Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
AN INTENSIVE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE SURVEY FOR z>1 TYPE Ia SUPERNOVAE BY TARGETING GALAXY CLUSTERS

We present a new survey strategy to discover and study high-redshift Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). By targeting massive galaxy clusters at 0.9 < z < 1.5, we obtain a twofold improvement in the efficiency of finding SNe compared to an HST field survey and a factor of 3 improvement in the total yield of SN detections in relatively dust-free red-sequence galaxies. In total, sixteen SNe were discovered at z>0.95, nine of which were in galaxy clusters. This strategy provides an SN sample that can be used to decouple the effects of host-galaxy extinction and intrinsic color in high-redshift SNe, thereby reducing one of the largest systematic uncertainties in SN cosmology.
Toward a subjective measurement model for firm performance

Firm performance is a relevant construct in strategic management research and frequently used as a dependent variable. Despite this relevance, there is hardly a consensus about its definition, dimensionality and measurement, what limits advances in research and understanding of the concept. This article proposes and tests a measurement model for firm performance, based on subjective indicators. The model is grounded in stakeholder theory and a review of empirical articles. Confirmatory Factor Analyses, using data from 116 Brazilian senior managers, were used to test its fit and psychometric properties. The final model had six first-order dimensions: profitability, growth, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, social performance, and environmental performance. A second-order financial performance construct, influencing growth and profitability, correlated with the first-order intercorrelated, non-financial dimensions. Results suggest dimensions cannot be used interchangeably, since they represent different aspects of firm performance, and corroborate the idea that stakeholders have different demands that need to be managed independently. Researchers and practitioners may use the model to fully treat performance in empirical studies and to understand the impact of strategies on multiple performance facets.
A Chance Constrained Programming Approach to Determine the Optimal Disassembly Sequence

Disassembly planning is aimed to perform the optimal disassembly sequence given a used or obsolete product in terms of cost and environmental impact. However, the actual disassembly process of products can experience great uncertainty due to a variety of unpredictable factors. To deal with such uncertainty, this work presents some chance constrained programming models for disassembly cost from the perspective of stochastic planning. Moreover, two hybrid intelligent algorithms, namely, one integrating stochastic simulation and neural network (NN), and another integrating stochastic simulation, genetic algorithm (GA) and neural network (NN), are proposed to solve the proposed models, respectively. Some numerical examples are given to illustrate the proposed models and the effectiveness of proposed algorithms.
A molecular phylogeny of the Solanaceae

A phylogeny of Solanaceae is presented based on the chloroplast DNA regions ndhF and trnLF. With 89 genera and 190 species included, this represents a nearly comprehensive genus-level sampling and provides a framework phylogeny for the entire family that helps integrate many previously-published phylogenetic studies within Solanaceae. The four genera comprising the family Goetzeaceae and the monotypic families Duckeodendraceae, Nolanaceae, and Sclerophylaceae, often recognized in traditional classifications, are shown to be included in Solanaceae. The current results corroborate previous studies that identify a monophyletic subfamily Solanoideae and the more inclusive "x = 12" clade, which includes Nicotiana and the Australian tribe Anthocercideae. These results also provide greater resolution among lineages within Solanoideae, confirming Jaltomata as sister to Solanum and identifying a clade comprised primarily of tribes Capsiceae (Capsicum and Lycianthes) and Physaleae. Stronger evidence also is provided for the inclusion of Capsicum within a paraphyletic Lycianthes. Solanaceae are a predominantly New World group, with several lineages represented on other continents. Apart from events within Solanum (for which sampling in this study is inadequate for biogeographic interpretations) the Old World representatives of Solanaceae can be accounted for by eight or nine dispersal events.
Purification and characterization of mammalian integrins expressed by a rat neuronal cell line (PC12): evidence that they function as alpha/beta heterodimeric receptors for laminin and type IV collagen

