Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The United Nations Global Compact: List of contributors

The United Nations Global Compact is a strategic policy initiative that encourages businesses to support ten universal principles in the areas of human rights, labor standards, the environment, and anti-corruption. It is the world's largest voluntary corporate responsibility initiative with more than 7,500 business and non-business participants in over 130 countries. This book reviews the first ten years of the Compact's existence (2000-2010) by presenting exclusively commissioned chapters from well-known scholars, practitioners from the business world and civil society, and Global Compact staff. They reflect on what the Global Compact has achieved, what trends it may have to respond to, and what challenges are ahead. The book contains not only up-to-date reflections but also debates recent changes to the structure of the Compact, including the Communication on Progress policy, the role of Global Compact Local Networks, and the role of emerging specialized initiatives.
Motor Response Selection in Overt Sentence Production: A Functional MRI Study

Many different cortical areas are thought to be involved in the process of selecting motor responses, from the inferior frontal gyrus, to the lateral and medial parts of the premotor cortex. The objective of the present study was to examine the neural underpinnings of motor response selection in a set of overt language production tasks. To this aim, we compared a sentence repetition task (externally constrained selection task) with a sentence generation task (volitional selection task) in a group of healthy adults. In general, the results clarify the contribution of the pre-SMA, cingulate areas, PMv, and pars triangularis to the process of selecting motor responses in the context of sentence production, and shed light on the manner in which this network is modulated by selection mode. Further, the present study suggests that response selection in sentence production engages neural resources similar to those engaged in the production of isolated words and oral motor gestures.
Role of Sensory Stimulation in Amelioration of Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), characterized by recurrent upper airway (UA) collapse during sleep, is associated with significant morbidity and disorders. Polysomnogram is employed in the evaluation of OSA and apnea-hypopnea number per hour reflects severity. For normal breathing, it is essential that the collapsible UA is patent. However, obstruction of the UA is quite common in adults and infants. Normally, important reflex mechanisms defend against the UA collapse. The muscle activity of UA dilators, including the genioglossus, tensor palatini (TP), and pharyngeal constrictors, is due to the integrated mechanism of afferent sensory input → to motor function. Snoring is harsh breathing to prevent UA obstruction. Unfortunately, snoring vibrations, pharyngeal suction collapse, negative pressure, and hypoxia cause pathological perturbations including dysfunctional UA afferent sensory activity. The current paper posits that peripheral sensory stimulation paradigm, which has been shown to be efficacious in improving several neurological conditions, could be an important therapeutic strategy in OSA also.
A blind matching algorithm for cognitive radio networks

We consider a cognitive radio network where secondary users (SUs) are allowed access time to the spectrum belonging to the primary users (PUs) provided that they relay primary messages. PUs and SUs negotiate over allocations of the secondary power that will be used to relay PU data. We formulate the problem as a generalized assignment market to find an epsilon pairwise stable matching. We propose a distributed blind matching algorithm (BLMA) to produce the pairwise-stable matching plus the associated power allocations. We stipulate a limited information exchange in the network so that agents only calculate their own utilities but no information is available about the utilities of any other users in the network. We establish convergence to epsilon pairwise stable matchings in finite time. Finally we show that our algorithm exhibits a limited degradation in PU utility when compared with the Pareto optimal results attained using perfect information assumptions.
Measuring Changes in Firm-Level Volatility: An Application to Japan

This paper develops a new technique for estimating earnings and employment volatility at the firm level, and applies it to Japanese firms. Unlike earlier studies for the United States, we estimate instantaneous volatility for every year, rather than a rolling ten-year average of volatility. In addition, our technique allows us to estimate the firm-specific component of firm volatility separately, by controlling for variation in firms’ earnings and employment growth induced by aggregate and sectoral factors. We find that firm-specific sales volatility was substantially higher before the 1990 stock market crash than in the following fifteen years. The conditional variance of earnings and employment growth stayed relatively constant until the late 1990s, but increased substantially from 1999 onwards.
Tannins Possessing Bacteriostatic Effect Impair Pseudomonas aeruginosa Adhesion and Biofilm Formation

