Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diffractive and Exclusive (Higgs?) Production from CDF to LHC

The diffractive program of the CDF Collaboration at the Fermilab Tevatron p-pbar collider is reviewed with emphasis on recent results from Run II at a c.m.s. energy of 1.96 TeV. Results are presented on the x-Bjorken and Q^2 dependence of the diffractive structure function obtained from di-jet production, on the slope parameter of the t-distribution of diffractive events as a function of Q^2 in the range 1 GeV^2<Q^2<10^4 GeV^2, and on cross sections for exclusive di-jet, e+e-, and di-photon production. The exclusive di-jet and di-photon production rates are used to check theoretical estimates of exclusive Higgs boson production at the Large Hadron Collider. Other data on soft and hard diffraction from p-ppbar collisions, and also data from diffractive deep inelastic scattering are presented and interpreted in the RENORM phenomenological model, in which cross sections are obtained from the underlying inclusive parton distribution function of the nucleon and QCD color factors.
Engaging diasporas as development partners for home and destination countries : challenges for policymakers

The role of diasporas in development, poverty reduction, reconstruction and growth is gaining considerable policy interest. The interest in diasporas is summarised in a three variable equation: ensuring benefits for migrants, host countries and home countries. This paper is the executive summary of the IOM paper “Engaging diasporas as development partners, for home and destination countries: A Policy Roadmap”. The complete version of this paper (in English) will be published by IOM in 2005.
Overuse of tympanostomy tubes in New York metropolitan area: evidence from five hospital cohort

Objectives To compare tympanostomy tube insertion for children with otitis media in 2002 with the recommendations of two sets of expert guidelines. Design Retrospective cohort study. Setting New York metropolitan area practices associated with five diverse hospitals. Participants 682 of 1046 children who received tympanostomy tubes in the five hospitals for whom charts from the hospital, primary care physician, and otolaryngologist could be accessed. Results The mean age was 3.8 years. On average, children with acute otitis media had fewer than four infections in the year before surgery. Children with otitis media with effusion had less than 30 consecutive days of effusion at the time of surgery. Concordance with recommendations was very low: 30.3% (n=207) of all tympanostomies were concordant with the explicit criteria developed for this study and 7.5% (n=13) with the 1994 guideline from the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Family Medicine, and American Academy of Otolaryngology—Head and Neck Surgery. Children who had previously had tympanostomy tube surgery, who were having a concomitant procedure, or who had “at risk conditions” were more likely to be discordant. Conclusions A significant majority of tympanostomy tube insertions in the largest and most populous metropolitan area in the United States were inappropriate according to the explicit criteria and not recommended according to both guidelines. Regardless of whether current practice represents a substantial overuse of surgery or the guidelines are overly restrictive, the persistent discrepancy between guidelines and practice cannot be good for children or for people interested in improving their health care.
Thread-Modular Veriﬁcation with Arbitrary Precision

State explosion is the curse of concurrency. Thread-modular veriﬁcation of multithreaded programs is a promising method that circumvents the state explosion. The method trades its polynomial complexity for a loss of precision that limits the veriﬁcation power of the method. In this paper we show why this limit can be removed and how. Our work is based on the fact that thread-modular veriﬁcation is abstract interpretation with Cartesian abstraction. We show that one can parameterize the abstraction and thus adapt the degree of precision to the speciﬁc veriﬁcation problem. The parameterized thread-modular ver-iﬁcation is still polynomial in the number of threads. We formalize our approach in the abstract interpretation framework, giving a suﬃcient condition under which a polynomial-time abstraction can be parameterized without loss of polynomial-time complexity.
Estimating and Testing Sochastic Volatility Models using Realized Measures

