Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Mutual Relationship of Strategic Stances and Formulation Methods, and Their Impacts on Performance in Public Local Transit Agencies

This study is a continuation of previous work that emphasizes an alignment between the internal management (strategy formulation) of public organizations and their environment (strategic stance). As public organizations formulate strategy through strategic planning or logical incrementalism, they relate to their external environments through the strategy stances of prospector or defender. Current research asserts that organizations with a prospector stance perform better when they adopt logical incrementalism, whereas organizations with a defender stance perform better when they formulate their strategy through formal strategic planning (FSP). Our study on the transit industry, however, could not find support to these assertions.
Echinoid synergizes with the Notch signaling pathway in Drosophila mesothorax bristle patterning

echinoid (ed) encodes an immunoglobulin domain-containing cell adhesion molecule that negatively regulates the Egfr signaling pathway during Drosophila photoreceptor development. We show a novel function of Ed, i.e. the restriction of the number of notum bristles that arise from a proneural cluster. Thus, loss-of-function conditions for ed give rise to the development of extra macrochaetae near the extant ones and increase the density of microchaetae. Analysis of ed mosaics indicates that extra sensory organ precursors (SOPs) arise from proneural clusters of achaete-scute expression in a cell-autonomous way. ed embryos also exhibit a neurogenic phenotype. These phenotypes suggest a functional relation between ed and the Notch (N) pathway. Indeed, loss-of-function of ed reduces the expression of the N pathway effector E(spl)m8 in proneural clusters. Moreover, combinations of moderate loss-of-function conditions for ed and for different components of the N pathway show clear synergistic interactions manifested as strong neurogenic bristle phenotypes. We conclude that Ed is not essential for, but it facilitates, N signaling. It is known that the N and Egfr pathways act antagonistically in bristle development. Consistently, we find that Ed also antagonizes the bristle-promoting activity of the Egfr pathway, either by the enhancement of N signalling or, similar to the eye, by a more direct action on the Egfr pathway.
Searching for pulsed emission from XTE J0929-314 at high radio frequencies

The aim of this work is to search for radio signals in the quiescent phase of accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars, in this way giving an ultimate proof of the recycling model, thereby unambiguously establishing that accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars are the progenitors of radio millisecond pulsars. To overcome the possible free-free absorption caused by matter surrounding accreting millisecond X-ray pulsars in their quiescence phase, we performed the observations at high frequencies. Making use of particularly precise orbital and spin parameters obtained from X-ray observations, we carried out a deep search for radio-pulsed emission from the accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar XTE J0929-314 in three steps, correcting for the effect of the dispersion due to the interstellar medium, eliminating the orbital motions effects, and finally folding the time series. No radio pulsation is present in the analyzed data down to a limit of 68 microJy at 6.4 GHz and 26 microJy at 8.5 GHz. We discuss several mechanisms that could prevent the detection, concluding that beaming factor and intrinsic low luminosity are the most likely explanations.
Electrophysiologic Confirmation of Heterogenous Motor Polyneuropathy in Young Cats

Background Reports of motor polyneuropathies in young cats are scarce. Further, in‐depth electrophysiologic evaluation to confirm a motor polyneuropathy in young cats of various breeds other than 2 Bengal cats is lacking. Hypothesis/Objectives To confirm a motor polyneuropathy in young cats of various breeds. Animals Five young cats with heterogenous chronic or relapsing episodes of weakness. Methods Retrospective case series. Cats were presented for evaluation of generalized neuromuscular disease and underwent electrophysiologic examination including electromyography, nerve conduction, and repetitive nerve stimulation. Minimum database and muscle and nerve biopsy analyses were carried out. Descriptive statistics were performed. Results Disease onset was at 3 months to 1 year of age and in 5 breeds. The most common clinical sign (5 of 5 cats) was weakness. Additional neurologic deficits consisted of palmigrade and plantigrade posture (4/4), low carriage of the head and tail (4/4), and variable segmental reflex deficits (5/5). Motor nerve conduction studies were abnormal for the ulnar (4/4), peroneal (5/5), and tibial (2/2) nerves (increased latencies, reduced amplitudes, slow velocities). A marked decrement was observed on repetitive nerve stimulation of the peroneal nerve in 3 cats for which autoimmune myasthenia gravis was ruled out. All sensory nerve conduction studies were normal. Histologic evaluation of muscle and nerve biopsies supported heterogenous alterations consistent with motor polyneuropathy with distal nerve fiber loss. Conclusions and Clinical Importance Heterogenous motor polyneuropathies should be considered in young cats of any breed and sex that are presented with relapsing or progressive generalized neuromuscular disease.
Diversification Discount or Premium? New Evidence from the Business Information Tracking Series

