Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Geometry of Dyonic Instantons in 5-dimensional Supergravity

We systematically construct and study smooth supersymmetric solutions in 5 dimensional N=1 Yang-Mills-Einstein supergravity. Our solution is based on the ADHM construction of (dyonic) multi-instantons in Yang-Mills theory, which extends to the gravity-coupled system. In a simple supergravity model obtained from N=2 theory, our solutions are regular ring-like configurations, which can also be interpreted as supertubes. By studying the SU(2) 2-instanton example in detail, we find that angular momentum is maximized, with fixed electric charge, for circular rings. This feature is qualitatively same as that of supertubes. Related to the existence of this upper bound of angular momentum, we also check the absence of closed timelike curves for the circular rings. Finally, in supergravity and gauge theory models with non-Abelian Chern-Simons terms, we point out that the solution in the symmetric phase carries electric charge which does not contribute to the energy. A possible explanation from the dynamics on the instanton moduli space is briefly discussed.
Changes in the Relative Importance of Sector and Regional Factors: 1987-2002

A stylised fact in the real estate portfolio diversification literature is that sector (property-type) effects are relatively more important than regional (geographical) factors in determining property returns. Thus, for those portfolio managers who follow a top-down approach to portfolio management, they should first choose in which sectors to invest and then select the best properties in each market. However, the question arises as to whether the dominance of the sector effects relative to regional effects is constant. If not property fund managers will need to take account of regional effects in developing their portfolio strategy. Using monthly data over the period 1987:1 to 2002:12 for a sample of over 1000 properties the results show that the sector-specific factors dominate the regional-specific factors for the vast majority of the time. Nonetheless, there are periods when the regional factors are of equal or greater importance than the sector effects. In particular, the sector effects tend to dominate during volatile periods of the real estate cycle; however, during calmer periods the sector and regional effects are of equal importance. These findings suggest that the sector effects are still the most important aspect in the development of an active portfolio strategy.
Evaluating the impact of different virtual characters in product recommendations

This paper presents an evaluation of the effect that distinct interface characters could have on the users' perception of their interaction with an ecommerce website. A recommender system has been integrated to the characters' architecture, with the goal of assessing their impact in making personalized recommendations. The characters used to interact with the users had different features such as being a known or an unknown person; being represented by an anthropomorphic figure or not. In spite of these differences, the characters also had a lot of similarities: they used the same language and had the same strategy for recommending products. They also had the same type of graphical representation. An experiment involving 180 students was set up, in which students had to complete a few purchases in an ecommerce website where the virtual characters gave tips and suggested products related to the users' perceived interests. The results of the experiment are presented here, as well as conclusions and direction for future work.
Bowman Birk Inhibitor Concentrate and Oral Leukoplakia: A Randomized Phase IIb Trial

Oral premalignancy serves as an ideal model for study of chemopreventive agents. Although 13-cis-retinoic acid showed reversal of oral premalignancy, toxicity, and reversal of clinical response after cessation of therapy obviated its widespread use. A search for nontoxic agents with cancer preventive activity led us to evaluate Bowman Birk Inhibitor (BBI) formulated as BBI Concentrate (BBIC). We previously reported encouraging results in a phase IIa trial of BBIC in patients with oral leukoplakia with measurable clinical responses and favorable biomarker changes. On the basis of these results, we undertook a randomized, placebo controlled phase IIb trial with patients receiving BBIC or placebo for 6 months, with assessment of clinical response and change in lesion area as primary end point and an intent-to-treat analysis. One hundred and thirty two subjects were randomized; and 89 subjects completed six months on study drug or placebo. Both placebo and BBIC showed a statistically significant decrease in mean lesion area of 17.1% and 20.6%, respectively, and partial or greater clinical responses of 30% and 28% respectively. No significant difference between placebo and study drug arms was observed. Histologic review, review of photographs of lesions, and comparison of serum neu protein and oral mucosal cell protease activity also did not show significant differences between study arms. Probable reasons for these negative results were considered, are discussed, and include a placebo with non-BBIC clinical activity and reduced pharmacokinetic availability of the second batch of BBIC. This experience should be a strong cautionary note to those considering “Green” chemoprevention. Cancer Prev Res; 6(5); 410–8. ©2013 AACR.
Spitzer Observations of the Massive Star-forming Complex S254-S258: Structure and Evolution