Cells of the rat neuronal line, PC12, adhere well to substrates coated with laminin and type IV collagen, but attach poorly to fibronectin. Adhesion and neurite extension in response to these extracellular matrix proteins are inhibited by Fab fragments of an antiserum (anti- ECMR) that recognizes PC12 cell surface integrin subunits of Mr 120,000, 140,000, and 180,000 (Tomaselli, K. J., C. H. Damsky, and L. F. Reichardt. 1987. J. Cell Biol. 105:2347-2358). Here we extend our study of integrin structure and function in PC12 cells using integrin subunit-specific antibodies prepared against synthetic peptides corresponding to the cytoplasmic domains of the human integrin beta 1 and the fibronectin receptor alpha (alpha FN) subunits. Anti-integrin beta 1 immunoprecipitated a 120-kD beta 1 subunit and two noncovalently associated integrin alpha subunits of 140 and 180 kD from detergent extracts of surface-labeled PC12 cells. Immunodepletion studies using anti-integrin beta 1 demonstrated that these two putative alpha/beta heterodimers are identical to those recognized by the adhesion- perturbing ECMR antiserum. Anti-alpha FN immunoprecipitated fibronectin receptor heterodimers in human and rat fibroblastic cells, but not in PC12 cells. Thus, low levels of expression of the integrin alpha FN subunit can explain the poor attachment of PC12 cells to FN. The PC12 cell integrins were purified using a combination of lectin and ECMR antibody affinity chromatography. The purified integrins: (a) completely neutralize the ability of the anti-ECMR serum to inhibit PC12 cell adhesion to laminin and collagen IV; (b) have hydrodynamic properties that are very similar to those of previously characterized integrin alpha/beta heterodimeric receptors for ECM proteins; and (c) can be incorporated into phosphatidylcholine vesicles that then bind specifically to substrates coated with laminin or collagen IV but not fibronectin. Thus, the ligand-binding specificity of the liposomes containing the purified PC12 integrins closely parallels the substrate- binding preference of intact PC12 cells. These results demonstrate that mammalian integrins purified from a neuronal cell line can, when incorporated into lipid vesicles, function as receptors for laminin and type IV collagen.
Legal Framework for High-Tech Workers in Germany

The German green-card law to facilitate the hiring of foreign Information and Telecommunication (IT) specialists has created some attention in Germany as well as abroad. It must be seen in connection with the employment of foreign employees in Germany in general. After World War II, many Gastarbeiter (guest workers) were invited to Germany, Turks especially. Later on, the invitation of foreign workers in Germany was stopped by the government. There are and there have been privileged groups as members of the EC and Aussiedler (exiles). Others are only allowed to work in Germany on the basis of special permits according to the Auslandergesetz. In general, the permit is limited in time. The green-card regulation was created especially for employees in Information and Telecommunication; the regulation came into force on August 2000. These specialists had easier access to the German labor market. The new Zuwanderungsgesetz, coming into force in January 2005, contains privileges for highly-qualified workers in general and will include IT-workers.
Searching for Evidence of Gile’s Effort Models in Retrospective Protocols of Trainee Simultaneous Interpreters

The aim of this study is to find empirical evidence for Gile’s Effort Models through retrospection. The main objective is to investigate simultaneous interpreting trainees’ perception of the cognitive processes underlying the SI task, their decision-making process when faced with increased cognitive load and processing capacity saturation, as well as their coping mechanisms under the constraints of constant requirement of attentional resources allocation. The study triangulates process analysis (retrospective protocols) with product analysis (manual comparison of source and target texts). The corpus of the study consists of about 75 hours of recordings of 240 interpreting outputs in both directions of interpreting (Polish-English and English-Polish) and the recordings of retrospective protocols (5,005 remarks). The analysed retrospective comments provide evidence of the conflicting efforts and problems with processing capacity management described by Gile. The total of 531 verbalisations refer to the aspects related to Gile’s Effort Models and 108 out of 120 interpreters participating in this experiment made at least one remark reporting them, which clearly confirms Gile’s observations about the nature of the simultaneous interpreting process.
Unemployment Traps: Do Financial Disincentives Matter?

This paper analyses the importance of financial dis-incentives for workers in Denmark. Based on a panel survey which is merged to a number of administrative registers it is possible to calculate precise measures of the economic incentives for labour force participants between employment in a full time job and being on unemployment insurance benefits and considering also the fixed costs of work. The results indicate large dis-incentives effects for some groups, especially low paid women. In 1996, 6 per cent of Danish men and 13 per cent of the women had a lower disposable net income if working in a full-time job compared to being on unemployment benefits. The effect of these financial dis-incentives is analysed in simple reduced form models of on-the-job search, unemployed search behaviour, unemployment risk, and transitions out of the labour force. We find that the net compensation rate in unemployment has a significant impact on women’s propensity to leave the labour force, on measures of search intensity, on the risk of being hit by unemployment and on one of our flexibility measures, i.e. the maximum acceptable commuting time to a job. The net compensation rate has no impact on the willingness to move to another place to get a job. However, here we find a significant impact from job attitude related measures. We end the paper reporting the results from including attitude variables along with economic variables. We find a number of significant effects from attitude variables. However, the main conclusion is that economic incentives dominate the present analysis of unemployment traps.
The synergistic interaction between RecA protein and SSB protein during DNA strand exchange

