Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of the Permanence of Land Use Change Induced by Payments for Environmental Services in Quindío, Colombia

The effectiveness of conservation interventions such as Payments for Environmental Services (PES) is often evaluated—if it is evaluated at all—only at the completion of the intervention. Since gains achieved by the intervention may be lost after it ends, even apparently successful interventions may not result in long-term conservation benefits, a problem known as that of permanence. This paper uses a unique dataset to examine the permanence of land use change induced by a short-term, asset-building PES program implemented in Quindío, Colombia, between 2003 and 2008. This the first PES program to have a control group for comparison. Under this program, PES had been found to have a positive and highly significant impact on land use. To assess the long-term permanence of these changes, both PES recipients and control households were re-surveyed in 2011, four years after the last payment was made. We find that the land use changes that had been induced by PES were broadly sustained in intervening years, with minor differences across specific practices and sub-groups of participants, indicating that these changes were in fact permanent. The patterns of change in the period after the PES program was completed also help better understand the reasons for the program’s success. These results suggest that, at least in the case of productive land uses such as silvopastoral practices under conditions such as those at the study site, asset-building PES programs can be effective at encouraging land owners to adopt environmentally-beneficial land management practices and that the benefits will persist after payments cease.
Noise-mean relationship in mutated promoters Material

Gene expression depends on the frequency by transcription events (burst frequency), and on the number of mRNA molecules made per event (burst size). Both processes are encoded in the promoter sequence, yet their relative dependence on different mutation types is poorly understood. Theory suggests that burst size and burst frequency can be distinguished by monitoring the stochastic variation (noise) in gene expression: Increasing burst size will increase mean expression without changing noise, while increasing burst frequency will increases mean expression and decrease noise. To reveal principles by which promoter sequence regulates burst size and burst frequency, we randomly mutated twenty-two yeast promoters chosen to span a range of expression and noise levels, generating libraries of hundreds of sequence variants. In each library, mean expression (m) and noise (coefficient of variation, varied together, defining a scaling curve: b/m+ext . This relation is expected if sequence mutations modulate burst frequency primarily. The estimated burst size (b) differed between promoters, being higher in promoter containing a TATA box and lacking a nucleosome-free region. The rare variants that significantly decreased b were fully explained by mutations in the TATA box, or by an insertion of an out-of-frame translation start site. When subjecting TATA-mutated promoters to a second round of mutagenesis, the noise-mean relationship defined a shifted scaling curve, consistent with a lower burst size. These TATA box mutations also modulated the responsiveness of gene expression to changing conditions. Our results suggest that burst size is a promoter-specific property that is relatively robust to sequence mutations but is strongly dependent on the interaction between the TATA box and promoter nucleosomes. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press on November 5, 2012 Published by genome.cshlp. org Downloaded from
The Komlos Conjecture Holds for Vector Colorings

The Komlos conjecture in discrepancy theory states that for some constant K and for any m by n matrix A whose columns lie in the unit ball there exists a +/- 1 vector x such that the infinity norm of Ax is bounded above by K. This conjecture also implies the Beck-Fiala conjecture on the discrepancy of bounded degree hypergraphs. Here we prove a natural relaxation of the Komlos conjecture: if the columns of A are assigned unit real vectors rather than +/- 1 then the Komlos conjecture holds with K=1. Our result rules out the possibility of a counterexample to the conjecture based on semidefinite programming. It also opens the way to proving tighter efficient (polynomial-time computable) upper bounds for the conjecture using semidefinite programming techniques.
Benchmarking best manufacturing practices: A study into four sectors of Turkish industry

Reports on a benchmarking study conducted to quantify how well companies operating in various sectors of Turkish industry match up to best practice, both in the practices they adopt and in the operational outcomes that result, and to test the hypothesis that the closer a company is to best practice, the more likely it is for that company to achieve higher business performance. The survey conducted in 1997 and 1998 included 82 companies from the Turkish electronics, cement, automotive sectors and part and component suppliers to the appliance industry. For data gathering, employs the Competitive Strategies and Best Practices Benchmarking Questionnaire, supported by some follow‐up interviews and one‐day site visits. Classifies two small groups of companies as leaders and laggers, depending on how close they were to best practice. Shows that the leaders have performed better than the laggers in adopting best manufacturing practices and in the achievement of high performance levels. The leaders also have achie.
Income Heterogeneity and Environmental Kuznets Curve in Africa

