Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A signature of persistent natural thermohaline circulation cycles in observed climate

Analyses of global climate from measurements dating back to the nineteenth century show an ‘Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation’ (AMO) as a leading large‐scale pattern of multidecadal variability in surface temperature. Yet it is not possible to determine whether these fluctuations are genuinely oscillatory from the relatively short observational record alone. Using a 1400 year climate model calculation, we are able to simulate the observed pattern and amplitude of the AMO. The results imply the AMO is a genuine quasi‐periodic cycle of internal climate variability persisting for many centuries, and is related to variability in the oceanic thermohaline circulation (THC). This relationship suggests we can attempt to reconstruct past THC changes, and we infer an increase in THC strength over the last 25 years. Potential predictability associated with the mode implies natural THC and AMO decreases over the next few decades independent of anthropogenic climate change.
Leaky Gut and Mycotoxins: Aflatoxin B1 Does Not Increase Gut Permeability in Broiler Chickens

Previous studies conducted in our laboratory have demonstrated that intestinal barrier function can be adversely affected by diet ingredients or feed restriction, resulting in increased intestinal inflammation-associated permeability. Two experiments were conducted in broilers to evaluate the effect of three concentrations of Aflatoxin B1 (AFB1; 2, 1.5, or 1 ppm) on gastrointestinal leakage and liver bacterial translocation (BT). In experiment 1, 240 day-of-hatch male broilers were allocated in two groups, each group had six replicates of 20 chickens (n = 120/group): Control feed or feed + 2 ppm AFB1. In experiment 2, 240 day-of-hatch male broilers were allocated in three groups, each group had five replicates of 16 chickens (n = 80/group): Control feed; feed + 1 ppm AFB1; or feed + 1.5 ppm AFB1. In both experiments, chickens were fed starter (days 1–7) and grower diets (days 8–21) ad libitum and performance parameters were evaluated every week. At day 21, all chicks received an oral gavage dose of FITC-d (4.16 mg/kg) 2.5 h before collecting blood samples to evaluate gastrointestinal leakage of FITC-d. In experiment 2, a hematologic analysis was also performed. Liver sections were aseptically collected and cultured using TSA plates to determine BT. Cecal contents were collected to determine total colony-forming units per gram of Gram-negative bacteria, lactic acid bacteria (LAB), or anaerobes by plating on selective media. In experiment 2, liver, spleen, and bursa of Fabricius were removed to determine organ weight ratio, and also intestinal samples were obtained for morphometric analysis. Performance parameters, organ weight ratio, and morphometric measurements were significantly different between Control and AFB1 groups in both experiments. Gut leakage of FITC-d was not affected by the three concentrations of AFB1 evaluated (P > 0.05). Interestingly, a significant reduction in BT was observed in chickens that received 2 and 1 ppm AFB1. An increase (P < 0.05) in total aerobic bacteria, total Gram negatives, and total LAB were observed in chickens fed with 2 and 1.5 ppm of AFB1 when compared with Control and 1 ppm chickens. The integrity of gut epithelial barrier was not compromised after exposure to the mycotoxin.
Galaxy formation and evolution - I. The Padua tree-sph code (pd-sph)

In this paper we report on pd-sph, the new tree-sph code developed in Padua. The main features of the code are described and the results of a new and independent series of 1D and 3D tests are shown. The paper is mainly dedicated to the presentation of the code and to the critical discussion of its performance. In particular, great attention is devoted to the convergency analysis. The code is highly adaptive in space and time by means of individual smoothing lengths and individual time-steps. At present it contains both dark and baryonic matter, this latter in the form of gas and stars, cooling, thermal conduction, star formation, feedback from Type I and II supernovae, stellar winds, and ultraviolet flux from massive stars, and finally chemical enrichment. New cooling rates that depend on the metal abundance of the interstellar medium are employed, and the differences with respect to the standard ones are outlined. Finally, we show the simulation of the dynamical and chemical evolution of a disc-like galaxy with and without feedback. The code is suitably designed to study in a global fashion the problem of formation and evolution of elliptical galaxies, and in particular to feed a spectrophotometric code from which the integrated spectra, magnitudes and colours (together with their spatial gradients) can be derived.
The Ghost of Sagittarius and Lumps in the Halo of the Milky Way