This paper proposes a procedure to test for the correct specification of the functional form of the volatility process, within the class of eigenfunction stochastic volatility models (Meddahi, 2001). The procedure is based on the comparison of the moments of realized volatility measures with the corresponding ones of integrated volatility implied by the model under the null hypothesis. We first provide primitive conditions on the measurement error associated with the realized measure, which allow to construct asymptotically valid specification tests. Then we establish regularity conditions under which realized volatility, bipower variation (Barndorff-Nielsen & Shephard, 2004d), and modified subsampled realized volatility (Zhang, Mykland & Ait Sahalia, 2003), satisfy the given primitive assumptions. Finally, we provide an empirical illustration based on three stock from the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Casimir effect and global theory of boundary conditions

The consistency of quantum field theories defined on domains with external borders imposes very restrictive constraints on the type of boundary conditions that the fields can satisfy. We analyse the global geometrical and topological properties of the space of all possible boundary conditions for scalar quantum field theories. The variation of the Casimir energy under the change of boundary conditions reveals the existence of singularities generically associated with boundary conditions which either involve topology changes of the underlying physical space or edge states with unbounded below classical energy. The effect can be understood in terms of a new type of Maslov index associated with the non-trivial topology of the space of boundary conditions. We also analyse the global aspects of the renormalization group flow, T-duality and the conformal invariance of the corresponding fixed points.
Cholinergic system during the progression of Alzheimer’s disease: therapeutic implications

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by a progressive phenotypic downregulation of markers within cholinergic basal forebrain (CBF) neurons, frank CBF cell loss and reduced cortical choline acetyltransferase activity associated with cognitive decline. Delaying CBF neurodegeneration or minimizing its consequences is the mechanism of action for most currently available drug treatments for cognitive dysfunction in AD. Growing evidence suggests that imbalances in the expression of NGF, its precursor proNGF and the high (TrkA) and low (p75NTR) affinity NGF receptors are crucial factors underlying CBF dysfunction in AD. Drugs that maintain a homeostatic balance between TrkA and p75NTR may slow the onset of AD. A NGF gene therapy trial reduced cognitive decline and stimulated cholinergic fiber growth in humans with mild AD. Drugs treating the multiple pathologies and clinical symptoms in AD (e.g., M1 cholinoceptor and/or galaninergic drugs) should be considered for a more comprehensive treatment approach for cholinergic dysfunction.
SM proteins Sly1 and Vps33 co-assemble with Sec17 and SNARE complexes to oppose SNARE disassembly by Sec18

Secretory and endolysosomal fusion events are driven by SNAREs and cofactors, including Sec17/α-SNAP, Sec18/NSF, and Sec1/Munc18 (SM) proteins. SMs are essential for fusion in vivo, but the basis of this requirement is enigmatic. We now report that, in addition to their established roles as fusion accelerators, SM proteins Sly1 and Vps33 directly shield SNARE complexes from Sec17- and Sec18-mediated disassembly. In vivo, wild-type Sly1 and Vps33 function are required to withstand overproduction of Sec17. In vitro, Sly1 and Vps33 impede SNARE complex disassembly by Sec18 and ATP. Unexpectedly, Sec17 directly promotes selective loading of Sly1 and Vps33 onto cognate SNARE complexes. A large thermodynamic barrier limits SM binding, implying that significant conformational rearrangements are involved. In a working model, Sec17 and SMs accelerate fusion mediated by cognate SNARE complexes and protect them from NSF-mediated disassembly, while mis-assembled or non-cognate SNARE complexes are eliminated through kinetic proofreading by Sec18. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.7554/eLife.02272. 001
On the Exportability of Robust Satellite Techniques (RST) for Active Volcano Monitoring

