Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Suspended sediment prolongs larval development in a coral reef fish

Increasing sediment input into coastal environments is having a profound influence on shallow marine habitats and associated species. Coral reef ecosystems appear to be particularly sensitive, with increased sediment deposition and re-suspension being associated with declines in the abundance and diversity of coral reef fishes. While recent research has demonstrated that suspended sediment can have negative impacts on post-settlement coral reef fishes, its effect on larval development has not been investigated. In this study, we tested the effects of different levels of suspended sediment on larval growth and development time in Amphiprion percula, a coral reef damselfish. Larvae were subjected to four experimental concentrations of suspended sediment spanning the range found around coastal coral reefs (0–45 mg l−1). Larval duration was significantly longer in all sediment treatments (12 days) compared with the average larval duration in the control treatment (11 days). Approximately 75% of the fish in the control had settled by day 11, compared with only 40–46% among the sediment treatments. In the highest sediment treatment, some individuals had a larval duration twice that of the median duration in the control treatment. Unexpectedly, in the low sediment treatment, fish at settlement were significantly longer and heavier compared with fish in the other treatments, suggesting delayed development was independent of individual condition. A sediment-induced extension of the pelagic larval stage could significantly reduce numbers of larvae competent to settle and, in turn, have major effects on adult population dynamics.
From Corruption to Lobbying and Economic Growth

Why do we often observe corruption in poor countries and lobbying in rich ones, and what are the consequences? We present a simple growth model where firms can either bribe bureaucrats to “bend the rules” or lobby the government to “change the rules”. While changing the rules is more permanent, the bureaucrat cannot commit not to ask for bribes also in the future. Based on this assumption, we find that firms bribe when the level of development is low, but they switch to lobbying when the level of development is sufficiently high. However, bribing leads to holdup problems which discourage firms to invest, and the economy might get stuck in a poverty trap with bribing forever. A poverty trap is more likely if penalties on corruption and the cost of compliance are large.
THE INTRANSITIVITY OF CERTAIN CRITERIA USED IN WELFARE ECONOMICS

In this paper it is shown that neither the Scitovsky nor the double index number criterion for an increase in welfare is transitive. The consistent use of either could therefore lead to inconsistent judgements. The relationship of these results to Arrow's general theorem concerning the impossibility of constructing a social welfare function satisfying certain restrictions is discussed. The author feels sure that many of these results must be familiar to individual economists, but they do not appear to be generally known.
NAADP activates a Ca2+ current that is dependent on F‐actin cytoskeleton

Nicotinic acid adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NAADP) is involved in the Ca2+ response observed at fertilization in several species, including starfish. In this study, we have employed Ca2+ imaging and the single‐electrode voltage‐clamp technique to investigate whether the NAADP‐mediated Ca2+ entry discovered in our laboratory in starfish oocytes was underlain by a membrane current and whether the response to NAADP required an intact cytoskeleton. Uncaging of preinjected NAADP evoked a cortical Ca2+ flash that was followed by the spreading of the wave to the remainder of the cell. No Ca2+ increase was detected in Ca2+‐free sea water. Under voltage‐clamp conditions, the photoliberation of NAADP activated an inward rectifying membrane current, which reversed at potentials more positive than +50 mV and was abolished by removal of Ca2+ but not of Na+. The current was affected by preincubation with verapamil, SK&F 96356, and thapsigargin but not by preinjection of heparin, 8‐NH2‐ cyclic ADP‐ribose, or both antagonists. The membrane current and the Ca2+ wave were inhibited by latrunculin‐A and jasplakinolide, which depolymerize and stabilize actin cytoskeleton, respectively. These data offer the first demonstration that NAADP initiates a Ca2+ sweep by activating a Ca2+‐permeable membrane current that requires an intact F‐actin cytoskeleton as other Ca2+‐permeable currents, such as ICRAC and IARC.
Advances in using hierarchical mixture of experts for signal classification

The hierarchical mixture of experts (HME) architecture is a powerful tree structured architecture for supervised learning. An efficient one-pass algorithm to solve the M-step of the EM iterations while training the HME network to perform classification tasks, is first described. This substantially reduces the training time compared to using the IRLS method to solve the M-step. Further, a pre-processing stage is proposed, consisting of radial basis function kernels, aimed at reducing the tree height of the HME network. Alternatively, employment of a localized form of gating network is suggested to reduce the tree height. Shorter HME trees, with much fewer network parameters, are significantly faster to train. Simulation results are presented on a real life data set.
Evidence of widespread binding of HLA class I molecules to peptides

