Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
ANTIOXIDANT , ORGAN PROTECTIVE AND AMELIORATIVE PROPERTIES OF METHANOL EXTRACT OF ANOGEISSUS LEIOCARPUS STEM BARK AGAINST CARBON TETRACHLORIDE-INDUCED LIVER INJURY

The methanol extract of the stem bark of Anogeissus leiocarpus was evaluated in vivo at 2.5mg/kg for antioxidant, hepatoprotective and ameliorative effect on hepatocellular injury following pre-treatment or post-treatment with carbon tetrachloride (CCl4). Levels of the lipid peroxidation product, malondialdehyde (MDA) or thiobarbituric reactive substances (TBARS) were taken as a measure of oxidative stress, while levels of biochemical such as aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase and bilirubin (total and conjugated) were taken as biomarkers of liver damage. Irrespective of whether the animals were preor posttreated with Anogeissus leiocarpus, there was no statistical difference between the levels of MDA and markers of liver damage in the groups on A. Leiocarpus + CCL4 group and Vitamin E + CCl4, although both were significantly (P<0.05) lower than in the group on CCL4 only. However, malondialdehyde (MDA) levels in the heart, and to some extent, in the kidney, were hardly influenced by the treatments. These results indicate that methanolic extract of the stem bark of Anogeissus leiocarpus possess antioxidant, hepatoprotective and ameliorative effect on hepatocellular injury which may in part, account for the mechanism by which this plant brings about some of its reported therapeutic effects. INTRODUCTION: According to Allen and Tresini (2000), reactive oxygen species (ROS) such as superoxyl, hydroxyl and peroxyl radicals are produced as part of normal metabolic processes and are believed to be involved in the oxidative damage of lipids, proteins, nucleic acids and other macromolecules. This causes different chronic diseases which among others include cancer, atherosclerosis, ageing, diabetes, asthma and cardiovascular disorders (Hadi et al., 2000). In developing countries of Africa where about 200,000 to 300,000 known plant species are found, and where about 85% of the population relies on traditional medicine as the cornerstone of their healthcare delivery, the United Nations encourages the inclusion of herbal medicine of proven safety and efficacy in their healthcare delivery program (UNESCO, 1998; Ampofo, (1997). Anogeissus leiocarpus is a plant that is widely used in Northern Nigeria ethnomedicine. It belongs to the phylum, Tracheophyta; Order; Myrtales and Family: Combretaceae (combretoideae). It is commonly called Axle-wood tree, and in Nigeria, it is referred to as Marke (Hausa), Kojoli (Fulani), Annum (Kanuri), Ayin or Orin-odan Ainy (Yoruba), Atara (Igbo) and Kukunchi (Nupe). It is a very graceful tropical tree which grows up to 28m and occurs in the most of the savannah
Spectral theory of no-pair Hamiltonians

We prove a HVZ theorem for a general class of no-pair Hamiltonians describing an atom or positively charged ion with several electrons in the presence of a classical external magnetic field. Moreover, we show that there exist infinitely many eigenvalues below the essential spectrum and that the corresponding eigenfunctions are exponentially localized. The novelty is that the electrostatic and magnetic vector potentials as well as a non-local exchange potential are included in the projection determining the model. As a main technical tool we derive various commutator estimates involving spectral projections of Dirac operators with external fields. Our results apply to all nuclear charges less than or equal to 137.
The Values of Waiting Time, Travel Time, and a Seat on a Bus

Travel-time savings tend to be the dominant benefit of transportation improvements in developed countries. We can infer the values travelers attach to travel time from their choices among services that differ in time and money costs. This study applies maximum-likelihood estimation techniques to ridership survey data from routes on which a schedule of alternating high- and low-fare buses offers passengers an unusually wide range of prices for saving time. The methods we use provide estimates of the population distribution of waiting-time values rather than merely one, or a few, representative values.
Security Pricing and Investment Criteria in Competitive Markets: Comment

Recently, Jan Mossin presented a security pricing model within the framework of a market equilibrium theory. The model is based on particular preference structures of investors, specified in terms of quadratic utility functions with final wealth as the argument of the functions. As an implication of his model for the firm's optimal investment policy, Mossin demonstrates how Proposition III put forth by Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller (1958) can be validated. In addition, the analysis is extended to suggest investment criteria for investments with completely arbitrary yield characteristics. The purpose of this comment is twofold. First, to show that Mossin's proof of the validity of M-M's Proposition III is questionable, given his assumptions. Second, an attempt is made to show how a troublesome assumption of Mossin's analysis could possibly be eliminated. For the sake of exposition, Mossin's securitv pricing model as shown on page 752, equation (6), is stated below with all relevant definitions:
Predictors of Plasmodium falciparum Malaria Incidence in Chano Mille, South Ethiopia: A Longitudinal Study

