Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Diversity of Accrual Policies in Local Government Financial Reporting: An Examination of Infrastructure, Art and Heritage Assets in Germany, Italy and the UK

This paper examines the norms and practices for infrastructure, art and heritage assets in six cities, across three European countries, to determine how the national norms of accrual accounting compared with each other, and with IPSAS, and how the practices in each city compared with the norms. We identify significant diversity between actual practices and the norms imposed by national policy‐makers or set by IPSAS. Given that a longstanding concern of the literature has been on whether these kinds of assets should be included in governmental balance sheets and operating statements at all, it is striking how often the question was settled in practice by excluding art and heritage assets, even when this meant non‐compliance with national norms. In our three countries, it is clear that comparability of the financial statements between countries was not a concern of policy‐makers, and comparability between cities within each country not a concern of preparers.
Blood and lymphatic vessel invasion as prognostic factors for patients with primary resected nonsmall cell carcinoma of the lung with intrapulmonary metastases

Background. The new classification of intrapulmonary metastases of lung cancer was proposed by the American Joint Committee on Cancer; however, the prognostic factors are heterogeneous and not yet fully clarified. In this study, the authors evaluated the prognostic factors for and the possible routes of intrapulmonary metastases.
The Inflation-Hedging Effectiveness of Real Estate

Inflation has become one of the predominant financial concerns of the late twentieth century. In the late 1970s, public opinion polls ranked inflation as the number one problem in the United States. While the rate of inflation has slowed since the late 1970s, inflation is still present and many investors expect a resurgence of inflation to higher levels in the near to immediate future. This continued concern about inflation has led to an increased search and evaluation of investments that will protect investors from inflation. Assets that have the ability to protect investors from the effects of inflation are generally labeled inflation hedges. Real estate has been regarded as one of the best inflation hedges of past years. While there has been research in the past evaluating this possibility and some recent research using only business real estate, no current research on residential real estate or farmland as inflation hedges exists. This study examines the inflation-hedging effectiveness of residential real estate, farmland, and business real estate (with a different data set) as individual assets and in a portfolio context for 1960-86.
Further Evidence on the Spatio-Temporal Model of House Prices in the United States

SUMMARY Holly, Pesaran, and Yamagata (Journal of Econometrics 2010; 158 : 160–173) use a panel of 49 states over the period 1975–2003 to show that state‐level real housing prices are driven by economic fundamentals, such as real per capita disposable income, as well as by common shocks, such as changes in interest rates, oil prices and technological change. They apply the common correlated effects estimator of Pesaran (Econometrica 2006; 74 (4): 967–101), which takes into account spatial interactions that reflect both geographical proximity and unobserved common factors. This paper replicates their results using a panel of 381 metropolitan statistical areas observed over the period 1975–2011. Our replication shows that their results are fairly robust to the more geographically refined cross‐section units, and to the updated period of study. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Labor Force Structure, Potential Output, and Productivity

ECONOMISTS HAVE ATTEMPTED TO ESTIMATE potential gross national product for over a decade now. Potential GNP measures the output the economy would produce if it were operating at some fixed, fairly low level of unemployment, usually defined by an aggregate unemployment rate of about 4 percent. The difference between potential and actual GNP at any point in time is known as the GNP gap. In 1962, Arthur Okun published an analysis that has been the benchmark for official measures of potential GNP ever since, and in the process enunciated what came to be known as Okun's law, which relates the unemployment rate to the percentage GNP gap. ' Potential GNP and Okun's law became two of the handiest tools of analysis and presentation for economic stabilization problems. Particularly during the first half of the 1960s, when GNP was running below potential and policy was devoted to closing the gap, no sophisticated analysis of the economy failed to identify the loss in real output that was associated with an economy falling short of full employment. The careful estimation of the full employment surplus in the federal budget has been an important by-product of the estimation of potential
Generating organisational performance

Purpose – This paper aims to advance the current debates on the effect of performance measurement (PM) in the operations management domain. In order to accomplish that, it investigates the contribution of business PM and human resource management (HRM) practices to business performance. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on ten case studies conducted across both manufacturing and service organisations capturing evidence from both the human resource function and line management. Findings – In the PM and HRM literatures, there is a debate about the contribution these practices make to the overall performance of the organisation. In particular, the results from the PM literature are inconclusive. This paper argues that performance is a result of employee engagement and that the PM system is a communication and guiding mechanism, which if implemented well and used appropriately, can channel the efforts of employees striving to perform. Originality/value – This paper contradicts the performance d.
Computed Tomography as an Adjunct in Etiological Analysis of Hemiplegic Cerebral Palsy - I: Children Born Preterm