We have tested the binding of HLA class I proteins to peptides using a solid-phase binding assay. We tested 102 peptides, mostly derived from the HIV gag and HIV pol sequences. Most peptides did not bind to any class I protein tested. The pattern of binding among the three class I proteins tested, HLA-A2, -B27, and -B8, was approximately 85% concordant. Further, all five of the known HIV-1 gag T cell epitopes detected by human CTL bound at least one class I protein. Binding of class I to the peptides could be detected either by directly iodinated class I proteins, or indirectly using monoclonal antibodies specific for class I. The binding to the plates could be blocked with MA2.1, which binds in the alpha 1 region of A2, but not by W6/32, which binds elsewhere. The data presented here show that binding of class I to peptides is specific, but that many peptides bind to more than a single class I protein.
A Competency-Based Educational Model in a Chemical Engineering School*

An educational model has been designed and implemented at the School of Chemical Engineering (ETSEQ) at Tarragona, Spain, to enable ChE students to acquire and integrate technical and scientific knowledge through the simultaneous and gradual development of competencies encom- passing social and management skills. This model is based on the large-scale deployment of a project-based cooperative learning approach throughout the ChE curriculum. This extensive deployment can only be effective if it is supported by experts in change management and the systematic development of student teams that, in turn, requires that individual students develop key social and management skills. To this end, a partnership between the ETSEQ and Dow Chemical Iberica was established in 1997. The expertise of Dow Chemical in team development and change management methodologies, gained from nearly a decade of implementation work, has comple- mented the practice of the ETSEQ with experiential learning methodologies. A set of external training interventions has been designed to support the development of competencies by students. In the new educational system student teams grow from leader-directed teams in the first semester of the first academic year to self-directed or empowered teams in the fifth year of the curriculum. In this empowerment journey, fourth-year students play a key role as they act as facilitative leaders of first-year and second-year project teams, adjusting their facilitative leadership role according to the team development stage. The core of the competency-based educational model is client orientation. The need to satisfy clients and to adapt to their changing needs triggers the development of competencies related to the transformation of the individual students (versatility, entrepreneurship and innovation, systemic thinking, etc.), of the organization (facilitative leadership, teamwork and cooperation), and of the institution (organizational development and performance, and organ- izational leadership). Preliminary results show that student attendance has increased, that drop out has decreased, that more professors act as facilitators in the classroom, and that active-oriented and student-centered educational methodologies are increasingly applied. In addition, the number of internships and first-job hirings at Dow has increased by nearly tenfold and threefold, respectively, since the first students educated under the new system graduated.
Economic Assessment of FMDv Releases from the National Bio and Agro Defense Facility

This study evaluates the economic consequences of hypothetical foot-and-mouth disease releases from the future National Bio and Agro Defense Facility in Manhattan, Kansas. Using an economic framework that estimates the impacts to agricultural firms and consumers, quantifies costs to non-agricultural activities in the epidemiologically impacted region, and assesses costs of response to the government, we find the distribution of economic impacts to be very significant. Furthermore, agricultural firms and consumers bear most of the impacts followed by the government and the regional non-agricultural firms.
A review of biomass burning emissions part III: intensive optical properties of biomass burning particles

Abstract. The last decade has seen tremendous advances in atmospheric aerosol particle research that is often performed in the context of climate and global change science. Biomass burning, one of the largest sources of accumulation mode particles globally, has been closely studied for its radiative, geochemical, and dynamic impacts. These studies have taken many forms including laboratory burns, in situ experiments, remote sensing, and modeling. While the differing perspectives of these studies have ultimately improved our qualitative understanding of biomass-burning issues, the varied nature of the work make inter-comparisons and resolutions of some specific issues difficult. In short, the literature base has become a milieu of small pieces of the biomass-burning puzzle. This manuscript, the second part of four, examines the properties of biomass-burning particle emissions. Here we review and discuss the literature concerning the measurement of smoke particle size, chemistry, thermodynamic properties, and emission factors. Where appropriate, critiques of measurement techniques are presented. We show that very large differences in measured particle properties have appeared in the literature, in particular with regards to particle carbon budgets. We investigate emissions uncertainties using scale analyses, which shows that while emission factors for grass and brush are relatively well known, very large uncertainties still exist in emission factors of boreal, temperate and some tropical forests. Based on an uncertainty analysis of the community data set of biomass burning measurements, we present simplified models for particle size and emission factors. We close this review paper with a discussion of the community experimental data, point to lapses in the data set, and prioritize future research topics.
Receptor potentials and electrical properties of nonspiking stretch-receptive neurons in the sand crab Emerita analoga (Anomura, Hippidae).