I use the Business Information Tracking Series (BITS), a new census database that covers the whole U.S. economy at the establishment level, to examine whether the finding of a diversification discount is an artifact of segment data. BITS data allow me to construct business units that are more consistently and objectively defined than segments, and thus more comparable across firms. Using these data on a sample that yields a discount according to segment data, I find a diversification premium. The premium is robust to variations in the sample, business unit definition, and measures of excess value and diversification. Copyright 2004 by The American Finance Association.
Early stopping in Byzantine agreement

Two different kinds of Byzantine Agreement for distributed systems with processor faults are defined and compared. The first is required when coordinated actions may be performed by each participant at different times. This kind is called Simultaneous Byzantine Agreement (SBA). This paper deals with the number of rounds of message exchange required to reach Byzantine Agreement of either kind (BA). If an algorithm allows its participants to reach Byzantine agreement in every execution in which at most <italic>t</italic> participants are faulty, then the algorithm is said to tolerate <italic>t</italic> faults. It is well known that any BA algorithm that tolerates <italic>t</italic> faults (with <italic>t</italic> < <italic>n</italic> - 1 where <italic>n</italic> denotes the total number of processors) must run at least <italic>t</italic> + 1 rounds in some execution. However, it might be supposed that in executions where the number <italic>f</italic> of actual faults is small compared to <italic>t</italic>, the number of rounds could be correspondingly small. A corollary of our first result states that (when <italic>t</italic> < <italic>n</italic> - 1) any algorithm for SBA must run <italic>t</italic> + 1 rounds in some execution where there are no faults. For EBA (with <italic>t</italic> < <italic>n</italic> - 1), a lower bound of min(<italic>t</italic> + 1,<italic>f</italic> + 2) rounds is proved. Finally, an algorithm for EBA is presented that achieves the lower bound, provided that <italic>t</italic> is on the order of the square root of the total number of processors.
Fusing 2D Uncertainty and 3D Cues for Monocular Body Pose Estimation

Most recent approaches to monocular 3D human pose estimation rely on Deep Learning. They typically involve training a network to regress from an image to either 3D joint coordinates directly, or 2D joint locations from which the 3D coordinates are inferred by a model-fitting procedure. The former takes advantage of 3D cues present in the images but rarely models uncertainty. By contrast, the latter often models 2D uncertainty, for example in the form of joint location heatmaps, but discards all the image information, such as texture, shading and depth cues, in the fitting step. In this paper, we therefore propose to jointly model 2D uncertainty and leverage 3D image cues in a regression framework for monocular 3D human pose estimation. To this end, we introduce a novel two-stream deep architecture. One stream focuses on modeling uncertainty via probability maps of 2D joint locations and the other exploits 3D cues by directly acting on the image. We then study different approaches to fusing their outputs to obtain the final 3D prediction. Our experiments evidence in particular that our late-fusion mechanism improves upon the state-of-the-art by a large margin on standard 3D human pose estimation benchmarks.
Human Neuroscience Original Research Article Neglect Impairs Explicit Processing of the Mental Number Line

Converging evidence suggests that visuospatial attention plays a pivotal role in numerical processing, especially when the task involves the manipulation of numerical magnitudes. Visuospatial neglect impairs contralesional attentional orienting not only in perceptual but also in numerical space. Indeed, patients with left neglect show a bias toward larger numbers when mentally bisecting a numerical interval, as if they were neglecting its leftmost part. In contrast, their performance in parity judgments is unbiased, suggesting a disso-ciation between explicit and implicit processing of numerical magnitude. Here we further investigate the consequences of these visuospatial attention impairments on numerical processing and their interaction with task demands. Patients with right hemisphere damage , with and without left neglect, were administered both a number comparison and a parity judgment task that had identical stimuli and response requirements. Neglect patients' performance was normal in the parity task, when processing of numerical magnitude was implicit, whereas they showed characteristic biases in the number comparison task, when access to numerical magnitude was explicit. Compared to patients without neglect, they showed an asymmetric distance effect, with slowing of the number immediately smaller than (i.e., to the left of) the reference and a stronger SNARC effect, particularly for large numbers. The latter might index an exaggerated effect of number-space compatibility after ipsilesional (i.e., rightward) orienting in number space.Thus, the effect of neglect on the explicit processing of numerical magnitude can be understood in terms of both a failure to orient to smaller (i.e., contralesional) magnitudes and a difficulty to disengage from larger (i.e., ipsilesional) magnitudes on the number line, which resembles the disrupted pattern of attention orienting in visual space.
In Economics and Social Sciences Working Papers Series a New Necessary Condition for Implementation in Iteratively Undominated Strategies a New Necessary Condition for Implementation in Iteratively Undominated Strategies *

