Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Persistence of CD34 Stem Marker in Human Lipoma: Searching for Cancer Stem Cells

Background: Lipomas are benign solid tumours that develop in soft tissues with origin in mesenchymal progenitors. Macroscopically, they appear as soft-elastic nodules, varying in volume from a few millimiters to several centimetres and can enlarge progressively. Although they are usually asymptomatic, they can cause symptoms due to nerve or vessel compression. Microscopically they appear as fibrous connective tissue stroma with embedded adipocytes, and absence of inflammation. Up to now no characterisation of stem cell population present in this tissue has been performed. Methods: Cytofluorimetric, biological and molecular biology analyses have been performed in order to test superficial cell markers and gene expression profile related to stemness and apoptotic activity of cells present in lipoma tissues compared to those of adipose tissue's cells. Results: Our results confirmed that CD34+ cells in lipoma were present around small adipocytes, showing several altered biological activity such as proliferation, apoptotis and stemness. Conclusions: The data emerging from the comparison of the lipoma cells and normal adipose tissue, suggests the presence of cell precursors involved in the development of the lipoma. This hypothesis requires further investigation and may indicate new thresholds in the study of benign tumour pathogenesis.
Event-Related Brain Potentials and Case Information in Syntactic Ambiguities

In an ERP study, German sentences were investigated that contain a case-ambiguous NP that may be assigned accusative or dative case. Sentences were disambiguated by the verb in final position of the sentence. As our data show, sentences ending in a verb that assigns dative case to the ambiguous NP elicit a clear garden-path effect. The garden-path effect was indicated by a broad centro-posterior negative shift that occurred between 300 and 900 msec after the dative-assigning verb was presented. No enhanced P600 following the misanalysis was observed. Noun phrases whose case ambiguity was resolved in favor of accusative case and unambiguously dative-marked NPs did not trigger significant ERP differences. We will discuss the implications of our results for parsing and its neuropsychological correlates. The results of this study support a parser design according to which the so-called structural case (nominative or accusative) is assigned without any delay in the absence of morpho-lexical counterevidence. It is argued that the enhancement of a negative ERP component with a ficlassicalfl N400 topography refiects the difficulty of reanalysis due to reaccessing morpho-lexical information that lies outside the domain of the parsing module. Consequently, ERP responses to garden-path effects are not confined to a late positivity but vary depending on the level of processing involved in reanalysis. The fact that garden-path effects may also elicit an N400 can be linked to the nonhomogeneous linguistic properties of the constructions from which they arise.
Computational modeling of the neural representation of object shape in the primate ventral visual system

Neurons in successive stages of the primate ventral visual pathway encode the spatial structure of visual objects. In this paper, we investigate through computer simulation how these cell firing properties may develop through unsupervised visually-guided learning. Individual neurons in the model are shown to exploit statistical regularity and temporal continuity of the visual inputs during training to learn firing properties that are similar to neurons in V4 and TEO. Neurons in V4 encode the conformation of boundary contour elements at a particular position within an object regardless of the location of the object on the retina, while neurons in TEO integrate information from multiple boundary contour elements. This representation goes beyond mere object recognition, in which neurons simply respond to the presence of a whole object, but provides an essential foundation from which the brain is subsequently able to recognize the whole object.
Mediated tabletop interaction in the biology lab: exploring the design space of the rabbit

Interactive surfaces like diffuse illumination tabletops (DIT) identify and track objects using multiple techniques like shape and color recognition, fiducial markers, electronic components, and RFID tags. However, tracking becomes more complex when dealing with multiple small objects of similar form. We propose to use tangible mediators for integrating such objects to tabletops. This paper reports on our initial explorations of mediated tabletop interaction consisting of a mediator prototype and a design space definition. We built a mediator, the Rabbit, a device that translates thevalue of an RFID tag into a visual 2D code. The Rabbit rests on the interactive surface, holds the object, reads its passive RFID tag, and converts the read value into a 2D code that can be read by the DIT's built-in camera. When handling multiple objects, the Rabbit iterates through the generated 2D codes. Through a series of participatory activities with end users (molecular biologists), we collected initial feedback from participants and defined a design space for mediated tabletop interaction.
Ductile crystalline–amorphous nanolaminates