CT brain scans were used to evaluate the most likely etiology of hemiplegic cerebral palsy in a group of children born at term. The population based study group comprised 83 children. The CT findings were classified to reflect the phase of brain maturation during which the injury causing hemiplegia most likely had occurred. The most common finding (37%) was periventricular atrophy considered to represent periventricular leukomalacia (PVL). PVL is a form of hypoxic-ischemic damage typical of the immature brain and most commonly seen as a complication of preterm birth. As this lesion was found in children born at term it was considered to reflect a cerebral injury that had occurred in utero. Cerebral maldevelopment, due to a very early intrauterine lesion, was detected in 17%, while cortical-/subcortical lesions, previously considered to be of major importance in hemiplegia, were seen in just 16% of the children. Altogether the CT findings indicated a prenatal origin of hemiplegia in 57%. Assessing the time of injury based on clinical records concurred with prenatal origin in 32% of the children thought to have prenatal origin of hemiplegia by CT. The objective information available from careful review of imaging information such as CT brain scans, is an important adjunct to clinical data. We propose that assessment of brain morphology, by means of imaging, should be integrated with clinical assessment when evaluating the etiology of brain lesions in children with congenital motor impairment.
Intellectual capital and traditional measures of corporate performance

The principal purpose of this study is to investigate the association between the efficiency of value added (VA) by the major components of a firm's resource base (physical capital, human capital and structural capital) and three traditional dimensions of corporate performance: profitability, productivity, and market valuation. Data are drawn from a sample of 75 publicly traded firms from South Africa from business sectors heavily reliant on intellectual capital. Empirical analysis is conducted using correlation and linear multiple regression analysis. Findings from the empirical analysis indicate that associations between the efficiency of VA by a firm's major resource bases and profitability, productivity and market valuation are generally limited and mixed. Overall, the empirical findings suggest that physical capital remains the most significant underlying resource of corporate performance in South Africa despite efforts to increase the nation's intellectual capital base.
Should Firms Outsource Their Basic Research? The Impact of Firm Size on In‐House Versus Outsourced R&D Productivity

It has been long known that firms can benefit substantially from basic research. Recently, however, the open innovation literature has questioned whether firms should conduct these basic research activities in‐house and has suggested that outsourcing is more appropriate both for small and large firms. However, existing empirical work investigates the performance implications of R&D outsourcing in general, but does not take into account the differences between basic research on the one hand and more applied R&D on the other. This paper therefore studies whether outsourced basic research indeed contributes equally to firm productivity as in‐house basic research, while explicitly incorporating the moderating effect of firm size. A production function approach is applied to firm‐level data stemming from three waves of the Flemish R&D survey, combined with data from firms' annual accounts. The results show that small firms benefit from outsourcing their basic research activities. For medium‐sized and large firms, however, in‐house basic research is more productive than outsourced basic research. These results contradict the general belief that small firms benefit little from basic research and cast doubts on the recent trend to close medium‐sized and large firms' corporate labs.
Empowering Leadership, Psychological Empowerment and Employee Outcomes: Testing a Multi‐Level Mediating Model

This study examined the effects of empowering leadership on employees in a customer service organization, using data from 266 employees and their supervisors from 41 work teams in a division of a large Hong Kong telecommunications corporation. Empowering leadership had acceptable levels of within‐group agreement and between‐group variability, providing support for its analysis as a group‐level construct. Testing a multi‐level model in which psychological empowerment was hypothesized to mediate the relationship between both within‐group and between‐group empowering leadership and individual outcomes, empowering leadership was associated with psychological empowerment at both levels. There was evidence of significant mediation effects at both the individual and group levels. These findings underline the importance of analysing both within‐group and between‐group differences in empowering leadership and their effects on individual attitudes and behaviours.
Wideband energy harvesting for piezoelectric devices with linear resonant behavior

In this paper, an active energy harvesting technique for a spring-mass-damper mechanical resonator with piezoelectric electromechanical coupling is investigated. This technique applies a square-wave voltage to the terminals of the device at the same frequency as the mechanical excitation. By controlling the magnitude and phase angle of this voltage, an effective impedance matching can be achieved which maximizes the amount of power extracted from the device. Theoretically, the harvested power can be the maximum possible value, even at off-resonance frequencies. However, in actual implementation, the efficiency of the power electronic circuit limits the amount of power harvested. A power electronic full-bridge converter is built to implement the technique. Experimental results show that the active technique can increase the effective bandwidth by a factor of more than 2, and harvests significantly higher power than rectifier-based circuits at off-resonance frequencies.
Studies on Auxin Protectors: IX. Inactivation of Certain Protectors by Polyphenol Oxidase.