We assessed potential effects of local meteorological and environmental conditions, indoor residual spraying with insecticides, insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) use at individual and community levels, and individual factors on Plasmodium falciparum malaria incidence in a village in south Ethiopia. A cohort of 8,121 people was followed for 101 weeks with active and passive surveillance. Among 317 microscopically confirmed P. falciparum malaria episodes, 29.3% occurred among temporary residents. The incidence density was 3.6/10,000 person-weeks of observation. We observed higher malaria incidence among males, children 5–14 years of age, ITNs non-users, the poor, and people who lived closer to vector breeding places. Rainfall increased and indoor residual spraying with Deltamethrin reduced falciparum incidence. Although ITNs prevented falciparum malaria for the users, we did not find that free mass ITNs distribution reduced falciparum malaria on a village level.
Contrasting patterns of sequence divergence and base composition between Drosophila introns and intergenic regions

Two non-coding DNA classes, introns and intergenic regions, of Drosophila melanogaster exhibit contrasting evolutionary patterns. GC content is significantly higher in intergenic regions and affects their degree of nucleotide variability. Divergence is positively correlated with recombination rate in intergenic regions, but not in introns. We argue that these differences are due to different selective constraints rather than mutational or recombinational mechanisms.
Bureaucracy and clientelism in an authoritarian context: a case study of local government reforms (2001-2009) in Pakistan

The chaotic political history of Pakistan is riddled with frequent changes in government that includes three major military regimes. Since independence in 1947, Pakistan’s civil-military bureaucracy has been at the forefront in administering most of the state’s institutions. Decentralisation of political and administrative authority is reckoned as one of the most effective political strategies for dealing with the predominant ethnic identity problems as well as issues related to the over-centralised administration. In Pakistan, various programmes of decentralisation have been implemented by authoritarian regimes. Concealed under the facade of democratising local governance, the core objective of those military regimes was the quest for securing a local collaborative political base. In such context, the local governments’ functional autonomy and political influence has largely been nominal. With a particular focus on the local government reforms implemented in year 2001, this thesis investigates a range of political and administrative issues in Pakistan’s local governance. The study elaborates Pakistan’s post-independence political history to explain why the process of democratisation in general and decentralisation in particular has not been successful. Besides, international political economy perspectives are also evaluated in order to identify the hurdles that have obstructed the process of institution-building in Pakistan. In order to examine the factors that affect the inter-institutional and inter-governmental working relationships, the study is divided into two main analytical spheres. First, the organisational character and behaviour of civil bureaucracy is evaluated as one of the main reasons affecting the performance of local governments. Secondly, the thesis investigates the extent to which political clientelism is ingrained in the local political organisation of Pakistan. More specifically, it probes to find out how the nature of citizen-politician relationships, voting behaviour, and electoral mechanisms explain the failure of local government reforms
Transcriptome Analysis of Litopenaeus vannamei in Response to White Spot Syndrome Virus Infection

Pacific white shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei) is the most extensively farmed crustacean species in the world. White spot syndrome virus (WSSV) is one of the major pathogens in the cultured shrimp. However, the molecular mechanisms of the host-virus interaction remain largely unknown. In this study, the impact of WSSV infection on host gene expression in the hepatopancreas of L. vannamei was investigated through the use of 454 pyrosequencing-based RNA-Seq of cDNA libraries developed from WSSV-challenged shrimp or normal controls. By comparing the two cDNA libraries, we show that 767 host genes are significantly up-regulated and 729 genes are significantly down-regulated by WSSV infection. KEGG analysis of the differentially expressed genes indicated that the distribution of gene pathways between the up- and down-regulated genes is quite different. Among the differentially expressed genes, several are found to be involved in various processes of animal defense against pathogens such as apoptosis, mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling, toll-like receptor (TLR) signaling, Wnt signaling and antigen processing and presentation pathways. The present study provides valuable information on differential expression of L. vannamei genes following WSSV infection and improves our current understanding of this host-virus interaction. In addition, the large number of transcripts obtained in this study provides a strong basis for future genomic research on shrimp.
Development of public e-services - a method outline

