Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A rising tide lifts all phytoplankton: Growth response of other phytoplankton taxa in diatom‐dominated blooms

Oceanic phytoplankton assemblages composed predominantly of picophytoplankton respond to the onset of favorable growth conditions with diatom‐dominated blooms, the formation of which involves characteristic growth and accumulation responses by both diatoms and the ambient nondiatom community. Contrary to conventional wisdom, both groups of phytoplankton increase in growth rates and absolute abundance, but the biomass increase of the ambient nondiatom assemblage is modest, especially compared to the order of magnitude or more increase of diatom biomass. This enormous proportional increase in diatom biomass has fostered the misconception that diatoms replace the nondiatom taxa by succession as the bloom matures. However, while the relative abundance of the nondiatom taxa decreases dramatically, their absolute biomass increases modestly and the specific growth rate of picophytoplankton in the bloom increases; at the same time, protistan grazing rate also increases, holding the picophytoplankton assemblage in the bloom to a new steady state biomass concentration. Recent evidence for the ubiquity of the additive response pattern in pelagic diatom blooms comes from observations in many oceanic regions where equatorial upwelling, eddy dynamics, tropical instability waves, and oceanic iron‐addition experiments have allowed documentation of the biological response to rapid onset of favorable nutrient, micronutrient or light conditions. The response of diatoms to these favorable conditions is well known; this report offers a more accurate description of the response of the ambient nondiatom taxa to rapid onset of favorable conditions. Realistic representation of the growth dynamics of both the diatoms and nondiatoms in blooms is required to improve forecasting of how future conditions will affect processes that control carbon recycling and export.
An abstract Voiculescu–Brown–Douglas–Fillmore absorption theorem

A common generalization is given of what are often referred to as the Weyl–von Neumann theorems of Voiculescu, Kasparov, Kirchberg, and, more recently, Lin. (These in turn extend a result of Brown, Douglas, and Fillmore.) More precisely, an intrinsic characterization is obtained of those extensions of one separable C∗-algebra by another—the first, i.e., the ideal, assumed to be stable, so that BrownDouglas-Fillmore addition of extensions can be carried out— which are absorbing in a certain natural sense related to this addition, a sense which reduces to that considered by earlier authors if either the ideal or the quotient is nuclear. The specific absorption theorems referred to above can be deduced from this characterization.
Clusters at Half Hubble Time: Galaxy Structure and Colors in RX J0152.7–1357 and MS 1054–03

We study the photometric and structural properties of spectroscopically confirmed members in the two massive X-ray-selected z ≈ 0.83 galaxy clusters MS 1054-03 and RX J0152.7-1357 using three-band mosaic imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys. The samples include 105 and 140 members of RX J0152.7-1357 and MS 1054-03, respectively, to i775 < 24.0. A quantitative classification scheme using Sérsic indices and "bumpiness" (the ratio of the rms residuals to the model mean) was found to correlate well with visual morphological type. The color-magnitude residuals correlate well with the local density, as measured from both galaxy numbers and weak lensing. Weaker correlations are found with cluster radius (the fundamental dependence is on local density). We identify a threshold surface mass density of Σ ≈ 0.1, in units of the critical density, above which there are relatively few blue (star-forming) galaxies. In RX J0152.7-1357, there is an offset of 0.006 ± 0.002 in the mean redshifts of the early- and late-type galaxies, possibly from an infalling foreground association of late-type galaxies. A range of star-formation time-scales are needed to reproduce the galaxy loci in the color-color diagrams. We find rest-frame scatters for the ellipticals of 0.03 ± 0.01 mag in U - B and 0.07 ± 0.01 mag in U - V. The mean colors and their scatters imply ages ~3.5 Gyr, or formation at z ≈ 2.2. Thus, when the universe was half its present age, cluster ellipticals were about half the age of the universe; the same is coincidentally true of the median ages of ellipticals today. However, the most massive local ellipticals have ages ≳10 Gyr, consistent with our results for their likely progenitors at z ≳ 0.8.
The CREB-Binding Protein Inhibitor ICG-001 Suppresses Pancreatic Cancer Growth

