Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Meiotic Studies in Some Species of Tribe Cichorieae (Asteraceae) from Western Himalayas

The present paper deals with meiotic studies in 15 species belonging to 6 genera of the tribe Cichorieae from various localities of Western Himalayas. The chromosome number has been reported for the first time in Hieracium crocatum (2n = 10) and Lactuca lessertiana (2n = 2x = 16). Further, intraspecific variability has been reported for the first time in H. umbellatum (2n = 2x = 10 and 2n = 6x = 54), Tragopogon dubius (2n = 2x = 14 and 2n = 4x = 28), and T. gracilis (2n = 2x = 14). The chromosome report of 2n = 2x = 10 in Youngia tenuifolia is made for the first time in India. Maximum numbers of the populations show laggards, chromosome stickiness, and cytomixis from early prophase to telophase-II, leading to the formation of aneuploid cells or meiocytes with double chromosome number. Such meiotic abnormalities produce unreduced pollen grains and the reduced pollen viability.
Exploring the nature of governance at the level of implementation for health system strengthening: the DIALHS experience

Health system governance has been recognized as a critical element of the health system strengthening agenda. To date, health governance research often focuses at national or global levels, adopting a macro-perspective that deals with governance structures, forms and principles. Little attention has been given to a micro-perspective which recognizes the role of health system actors in governance, or to considering the operational level of the health system. This article presents a South African case study of an intervention to address conflict in roles and responsibilities between multiple actors supporting service delivery at the local level, and explores the broader insights this experience generates about the nature of local health system governance. In an embedded case study, action learning and reflection theory were used to design and implement the intervention. Data in this article were drawn from minutes, observations and recorded reflections of the meetings and workshops that comprised the intervention. A theoretical governance framework was used both to understand the context of the intervention and to analyse the dimensions of governance relevant in the experience. The study shows how, through action learning and reflection, local managers in two organizations came to understand how the higher level misalignment of organizational structures and processes imposed governance constraints on them, and to see the impact this had on their organizational relationships. By re-framing the conflict as organizational, they were then able to create opportunities for staff to understand their context and participate in negotiating principles for communication and collaborative work. The result reduced conflict between staff in the two organizations, leading to improved implementation of programme support. Strengthening relationships among those working at local level by building collaborative norms and values is an important part of local health system governance for improved service delivery by multiple actors.
Do Environmental Concerns Affect the Cost of Bank Loans ?

I study whether a firm’s environmental profile affects the cost of its bank loans. I find that firms with environmental concerns such as hazardous waste concern, substantial toxic chemical emission concern and climate change concern pay a higher interest rate on their bank loans. Firms that derive substantial revenue from environmentally beneficial products pay a lower interest rate on their bank loans but membership in voluntary environmental initiatives such as CERES doesn’t have a significant impact on the price of bank loans. Further, I provide evidence that the environmental concerns and strengths of the firm are not simply proxying for an omitted component of firm’s default risk. These results suggest that environmentally sensitive lending has a potential to impact the environmental policies of the firm through the cost of capital channel. Faced with mounting pressure from protest groups, ten of the world’s leading banks have agreed to adhere to international environmental and social-impact standards when financing dams, power plants, pipelines and other infrastructure projects. (Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2003) . Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley say they’ve produced The Carbon Principles together with several large power companies, Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council, that will make it more difficult for new U.S. coal-fired power plants to secure financing. The focus of the principles will be to steer power companies away from plants that emit high levels of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) and to focus on new, cleaner and renewable technologies. (Associated Press, Feb 4, 2008).
Coevolutionary patterning of teeth and taste buds

Significance Teeth and taste buds are placode-derived organs studied in isolation because of their separate anatomical locations in mammals. Yet, the mouth and pharynx of many aquatic vertebrates, including bony fishes, are lined with teeth and taste buds, one next to the other. Using a combination of genome mapping, synexpression analysis, and small-molecule manipulation, we identify factors that couple tooth and taste bud density (Wingless signals) and those that differentiate the identity of each organ from a common epithelial lamina (BMP, Hedgehog). Integrating results from fishes and mouse suggests a model wherein the regulatory hierarchies that configure teeth and taste buds on mammalian jaws and tongues may be evolutionary remnants inherited from ancestors whose oral organs were copatterned from common epithelium. Teeth and taste buds are iteratively patterned structures that line the oro-pharynx of vertebrates. Biologists do not fully understand how teeth and taste buds develop from undifferentiated epithelium or how variation in organ density is regulated. These organs are typically studied independently because of their separate anatomical location in mammals: teeth on the jaw margin and taste buds on the tongue. However, in many aquatic animals like bony fishes, teeth and taste buds are colocalized one next to the other. Using genetic mapping in cichlid fishes, we identified shared loci controlling a positive correlation between tooth and taste bud densities. Genome intervals contained candidate genes expressed in tooth and taste bud fields. sfrp5 and bmper, notable for roles in Wingless (Wnt) and bone morphogenetic protein (BMP) signaling, were differentially expressed across cichlid species with divergent tooth and taste bud density, and were expressed in the development of both organs in mice. Synexpression analysis and chemical manipulation of Wnt, BMP, and Hedgehog (Hh) pathways suggest that a common cichlid oral lamina is competent to form teeth or taste buds. Wnt signaling couples tooth and taste bud density and BMP and Hh mediate distinct organ identity. Synthesizing data from fish and mouse, we suggest that the Wnt-BMP-Hh regulatory hierarchy that configures teeth and taste buds on mammalian jaws and tongues may be an evolutionary remnant inherited from ancestors wherein these organs were copatterned from common epithelium.
Medial temporal lobe BOLD activity at rest predicts individual differences in memory ability in healthy young adults