Proceedings of the conference. ABSTRACT RecA protein catalyzes DNA strand exchange, a basic step of homologous recombination. RecA protein possesses two DNA binding sites. During DNA strand exchange, the primary site binds to ssDNA, forming the helical RecA nucleoprotein filament. The weaker secondary site binds dsDNA during the homology search process. Surprisingly, the secondary DNA binding site displays a higher affinity for ssDNA than for dsDNA. Binding of ssDNA to this secondary site shows base compositional specificity, in that polypyrimidinic DNA binds to the RecA protein-ssDNA filament with higher affinity than polypurinic sequences. We found that this specific-ity reflects an intrinsic property of the secondary site of RecA protein rather than an interaction between DNA molecules within nucleoprotein filament , i.e., self-recognition. Here we demonstrate that this site has a second important function. It binds the ssDNA strand that is displaced from ho-mologous duplex DNA during DNA strand exchange, stabilizing the initial heteroduplex DNA product. Although the high affinity of the secondary site for ssDNA is essential for DNA strand exchange , it renders DNA strand exchange sensitive to an excess of ssDNA which competes with dsDNA for binding. We further demonstrate that SSB can sequester ssDNA, preventing its binding to the secondary site and thereby assisting at two levels: it averts the inhibition caused by an excess of ssDNA and prevents the reversal of DNA strand exchange by removing the displaced strand from the secondary site.
The Impact of Various Upgrade Strategies on the Long-Term Dynamics and Robustness of the Transmission Grid

We use the OPA global complex systems model of the power transmission system to investigate the effect of a series of different network upgrade scenarios on the long time dynamics and the probability of large cascading failures. The OPA model represents the power grid at the level of DC load flow and LP generation dispatch and represents blackouts caused by randomly triggered cascading line outages and overloads. This model represents the long-term, slow evolution of the transmission grid by incorporating the effects of increasing demand and engineering responses to blackouts such as upgrading transmission lines and generators. We examine the effect of increased component reliability on the long-term risks, the effect of changing operational margins and the effect of redundancy on those same long-term risks. The general result is that while increased reliability of the components decreases the probability of small blackouts, depending on the implementation, it actually can increase the probability of large blackouts. When we instead increase some types of redundancy of the system there is an overall decrease in the large blackouts with a concomitant increase of the smallest blackouts. As some of these results are counter intuitive these studies suggest that care must be taken when making what seem to be logical upgrade decisions.
Six large coronal X-ray flares observed with Chandra

Aims. A study of the six largest coronal X-ray flares in the Chandra archive is presented. The flares were observed on II Peg, OU And. Algol, HR 1099, TZ CrB and CC Eri, all with the High Energy Transmission Grating spectrometer (HETG) and the ACIS detectors. Methods. We reconstruct an Emission Measure Distribution EMD(T), using a spectral line analysis method, for flare and quiescence states separately and compare the two. Subsequently, elemental abundances are obtained from the EMD. Results. We find similar behaviour of the EMD in all flares, namely a large high-T component appears while the low-T (kT < 2 keV) plasma is mostly unaffected, except for a small rise in the low-T Emission Measure. In five of the six flares we detect a First lonization Potential (FIP) effect in the flare abundances relative to quiescence. This may contradict previous suggestions that flares are the cause of an inverse FIP effect in highly active coronae.
My Class Activities Instrument as Used in Saturday Enrichment Program Evaluation

My Class Activities (MCA) is an instrument that has been used for evaluation of university-based Saturday enrichment programs, but was originally normed using students in regular schools. A sample of MCA scores from 826 students in grades 3-8 from a Saturday enrichment program was used. Four different MCA models were evaluated: (a) the original MCA model containing interest, challenge, choice, and enjoyment; (b) a model including a second-order term connecting enjoyment and interest; (c) a three-factor model containing a combination of interest and enjoyment, challenge, and choice; and (d) the original MCA model after two items were removed. Results indicated that the original MCA four-factor structure provided a better fit when used with the Saturday enrichment sample than did the second-order and the three first-order factor models. However, the best solution regarding model fit was found using the original model, but with the removal of two poorly functioning items. This study highlighted the importance of evaluating an instrument whenever used with a different population than that on which it was originally normed. With two items deleted from the challenge scale, MCA is a potential tool for use in enrichment program evaluation that provides measures of four motivational dimensions often emphasized in programs for high-ability students.
Effects of Alterations in CAR on Bilirubin Detoxification in Mouse Collagen-Induced Arthritis

Nuclear receptors such as constitutive androstane receptor (CAR) and pregnane X receptor (PXR) regulate the transcription of cytochromes P450 and transporters. We investigated whether quantitative and functional changes in CAR and PXR could affect bilirubin detoxification in chronic arthritis. The CAR mRNA level was significantly decreased in the liver of mice with collagen-induced arthritis (CIA) compared with control mice. In normal mice treated with CAR agonists, relatively rapid elimination of bilirubin was observed after its intravenous injection. Next, we investigated the effects of CAR on bilirubin-detoxifying enzymes and transporters in arthritis. The mRNA levels of organic anion transporter peptide (OATP) 2, glutathione S-transferase (GST) A1, and GSTA2 were decreased in CIA mice, whereas the mRNA levels of OATP4, UDP-glucuronosyl-transferase 1A1, and multidrug resistance-associated protein 2 remained unchanged. The protein levels and transport activities of OATP2 were also decreased in CIA mice. Furthermore, the CIA mice actually exhibited retarded elimination of bilirubin after its intravenous injection. These results indicate that alterations to CAR during arthritis affect the elimination of bilirubin because of changes in multiple bilirubin-detoxifying enzymes and transporters.
Comprehensive analysis of a new fuzzy rule interpolation method

