Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Insulin action during late pregnancy in the conscious dog.

Our aim was to assess the magnitude of peripheral insulin resistance and whether changes in hepatic insulin action were evident in a canine model of late (3rd trimester) pregnancy. A 3-h hyperinsulinemic (5 mU.kg(-1). min(-1)) euglycemic clamp was conducted using conscious, 18-h-fasted pregnant (P; n = 6) and nonpregnant (NP; n = 6) female dogs in which catheters for intraportal insulin infusion and assessment of hepatic substrate balances were implanted approximately 17 days before experimentation. Arterial plasma insulin rose from 11 +/- 2 to 192 +/- 24 and 4 +/- 2 to 178 +/- 5 microU/ml in the 3rd h in NP and P, respectively. Glucagon fell equivalently in both groups. Basal net hepatic glucose output was lower in NP (1.9 +/- 0.1 vs. 2.4 +/- 0.2 mg.kg(-1). min(-1), P < 0.05). Hyperinsulinemia completely suppressed hepatic glucose release in both groups (-0.4 +/- 0.2 and -0.1 +/- 0.2 mg.kg(-1). min(-1) in NP and P, respectively). More exogenous glucose was required to maintain euglycemia in NP (15.2 +/- 1.3 vs. 11.5 +/- 1.1 mg.kg(-1). min(-1), P < 0.05). Nonesterified fatty acids fell similarly in both groups. Net hepatic gluconeogenic amino acid uptake with high insulin did not differ in NP and P. Peripheral insulin action is markedly impaired in this canine model of pregnancy, whereas hepatic glucose production is completely suppressed by high circulating insulin levels.
On the phase diagram of QCD at finite isospin density

Using a canonical formalism, we determine the equation of state and the phase diagram of eight-flavour QCD, as a function of temperature and isospin density. Two mechanisms are at work: Bose condensation of pions at high density, and deconfinement at high temperature. We study their interplay and find that on our small and coarse lattice the first order deconfinement transition appears to end at a critical point at finite density. We investigate the strength of the overlap and of the sign problems and discuss implications for the baryonic density case.
Modulating mind-wandering in dysphoria

Depression is associated with significant difficulty staying “in the moment” as the mind tends to wander away from current activity to focus instead on personal concerns. Mind-wandering (MW) may in some instances be a precursor for depressive rumination, a thinking style believed to confer vulnerability to the likelihood and extent of depression. Thus, MW may be not only a consequence but also a cause of low mood. Identifying a paradigm that could modulate MW, particularly in depressed individuals, would allow future studies to test whether elevated rates of MW causally drive cognitive-affective features of depression, such as rumination and anhedonia. This study therefore explored the feasibility of using an existing task manipulation to modulate behavioral and self-report indices of MW in participants with varying levels of self-reported dysphoria. Participants completed two go/no-go tasks—the SART and a high target probability task—and measures of state and trait MW. The two tasks were identical in all respects apart from the lower probability of no-go targets on the SART, a feature considered to encourage mindless, or inattentive, responding. Across participants, errors of commission (a behavioral indicator of MW) were elevated on the SART relative to the high probability task, a pattern that was particularly pronounced in dysphoric participants. Dysphoric individuals furthermore reported elevated levels of MW, though the modulation of these subjective reports by task was present to a similar rather than greater extent in the dysphoric individuals. These findings provide encouraging preliminary support for the use of this paradigm as one that modulates MW in depressed individuals. The implications of these results and directions for future research are discussed.
Prospective evaluation of a polymerase chain reaction-ELISA targeted to Aspergillus fumigatus and Aspergillus flavus for the early diagnosis of invasive aspergillosis in patients with hematological malignancies.

BACKGROUND Current laboratory and radiological methods for diagnosis of invasive aspergillosis (IA) lack sensitivity and specificity. METHODS We prospectively evaluated the diagnostic value of twice-weekly screening for circulating Aspergillus fumigatus and A. flavus DNA with a polymerase chain reaction-enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (PCR-ELISA). RESULTS Among the 201 adult patients with hematological malignancies who were included in the study, 55 IA cases were diagnosed. On the basis of the analysis of 1205 serum samples from 167 patients, the sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values of the PCR-ELISA for proven and probable IA cases were 63.6%, 89.7%, 63.6%, and 89.7%, respectively, when samples with 2 consecutive positive results were used. The use of a combination of the PCR-ELISA and a galactomannan (GM) assay increased the sensitivity to 83.3%, increased the negative predictive value to 97.6%, and decreased the specificity to 69.8%. In most patients with IA, PCR-ELISA positivity anticipated or was simultaneous with the initiation of antifungal therapy, the abnormalities found by computed tomography, the mycological/histological diagnosis, and the GM positivity. Overall, 56.3% of the patients had at least 1 positive sample, and the false single-positive rate was 44.8%. CONCLUSIONS In addition to serial screening for GM antigenemia and radiological surveillance, PCR-ELISA may improve the rates of early diagnosis of IA and the management of patients with hematological malignancies.
International Cross-Listing and Shareholders’ Wealth