Plants produce many compounds that are biologically active, either as part of their normal program of growth and development or in response to pathogen attack or stress. Traditionally, Anadenanthera colubrina, Commiphora leptophloeos and Myracrodruon urundeuva have been used by communities in the Brazilian Caatinga to treat several infectious diseases. The ability to impair bacterial adhesion represents an ideal strategy to combat bacterial pathogenesis, because of its importance in the early stages of the infectious process; thus, the search for anti-adherent compounds in plants is a very promising alternative. This study investigated the ability of stem-bark extracts from these three species to control the growth and prevent biofilm formation of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an important opportunistic pathogen that adheres to surfaces and forms protective biofilms. A kinetic study (0–72 h) demonstrated that the growth of extract-treated bacteria was inhibited up to 9 h after incubation, suggesting a bacteriostatic activity. Transmission electron microscopy and fluorescence microscopy showed both viable and nonviable cells, indicating bacterial membrane damage; crystal violet assay and scanning electron microscopy demonstrated that treatment strongly inhibited biofilm formation during 6 and 24 h and that matrix production remained impaired even after growth was restored, at 24 and 48 h of incubation. Herein, we propose that the identified (condensed and hydrolyzable) tannins are able to inhibit biofilm formation via bacteriostatic properties, damaging the bacterial membrane and hindering matrix production. Our findings demonstrate the importance of this abundant class of Natural Products in higher plants against one of the most challenging issues in the hospital setting: biofilm resilience.
Open Platform Strategies and Innovation: Granting Access vs. Devolving Control

This paper studies two fundamentally distinct approaches to opening a technology platform and their different impacts on innovation. One approach is to grant access to a platform and thereby open up markets for complementary components around the platform. Another approach is to give up control over the platform itself. Using data on 21 handheld computing systems (1990--2004), I find that granting greater levels of access to independent hardware developer firms produces up to a fivefold acceleration in the rate of new handheld device development, depending on the precise degree of access and how this policy was implemented. Where operating system platform owners went further to give up control (beyond just granting access to their platforms) the incremental effect on new device development was still positive but an order of magnitude smaller. The evidence from the industry and theoretical arguments both suggest that distinct economic mechanisms were set in motion by these two approaches to opening.
Recurrent evolution of host-specialized races in a globally distributed parasite

The outcome of coevolutionary interactions is predicted to vary across landscapes depending on local conditions and levels of gene flow, with some populations evolving more extreme specializations than others. Using a globally distributed parasite of colonial seabirds, the tick Ixodes uriae, we examined how host availability and geographic isolation influences this process. In particular, we sampled ticks from 30 populations of six different seabird host species, three in the Southern Hemisphere and three in the Northern Hemisphere. We show that parasite races have evolved independently on hosts of both hemispheres. Moreover, the degree of differentiation between tick races varied spatially within each region and suggests that the divergence of tick races is an ongoing process that has occurred multiple times across isolated areas. As I. uriae is vector to the bacterium responsible for Lyme disease Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato, these results may have important consequence for the epidemiology of this disease. With the increased occurrence of novel interspecific interactions due to global change, these results also stress the importance of the combined effects of gene flow and selection for parasite diversification.
A Metapopulation Model to Assess the Capacity of Spread of Meticillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus ST398 in Humans