We present Spitzer IRAC, NOAO 2.1 m Flamingos, Keck NIRC, and FCRAO SEQUOIA observations of the massive star-forming complex S254-S258, covering an area of 25′ × 20′. Using a combination of the IRAC and NIR data, we identify and classify the young stellar objects (YSOs) in the complex. We detect 510 sources with near- or mid-IR excess, and we classify 87 Class I and 165 Class II sources. The YSOs are found in clusters surrounded by isolated YSOs in a low-density distributed population. The ratio of clustered to total YSOs is 0.8. We identify six new clusters in the complex. One of them, G192.63-00, is located around the ionizing star of the H II region S255. We hypothesize that the ionizing star of S255 was formed in this cluster. We also detect a southern component of the cluster in H II region S256. The cluster G192.54-0.15, located inside H II region S254 has a VLSR of 17 km s−1 with respect to the main cloud, and we conclude that it is located in the background of the complex. The structure of the molecular cloud is examined using 12CO and 13CO , as well as a near-IR extinction map. The main body of the molecular cloud has VLSR between 5 and 9 km s−1. The arc-shaped structure of the molecular cloud following the border of the H II regions and the high column density in the border of the H II regions support the idea that the material has been swept up by the expansion of the H II regions.
Suppression of CD4+ T-Cells in the Spleen of Mice Infected with Toxoplasma gondii KI-1 Tachyzoites

Toxoplasma gondii KI-1, a recent new isolate from Korea, shows similar pathogenicity and infectivity to mice compared to the virulent RH strain. To understand characteristics of host immunity, including immune enhancement or suppression, we investigated proliferative responses and phenotypes of spleen cells. In addition, kinetics of IFN-γ, a Th1 cytokine, was examined in BALB/c mice up to day 6 post-infection (PI). Intraperitoneal injection of mice with 103 KI-1 tachyzoites induced significant decreases (P < 0.05) in proliferative responses of spleen cells. This occurred at days 2-6 PI even when concanavalin A (con A) was added and when stimulated with KI-1 antigen, suggesting suppression of the immunity. CD4+ T-cells decreased markedly at day 2 PI (P < 0.05), whereas CD8+ T-cells, NK cells, and macrophages did not show significant changes, except a slight, but significant, increase of CD8+ T-cells at day 6 PI. The capacity of splenocytes to produce IFN-γ by con A stimulation dropped significantly at days 2-6 PI. These results demonstrate that intraperitoneal injection of KI-1 tachyzoites can induce immunosuppression during the early stage of infection, as revealed by the decrease of CD4+ T-cells and IFN-γ.
Inequality of Access to Surgical Specialty Health Care: Why Children With Government-Funded Insurance Have Less Access Than Those With Private Insurance in Southern California