It is known that the room-temperature plastic deformation of bulk metallic glasses is compromised by strain softening and shear localization, resulting in near-zero tensile ductility. The incorporation of metallic glasses into engineering materials, therefore, is often accompanied by complete brittleness or an apparent loss of useful tensile ductility. Here we report the observation of an exceptional tensile ductility in crystalline copper/copper–zirconium glass nanolaminates. These nanocrystalline–amorphous nanolaminates exhibit a high flow stress of 1.09 ± 0.02 GPa, a nearly elastic-perfectly plastic behavior without necking, and a tensile elongation to failure of 13.8 ± 1.7%, which is six to eight times higher than that typically observed in conventional crystalline–crystalline nanolaminates (<2%) and most other nanocrystalline materials. Transmission electron microscopy and atomistic simulations demonstrate that shear banding instability no longer afflicts the 5- to 10-nm-thick nanolaminate glassy layers during tensile deformation, which also act as high-capacity sinks for dislocations, enabling absorption of free volume and free energy transported by the dislocations; the amorphous–crystal interfaces exhibit unique inelastic shear (slip) transfer characteristics, fundamentally different from those of grain boundaries. Nanoscale metallic glass layers therefore may offer great benefits in engineering the plasticity of crystalline materials and opening new avenues for improving their strength and ductility.
The Protestant Fiscal Ethic: Religious Confession and Euro Skepticism in Germany

During the European sovereign debt crisis, most countries that ran into fiscal trouble had Catholic majorities, whereas countries with Protestant majorities were able to avoid fiscal problems. Survey data show that, within Germany, views on the euro differ between Protestants and Non-Protestants, too. Among Protestants, concerns about the euro have, compared to Non-Protestants, increased during the crisis, and significantly reduce their subjective wellbeing only. We use the timing of survey interviews and news events in 2011 to account for the endogeneity of euro concerns. Emphasis on moral hazard concerns in Protestant theology may, thus, still shape economic preferences.
Heart Cells with Regenerative Potential from Pediatric Patients with End Stage Heart Failure: A Translatable Method to Enrich and Propagate

Background. Human cardiac-derived progenitor cells (hCPCs) have shown promise in treating heart failure (HF) in adults. The purpose of this study was to describe derivation of hCPCs from pediatric patients with end-stage HF. Methods. At surgery, discarded right atrial tissues (hAA) were obtained from HF patients (n = 25; hAA-CHF). Minced tissues were suspended in complete (serum-containing) DMEM. Cells were selected for their tissue migration and expression of stem cell factor receptor (hc-kit). Characterization of hc-kitpositive cells included immunohistochemical screening with a panel of monoclonal antibodies. Results. Cells, including phase-bright cells identified as hc-kitpositive, spontaneously emigrated from hAA-CHF in suspended explant cultures (SEC) after Day 7. When cocultured with tissue, emigrated hc-kitpositive cells proliferated, first as loosely attached clones and later as multicellular clusters. At Day 21~5% of cells were hc-kitpositive. Between Days 14 and 28 hc-kitpositive cells exhibited mesodermal commitment (GATA-4positive and NKX2.5positive); then after Day 28 cardiac lineages (flk-1positive, smooth muscle actinpositive, troponin-Ipositive, and myosin light chainpositive). Conclusions. C-kitpositive hCPCs can be derived from atrial tissue of pediatric patients with end-stage HF. SEC is a novel culture method for derivation of migratory hc-kitpositive cells that favors clinical translation by reducing the need for exogenously added factors to expand hCPCs in vitro.
Should Nations Learn to Live with Inflation?

It is often argued that the most important costs of inflation can be substantially mitigated by indexing reforms. Yet governments in moderate inflation countries have generally been very reluctant to promote institutional changes that would reduce the costs of inflation. Capital income continues to be taxed on a nominal basis, indexed bonds are a rarity, typical mortgage contracts keep nominal rather than real payments constant, and interest is not paid on required reserves. This paper examines the welfare consequences of inflation mitigation measures in the context of dynamic consistency theories of the determination of the inflation rate. Our general conclusion is that recognizing the effects of inflation mitigation measures on the choice of the inflation rate substantially undercuts the welfare case in their favor. It is easy to construct examples in which such measures actually reduce welfare. The case for indexing measures is strongest in settings where governments already have strong anti-inflation reputations, cannot precisely control the inflation rate, and can offset the effects of unanticipated inflation without reducing the costs of anticipated inflation. Conversely, the case for inflation mitigation measures is weakest where governments lack strong reputations, can control the inflation rate, and where indexing makes it easier to live with anticipated inflation.
Discussion Paper Series in Economics and Management Strategic Groups in European Commercial Banking German Economic Association of Business Administration -geaba Strategic Groups in European Commercial Banking Strategic Groups in European Commercial Banking