The emergence of the livestock-associated clone of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) ST398 is a serious public health issue throughout Europe. In The Netherlands a stringent ‘search-and-destroy’ policy has been adopted, keeping low the level of MRSA prevalence. However, reports have recently emerged of transmission events between humans showing no links to livestock, contradicting belief that MRSA ST398 is poorly transmissible in humans. The question regarding the transmissibility of MRSA ST398 in humans therefore remains of great interest. Here, we investigated the capacity of MRSA ST398 to spread into an entirely susceptible human population subject to the effect of a single MRSA-positive commercial pig farm. Using a stochastic, discrete-time metapopulation model, we explored the effect of varying both the probability of persistent carriage and that of acquiring MRSA due to contact with pigs on the transmission dynamics of MRSA ST398 in humans. In particular, we assessed the value and key determinants of the basic reproduction ratio (R 0) for MRSA ST398. Simulations showed that the presence of recurrent exposures with pigs in risky populations allows MRSA ST398 to persist in the metapopulation and transmission events to occur beyond the farming community, even when the probability of persistent carriage is low. We further showed that persistent carriage should occur in less than 10% of the time for MRSA ST398 to conserve epidemiological characteristics similar to what has been previously reported. These results indicate that implementing control policy that only targets human carriers may not be sufficient to control MRSA ST398 in the community if it remains in pigs. We argue that farm-level control measures should be implemented if an eradication programme is to be considered.
Automated Synthesis of Service Choreographies

Future Internet research promotes the production of a distributed-computing environment that will be increasingly surrounded by a virtually infinite number of software services that can be composed to meet user needs. Services will be increasingly active entities that, communicating peer-to-peer, can proactively make decisions and autonomously perform tasks. Service choreography is a form of decentralized service composition that describes peer-to-peer message exchanges among participant services from a global perspective. In a distributed setting, obtaining the coordination logic required to realize a choreography is nontrivial and error prone. So, automatic support for realizing choreographies is needed. For this purpose, researchers developed a choreography synthesis tool. The Web extra at http://www.di. univaq.it/marco.autili/synthesis/shortdemo/demo.htm is a short demonstration of CHOReOSynt, a choreography synthesis tool.
Budget transparency around the World: Results from the 2008 open budget survey

The movement for greater fiscal transparency has been gaining momentum in recent years. To contribute to these efforts, the International Budget Partnership (IBP) developed the Open Budget Survey in 2006. The 2008 survey finds that the state of budget transparency around the world is deplorable, although a number of countries have improved their performance over the past two years. This article discusses the results of the 2008 survey and ways of improving budget transparency.
The Chemical Properties of Milky Way and M31 Globular Clusters. I. A Comparative Study

A comparative analysis is performed between high-quality integrated spectral indices of 30 M31 globular clusters, 20 Milky Way globular clusters, and a sample of field and cluster elliptical galaxies. We find that the Lick CN indices in the M31 and Galactic clusters are enhanced relative to the bulges of the Milky Way, M31, and elliptical spheroids, in agreement with Burstein and coworkers. Although not particularly evident in the Lick CN indices, the near-UV cyanogen feature (λ3883) is strongly enhanced with respect to the Galactic globular clusters at metallicities -1.5 < [Fe/H] < -0.3. Carbon shows signs of varying among these two groups. For [Fe/H] > -0.8, we observe no systematic differences in the Hδ, Hγ, or Hβ indices between the M31 and Galactic globular clusters, in contrast to previous studies. The elliptical galaxy sample lies offset from the loci of the globular clusters in both the cyanogen-[MgFe] and Balmer-line–[MgFe] planes. Six of the M31 clusters appear young and are projected onto the M31 disk. Population synthesis models suggest that these are metal-rich clusters with ages 100–800 Myr, metallicities -0.20 ≤ [Fe/H] ≤ 0.35, and masses 0.7– ∼ 7.0 × 104 M⊙. Two other young clusters are Hubble V in NGC 205, observed as a template, and an older (∼3 Gyr) cluster some 7 kpc away from the plane of the disk. The six clusters projected onto the disk show signs of rotation similar to the H I gas in M31, and three clusters exhibit thin disk kinematics, according to Morrison and coworkers. Dynamical mass estimates and detailed structural parameters are required for these objects to determine whether they are massive open clusters or globular clusters. If they are the latter, our findings suggest globular clusters may trace the buildup of galaxy disks. In either case, we conclude that these clusters are part of a young, metal-rich disk cluster system in M31, possibly as young as 1 Gyr old.
The Effect of Radical-Based Grouping in Character Learning in Chinese as a Foreign Language