Objective. More than 25 million children in the United States are dependent on federal and state medical insurance programs for their health care needs. In California, 3.25 million children depend on Medi-Cal for their health insurance. In Southern California alone, the figure is as high as 1.81 million. However, 9.30 million children nationally and 1.55 million in California have no health insurance. Various public policies that would increase enrollment in these programs are being discussed to address this problem. However, before their implementation, it is important to understand what impact such policies would have on the actual delivery of health care to this patient population. In California, 2 predominant health care delivery models exist for Medi-Cal: a fee-for-service (so-called regular or straight Medi-Cal) and a managed care plan. One third of the children in Medi-Cal in the state are enrolled in the fee-for-service plan with the remainder in the managed care plan, whereas in Southern California, this figure is slightly lower at 28% in the fee-for-service plan. The objective of this study was to determine the number of otolaryngologists in Southern California who would offer a new patient appointment for an evaluation for tonsillectomy for a child with commercial insurance versus government-funded (Medi-Cal) insurance through direct contact with the physician and to determine whether the surgeon would offer to perform the procedure or refer the patient to another institution and to identify the specific reason(s) for any disparity in access to health care. Methods. A written questionnaire was sent via regular mail to 303 otolaryngologists in the Southern California area in 2003. Results. A total of 100 fully completed questionnaires were received. Ninety-seven surgeons would offer an office appointment to a child with commercial insurance as compared with only 27 for a child with Medi-Cal. Of those 27 surgeons, 8 would then refer the child to another physician to perform the surgery, and only 19 would actually offer to perform surgery, if indicated. Reasons provided for not offering an office appointment or surgery for the child with Medi-Cal include excessive paperwork and/or administrative burdens (96%), low monetary reimbursement for the surgery (92%), and low monetary reimbursement for the office visit (87%). Conclusions. There is a tremendous inequality of access to surgical specialty health care for children with government-funded insurance when compared with those with commercial insurance in Southern California. Physicians indicate that this disparity is related to excessive administrative burdens and low monetary reimbursement. The implications of our findings on public health care policies are discussed.
Scaling out big data missing value imputations: pythia vs. godzilla

Solving the missing-value (MV) problem with small estimation errors in big data environments is a notoriously resource-demanding task. As datasets and their user community continuously grow, the problem can only be exacerbated. Assume that it is possible to have a single machine (`Godzilla'), which can store the massive dataset and support an ever-growing community submitting MV imputation requests. Is it possible to replace Godzilla by employing a large number of cohort machines so that imputations can be performed much faster, engaging cohorts in parallel, each of which accesses much smaller partitions of the original dataset? If so, it would be preferable for obvious performance reasons to access only a subset of all cohorts per imputation. In this case, can we decide swiftly which is the desired subset of cohorts to engage per imputation? But efficiency and scalability is just one key concern! Is it possible to do the above while ensuring comparable or even better than Godzilla's imputation estimation errors? In this paper we derive answers to these fundamentals questions and develop principled methods and a framework which offer large performance speed-ups and better, or comparable, errors to that of Godzilla, independently of which missing-value imputation algorithm is used. Our contributions involve Pythia, a framework and algorithms for providing the answers to the above questions and for engaging the appropriate subset of cohorts per MV imputation request. Pythia functionality rests on two pillars: (i) dataset (partition) signatures, one per cohort, and (ii) similarity notions and algorithms, which can identify the appropriate subset of cohorts to engage. Comprehensive experimentation with real and synthetic datasets showcase our efficiency, scalability, and accuracy claims.
The double PHD finger domain of MOZ/MYST3 induces α-helical structure of the histone H3 tail to facilitate acetylation and methylation sampling and modification

Histone tail modifications control many nuclear processes by dictating the dynamic exchange of regulatory proteins on chromatin. Here we report novel insights into histone H3 tail structure in complex with the double PHD finger (DPF) of the lysine acetyltransferase MOZ/MYST3/KAT6A. In addition to sampling H3 and H4 modification status, we show that the DPF cooperates with the MYST domain to promote H3K9 and H3K14 acetylation, although not if H3K4 is trimethylated. Four crystal structures of an extended DPF alone and in complex with unmodified or acetylated forms of the H3 tail reveal the molecular basis of crosstalk between H3K4me3 and H3K14ac. We show for the first time that MOZ DPF induces α-helical conformation of H3K4-T11, revealing a unique mode of H3 recognition. The helical structure facilitates sampling of H3K4 methylation status, and proffers H3K9 and other residues for modification. Additionally, we show that a conserved double glycine hinge flanking the H3 tail helix is required for a conformational change enabling docking of H3K14ac with the DPF. In summary, our data provide the first observations of extensive helical structure in a histone tail, revealing the inherent ability of the H3 tail to adopt alternate conformations in complex with chromatin regulators.
An Optimized Method for Manufacturing a Clinical Scale Dendritic Cell-Based Vaccine for the Treatment of Glioblastoma