This study evaluates the relationship between international cross-listings and shareholders’ wealth across different host markets and across time. For a sample of cross-listings by European companies in the US, in the UK, and within Europe, the findings show that US and UK cross-listings, on average, result in positive cumulative abnormal returns around the announcement of cross-listing. No such evidence exists for the rest of European cross-listings. In addition, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 affects negatively the wealth benefits of US cross-listings, while wealth creation around UK cross-listings is primarily concentrated in Alternative Investment Market listings rather than Main Market listings. There is no evidence that the introduction of the Euro affects the wealth effects of cross-listings within the Eurozone. Finally, this study provides evidence on the relative importance of alternative theories on the wealth effects of cross-listing, including market segmentation, legal bonding, liquidity, investor recognition, proximity preference, market timing and business strategy theories, after considering the effect of the introduction of the Euro and the adoption of SOX. The results show that significance of the alternative theories varies across host markets and over time.
Offloading on the Edge: Analysis and Optimization of Local Data Storage and Offloading in HetNets

The rapid increase in data traffic demand has overloaded existing cellular networks. Planned upgrades in the communication architecture (e.g. LTE), while helpful, are not expected to suffice to keep up with demand. As a result, extensive densification through small cells, caching content closer to or even at the device, and device-to-device (D2D) communications are seen as necessary components for future heterogeneous cellular networks to withstand the data crunch. Nevertheless, these options imply new CAPEX and OPEX costs, extensive backhaul support, contract plan incentives for D2D, and a number of interesting tradeoffs arise for the operator. In this paper, we propose an analytical model to explore how much local storage and communication through "edge" nodes could help offload traffic in various heterogeneous network (HetNet) setups and levels of user tolerance to delays. We then use this model to optimize the storage allocation and access mode of different contents as a tradeoff between user satisfaction and cost to the operator. Finally, we validate our findings through realistic simulations and show that considerable amounts of traffic can be offloaded even under moderate densification levels.
Young Lives: Ethiopia Round 2 Survey Report

This report presents initial findings from the second round of data collection carried out in Ethiopia in late 2006 to early 2007. It does not aim to give a comprehensive overview of all the findings from Young Lives. Rather it gives a broad outline of some of the key indicators of childhood poverty and changes that have taken place in the children’s lives between the first round of data collection in 2002 and the second. Data are mainly presented for the entire age group cohort, in most cases separated into wealth groups or by rural/urban location. The full richness of the data is not reflected in this preliminary report, but we hope that it contains enough information to prompt other researchers, policymakers and stakeholders to start to engage with the data. From our survey data, there are signs that the economic growth and improved access to services have been broadly inclusive. We see that children’s well-being – in all dimensions – is strongly linked to, and determined by, their socio-economic status and parents’ backgrounds. Over the past 5 years, there have been obvious improvements in basic services, and school enrolment is up, although quality of education is now a key priority for the government. Nutrition remains a challenge, with high levels of undernutrition, although in other ways we have seen obvious recovery following the 2002 drought.
CChi: An efficient cloud epistasis test model in human genome wide association studies

Due to the vast amounts of SNPs and huge search space, how to decrease the total computation costs is a challenge in genome wide association studies (GWAS). Triggered by this problem, we develop an effective and efficient algorithm for epistasis detection in GWAS. We propose a cloud-based algorithm using chi-square test, denoted as CChi. CChi adopts a pruning strategy by utilizing an upper bound to prune amounts of unnecessary SNP pairs, and is implemented under Google's MapReduce framework. A best-fit model is proposed by us to distribute SNP pairs to each reducer. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that CChi is practically and computationally efficient.
Emerging Market Exchange-Rate Exposure

We estimate the exposure of emerging market companies to fluctuations in their domestic exchange rates. We use an instrumental-variable approach that identifies the total exposure of a company to exchange rate movements, yet abstracts from the influence of confounding macroeconomic shocks. In the sub-period of 1999-2002, we find that depreciations tend to have a negative impact on emerging market stock returns. In the sub-period of 2002-2006, this tendency has largely disappeared. Since we estimate the exchange rate exposure of firms from different countries with a common set of instruments, we can make coherent, cross-country comparisons of their determinants. We find that the impact of various measures of debt on exchange rate exposure, which is negative and significant in the early sub-period, becomes insignificant and even reverses sign in the recent sub-period.
Efficiency and Risk-Taking in Pre-Crisis Investment Banks

