Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Uncertainties in thermohaline circulation response to greenhouse warming

The uncertainty in the response of the thermohaline circulation to greenhouse forcing due to the use of flux adjustments in coupled ocean‐atmosphere models is evaluated. This is done by using a different yet physically justifiable flux adjustment procedure and examining its effect on the thermohaline response to greenhouse forcing in a three dimensional primitive equations coupled ocean atmosphere general circulation model. It is found that while the initial thermohaline circulation weakening is robust, its eventual recovery which is seen in some coupled model simulations may be more sensitive to the details of the flux adjustment procedure and may therefore be less certain.
Advancing Medical Technology, Aging Population, and Economic Growth

Endogenous accumulation of human capital increases labor productivity and promotes technological progress in the medical industry. Technological progress lowers the relative price of health services. The rising income and decreasing price of health services allow the elderly to prolong their life expectancy by using increasing amounts of healthcare services—but not necessarily by consuming a larger share of healthcare expenditure. As adults invest more in their human capital, they bear fewer children. Thus, the aging of the population is two-tailed. We characterize the optimal heath tax rate, and analyze the affects of suboptimal taxation on the dynamics of growth and aging.
Draft Habitat-specific production of aquatic and terrestrial invertebrate drift in 1 small forest streams : implications for drift-feeding fish 2 3 4

Journal: Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences Manuscript ID cjfas-2016-0406.R1 Manuscript Type: Article Date Submitted by the Author: 22-Nov-2016 Complete List of Authors: Naman, Sean; University of British Columbia, Zoology Rosenfeld, Jordan; British Columbia Ministry of the Environment, Third, Laura; University of British Columbia, Forest and Conservation Sciences Richardson, John; University of British Columbia,
Gender Differences in the Relationship between Maladaptive Behaviors and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. A Study on 900 L’ Aquila 2009 Earthquake Survivors

Background: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) represents one of the most frequently psychiatric sequelae to earthquake exposure. Increasing evidence suggests the onset of maladaptive behaviors among veterans and adolescents with PTSD, with specific gender differences emerging in the latter. Aims of the present study were to investigate the relationships between maladaptive behaviors and PTSD in earthquake survivors, besides the gender differences in the type and prevalence of maladaptive behaviors and their association with PTSD. Methods: 900 residents of the town of L’Aquila who experienced the earthquake of April 6th 2009 (Richter Magnitude 6.3) were assessed by means of the Trauma and Loss Spectrum-Self Report (TALS-SR). Results: Significantly higher maladaptive behavior prevalence rates were found among subjects with PTSD. A statistically significant association was found between male gender and the presence of at least one maladaptive behavior among PTSD survivors. Further, among survivors with PTSD significant correlations emerged between maladaptive coping and symptoms of re-experiencing, avoidance and numbing, and arousal in women, while only between maladaptive coping and avoidance and numbing in men. Conclusions: Our results show high rates of maladaptive behaviors among earthquake survivors with PTSD suggesting a greater severity among men. Interestingly, post-traumatic stress symptomatology appears to be a better correlate of these behaviors among women than among men, suggesting the need for further studies based on a gender approach.
WiFall: Device-free fall detection by wireless networks

The world population is in the midst of a unique and irreversible process of aging. Fall, which is one of the major health threats and obstacles to independent living of elders, will aggravate the global pressure in elders' health care and injury rescue. Thus, automatic fall detection is highly in need. Current proposed fall detection systems either need hardware installation or disrupt people's daily life. These limitations make it hard to widely deploy fall detection systems in residential settings. In this work, we analyze the wireless signal propagation model considering human activities influence. We then propose a novel and truly unobtrusive detection method based on the advanced wireless technologies, which we call as WiFall. WiFall employs the time variability and special diversity of Channel State Information (CSI) as the indicator of human activities. As CSI is readily available in prevalent in-use wireless infrastructures, WiFall withdraws the need for hardware modification, environmental setup and worn or taken devices. We implement WiFall on laptops equipped with commercial 802.11n NICs. Two typical indoor scenarios and several layout schemes are examined. As demonstrated by the experimental results, WiFall yielded 87% detection precision with false alarm rate of 18% in average.
Maxillary Impacted Canines : A Cross-Sectional Study among Tunisian Orthodontic Population