Immune-based treatments represent a promising new class of therapy designed to boost the immune system to specifically eradicate malignant cells. Immunotherapy may generate specific anti-tumor immune responses, and dendritic cells (DC), professional antigen-presenting cells, are widely used in experimental cancer immunotherapy. Several reports describe methods for the generation of mature, antigen-pulsed DC for clinical use. Improved quality and standardization are desirable to obtain GMP-compliant protocols. In this study we describe the generation of DC from 31 Glioblastoma (GB) patients starting from their monocytes isolated by immunomagnetic CD14 selection using the CliniMACS® device. Upon differentiation of CD14+ with IL-4 and GM-CSF, DC were induced to maturation with TNF-α, PGE2, IL-1β, and IL-6. Whole tumor lysate was obtained, for the first time, in a closed system using the semi-automated dissociator GentleMACS®. The yield of proteins improved by 130% compared to the manual dissociation method. Interestingly the Mean Fluorescence Intensity for CD83 increased significantly in DC pulsed with “new method” lysate compared to DC pulsed with “classical method” lysate. Our results indicate that immunomagnetic isolation of CD14+ monocytes using the CliniMACS® device and their pulsing with whole tumor lysate proteins is a suitable method for clinical-scale generation of high quality, functional DC under GMP-grade conditions.
Forecasting International Tourism Demand for Greece

Summary Accurate tourism demand forecasting has an important role to play in underpinning government investment decisions concerning the development of national tourism infrastructure for future economic benefit. In this paper a contingency approach to tourism forecasting model selection is taken and the appropriateness of a multiplicative seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average (SARIMA) to modelling Greece's inbound tourism in the medium/long-term to the year 2005 is investigated. Furthermore, the findings of this paper indicate that there are circumstances where the conventional restriction and use of ARIMA for short-term forecasting only can be relaxed. Predicated upon the impact of previous Olympic Games on host nations' tourism demand, baseline shift estimates were incorporated to the SARIMA baseline time series model using simple superposition. Predicting the most likely level of inbound tourism demand in Greece, as a consequence of the forthcoming 2004 Olympic Games, inevitably has major implications for government policy, tourism infrastructure investment and marketing decisions at various levels of aggregation. Within this context, two candidate SARIMA models are evaluated for their forecasting ability using conventional diagnostic statistics for goodness of fit together with comparisons made with alternative establishment forecasts. Whilst the limitations of univariate time series and SARIMA non casual models are acknowledged, within a contingency approach, the strategic implications of SARIMA to tourism forecasting and tourism marketing in data poor modelling contexts are nevertheless beneficial and insightful in the absence of more rigorous alternatives. Moreover, a systemic perspective is proposed where tourism forecasting and tourism marketing are considered to be integral components of a second order, homoscedastic, feedforward cybernetic model, i.e., a recursive cyberfilter approach (RCA).
Temporal attention filters for human activity recognition in videos

In this paper, we newly introduce the concept of temporal attention filters, and describe how they can be used for human activity recognition from videos. Many high-level activities are often composed of multiple temporal parts (e.g., sub-events) with different duration/speed, and our objective is to make the model explicitly consider such temporal structure using multiple temporal filters. Our attention filters are designed to be fully differentiable, allowing end-of-end training of the temporal filters together with the underlying frame-based or segment-based convolutional neural network architectures. The paper not only presents an approach of learning optimal static temporal attention filters to be shared across different videos, but also describes an approach of dynamically adjusting attention filters per testing video using recurrent long short-term memory networks (LSTMs). We experimentally confirm that the proposed concept of temporal attention filters benefits the activity recognition tasks by capturing the temporal structure in videos.
COMPARISON OF PROBABILISTIC MODAL-CHOICE MODELS: ESTIMATION METHODS AND SYSTEM INPUTS