Investment banks’ core functions expose them to a wide array of risks. This paper analyses cost and profit efficiency for a sample of investment banks for the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK and US) and Switzerland prior to the recent financial crisis. We follow Coelli et al. (J Prod Anal 11:251–273, 1999)’s methodology to adjust the estimated cost and profit efficiency scores for environmental influences including key banks’ risks, bank- and industry- specific factors and macroeconomic conditions. Our evidence suggests that failing to account for environmental factors can considerably bias the efficiency scores for investment banks. Specifically, bank risk-taking factors (including liquidity and capital risk exposures) are found particularly important to accurately assess profit efficiency: i.e. profit efficiency estimates are consistently underestimated without accounting for bank risk-taking. Interestingly, our evidence suggests that size matters for both cost and profit efficiency, however this does not imply that more concentrated markets are more efficient.
Optimism and social support: The providers’ perspective

It has been presumed that the beneficial health effects of optimism are mediated by social support provided by the social environment. To further analyze this assumption, in two experiments (N = 240 and N = 120) social responses toward optimists, pessimists, and realists were examined. Participants listened to tape-recorded conversations in which optimistic, pessimistic and realistic targets reported how they were dealing with a stressful situation before completing a questionnaire assessing (a) their evaluation of the target's behavior and personality, (b) their attraction to the target, and (c) their willingness to provide the target with social support. Optimistic and realistic targets were viewed more favorably than pessimistic targets, while the behavior of realists was regarded as being more adequate than that of optimists. However, the more positive evaluation of optimists and realists compared to pessimists was not accompanied by a greater willingness to provide them with social support.
Why Do Traders Choose Dark Markets?

We examine U.S. equity trader use of dark and lit markets. Marketable orders executed in the dark have lower information content and smaller fill rates. Dark orders take longer to execute, but they execute at more favorable prices. Traders are more likely to go dark when the bid-ask spread is wider and those with higher dark participation are more sophisticated. Although market regulators have expressed concern over the rise in dark trading, our results indicate that dark markets provide important benefits to traders that lit markets do not.
International Stock Market Interdependence: Are Developing Markets the Same As Developed Markets?

This paper uses a dynamic panel-data gravity model to explain the correlations between 40 markets from 1996 to 2010 using four types of market linkages: information capacity, financial integration, economic integration, and similarity in industrial structure. The mechanism of interdependence of developed markets and that of developing markets are heterogeneous: (1) information capacity and industrial structure similarity have significant impact on the correlations of a developed market with other markets; (2) economic integration drives the correlations of a developing market with other markets; (3) financial integration is important for interdependence among developed markets and that among developing markets, but not for that between developed and developing markets. The EMU has a significant positive impact on stock market integration from 1996 to 2002. This impact increases after the inauguration of the EMU in 1999 but does not increase further after the monetary transition being accomplished in 2002.
Upconversion Nanoparticles: Design, Nanochemistry, and Applications in Theranostics

Applications in Theranostics Guanying Chen,*,†,‡ Hailong Qiu,†,‡ Paras N. Prasad,*,‡,§ and Xiaoyuan Chen* †School of Chemical Engineering and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, Heilongjiang 150001, China ‡Department of Chemistry and the Institute for Lasers, Photonics, and Biophotonics, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, Buffalo, New York 14260, United States Department of Chemistry, Korea University, Seoul 136-701, Korea Laboratory of Molecular Imaging and Nanomedicine, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-2281, United States
Maximum Entropy Closure of Balance Equations for Miniband Semiconductor Superlattices

Charge transport in nanosized electronic systems is described by semiclassical or quantum kinetic equations that are often costly to solve numerically and difficult to reduce systematically to macroscopic balance equations for densities, currents, temperatures and other moments of macroscopic variables. The maximum entropy principle can be used to close the system of equations for the moments but its accuracy or range of validity are not always clear. In this paper, we compare numerical solutions of balance equations for nonlinear electron transport in semiconductor superlattices. The equations have been obtained from Boltzmann–Poisson kinetic equations very far from equilibrium for strong fields, either by the maximum entropy principle or by a systematic Chapman–Enskog perturbation procedure. Both approaches produce the same current-voltage characteristic curve for uniform fields. When the superlattices are DC voltage biased in a region where there are stable time periodic solutions corresponding to recycling and motion of electric field pulses, the differences between the numerical solutions produced by numerically solving both types of balance equations are smaller than the expansion parameter used in the perturbation procedure. These results and possible new research venues are discussed.
A Corpus of Gesture-Annotated Dialogues for Monologue-to-Dialogue Generation from Personal Narratives