We identify new structures in the halo of the Milky Way from positions, colors, and magnitudes of five million stars detected in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Most of these stars are within 1. °26 of the celestial equator. We present color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) for stars in two previously discovered, tidally disrupted structures. The CMDs and turnoff colors are consistent with those of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, as had been predicted. In one direction, we are even able to detect a clump of red stars, similar to that of the Sagittarius dwarf, from stars spread across 110 deg2 of sky. Focusing on stars with the colors of F turnoff objects, we identify at least five additional overdensities of stars. Four of these may be pieces of the same halo structure, which would cover a region of the sky at least 40° in diameter, at a distance of 11 kpc from the Sun (18 kpc from the center of the Galaxy). The turnoff is significantly bluer than that of thick-disk stars, yet the stars lie closer to the Galactic plane than a power-law spheroid predicts. We suggest two models to explain this new structure. One possibility is that this new structure could be a new dwarf satellite of the Milky Way, hidden in the Galactic plane and in the process of being tidally disrupted. The other possibility is that it could be part of a disklike distribution of stars which is metal-poor, with a scale height of approximately 2 kpc and a scale length of approximately 10 kpc. The fifth overdensity, which is 20 kpc away, is some distance from the Sagittarius dwarf streamer orbit and is not associated with any known Galactic structure. We have tentatively identified a sixth overdensity in the halo. If this sixth structure is instead part of a smooth distribution of halo stars (the spheroid), then the spheroid must be very flattened, with axial ratio q = 0.5. It is likely that there are many smaller streams of stars in the Galactic halo.
On the Determinants of Absorptive Capacity: Evidence from OECD Countries

It has long been recognised that international technology transfer in the form of knowledge spillovers is an important source of growth, and that the progress of both developed and developing nations may be determined in part by its extent (Gerschenkron, 1962). There does however appear to be large differences in how effective countries are in adopting foreign technology. Given that the bulk of new technology is created in a handful of the world’s richest countries,
Developing Intercultural Competence Through Collaborative Learning in International Higher Education

In this study, it was hypothesized that collaborative learning in international higher education contributes to the development of intercultural competence. Two hundred fifty-two students of an International Business and Management Study program of a Dutch university participated in two surveys on collaboration in a group-learning activity and one survey on their development of intercultural competence. In addition, three groups of four to six students took part in focus group interviews. The results indicated that when students perceive that the group process improves, the quality of the collaboration in terms of verbal interaction and equal contribution will also improve. Furthermore, the results revealed that a higher perceived quality of the collaboration relates to an increasing development of intercultural competence. The findings are discussed and related to implications for the use of group-learning activities in international higher education.
Does diversity management matter in a traditionally homogeneous culture?

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate diversity management in an under-researched country by merging theoretical insights developed in the Western literature with cultural aspects of a traditionally homogeneous country, South Korea. Design/methodology/approach This study integrates theory and research on why diversity can have either a positive (i.e. the information/decision-making paradigm) or a negative (i.e. the social categorization paradigm) effect on performance with different diversity perspectives (i.e. integration-and-learning, access-and-legitimacy, and discrimination-and-fairness). This study develops a model of when and how gender diversity affects organization performance and test the model with a sample of 177 South Korean organizations. Findings This study finds that gender diversity is negatively related to organization performance in South Korea. This study also finds that the effect of gender diversity is contingent on organizational diversity perspectives. Organizations with high gender diversity perform better to the extent that they have a discrimination-fairness perspective, but not a business-oriented perspective. On the other hand, a discrimination-fairness perspective is unrelated to performance for organizations that are low in gender diversity. Originality/value Although gender diversity in the South Korean workplace continues to increase, the relationship between gender diversity and organization performance has rarely been studied in the aspect of Korea’s traditionally homogeneous culture. This study highlights the importance of cultural-contingencies in understanding the consequences of diversity.
Disastrous disappointments: asset-pricing with disaster risk and disappointment aversion

In this paper, I combine disappointment aversion, as employed by Routledge and Zin and Campanale, Castro and Clementi, with rare disasters in the spirit of Rietz, Barro, Gourio, Gabaix and others. I find that, when the model’s representative agent is endowed with an empirically plausible degree of disappointment aversion, a rare disaster model can produce moments of asset returns that match the data reasonably well, using disaster probabilities and disaster sizes much smaller than have been employed previously in the literature. This is good news. Quantifying the disaster risk faced by any one country is inherently difficult with limited time series data. And, it is open to debate whether the disaster risk relevant to, say, US investors is well-approximated by the sizable risks found by Barro and co-authors in cross-country data. On the other hand, we have evidence that individuals tend to over-weight bad or disappointing outcomes, relative to the outcomes’ weights under expected utility. Recognizing aversion to disappointment means that disaster risks need not be nearly as large as suggested by the cross-country evidence for a rare disaster model to produce average equity premia and risk-free rates that match the data. I illustrate the interaction between disaster risk and disappointment aversion both analytically and in the context of a simple Rietz-like model of asset-pricing with rare disasters. I then analyze a richer model, in the spirit of Barro, with a distribution of disaster sizes, Epstein-Zin preferences, and partial default (in the event of a disaster) on the economy’s ‘risk-free’ asset. For small elasticities of intertemporal substitution, the model is able to match almost exactly the means and standard deviations of the equity return and risk-free rate, for disaster risks one-half or one-fourth the estimated sizes from Barro. For larger elasticities of intertemporal substitution, the model’s fit is less satisfactory, though it fails in a direction not often viewed as problematic—it under-predicts the volatility of the riskfree rate. Even so, apart from that failing, the results are broadly similar to those obtained by Gourio but with disaster risks one-half or onefourth as large.
Discrete Actions in Information-Constrained Tracking Problems