Satellite remote sensing has increasingly become a crucial tool for volcanic activity monitoring thanks to continuous observations at global scale, provided with different spatial/spectral/temporal resolutions, on the base of specific satellite platforms, and at relatively low costs. Among the satellite techniques developed for volcanic activity monitoring, the RST (Robust Satellite Techniques) approach has shown high performances in detecting hot spots as well as in automatically identifying ash plumes, effectively discriminating them from weather clouds. This method, based on an extensive, multi-temporal analysis of long-term time series of homogeneous satellite records, has recently been implemented on EOS-MODIS and MSG-SEVIRI data for which further performance improvements are expected. These satellite systems, in fact, offer improved spectral and/or temporal resolutions. In this paper, some preliminarily results of these analyses are presented, both regarding hot spot identification and ash cloud detection and tracking. The potential of RST, to be used within early warning systems devoted to volcanic hazard monitoring and mitigation, will also be discussed.
Financial Weakness and Product Market Performance: Internal Capital Market Evidence

Using a data set of Korean business groups in the period 1999–2006, just after the Asian Financial Crisis, this study shows how business groups’ financial leverage can lead group-affiliated firms to lose market share to industry rivals. This analysis reveals that the negative effect of group leverage is greater when an affiliated firm is financially weak. Additionally, high group leverageis more detrimental to firms operating in fast-growing industries,discouraging affiliated firms from investing while encouraging their rivals. The results suggest that groups’ financial positions encompass a substantial strategic dimension of group-affiliated firms.
Lensing of Stars by Spherical Gas Clouds

Cold gas clouds of ~Jovian mass and ~AU size will act as lenses for optical light. If the Galaxy contains ~1011 M☉ in such clouds, background stars will be magnified at a detectable rate. The resulting light curves can resemble those due to gravitational lensing by a point mass, raising the possibility that some events attributed to gravitational lensing might instead be due to "gaseous lensing. " During a lensing event, the lens would impose narrow infrared and far-red H2 absorption lines on the stellar spectrum. Existing programs to observe gravitational microlensing, supplemented by spectroscopy, can therefore be used to either detect such events or place limits on the number of such gas clouds present in the Galaxy.
The Nature of the Compact Supernova Remnants in Starburst Galaxies

Radio observations of starburst regions in galaxies have revealed groups of compact nonthermal sources that we interpret as radiative supernova remnants expanding in the interclump medium of molecular clouds. Because of the high pressure in starburst regions, the interclump medium may have a density ~103 H atoms cm-3 in a starburst nucleus like M82 and ≳104 H atoms cm-3 in an ultraluminous galaxy like Arp 220. In M82, our model can account for the sizes, the slow evolution, the high radio luminosities, and the low X-ray luminosities of the sources. We predict expansion velocities ~500 km s-1, which is slower than the one case measured by VLBI techniques. Although we predict the remnants to be radiative, the expected radiation is difficult to detect because it is at infrared wavelengths and the starburst is itself very luminous; one detection possibility is broad [O I] 63 μm line emission at the positions of the radio remnants. The more luminous and compact remnants in Arp 220 can be accounted for by the higher molecular cloud density. In our model, the observed remnants lose most of the supernova energy to radiation. Other explosions in a lower density medium may directly heat a hot, low density interstellar component, leading to the superwinds that are associated with starburst regions.
Purification, Molecular Cloning, and Enzymatic Properties of a Family 12 Endoglucanase (EG-II) from Fomitopsis palustris: Role of EG-II in Larch Holocellulose Hydrolysis

ABSTRACT A family 12 endoglucanase with a molecular mass of 23,926 Da (EG-II) from the brown-rot basidiomycete Fomitopsis palustris was purified and characterized. One of the roles of EG-II in wood degradation is thought to be to loosen the polysaccharide network in cell walls by disentangling hemicelluloses that are associated with cellulose.
High‐Precision CTE Measurement of SiC‐100 for Cryogenic Space Telescopes