Human beings differ in their ability to form and retrieve lasting long-term memories. To explore the source of these individual differences, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) activity in healthy young adults (n = 50) during periods of resting fixation that were interleaved with periods of simple cognitive tasks. We report that medial temporal lobe BOLD activity during periods of rest predicts individual differences in memory ability. Specifically, individuals who exhibited greater magnitudes of task-induced deactivations in medial temporal lobe BOLD signal (as compared to periods of rest) demonstrated superior memory during offline testing. This relationship was independent of differences in general cognitive function and persisted across different control tasks (i.e., number judgment versus checkerboard detection) and experimental designs (i.e., blocked versus event-related). These results offer a neurophysiological basis for the variability in mnemonic ability that is present amongst healthy young adults and may help to guide strategies aimed at early detection and intervention of neurological and mnemonic impairment.
CO(J = 1–0) IMAGING OF M51 WITH CARMA AND THE NOBEYAMA 45 m TELESCOPE

We report the CO(J = 1–0) observations of the Whirlpool Galaxy M51 using both the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA) and the Nobeyama 45 m telescope (NRO45). We describe a procedure for the combination of interferometer and single-dish data. In particular, we discuss (1) the joint imaging and deconvolution of heterogeneous data, (2) the weighting scheme based on the root-mean-square (rms) noise in the maps, (3) the sensitivity and uv coverage requirements, and (4) the flux recovery of a combined map. We generate visibilities from the single-dish map and calculate the noise of each visibility based on the rms noise. Our weighting scheme, though it is applied to discrete visibilities in this paper, should be applicable to grids in uv space, and this scheme may advance in future software development. For a realistic amount of observing time, the sensitivities of the NRO45 and CARMA visibility data sets are best matched by using the single-dish baselines only up to 4–6 kλ (about 1/4–1/3 of the dish diameter). The synthesized beam size is determined to conserve the flux between the synthesized beam and convolution beam. The superior uv coverage provided by the combination of CARMA long baseline data with 15 antennas and NRO45 short spacing data results in the high image fidelity, which is evidenced by the excellent overlap between even the faint CO emission and dust lanes in an optical Hubble Space Telescope image and polycyclicaromatichydrocarbon emission in a Spitzer 8 μm image. The total molecular gas masses of NGC 5194 and 5195 (d = 8.2 Mpc) are 4.9 × 109 M☉ and 7.8 × 107 M☉, respectively, assuming the CO-to-H2 conversion factor of XCO = 1.8 × 1020 cm-2(K km s−1)−1. The presented images are an indication of the millimeter-wave images that will become standard in the next decade with CARMA and NRO45, and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array.
Wall street occupations

type="main"> Many finance jobs entail the risk of large losses, and hard-to-monitor effort. We analyze the equilibrium consequences of these features in a model with optimal dynamic contracting. We show that finance jobs feature high compensation, up-or-out promotion, and long work hours, and are more attractive than other jobs. Moral hazard problems are exacerbated in booms, even though pay increases. Employees whose talent would be more valuable elsewhere can be lured into finance jobs, while the most talented employees might be unable to land these jobs because they are “too hard to manage. ”
Embryonic Development and Rates of Metabolic Activity in Early and Late Hatching Eggs of the Major Malaria Vector Anopheles gambiae