Despite contrary expectations of both researchers and practitioners, the European monetary union has so far not led to a discernable convergence of the roles of commercial banks in different European financial systems. This empirical study aims to shed more light on these structural differences by analysing the strategic positions of 624 commercial banks from 12 European countries. Based solely on their market-based and resource-based profiles in 1999 and not on their respective country of origin, banks are classified into nine distinct strategic groups. Applying discriminant analysis and logit models indeed reveals remarkable differences concerning the strategies pursued by banks from different countries. Strongly divergent market positions in terms of business risk exposure, asset growth patterns and the relative importance of loan and fee businesses in conjunction with only minor differences in terms of efficiency ratios and the skill levels of employees imply that banks face vastly different national market environments. Our empirical results may explain why national banking markets are still dominated by domestic players and indicate that performance differentials are not so much driven by technical and scale efficiencies but much more by (achievable) market positions.
Modeling the U.S. Short-Term Interest Rate by Mixture Autoregressive Processes

A new kind of mixture autoregressive model with GARCH errors is introduced and applied to the U.S. short-term interest rate. According to the diagnostic tests developed in the paper and further informal checks the model is capable of capturing both of the typical characteristics of the short-term interest rate: volatility persistence and the dependence of volatility on the level of interest rate. The model also allows for regime switches whose presence has been a third central result emerging from the recent empirical literature on the U.S. short-term interest rate. Realizations generated from the estimated model seem stable and their properties resemble those of the observed series closely. The drift and diffusion functions implied by the new model are in accordance with the results in much of the literature on continuous-time diffusion models for the short-term interest rate, and the term structure implications agree with historically observed patterns.
Communication Behaviors in Colocated Collaborative AR Interfaces

The authors present an analysis of communication behavior in face-to-face collaboration using a multi-user augmented reality (AR) interface. 2 experiments were conducted. In the 1st experiment, collaboration with AR technology was compared with more traditional unmediated and screen-based collaboration. In the 2nd experiment, the authors compared collaboration with 3 different AR displays. Several measures were used to analyze communication behavior, and the authors found that users exhibited many of the same behaviors in a collaborative AR interface as in face-to-face unmediated collaboration. However, user communication behavior changed with the type of AR display used. The authors describe implications of these results for the design of collaborative AR interfaces and directions for future research.
Evaluating educational reforms Scandinavian perspectives

List of Contributors. Preface. Thomas A. Schwandt And Peder Haug. The Research Council of Norway Evaluating Reform 97. Peder Haug. Challenges And Dilemmas for the Evaluation of Reform 97. Lars Monsen. Models of Evaluation. Evert Vedung. From Basic Research to Evaluation. Gunnar Stangvik. What's Being Done in the Name Of Evaluation? : Experiences Drawn From the Recent Evaluation of Schooling Reforms in Switzerland. Heinz Rhyn. The Political Governing (Governance) of Education and Evaluation. Ulf P. Lundgren. On the Evaluation of Curriculum Reforms. Stefan Thomas Hopmann. Democratic Evaluation: An Arena for Dialogue And Learning? Ove Karlsson. Democratic Evaluation and Evaluation for Learning: A Reply to Ove Karlsson. Gunn Imsen. Linking Evaluation and Education: Enlightenment and Engagement. Thomas A. Schwandt. Evaluating a National Curriculum Reform. Ian Westbury.
Do Individual Accounts Postpone Retirement: Evidence from Chile

Postponing retirement will become increasingly important as a means to increase the labor force, its output and old age security, as populations age. Recent research has focused on incentives stemming from the social security system that influence the worker’s decision to retire. Defined benefit systems (both public and private) often contain penalties for postponing access to pensions or continuing to work while receiving a pension. In contrast, the tight link between contributions and accumulations and the actuarial conversion of accumulations into pensions in privately managed defined contribution systems may lead workers to postpone pensions or to continue working after withdrawals begin. The experience of Chile, which implemented its new system in 1982, offers an opportunity to test if the change in incentives has indeed produced the expected change in retirement behavior. Using probit analysis of household survey data from 1960 to 2002, we estimate the impact of the pension reform on the probability of 1) becoming a pensioner and 2) dropping out of the labor force, for older workers. We find strong effects of the new system on both propensities, in the aggregate and at the individual level after controlling for individual and macro-economic variables. In particular, restricted access to early pensions and the exemption of pensioners from the pension payroll tax appear to exert a powerful effect on labor force participation rates.
The turn in economics and the turn in economic methodology

