Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Molecular phylogeny of hybridizing species from the genus Spartina Schreb. (Poaceae).

Interspecific hybridization events have been reported in the genus Spartina Schreb. (Poaceae), involving the east American species Spartina alterniflora, and including either introgression (e.g., with the western American Spartina foliosa) or allopolyploid speciation (e.g., with the Euro-African Spartina maritima). Molecular phylogenetic analysis of the genus has been undertaken in order to understand phylogenetic relationships and genetic divergence among these hybridizing species. Twelve Spartina species have been sequenced for two nuclear DNA regions (ITS of ribosomal DNA, and part of the Waxy gene) and one chloroplast DNA spacer (trnT-trnL). Separate and conditional combined phylogenetic analyses using Cynodon dactylon as the outgroup have been conducted. Spartina is composed of two lineages. The first clade includes all hexaploid species: the Euro-African S. maritima (2n = 60), the East-American S. alterniflora (2n = 62) and the West-American S. foliosa (2n = 60). Spartina alterniflora appears as a closely related sister species to S. foliosa. Although belonging to the same lineage, Spartina maritima appears consistently more genetically differentiated from S. alterniflora than S. foliosa. The tetraploid species S. argentinensis (2n = 40) is placed at the base of this first clade according to the Waxy data, but its position is not well resolved by the other sequences. The second well-supported main lineage within genus Spartina includes the other tetraploid American species. Significant incongruence has been encountered between the waxy based tree and both the ITS and trnT-trnL trees concerning the position of S. densiflora, suggesting a possible reticulate evolution for this species. The results agree with hybridization patterns occurring in Spartina: introgression involving closely related species (S. alterniflora and S. foliosa) on one hand, and alloploid speciation involving more differentiated species (S. alterniflora and S. maritima) on the other hand.
Reverse Curriculum Generation for Reinforcement Learning

Many relevant tasks require an agent to reach a certain state, or to manipulate objects into a desired configuration. For example, we might want a robot to align and assemble a gear onto an axle or insert and turn a key in a lock. These goal-oriented tasks present a considerable challenge for reinforcement learning, since their natural reward function is sparse and prohibitive amounts of exploration are required to reach the goal and receive some learning signal. Past approaches tackle these problems by exploiting expert demonstrations or by manually designing a task-specific reward shaping function to guide the learning agent. Instead, we propose a method to learn these tasks without requiring any prior knowledge other than obtaining a single state in which the task is achieved. The robot is trained in reverse, gradually learning to reach the goal from a set of start states increasingly far from the goal. Our method automatically generates a curriculum of start states that adapts to the agent's performance, leading to efficient training on goal-oriented tasks. We demonstrate our approach on difficult simulated navigation and fine-grained manipulation problems, not solvable by state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods.
1 Dispersion of Beliefs and Market Volatility in the Foreign Exchange Market

This paper examines the existence of heterogeneous expectations among market participants in the foreign exchange market by using a data set of individual market expectations for the major currencies, and approaches the formation of expectations from a bounded-rationality approach. We find that that there are distinct periods of high and low dispersion in which market participants disagree as to what will happen to the future level of the exchange rates. Furthermore, we document that the frequency at which extremist differences in expectations among market participants occurs, is higher than that what would occur under normality. Dispersion of beliefs seems to occur as a result of the combined effects of market participants holding individual expectations and attaching different weights on various elements from their information sets. Finally, we find that market volatility Granger-causes trader heterogeneity.
Mobile Multi-Food Recognition Using Deep Learning

In this article, we propose a mobile food recognition system that uses the picture of the food, taken by the user’s mobile device, to recognize multiple food items in the same meal, such as steak and potatoes on the same plate, to estimate the calorie and nutrition of the meal. To speed up and make the process more accurate, the user is asked to quickly identify the general area of the food by drawing a bounding circle on the food picture by touching the screen. The system then uses image processing and computational intelligence for food item recognition. The advantage of recognizing items, instead of the whole meal, is that the system can be trained with only single item food images. At the training stage, we first use region proposal algorithms to generate candidate regions and extract the convolutional neural network (CNN) features of all regions. Second, we perform region mining to select positive regions for each food category using maximum cover by our proposed submodular optimization method. At the testing stage, we first generate a set of candidate regions. For each region, a classification score is computed based on its extracted CNN features and predicted food names of the selected regions. Since fast response is one of the important parameters for the user who wants to eat the meal, certain heavy computational parts of the application are offloaded to the cloud. Hence, the processes of food recognition and calorie estimation are performed in cloud server. Our experiments, conducted with the FooDD dataset, show an average recall rate of 90.98%, precision rate of 93.05%, and accuracy of 94.11% compared to 50.8% to 88% accuracy of other existing food recognition systems.
Piperine, a Pungent Alkaloid from Black Pepper, Inhibits B Lymphocyte Activation and Effector Functions