Implementation in iteratively undominated strategies relies on permissive conditions. However, for the sufficiency results available, authors have relied on assumptions that amount to quasilinear preferences on a numeraire. We uncover a new necessary condition that implies that such assumptions cannot be dispensed with. We term the condition " restricted deception-proofness. " It requires that, in environments with identical preferences, the social choice function be immune to all deceptions, making it then stronger than incentive compatibility. In some environments the conditions for (exact or approximate) implementation are more restrictive than previously thought.
Building a Treebank for Italian: a Data-driven Annotation Schema

Many natural language researchers are currently turning their attention to treebank development and trying to achieve accuracy and corpus data coverage in their representation formats. This paper presents a data-driven annotation schema developed for an Italian treebank ensuring data coverage and consistency between annotation of linguistic phenomena. The schema is a dependency-based format centered upon the notion of predicate-argument structure augmented with traces to represent discontinuous constituents. The treebank development involves an annotation process performed by a human annotator helped by an interactive parsing tool that builds incrementally syntactic representation of the sentence. To increase the syntactic knowledge of this parser, a specific data-driven strategy has been applied. We describe the cyclical development of the annotation schema highlighting the richness and flexibility of the format, and we present some representational issues.
Military Utopias of Mind and Machine

The central locus of my study is southern California, at the nexus of the Hollywood entertainment industry, the rapidly growing game design world, and military training medical R&D. My research focuses on the rise of military utopic visions of mind that involve the creation of virtual worlds and hyper-real simulations in military psychiatry. In this paper, I employ ethnography to examine a broader turn to the senses within military psychology and psychiatry that involve changes in the ways some are coming to understand war trauma, PTSD, and what is now being called "psychological resilience. " In the article, I critique assumptions that are made when what is being called "a sense of presence" and "immersion" are given privileged attention in military therapeutic contexts, diminishing the subjectivity of soldiers and reducing meaning to biometric readings on the surface of the body. I argue that the military's recent preoccupation with that which can be described as "immersive" and possessing a sense of presence signals a concentrated effort aimed at what might be described as a colonization of the senses – a digital Manifest Destiny that envisions the mind as capital, a condition I am calling military utopias of mind and machine . Military utopias of mind and machine aspire to have all the warfare without the trauma by instrumentalizing the senses within a closed system. In the paper, I argue that such utopias of control and containment are fragile and volatile fantasies that suffer from the potential repudiation of their very aims. I turn to storytelling, listening, and conversations as avenues towards healing, allowing people to ascribe meaning to difficult life experiences, affirm social relationships, and escape containment within a closed language system.
Data-Driven Generation of Emphatic Facial Displays

We describe an implementation of datadriven selection of emphatic facial displays for an embodied conversational agent in a dialogue system. A corpus of sentences in the domain of the target dialogue system was recorded, and the facial displays used by the speaker were annotated. The data from those recordings was used in a range of models for generating facial displays, each model making use of a different amount of context or choosing displays differently within a context. The models were evaluated in two ways: by cross-validation against the corpus, and by asking users to rate the output. The predictions of the cross-validation study differed from the actual user ratings. While the cross-validation gave the highest scores to models making a majority choice within a context, the user study showed a significant preference for models that produced more variation. This preference was especially strong among the female subjects.
Community participation in malaria control strategy of intersect oral collaboration in Ghana: Myth or reality?

Abstract Background For many years, malaria has been one of the main health concerns of the government of Ghana. The government has recently implemented a control strategy which will ensure the inclusion of the community members who were previously excluded from the process. Until now, however, scientific study on this strategy has been scanty. Objectives The objectives were to investigate the level at which communities have been allowed to participate and to understand whether the idea of community participation in malaria control strategy is a myth or a reality. Methods Data were collected in the rural district of Ahafo-Ano South in the Ashanti region of Ghana. An exploratory qualitative approach was employed in order to ascertain the opinions of the local health officials and community members. The level of participation was measured using the framework of Arnstein's ‘ladder’ of participation, as developed in 1969. Results Evidence showed that the level of community participation was only tokenistic. Communities were only informed and/or consulted after decisions had been made, but the real engagement and negotiations were absent. Communities thus had limited opportunities to air their views in the planning process. Conclusion This article has revealed that the government's vision of ensuring community participation in the malaria control policy-making process can be said to be a myth rather than a reality.
SoilGrids1km — Global Soil Information Based on Automated Mapping