Optimal actions of an agent facing a Shannon capacity constraint on the translation of an uncertain signal into an action can easily turn out to be discretely distributed, even when the objective function and the initial distribution of uncertainty contain no discrete elements. We show this result analytically in a broad class of cases. It has implications for the interpretation of observed intervals between changes in prices or other economic choice variables in micro-data as indicators of costs of adjustment or of the degree of “stickiness” in responses to aggregate policy changes or business cycle fluctuations.
Approaching the Discriminatory Work Environment as Stressor: The Protective Role of Job Satisfaction on Health

Discrimination is a complex phenomenon with adverse consequences at personal and organizational levels. Past studies have demonstrated that workers who are victims of discrimination might show less job satisfaction, less organizational commitment and worse levels of health and productivity. Although most research has focused on the effects of discrimination on victims, less is known about the extent to which discrimination produces consequences on workers who perceive the existence of a discriminatory work environment. The goal of this article is to analyze the consequences of the perception of a discriminatory work environment on employees’ health. The importance of this relationship is studied taking into account the mediating effect of job satisfaction. In order to reach this goal a cross-sectional study was carried out with a sample of 1633 Italian workers (male = 826, female = 764), employed in private and public sectors, and in different hierarchical positions. Results suggest that the perception of a discriminatory work environment is negatively associated with employees’ health. This relationship is partially mediated by job satisfaction (R2 = 0.17). This study demonstrates that perceiving a discriminatory work environment might have a negative impact on workers’ health. A higher level of job satisfaction might buffer this effect. These findings have several practical implications. On the one hand, Human Resource Managers need to intervene in order to recognize and diminish implicit biases, creating a healthy and inclusive environment (e.g., through training, diversity policies, etc.). On the other hand, promoting job satisfaction (e.g., providing mechanisms of voice) might help workers to preserve their well-being, coping with the negative effects of a discriminatory work environment.
How much can we learn from international comparisons of intergenerational mobility

This paper summarises research on the relative level of intergenerational mobility – whether classified by income, social class, social status or education – considering observations from 65 countries. With the exception of social class, the different approaches reveal similar patterns. South America, other developing nations, southern European countries and France tending to have rather limited mobility while the Nordic countries exhibit strong mobility. Evidence for the US and Germany differs across the measures, with Germany immobile on education and class and fairly mobile on income and the reverse true for the US. These differences are likely explained by greater within-group income inequality and persistence in the US. The second part of the paper finds that mobility is negatively correlated with inequality and the returns to education and positively correlated with a nation’s education spending.
Local Substitutability for Sequence Generalization

Genomic banks are fed continuously by large sets of DNA or RNA sequences coming from high throughput machines. Protein annotation is a task of first importance with respect to these banks. It consists of retrieving the genes that code for proteins within the sequences and then predict the function of these new proteins in the cell by comparison with known families. Many methods have been designed to characterize protein families and discover new members, mainly based on subsets of regular expressions or simple Hidden Markov Models. We are interested in more expressive models that are able to capture the longrange characteristic interactions occurring in the spatial structure of the analyzed protein family. Starting from the work of Clark and Eyraud (2007) and Yoshinaka (2008) on inference of substitutable and k, l-substitutable languages respectively, we introduce new classes of substitutable languages using local rather than global substitutability, a reasonable assumption with respect to protein structures to enhance inductive leaps performed by least generalized generalization approaches. The concepts are illustrated on a first experiment using a real proteic sequence set.
Prevalence and causes of functional low vision in school-age children: results from standardized population surveys in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