The logographic nature of the Chinese writing system creates a huge hurdle for Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners. Existing literature (e.g., Shen, 2010; Taft & Chung, 1999) suggests that radical knowledge facilitates character learning. In this project, we selected 48 compound characters in eight radical groups and examined how grouping characters based on their radicals affected the form, sound, and meaning representations of characters and radical knowledge development. We found that for beginning learners, learning radical-sharing characters in groups consistently led to better recall and better radical generalization than learning in distribution. For intermediate level learners, the grouping factor did not lead to significant differences, while participants in both conditionsmade improvement in radical perception and radical semantic awareness generalization.We concluded that there is a benefit to presenting learners with recurring radicals in compound characters in groups in character learning and in the autonomous generalization of radical knowledge. We also noted the differences between beginning and intermediate learners in their character perception and learning, and put forward implications for CFL pedagogy.
Proprioceptive Interaction

We propose a new way of eyes-free interaction for wearables. It is based on the user's proprioceptive sense, i.e., rather than seeing, hearing, or feeling an outside stimulus, users feel the pose of their own body. We have implemented a wearable device called Pose-IO that offers input and output based on proprioception. Users communicate with Pose-IO through the pose of their wrists. Users enter information by performing an input gesture by flexing their wrist, which the device senses using a 3-axis accelerometer. Users receive output from Pose-IO by find-ing their wrist posed in an output gesture, which Pose-IO actuates using electrical muscle stimulation. This mechanism allows users to interact with Pose-IO without visual or auditory senses, but through the proprioceptive sense alone. We developed three simple applications that demonstrate symmetric proprioceptive interaction, where input and output occur through the same limb, as well as asymmetric interaction, where input and output occur through different limbs. In a first user study, participants using a symmetric proprioceptive interface re-entered poses received from Pose-IO with an average accuracy of 5.8° despite the minimal bandwidth offered by the device. In a second, exploratory study, we investigated participants' emotional response to asymmetric proprioceptive interaction and the concept of the user's body serving as interface. Participants reported to enjoy the experience (4.6 out of 5).
Discussion on ”A State Observer for a Class of Nonlinear Systems with Multiple Discrete and Distributed Time Delays

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Discussion on ”A State Observer for a Class of Nonlinear Systems with Multiple Discrete and Distributed Time Delays Olivier Sename
Bruchpilot, A Synaptic Active Zone Protein for Anesthesia-Resistant Memory

In Drosophila, aversive associative memory of an odor consists of heterogeneous components with different stabilities. Here we report that Bruchpilot (Brp), a ubiquitous presynaptic active zone protein, is required for olfactory memory. Brp was shown before to facilitate efficient vesicle release, particularly at low stimulation frequencies. Transgenic knockdown in the Kenyon cells of the mushroom body, the second-order olfactory interneurons, revealed that Brp is required for olfactory memory. We further demonstrate that Brp in the Kenyon cells preferentially functions for anesthesia-resistant memory. Another presynaptic protein, Synapsin, was shown previously to be required selectively for the labile anesthesia-sensitive memory, which is less affected in brp knockdown. Thus, consolidated and labile components of aversive olfactory memory can be dissociated by the function of different presynaptic proteins.
Explaining Online Recommendations Using Personalized Tag Clouds

