Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PGD for fragile X syndrome: ovarian function is the main determinant of success.

BACKGROUND PGD for fragile X syndrome (FRAX) is inefficient, probably owing to fewer oocytes, poor embryo quality and difficulties in genetic analysis. We investigated IVF-PGD in FRAX mutation carriers compared with controls, looking at the effects of oocyte and embryo number/quality on live birth outcome. METHODS We performed IVF-PGD in 27 patients with the FRAX mutation and 33 controls with other genetic diseases. Genetic testing was by multiplex PCR. RESULTS Seventy-nine and 108 IVF-PGD cycles were started in FRAX mutation carriers and controls, respectively. Twenty-two patients had a premutation (CGG repeat number 60-200) and five had a full mutation (300-2000 CGG repeats). FRAX patients required higher doses of gonadotrophins (6788 ± 2379 versus 4360 ± 2330, P< 0.001) but had lower peak serum estradiol levels (8166 ± 5880 versus 10 211 ± 4673, P = 0.03) and fewer oocytes retrieved (9.8 ± 6 versus 14 ± 8, P = 0.01). The cancellation rate (unsatisfactory ovarian response) was higher in the FRAX group than in the control group (13 versus 1%, P < 0.001). When embryos were transferred, ongoing pregnancy/live birth rates per transfer were similar (29 versus 36%, P = 0.54). CONCLUSIONS Ovarian dysfunction in FRAX carriers is more prevalent and profound than previously appreciated, with a high cancelation rate and reduced efficiency of PGD. The main determinant for successful PGD for FRAX is ovarian dysfunction. When embryo transfer is possible, the results are comparable to PGD for other monogenic diseases.
Cortical Interneurons Upregulate Neurotrophinsin Vivoin Response to Targeted Apoptotic Degeneration of Neighboring Pyramidal Neurons

Intercellular signals provided by growth and neurotrophic factors play a critical role during neurogenesis and as part of cellular repopulation strategies directed toward reconstruction of complex CNS circuitry. Local signals influence the differentiation of transplanted and endogenous neurons and neural precursors, but the cellular sources and control over expression of these molecules remain unclear. We have previously examined microenvironmental control in neocortex over neuron and neural precursor migration and differentiation following transplantation, using an approach of targeted apoptotic neuronal degeneration to specific neuronal populations in vivo. Prior results suggested the hypothesis that upregulated or reexpressed developmental signal molecules, produced by degenerating pyramidal neurons and/or by neighboring neurons or nonneuronal cells, may be responsible for observed events of directed migration, differentiation, and connectivity by transplanted immature neurons and precursors. To directly investigate this hypothesis, we analyzed the gene expression of candidate and control neurotrophins, growth factors, and receptors within regions of targeted neuronal cell death, first by quantitative Northern blot analysis and then by in situ hybridization combined with immunocytochemical analysis. The genes for BDNF, NT-4/5, trkB receptors, and to a lesser extent NT-3 were upregulated specifically within the regions of neocortex undergoing targeted neuronal degeneration and specifically during the period of ongoing pyramidal neuron apoptosis. Upregulation occurred during the same 3-week period as the previously investigated cellular events of directed migration, differentiation, and integration. No upregulation was seen in panels of control neurotrophins, growth factors, and receptors that are not as developmentally regulated in cortex or that are thought to have primary actions in other CNS regions. In situ hybridization and immunocytochemistry revealed that BDNF mRNA expression was upregulated specifically by local interneurons adjacent to degenerating pyramidal neurons. These findings suggest specific effects of targeted apoptosis on neurotrophin and other gene expression via mechanisms, including intercellular signaling between degenerating pyramidal neurons and surrounding interneurons. Further understanding of these and other controls over neocortical projection neuron differentiation may provide insight regarding normal neocortical development, intercellular signaling induced by apoptosis, and toward reconstruction and cellular repopulation of complex neocortical and other CNS circuitry.
Banking and Trading

We study the effects of a bank’s engagement in trading. Traditional banking is relationship-based: not scalable, long-term oriented, with high implicit capital, and low risk (thanks to the law of large numbers). Trading is transactions-based: scalable, short-term, capital constrained, and with the ability to generate risk from concentrated positions. When a bank engages in trading, it can use its ‘spare’ capital to profitably expand the scale of trading. However there are two inefficiencies. A bank may allocate too much capital to trading ex-post, compromising the incentives to build relationships ex-ante. And a bank may use trading for risk-shifting. Financial development augments the scalability of trading, which initially benefits conglomeration, but beyond some point inefficiencies dominate. The deepening of financial markets in recent decades leads trading in banks to become increasingly risky, so that problems in managing and regulating trading in banks will persist for the foreseeable future. The analysis has implications for capital regulation, subsidiarization, and scope and scale restrictions in banking.
Economic Convergence. Applications - Second Part -

