Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Protocol biopsy: what is the rationale and what is the evidence?

The incidence of acute rejection (and the proportion of grafts lost during the first year after renal transplantation) have markedly decreased after the introduction of cyclosporin A. The reduction of the rate of graft loss after the first year, however, has been much less impressive. Chronic transplant nephropathy has become the most common cause of late graft failure [1]. Chronic allograft nephropathy is strongly correlated with the number of acute rejection episodes during the first year after renal transplantation [2,3]. In the past, the possibility of graft failure was suspected only when a sustained and irreversible decline of renal function was evident, usually in the context of proteinuria and hypertension. Unfortunately, by the time the clinical diagnosis was confirmed by histology renal scarring was usually too advanced to make delayed treatment a promising proposition. Traditionally, renal allograft biopsies were performed mainly in the setting of acute graft dysfunction. Recently, there has been a change of paradigms. Several reports suggested that acute rejection episodes and chronic allograft nephropathy are often subclinical without causing a measurable decrease in renal function. This raises the issue of biopsies of stable allografts (protocol biopsies) and the clinically useful information they provide.
Scatter-search with support vector machine for prediction of relative solvent accessibility

Proteins have vital roles in the living cells. The protein function is almost completely dependent on protein structure. The prediction of relative solvent accessibility gives helpful information for the prediction of tertiary structure of a protein. In recent years several relative solvent accessibility (RSA) prediction methods including those that generate real values and those that predict discrete states have been developed. The proposed method consists of two main steps: the first one, provided subset selection of quantitative features based on selected qualitative features and the second, dedicated to train a model with selected quantitative features for RSA prediction. The results show that the proposed method has an improvement in average prediction accuracy and training time. The proposed method can dig out all the valuable knowledge about which physicochemical features of amino acids are deemed more important in prediction of RSA without human supervision, which is of great importance for biologists and their future researches.
Financial Leverage and Recession: Consequences for Tourism-Related Operations

This comparative study focuses on the application of financial leverage theory in the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s. After a brief demonstration of the theory of financial leverage a comparative case study examines its impact in the most recent recessionary period. Two corporations, Four Seasons Hotels and O'Toole's Restaurants had very different leverage movements both before and during the recession. Their experiences are examined in depth and related to financial leverage theory.
Asymmetric Beta Comovement and Systematic Downside Risk

In this paper, we document evidence that downside betas tend to comove more than upside betas during a financial crisis, but upside betas tend to comove more than the downside betas during financial booms. We find that the asymmetry between Downside-Beta Comovement and Upside-Beta Comovement is the main driving force for market level skewness. An indicator called "Systematic Downside Risk" (SDR) is defined to characterize this asymmetry in the comovement of betas. This indicator negatively predicts future market returns. The SDR effectively forecasts future monthly stock market movements with an out-of-sample R-square above 2.27% relative to a strategy based on historical mean. An investor who timed the market using SDR would have obtained a Sharpe ratio gain of 0.206.
Indeterminacy and society

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Massive MIMO downlink 1-bit precoding with linear programming for PSK signaling

Quantized massive multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems are gaining more interest due to their power efficiency. We present a new precoding technique to mitigate the multi-user interference and the quantization distortions in a downlink multi-user (MU) multiple-input-single-output (MISO) system with 1-bit quantization at the transmitter. This work is restricted to PSK modulation schemes. The transmit signal vector is optimized for every desired received vector taking into account the 1-bit quantization. The optimization is based on maximizing the safety margin to the decision thresholds of the PSK modulation. Simulation results show a significant gain in terms of the uncoded bit-error-ratio (BER) compared to the existing linear precoding techniques.
News Framing and Cueing of Issue Regimes: Explaining Clinton's Public Approval in Spite of Scandal

During the period of exceedingly critical news coverage surrounding the Monica Lewinsky debacle, President Bill Clinton's job approval ratings were at some of the highest levels they reached during his tenure in office. Given this public response, many pollsters, pundits, and scholars argued that news coverage of the scandal must have been largely irrelevant to the public. Our view counters these claims by ad- vancing a theory that recognizes that citizens' political preferences are influenced substantially by frames and cues provided by news media. To test our ideas, we draw upon three types of data, all from January 1993 to March 1999: (a) a longitudinal content analysis of major news media, (b) a time-trend of opinion polls on presidential job approval, and (c) monthly estimates of real disposable personal income, seasonally adjusted. Analyses reveal that news media emphasis upon and framing of certain issue regimes—specifically, coverage of the economy, general policy performance, and scandal—explained changes in mass evalu- ations of Clinton throughout his presidency, including the surprising trend during the "Lewinsky period. " In particular, findings suggest that sustained support for Clinton can be explained as a complex counter- response—a backlash—to the framing of the scandal in terms of the strategic motives of conservative elites.
A generalization of the regularization proximal point method