Piperine has several well‐documented anti‐inflammatory properties; however, little is known regarding its effect on humoral immunity. In this study, we describe the immunosuppressive effect of piperine on B lymphocytes, which are integral to the humoral immune response. Mouse B cells were cultured in the absence or presence of non‐cytotoxic concentrations (25, 50, and 100 μM) of piperine during T‐dependent or T‐independent stimulation. Piperine inhibited B cell proliferation by causing G0/G1 phase cell cycle arrest in association with reduced expression of cyclin D2 and D3. The inhibitory effect of piperine was not mediated through transient receptor potential vanilloid‐1 ion channel (TRPV1) because piperine also inhibited the proliferation of B cells from TRPV1‐deficient mice. Expression of class II major histocompatibility complex molecules and costimulatory CD40 and CD86 on B lymphocytes was reduced in the presence of piperine, as was B cell‐mediated antigen presentation to syngeneic T cells. In addition, piperine inhibited B cell synthesis of interleukin (IL)‐6 and IL‐10 cytokines, as well as IgM, IgG2b, and IgG3 immunoglobulins. The inhibitory effect of piperine on B lymphocyte activation and effector function warrants further investigation for possible application in the treatment of pathologies related to inappropriate humoral immune responses. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
When subordinates feel supported by managers: investigating the relationships between support, trust, commitment and outcomes

The purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between managers and their subordinates. The framework of social exchange theory was used in order to examine whether subordinates demonstrate effort at work and remain in exchange of support by their manager. Using a sample of employees (N = 704) working for a provincial government in Canada, the results indicate that perceived supervisor support, trust in the supervisor reduce the likelihood that a public sector employee will leave their job or procrastinate at work, through commitment to their supervisor. The results are discussed in the light of public management research. Points for practitioners The ability of managers to create a healthy work environment based on the capacity to recognize the efforts of their subordinates requires the professionalization of the role by providing managers with greater autonomy to manage the resources at their disposal.
A Novel Murine Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Model and the Pathogenic Role of MicroRNA-21

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a multi-pathogenesis chronic lung disease. The mechanisms underlying COPD have not been adequately illustrated. Many reseachers argue that microRNAs (miRs) could play a crucial role in COPD. The classic animal model of COPD is both time consuming and costly. This study proposes a novel mice COPD model and explores the role of miR-21 in COPD. A total of 50 wide-type (WT) C57BL/6 mice were separated into five euqlly-sized groups—(1) control group (CG), (2) the novel combined method group (NCM, cigarette smoke (CS) exposure for 28 days combined with cigarette smoke extract (CSE) intraperitoneal injection), (3) the short-term CS exposure group (SCSE, CS exposure for 28 days), (4) the CSE intraperitoneal injection group (CSEII, 28 days CSE intraperitoneal injection), and (5) the long-term CS exposure group (LCSE, CS exposure). The body weight gain of mice were recorded and lung function tested once the modeling was done. The pathological changes and the inflammation level by hematoxylin eosin (H&E) staining and immunohistochemical staining (IHS) on the lung tissue sections were also evaluated. The level of miR-21 in the mice lungs of the mice across all groups was detected by RT-qPCR and the effects of miR-21 knock-down in modeled mice were observed. The mice in LCSE and NCM exhibited the most severe inflammation levels and pathological and pathophysiological changes; while the changes for the mice in SCSE and CSEII were less, they remained more severe than the mice in the CG. The level of miR-21 was found to be negatively correlated with lung functions. Moreover, knocking miR-21 down from the modeled mice, ameliorated all those tested COPD-related changes. Our novel modeling method detected virtually the same changes as those detected in the classic method in WT mice, but in less time and cost. Further, it was determined that the level of miR-21 in the lungs could be an indicator of COPD severity and blocking functions of miR-21 could be a potential treatment for early stage COPD.
Global Protein Expression Profiling Underlines Reciprocal Regulation of Caveolin 1 and Endothelial Nitric Oxide Synthase Expression in Ovariectomized Sheep Uterine Artery by Estrogen/Progesterone Replacement Therapy1