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis asserts that pollution levels rises as a country develops, but reaches a certain threshold where pollution begins to fall with increasing income. In EKC analysis, the relationship between environmental degradation and income is usually expressed as a quadratic function with turning point occurring at a maximum pollution level. The study seeks to examine the pattern and nature of EKC in Africa and major income groups according to World Bank classification comprising low income, lower middle income and upper middle income in Africa. In ensuring the robustness of our study; the paper proceeded by ascertaining the nature of EKC in all fifty-three countries of Africa in order to confirm the results obtained from basic and augmented EKC model. The study could not validate EKC hypothesis in Africa (combined), low income and upper middle income but empirical and analytical evidences supports the existence of EKC in lower middle income countries. Likewise, evidences from the robustness checks confirmed the findings from the basic and augmented EKC model. The study could not attain a reasonable turning point as there are evidences that Africa could be turning on the EKC at lower levels of income. Also, there is need to strengthen institutions in order to enforce policies that prohibits environmental pollution and ensure pro-poor development.
Finding Dominating Set from Verbal Contextual Graph for Personalized Search in Folksonomy

With the development of the Internet, user-generated data has been growing tremendously in Web 2.0 era. Facing such a big volume of resources in folksonomy, people need a method of fast exploration and indexing to find their demanded data. To achieve this goal, contextual information is indispensable and valuable to understand user preference and purpose. In sociolinguistics, context can be mainly categorized as verbal context and social context. Comparing with verbal context, social context not only requires domain knowledge to pre-define contextual attributes but also acquires additional data from users. However, there is no research of addressing irrelevant contextual factors for verbal context model so far. The dominating set from verbal context proposed in this paper is to fill this blank. We present the verbal context in folksonomy to capture the user intention, and propose a dominating set discovering method for this verbal context model to prune the irrelevant contextual factors and keep the major characteristics at the same time. Furthermore, the experiments, which are conducted on a public data set, show that the proposed method gives convincing results.
Carrier signal based sensorless control of electrically excited synchronous machines at standstill and low speed using the rotor winding as a receiver

This paper presents a new carrier signal based approach for motion sensorless control of electrically excited synchronous machines. In the case of permanent magnet synchronous machines sensorless control at standstill and low speed is mostly done by injecting a high-frequency voltage and evaluating the resulting current response. Hence, the stator is used as the transmitter and as the receiver of the carrier signal. The major drawback is that a magnetic saliency is mandatory. In the case of electrically excited synchronous machines the rotor voltage serves as an additional input to the system and the resulting field current as an additional, easy to measure, state variable. The presented approach makes use of this fact and uses the field winding as the receiver of a carrier signal, which is injected into the stator winding. Like this no magnetic saliency is mandatory in order to track the position. The new approach is compared to a well-known carrier signal based method, in which the stator works as the transmitter and as the receiver of the carrier signal. In this case a magnetic saliency is mandatory which differs from the saliency necessary for permanent magnet synchronous machines. The applicability of both approaches is proven in experiments.
Mergers of accreting stellar-mass black holes

We present post-Newtonian $N$-body simulations on mergers of accreting stellar-mass black holes (BHs), where such general relativistic effects as the pericenter shift and gravitational wave (GW) emission are taken into consideration. The attention is concentrated on the effects of the dynamical friction and the Hoyle-Lyttleton mass accretion by ambient gas. We consider a system composed of ten BHs with initial mass of $30~M_\odot$. As a result, we show that mergers of accreting stellar-mass BHs are classified into four types: a gas drag-driven, an interplay-driven, a three body-driven, or an accretion-driven merger. We find that BH mergers proceed before significant mass accretion, even if the accretion rate is $\sim10$ Eddington accretion rate, and then all BHs can merge into one heavy BH. Using the simulation results for a wide range of parameters, we derive a critical accretion rate ($\dot{m}_{\rm c}$), below which the BH growth is promoted faster by mergers. Also, it is found that the effect of the recoil by the GW emission can reduce $\dot{m}_{\rm c}$ especially in gas number density higher than $10^8~{\rm cm}^{-3}$, and enhance the escape probability of merged BHs. Very recently, a gravitational wave event, GW150914, as a result of the merger of a $\sim 30~M_\odot$ BH binary has been detected (Abbott et al. 2016). Based on the present simulations, the BH merger in GW150914 is likely to be driven by three-body encounters accompanied by a few $M_\odot$ of gas accretion, in high-density environments like dense interstellar clouds or galactic nuclei.
An online em algorithm in hidden (semi-)Markov models for audio segmentation and clustering

