Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vote Buying and Turnout in Kenya's 2002 Elections 1

Vote buying has and continues to be pervasive in many electoral regimes. Yet the relationship between vote buying and voting behavior, particularly in the context of the secret ballot, remains largely unknown. In this paper I study the effect of vote buying on voter turnout in Kenya, using a nationally representative survey that includes questions about the country's 2002 presidential and parliamentary elections. Estimating the causal effect of vote buying on voter turnout is complicated by its strategic nature, and so this study also examines the strategic logic of vote buying in Kenya. The results suggest that poor individuals and “swing” voters in the country's most electorally competitive districts are vote buyers most likely targets. Using these results, I use matching to estimate that individuals who were approached by a vote buyer were about 14 percentage points more likely to vote than those who were not, while the least educated individuals were the most highly influenced by vote-buying. These results present a puzzle. If voting is secret and voluntary, why does vote buying have this impact? I propose and test the empirical implications of three explanations: individual monitoring, community-level monitoring, and credibility signaling. Evidence is consistent with individual monitoring and credibility signaling, though not with community-level monitoring: vote buying influences perceptions of party monitoring and involvement in violence, and improves perceptions of party credibility.
Companion Diagnostics and Cancer Biomarkers Coordinate Hyperactivation of Notch 1 and Ras / MAPK Pathways Correlates with Poor Patient Survival : Novel Therapeutic Strategy for Aggressive Breast Cancers

Aberrant activation of Notch and Ras pathways has been detected in breast cancers. A synergy between these two pathways has also been shown in breast cell transformation in culture. Yet, the clinical relevance of Notch–Ras cooperation in breast cancer progression remains unexplored. In this study, we show that coordinate hyperactivation of Notch1 and Ras/MAPK pathways in breast cancer patient specimens, as assessed by IHC for cleaved Notch1 and pErk1/2, respectively, correlated with early relapse to vital organs and poor overall survival. Interestingly, majority of such Notch1Erk cases encompassed the highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancers (TNBC), and were enriched in stem cell markers. We further show that combinatorial inhibition of Notch1 and Ras/MAPK pathways, using a novel mAb against Notch1 and a MEK inhibitor, respectively, led to a significant reduction in proliferation and survival of breast cancer cells compared with individual inhibition. Combined inhibition also abrogated sphere-forming potential, and depleted the putative cancer stem-like cell subpopulation. Most importantly, combinatorial inhibition of Notch1 and Ras/MAPK pathways completely blocked tumor growth in a panel of breast cancer xenografts, including the TNBCs. Thus, our study identifies coordinate hyperactivation of Notch1 and Ras/MAPK pathways as novel biomarkers for poor breast cancer outcome. Furthermore, based on our preclinical data, we propose combinatorial targeting of these two pathways as a treatment strategy for highly aggressive breast cancers, particularly the TNBCs that currently lack any targeted therapeutic module. Mol Cancer Ther; 13(12); 3198–209. 2014 AACR.
ISO observations of the Wolf-Rayet galaxies NGC 5430, NGC 6764, Mrk 309 and VII Zw 19

Observations of four WR galaxies (NGC 5430, NGC 6764, Mrk 309 and VII Zw 19) using the Infrared Space Observatory are presented here. ISOCAM maps of NGC 5430, Mrk 309 and NGC 6764 revealed the location of star formation regions in each of these galaxies. ISOPHOT spectral observations from 4 to 12 µm detected the ubiquitous PAH bands in the nuclei of the targets and several of the disk star forming regions, while LWS spectroscopy detected (O I) and (C II) emission lines from two galaxies, NGC 5430 and NGC 6764. Using a combination of ISO and IRAS flux densities, a dust model based on the sum of modified blackbody components was successfully fitted to the available data. These models were then used to calculate new values for the total IR luminosities for each galaxy, the size of the various dust populations, and the global SFR. The derived flux ratios, the SFRs, the high L(PAH)/L(40-120 µm) and F(PAH 7.7 µm)/F(7.7 µm continuum) values sug- gest that most of these galaxies are home to only a compact burst of star formation. The exception is NGC 6764, whose F(PAH 7.7 µm)/F(7.7 µm continuum) value of 1.22 is consistent with the presence of an AGN, yet the L(PAH)/L(40-120 µm) is more in line with a starburst, a finding in line with a compact low-luminosity AGN dominated by the starburst.
Virtualized Reality: Constructing Virtual Worlds from Real Scenes

A new visual medium, Virtualized Reality, immerses viewers in a virtual reconstruction of real-world events. The Virtualized Reality world model consists of real images and depth information computed from these images. Stereoscopic reconstructions provide a sense of complete immersion, and users can select their own viewpoints at view time, independent of the actual camera positions used to capture the event.
Nonmonotonic Extension Models 1