We present the results of high‐precision measurements of the thermal expansion of sintered SiC, SiC‐100, intended for use in cryogenic space telescopes, in which minimization of thermal deformation of the mirror is critical, and precise information of the thermal expansion is needed for the telescope design. The temperature range of the measurements extends from room temperature down to ∼10 K. Three samples, Nos. 1, 2, and 3, were manufactured from blocks of SiC produced in different lots. The thermal expansion of the samples was measured with a cryogenic dilatometer, consisting of a laser interferometer, a cryostat, and a mechanical cooler. The typical thermal expansion curve is presented using an eighth‐order polynomial of the temperature. For the three samples, the coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE), α 1, α 2, and α 3, were derived for temperatures between 293 and 10 K. The average and the dispersion (1 σ rms) of these three CTEs are 0.816 × 10−6 and 0.002 × 10−6 K−1, respectively. No significant difference was detected in the CTE of the three samples from the different lots. Neither inhomogeneity nor anisotropy of the CTE was observed. Based on the CTE dispersion obtained, we performed a finite‐element method (FEM) analysis of the thermal deformation of a 3.5 m diameter cryogenic mirror made of six SiC‐100 segments. It was shown that the present CTE measurement has an accuracy that is sufficient for the design of the 3.5 m cryogenic infrared telescope mission SPICA (Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics).
Disconnected: Skills, Education, and Employment in Latin America

Disconnected is a path-breaking analysis of the relationship between schooling and employers in Latin America. It is sophisticated in its design, using multiple surveys and multiple methods. It distinguishes carefully among different types of skills and the relationship of each type to employment outcomes and employer needs. It examines both the demand and the supply side of the labor market. And it provides guidance for further work. We commend this book to all readers, scholars, and practitioners concerned with schooling and job markets in Latin America.
Exploration of the power of attribute-oriented induction in data mining

Attribute-oriented induction is a set-oriented database mining method which generalizes the task-relevant subset of data attribute-by-attribute, compresses it into a generalized relation, and extracts from it the general features of data. In this chapter, the power of attribute-oriented induction is explored for the extraction from relational databases of diierent kinds of patterns, including characteristic rules, discriminant rules, cluster description rules, and multiple-level association rules. Furthermore, it is shown that the method is eecient, robust, with wide applications, and extensible to knowledge discovery in advanced database systems, including object-oriented, deductive, and spatial database systems. The implementation status of DB-Miner, a system prototype which applies the method, is also reported here.
Phasic dopamine neuron activity elicits unique mesofrontal plasticity in adolescence

The mesofrontal dopaminergic circuit, which connects the midbrain motivation center to the cortical executive center, is engaged in control of motivated behaviors. In addition, deficiencies in this circuit are associated with adolescent-onset psychiatric disorders in humans. Developmental studies suggest that the mesofrontal circuit exhibits a protracted maturation through adolescence. However, whether the structure and function of this circuit are modifiable by activity in dopaminergic neurons during adolescence remains unknown. Using optogenetic stimulation and in vivo two-photon imaging in adolescent mice, we found that phasic, but not tonic, dopamine neuron activity induces the formation of mesofrontal axonal boutons. In contrast, in adult mice, the effect of phasic activity diminishes. Furthermore, our results showed that dopaminergic and glutamatergic transmission regulate this axonal plasticity in adolescence and inhibition of dopamine D2-type receptors restores this plasticity in adulthood. Finally, we found that phasic activation of dopamine neurons also induces greater changes in mesofrontal circuit activity and psychomotor response in adolescent mice than in adult mice. Together, our findings demonstrate that the structure and function of the mesofrontal circuit are modifiable by phasic activity in dopaminergic neurons during adolescence and suggest that the greater plasticity in adolescence may facilitate activity-dependent strengthening of dopaminergic input and improvement in behavioral control.
Labor Demand and the Source of Adjustment Costs

Most models of dynamic labor demand are written in terms of costs of adjusting employment (net adjustment costs). A few are based on the costs of hiring and firing (gross adjustment costs). This study derives several models containing both types of adjustment costs. A dynamic-programming model with quadratic adjustment costs generates an estimate of the lower bound on the fraction of adjustment costs that are gross costs. A model with lumpy costs of adjustment also estimates the relative sizes of the two types of costs. The models are estimated over two sets of short monthly time series obtained from private sources, one from a medium-size hospital, the other describing three plants operated by a small manufacturing firm, The quadratic-cost model is also estimated using data describing small industries. The estimates demonstrate that the importance of the two types of costs differs across establishments, though gross adjustment costs appear relatively larger. The results provide evidence on issues of asymmetry in business cycles and the role of human capital in generating externalities in economic growth.
Food for thought⋯: Animal use for science in Europe