Original Research Article Dental impaction is one of the most common abnormalities encountered during orthodontic consultations. After the impacted wisdom teeth, permanent maxillary canines come in the second place concerning this malocclusion. Their prevalence varies from 1% to 3% depending on studied populations. However, there are no previous studies concerning maxillary impacted canines among Tunisian population. For this reason, we propose in this work, through a cross-sectional study, to assess the prevalence of this phenomenon among a Tunisian orthodontic sample as well as to study its associations with some factors such as: sex, dental abnormalities (shape, size, number.) and transversal abnormalities. Some consequences such as adjacent teeth‟s resorption are also studied. Lastly, a preposition of orthodontic traction duration was given based on recent studies.
Testing Weak-form efficiency of Exchange Traded Funds Market

In this paper we assess the weak-form efficiency of Exchange Traded Funds market applying various parametric and non-parametric tests. The parametric tests performed concern serial correlation tests and Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) unit root test while the nonparametric tests used is the Phillips-Peron (PP) unit root test. To assess ETF market efficiency, we employ full daily return historical data of a sample of 66 equity-linked ETFs traded in the U.S. stock over the period 2001-2010. The performed tests provide evidence on the fact that the efficient market hypothesis holds in the ETF market. In particular, the majority of serial correlation tests show the lack of such an issue in the time series of ETF returns, which is a prerequisite in order for the efficient market hypothesis to be verified. Moreover, both the parametric and non-parametric unit root tests adopted reveal the non-existence of such an issue with respect to the pricing of ETFs and, therefore, the weakform of the efficient market hypothesis seems not to be infringed in the U.S. ETF market.
Dynamic Software Defined Network Provisioning for Resilient Cloud Service Provider Optical Networks

- Cloud computing service providers (CSPs) face many challenges related to rapid, elastic provisioning and capacity planning for high resilience networks within and between data centers. The design space for cloud network services may be partitioned according to the required data semantics and trade-offs between consistency, availability, and partition tolerance. We investigate high availability solutions for resilient CSP networks. In particular, live migration of virtual servers may require dynamic provisioning of optical networks over 100 km in length. We demonstrate an experimental proof of concept automated test bed that reduces re-provisioning times from several days to under a minute. A simple analytic model for application migration time as a function of bandwidth is proposed and validated. We also demonstrate the application of fast dynamic optical network re-provisioning to mitigating the effects of traffic bursts in quasi-synchronous storage applications.
Genome instability in rad 54 mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

The RAD54 gene of Saccharomyces cerevisiae encodes a conserved dsDNA-dependent ATPase of the Swi2/Snf2 family with a specialized function during recombinational DNA repair. Here we analyzed the consequences of the loss of Rad54 function in vegetative (mitotic) cells. Mutants in RAD54 exhibited drastically reduced rates of spontaneous intragenic recombination but were pro®cient for spontaneous intergenic recombinant formation. The intergenic recombinants likely arose by a RAD54independent pathway of break-induced replication. Signi®cantly increased rates of spontaneous chromosome loss for diploid rad54/rad54 cells were identi®ed in several independent assays. Interestingly, the increase in chromosome loss appeared to depend on the presence of a homolog. In addition, the rate of complex genetic events involving chromosome loss were drastically increased in diploid rad54/rad54 cells. Together, these data suggest a role for Rad54 protein in the repair of spontaneous damage, where in the absence of Rad54 protein, homologous recombination is initiated but not properly terminated, leading to misrepair and chromosome loss.
Persuasion in Relationship Finance