Anopheles gambiae eggs generally hatch at the completion of embryo development; two-three days post oviposition. However, staggered or delayed hatching has been observed whereby a single batch of eggs shows marked variation in time-to-hatch, with some eggs hatching 18 days post oviposition or later. The mechanism enabling delayed hatch has not been clearly elucidated but is likely mediated by environmental and genetic factors that either induce diapause or slow embryo development. This study aimed to compare metabolic activity and embryonic development between eggs collected from sub-colonies of the baseline Anopheles gambiae GAH colony previously selected for early or late time-to-hatch. Egg batches from early and late hatch sub-colonies as well as from the baseline colony were monitored for hatching. For both time-to-hatch selected sub-colonies and the baseline colony the majority of eggs hatched on day two post oviposition. Nevertheless, eggs produced by the late hatch sub-colony showed a significantly longer mean time to hatch than those produced by the early hatch sub-colony. The overall proportions that hatched were similar for all egg batches. CO2 output between eggs from early and late hatch sub-colonies showed significant differences only at 3 and 7 days post oviposition where eggs from the early hatch and the late hatch sub-colony were more metabolically active, respectively. No qualitative differences were observed in embryo development between the sub-colonies. It is concluded that all viable embryos develop to maturity at the same rate and that a small proportion then enter a state of diapause enabling them to hatch later. As it has previously been shown that it is possible to at least partially select for late hatch, this characteristic is likely to involve genetic as well as environmental factors. Delayed hatching in An. gambiae is likely an adaptation to maximise reproductive output despite the increased risk of desiccation in an unstable aquatic environment.
GINI Country Report: Growing Inequalities and their Impacts in Italy

There are two main dimensions of inequality in Italy. On one side, there is geography. The sharp division between a more developed North and a backwards South has been a central feature of the country since the birth of the Italian national state, and is still, a central topic of Italian politics and public discussion. The weakness of the state is the second major reason to explain the relatively high level of inequality observed in contemporary Italy. On one side, the inefficiency of the state directly condemns to failure any redistributive policy aimed at effectively reducing income inequality and other kinds of inequality. On the other side, the weakness of the state indirectly increases social inequality, as it is complemented by individualistic, market-based mobilization and by the strength of particular social groups. Among the latter, the most important is surely the family, but also trade unions, employers’ association and the professions have played a strong role in Italian politics.
On Testing Dependence between Time to Failure and Cause of Failure when Causes of Failure Are Missing

The hypothesis of independence between the failure time and the cause of failure is studied by using the conditional probabilities of failure due to a specific cause given that there is no failure up to certain fixed time. In practice, there are situations when the failure times are available for all units but the causes of failures might be missing for some units. We propose tests based on U-statistics to test for independence of the failure time and the cause of failure in the competing risks model when all the causes of failure cannot be observed. The asymptotic distribution is normal in each case. Simulation studies look at power comparisons for the proposed tests for two families of distributions. The one-sided and the two-sided tests based on Kendall type statistic perform exceedingly well in detecting departures from independence.
Organizational citizenship behaviors in the era of changing employment patterns

Purpose The increasing flexibility and discontinuity of labor relations have been associated with the development of new forms of psychological contracts as well as the development of more self-directed and mobile career attitudes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the forms of psychological contract and protean/boundaryless career attitudes on the one hand and organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) on the other. Design/methodology/approach In total, 458 employees of three large Italian organizations were sampled through a self-report questionnaire. Zero-order correlations were carried out to examine the associations between study variables while dominance analysis, along with multiple linear regression, was used for evaluating their unique contribution with respect to OCB. Findings OCB were positively predicted by relational and balanced psychological contracts, protean career attitude and boundaryless mindset. Practical implications Organizations must pay particular attention to the content of the psychological contract and the career attitudes of their employees because they influence their willingness to carry out OCB. Originality/value The results add new evidence to the careers literature in terms of boundary conditions with regard to the effects of protean and boundaryless career attitudes as well as different forms of psychological contracts.
Interaction between Retinoid Acid Receptor-Related Orphan Receptor Alpha (RORA) and Neuropeptide S Receptor 1 (NPSR1) in Asthma

Retinoid acid receptor-related Orphan Receptor Alpha (RORA) was recently identified as a susceptibility gene for asthma in a genome-wide association study. To investigate the impact of RORA on asthma susceptibility, we performed a genetic association study between RORA single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the vicinity of the asthma-associated SNP (rs11071559) and asthma-related traits. Because the regulatory region of a previously implicated asthma susceptibility gene, Neuropeptide S receptor 1 (NPSR1), has predicted elements for RORA binding, we hypothesized that RORA may interact biologically and genetically with NPSR1. 37 RORA SNPs and eight NPSR1 SNPs were genotyped in the Swedish birth cohort BAMSE (2033 children) and the European cross-sectional PARSIFAL study (1120 children). Seven RORA SNPs confined into a 49 kb region were significantly associated with physician-diagnosed childhood asthma. The most significant association with rs7164773 (T/C) was driven by the CC genotype in asthma cases (OR = 2.0, 95%CI 1.36–2.93, p = 0.0003 in BAMSE; and 1.61, 1.18–2.19, p = 0.002 in the combined BAMSE-PARSIFAL datasets, respectively), and strikingly, the risk effect was dependent on the Gln344Arg mutation in NPSR1. In cell models, stimulation of NPSR1 activated a pathway including RORA and other circadian clock genes. Over-expression of RORA decreased NPSR1 promoter activity further suggesting a regulatory loop between these genes. In addition, Rora mRNA expression was lower in the lung tissue of Npsr1 deficient mice compared to wildtype littermates during the early hours of the light period. We conclude that RORA SNPs are associated with childhood asthma and show epistasis with NPSR1, and the interaction between RORA and NPSR1 may be of biological relevance. Combinations of common susceptibility alleles and less common functional polymorphisms may modify the joint risk effects on asthma susceptibility.
Data interlinking through robust linkkey extraction

