstrate its applicability towards reducing the volume and time of parametric test measurements by about 2.5 - 6.1times at absolutely no impact to test quality.
The Association Factor in Information Retrieval

This paper describes an all computer document retrieval system which can find documents related to a request even though they may not be indexed by the exact terms of the request, and can present these documents in the order of their relevance to the request. The key to this ability lies in the application of a statistical formula by which the computer calculates the degree of association between pairs of index terms. With proper manipulation of these associations (entirely within the machine) a vocabulary of synonyms, near synonyms and other words closely related to any given term or group of terms is derived. Such a vocabulary related to a group of request terms is believed to be a much more powerful tool for selecting documents from a collection than has been available heretofore. By noting the number of matching terms between this extended list of request terms and the terms used to index a document, and with due regard for their degree of association, documents are selected by the computer and arranged in the order of their relevance to the request. Like all other documentalists who are operating large coordinate indexes, we are searching for better ways to exploit this type of information system. In our library we have already eliminated the time-consuming job of posting document numbers manually by enlisting the aid of a 705 computer. (The computer periodically prepares revised posting cards to replace the outdated ones.) Now we are searching for better solutions to our retrieval problems. One obvious retrieval problem in any large system is the time required to "coordinate" heavily posted terms. We are convinced we must mechanize if we are to allow our collection to grow indefinitely. A second problem is the retrieval of so many documents related to a single request that the customer finds it difficult to decide which to examine first. Since he has no precise means of determining which document is most closely related to a request, we have been forced into assisting him to use somewhat arbitrary or subjective means. The date of the document is sometimes used as a relevance criterion with the hope that the most recent document will be the most pertinent, or the name of the author is used with the hope that a known author will answer the request better than an unknown one. The pitfalls of such criteria are apparent. The third, and …
Graph-partitioning based instruction scheduling for clustered processors

This paper presents a novel scheme to schedule loops for clustered microarchitectures. The scheme is based on a preliminary cluster assignment phase implemented through graph partitioning techniques followed by a scheduling phase that integrates register allocation and spill code generation. The graph partitioning scheme is shown to be very effective due to its global view of the whole code while the partition is generated. Results show a significant speedup when compared with previously proposed techniques. For some processor configuration the average speedup for the SPECfp95 is 23% with respect to the published scheme with the best performance. Besides, the proposed scheme is much faster (between 2-7 times, depending on the configuration).
Efficient Motion Planning Based on Disassembly

Disassembly-based motion planning (DBMP) is a novel and efficient single-query, sampling-based motion planning approach for free-flying robots. Disassembly-based motion planning uses workspace information to determine the workspace volume of a potential solution path and uses this information to exclude large portions of configuration space from exploration. It also identifies the most constrained placements of the robot along the potential solution path. These placements are referred to as assemblies because they are highly constrained by the environment, much like parts in an assembly are constrained. The constraints limit the possible motions of the robot and thus can be exploited to further limit configuration space exploration. The use of these two sources of workspace information permits the solution of many practical problems with very limited configuration space exploration. This reduction in configuration space exploration results in performance improvements of several orders of magnitude, compared to state-of-the-art motion planning methods. For non-free-flying robots, disassembly-based motion planning performs at least as well as the sampling-based motion planning method it is based on.
Extracellular ATP Activates Transcription Factor NF-κB through the P2Z Purinoreceptor by Selectively Targeting NF-κB p65 (RelA)

Cells of the macrophage lineage express a peculiar surface receptor for extracellular ATP, designated P2Z/P2X7 purinergic receptor, that induces pore formation and collapse of the plasma membrane potential. Although the function of the P2Z receptor is largely unknown, accumulating evidence implicates its role in cell signaling and immune reactions. Here, we investigated the effect of P2Z receptor ligation on the activation of NF-κB, a transcription factor controlling cytokine expression and apoptosis. Exposure of microglial cells to ATP but not other nucleotides resulted in potent NF-κB activation. This effect was specifically mediated by the P2Z receptor, because selective receptor antagonists prevented NF-κB activation. NF-κB activation required reactive oxygen intermediates and proteases of the caspase family, because it was abolished by antioxidants and specific protease inhibitors. The subunit composition of the ATP-induced NF- κB–DNA complex was rather unusual. Whereas exposure to LPS-induced prototypical NF-κB p50 homo- and p65 (RelA)/p50 heterodimers, ATP stimulation resulted in the sole appearance of a p65 homodimer. This is the first demonstration that a certain stimulus activates a particular NF-κB subunit. Because different NF-κB complexes exhibit distinct transcriptional and DNA-binding activities, ATP may control the expression of a subset of NF-κB target genes distinct from those activated by classical proinflammatory mediators.
Effects of Land Management Strategies on the Dispersal Pattern of a Beneficial Arthropod

Several arthropods are known to be highly beneficial to agricultural production. Consequently it is of great relevance to study the importance of land management and land composition for the conservation of beneficial aphid-predator arthropod species in agricultural areas. Therefore our study focusing on the beneficial arthropod Bembidion lampros had two main purposes: I) identifying the physical barriers to the species' dispersal in the agricultural landscape, and II) assessing the effect of different land management strategies (i.e. use of pesticides and intensiveness) on the dispersal patterns. The study was conducted using genetic analysis (microsatellite markers) applied to samples from two agricultural areas (in Denmark) with different agricultural intensity. Land management effects on dispersal patterns were investigated with particular focus on: physical barriers, use of pesticide and intensity of cultivation. The results showed that Bembidion lampros disperse preferably through hedges rather than fields, which act as physical barriers to gene flow. Moreover the results support the hypothesis that organic fields act as reservoirs for the re-colonization of conventional fields, but only when cultivation intensity is low. These results show the importance of non-cultivated areas and of low intensity organic managed areas within the agricultural landscape as corridors for dispersal (also for a species typically found within fields). Hence, the hypothesis that pesticide use cannot be used as the sole predictor of agriculture's effect on wild species is supported as land structure and agricultural intensity can be just as important.
Policing Politicians: Citizen Empowerment and Political Accountability in Africa1

Does greater transparency improve governmental performance and increase political accountability? In this paper, we describe a unique field experiment designed to estimate the impact of increased access to information about what happens in the Ugandan Parliament on three outcome variables of interest (i) how members of parliament (MPs) perform (ii) voter attitudes and behavior and (iii) electoral outcomes. Our strategy involves generating, together with the support of the Ugandan Parliament and the Africa Leadership Institute, an annual scorecard reporting on the performance of MPs. In a random sub-sample of constituencies, the scorecard will be disseminated through extensive constituency-level workshops in which MPs are given the opportunity to defend their records and field questions from voters and opposition candidates. The selection of sites for dissemination will be public information; in particular, they will be known to MPs four years in advance of the next parliamentary elections in 2011. Mechanisms that work through the impact of the information on individual voter attitudes and through effects on politician and party political behavior are distinguished by combining a survey experiment with the randomizes dissemination strategy. In an early assessment of the plausibility of the strategy, we briefed a random set of Ugandan MPs on the scorecard design in March 2007. These briefings produced a 50% increase in the rate of participation in parliamentary debates among these MPs. 1 This paper was prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 2007. We thank our partners in the field at AFLI and Nathan Falck who played a central role in developing the Scorecard and implementing the early intervention described in this paper during the past year.