Receptor potentials and electrical properties of nonspiking stretch-receptive neurons in the sand crab Emerita analoga (Anomura, Hippidae). Four nonspiking, monopolar neurons with central somata and large peripheral dendrites constitute the sole innervation of the telson-uropod elastic strand stretch receptor in Emerita analoga. We characterized their responses to stretch and current injection, using two-electrode current clamp, in intact cells and in two types of isolated peripheral dendritic segments, one that included and one that excluded the dendritic termini (mechanosensory membrane). The membrane potentials of intact cells at rest (mean +/- SD: -57 +/- 4. 4 mV, n = 30), recorded in peripheral or neuropil processes, are similar to the membrane potentials of isolated dendritic segments and always less negative than membrane potentials of motoneurons and interneurons recorded in the same preparations. Ion substitution experiments indicate that the membrane potential is influenced strongly by Na+ conductance, probably localized in the mechanotransducing terminals within the elastic strand. The form of the receptor potential in response to ramp-hold-release stretch remains the same as stretch amplitude is varied and is not dependent on initial membrane potential (-70 to -30 mV) or recording site: initial depolarization (slope follows ramp of applied stretch), terminated by rapid, partial repolarization to a plateau (delayed depolarization) that is intermediate between the peak depolarization and the initial potential and sustained for the duration of the stretch. Responses to depolarizing current pulses are similar to stretch-evoked receptor potentials, except for small amplitude stimuli: an initial peak occurs only in response to stretch and probably reflects elastic recoil of the extracellular matrix surrounding the dendritic terminals. The rapid, partial repolarization depends on holding potential and is abolished by 4-aminopyridine (4-AP; 10 mM), implicating a fast-activating, fast-inactivating K+ conductance; TEA (60 mM) abolishes the remaining slow repolarization to the plateau. In intact cells, but not dendritic segments, regenerative depolarizations can arise in response to stretch or depolarizing current pulses; they are reduced by CdCl2 (10 microM) in the saline containing TEA and 4-AP and probably reflect current spread from Ca2+ influx at presynaptic terminals in the ganglion. We found no evidence for other voltage-activated conductances. Unlike morphologically similar "nonspiking" thoracic receptors of other species, E. analoga's nonspiking neurons are electrically compact and do not boost the analogue afferent signal by voltage-activated inward currents. The most prominent (only? ) voltage-activated extra-ganglionic conductances are for potassium; by reducing the slope of the stretch-plateau depolarization curve, they extend each neuron's functional range to the full range of sensitivity of the receptor.
Financial Prudence and Next Generation Financial Strain

The purpose of this study is to examine the influence parents have in reducing the financial strain their children experience as early adults to the extent that financial prudence was modeled in the commonplace routines of home and family life during the child's growing-up years. Using data from students about to graduate from two large U.S. universities (from a southeastern and a western state), financial prudence was examined for its direct effect on the reduction of financial strain and also for two possible indirect effects through debt avoidance and credit card misuse. Financial prudence was found to decrease financial strain directly and also indirectly through debt avoidance and credit card misuse behaviors.
Analysis on Players’ Playing Skills During the National Volleyball League (Proliga) 2016

The setback in our national-level volleyball teams is caused not only by factors of guidance and competitions. Playing skill also constitute a basic factor for producing maximum achievements. Therefore, this research was intended to analyze the skills of female Indonesian national-level volleyball teams championing the Proliga final four. This research used combination methods and collected the statistical data on the spiking, blocking, serving and receiving skills. The data were then analyzed statistically and descriptively for drawing the conclusions. The subjects for this research were 50 female volleyball players participating in the final four, 2016. For collecting the sample, this research used the technique of purposive sampling. The instrument used was VIS (Volleyball Information System). The results show that the best spiking skills were dominated by Gersik Petrokimia (52,87%), the best blocking skills were dominated by Jakarta Pertamina Energi (52,94%), the best serving skills were dominated by Jakarta Elektrik PLN (76,82%) and the best receiving skills were dominated by Jakarta Pertamina Energi (93,60%). The results from such prediction might then be used for developing the strategies for winning the competitions, level of sports professional achievement and level of students.
Context-independent phoneme recognition using a K-Nearest Neighbour classification approach

In this paper we investigate a non-parametric classification of English phonemes in speaker-independent continuous speech. We employ the “voting” k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN) classifier, a powerful technique in pattern recognition problems, along with a new representation of phonemes for the speech recognition task. We also exploit the idea behind “approximate” k-NN that results in a very fast way of computing the k approximate closest neighbours of each data point. Comparing the recognition performance of the proposed method with the HMM-based recognizer of HTK toolkit reveals that the k-NN-based recognizer outperforms its counterpart. In addition, incorporating the “approximate” nearest neighbour search instead of the “exact” one results in completing the training step much faster than the HMM-based system, and the testing step with a comparable computational time. We also reduced the amount of the training data by applying a pattern recognition technique, called “thinning” algorithm. The outcome was a considerable reduction in the k-NN search space and hence the execution time, and also a slight increase in the recognition performance.
Endoplasmic reticulum stress induces Wfs1 gene expression in pancreatic beta-cells via transcriptional activation.