Links are important for the publication of RDF data on the web. Yet, establishing links between data sets is not an easy task. We develop an approach for that purpose which extracts weak linkkeys. Linkkeys extend the notion of a key to the case of different data sets. They are made of a set of pairs of properties belonging to two different classes. A weak linkkey holds between two classes if any resources having common values for all of these properties are the same resources. An algorithm is proposed to generate a small set of candidate linkkeys. Depending on whether some of the, valid or invalid, links are known, we define supervised and non supervised measures for selecting the appropriate linkkeys. The supervised measures approximate precision and recall, while the non supervised measures are the ratio of pairs of entities a linkkey covers (coverage), and the ratio of entities from the same data set it identifies (discrimination). We have experimented these techniques on two data sets, showing the accuracy and robustness of both approaches.
The Southern Galactic Plane Survey: The Test Region

The Southern Galactic Plane Survey (SGPS) is a project to image the H I line emission and 1.4 GHz continuum in the fourth quadrant of the Milky Way at high resolution using the Australia Telescope Compact Array and the Parkes Radio Telescope. This paper describes the survey details and goals, presents 21 cm continuum data, and discusses H I absorption and emission characteristics of the SGPS test region (325.°5 ≤ l ≤ 333.°5; -0.°5 ≤ b ≤ +3.°5). We explore the effects of massive stars on the interstellar medium through a study of H I shells and the H I environments of H II regions and supernova remnants (SNRs). We find an H I shell surrounding the H II region RCW 94, which indicates that the region is embedded in a molecular cloud. We give lower limits for the kinematic distances to SNRs G327.4+0.4 and G330.2+1.0 of 4.3 and 4.9 kpc, respectively. We find evidence of interaction with the surrounding H I for both of these remnants. We also present images of a possible new SNR G328.6-0.0. Additionally, we have discovered two small H I shells with no counterparts in continuum emission.
Automated super-voxel based features classification of urban environments by integrating 3D point cloud and image content

In this paper we present a novel street scene semantic recognition framework, which takes advantage of 3D point cloud captured by a high definition LiDAR laser scanner. An important problem in object recognition is the need for sufficient labeled training data to learn robust classifiers. We show how to significantly reduce the need for manually labeled training data by reduction of scene complexity using non-supervised ground and building segmentation. Our system first automatically segments grounds point cloud. Then, using binary range image processing building facades will be detected. Remained point cloud will grouped into voxels which are then transformed to super voxels. Local 3D features extracted from super voxels are classified by trained boosted decision trees and labeled with semantic classes e.g. tree, pedestrian, car. Given labeled 3D points cloud and 2D image with known viewing camera pose, the proposed association module aligned collections of 3D points to the groups of 2D image pixel to parsing 2D cubic images.
Speech intelligibility as a function of the number of channels of stimulation for signal processors using sine-wave and noise-band outputs.

Vowels, consonants, and sentences were processed through software emulations of cochlear-implant signal processors with 2-9 output channels. The signals were then presented, as either the sum of sine waves at the center of the channels or as the sum of noise bands the width of the channels, to normal-hearing listeners for identification. The results indicate, as previous investigations have suggested, that high levels of speech understanding can be obtained using signal processors with a small number of channels. The number of channels needed for high levels of performance varied with the nature of the test material. For the most difficult material--vowels produced by men, women, and girls--no statistically significant differences in performance were observed when the number of channels was increased beyond 8. For the least difficult material--sentences--no statistically significant differences in performance were observed when the number of channels was increased beyond 5. The nature of the output signal, noise bands or sine waves, made only a small difference in performance. The mechanism mediating the high levels of speech recognition achieved with only few channels of stimulation may be the same one that mediates the recognition of signals produced by speakers with a high fundamental frequency, i.e., the levels of adjacent channels are used to determine the frequency of the input signal. The results of an experiment in which frequency information was altered but temporal information was not altered indicates that vowel recognition is based on information in the frequency domain even when the number of channels of stimulation is small.