Abstract After initial investments, relationship financiers routinely observe interim information about projects before continuing financing them. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs produce information endogenously and issue securities to incumbent insider and competitive outsider investors. In such persuasion games with differentially informed receivers and contingent transfers, entrepreneurs’ endogenous experimentation reduces insiders’ information monopoly but impedes relationship formation through an “information production hold-up. ” Insiders’ information production and interim competition mitigate this hold-up and jointly explain empirical links between competition and relationship lending. Optimal contracts restore first-best outcomes using convertible securities for insiders and residuals for outsiders. Our findings are robust under various extensions and alternative specifications.
Explicit thresholds for approximately sparse compressed sensing via ℓ1-optimization

It is well known that compressed sensing problems reduce to solving large under-determined systems of equations. If we choose the elements of the compressed measurement matrix according to some appropriate probability distribution and if the signal is sparse enough then the ℓ1-optimization can recover it with overwhelming probability (see, e.g. [5], [9], [10]). In fact, [5], [9], [10] establish (in a statistical context) that if the number of measurements is proportional to the length of the signal then there is a sparsity of the unknown signal proportional to its length for which the success of the ℓ1-optimization is guaranteed. In this paper we consider a modification of this standard setup, namely the case of the so-called approximately sparse unknown signals [7], [27]. We determine sharp lower bounds on the values of allowable approximate sparsity for any given number (proportional to the length of the unknown signal) of measurements. We introduce a novel, very simple technique which provides very good values for proportionality constants.
Automatic Test Packet Generation

Networks are getting larger and more complex, yet administrators rely on rudimentary tools such as ping and traceroute to debug problems. We propose an automated and systematic approach for testing and debugging networks called “Automatic Test Packet Generation” (ATPG). ATPG reads router configurations and generates a device-independent model. The model is used to generate a minimum set of test packets to (minimally) exercise every link in the network or (maximally) exercise every rule in the network. Test packets are sent periodically, and detected failures trigger a separate mechanism to localize the fault. ATPG can detect both functional (e.g., incorrect firewall rule) and performance problems (e.g., congested queue). ATPG complements but goes beyond earlier work in static checking (which cannot detect liveness or performance faults) or fault localization (which only localize faults given liveness results). We describe our prototype ATPG implementation and results on two real-world data sets: Stanford University's backbone network and Internet2. We find that a small number of test packets suffices to test all rules in these networks: For example, 4000 packets can cover all rules in Stanford backbone network, while 54 are enough to cover all links. Sending 4000 test packets 10 times per second consumes less than 1% of link capacity. ATPG code and the data sets are publicly available.
Generation of student interest in an inquiry-based mobile learning environment

A declining trend in adolescents’ interest in science learning and attitudes towards science-related careers has been reported during recent years. There has been a call for more motivating learning environments that inspire students to develop interest towards science. This study examines students’ interest development in STEM subjects in an ecologically valid setting during one school year and how features of the learning environment affect students’ generation of interest. In a quasi-experimental study design, one class of 7th grade (aged 12 to 13 years) students (N = 18) studied in an inquiry-based mobile learning environment that had a special emphasis on integrated curriculum. Interest variables were measured three times and focus group interviews were held twice during the school year. From a group of 113 students studying in an ordinary learning setting, a propensity score-matched control group of 18 students was selected based on general self-efficacy, intrinsic goal orientation, interest in technology, and web-user self-efficacy. Results from the quantitative analyses revealed only minor differences between the two groups. Results from the qualitative analyses indicate that students found the new environment to be interest generating, thus ascribing to the general idea and aim of the new environment, but also that the implementation was in many cases far from ideal, indicating that much of its potential was unrealized.
Enhanced prestack depth imaging of wide-azimuth data from the Gulf of Mexico: A case history

We present a case study of enhanced imaging of wide-azimuth data from the Gulf of Mexico utilizing recent technologies; and we discuss the resulting improvements in image quality, especially in subsalt areas, relative to previous results. The input seismic data sets are taken from many large-scale wide-azimuth surveys and conventional narrow-azimuth surveys located in the Mississippi Canyon and Atwater Valley areas. In the course of developing the enhanced wide azimuth processing flow, the following three key steps are found to have the most impact on improving subsalt imaging: (1) 3D true azimuth surface-related multiple elimination (SRME) to remove multiple energy, in particular, complex multiples beneath salt; (2) reverse-time migration (RTM) based delayed imaging time (DIT) scans to update the complex subsalt velocity model; and (3) tilted transverse isotropic (TTI) RTM to improve image quality. Our research focuses on the depth imaging aspects of the project, with particular emphasis on the applicati.
A Case Study of Extreme L 1 Attrition in the Domain of Phonetics