Protector-II (Pr-II) of the Japanese morning glory (Pharbitis nil Choisy) was inactivated by exposure to polyphenol oxidase. An unidentified protector in the same molecular weight range obtained from sunflower was also inactivated by this enzyme. Earlier speculations that protectors might be lipoprotein in nature were negated by the fact that neither lipase nor protease inactivated the protectors. The protectors were also not inactivated by incubating with alpha-amylase, DNase, or RNase. Catechol mimics Pr and is inactivated by polyphenol oxidase. The oxidation of catechol to o-quinone is accompanied by a loss of chromophores that absorb ultraviolet light and the appearance of a reddish brown color. Similarly, when the relatively low molecular weight auxin protectors (Pr-II class) were incubated with polyphenol oxidase, their oxidation was also frequently associated with the formation of brown color, and oxidation with H(2)O(2) caused a loss of ultraviolet-absorbing chromophores. The data indicate that auxin protectors contain o-dihydroxyphenolic groups at their active site.That o-dihydroxyphenols inhibit indoleacetic acid oxidation has been demonstrated by numerous workers. It is suggested that the high molecular weight auxin protectors and the phenolic compounds described by other authors comprise part of a metabolic system concerned with the regulation of peroxidase-catalyzed redox reactions.
Pleiotropic effects of a mutation in rfaC on Escherichia coli hemolysin

Several genes involved in the lipopolysaccharide (LPS) biosynthetic pathway have been shown to affect the expression or activity of Escherichia coli hemolysin (Hly), a secreted cytotoxin that is the prototype of the RTX family of toxins. To further study this relationship, E. coli K-12 strains harboring mutations in the LPS biosynthetic genes rfaS, rfaQ, rfaJ, rfaP, and rfaC were transformed with a recombinant plasmid harboring the hlyCABD operon and examined for their effects on extracellular expression and hemolytic activity. A mutation in rfaC that affected both extracellular expression and activity of Hly was studied in greater detail. This mutation led to a growth-phase-dependent decrease up to 16-fold in the steady-state level of extracellular HlyA, although transcription and secretion of HlyA were decreased no more than 2-fold. Specific hemolytic activity in toxin produced from the rfaC mutant strain was significantly reduced, in a growth-phase-dependent manner. With the rfaC gene supplied in trans, both the decreased expression and activity of Hly were restored to wild-type levels. Hly from the rfaC mutant strain exhibited much slower kinetics of hemolysis, a more rapid rate of decay of activity, and greater formation of apparently inactive HlyA-containing aggregates in culture supernatants than was exhibited in the wild-type strain. A model is proposed for a physical interaction between LPS and Hly in which LPS with intact inner core participates in forming or maintaining an active conformation of Hly and helps to protect it from aggregation or degradation.
The moderating role of context in managerial ties–firm performance link: a meta-analytic review of mainly Chinese-based studies

Through a meta-analysis of 7748 firm samples reported in 29 studies (21 Chinese-based studies and 8 other country-based studies), we test the prediction of resource-based theory and institutional theory in the context of managerial ties–firm performance relationship. We examine whether contextual factors, including culture type (individualism vs. collectivism), industry setting (manufacturing vs. service), firm size (small and medium enterprises (SMEs) vs. non-SMEs), and measurements influence the managerial ties–firm performance link. Meta-analysis findings illustrate a positive and significant effect between managerial ties and firm performance, and business ties have a stronger positive effect on firm performance than political ties. The contextual moderators of cultural type, industry setting and firm size partially explain significant variance in effect sizes across studies. The result of meta-regression also suggests that the importance of political ties will decline over time. Finally, our analysis suggests that the measurement of managerial ties is not the reason for previous inconsistent findings in managerial ties–firm performance link. Drawing on these findings, we propose practical implications to managers and future research directions to scholars.
A statistical method for the measurement of muscle activation intervals from surface myoelectric signal during gait

The aim of this work is to present an original double-threshold detector of muscle activation, specifically developed for gait analysis. This detector operates on the raw myoelectric signal and, hence, it does not require any envelope detection. Its performances are fixed by the values of 3 parameters, namely, false-alarm probability (P/sub fa/), detection probability, and time resolution. Double-threshold detectors are preferable to single-threshold ones because, for a fixed value of the P/sub fa/, they yield higher detection probability; furthermore, they allow the user to select the couple false alarm-detection probability with a higher degree of freedom, thus, adapting the performances of the detector to the characteristics of the myoelectric signal of interest and of the experimental situation. Here, first the authors derive the detection algorithm and describe different strategies for selecting its parameters, then they present the performances of the proposed procedure evaluated by means of computer simulations, and finally they report an example of application to myoelectric signals recorded during gait. The characterization of the proposed double-threshold detector demonstrates that, in most practical situations, the bias of the estimates of the on-off transitions is smaller than 10 ms, the standard deviation may be kept lower than 15 ms, and the percentage of erroneous patterns is below 5%. These results show that this detection approach is satisfactory in research applications as well as in the clinical practice.
Ketogenic diet exhibits anti‐inflammatory properties