The first published result in fuzzy rule interpolation was the /spl alpha/-cut based fuzzy rule interpolation, termed as KH fuzzy rule interpolation, originally devoted for complexity reduction. A modified version of the KH approach has been presented by Yam et al. (1999), which eliminates the subnormality problem while at the same time intending to maintain the advantageous computational properties of the original method. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the new method, which includes detailed comparison with the original KH fuzzy rule interpolation method concerning the explicit functions of the methods, preservation of piecewise linearity, and stability. The fuzziness of the conclusion with respect to the fuzziness of the observation is also investigated in comparison with several interpolation techniques. All these comparisons shows that the new method preserves the advantageous properties of the KH method and alleviates its most significant disadvantage, the problem of subnormality.
A cloudy Vlasov solution

We propose to integrate the Vlasov-Poisson equations giving the evolution of a dynamical system in phase-space using a continuous set of local basis functions. In practice, the method decomposes the density in phase-space into small smooth units having compact support. We call these small units ``clouds\'\' and choose them to be Gaussians of elliptical support. Fortunately, the evolution of these clouds in the local potential has an analytical solution, that can be used to evolve the whole system during a significant fraction of dynamical time. In the process, the clouds, initially round, change shape and get elongated. At some point, the system needs to be remapped on round clouds once again. This remapping can be performed optimally using a small number of Lucy iterations. The remapped solution can be evolved again with the cloud method, and the process can be iterated a large number of times without showing significant diffusion. Our numerical experiments show that it is possible to follow the 2 dimensional phase space distribution during a large number of dynamical times with excellent accuracy. The main limitation to this accuracy is the finite size of the clouds, which results in coarse graining the structures smaller than the clouds and induces small aliasing effects at these scales. However, it is shown in this paper that this method is consistent with an adaptive refinement algorithm which allows one to track the evolution of the finer structure in phase space. It is also shown that the generalization of the cloud method to the 4 dimensional and the 6 dimensional phase space is quite natural.
Comparative Genome Analysis Reveals an Absence of Leucine-Rich Repeat Pattern-Recognition Receptor Proteins in the Kingdom Fungi

Background In plants and animals innate immunity is the first line of defence against attack by microbial pathogens. Specific molecular features of bacteria and fungi are recognised by pattern recognition receptors that have extracellular domains containing leucine rich repeats. Recognition of microbes by these receptors induces defence responses that protect hosts against potential microbial attack. Methodology/Principal Findings A survey of genome sequences from 101 species, representing a broad cross-section of the eukaryotic phylogenetic tree, reveals an absence of leucine rich repeat-domain containing receptors in the fungal kingdom. Uniquely, however, fungi possess adenylate cyclases that contain distinct leucine rich repeat-domains, which have been demonstrated to act as an alternative means of perceiving the presence of bacteria by at least one fungal species. Interestingly, the morphologically similar osmotrophic oomycetes, which are taxonomically distant members of the stramenopiles, possess pattern recognition receptors with similar domain structures to those found in plants. Conclusions The absence of pattern recognition receptors suggests that fungi may possess novel classes of pattern-recognition receptor, such as the modified adenylate cyclase, or instead rely on secretion of anti-microbial secondary metabolites for protection from microbial attack. The absence of pattern recognition receptors in fungi, coupled with their abundance in oomycetes, suggests this may be a unique characteristic of the fungal kingdom rather than a consequence of the osmotrophic growth form.
Multiscale Causal Connectivity Analysis by Canonical Correlation: Theory and Application to Epileptic Brain

Multivariate Granger causality is a well-established approach for inferring information flow in complex systems, and it is being increasingly applied to map brain connectivity. Traditional Granger causality is based on vector autoregressive (AR) or mixed autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model, which are potentially affected by errors in parameter estimation and may be contaminated by zero-lag correlation, notably when modeling neuroimaging data. To overcome this issue, we present here an extended canonical correlation approach to measure multivariate Granger causal interactions among time series. The procedure includes a reduced rank step for calculating canonical correlation analysis (CCA), and extends the definition of causality including instantaneous effects, thus avoiding the potential estimation problems of AR (or ARMA) models. We tested this approach on simulated data and confirmed its practical utility by exploring local network connectivity at different scales in the epileptic brain analyzing scalp and depth-EEG data during an interictal period.