Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Adaptation as a mechanism for gain control in cockroach ON and OFF olfactory receptor neurons

In many sensory systems adaptation acts as a gain control mechanism that optimizes sensory performance by trading increased sensitivity to low stimulus intensity for decreased sensitivity to high stimulus intensity. Adaptation of insect antennal olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) has been studied for strong odour concentrations, either pulsed or constant. Here, we report that during slowly oscillating changes in the concentration of the odour of lemon oil, the ON and OFF ORNs on the antenna of the cockroach Periplaneta americana adapt to the actual odour concentration and the rate at which concentration changes. When odour concentration oscillates rapidly with brief periods, adaptation improves gain for instantaneous odour concentration and reduces gain for the rate of concentration change. Conversely, when odour concentration oscillates slowly with long periods, adaptation increases gain for the rate of change at the expense of instantaneous concentration. Without this gain control the ON and OFF ORNs would, at brief oscillation periods, soon reach their saturation level and become insensitive to further concentration increments and decrements. At long oscillation periods, on the other hand, the cue would simply be that the discharge begins to change. Because of the high gain for the rate of change, the cockroach will receive creeping changes in odour concentration, even if they persist in one direction. Gain control permits a high degree of precision at small rates when it counts most, without sacrificing the range of detection and without extending the measuring scale.
The Influence of Regulations on Innovation in Information Security

We postulate that regulatory compliance pressures that have forced information security out of obscurity and into the corporate boardroom provide economic justification for information security firms to innovate. We aim to establish the link between regulations and innovation through the intermediary of demand for information security products and services. First, we show from the results of a pilot study of US firms that regulations do indeed bolster demand for information security products and services. Next, we use time series methods to further confirm these results and to establish a strong correlation between demand and innovation, proxied by R&D expenses. The results show that demand is highly correlated with innovation (correlation of 0.516) and that it significantly increases around the timing of major information security regulations and standards (t-stat of 2.2 at a 95% confidence level). Motivated by these findings, we argue in favor of regulating the IT industry, which includes the information security sector, not through imposing punitive regimes but rather by providing incentives to IT producers, thus stimulating technological, process, and organizational innovations.
The economic determinants of entrepreneurial activity : evidence from a Bayesian approach : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies in Financial Economics at Massey University

In this paper we investigate the economic, political, institutional, and societal factors that encourage entrepreneurial activity. We do so by applying Bayesian Model Averaging, which controls for model uncertainty, to a panel data set for 33 countries. Our results indicate that the general state of macroeconomic activity, the availability of financing, the level of human capital, fiscal policies implemented and the type of economic system are the main determinants of the level of entrepreneurship. We also document a non-linear, Ushaped relation between distortionary taxation and entrepreneurial activity.
A Hybrid Genetic Algorithm Approach for Concave Minimum Cost Network Flow Problems

This paper presents a hybrid approach combining a genetic algorithm with a local search for the single-source uncapacitated minimum cost network flow problem with general concave costs. This class of problems is known to be NP-Hard and therefore, exact methods to solve this class of problems in their full generality are only able to address small size instances. Computational experiments were performed using randomly generated problems. The results of the test problems are compared to optimal solutions obtained by dynamic programming method and to upper bounds obtained by a local search method for larger problem instances. From the results reported it can be shown that the hybrid methodology improves upon previous approaches. keywords Network flows, genetic algorithms, local search, concave-cost optimization
Search Problems for Speech and Audio Sequences

The modern proliferation of very large audio and video databases has created a need for effective methods of indexing and searching highly variable or uncertain data. Classical search and indexing algorithms deal with clean input sequences. However, an index created from speech or music transcriptions is marked with errors and uncertainties stemming from the use of imperfect statistical models in the transcription process. This thesis presents novel algorithms, analyses, and general techniques and tools for effective indexing and search that not only tolerate but exploit this uncertainty. We have devised a new music identification technique in which each song is represented by a distinct sequence of music sounds, called "music phonemes. " We learn the set of music phonemes, as well as a unique sequence of music phonemes characterizing each song, using an unsupervised algorithm. We also create a compact mapping of music phoneme sequences to songs. Using these techniques, we construct an efficient and robust large-scale music identification system. We have further designed new algorithms for compact indexing of uncertain inputs based on suffix and factor automata and given novel theoretical guarantees for their space requirements. We show that the suffix automaton or factor automaton of a set of strings U has at most 2Q - 2 states, where Q is the number of nodes of a prefix-tree representing the strings in U. We also describe matching new linear-time algorithms for constructing the suffix automaton S or factor automaton F of U in time O(|S|). We have also defined a new quality measure for topic segmentation systems and designed a discriminative topic segmentation algorithm for speech inputs. The new quality measure improves on previously used criteria and is correlated with human judgment of topic-coherence. Our segmentation algorithm uses a novel general topical similarity score based on word co-occurrences. This new algorithm outperforms previous methods in experiments over speech and text streams. We further demonstrate that the performance of segmentation algorithms can be improved by using a lattice of competing hypotheses over the speech stream rather than just the one-best hypothesis as input.
An Integrated Authoring Tool for Tactical Questioning Dialogue Systems