The ketogenic diet (KD) is an established treatment for refractory epilepsy, including some inflammation‐induced epileptic encephalopathies. In a lipopolysaccharide (LPS)–induced fever model in rats, we found that animals given the KD for 14 days showed less fever and lower proinflammatory cytokine levels than control animals. However, KD rats exhibited a decrease in circulating levels of arachidonic acid and long‐chain n‐3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), suggesting that the anti‐inflammatory effect of KD was probably not due to an increase in anti‐inflammatory n‐3 PUFA derivatives. These properties might be of interest in some conditions such as fever‐induced refractory epileptic encephalopathy in school‐aged children.
Glycolytic control of adjuvant‐induced macrophage survival: role of PI3K, MEK1/2, and Bcl‐2

Uptake by macrophages forms an important part of the mode of action of particulate adjuvants such as oil‐in‐water emulsions and alum. We have found previously that such adjuvants promote macrophage survival and suggested that this response may contribute to their efficacy. To explore this adjuvant activity further, we have investigated whether oil‐in‐water emulsion stimulates glucose uptake in macrophages and whether such uptake is relevant to the promotion of survival. We found that oil‐in‐water emulsion stimulated glucose uptake in a biphasic manner. The first acute phase was independent of mRNA and protein synthesis but appeared to require PI3K activity. In contrast, the second chronic phase was dependent on mRNA and protein synthesis. Importantly, the second phase of glucose uptake required MEK1/2 as well as PI3K activity, indicating that the MEK1/2 pathway can also contribute to cellular glucose uptake. The increased glucose transporter 1 expression during the second phase and long‐term survival also appeared to be dependent on PI3K and MEK1/2 signaling pathways. Metabolism of the glucose was required for the emulsion‐stimulated survival as well as the increase of prosurvival Bcl‐2 transcript levels and maintenance of Bcl‐2 protein expression. As transgenic overexpression of Bcl‐2 enhances the survival of macrophages in the absence of growth factor, the glycolytic control of Bcl‐2 levels may play a central role in emulsion‐stimulated macrophage survival. Enhanced glucose uptake by macrophages may therefore be critical to the action of particulate adjuvants.
After the Election

We began forecasting the presidential vote prior to the 1992 presidential election (Erikson & Wlezien, 1994). Our starting point was Erikson’s (1989) basic explanatory model of the vote. That model contains a measure of per capita disposable income growth leading up to the election (following Hibbs, 1987) and a measure of net candidate evaluations (adapted slightly from Tufte, 1978) using American National Election Study (ANES) data collected during the fall campaign. Because the model relies on information that is not available until after the election, it is not expressly useful for the purposes of forecasting: Although much of the information about income growth during a presidential term is available before an election, information about candidate evaluations is not, at least not in the ANES. Thus, we turned to an analysis of candidate evaluations themselves. This analysis revealed that the public’s net evaluations of candidates are largely structured by assessments of the incumbent president, especially presidential approval and, to a lesser extent, incumbency (Erikson & Wlezien, 1994). The results represented, at least to us, pretty powerful support for the underlying “referendum” model implicit in most forecasting models. Most important, information about presidential approval and incumbency is available in advance of an election, which allowed us to forecast the 1992 presidential vote in August. Our model performed fairly well, within 0.3 of a percentage point.
Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine Regenerative Responses and Axon Pathfinding of Retinal Ganglion Cells in Chronically Injured Mice

Citation: Yungher BJ, Ribeiro M, Park KK. Regenerative responses and axon pathfinding of retinal ganglion cells in chronically injured mice. Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2017;58:1743–1750. DOI:10.1167/iovs.16-19873 PURPOSE. Enhanced regeneration of retinal ganglion cell (RGC) axons can be achieved by modification of numerous neuronal-intrinsic factors. However, axon growth initiation and the pathfinding behavior of these axons after traumatic injury remain poorly understood outside of acute injury paradigms, despite the clinical relevance of more chronic settings. We therefore examined RGC axon regeneration following therapeutic delivery that is postponed until 2 months after optic nerve crush injury.