Research on L1 attrition of speech generally investigates group data, often making generalisations based on the group’s norm (see de Leeuw, Schmid & Mennen 2010; de Leeuw, Mennen & Scobbie, 2011; 2012; although Mayr, Price & Mennen, 2012 is a recent exception). In contrast, the focus of the present research was to investigate a case study of L1 attrition in the domain of phonetics. The analysis of this late bilingual’s speech was specifically chosen because he displayed L1 attrition in all of his previously investigated phonetic variables, whilst other comparable late bilinguals, with similar ages of L2 acquisition, did not do this to the same extent (see de Leeuw et al., 2010; 2011; 2012 for comparisons of this participant in group analyses). Therefore, as an outlier within a larger group, he is considered to be an exemplary case of extreme L1 attrition in the domain of phonetics, indicating instability of L1 speech which may go unnoticed in group analyses. More specifically, results from the analysis of his speech revealed that, like the previously investigated phonetic variables, his L1 German rhotic deviated from the expected German monolingual norm. Indeed, the F2 and F3 frequencies of his German rhotic (identified to be English-like in a preliminary impressionistic analysis) were within the English rhotic norm, i.e. for these tokens his F2 and F3 frequencies were English-like in both his German and English. The results of both the impressionistic and acoustic analysis are discussed in relation to the amount and type of his German and English language use; and it is suggested that his extreme L1 attrition in the domain of phonetics may have resulted from his prolonged reduced use of German coupled with extended complete immersion in a monolingual English environment.
The Ideal Structures of Crossed Products of Cuntz Algebras by Quasi-Free Actions of Abelian Groups

Abstract We completely determine the ideal structures of the crossed products of Cuntz algebras by quasi-free actions of abelian groups and give another proof of A. Kishimoto's result on the simplicity of such crossed products. We also give a necessary and sufficient condition that our algebras become primitive, and compute the Connes spectra and $K$ -groups of our algebras.
THE ∂-EQUATION ON HOMOGENEOUS VARIETIES WITH AN ISOLATED SINGULARITY

Let X be a regular irreducible variety in CPn−1, Y the associated homogeneous variety in C, and N the restriction of the universal bundle of CPn−1 to X. In the present paper, we compute the obstructions to solving the ∂-equation in the L-sense on Y for 1 ≤ p ≤ ∞ in terms of cohomology groups H(X,O(N)). That allows to identify obstructions explicitly if X is specified more precisely, for example if it is equivalent to CP or an elliptic curve.
Purification and some properties of two NADP+-specific isocitrate dehydrogenases from an obligately psychrophilic marine bacterium, Vibrio sp., strain ABE-1.

Two isozymes of NADP+-specific isocitrate dehydrogenase [ICDH; EC 1.1. 1.42] were confirmed to be present in an obligately psychrophilic marine bacterium, Vibrio sp. , strain ABE-1, on the basis of the temperature-activity curve and electrophoretic mobilities. These isozymes were separated and purified about 170-fold for isozyme I (specific activity at 40 degrees C, 24.3 units/mg protein) and about 180-fold for isozyme II (specific activity at 20 degrees C, 59.2 units/mg protein), though the isozymes were still not homogeneous. The molecular weights of these isozymes determined by gel filtration were both about 85,000, but the properties of the isozymes were considerably different from each other. The thermostability of isozyme I resembled those of mesophiles, but isozyme II was extremely labile above 20 degrees C. NaCl affected the ICDH isozymes in different ways; the salt protected isozyme I from heat inactivation, but not isozyme II. Nevertheless it enormously enhanced the activity of isozyme II at low concentrations. Moreover, these ICDH isozymes showed different pH optima, Km values for isocitrate, susceptibilities to concerted inhibition by glyoxylate plus oxalacetate, and effects of 2-mercaptoethanol on their stabilities.
miR-215 controls proliferation , invasion , and apoptosis of human retinoblastoma cells by regulating RB 1 expression