There has been a rapid growth in the development and launching of new public e-services over the web to citizens. This is dependent on general development of applications on the web, national and international programs for e-government development and also on demands and expectations from external clients as citizens and companies. It seems that there has been a focus on broad launching of public e-services rather than emphasis on quality in use for the e-services. To get good points in national and international bench-marks, it is more important to have a great number of e-services than having a few really good ones. This means that there exist several e-services with a low degree of usage. Many e-services can also be criticized for usability deficiencies.
Auditor-Client Interactions in the Changed UK Regulatory Environment – A Revised Grounded Theory Model

Audit and financial reporting quality are under intense scrutiny nationally and globally. The outcome of high‐level auditor‐auditee discussion and negotiation issues (auditor–client interactions) is central to this debate. Beattie et al. developed a grounded theory model of these interactions in the 1997 UK setting. This paper reports on a field study of 45 interactions in nine case companies in the radically changed post‐SOX regulatory environment. Crucially, interviewees in each case company extend the chief financial officer–audit partner dyad to include the audit committee chair. Fundamental revisions to the model emerge. The strongest influence on interactions has become the national enforcement regime, overlaid upon the international standard‐setting regime. The outcome in both the eyes of the participants and in our evaluation is full compliance (contrary to the findings from the 1997 setting), regardless of the perceived quality of the standards and the integrity of the outcome. Personal and company characteristics, which were of most importance in 1997, have become peripheral. The audit committee chair is shown to fulfil a gatekeeping role in relation to the full audit committee.
Can diabetes management be safely transferred to practice nurses in a primary care setting? A randomised controlled trial.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES To determine whether the management of type 2 diabetes mellitus in a primary care setting can be safely transferred to practice nurses. BACKGROUND Because of the increasing prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus and the burden of caring for individual patients, the demand type 2 diabetes mellitus patients place on primary health care resources has become overwhelming. DESIGN Randomised controlled trial. METHODS The patients in the intervention group were cared for by practice nurses who treated glucose levels, blood pressure and lipid profile according to a specified protocol. The control group received conventional care from a general practitioner. The primary outcome measure was the mean decrease seen in glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) levels at the end of the follow-up period (14 months). RESULTS A total of 230 patients was randomised with 206 completing the study. The between-group differences with respect to reduction in HbA1c, blood pressure and lipid profile were not significant. Blood pressure decreased significantly in both groups; 7.4/3.2 mm Hg in the intervention group and 5.6/1.0 mm Hg in the control group. In both groups, more patients met the target values goals for lipid profile compared to baseline. In the intervention group, there was some deterioration in the health-related quality of life and an increase in diabetes-related symptoms. Patients being treated by a practice nurse were more satisfied with their treatment than those being treated by a general practitioner. CONCLUSION Practice nurses achieved results, which were comparable to those achieved by a general practitioner with respect to clinical parameters with better patient satisfaction. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE This study shows that diabetes management in primary care can be safely transferred to practice nurses.
Defining the schizophrenia spectrum: issues for genetic linkage studies.

Genetic linkage studies of schizophrenia depend on accurate psychiatric diagnosis of relatives within multiply affected families. Each investigator makes a series of explicit or implicit decisions to define which relatives will be assumed to share a schizophrenia-related genotype, that is, who is an "affected relative. " In this article we delineate issues that we believe should be considered in such studies and review the relevant literature. Issues include criteria for selecting probands; whether broader criteria should be used to select affected relatives; approaches to including or excluding diagnoses for which family study data suggest a relationship to schizophrenia or to affective disorders or other psychiatric disorders; clarification of diagnostic hierarchy; and issues related to substance abuse and neurological disorders. Also discussed are whether relatives without spectrum diagnoses should be considered unaffected or undiagnosed in linkage analyses, how bilateral familial affectedness should be defined, and provision for independent review of study diagnoses. As an illustration, the clinical model for the authors' schizophrenia linkage study is described.
Law Enforcement Lessons Learned from Hurricane Katrina

Major disasters represent infrequent events that often require response organizations to vicariously learn from the experiences of others in order to improve their operations. A primary mechanism for such knowledge diffusion is the different practitioner and empirical journals for the organizational fields that comprise disaster response. A review of the literature for the law enforcement field, however, reveals that little attention is given to how these organizations manage actual disasters. In particular, the presentation of organizational experiences, whether through case studies or other methodologies, is very limited in the practitioner and empirical literature of this field. This represents a considerable problem for improvements of disaster response operations given that law enforcement agencies represent a key component in such efforts. The research presented in this article is an effort to fill this knowledge gap and thereby facilitate organizational learning to improve future law enforcement disaster response activities. The authors traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina to examine the response efforts of state and local law enforcement agencies to the storm. The findings from this research are reported here in a lessons-learned format to inform law enforcement disaster response policy. Copyright 2007 by The Policy Studies Organization.
An embedded co-processor architecture for energy-efficient stream computing