There is now considerable evidence that economics is undergoing significant change in which a collection of new research programs all at odds in important respects with standard neoclassical economics is increasingly dominating the economics research frontier (Davis 2006b). These new programs include game theory, evolutionary economics, behavioral economics, experimental economics, agent-based complexity economics and neuroeconomics. All raise new issues for economics, and contest longheld assumptions. Such a development, however, naturally raises questions about the nature and direction of economic methodology. Whereas economics investigates the economy, economic methodology investigates economics (as does the history of economics). Thus a significant re-direction of economics suggests there may be a need for an associated re-direction in the focus and concerns of economic methodology. Of course change in the economics research frontier per se does not hold any special implications for economic methodology, since change in any field’s research frontier is always ongoing. Indeed even dramatic change in a field’s research frontier need not have any special implications for its philosophy of science. The current change in economics, however, has one remarkable characteristic: all the new research programs in economics have their origins in other sciences. Thus whereas economic methodology – as befits its name – has essentially only had economics as its province in the past, it now may need to have as its new domain of responsibility not science in general (then it would be indistinguishable from the philosophy of science), but economics-within-science. In this regard, economic methodology as a field comes relatively well prepared, since its own origins and resources as the philosophy of science for economics lie in large degree outside economics in the history and philosophy of science. From the logical
Adaptive Power Management through Thermal Aware Workload Balancing in Internet Data Centers

The past decade witnessed the tremendous growth of online services and applications. Together with the increase of cloud computing, more and more computation are hosted by Internet data centers (IDCs). Today's IDCs are achieving significant advances in communication and computation capabilities. However, along with the increasing demand from IDC clients, power consumption for powering up and cooling these IDCs has been skyrocketing. Most existing works optimize the power consumption of either servers or Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRACs), and overlook the correlation between the power consumption of these two types of equipment. In this paper, we propose an adaptive power control method which leverages the correlation between the power consumption of servers and CRACs. To capture the workload uncertainties and thermal dynamics, we exploit Recursive-Least Square based Model Predictive Control (MPC) to solve the power control problem. Performance evaluations shows the effective power peak reduction using our approach.
Seasonal and topographic effects on estimating fire severity from Landsat TM/ETM+ data

The maximum solar elevation is typically less than 50 degrees in the Alaskan boreal region and solar elevation varies substantially during the growing season. Because of the relatively low solar elevation at boreal latitudes, the effect of topography on spectral reflectance can influence fire severity indices derived from remotely sensed data. We used Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM) data to test the effect of changing solar elevation and topography on the Normalized Burn Ratio (NBR) and the differenced Normalized Burn Ratio (dNBR). When a time series of unburned pixels from black spruce forests was examined, we found that NBR values consistently decreased from June through September. At the stand level, dNBR-derived values from similar unburned and burned black spruce stands were substantially higher from September imagery relative to July or August imagery. Within the Boundary burn, we found mean post-fire NBR to consistently vary owing to topographic control of potential solar radiation. To minimise spectral response due to topographic control of vegetation and fire severity, we computed a dNBR using images from August and September immediately after a June–July wildfire. There was a negative bias in remotely sensed fire severity estimates as potential solar radiation decreased owing to topography. Thus fire severity would be underestimated for stands in valley bottoms dominated by topographic shading or on steep north-facing slopes oriented away from incoming solar radiation. This is especially important because highly flammable black spruce stands typically occur on such sites. We demonstrate the effect of changing pre- and post-fire image dates on fire severity estimates by using a fixed NBR threshold defining ‘high severity’. The actual fire severity was constant, but owing to changes in phenology and solar elevation, ‘high severity’ pixels within a burn ranged from 56 to 76%. Because spectral reflectance values vary substantially as solar elevation and plant phenology change, the use of reflectance-based indices to assess trends in burn severity across regions or years may be especially difficult in high-latitude areas such as the Alaskan boreal forest.
A cross-country investigation of macroeconomic asymmetries

Using a recently introduced nonparametric test, I investigate two important and distinct asymmetries in cross-country quarterly macroeconomic time series. Asymmetries are suggested by many theories (old and new), and those discovered aid in the selection of the appropriate nonlinear time series representation (useful, for example, in both forecasting and policy guidance). Further, asymmetries can help determine underlying economic mechanisms. The key findings: positive growth rate asymmetry is nearly ubiquitous in price level data (but is not caused by money growth asymmetry); and the pattern of asymmetries varies dramatically across countries (making widespread reliance on US data to study fluctuations worrisome).
Estimating Agricultural Pollution Abatement Costs at the Plot Level Using Experimental Data: A Maximum Entropy Approach

This paper uses a directional output distance function to estimate a multi-output production frontier for a sample of experimental plots grown for the Sustainable Agriculture Farming Systems project at the University of California, Davis. Cross-sectional technical efficiency indices are estimated that take into account two proxies for undesirable output: number of trips across a field as a proxy for air pollution and/or soil erosion, and pints of pesticides applied to account for potential leaching and/or health risks. Shadow price estimates based on marginal rates of transformation ranged from $8-$21 for trips, while shadow prices for pints of pesticides averaged $23-$27.