OBJECTIVE The WFS1 gene encodes an endoplasmic reticulum (ER) membrane-embedded protein. Homozygous WFS1 gene mutations cause Wolfram syndrome, characterized by insulin-deficient diabetes mellitus and optic atropy. Pancreatic beta-cells are selectively lost from the patient's islets. ER localization suggests that WFS1 protein has physiological functions in membrane trafficking, secretion, processing and/or regulation of ER calcium homeostasis. Disturbances or overloading of these functions induces ER stress responses, including apoptosis. We speculated that WFS1 protein might be involved in these ER stress responses. DESIGN AND METHODS Islet expression of the Wfs1 protein was analyzed immunohistochemically. Induction of Wfs1 upon ER stress was examined by Northern and Western blot analyses using three different models: human skin fibroblasts, mouse pancreatic beta-cell-derived MIN6 cells, and Akita mouse-derived Ins2 (96Y/Y) insulinoma cells. The human WFS1 gene promoter-luciferase reporter analysis was also conducted. RESULT Islet beta-cells were the major site of Wfs1 expression. This expression was also found in delta-cells, but not in alpha-cells. WFS1 expression was transcriptionally up-regulated by ER stress-inducing chemical insults. Treatment of fibroblasts and MIN6 cells with thapsigargin or tunicamycin increased WFS1 mRNA. WFS1 protein also increased in response to thapsigargin treatment in these cells. WFS1 gene expression was also increased in Ins2 (96Y/Y) insulinoma cells. In these cells, ER stress was intrinsically induced by mutant insulin expression. The WFS1 gene promoter-luciferase reporter system revealed that the human WFS1 promoter was activated by chemically induced ER stress in MIN6 cells, and that the promoter was more active in Ins2 (96Y/Y) cells than Ins2 (wild/wild) cells. CONCLUSION Wfs1 expression, which is localized to beta- and delta-cells in pancreatic islets, increases in response to ER stress, suggesting a functional link between Wfs1 and ER stress.
A geographic routing oriented sleep scheduling algorithm in duty-cycled sensor networks

Geographic routing is assumed to be the most potential routing scheme in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to its scalability and efficiency. Recently more and more research work about geographic routing pay attention to its application scenarios in duty-cycled WSNs because of the natural advantage of saving energy consumption with duty-cycling. However, it may cause significant latency issue when applying geographic routing in duty-cycled WSNs and almost all current researches try to handle the latency problem from the point of changing the geographic forwarding mechanism, apart from the connected-k neighborhood (CKN) algorithm which focuses on sleep scheduling. In this paper, we discuss and analyze the first transmission path's performance of the two-phase geographic forwarding (TPGF) in a CKN based WSN and further propose a geographic routing oriented sleep scheduling (GSS) algorithm to shorten the first transmission path of TPGF in duty-cycled WSNs. Further theoretical and simulation results show that GSS can achieve a good tradeoff between the length of the first transmission path explored by TPGF and the total energy consumption to transmit data with the explored first transmission path, compared with the CKN sleep scheduling algorithm.
Component Masses of the Young Spectroscopic Binary UZ Tau E

We report estimates of the masses of the component stars in the pre-main-sequence spectroscopic binary UZ Tau E. These results come from the combination of our measurements of the mass ratio, M2/M1 = 0.28 ± 0.01, obtained using high-resolution H-band spectroscopy, with the total mass of the system, (1.31 ± 0.08)(D/140 pc) M☉, derived from millimeter observations of the circumbinary disk (Simon, Dutrey, & Guilloteau). The masses of the primary and secondary are (1.016 ± 0.065)(D/140 pc) M☉ and (0.294 ± 0.027)(D/140 pc) M☉, respectively. Using the orbital parameters determined from our six epochs of observation, we find that the inclination of the binary orbit, 59. °8 ± 4. °4, is consistent with that determined for the circumbinary disk from the millimeter observations, indicating that the disk and binary orbits are probably coplanar.
How College Affects Students: A Third Decade of Research. Volume 2.

This is the long-awaited second volume of Pascarella and Terenzini's 1991 award-winning review of the research on the impacts of college on students. The authors review their earlier findings and then synthesize what has been learned since 1990 about college's influences on students’ learning. The book also discusses the implications of the findings for research, practice, and public policy. This authoritative and comprehensive analysis of the literature on college-impact is required reading for anyone interested in higher education practice, policy, and promise3⁄4faculty, administrators, researchers, policy analysts, and decision-makers at every level.