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a highly lethal cancer due in part to a lack of highly robust cytotoxic or molecular-based therapies. Recent studies investigating ligand-mediated Wnt/β-catenin signaling have highlighted its importance in pancreatic cancer initiation and progression, as well as its potential as a therapeutic target in PDAC. The small-molecule ICG-001 binds cAMP-responsive element binding (CREB)-binding protein (CBP) to disrupt its interaction with β-catenin and inhibit CBP function as a coactivator of Wnt/β-catenin–mediated transcription. Given its ability to inhibit Wnt/β-catenin–mediated transcription in vitro and in vivo, as well as its efficacy in preclinical models of colorectal cancer and other Wnt-driven diseases, we examined ICG-001 and its potential role as a therapeutic in PDAC. ICG-001 alone significantly inhibited anchorage-dependent and -independent growth of multiple PDAC lines, and augmented in vitro growth inhibition when used in combination with gemcitabine. ICG-001 had only variable modest effects on PDAC apoptosis and instead mediated PDAC growth inhibition primarily through robust induction of G1 cell-cycle arrest. These effects, however, seemed decoupled from its inhibition of Wnt/β-catenin–mediated transcription. DNA microarrays performed on PDAC cells in the context of ICG-001 treatment revealed ICG-001 altered the expression of several genes with well-established roles in DNA replication and cell-cycle progression, including direct actions on SKP2 and CDKN1A. ICG-001 also significantly prolonged survival in an in vivo orthotopic xenograft model of PDAC, indicating ICG-001 or derived compounds that disrupt CBP activity are potentially useful small-molecule therapeutics for pancreatic cancer. Mol Cancer Ther; 13(10); 2303–14. ©2014 AACR.
Explaining and Forecasting Online Auction Prices and Their Dynamics Using Functional Data Analysis

Online auctions have become increasingly popular in recent years, and as a consequence there is a growing body of empirical research on this topic. Most of that research treats data from online auctions as cross-sectional, and consequently ignores the changing dynamics that occur during an auction. In this article we take a different look at online auctions and propose to study an auction's price evolution and associated price dynamics. Specifically, we develop a dynamic forecasting system to predict the price of an ongoing auction. By dynamic, we mean that the model can predict the price of an auction “in progress” and can update its prediction based on newly arriving information. Forecasting price in online auctions is challenging because traditional forecasting methods cannot adequately account for two features of online auction data: (1) the unequal spacing of bids and (2) the changing dynamics of price and bidding throughout the auction. Our dynamic forecasting model accounts for these special features by using modern functional data analysis techniques. Specifically, we estimate an auction's price velocity and acceleration and use these dynamics, together with other auction-related information, to develop a dynamic functional forecasting model. We also use the functional context to systematically describe the empirical regularities of auction dynamics. We apply our method to a novel set of Harry Potter and Microsoft Xbox data and show that our forecasting model outperforms traditional methods.
MISP: The Design and Implementation of a Collaborative Threat Intelligence Sharing Platform

The IT community is confronted with incidents of all kinds and nature, new threats appear on a daily basis. Fighting these security incidents individually is almost impossible. Sharing information about threats among the community has become a key element in incident response to stay on top of the attackers. Reliable information resources, providing credible information, are therefore essential to the IT community, or even at broader scale, to intelligence communities or fraud detection groups. This paper presents the Malware Information Sharing Platform (MISP) and threat sharing project, a trusted platform, that allows the collection and sharing of important indicators of compromise (IoC) of targeted attacks, but also threat information like vulnerabilities or financial indicators used in fraud cases. The aim of MISP is to help in setting up preventive actions and counter-measures used against targeted attacks. Enable detection via collaborative-knowledge-sharing about existing malware and other threats.
Automated Selection of Configurable Web Services