261 Received September 8, 2015; http://dx.doi. org/10.4573/altex.1509081 research on methods to substitute animal testing. The first meeting, organized by CAAT-Europe and chaired by MEP Ms. Sirpa Pietikäinen from Finland (Vice-President of the European Parliament intergroup on the welfare and conservation of animals (http://www.animalwelfareintergroup.eu/)) was held on January 27, 2015 in Brussels on “Safety Testing, 3Rs and Policy Making: Challenges & Opportunities for the Scientific Community. ” Despite large successes in the field of alternative methods during the last 20 years (Leist et al., 2008b), the consumption of animals in the EU still exceeds 11 Mio per year (EC, 2013), and also still includes dogs (Box and Spielmann, 2005; Dellarco et al., 2010; Hasiwa et al., 2011), and non-human primates (Burm et al., 2014; Bailey and Taylor, 2009). A re-evaluation of animal experimentation has become necessary, as drastic changes have taken place during the last decade, concerning the i) legal background (Hartung, 2010a), ii) scientific and technological opportunities and developments (Hartung, 2011) and iii) societal demands (Bottini and Hartung, 2009).
Estimating galaxy luminosity functions.

In this work a comparison between different galaxy luminosity function estimators by means of Monte-Carlo simulations is presented. The simulations show that the C- method of Lynden-Bell (1971) and the STY method derived by Sandage, Tammann & Yahil (1979) are the best estimators to measure the shape of the luminosity function. The simulations also show that the STY estimator has a bias such that the faint-end slope is underestimated for steeper inclinations of the Schechter Function, and that this bias becomes quite severe when the sample contains only a few hundred objects. Overall, the C- is the most robust estimator, being less affected by different values of the faint end slope of the Schechter parameterization and sample size. The simulations are also used to compare different estimators of the luminosity function normalization. They demonstrate that most methods bias the recovered mean density towards values which are about 20% lower than the input value.
An analysis of the significance of sub-regional partnerships in the community sport policy process

Community sport policy is characterised as complex and multi-faceted partly due to the number of agencies involved. This thesis explores the community sport policy process in England, specifically the significance of the relationship between CSPs and NGBs in the community sport policy process. The four key objectives of this study are (i) to analyse the significance of the relationship between CSPs and NGBs with regard to the national community sport policy process; (ii) to analyse the significance of the relationship between CSPs and NGBs in local-level policy making and policy implementation; (iii) to identify CSP and NGB attitudes and perceptions toward the community sport policy process; and as the study focuses on the meso-level of analysis, (iv) to evaluate the explanatory value of selected meso-level theories of the policy process in developing a better understanding of the community sport policy process. This study uses a mixed method comprising a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. Initially, a quantitative questionnaire was used to gather information regarding CSPs and NGBs and support the selection of CSP cases. From this CSP-based case studies were developed involving semi-structured interviews with CSP, NGB and local authority representatives. The study draws attention to the hierarchical nature of the community sport policy process, the implications for collaboration, the mediating role of CSPs in national and local policy settings, and the associated challenges that agents face in implementing community sport policy. The study emphasises the value of theoretical pluralism in analysing the community sport field, particularly the combined used of meso-level frameworks such as the Advocacy Coalition Framework and the Policy Networks Approach with micro-level considerations from implementation theory and the partnership literature. It concludes that empirically, it is only by giving policy agents a voice that we can develop a more accurate understanding of the policy process and that practically only by harnessing the commitment and energy of the grassroots can we step toward a more effective policy community.