Abstract Recommender systems are sales-supporting applications that are usually integrated into online shops and are designed to point the visitor to products or services she or he might be interested in but has not bought yet. In the last decade, many techniques have been developed to improve the predictive accuracy of such systems. However, there are also factors other than accuracy that infl uence the user-perceived quality of such a system. In particular, system-generated explanations as to why a certain item has been recommended have shown to be a valuable tool to improve both the user's satisfaction and the system's effi ciency. This paper reports the results of a fi rst user study which was conducted to evaluate whether personalized tag clouds are an appropriate means to visually explain recommendations. The evaluation reveals that using tag clouds as explanation mechanism leads to higher user satisfaction and recommendation effi ciency than previous keyword-style explanations. Zusammenfassung Empfehlungssystem sind verkaufsunterstützende Anwendungen, welche gewöhnlich in Webshops integriert sind und den Konsumenten auf Produkte und Dienstleistungen hinweisen, an denen er oder sie interessiert sein könnte, aber noch nicht gekauft hat. In den letzten Jahren wurden zahlreiche Algorithmen zur Erhöhung der Vorhersagegenauigkeit solcher Systeme entwickelt. Es gibt jedoch auch andere Faktoren, die die durch den Benutzer empfundene Qualität des Systems beeinfl ussen. Es hat sich insbesondere gezeigt, dass systemseitig erzeugte Erklärungen, warum ein bestimmtes Produkt vorgeschlagen wurde, besonders dazu geeignet sind, die Zufriedenheit des Benutzers mit dem System sowie die Effi zienz des Empfehlungsprozesses zu steigern. In diesem Aufsatz berichten wir von den Ergebnissen einer ersten Studie, in welcher untersucht wurde, inwiefern Schlagwortwolken ein geeignetes Mittel sind, um Empfehlungen visuell zu erklären. Die Studie zeigt, dass mithilfe von Schlagwortwolken sowohl die Zufriedenheit des Benutzers mit dem System als auch die Empfehlungseffi zienz im Vergleich zu anderen existierenden schlagwort-basierten Verfahren messbar gesteigert werden kann.
Role of Protein Tyrosine Kinase and Erk1/2 Activities in the Toll-Like Receptor 2-Induced Cellular Activation of Murine B Cells by Neisserial Porin

ABSTRACT Neisserial porins are potent immune adjuvants and have been demonstrated to stimulate and induce the activation of human and murine B lymphocytes. Their immunopotentiating ability is due largely to the upregulation of the surface expression of the costimulatory ligand CD86 (B7-2) on B cells and other antigen-presenting cells. Porin-induced activation is dependent on the innate immune pattern recognition receptor Toll-like receptor 2 (TLR2). These data have led us to investigate the signal transduction events induced by PorB from Neisseria meningitidis and then, using inhibitors of these pathways, to establish the mechanism by which this bacterial major outer membrane protein induces CD86 upregulation and the proliferation of murine B cells. PorB was able to induce (i) protein tyrosine kinase (PTK) activity, (ii) the phosphorylation of Erk1 and Erk2, and (iii) IκB-α phosphorylation, leading to NF-κB nuclear translocation in B cells in a TLR2-dependent manner. PorB-induced NF-κB nuclear translocation was not dependent on either PTK or Erk1/2 activities. However, B-cell proliferation and the induction of increased surface expression of CD86 by PorB were dependent on PTK activity and not Erk1/2 activation. In conclusion, PorB acts through TLR2 as a B-cell mitogen, triggering tyrosine phosphorylation of various cellular proteins that are involved in proliferation and CD86 expression, as well as the phosphorylation of Erk1/2, which is not necessary for CD86 upregulation or the proliferation of B cells.
EMX2‐independent familial schizencephaly: Clinical and genetic analyses

Schizencephaly is a human brain malformation distinguished by full‐thickness unilateral or bilateral clefts through the neocortex. Heterozygous mutations in the EMX2 locus are reported to give rise to schizencephaly. However, the comprehensive identification of causative genetic loci is precluded by a lack of large pedigrees and genome‐wide linkage analyses. We present here a large Turkish pedigree with three individuals with schizencephaly. The similarity of clinical signs in affected individuals strongly suggests an underlying genetic cause; however, genome‐wide linkage analysis rules out EMX2 linkage and instead suggests additional candidate loci. These results indicate that genetic forms of schizencephaly are likely to be heterogeneous. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.