To bring service-oriented architectures to their full potential, automatic service discovery and selection mechanisms are required. In this paper, a service selection component is presented that supports offers providing multiple configurations of a service. The selection algorithm ranks the offered services and their configurations according to the requester’s preferences and thus facilitates personalized selection strategies. In addition, the approach leverages existing Web standards to provide a maximal degree of interoperability between service providers and their customers leading to significant efficiency gains. The approach is implemented prototypically and the performance is evaluated by means of a simulation.
Wage Growth: When the Type of Education Matters more than its Length

Using data from the Swiss Labor Force Survey (1998-2006), we estimate the returns to job tenure, general experience, occupational experience and industrial experience. General labor market experience appears to be the far most important determinant of wage growth, occupational experience having a positive but quantitatively weak impact. If occupational experience is included in the wage equation, the returns to tenure and industrial experience become negligible and nonsignicant. When distinguishing by education type, we observe that individuals with apprenticeship training constitute a special group. Their returns to general experience are lower than for both the lessand the more-educated, even though their education length would place them in between. The type of education thus matters more than education length in the determination of wage growth.
ISOCAM Observations of Galactic Globular Clusters: Mass Loss along the Red Giant Branch

Deep images in the 10 μm spectral region have been obtained for five massive Galactic globular clusters, NGC 104 (=47 Tuc), NGC 362, NGC 5139 (=ω Cen), NGC 6388, NGC 7078 (=M15), and NGC 6715 (=M54) in the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal using the ISOCAM on board the Infrared Space Observatory in 1997. A significant sample of bright giants have an ISOCAM counterpart, but only fewer than 20% of these have a strong mid-IR excess indicative of dusty circumstellar envelopes. From a combined physical and statistical analysis we derive mass-loss rates and frequency. We find that (1) significant mass loss occurs only at the very end of the Red Giant Branch evolutionary stage and is episodic, (2) the modulation timescales must be greater than a few decades and less than a million years, and (3) mass-loss occurrence does not show a crucial dependence on the cluster metallicity.
Microinfusion of Pituitary Adenylate Cyclase-Activating Polypeptide into the Central Nucleus of Amygdala of the Rat Produces a Shift from an Active to Passive Mode of Coping in the Shock-Probe Fear/Defensive Burying Test

High concentrations of pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) nerve fibers are present in the central nucleus of amygdala (CeA), a brain region implicated in the control of fear-related behavior. This study evaluated PACAPergic modulation of fear responses at the CeA in male Sprague-Dawley rats. PACAP (50–100 pmol) microinfusion via intra-CeA cannulae produced increases in immobility and time the rats spent withdrawn into a corner opposite to the electrified probe compared to controls in the shock-probe fear/defensive burying test. Shock-probe burying and exploration, numbers of shocks received, locomotion distance, and velocity were all reduced by intra-CeA PACAP injection. Further, intra-CeA PACAP effects were manifested only when the animals were challenged by shock, as intra-CeA PACAP injections did not cause significant changes in the behaviors of unshocked rats. Thus, intra-CeA administration of PACAP produces a distinct reorganization of stress-coping behaviors from active (burying) to passive modes, such as withdrawal and immobility. These findings are potentially significant toward enhancing our understanding of the involvement of PACAP and the CeA in the neural basis of fear and anxiety.
The Impact of Length of the School Year on Student Performance and Earnings: Evidence from the German Short School Years

This paper investigates how changing the length of school year, leaving the basic curriculum unchanged, affects learning and subsequent earnings. I use variation introduced by the West-German short school years in 1966-67, which exposed some students to a total of about two thirds of a year less of schooling while enrolled. I show that the short school years led indeed to shorter schooling for affected students. Using comparisons across cohorts, states, and secondary school tracks, I find that the short school years increased grade repetition in primary school, but had no adverse effect on the number of students attending the highest secondary school track or earnings later in life. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Voltage, stability and diffusion barrier differences between sodium-ion and lithium-ion intercalation materials