We present an integrated authoring tool for rapid prototyping of dialogue systems for virtual humans taking part in tactical questioning simulations. The tool helps domain experts, who may have little or no knowledge of linguistics or computer science, to build virtual characters that can play the role of the interviewee. Working in a top-down fashion, the authoring process begins with specifying a domain of knowledge for the character; the authoring tool generates all relevant dialogue acts and allows authors to assign the language that will be used to refer to the domain elements. The authoring tool can also be used to manipulate some aspects of the dialogue strategies employed by the virtual characters, and it also supports re-using some of the authored content across different characters.
Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program Recommendations from Urban and Reservation Northern Plains American Indian Community Members

Despite declines over the past few decades, the United States has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy compared to other industrialized nations. American Indian youth have experienced higher rates of teen pregnancy compared to the overall population for decades. Although it's known that community and cultural adaptation enhance program effectiveness, few teen pregnancy prevention programs have published on recommendations for adapting these programs to address the specific needs of Northern Plains American Indian youth. We employed a mixed-methods analysis of 24 focus groups and 20 interviews with a combined total of 185 urban and reservation-based American Indian youth and elders, local health care providers, and local school personnel to detail recommendations for the cultural adaptation, content, and implementation of a teen pregnancy prevention program specific to this population. Gender differences and urban /reservation site differences in the types of recommendations offered and the potential reasons for these differences are discussed.
The World is Not Small for Everyone: Inequity in Searching for Knowledge in Organizations

We explore why some employees may be at a disadvantage in searching for information in organizations. The “small-world” argument in social network theory emphasizes that people are, on average, only a few connections away from the information they seek. However, we argue that such a network structure does not benefit everyone: some employees may have longer search paths in locating knowledge in an organization---their world may be large. We theorize that this disadvantage is the result of more than just an inferior network position. Instead, two mechanisms---periphery status and homophily---jointly operate to aggravate the inefficiency of search for knowledge. Employees who belong to the periphery of an organization because of their minority gender status, lower tenure, or poor connectedness have limited awareness of who knows what and a lower ability to seek help from others best suited to guide the search. When they start a search chain, they are likely to engage in homophilous search by contacting colleagues like themselves, thus contacting others who also belong to the periphery. To search effectively, employees on the periphery need to engage in heterophilous search behaviors by crossing social boundaries. We find support for these arguments in a network field experiment consisting of 381 unfolding search chains in a large multinational professional services firm. The framework helps explain employees' unequal access to the knowledge they seek, a poorly understood yet important type of organizational inequity in an information economy.
The association of subtypes of breast cancer with tumour characteristics and reproductive factors in 1326 Mexican women

Aim of the study In breast cancer, oestrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PgR), and HER2 (HER2/Neu) expression status are used to classify neoplasms into subtypes: Luminal A, Luminal B, HER2/Neu type, and Basallike. The aim of the present study was to establish the molecular subtypes of breast cancers and their association with tumour characteristics and reproductive factors in Mexican women. Material and methods A total of 1326 biopsies of breast tumour tissues were analysed for ER, PR, and HER2/Neu by immunohistochemistry (IHC). Information regarding age, tumour characteristics, and node involvement profiles were collected. Results IHC established that the most common subtype of breast cancer was Luminal A (64.93%), followed by Basal-Like (13.88%), Luminal B (12.52%), and HER2/Neu (8.67%). T2-size tumours (> 2 cm but < 5 cm) were present in 47.59% of all patients. Univariate analysis showed that lymph node positivity (p = 0.009), stage (p = 0.013), and placement of the tumour (p = 0.001) were factors associated with breast cancer subtype. Conclusions Our data show that IHC is useful for distinguishing different subtypes of breast cancer and that Luminal A is the most common breast cancer subtype in the Mexican population. All subtypes were associated with unfavourable clinicopathological features, suggesting that late diagnosis is an important contributor to high mortality rates in the Mexican population.
Introduction of point-of-care testing in Japanese outpatient clinics is associated with improvement in time in therapeutic range in anticoagulant-treated patients.