This paper deals with the generalized regularization proximal point method which was introduced by the authors in [Four parameter proximal point algorithms, Nonlinear Anal. 74 (2011), 544-555]. It is shown that sequences generated by it converge strongly under minimal assumptions on the control parameters involved. Thus the main result of this paper unify many results related to the prox-Tikhonov method, the contraction proximal point algorithm and/or the regularization method as well as some results of the above quoted paper.
Strengthening ‘folk ecology’: community-based learning for integrated soil fertility management, western Kenya

Farmers and researchers in western Kenya have used community-based learning approaches to jointly develop a ‘dynamic expertise’ of integrated soil fertility management (ISFM). This transformative learning approach builds on farmers' ‘folk ecology’ and outsiders' knowledge, taking action research on natural resource management beyond methods that are descriptive (ethnopedology) or curriculum-driven (farmer field schools). The paper presents insights from a project's experience of applying the strengthening ‘folk ecology’ approach in western Kenya, with emphasis on the community-based learning process, collective and individual experimentation, the power dynamics of farmer research groups, and learning from the farmer—researcher interface. Farmer groups have been empowered by this approach but diversification into non-soil activities highlights the limitations of experimentation and the challenges of scaling up participatory action research.
Adaptive Bayesian Latent Semantic Analysis

Due to the vast growth of data collections, the statistical document modeling has become increasingly important in language processing areas. Probabilistic latent semantic analysis (PLSA) is a popular approach whereby the semantics and statistics can be effectively captured for modeling. However, PLSA is highly sensitive to task domain, which is continuously changing in real-world documents. In this paper, a novel Bayesian PLSA framework is presented. We focus on exploiting the incremental learning algorithm for solving the updating problem of new domain articles. This algorithm is developed to improve document modeling by incrementally extracting up-to-date latent semantic information to match the changing domains at run time. By adequately representing the priors of PLSA parameters using Dirichlet densities, the posterior densities belong to the same distribution so that a reproducible prior/posterior mechanism is activated for incremental learning from constantly accumulated documents. An incremental PLSA algorithm is constructed to accomplish the parameter estimation as well as the hyperparameter updating. Compared to standard PLSA using maximum likelihood estimate, the proposed approach is capable of performing dynamic document indexing and modeling. We also present the maximum a posteriori PLSA for corrective training. Experiments on information retrieval and document categorization demonstrate the superiority of using Bayesian PLSA methods.
Behavioral Explanation of Tax Asymmetries

This note develops a behavioral explanation for the existence of an asymmetric tax treatment of gains and losses when investors are loss averse. We find that loss offset rules should be more restrictive for investors which are (1) more risk averse in case of gains, (2) less risk seeking in case of losses, or (3) more loss averse. Our findings have important policy implications. Tax authorities often implement identical loss offset rules for different investor clienteles. However, there should be specific loss offset rules for investors who differ in risk attitude as well as in loss aversion.
Input Measurement and Productivity Growth in Japanese and U.S. Manufacturing

This paper analyzes multifactor productivity growth (based on capital, labor, energy, and materials) and labor productivity growth in the Japanese and U.S. manufacturing sectors. We find that the tests of separability required for a value-added approach fail for both the U.S. and Japan, making gross output the correct approach.Additionally, confirming Jorgenson and Nishimizu, we find that the remarkable differences in productive efficiency between Japan and the U.S. — at the two-digit industry level — are largely due to differences in the levels of capital investment and not to differences in multifactor productivity.
RED SUPERGIANTS AS POTENTIAL TYPE IIn SUPERNOVA PROGENITORS: SPATIALLY RESOLVED 4.6 μm CO EMISSION AROUND VY CMa AND BETELGEUSE

We present high-resolution 4.6 μm CO spectra of the circumstellar environments of two red supergiants (RSGs) that are potential supernova (SN) progenitors: Betelgeuse and VY Canis Majoris (VY CMa). Around Betelgeuse, 12CO emission within ±3″ (±12 km s−1) follows a mildly clumpy but otherwise spherical shell, smaller than its ∼55″ shell in K i λ7699. In stark contrast, 4.6 μm CO emission around VY CMa is coincident with bright K i in its clumpy asymmetric reflection nebula, within ±5″ (±40 km s−1) of the star. Our CO data reveal redshifted features not seen in K i spectra of VY CMa, indicating a more isotropic distribution of gas punctuated by randomly distributed asymmetric clumps. The relative CO and K i distribution in Betelgeuse arises from ionization effects within a steady wind, whereas in VY CMa, K i is emitted from skins of CO cloudlets resulting from episodic mass ejections 500–1000 yr ago. In both cases, CO and K i trace potential pre-SN circumstellar matter: we conclude that an extreme RSG like VY CMa might produce a Type IIn event like SN 1988Z if it were to explode in its current state, but Betelgeuse will not. VY CMa demonstrates that luminous blue variables are not necessarily the only progenitors of SNe IIn, but it underscores the requirement that SNe IIn suffer enhanced episodic mass loss shortly before exploding.
How do public private partnerships influence business school performance in English-speaking Caribbean?