Story-telling is a fundamental and prevalent aspect of human social behavior. In the wild, stories are told conversationally in social settings, often as a dialogue and with accompanying gestures and other nonverbal behavior. This paper presents a new corpus, the Story Dialogue with Gestures (SDG) corpus, consisting of 50 personal narratives regenerated as dialogues, complete with annotations of gesture placement and accompanying gesture forms. The corpus includes dialogues generated by human annotators, gesture annotations on the human generated dialogues, videos of story dialogues generated from this representation, video clips of each gesture used in the gesture annotations, and annotations of the original personal narratives with a deep representation of story called a Story Intention Graph. Our long term goal is the automatic generation of story co-tellings as animated dialogues from the Story Intention Graph. We expect this corpus to be a useful resource for researchers interested in natural language generation, intelligent virtual agents, generation of nonverbal behavior, and story and narrative representations.
Temporal comparison and predictors of fish species abundance and richness on undisturbed coral reef patches

Large disturbances can cause rapid degradation of coral reef communities, but what baseline changes in species assemblages occur on undisturbed reefs through time? We surveyed live coral cover, reef fish abundance and fish species richness in 1997 and again in 2007 on 47 fringing patch reefs of varying size and depth at Mersa Bareika, Ras Mohammed National Park, Egypt. No major human or natural disturbance event occurred between these two survey periods in this remote protected area. In the absence of large disturbances, we found that live coral cover, reef fish abundance and fish species richness did not differ in 1997 compared to 2007. Fish abundance and species richness on patches was largely related to the presence of shelters (caves and/or holes), live coral cover and patch size (volume). The presence of the ectoparasite-eating cleaner wrasse, Labroides dimidiatus, was also positively related to fish species richness. Our results underscore the importance of physical reef characteristics, such as patch size and shelter availability, in addition to biotic characteristics, such as live coral cover and cleaner wrasse abundance, in supporting reef fish species richness and abundance through time in a relatively undisturbed and understudied region.
The second homology group of current Lie algebras

This is an old paper put here for archeological purposes. We derive a general formula expressing the second homology of a Lie algebra of the form L\otimes A with coefficients in the trivial module through homology of $L$, cyclic homology of $A$, and other invariants of $L$ and $A$. This is achieved by using the Hopf formula expressing the second homology of a Lie algebra in terms of its presentation. We also derive a similar formula for the associated Lie algebra of the tensor product of two associative algebras.
GeSi infrared photodetectors grown by rapid thermal CVD

GexSi1-x infrared detectors grown by Rapid Thermal CVD are demonstrated. External quantum efficiency of 7% at (lambda) equals 1.32 micrometers and eye-diagram at 1.5 Gbit/s are obtained for Ge.29Si. 71 waveguide pin detectors. It is shown that external quantum efficiency is limited by fiber to waveguide coupling efficiency. These, along with system considerations suggest that with further improvements, such devices can be used in Si- based monolithic optoelectronic receivers.
Presenting identity in a virtual world through avatar appearances

One of the first tasks that people must do when entering a virtual world (VW) is create a virtual representation for themselves. In many VWs, this means creating an avatar that represents some desired appearance, whether a reflection of one's real life self, or a different identity. We investigate the variety of ways in which people create and evolve avatar appearances in the VW of Second Life® (SL) through contextual interviews. Our findings reveal that users balance pressures from the societal norms of SL with the need to create an appearance that matches a desired virtual identity. These identity needs differ based on four types of users---Realistics, Ideals, Fantasies, and Roleplayers---where each presents unique challenges for avatar design. Current research tends to focus on the needs of only one of these user types.
PENGARUH KEPEMIMPINAN TRANSFORMASIONAL TERHADAP BUDAYA ORGANISASI

Bank Mandiri is the biggest state-owned bank in the total asset that were previously performing poorly. One of management strategies to improve performance is by the implementation of organizational culture. Organizational culture is very important in supporting the performance of banks as financial services companies. Implementation of a comprehensive new work culture conducted in 2005 and the process is still running until today. The study aims to examine the influence of transformational leadership on organizational culture. The research sample are 113 credit managers at Bank Mandiri Region VII (Central Java and Yogyakarta), and the data was analysed using regression equations. The results showed that transformational leadership has positive and significant impact on organizational culture. Inspirational motivation dimensions of transformational leadership has a positive and significant influence on the cultural dimensions of involvement, adaptability, and mission. Individual consideration dimension of transformational leadership has a positive and significant influence on the cultural dimensions of consistency.