To evaluate the potential of Na-ion batteries, we contrast in this work the difference between Na-ion and Li-ion based intercalation chemistries in terms of three key battery properties—voltage, phase stability and diffusion barriers. The compounds investigated comprise the layered AMO2 and AMS2 structures, the olivine and maricite AMPO4 structures, and the NASICON A3V2(PO4)3 structures. The calculated Na voltages for the compounds investigated are 0.18–0.57 V lower than that of the corresponding Li voltages, in agreement with previous experimental data. We believe the observed lower voltages for Na compounds are predominantly a cathodic effect related to the much smaller energy gain from inserting Na into the host structure compared to inserting Li. We also found a relatively strong dependence of battery properties on structural features. In general, the difference between the Na and Li voltage of the same structure, DVNa–Li, is less negative for the maricite structures preferred by Na, and more negative for the olivine structures preferred by Li. The layered compounds have the most negative DVNa–Li. In terms of phase stability, we found that open structures, such as the layered and NASICON structures, that are better able to accommodate the larger Na+ ion generally have both Na and Li versions of the same compound. For the close-packed AMPO4 structures, our results show that Na generally prefers the maricite structure, while Li prefers the olivine structure, in agreement with previous experimental work. We also found surprising evidence that the barriers for Na+ migration can potentially be lower than that for Li+ migration in the layered structures. Overall, our findings indicate that Na-ion systems can be competitive with Li-ion systems.
Biodegradation of three different collagen membranes in the rat calvarium: a comparative study.

BACKGROUND Collagen barrier membranes are commonly applied in periodontal and bone-regenerative procedures. Membranes differ in their resorption pattern following implantation, thus influencing clinical outcome. The purpose of this study was to quantitatively evaluate the biodegradation of three different commercially available collagen membranes. METHODS Collagen membranes were cut into 5-mm-diameter disks and labeled with aminohexanoyl-biotin-N-hydroxy-succinimide ester. One membrane disk of each type (non-cross-linked [NCL], glutaraldehyde cross-linked [GCL], and ribose cross-linked [RCL]) was implanted on the calvaria of 20 Wistar rats. Block sections were retrieved after 2 days (baseline, two animals), 14 days (10 animals), or 28 days (eight animals). Decalcified histologic sections were stained with streptavidin horseradish peroxidase. Residual membrane thickness and area were measured. Statistical analysis consisted of analysis of variance (ANOVA) with repeated measures. RESULTS Statistically significant differences in the amount of residual membrane material were recorded within each membrane (among different time points) and among different membranes at the same time points (P <0.001). At 28 days, the least amount of residual collagen area, expressed as the percentage of baseline, was observed in the NCL group (13.9% +/- 10.25%), followed by the GCL (24.7% +/- 35.11%) and RCL (91.3% +/- 10.35%) groups. Residual membrane thickness, expressed as the percentage of baseline thickness, presented a similar pattern (31% +/- 16.55%, 37% +/- 41.90%, and 94.1% +/- 12.22%, respectively). ANOVA with repeated measures showed a significant interaction between membranes and time (P <0.001). CONCLUSIONS The tested membranes differed in their degradation patterns and collagen contents. Membranes should be chosen for each clinical case according to the desired biodegradation characteristics.
Existence of Engel structures

We develop a construction of Engel structures on 4-manifolds based on decompositions of manifolds into round handles. This allows us to show that all parallelizable 4-manifolds admit an Engel structure. We also show that, given two Engel manifolds M1,M2 satisfying a certain condition on the characteristic foliations, there is an Engel structure on M1#M2#(S2 ×S2) which is closely related to the original Engel structures.
Penalized Normal Likelihood and Ridge Regularization of Correlation and Covariance Matrices