This thesis addresses the question of how business schoolsestablished as public privatepartnerships (PPPs) within a regional university in the English-speaking Caribbean survived for over twenty-one years and achieved legitimacy in their environment. The aim of the study was to examine how public and private sector actors contributed to the evolution of the PPPs. A social network perspective provided a broad relational focus from which to explore the phenomenon and engage disciplinary and middle-rangetheories to develop explanations. Legitimacy theory provided an appropriate performance dimension from which to assess PPP success. An embedded multiple-case research design, with three case sites analysed at three levels including the country and university environment, the PPP as a firm and the subgroup level constituted the methodological framing of the research process. The analysis techniques included four methods but relied primarily on discourse and social network analysis of interview data from 40 respondents across the three sites. A staged analysis of the evolution of the firm provided the ‘time and effects’ antecedents which formed the basis for sense-making to arrive at explanations of the public-private relationship-influenced change. A conceptual model guided the study and explanations from the cross-case analysis were used to refine the process model and develop a dynamic framework and set of theoretical propositions that would underpin explanations of PPP success and legitimacy in matched contexts through analytical generalisation. The study found that PPP success was based on different models of collaboration and partner resource contribution that arose from a confluence of variables including the development of shared purpose, private voluntary control in corporate governance mechanisms and boundary spanning leadership. The study contributes a contextual theory that explains how PPPs work and a research agenda of ‘corporate governance as inspiration’ from a sociological perspective of ‘liquid modernity’. Recommendations for policy and management practice were developed.
Efficient Observation Selection in Probabilistic Graphical Models Using Bayesian Lower Bounds

Real-world data often includes rich relational information, which can be leveraged to help predict unknown variables using a small amount of observed variables via a propagation effect. We consider the problem of selecting the best subset of variables to observe to maximize the overall prediction accuracy. Under the Bayesian framework, the optimal subset should be chosen to minimize the Bayesian optimal error rate, which, unfortunately, is critically challenging to calculate when the variables follow complex and high dimensional probabilistic distributions such as graphical models. In this paper, we propose to use a class of Bayesian lower bounds, including Bayesian Cramer Rao bounds as well as a novel extension of it to discrete graphical models, as surrogate criteria for optimal subset selection, providing a set of computationally efficient algorithms. Extensive experiments are presented to demonstrate our algorithm on both simulated and real-world datasets.
Partial Cleavage of RasGAP by Caspases Is Required for Cell Survival in Mild Stress Conditions

ABSTRACT Tight control of apoptosis is required for proper development and maintenance of homeostasis in multicellular organisms. Cells can protect themselves from potentially lethal stimuli by expressing antiapoptotic factors, such as inhibitors of apoptosis, FLICE (caspase 8)-inhibitory proteins, and members of the Bcl2 family. Here, we describe a mechanism that allows cells to survive once executioner caspases have been activated. This mechanism relies on the partial cleavage of RasGAP by caspase 3 into an amino-terminal fragment called fragment N. Generation of this fragment leads to the activation of the antiapoptotic Akt kinase, preventing further amplification of caspase activity. Partial cleavage of RasGAP is required for cell survival under stress conditions because cells expressing an uncleavable RasGAP mutant cannot activate Akt, cannot prevent amplification of caspase 3 activity, and eventually undergo apoptosis. Executioner caspases therefore control the extent of their own activation by a feedback regulatory mechanism initiated by the partial cleavage of RasGAP that is crucial for cell survival under adverse conditions.
Casimir Piston at Zero and Finite Temperature