BACKGROUND Warfarin reduces the risk of stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation, but requires a moderate-to-high time in therapeutic range (TTR). We hypothesized that point-of-care (POC) testing for prothrombin time-internationalized normalized ratio (PT-INR) could improve the TTR in patients receiving warfarin. METHODS AND RESULTS Eight outpatient clinics that introduced POC testing for PT-INR participated in this study. We identified 148 consecutive patients who received warfarin for at least 12 months before and after the introduction of POC testing. We compared the TTR before and after the introduction of POC testing for each patient. TTR after the introduction of POC testing was significantly higher than that beforehand (51.9%±33.0% vs. 69.3%±26.3%; P<0.0001). The improvement in TTR was statistically significant in patients who had low TTR (<70%) before the introduction of POC testing. After the introduction of POC, the time spent above the target INR showed no significant change (3.7%±10.6% vs. 3.3%±6.3%, P=0.7322), while that spent below the target INR improved significantly (44.4%±34.4% vs. 27.4%±27.6%, P<0.0001). CONCLUSIONS The introduction of POC testing was associated with an improvement in TTR, mainly through a reduction in the time spent below the target INR.
Signaling Properties of a Short-Wave Cone Visual Pigment and Its Role in Phototransduction

Although visual pigments play key structural and functional roles in photoreceptors, the relationship between the properties of mammalian cone pigments and those of mammalian cones is not well understood. We generated transgenic mice with rods expressing mouse short-wave cone opsin (S-opsin) to test whether cone pigment can substitute for the structural and functional roles of rhodopsin and to investigate how the biophysical and signaling properties of the short-wave cone pigment (S-pigment) contribute to the specialized function of cones. The transgenic S-opsin was targeted to rod outer segments, and formed a pigment with peak absorption at 360 nm. Expression of S-opsin in rods lacking rhodopsin (rho−/−) promoted outer segment growth and cell survival and restored their ability to respond to light while shifting their action spectrum to 355 nm. Using the spectral separation between S-pigment and rhodopsin, we found that the two pigments produced similar photoresponses. Dark noise did not increase in transgenic rods, indicating that thermal activation of S-pigment might not contribute to the low sensitivity of mouse S-cones. Using rod arrestin knock-out animals (arr1−/−), we found that the physiologically active (meta II) state of S-pigment decays 40 times faster than that of rhodopsin. Interestingly, rod arrestin was efficient in deactivating S-pigment in rods, but its deletion did not have any obvious effect on dim-flash response shutoff in cones. Furthermore, transgenic cone arrestin was not able to rescue the slow shutoff of S-pigment dim-flash response in arr1−/− rods. Thus, the connection between rod/cone arrestins and S-pigment shutoff remains unclear.
PERIODIC VERY HIGH ENERGY γ-RAY EMISSION FROM LS I +61°303 OBSERVED WITH THE MAGIC TELESCOPE

The MAGIC collaboration has recently reported the discovery of γ-ray emission from the binary system LS I +61°303 in the TeV energy region. Here we present new observational results on this source in the energy range between 300 GeV and 3 TeV. In total, 112 hr of data were taken between 2006 September and December covering four orbital cycles of this object. This large amount of data allowed us to produce an integral flux light curve covering for the first time all orbital phases of LS I +61°303. In addition, we also obtained a differential energy spectrum for two orbital phase bins covering the phase range 0.5 < ϕ < 0.6 and 0.6 < ϕ < 0.7. The photon index in the two phase bins is consistent within the errors with an average index Γ = 2.6 ± 0.2stat ± 0.2sys. LS I +61°303 was found to be variable at TeV energies on timescales of days. These new MAGIC measurements allowed us to search for intranight variability of the very high energy emission; however, no evidence for flux variability on timescales down to 30 min was found. To test for possible periodic structures in the light curve, we apply the formalism developed by Lomb and Scargle to the LS I +61°303 data taken in 2005 and 2006. We found the LS I +61°303 data set to be periodic with a period of (26.8 ± 0.2) days (with a post-trial chance probability of 10−7), close to the orbital period.
Habermas and the Media

Jurgen Habermas is arguably the most influential social theorist and philosopher of the twentieth century, and his imprint on media and communication studies extends well into the twenty-first. This book lucidly unpacks Habermas' sophisticated contributions to the study of media centring around the three core concepts for which his work is most known: the public sphere, communicative action, and deliberative democracy. Habermas and the Media offers an accessible introduction as well as a critical investigation of how Habermas' thinking can help us to understand and assess our contemporary communication environment and where his framework needs revision and extension. The book seeks to address questions such as: How does deliberative democracy fare in comparison to its main normative rivals: liberal, republican, and agonistic democracy? How deliberative are discussions presented on television, in political blogs, and on Twitter? What is the role of emotions in mediated deliberation? Full of original and sometimes surprising insights, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of media, political communication, and democracy, as well as anyone seeking guidance through Habermas' rich world of thought.
Empirically Constrained Color-Temperature Relations. II. uvby