Audio segmentation is an essential problem in many audio signal processing tasks, which tries to segment an audio signal into homogeneous chunks. Rather than separately finding change points and computing similarities between segments, we focus on joint segmentation and clustering, using the framework of hidden Markov and semi-Markov models. We introduce a new incremental EM algorithm for hidden Markov models (HMMs) and show that it compares favorably to existing online EM algorithms for HMMs. We present results for real-time segmentation of musical notes and acoustic scenes.
The Role of EI as a Mediator between Leadership Styles and its Effectiveness among the Employees of Banking Sector

The current research study focus on investigating the model of leadership, its effectiveness and emotional intelligence level among the banking sector employees proposed by (Badrui-Harun, Zainol, Amar and Sheri.,2016). In order to get appropriate response data was obtained from banking sector employees located in Islamabad through random sampling technique. Total 600 questionnaires were distributed among the selected head office employees of different banks. After removing missing item constructs finally 390 questionnaires were used for further analysis. In order to validate the model (Barron and Kenny.1986) mediational technique through regression analysis was performed. Results indicate that direct relationship between (Transformational and Transactional Leadership) with effectiveness (Dependent Variable) and Emotional Intelligence (Mediating Variable) was significant. That leads to acceptance of the hypothesis relating direct relationship among these variable. In the next stage mediating variables findings show that emotional intelligence fully mediate the relationship between Transformational leadership style and leader’s effectiveness, while EI partially mediate the relationship between Transactional Leadership and leader’s effectiveness. Result indicate that emotional intelligence act as a good mediator between transformational leadership and leader effectiveness.
Open Access Research Article Prediction of Cpg-island Function: Cpg Clustering vs. Sliding-window Methods

article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Unmethylated stretches of CpG dinucleotides (CpG islands) are an outstanding property of mammal genomes. Conventionally, these regions are detected by sliding window approaches using %G + C, CpG observed/ expected ratio and length thresholds as main parameters. Recently, clustering methods directly detect clusters of CpG dinucleotides as a statistical property of the genome sequence. Results: We compare sliding-window to clustering (i.e. CpGcluster) predictions by applying new ways to detect putative functionality of CpG islands. Analyzing the co-localization with several genomic regions as a function of window size vs. statistical significance (p-value), CpGcluster shows a higher overlap with promoter regions and highly conserved elements, at the same time showing less overlap with Alu retrotransposons. The major difference in the prediction was found for short islands (CpG islets), often exclusively predicted by CpGcluster. Many of these islets seem to be functional, as they are unmethylated, highly conserved and/or located within the promoter region. Finally, we show that window-based islands can spuriously overlap several, differentially regulated promoters as well as different methylation domains, which might indicate a wrong merge of several CpG islands into a single, very long island. The shorter CpGcluster islands seem to be much more specific when concerning the overlap with alternative transcription start sites or the detection of homogenous methylation domains. Conclusions: The main difference between sliding-window approaches and clustering methods is the length of the predicted islands. Short islands, often differentially methylated, are almost exclusively predicted by CpGcluster. This suggests that CpGcluster may be the algorithm of choice to explore the function of these short, but putatively functional CpG islands. Background The methylation of CpG dinucleotides is an important epigenetic modification of DNA, required in mammals for embryonic development, genomic imprinting and X-chromosome inactivation [1-3]. Around 80% of all CpG dinucleotides are methylated in mammal genomes. The exceptions are short stretches of CpG dinucleotides (CpG islands or CGIs), which are predominantly hypomethy-lated in healthy tissues [4,5]. CGIs are thought to be predominantly located in the promoter region of genes; around 70% of all genes have a CGI overlapping its pro
Independent Aging with the Help of Smart Technology: Investigating the Acceptance of Ambient Assisted Living Technologies

Who takes care of our older adults? According to the European Union, smart technologies that support independent living and active aging, introduced as ‘Ambient Assisted Living’ (AAL), are the future for our aging population. Promises of AAL include saving long-term care costs, improving the quality of care, unburdening family caregivers, and increasing the older adults’ independence and overall quality of life. While the policy enthusiasm for AAL technology is high, it is unclear if the potential users of AAL are willing to embrace AAL technologies in their daily lives. This dissertation addressed this issue by focusing on the perspective of older adults and their caregivers. Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches, we developed a comprehensive and theoretically grounded understanding of how and why users perceive AAL technologies in a certain way. Important factors that drive or hinder the acceptance were identified. These insights resulted in a model of AAL acceptance that was validated in a representative sample (n = 1296) of the Dutch older adult population. This dissertation contributes to a more user-driven approach in AAL research and development and has important implications for researchers, developers and policy makers alike. We hope that our results will guide future research efforts, design and policy directions in the AAL field.
The way the definite determiner affects quantifiers in Basque