Abstract Ovariectomized (OVX) ewes were assigned to receive vehicle, progesterone (P4, 0.9-g controlled internal drug release vaginal implants), estradiol-17β (E2, 5 μg/kg bolus + 6 μg kg−1 day−1), or P4 + E2 for 10 days (n = 3/group). Uterine artery endothelial proteins were mechanically isolated on Day 10. The samples were used for protein expression profiling by the Ciphergen Proteinchip system and immunoblotting analysis of endothelial nitric oxide synthase (NOS3, also termed eNOS) and caveolin 1. Uterine artery rings were cut and analyzed by immunohistochemistry to localize NOS3 and caveolin 1 expression. With the use of the IMAC3 protein chip with loading as little as 2 μg protein/sample, many protein peaks could be detected. Compared to vehicle controls, a ∼133.1-kDa protein was identified to be upregulated by 2- to 4-fold in OVX ewes receiving E2, P4, and their combination, whereas a ∼22.6-kDa protein was downregulated by 2- to 4-fold in OVX ewes receiving E2 and E2/P4, but not P4 treatments. Western blot analysis revealed that E2, P4, and their combination all increased NOS3 protein, whereas E2 and its combination with P4, but not P4 alone, downregulated caveolin 1 expression. Immunohistochemical analysis revealed that NOS3 was mainly localized in the endothelium and upregulated by E2, whereas caveolin 1 was localized in both endothelium and smooth muscle and downregulated by E2. Thus, our data demonstrate that uterine artery endothelial NOS3 and caveolin 1 are regulated reciprocally by estrogen replacement therapy. In keeping with the facts that E2, but not P4, causes uterine vasodilatation and that E2 and P4 increase NOS3 expression, but only E2 decrease caveolin 1 expression, our current study suggests that both increased NOS3 expression and decreased caveolin 1 expression are needed to facilitate estrogen-induced uterine vasodilatation.
Investment-Cash Flow Sensitivities or Cash-Cash Flow Sensitivities? An Evaluative Framework for Measures of Financial Constraints

We evaluate two models commonly used for measuring financial constraints in their ability to discriminate between constrained and unconstrained firms. We compute firm-specific estimates for the "cash flow sensitivity of investment" (CFSI), and the "cash flow sensitivity of cash" (CFSC) and provide a framework that summarizes the performance of each model into a single numerical metric. We argue that this 'ex-post' approach provides interesting advantages over the traditional operationalization, in which firms are classified 'ex-ante' on a theoretical basis. Our findings suggest the superiority of the CFSI model over the CFSC model for a sample of manufacturing SMEs in Belgium. Copyright (c) 2008 The Authors Journal compilation (c) 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Free-Living Physical Activity Energy Expenditure Is Strongly Related to Glucose Intolerance in Cameroonian Adults Independently of Obesity

OBJECTIVE—We examined the cross-sectional association between objectively measured free-living physical activity energy expenditure (PAEE) and glucose tolerance in adult Cameroonians without known diabetes. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—PAEE was measured in 34 volunteers using the doubly labeled water method and indirect calorimetry (resting). Fasting blood glucose and 2-h postload blood glucose were measured during a standard 75-g oral glucose tolerance test. RESULTS—There was a significant negative correlation between PAEE and 2-h glucose (r = −0.43; P = 0.01) but not fasting glucose (r = 0.1; P = 0.57). The inverse association between PAEE and 2-h glucose remained after adjustment for age, sex, smoking, alcohol consumption, and BMI (β = −0.017 [95% CI −0.033 to −0.002]) and was unchanged after further adjustment for waist circumference, body fat percentage, or aerobic fitness. CONCLUSIONS—PAEE is inversely associated with 2-h glucose independently of adiposity or fitness. Interventions aimed at increasing PAEE could play an important role in diabetes prevention in developing countries.
Individuals, teams and organizations score with gamification

Purpose – Explains how gamification can help to motivate employees and boost individual and organizational performance. Design/methodology/approach – Defines gamification and provides some examples of how it can work in practice. Findings – Charts how gamification helps to engage employees by infusing vigor, making them dedicated and enabling them to be absorbed in their work. Practical implications – Explains that gamification can help in infusing a feel of ownership of performance and results. Social implications – Outlines some of the social forces that can help to make gamification a success. Originality/value – Reveals that through gamification – designed sensitively, crafted creatively and implemented positively – organizations can target burn-out and help to foster an engaging work environment.
The Role of Short-Run Inflation Targets and Forecasts in Disinflation

Globally, the majority of countries using inflation targets have done so when inflation was neither low nor stable. Many such countries have changed their target each year, and the empirical estimates reported in this paper support theoretical predictions that annual changes to the target are endogenous to outcomes. A unique cross-country panel dataset of inflation targets and outcomes in 60 countries in the 1990s is used. The estimates suggest the target revision may be predicted according to a simple 'forecasting' rule, and depends upon the outcome's deviation from both the short-run and long-run target. During disinflation, policy-makers may therefore be characterised as using two types of policy rule; one for setting interest rates, the other for revising annual targets. In designing roles for the legislator and the central bank in the monetary framework, it is necessary to take into account the likelihood that the process of setting the target may, in some circumstances, be inseparable from that of setting policy instruments. In the light of other literature, it is also argued that during disinflation, short-run targets may help central banks to build credibility because they may increase transparency.
National system of greenhouse gas reporting for forest and nature areas under UNFCCC in the Netherlands