PURPOSE Data on the prevalence and causes of functional low vision (FLV) in adults and children are lacking but are important for planning low-vision services. This study was conducted to determine the prevalence and causes of FLV among children recruited in eight population-based prevalence surveys of visual impairment and refractive error from six countries (India [2 locations]; China [2 locations]; Malaysia, Chile, Nepal, and South Africa). METHODS Using the same protocol, 4082 to 6527 children aged 5 (or 7) to 15 years were examined at each site. Uncorrected and presenting visual acuities were successfully measured with retroilluminated logMAR tumbling-E charts in 3997 to 5949 children; cycloplegic autorefraction was performed and best corrected acuities assessed. All children were examined by an ophthalmologist and a cause of visual loss assigned to eyes with uncorrected acuity < or =6/12. The prevalence of FLV was determined overall and by site; associations with gender, age, parental education and urban/rural location were assessed with logistic regression. RESULTS The prevalence of FLV ranged from 0.65 to 2.75 in 1000 children, with wide confidence intervals. The overall prevalence was 1.52 in 1000 children (95% CI 1.16-1.95). FLV was significantly associated with age (odds ratio [OR] 1.13 for each year, P = 0.01), and parental education was protective (OR 0.75 for each of five levels of education, P = 0.017). Retinal lesions and amblyopia were the commonest causes. CONCLUSIONS More studies are needed to determine the prevalence and causes of FLV in children so that services can be planned that promote independence, improve quality of life, and increase access to education.
A Role for the Lymphotoxin/LIGHT Axis in the Pathogenesis of Murine Collagen-Induced Arthritis1

A lymphotoxin-β (LTβ) receptor-Ig fusion protein (LTβR-Ig) was used to evaluate the importance of the lymphotoxin/LIGHT axis in the development and perpetuation of arthritis. Prophylactic treatment with the inhibitor protein LTβR-Ig blocked the induction of collagen-induced arthritis in mice and adjuvant arthritis in Lewis rats. Treatment of mice with established collagen-induced arthritis reduced the severity of arthritic symptoms and joint tissue damage. However, in a passive model of anti-collagen Ab-triggered arthritis, joint inflammation was not affected by LTβR-Ig treatment precluding LT/LIGHT involvement in the very terminal immune complex/complement/FcR-mediated effector phase. Collagen-II and Mycobacterium-specific T cell responses were not impaired, yet there was evidence that the overall response to the mycobacterium was blunted. Serum titers of anti-collagen-II Abs were reduced especially during the late phase of disease. Treatment with LTβR-Ig ablated follicular dendritic cell networks in the draining lymph nodes, suggesting that impaired class switching and affinity maturation may have led to a decreased level of pathological autoantibodies. These data are consistent with a model in which the LT/LIGHT axis controls microenvironments in the draining lymph nodes. These environments are critical in shaping the adjuvant-driven initiating events that impact the subsequent quality of the anti-collagen response in the later phases. Consequently, blockade of the LT/LIGHT axis may represent a novel approach to the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis that involve both T cell and Ab components.
Asynchronous distributed alternating direction method of multipliers: Algorithm and convergence analysis

Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has been recognized as an efficient approach for solving many large-scale learning problems over a computer cluster. However, traditional synchronized computation does not scale well with the problem size, as the speed of the algorithm is limited by the slowest workers. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous distributed ADMM (AD- ADMM) which can effectively improve the time efficiency of distributed optimization. Our main interest lies in characterizing the convergence conditions of the AD-ADMM, under the popular partially asynchronous model which is defined based on a maximum tolerable delay in the network. Specifically, by considering general and possibly non-convex cost functions, we show that the AD-ADMM converges to the set of Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) points as long as the algorithm parameters are chosen appropriately according to the network delay. We also show that the asynchrony of ADMM has to be handled with care, as a slightly different implementation can significantly jeopardize the algorithm convergence.
Experience-dependent intrinsic plasticity in interneurons of barrel cortex layer IV.

It is unclear whether intrinsic excitabilities of specific interneurons are modulated by sensory experiences. Here, I examined the intrinsic excitabilities of interneurons in "sensory-spared" and "sensory-deprived" cortices of GAD67-GFP mice. The results showed that whisker trimming, begun at postnatal day 7 for 3 wk, induced significant changes in intrinsic and firing properties of fast-spiking (FS) but not regular spiking nonpyramidal (RSNP) cells. Firing threshold, spike frequency, spike adaptation index, and input resistance of FS cells were significantly altered by sensory deprivation such that FS cells became less excitable. An up-regulation of IA currents in FS cells appeared to be responsible. Along with changes in the intrinsic properties of FS cells, whisker trimming also induced a robust reduction in the number of vesicular glutamate transporter 2 positive varicosities and parvalbumin expression and the strength of thalamocortical (TC) excitatory postsynaptic currents in FS cells in the "sensory-deprived barrels. " The probability of spike induction by TC stimulus was reduced by 30% and the spike jitter was increased in sensory-deprived FS cells. These results suggest that the FS networks are selectively inhibited by sensory deprivation. The concurrent changes of intrinsic properties and expression of parvalbumin in FS but not RSNP cells with TC synapses support a contribution from the TC pathway and glutamate to sensory-induced activity-dependent intrinsic plasticity of inhibitory networks in barrel cortex.