Real convergence is an essential objective of Romania’s integration into the EU. Bridging the development gaps between Romania and the EU as soon as possible cannot be achieved exclusively through market forces, since they rather tend to cause divergence and polarization. For this purpose, special tools and mechanisms are required; e.g., cohesion. The study deals with the economic convergence of the European countries, and especially the convergence of the CEE countries, including Romania. Models are used to assess the economic growth, approximate the period of real convergence of Romania to the EU, as well as to estimate the s- and s-convergence, and the main shortcomings of the last indicator. Second part comprises some models and evidence of the economic growth and convergence.
Bayesian and frequentist inequality tests

Bayesian and frequentist criteria are fundamentally different, but often posterior and sampling distributions are asymptotically equivalent (and normal). We compare Bayesian and frequentist hypothesis tests of inequality restrictions in such cases. For finite-dimensional parameters, if the null hypothesis is that the parameter vector lies in a certain half-space, then the Bayesian test has (frequentist) size α if the null hypothesis is any other convex subspace, then the Bayesian test has size strictly above α and if the null is non-convex, then the Bayesian test's size may be above or below &alpha. For infinite-dimensional parameters, similar results hold. The example of first-order stochastic dominance testing is detailed.
Towards a New Operating System Architecture : Micro Kernel vs . Re ective Architecture

There have been many buzz words in the operating systems research community. In particular, micro kernel and re ective architecture are new additions. It seems that both approaches are very important yet there are not well de ned or analyzed. In this paper, we will rst discuss the important aspects of new operating systems architectures for future applications. We then introduce our de nitions of two approaches and discuss their pros and cons.
Word Ordering and Document Adjacency for Large Loop Closure Detection in 2-D Laser Maps

We address in this letter the problem of loop closure detection for laser-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) of very large areas. Consistent with the state of the art, the map is encoded as a graph of poses, and to cope with very large mapping capabilities, loop closures are asserted by comparing the features extracted from a query laser scan against a previously acquired corpus of scan features using a bag-of-words (BoW) scheme. Two contributions are here presented. First, to benefit from the graph topology, feature frequency scores in the BoW are computed not only for each individual scan but also from neighboring scans in the SLAM graph. This has the effect of enforcing neighbor relational information during document matching. Second, a weak geometric check that takes into account feature ordering and occlusions is introduced that substantially improves loop closure detection performance. The two contributions are evaluated both separately and jointly on four common SLAM datasets and are shown to improve the state-of-the-art performance both in terms of precision and recall in most of the cases. Moreover, our current implementation is designed to work at nearly frame rate, allowing loop closure query resolution at nearly 22 Hz for the best case scenario and 2 Hz for the worst case scenario.
Public attitudes towards solid waste landfill infrastructure : changes in perception over space and time

One of the most controversial planning issues internationally is the siting of waste disposal infrastructure in local communities. Compensation is viewed as a possible solution to siting difficulties in many countries. However, existing empirical evidence is conflicting as to whether or not compensation-based siting has reduced opposition to such developments. Thus, before compensation policy can be considered as the solution for recognising social costs and introducing equity into the waste planning system, it is important to understand why people reject waste disposal infrastructure developments and if this rejection continues over the lifetime of facility operations. This paper utilises information gathered through ex-ante – ex-post surveys to fully examine the effects of distance, local authority consultation efforts, experience and other factors, on attitudes towards nonhazardous solid waste landfill developments in potential and actual host communities. Our findings suggest distance proxies expectations of environmental risk in communities with no experience of living with landfill infrastructure. Conversely, distance does not play a significant role in explaining attitudes to landfill development in communities familiar with the development. Familiarity and consultation by authorities are consistently important, even after a landfill has been in operation for a number of years, but in this case these results may capture a feeling of “having served our time” prevalent in these types of communities.
Searching for Effective Teachers with Imperfect Information

Over the past four decades, empirical researchers -- many of them economists -- have accumulated an impressive amount of evidence on teachers. In this paper, we ask what the existing evidence implies for how school leaders might recruit, evaluate, and retain teachers. We begin by summarizing the evidence on five key points, referring to existing work and to evidence we have accumulated from our research with the nation's two largest school districts: Los Angeles and New York City. First, teachers display considerable heterogeneity in their effects on student achievement gains. Second, estimates of teacher effectiveness based on student achievement data are noisy measures. Third, teachers' effectiveness rises rapidly in the first year or two of their teaching careers but then quickly levels out. Fourth, the primary cost of teacher turnover is not the direct cost of hiring and firing, but rather is the loss to students who will be taught by a novice teacher rather than one with several years of experience. Fifth, it is difficult to identify at the time of hire those teachers who will prove more effective. As a result, better teachers can only be identified after some evidence on their actual job performance has accumulated. We then explore what these facts imply for how principals and school districts should act, using a simple model in which schools must search for teachers using noisy signals of teacher effectiveness. The implications of our analysis are strikingly different from current practice. Rather than screening at the time of hire, the evidence on heterogeneity of teacher performance suggests a better strategy would be identifying large differences between teachers by observing the first few years of teaching performance and retaining only the highest-performing teachers.
Lifting measures to inducing schemes