Purpose: The aim was to determine the effect of miR-215 on retinoblastoma cells proliferation, invasion, and apoptosis. Methods: ACBRI-181, HXO-Rb44 and SO-Rb50 cells were cultured. HXO-Rb44 cells were transfected. qRT-PCR, Western blot, MTT assay, transwell assay, flow cytometry analysis, and luciferase reporter assay were conducted. In vivo studies with nude mice were performed. Results: miR-215 in retinoblastoma cells was significantly up-regulated (P < 0.01). Compared with the Blank group and NC group, significantly higher OD495 value and invasive cell number and significantly lower apoptotic cells percentage was found in the miR-215 mimic group (P < 0.05), while the exact opposite result was found in the miR-215 inhibitor group. RB1 relative expression was significantly decreased (P < 0.05) in miR-215 mimic group and was significantly increased in miR-215 inhibitor group (P < 0.05). RB1 was the target gene of miR-215. siRNA-RB1 + mimic group was with much higher OD495 value and invasive cell number and much lower apoptotic cells percentage when compared with the siRNA-RB1 group (P < 0.05). Nude mice in the siRNA-RB1 + mimic group had a much higher tumor volume compared with that in the siRNA-RB1 group (P < 0.05). Conclusions: miR-215 affected HXO-Rb44 cells proliferation, invasion, and apoptosis through regulation of RB1 protein expression.
Intake of Red Wine Increases the Number and Functional Capacity of Circulating Endothelial Progenitor Cells by Enhancing Nitric Oxide Bioavailability

Objective—Red wine (RW) consumption has been associated with a reduction of cardiovascular events, but limited data are available on potential mediating mechanisms. This study tested the hypothesis that intake of RW may promote the circulating endothelial progenitor cell (EPC) level and function through enhancement of nitric oxide bioavailability. Methods and Results—Eighty healthy, young subjects were randomized and assigned to consume water (100 mL), RW (100 mL), beer (250 mL), or vodka (30 mL) daily for 3 weeks. Flow cytometry was used to quantify circulating EPC numbers, and in vitro assays were used to evaluate EPC functions. After RW ingestion, endothelial function determined by flow-mediated vasodilation was significantly enhanced; however, it remained unchanged after water, beer, or vodka intake. There were significantly increased numbers of circulating EPC (defined as KDR+CD133+, CD34+CD133+, CD34+KDR+) and EPC colony-forming units only in the RW group (all P<0.05). Only RW ingestion significantly enhanced plasma levels of nitric oxide and decreased asymmetrical dimethylarginine (both P<0.01). Incubation of EPC with RW (but not beer or ethanol) and resveratrol in vitro attenuated tumor necrosis factor-α–induced EPC senescence and improved tumor necrosis factor-α–suppressed EPC functions and tube formation. Incubation with nitric oxide donor sodium nitroprusside significantly ameliorated the inhibition of tumor necrosis factor-α on EPC proliferation, but incubation with endothelial nitric oxide synthase inhibitor l-NAME and PI3K inhibitor markedly attenuated the effect of RW on EPC proliferation. Conclusion—The intake of RW significantly enhanced circulating EPC levels and improved EPC functions by modifying nitric oxide bioavailability. These findings may help explain the beneficial effects of RW on the cardiovascular system. This study demonstrated that a moderate intake of RW can enhance circulating levels of EPC in healthy subjects by increasing nitric oxide availability. Direct incubation of EPC with RW and resveratrol can modify the functions of EPC, including attenuation of senescence and promotion of EPC adhesion, migration, and tube formation. These data suggest that RW ingestion may alter the biology of EPC, and these alterations may contribute to its unique cardiovascular-protective effect.