Based on Basque data (and in line with Etxeberria & Giannakidou 2010, to appear), this paper argues that the domain for quantifiers in certain languages is restricted overtly by a definite determiner (D). This strategy of domain restriction via D--DDR--happens by applying DDR to the nominal argument, but DDR can also apply to the Q-det itself, in which case it forms a constituent with it. In both cases, DDR is a type preserving function, i.e. a modifier, and supplies the contextual C variable. This analysis provides support for the program that domain restriction is syntactically realized, but an important refinement is proposed: domain restriction can affect the Q-det itself (pace Stanley 2002), and in fact quite systematically in certain languages. The Qdet that is affected by DDR is typically a strong one. So-called weak quantifiers cannot be contextually restricted by DDR. Crucially in Basque, D only appears with strong quantifiers.
A Chandra observation of the H2O megamaser IC 2560

A short Chandra ACIS-S observation of the Seyfert 2 galaxy IC 2560, which hosts a luminous nuclear water megamaser, shows (1) that the X-ray emission is extended; (2) that the X-ray spectrum displays emission features in the soft (E < 2 keV) X-ray band (this is the major component of the extended emission); and (3) a very strong (EW ∼ 3.6 keV) iron Ka line at 6.4 keV on a flat continuum. This last feature clearly indicates that the X-ray source is hidden behind Compton-thick obscuration, so that the intrinsic hard X-ray luminosity must be much higher than that observed, probably close to ∼3 x 10 4 2 erg s - 1 . We briefly discuss the implications for powering of the maser emission and the central source.
Supply‐Chain Research Opportunities with the Poor as Suppliers or Distributors in Developing Countries

Many social enterprises and some companies have developed supply chains with the poor as suppliers or distributors to alleviate poverty and to create revenues for themselves. Such supply chains have created new research opportunities because they raise issues fundamentally different from those examined in the existing operations management literature. We report this phenomenon of supply chains with the poor as suppliers or distributors in developing countries and identify operations management (OM) research opportunities. We also provide some stylized models to serve as potential seeds for modeling‐based research in this area.
40 Is the New 65? Older Adults and Niche Targeting Strategies in the Online Dating Industry

Niche dating sites have become a popular trend in the online dating industry; yet, little is known about the specialization strategies these sites use to cater to their users’ needs. Moreover, previous research alludes to the idea that many of these sites may be engaging in pseudo-individualization —a deceptive technique that creates an illusion of specialization. This study focuses on niche dating sites for older adults, one of the fastest growing niches in online dating. Through a qualitative content analysis and close reading of older-adult dating sites, I seek to determine how and to what extent online dating sites that target older adults actually customize their services to benefit this population. Three key findings emerge: (1) the use of mass segmentation, a strategy that combines elements of both mass marketing and market segmentation; (2) a strategic broadening of the boundaries of the older-adult niche; and (3) the use of deceptive advertising to attract users. These findings suggest that older-adult dating sites are, in fact, engaging in pseudo-individualization. They also highlight some of the unique aspects of online media that facilitate this practice. Implications for both online daters and site producers are discussed.
Deficiency of a Glycogen Synthase-associated Protein, Epm2aip1, Causes Decreased Glycogen Synthesis and Hepatic Insulin Resistance*

Background: Impaired activation of glycogen synthesis is a major component of insulin resistance. Results: We identified a protein, Epm2aip1, that associates with glycogen synthase (GS) and whose absence impairs allosteric activation of GS and causes hepatic insulin resistance. Conclusion: Epm2aip1 is a modulator of GS activity under insulin control. Significance: This study uncovers a novel component of glycogen regulation and hepatic insulin resistance. Glycogen synthesis is a major component of the insulin response, and defective glycogen synthesis is a major portion of insulin resistance. Insulin regulates glycogen synthase (GS) through incompletely defined pathways that activate the enzyme through dephosphorylation and, more potently, allosteric activation. We identify Epm2aip1 as a GS-associated protein. We show that the absence of Epm2aip1 in mice impairs allosteric activation of GS by glucose 6-phosphate, decreases hepatic glycogen synthesis, increases liver fat, causes hepatic insulin resistance, and protects against age-related obesity. Our work identifies a novel GS-associated GS activity-modulating component of insulin resistance.