A new grid of theoretical color indices for the Strömgren uvby photometric system has been derived from MARCS model atmospheres and SSG synthetic spectra for cool dwarf and giant stars having -3.0 ≤ [Fe/H] ≤ +0.5 and 3000 ≤ Teff ≤ 8000 K. At warmer temperatures (i.e., 8000 < Teff ≤ 40,000 K), this grid has been supplemented with the synthetic uvby colors from recent Kurucz atmospheric models without overshooting (Castelli, Gratton, & Kurucz, published in 1997). Our transformations appear to reproduce the observed colors of extremely metal-poor turnoff and giant stars: the various uvby color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) for the [Fe/H] ∼ -2.2 globular cluster M92 can be matched exceedingly well down to MV ≈ 6 by the same isochrone that provides a very good fit to published BV data (see Paper I), on the assumption of the same distance and reddening. Due to a number of assumptions made in the synthetic color calculations, however, our color-Teff relations for cool stars fail to provide a suitable match to the uvby photometry of both cluster and field stars having [Fe/H] > -2.0. To overcome this problem, the theoretical indices at intermediate and high metallicities have been corrected using a set of color calibrations based on field stars having well-determined distances from Hipparcos, accurate Teff estimates from the infrared flux method, and spectroscopic [Fe/H] values. In contrast with Paper I, star clusters played only a minor role in this analysis in that they provided a supplementary constraint on the color corrections for cool dwarf stars with Teff ≤ 5500 K. They were mainly used to test the color-Teff relations and, encouragingly, isochrones that employ the transformations derived in this study are able to reproduce the observed CMDs (involving u-v, v-b, and b-y colors) for a number of open and globular clusters (including M67, the Hyades, and 47 Tuc) rather well. Moreover, our interpretations of such data are very similar, if not identical, with those given in Paper I from a consideration of BV(RI)C observations for the same clusters—which provides a compelling argument in support of the color-Teff relations that are reported in both studies. In the present investigation, we have also analyzed the observed Strömgren photometry for the classic Population II subdwarfs, compared our "final" (b-y)–Teff relationship with those derived empirically in a number of recent studies and examined in some detail the dependence of the m1 index on [Fe/H].
Group Inequality and Conflict: Some Insights for Peacebuilding

Introduction Political, socioeconomic or cultural1 inequalities among defined groups could potentially motivate political violence in societies when groups have strong identities, and grievances mobilize both the group leaders and followers. These differences have been termed ‘horizontal inequalities,’ which galvanize group action to address actual or perceived inequalities. 2 These dynamics should influence peacebuilding efforts as they reveal underlying motivations for grievance and mobilization, require specific policy action to address the differences among groups and finally inform sequencing of policy implementation.
Oleandrin induces DNA damage responses in cancer cells by suppressing the expression of Rad51

Oleandrin is a monomeric compound extracted from leaves and seeds of Nerium oleander. It had been reported that oleandrin could effectively inhibit the growth of human cancer cells. However, the specific mechanisms of the oleandrin-induced anti-tumor effects remain largely unclear. Genomic instability is one of the main features of cancer cells, it can be the combined effect of DNA damage and tumour-specific DNA repair defects. DNA damage plays important roles during tumorigenesis. In fact, most of the current chemotherapy agents were designed to kill cancer cells by inducing DNA damage. In this study, we found that oleandrin was effective to induce apoptosis in cancer cells, and cause rapid DNA damage response, represented by nuclear RPA (Replication Protein A, a single strand DNA binding protein) and γH2AX(a marker for DNA double strand breaks) foci formation. Interestingly, expression of RAD51, a key protein involved in homologous recombination (HR), was suppressed while XRCC1 was up-regulated in oleandrin treated cancer cells. These results suggested that XRCC1 may play a predominant role in repairing oleandrin-induced DNA damage. Collectively, oleandrin may be a potential anti-tumor agent by suppressing the expression of Rad51.
Entrepreneurial Intentions and Motivation of Young Native Females in the UAE

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between perceived behavioural control, subjective norms, entrepreneurial intentions, motivations and cognitive planning of young female Emirati undergraduates by putting forward two theoretical models that integrate the theory of planned behaviour and the expectancy theory of motivation. The two theoretical models are researched using a quantitative method utilizing a questionnaire. The participants are 337 undergraduate female Emirati students from Dubai and the northern emirates. The difference between the two theoretical models is that whilst in the first model perceived behavioural control and subjective norms drive the entrepreneurial intentions and motivation is what links the intentions to the cognitive planning and actual actions, in the alternative model cognitive planning is researched as the result of perceived behavioural control and subjective norms, and is considered to precede entrepreneurial intentions. The main finding is that the fit between the theory of planned behaviour and the expectancy theory of motivation is best supported in the model where perceived behavioural control and subjective norms are significantly linked to cognitive planning which in turn is significantly linked to entrepreneurial intentions mediated by valence and outcome expectations.