Abstract In this paper we study the liftability property for piecewise continuous maps of compact metric spaces, which admit inducing schemes in the sense of Pesin and Senti [Y. Pesin and S. Senti. Thermodynamical formalism associated with inducing schemes for one-dimensional maps. Mosc. Math. J.5(3) (2005), 669–678; Y. Pesin and S. Senti. Equilibrium measures for maps with inducing schemes. Preprint, 2007]. We show that under some natural assumptions on the inducing schemes—which hold for many known examples—any invariant ergodic Borel probability measure of sufficiently large entropy can be lifted to the tower associated with the inducing scheme. The argument uses the construction of connected Markov extensions due to Buzzi [J. Buzzi. Markov extensions for multi-dimensional dynamical systems. Israel J. Math.112 (1999), 357–380], his results on the liftability of measures of large entropy, and a generalization of some results by Bruin [H. Bruin. Induced maps, Markov extensions and invariant measures in one-dimensional dynamics. Comm. Math. Phys.168(3) (1995), 571–580] on relations between inducing schemes and Markov extensions. We apply our results to study the liftability problem for one-dimensional cusp maps (in particular, unimodal and multi-modal maps) and for some multi-dimensional maps.
Systemic Risk and Home Bias in the Euro Area

According to conventional indicators, the euro-area financial integration has receded since 2007, mainly in the money market, sovereign debt market and uncollateralized credit markets. But price-based measures of debt market segmentation are inappropriate when solvency risk differs across countries: only the component of yield differentials that is not a reward for the issuer’s credit risk may reflect segmentation. We apply this idea to the euro sovereign debt market, using a dynamic factor model to decompose yield differentials in a country-specific and a common (or systemic) risk component. As the country-specific component dominates, purging yields from it produces much smaller measures of bond market segmentation than conventional ones for the crisis period. We also investigate how the home bias of banks’ sovereign portfolios – a quantity-based measure of segmentation – is related to yield differentials, by estimating a vector error-correction model on 2008-12 monthly data. We find that the sovereign exposures of banks in most euro-area countries respond positively to increases in yields, especially in periphery countries. When yield differentials are decomposed in their country-risk and common-risk components, we find that: (i) in the periphery, banks respond to increases in country risk by increasing their domestic exposure, while in core countries they do not; (ii) in contrast, in most euro-area countries banks respond to an increase in the common risk factor by raising their domestic exposures. Finding (i) hints at distorted incentives in periphery banks’ response to changes in their own sovereign’s risk. Finding (ii) indicates that, when systemic risk increases, all banks tend to increase the home bias of their portfolios, making the euro-area sovereign market more segmented.
Community innovation for sustainable energy

As in other countries, there is a growing public, policy and business interest in the UK in the roles and potential of community-led initiatives for sustainable energy consumption and production. Such initiatives include green lifestyle-based activities to reduce energy consumption (e.g. Transition Towns, and Carbon Reduction Action Groups), more traditional behaviour change initiatives such as neighbourhood insulation projects and energy-saving campaigns, as well as renewable energy generation projects such as community-owned windfarms and biofuel projects. Case studies of specific projects identify a variety of rationales amongst participants, whilst policy interest suggests a more instrumental concern for facilitating additional, larger-scale sustainable energy transitions. Amongst participant rationales are ideas that bottom-up, community-based projects deliver energy savings and behaviour changes that top-down policy instruments cannot achieve, due to the greater local knowledge and engagement they embody, the sense of common ownership and empowerment, and the social capital and trust that is generated among local actors. These resources provide organisational and values-based 'grassroots innovations' which experiment with new consumption practices based on alternative 'new economics' values. However, previous research shows 'grassroots innovations' face a series of critical challenges requiring support to overcome, in order to achieve their potential benefits more widely. This includes developing 'niche' networks for mobilising reforms both to highly centralised energy institutions and infrastructures, as well as deeply ingrained social practices of 'normal' energy consumption and everyday life. What makes this experience fascinating for the purposes of the SCORAI workshop is the way these community-based initiatives are trying to develop new energy-related consumption practices with a view to the socio-technical transition to local, renewable or lower carbon energy systems. Understandably, many projects remain practically focused on securing early successes and resourcing their long-term survival. However, the institutional and infrastructure reforms that will help in this endeavour require strategies for addressing the wider (national and international) political economy of consumption which adopts an ecological modernisation approach to sustainability. In surveying the community energy scene in the UK, our paper pays particular attention to this last issue.
Inflation, Nominal Wage Rigidity, and the Efficiency of Labor Markets