We introduce three new techniques for statistical language models: extension modeling, nonmonotonic contexts, and the divergence heuristic. Together these techniques result in language models that have few states, even fewer parameters, and low message entropies. For example, our techniques achieve a message entropy of 1.97 bits/char on the Brown corpus using only 89,325 parameters. In contrast, the character 4-gram model requires more than 250 times as many parameters in order to achieve a message entropy of only 2.47 bits/char. The fact that our model performs signi cantly better while using vastly fewer parameters indicates that it is a better probability model of natural language text. Thanks to Andrew Appel, Carl de Marken, and Dafna Scheinvald for their critique. Both authors are partially supported by Young Investigator Award IRI-0258517 to the rst author from the National Science Foundation. The second author is additionally supported by a tuition award from the Princeton University Research Board. The research was partially supported by NSF SGER IRI-9217208.
Repeated inhalation of bradykinin attenuates adenosine 5'-monophosphate (AMP) induced bronchoconstriction in asthmatic airways.

Repeated bronchial challenges with inhaled bradykinin lead to a rapid loss of the bronchoconstrictor response and this has been suggested to be due to depletion of contractile neuropeptides from sensory nerve endings. If adenosine 5'-monophosphate (AMP), another potent bronchoprovocant in asthma, and bradykinin share a common pathway in inducing bronchoconstriction in asthmatic subjects, then repeated bradykinin bronchoprovocation tests should reduce the response to subsequent inhalation of AMP. We examined this hypothesis in eight asthmatic subjects in a double-blind, randomized study. On the histamine study day, two consecutive concentration-response studies with inhaled histamine were followed by a third consecutive challenge with AMP and the provocation concentration producing a 20% fall in forced expiratory volume in one second from the post-diluent baseline value (PC20 FEV1) for this agonist was calculated. On the bradykinin study day, two consecutive bronchoprovocation tests with bradykinin were followed by a third inhalation challenge to obtain the PC20AMP value. On a further occasion, the asthmatic subjects underwent two consecutive concentration-response studies with inhaled bradykinin followed by a third consecutive challenge with histamine. On the histamine study day, the geometric mean PC20AMP value was 28.1 mg.ml-1, whilst on the bradykinin study day, the fifteenfold reduction in bradykinin responsiveness after the second bradykinin challenge was accompanied by a significant reduction of the airway responsiveness to AMP, the PC20AMP being 59.8 mg.ml-1. A similar reduction in bradykinin responsiveness failed to alter the airway response to a subsequent inhalation with histamine. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Constraining the Projected Radial Distribution of Galactic Satellites with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We use the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic sample to constrain the projected radial distribution of satellites around isolated ~L* galaxies. We employ mock galaxy catalogs derived from high-resolution cosmological simulations to investigate the effects of interloper contamination and show that interlopers significantly bias the estimated slope of the projected radial distribution of satellites. We also show that the distribution of interlopers around galaxies is expected to be nonuniform in velocity space because galaxies are clustered and reside in crowded environments. Successful methods of interloper contamination correction should therefore take into account environments of the host galaxies. Two such new methods are presented, and the most reliable of them is used to correct for interloper contamination in analyses of the SDSS galaxy sample. The best-fit power-law slope of the interloper-corrected surface density distribution of satellites, Σ(R) ∝ Rα, in the volume-limited SDSS sample is α ≃ -1.7 ± 0.1, independent of the galaxy and satellite luminosities. Comparison with ΛCDM simulations shows that the radial distribution of the SDSS satellites is more concentrated than that of subhalos around galaxy-sized halos, especially at R < 100 h-1 kpc. The predicted dark matter radial distribution is somewhat more concentrated than the profile of the SDSS satellites, but the difference is not statistically significant for our sample.
Dovepress Open Access to Scientific and Medical Research Open Access Full Text Article the Relationship between Adipokines, Body Composition, and Bone Density in Men with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Osteoporosis is common in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Data regarding the relationship between adipokines and bone mineral density (BMD) in this population is lacking. The purpose of this pilot study was to determine associations between the adipokines tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), leptin, adiponectin and resistin, body composition, and BMD in men with severe COPD. This was a cross-sectional study of men with severe COPD who visited the University of Colorado Hospital COPD Center. Bone density and parameters of body composition were measured by dual-energy X-ray absorpti-ometry. Twenty-three men were included (mean age = 66 years, mean percent predicted forced expiratory volume in one second = 32%). On bivariate analysis, there was no association between TNF-α and BMD. Parameters of body composition and serum concentrations of leptin and adiponectin were significantly associated with total hip and spine bone density. However, with partial correlation analysis, total body mass was the only independent predictor of total hip BMD, explaining approximately 50% of the variability. Overall, 18 out of 23 men enrolled (78%) had low bone density by T-score, and nine (39%) were classified as having osteoporosis. The men with osteoporosis had lower parameters of body composition, lower mean serum leptin concentrations, and a greater impairment in measures of lung function compared to the men without osteoporosis. We conclude that the effect of adipokines on BMD does not appear to be independent of body mass. However, larger studies are needed to further evaluate the relationship between adipokines, body weight, and BMD in patients with COPD.
A 3-D precise integration time-domain method without the restraints of the courant-friedrich-levy stability condition for the numerical solution of Maxwell's equations