Stream processing has emerged as an important model of computation in the context of multimedia and communication sub-systems of embedded System-on-Chip (SoC) architectures. The dataflow nature of streaming applications allows them to be most naturally expressed as a set of kernels iteratively operating on continuous streams of data. The kernels are computationally intensive and exhibit large amounts of data and instruction level parallelism. Streaming applications are mainly characterized by real-time constraints that demand high throughput and data bandwidth with limited global data reuse. Conventional architectures fail to meet these demands due to their poorly matched execution models and the overheads associated with instruction and data movements. We present StreamEngine, an embedded architecture for energy-efficient computation of stream kernels. StreamEngine introduces an instruction locking mechanism that exploits the iterative nature of the kernels and enables fine-grain instruction reuse. We also adopt a Context-aware Dataflow Execution model to exploit instruction-level and data-level parallelism within the stream kernels. Each instruction in StreamEngine is locked to a Reservation Station and maintains a context that is updated upon execution; thus instructions never retire from the RS. The entire kernel is hosted in RS Banks close to functional units for energy-efficient instruction and operand delivery. We evaluate the performance and energy-efficiency of our architecture for stream kernel benchmarks by implementing the architecture with TSMC 45nm process, and comparison with an embedded RISC processor.
Shutting the Stable Door After the Horse Has Bolted? On Educational Risk and the Quality of Education

We analyze whether a redistributive government should provide ex ante insurance against unfortunate outcomes or whether it should instead rely on transfers for redistributing income ex post. To this end, we develop a model of education in which individuals face educational risk and wage dispersion across two types of skills. Successful graduation and working as a skilled worker depends on individual effort in education and on public resources, but educational risk still causes (income) inequality. We show that in a second-best setting, in which learning effort is not observable, improving the quality of education by public funding of the educational sector has a significant effect and that this increases efficiency in comparison to a pure (linear) income tax with income transfers from skilled to unskilled workers. Compared to a first-best solution, providing ex ante insurance significantly gains importance relative to traditional ex post redistribution, because it simultaneously alleviates moral hazard in education. These results are strengthened when a (distortionary) skill-specific tax can be implemented.
Democracy in Immigrant America: Changing Demographics and Political Participation

Table of Contents for Democracy in Immigrant America List of Tables List of Figures Acknowledgments 1. Introduction 2. Studying the Newcomers 3. A Matter of Numbers: Immigrant Demographics and the Electoral Process 4. Are the Newcomers Exceptional? The Applicability of Traditional Models to Immigrant Political Participation 5. From Newcomers to Settlers: Immigrant Adaptation and Political Participation 6. Were They Pushed? Political Threat, Institutional Mobilization, and Immigrant Voting 7. Beyond the Ballot Box: Nonvoting Political Behavior Across Immigrant Generations 8. The Future of Immigrant Political Participation: Directions in Policy and Research Appendix Notes Bibliography Index
Cultural Impact of Human Resource Practices on Job Satisfaction: A Global Study Across 48 Countries

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine the effect of high-performance human resource practices on job satisfaction across four cultural regions – Asia, Europe, North America, and Latin America. High-performance human resource practices were used to predict job satisfaction for each region and then compared to determine significant differences. Hofstede's cultural dimensions were employed as a basis for structuring hypothesized differences across cultural regions. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from a proprietary industry survey on employee work attitudes. The sample consisted of over 70,000 employees from four large multinational organizations with at least four offices in each of the four regions. Data were analyzed using regression analysis and comparison testing across models. Findings – There are significant relationships between job characteristics and job satisfaction across all regions of the world, with a sense of achievement universally the most important driver. A.
Processing Chains in System of Systems

SOA has been seen as one of the main approaches for managing "system of systems" (SoS) i.e. Large scale IT landscapes. The extension of SOA to include the concept of process orientation could be the next evolutionary step for SOA. Before starting to define reference architectures for process-oriented SOA in SoS it would be advantageous to learn more about the current state of process handling in a SoS. The objective of the current paper is to describe the different approaches to implementing processes in a SoS. The term processing chain is introduced as an abstract representation of processes in SoS. A classification of processing chains is defined and an approximate distribution of different "processing chains" is presented in a case study based on the analyzed SoS. Also, the paper addresses the question which processing chain type would be appropriate in a certain context based on the underlying requirements.