TWELVE MODELS WERE FORMULATED BY SEGMENTING THE TOTAL TRAVEL TIME AND TOTAL TRAVEL COST BY RAPID TRANSIT AND BY AUTOMOBILE IN DIFFERENT WAYS OR BY LEAVING THEM OUT COMPLETELY AND INCLUDING ONLY SOCIOECONOMIC VARIABLES IN THE MODEL. THESE MODELS WERE THEN ESTIMATED BY USING LOGIT, PROBIT, AND DISCRIMINANT ANALYSES. THE RESULTS WERE EVALUATED IN 2 RESPECTS: ARE THERE DIFFERENCES IN PERFORMANCE AMONG THE METHODS OF ESTIMATION? AND ARE THERE DIFFERENCES IN PERFORMANCE AMONG THE 12 MODEL SPECIFICATIONS? THE RESULTS INDICATE THAT THERE ARE NO STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES EITHER AMONG THE METHODS OF ESTIMATION OR AMONG THE MODEL SPECIFICATIONS THEMSELVES. A MODEL THAT USES ONLY 2 USER CHARACTERISTICS, INCOME AND THE NUMBER OF WORKING HOUSEHOLD MEMBERS, AND 1 SYSTEM-RELATED VARIABLE, A DUMMY VARIABLE FOR WALK ACCESS TO THE TRANSIT STATION, PERFORMS NO WORSE THAN A MODEL THAT USES A WHOLE SET OF SYSTEM CHARACTERISTICS IN ADDITION TO THOSE 3 VARIABLES. VALUES OF TIME SIGNIFICANTLY LOWER THAN THOSE PREVIOUSLY REPORTED WERE FOUND; THE "BEST" ESTIMATE IN THIS STUDY IS ONLY 12 PERCENT OF THE WAGE RATE. /AUTHOR/
Deterministic One-Way Turing Machines with Sublinear Space

Deterministic one-way Turing machines with sublinear space bounds are systematically studied. We distinguish among the notions of strong, weak, and restricted space bounds. The latter is motivated by the study of P automata. The space available on the work tape depends on the number of input symbols read so far, instead of the entire input. The class of functions space constructible by such machines is investigated, and it is shown that every function f that is space constructible by a deterministic two-way Turing machine, is space constructible by a strongly f space-bounded deterministic one-way Turing machine as well. We prove that the restricted mode coincides with the strong mode for space constructible functions. The known infinite, dense, and strict hierarchy of strong space complexity classes is derived also for the weak mode by Kolmogorov complexity arguments. Finally, closure properties under AFL operations, Boolean operations and reversal are shown.
Relative Sectoral Prices and Population Ageing: A Common Trend

Demographic change raises demand for non-tradable old-age related services relative to tradable commodities. This demand shift increases the relative price of non-tradables and thereby causes real exchange rates to appreciate. We claim that the change in demand affects prices via imperfect intersectoral factor mobility. Using a sample of 15 OECD countries between 1970 and 2009, we estimate a robust increase of relative prices due to population ageing. Further findings confirm the relevance of imperfect factor mobility: Countries with more rigid labour markets experience stronger price effects.
Function Optimization using Connectionist Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

Any non-associative reinforcement learning algorithm can be viewed as a method for performing function optimization through (possibly noise-corrupted) sampling of function values. We describe the results of simulations in which the optima of several deterministic functions studied by Ackley were sought using variants of REINFORCE algorithms. Some of the algorithms used here incorporated additional heuristic features resembling certain aspects of some of the algorithms used in Ackley's studies. Differing levels of performance were achieved by the various algorithms investigated, but a number of them performed at a level comparable to the best found in Ackley's studies on a number of the tasks, in spite of their simplicity. One of these variants, called REINFORCE/MENT, represents a novel but principled approach to reinforcement learning in nontrivial networks which incorporates an entropy maximization strategy. This was found to perform especially well on more hierarchically organized tasks.
The Impact of the Informal Employment on the Social Security Deficits in Turkey

This study examines the impact of the formalization of the labor market on social security deficits in Turkey. After a brief discussion on the causes and consequences of the informality of the economy, the paper reveals the effect of possible developments in the labor market, --such as the reduction in informal employment, the decrease in contribution evasion, and the increase in youth employment and womens employment-- on the deficits, which has increased since the early 1990s. To assess the effect, we utilize a simple actuarial model to project the deficit through 2050 under different scenarios. The results point to the importance of increasing female labor force participation, preventing evasion of social security contributions, and show the effect of an ageing population.