The Netherlands as being a Party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has the obligation to design and operationalise a national system for the Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry sector (LULUCF). This report presents such a semi dynamic system at Tier 2 for forests and other nature terrains (trees outside forests, heathland, peats, and sandy areas) in The Netherlands. With this system a full account for carbondioxide and other greenhouse gas balance is presented and recalculated for 1990 ? 2002
The Economic Consequences of Increased Disclosure: Evidence from International Cross-Listings

We study return volatility and trading volume at times of earnings announcements to see if the increased disclosure faced by non-U.S. firms when listing shares in the U.S. has economically significant consequences. We find a surprising change in market behavior around earnings releases: absolute return and volume reactions to earnings announcements typically increase significantly once a stock cross-lists in the U.S. Furthermore, the increase in volatility and volume is greatest for firms from developed countries and firms that do not list on an organized stock exchange, rather than for emerging market firms from poor information disclosure environments or firms that submit to the stringent reporting demands of a high quality exchange listing. We explore several alternative explanations for this surprising finding.
Urban myth vs. economic explanation: an empirical analysis of land purchasing decisions in Accra

This paper reports the results of an analysis of market participants engaged in informal urban land transactions in Accra, Ghana. It has been occasioned by the dearth of empirical studies that shed light on commonly held beliefs that informal land transactions in sub-Saharan African cities account for many observed problems in their neighbourhoods. Employing regression and discriminant analyses, the paper finds as follows: informal transactions work remarkably well and obey the fundamental economic laws of demand and supply; claims that such transactions lead to high and escalating land prices are unfounded; claims concerning the charging of arbitrary prices by land suppliers are unfounded; government intervention through compulsory purchase leads to perverse outcomes. Unresolved title disputes, lack of registered title documents and the absence of reliable databases of ownership plague this particular market. The findings reveal that the argument that bureaucratic intervention offers a way out is misconceived. Market-led regulation emerges as the needed focus of future land policy and land management strategy.
Time on the Market and Sale Price of Non-Performing Loan Assets

Abstract The correlation between time on the market (TOM) and offer price or transaction price has been analyzed in a number of studies. Unlike previous studies, this paper focuses on atypical property (non-performing assets (NPAs)) and adopts a two-stage least squares regression (2SLS) model to test whether value enhancement strategies would enhance the disposal price in Kaohsiung city. The empirical results show that investors can’t profit just from increasing the time on the market (TOM). Investors have to adopt an enhancement strategy to increase NPA value as well. This is the important finding from the comparison of auction and value enhancement strategy in this paper. The Taiwanese experience reported in this paper shows that value increment can be achieved via the combination of longer TOM and value enhancement strategy.
Modelling Indian Wheat and Rice Sector Policies

This paper serves to disentangle the complex system of Indian food policies related to wheat and rice procurement, storage, distribution and trade. Using nationally aggregated time series data, these policies are econometrically analysed. Based on the estimation results, their market implications are assessed. Eventually, different scenarios, including the implementation of the National Food Security Act, are simulated with respect to fiscal costs and public stocks.
Health Expenditure, Literacy and Economic Growth: PMG Evidence from Asian Countries

Well-functioning health sector and high literacy rates are desirable features of an economy. To explicate their role for Asian countries, in economic growth this paper estimates their role using pooled mean group (PMG) estimation technique. Long run relationship is examined for a sample of 26 Asian countries with data for 1990 to 2012. PMG estimates are augmented by other estimators like FMOLS and DOLS to quantify the contribution of health sector and literacy. Results show the presence of long run relationship between income per capita, health expenditures, and literacy rate. Uni-causality is found from income per capita to health expenditures and bi-causality between income per capita and literacy rates. Results reveal that higher literacy rates lead to increased health expenditures due to increase demand of health services. Recommendations are made on the basis of empirical analysis.
The Macroeconomic Role of Fiscal Policy

This article examines the new consensus that fiscal policy should have no macroeconomic role in 'flexible inflation targeting' regimes. There is little basis for this presumption. Fiscal policy remains important in setting the policy mix and in managing shocks and imbalances. The credibility of an inflation-targeting regime should be enhanced rather than reduced if fiscal policy plays its proper role. It is true, nevertheless, that the costs of focusing fiscal policy narrowly on public-sector concerns may not be very great, most of the time. However, when interest rates cannot be used, the role of fiscal policy must be different. With interest rates at their lower bound of zero, there is no plausible alternative. For asymmetric shocks and adjustments in EMU, fiscal policy needs, ideally, to substitute for the interest-rate policy reaction function of the consensus, but the difficulties are very great. We suggest a policy focus on real exchange rates as a way of resolving some of the dilemmas. There is a serious danger that orthodox views about fiscal policy, drawn from the consensus, will be inappropriately applied, especially in Europe. Copyright 2005, Oxford University Press.