We consider the Casimir force acting on a d-dimensional rectangular piston due to massless scalar field with periodic, Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions and electromagnetic field with perfect electric conductor and perfect magnetic conductor boundary conditions. The Casimir energy in a rectangular cavity is derived by using cutoff method, and it is shown that its regular part coincides with the result obtained by zeta regularization method. The divergent parts of the Casimir energy from the interior and exterior regions of the piston are shown to contribute Casimir force of equal magnitude but opposite signs. Therefore the Casimir force acting on the piston is divergence free. It is verified analytically that at any temperature, the Casimir force acting on the piston increases from −∞ to 0 when the separation a between the piston and the opposite wall increases from 0 to ∞. This implies that the Casimir force is always an attractive force pulling the piston towards the interior region, and the magnitude of the force gets larger as the separation a gets smaller. Explicit exact expressions for the Casimir force for small and large plate separations and for low and high temperatures are computed. The limits of the Casimir force acting on the piston when some pairs of transversal plates are large are also derived. When the plate separation a is small, the magnitude of the Casimir force is found to behave like a −d−1 at all temperature; while for large plate separation a, it decays to zero with a rate depending on the type of the quantum fields and temperature. This means that at any temperature, the magnitude of the Casimir force can become large when the plate separation is small. An interesting result regarding the influence of temperature is that in contrast to the conventional result that the leading term of the Casimir force acting on a wall of a rectangular cavity at high temperature is the Stefan– Boltzmann (or black body radiation) term which is of order T d+1 , it is found that the contributions of this term from the interior and exterior regions cancel with each other in the case of piston. The high temperature leading order term of the Casimir force acting on the piston is of order T , which shows that the Casimir force has a nontrivial classical → 0 limit.
Improving lookahead in parallel wireless network simulation

Simulation of large sets of mobile computers or other wireless communication devices is difficult because of the computationally intensive models of wireless channels. Parallel simulation would seem to be applicable here because of the large computation granularity, but the location based communication topology makes conservative methods difficult to implement. This paper considers a novel approach to improving lookahead in conservative parallel simulations by differentiating between data flow paths in the simulation. An experimental study shows that for this application, the technique produces a 70% reduction in null message traffic, with only a 25% increase in null message computation overhead, and a consistent improvement in parallel performance.
Diamagnetic pumping near the base of a stellar convection zone

The property of inhomogeneous turbulence in conducting fluids to expel large-scale magnetic fields in the direction of decreasing turbulence intensity is shown as important for the magnetic field dynamics near the base of a stellar convection zone. The downward diamagnetic pumping confines a fossil internal magnetic field in the radiative core so that the field geometry is appropriate for formation of the solar tachocline. For the stars of solar age, the diamagnetic confinement is efficient only if the ratio of turbulent magnetic diffusivity ηT of the convection zone to the (microscopic or turbulent) diffusivity ηin of the radiative interior is ηT/ηin≥ 105. Confinement in younger stars requires larger ηT/ηin. The observation of persistent magnetic structures on young solar-type stars can thus provide evidence for the nonexistence of tachoclines in stellar interiors and on the level of turbulence in radiative cores. (© 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)
The Effect of External Social Resources on Firm Patent Performance: The Impact of Boards, Partnerships and Geographic Proximity

ABSTRACTWe have a limited understanding innovation, specifically how research and development translates into patents. Prior research assumes that internal resources are preeminent, largely ignoring external factors. This paper reviews outside resources to assess their effect on firm innovation. Using a sample of firms at their initial public offering, it was found that partnerships with universities and firm geographic location improve innovative activity, while government grants and partnerships with large firms did not foster improved innovative activity. The Board of Directors has no significant main impact, but a negative interaction effect on innovative activity.Key words: innovative activity, research and development, patents, external resources, board of directors, initial public offering (IPO). INTRODUCTIONHigh technology entrepreneurial firms by definition, encounter environmental change as well as technological and market uncertainty (Kor 2003), and need continual innovation to improve their performance (Deeds, and DeCarolis, 2000). Innovation is a process that involves the creation of new technical ideas and the harnessing of new knowledge which requires human and financial resources (Somaya, Williamson and Zhang, 2007). The focal research question is which external factors foster enhanced innovation? Innovation process research frequently focuses on elucidating the effects of research and development (RD Hall and Ziedonis, 2001; Kim and Marschke, 2004). While RD this is followed by the hypothesis development. The methodology and variables measurement is subsequently detailed. The paper then provides a description of the data analysis, results and a discussion of findings and concludes with implications, limitations and future research directions.THEORETICAL DEVELOPMENTThe Resources of a Firm and the Value of External ResourcesAccording to Barney and Arikan (2002 p. 138), "A resource is defined as tangible and intangible assets that firms use to conceive of and implement their strategies". The resource-based view of the firm assumes that firms manipulate multiple internal and external resources that affect their performance (Barney, 1991; Barney and Arikan, 2002). Antecedents of firm performance include manipulation of resources to create innovations. Prior research has examined the effect of firm internal (Somaya et al. …