In this paper, a new three-dimensional time-domain method for solving vector Maxwell's equations, called the precise-integration time-domain (PITD) algorithm, is proposed in order to eliminate the Courant-Friedrich-Levy (CFL) condition restraint. The new algorithm is based on the precise-integration technique. It is shown that this method is quite stable even when the CFL condition is not satisfied. Although the memory requirement of the PITD method is much larger than that of the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, this new algorithm is very appealing since the time step used in the simulation is no longer restricted by stability. As a result, computation speed can be improved. Therefore, if the minimum cell size in the computational domain is required to be much smaller than the wavelength, this new algorithm is more efficient than the FDTD scheme. Theoretical proof of the unconditional stability is shown and numerical results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the method. It is found that the accuracy of the PITD is independent of the time-step size.
A Statistical Measure of a Population’s Propensity to Engage in Post-Purchase Online Word-of-Mouth

The emergence of online communities has enabled firms to monitor consumer-generated online word-of-mouth (WOM) in real-time by mining publicly available information from the Internet. A prerequisite for harnessing this new ability is the development of appropriate WOM metrics and the identification of relationships between such metrics and consumer behavior. Along these lines this paper introduces a metric of a purchasing population's propensity to rate a product online. Using data from a popular movie website we find that our metric exhibits several relationships that have been previously found to exist between aspects of a product and consumers' propensity to engage in offline WOM about it. Our study, thus, provides positive evidence for the validity of our metric as a proxy of a population's propensity to engage in post-purchase online WOM. Our results also suggest that the antecedents of offline and online WOM exhibit important similarities.
Supervisory coaching and performance feedback as mediators of the relationships between leadership styles, work engagement, and turnover intention

ABSTRACT Human resource development (HRD) is key to organizational success. With some HRD roles devolving to leaders in recent years, a gap in understanding is now evident in how leaders’ leadership styles shape development-oriented behaviours that may effectively assist them in fulfilling their HRD roles, and the corresponding effects that this has on employee work engagement and turnover intention. This study compared the effects of transformational and transactional leadership styles on employee attitudes (i.e. work engagement and turnover intention) through leaders’ behaviours (i.e. supervisory coaching and performance feedback). This study used a multilevel approach (i.e. matching leaders to multiple subordinates) with 500 employees, nested in 65 workgroups from private organizations in Malaysia. As hypothesized, we found a link between transformational (but not transactional) leadership and higher levels of supervisory coaching and performance feedback, and that these job resources mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and work engagement. Furthermore, we found that work engagement mediates the relationships of both supervisory coaching and performance feedback to turnover intention. Overall, the study results reveal one way in which Asian leaders can effectively facilitate some aspects of HRD through development-focused behaviours which serve as job resources to boost work engagement and reduce turnover intention.
Access-pattern and bandwidth aware file replication algorithm in a grid environment

Replication in grid file systems can significantly improve I/O performance of data-intensive grid applications, but its manual creation and placement would be impractical in a real grid environment involving thousands to millions of files accessed per application. Although automatic determination of where and how many replicas should be created should be decided with regards to application access patterns and network throughputs, thereby achieving high application throughput and minimizing replica space overhead, previous studies have focused on limited parameter spaces in their algorithmic optimizations. We propose an automated replication algorithm that allows most of I/O accesses to be performed within a given time threshold, while simultaneously minimizing the space overhead by replication. Our algorithm models the replication problem as a combinatorial optimization problem, where the constraints are derived from the given access time threshold and various system parameters, while the objective function being to minimize file replication costs. We solve the optimization problem by dynamically monitoring and estimating inter-node link throughputs and file access patterns of running applications. Our simulation-based studies suggest that the proposed algorithm can achieve higher performance than simple techniques, such as ones that always or never create replicas, while keeping storage usage very low. The results also indicate that the proposed automated algorithm can perform comparably with manual replica placement.
Diversity protects plant communities against generalist molluscan herbivores