High dimensionality causes problems in various areas of statistics. A particular situation that rarely has been considered is the testing of hypotheses about multivariate regression models in which the dimension of the multivariate response is large. In this article a ridge regularization approach is proposed in which either the covariance or the correlation matrix is regularized to ensure nonsingularity irrespective of the dimensionality of the data. It is shown that the proposed approach can be derived through a penalized likelihood approach, which suggests cross-validation of the likelihood function as a natural approach for estimation of the ridge parameter. Useful properties of this likelihood estimator are derived, discussed, and demonstrated by simulation. For a class of test statistics commonly used in multivariate analysis, the proposed regularization approach is compared with some obvious alternative regularization approaches using generalized inverse and data reduction through principal components analysis. Essentially, the approaches considered differ in how they shrink eigenvalues of sample covariance and correlation matrices. This leads to predictable differences in power properties when comparing the use of different regularization approaches, as demonstrated by simulation. The proposed ridge approach has relatively good power compared with the alternatives considered. In particular, a generalized inverse is shown to perform poorly and cannot be recommended in practice. Finally, the proposed approach is used in analysis of data on macroinvertebrate biomasses that have been classified to species.
Regions Matter: How Localized Social Capital Affects Innovation and External Knowledge Acquisition

To introduce new products, firms often use knowledge from other organizations. Drawing on social capital theory and the relational view of the firm, we argue that geographically localized social capital affects a firm's ability to innovate through various external channels. Combining data on social capital at the regional level, with a large-scale data set of the innovative activities of a representative sample of 2,413 Italian manufacturing firms from 21 regions, and controlling for a large set of firm and regional characteristics, we find that being located in a region characterized by a high level of social capital leads to a higher propensity to innovate. We find also that being located in an area characterized by a high degree of localized social capital is complementary to firms' investments in internal research and development (R&D) and that such a location positively moderates the effectiveness of externally acquired R&D on the propensity to innovate.
Activation of Anterior Cingulate Cortex Extracellular Signal-Regulated Kinase-1 and -2 (ERK1/2) Regulates Acetic Acid-Induced, Pain-Related Anxiety in Adult Female Mice

In visceral pain, anxiety and pain occur simultaneously, but the etiogenesis of this effect is not yet well-described. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is known to be associated with the affective response to noxious stimuli. The aim of the current study is to define the role of ACC extracellular signal-regulated (ERK)-1 and-2 (ERK1/2) activity in the development of pain-related anxiety/depression and the nocifensive response in acetic acid (AA)-elicited visceral pain. The model of visceral pain was created by intraperitoneal (ip) injection of AA to female Kunming mice. We found that AA injection resulted in a dynamic, bilateral ERK1/2 activation pattern in the ACC. Inhibition of ERK1/2 activation 2 hr after AA injection by subcutaneous (sc) injection of the mitogen-activating extracellular kinase (MEK) inhibitor, SL327, had no effect on the nocifensive responses, but did attenuate anxiety-like behavior, as determined by elevated plus-maze and open-field testing results. These data suggest that AA-induced visceral pain activates expression of ACC ERK1/2, which regulates visceral pain-related anxiety, but not the nocifensive response.
Structural insights into Paf1 complex assembly and histone binding

The highly conserved Paf1 complex (PAF1C) plays critical roles in RNA polymerase II transcription elongation and in the regulation of histone modifications. It has also been implicated in other diverse cellular activities, including posttranscriptional events, embryonic development and cell survival and maintenance of embryonic stem cell identity. Here, we report the structure of the human Paf1/Leo1 subcomplex within PAF1C. The overall structure reveals that the Paf1 and Leo1 subunits form a tightly associated heterodimer through antiparallel beta-sheet interactions. Detailed biochemical experiments indicate that Leo1 binds to PAF1C through Paf1 and that the Ctr9 subunit is the key scaffold protein in assembling PAF1C. Furthermore, we show that the Paf1/Leo1 heterodimer is necessary for its binding to histone H3, the histone octamer, and nucleosome in vitro. Our results shed light on the PAF1C assembly process and substrate recognition during various PAF1C-coordinated histone modifications.