Background Soils are widely recognized as a non-renewable natural resource and as biophysical carbon sinks. As such, there is a growing requirement for global soil information. Although several global soil information systems already exist, these tend to suffer from inconsistencies and limited spatial detail. Methodology/Principal Findings We present SoilGrids1km — a global 3D soil information system at 1 km resolution — containing spatial predictions for a selection of soil properties (at six standard depths): soil organic carbon (g kg−1), soil pH, sand, silt and clay fractions (%), bulk density (kg m−3), cation-exchange capacity (cmol+/kg), coarse fragments (%), soil organic carbon stock (t ha−1), depth to bedrock (cm), World Reference Base soil groups, and USDA Soil Taxonomy suborders. Our predictions are based on global spatial prediction models which we fitted, per soil variable, using a compilation of major international soil profile databases (ca. 110,000 soil profiles), and a selection of ca. 75 global environmental covariates representing soil forming factors. Results of regression modeling indicate that the most useful covariates for modeling soils at the global scale are climatic and biomass indices (based on MODIS images), lithology, and taxonomic mapping units derived from conventional soil survey (Harmonized World Soil Database). Prediction accuracies assessed using 5–fold cross-validation were between 23–51%. Conclusions/Significance SoilGrids1km provide an initial set of examples of soil spatial data for input into global models at a resolution and consistency not previously available. Some of the main limitations of the current version of SoilGrids1km are: (1) weak relationships between soil properties/classes and explanatory variables due to scale mismatches, (2) difficulty to obtain covariates that capture soil forming factors, (3) low sampling density and spatial clustering of soil profile locations. However, as the SoilGrids system is highly automated and flexible, increasingly accurate predictions can be generated as new input data become available. SoilGrids1km are available for download via http://soilgrids.org under a Creative Commons Non Commercial license.
Leveraging user libraries to bootstrap collaborative filtering

We introduce a novel graphical model, the collaborative score topic model (CSTM), for personal recommendations of textual documents. CSTM's chief novelty lies in its learned model of individual libraries, or sets of documents, associated with each user. Overall, CSTM is a joint directed probabilistic model of user-item scores (ratings), and the textual side information in the user libraries and the items. Creating a generative description of scores and the text allows CSTM to perform well in a wide variety of data regimes, smoothly combining the side information with observed ratings as the number of ratings available for a given user ranges from none to many. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate CSTM's performance. We further demonstrate its utility in an application for personal recommendations of posters which we deployed at the NIPS 2013 conference.
Peptide-Mediated Inhibition of Neutrophil Transmigration by Blocking CD47 Interactions with Signal Regulatory Protein α1

CD47, a cell surface transmembrane Ig superfamily member, is an extracellular ligand for signal regulatory protein (SIRPα). Interactions between CD47 and SIRPα regulate many important immune cell functions including neutrophil (PMN) transmigration. Here we report identification of a novel function-blocking peptide, CERVIGTGWVRC, that structurally mimics an epitope on CD47 and binds to SIRPα. The CERVIGTGWVRC sequence was identified by panning phage display libraries on the inhibitory CD47 mAb, C5D5. In vitro PMN migration assays demonstrated that peptide CERVIGTGWVRC specifically inhibited PMN migration across intestinal epithelial monolayers and matrix in a dose-dependent fashion. Further studies using recombinant proteins indicated that the peptide specifically blocks CD47 and SIRPα binding in a dose-dependent fashion. Protein binding assays using SIRPα domain-specific recombinant proteins demonstrated that this peptide directly bound to the distal-most Ig loop of SIRPα, the same loop where CD47 binds. In summary, these findings support the relevance of CD47-SIRPα interactions in regulation of PMN transmigration and provide structural data predicting the key residues involved on the surface of CD47. Such peptide reagents may be useful for studies on experimental models of inflammation and provide a template for the design of anti-inflammatory agents.
Critical evaluation and modeling of algal harvesting using dissolved air flotation

In this study, Chlorella zofingiensis harvesting by dissolved air flotation (DAF) was critically evaluated with regard to algal concentration, culture conditions, type and dosage of coagulants, and recycle ratio. Harvesting efficiency increased with coagulant dosage and leveled off at 81%, 86%, 91%, and 87% when chitosan, Al3+, Fe3+, and cetyl trimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) were used at dosages of 70, 180, 250, and 500 mg g−1, respectively. The DAF efficiency‐coagulant dosage relationship changed with algal culture conditions. Evaluation of the influence of the initial algal concentration and recycle ratio revealed that, under conditions typical for algal harvesting, it is possible that the number of bubbles is insufficient. A DAF algal harvesting model was developed to explain this observation by introducing mass‐based floc size distributions and a bubble limitation into the white water blanket model. The model revealed the importance of coagulation to increase floc‐bubble collision and attachment, and the preferential interaction of bubbles with larger flocs, which limited the availability of bubbles to the smaller sized flocs. The harvesting efficiencies predicted by the model agree reasonably with experimental data obtained at different Al3+ dosages, algal concentrations, and recycle ratios. Based on this modeling, critical parameters for efficient algal harvesting were identified. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2014;111: 2477–2485. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.