Wildflower strips are used to increase natural enemies of crop pests and to conserve insect diversity on farmland. Mollusks, especially slugs, can affect the vegetation development in these strips considerably. Although recent theoretical work suggests that more diverse plant communities will exhibit greater resistance against herbivore pressure, empirical studies are scarce. We conducted a semi-natural experiment in wildflower strips, manipulating trophic structure (reduction in herbivorous mollusks and reduction in major predators) and plant diversity (2, 6, 12, 20 and 24 sown species). This design allowed us to assess the effect of plant diversity, biomass and composition on mollusks, and vice versa, the effect of mollusc abundance on vegetation. Seven species of mollusks were found in the strips, with the slugs Arion lusitanicus, Deroceras reticulatum and Deroceras panormitanum being most frequent. We found a negative relationship between plant diversity and mollusk abundance, which was due predominantly to a decrease in the agricultural pest species A. lusitanicus. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that plant diversity can reduce the impact of herbivores. However, plant identity also had an effect on mollusks, and accounted for a much larger fraction of the variation in mollusk communities than biodiversity effects. While overall plant diversity decreased during the 3 years of the study, in the final year the highest plant diversity was found in the plots where mollusk populations were experimentally reduced. We conclude that selective feeding by generalist herbivores leads to changes in plant community composition and hence reduced plant diversity. Our results highlight the importance of plant biodiversity as protection against generalist herbivores, which if abundant can in the long term negatively impact plant diversity, driving the system along a “low plant diversity – high mollusk abundance” trajectory.
Packing Triangles in Regular Tournaments

We prove that a regular tournament with n vertices has more than n211.5(1−o(1)) pairwise arc‐disjoint directed triangles. On the other hand, we construct regular tournaments with a feedback arc set of size less than n28 , so these tournaments do not have n28 pairwise arc‐disjoint triangles.
Securing group key exchange against strong corruptions and key registration attacks

In Group Key Exchange (GKE) protocols, users usually extract the group key using some auxiliary (ephemeral) secret information generated during the execution. Strong corruptions are attacks by which an adversary can reveal these ephemeral secrets, in addition to the possibly used long-lived keys. Undoubtedly, security impact of strong corruptions is serious, and thus specifying appropriate security requirements and designing secure GKE protocols appears an interesting yet challenging task – the aim of our article. We start by investigating the current setting of strong corruptions and derive some refinements like opening attacks that allow to reveal ephemeral secrets of users without their long-lived keys. This allows to consider even stronger attacks against honest, but 'opened' users. Further, we define strong security goals for GKE protocols in the presence of such powerful adversaries and propose a 3-round GKE protocol, named TDH1, which remains immune to their attacks under standard cryptographic assumptions. Our security definitions allow adversaries to register users and specify their long-lived keys, thus, in particular capture attacks of malicious insiders for the appropriate security goals such as Mutual Authentication, key confirmation, contributiveness, key control and key-replication resilience.
Toxoplasma gondii Ingests and Digests Host Cytosolic Proteins

ABSTRACT The protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii resides within a nonfusogenic vacuole during intracellular replication. Although the limiting membrane of this vacuole provides a protective barrier to acidification and degradation by lysosomal hydrolases, it also physically segregates the parasite from the host cytosol. Accordingly, it has been suggested that T. gondii acquires material from the host via membrane channels or transporters. The ability of the parasite to internalize macromolecules via endocytosis during intracellular replication has not been tested. Here, we show that Toxoplasma ingests host cytosolic proteins and digests them using cathepsin L and other proteases within its endolysosomal system. Ingestion was reduced in mutant parasites lacking an intravacuolar network of tubular membranes, implicating this apparatus as a possible conduit for trafficking to the parasite. Genetic ablation of proteins involved in the pathway is associated with diminished parasite replication and virulence attenuation. We show that both virulent type I and avirulent type II strain parasites ingest and digest host-derived protein, indicating that the pathway is not restricted to highly virulent strains. The findings provide the first definitive evidence that T. gondii internalizes proteins from the host during intracellular residence and suggest that protein digestion within the endolysosomal system of the parasite contributes to toxoplasmosis. IMPORTANCE Toxoplasma gondii causes significant disease in individuals with weak immune systems. Treatment options for this infection have drawbacks, creating a need to understand how this parasite survives within the cells it infects as a prelude to interrupting its survival strategies. This study reveals that T. gondii internalizes proteins from the cytoplasm of the cells it infects and degrades such proteins within a digestive compartment within the parasite. Disruption of proteins involved in the pathway reduced parasite replication and lessened disease severity. The identification of a novel parasite ingestion pathway opens opportunities to interfere with this process and improve the outcome of infection. Toxoplasma gondii causes significant disease in individuals with weak immune systems. Treatment options for this infection have drawbacks, creating a need to understand how this parasite survives within the cells it infects as a prelude to interrupting its survival strategies. This study reveals that T. gondii internalizes proteins from the cytoplasm of the cells it infects and degrades such proteins within a digestive compartment within the parasite. Disruption of proteins involved in the pathway reduced parasite replication and lessened disease severity. The identification of a novel parasite ingestion pathway opens opportunities to interfere with this process and improve the outcome of infection.