If nominal wages cannot fall, then positive inflation may facilitate real wage adjustment. We examine data on individuals' wage changes and find only limited evidence of such downward nominal rigidity. The shape of the distribution of wage changes is little affected by the rate of inflation. About 8 percent of job stayers have zero nominal wage change, but we estimate that less than half of that spike represents truncation associated with downward nominal rigidity. We estimate that reducing inflation from four percent to zero would result in an additional 1/2 to 1 3/4 percent of peoplehaving constrained wages because of downward nominal rigidity, and our estimates of the associated welfare loss center on about five-hundredths of a percent of aggregate output.
Does the performance scale the same as the cost in the cloud

Cloud computing is a paradigm that offers on-demand scalable resources with the “pay-per-usage” model. Cloud service providers' price rises linearly as the resources scale. However, the main challenge for the cloud customers is “Does the performance scale as the price for the rented resources in the cloud”? Also, how does the performance scales for different server load? In this paper we analyze the performance and the cost of a web service that utilize both memory and CPU varying the server load with different message size and number of concurrent messages in order to determine the real cost of rented CPU resources. The results show that the web service's cost rises linearly with the resources, i.e. the lowest cost is determined while hosted on one CPU.
Economic Opportunity Cost Of Labour: A Synthesis

In this article the economic opportunity cost of labor has been estimated using the supply price approach under a wide variety of labor market conditions and types of job. This approach is shown to be equivalent to the marginal product of labor foregone approach, when the latter can be estimated accurately. The primary reliance of the supply price approach on the wage rates demanded under the labor conditions of the project greatly facilitates the estimation of this economic parameter for use in the economic valuation of projects. A methodology has been outlined in detail to account for several adjustments that may need to be made to this supply price to reflect special labor market characteristics and distortions. Most of these factors, such as income taxes and unemployment insurance compensation, are straightforward and easy to estimate. Other issues dealing with the quality of the jobs and the nature of the unemployment present require a more detailed examination of the labor market. Once these values have been determined, they are used to adjust the supply price to arrive at an estimate of the economic opportunity cost of labor for a particular skill on a particular project.
Strategies for personal process improvement a comparison

Every so often, a new methodology is launched onto the software engineering landscape with all the force of a religious crusade. From its humble beginnings Software Process Improvement (SPI) has spread its wings into virtually every sector of the software engineering community and in the process has transformed itself from a bag of tools and techniques, into a serious set of methodologies for enhancing organisational effectiveness and competitive success. In the latter half of the 1990's, individual SPI methodologies such as PSP [1] and PIPSI [2] were promulgated as approaches to make the individual a better software engineer.Surveys of European software organisations [3] have shown support for SPI. In Europe to date, SPI programmes have concentrated at the organisational level, with less adoption at the level of the individual. This paper explores the role of individual-level methodologies in a European context and details the results of a series of experiments conducted by the authors.
The confusion limits to the sensitivity of submillimeter telescopes

The two major sources of confusion that limit the sensitivity of continuum observations at submillimeter wavelengths outside the galactic plane are discussed. One of the sources is the spatial structure of the thermal emission from dust in the Milky Way. The crowding of extragalactic sources at faint levels is the second source of confusion. Estimates of the noise expected from these two types of confusion as a function of wavelength and beam size on the sky are presented and compared to detector and photon noise estimates for proposed spaceborne telescopes.
Effect of PRX-1 Downregulation in the Type 1 Diabetes Microenvironment

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is caused by dysregulation of the immune system in the pancreatic islets, which eventually leads to insulin-producing pancreatic β-cell death and destabilization of glucose homeostasis. One of the major characteristics of T1D pathogenesis is the production of inflammatory mediators by macrophages that result in destruction or damage of pancreatic β-cells. In this study the inflammatory microenvironment of T1D was simulated with RAW264.7 cells and MIN6 cells, acting as macrophages and pancreatic β-cells respectably. In this setting, peroxiredoxin-1, an anti-oxidant enzyme was knocked down to observe its functions in the pathogenesis of T1D. RAW264.7 cells were primed with lipopolysaccharide and co-cultured with MIN6 cells while PRX-1 was knocked down in one or both cell types. Our results suggest that hindrance of PRX-1 activity or the deficiency of this enzyme in inflammatory conditions negatively affects pancreatic β-cell survival. The observed decrease in viability of MIN6 cells seems to be caused by nitric oxide production. Additionally, it seems that PRX-1 affects previously reported protective activity of IL-6 in pancreatic β cells as well. These results signify new, undiscovered roles for PRX-1 in inflammatory conditions and may contribute toward our understanding of autoimmunity.