Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A fistful of Euros: Does One-Euro-Job participation lead means-tested benefit recipients into regular jobs and out of unemployment benefit II receipt?

"In 2005 a major reform of the German means-tested unemployment benefit system came into force. The reform aimed at activating benefit recipients, e.g., by a workfare programme, the so-called One-Euro-Job. This programme was implemented at a large scale. Participants receive their means-tested benefit and a small compensation of usually one to 1.5 EURO per hour worked. Participation typically lasts six months or less. We investigate the impact of One-Euro-Jobs for participants who entered the programme at the start of the year 2005. We apply propensity score matching to estimate the treatment effects on the outcomes regular employment, neither being registered as unemployed nor as job-seeker and no unemployment benefit II receipt. We observe these outcomes for about two years after programme start. The locking-in effects are small. Moreover, 20 months after programme there is a significant but small positive impact on the employment rate of female but not male participants. During the first two years after programme start, participation does not contribute to avoiding unemployment benefit II receipt. Our results imply that there is some effect heterogeneity: Participation reduces the employment rate of participants younger than 25 years, but raises it for some older participant groups. It is ineffective for participants who were recently employed, while it is effective for participants who lost their last contributory job between 1992 and 2000. " (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))
Beam hopping in multi-beam broadband satellite systems: System simulation and performance comparison with non-hopped systems

A key requirement for the future multi-beam broadband satellite design is the provision of flexibility to adapt to different traffic demands by re-assigning capacity to beams in accordance with changing traffic distributions. Such flexibility would enable the best match to be maintained between the system resources and traffic demands over the satellite lifetime, thereby greatly enhancing the system utilisation and competitiveness. The current paper examines the use of beam hopping to provide such flexibility. It investigates the advantages of beam hopping and compares the performance and capacity capabilities of a beam hopped with that of equivalent non-hopped systems also designed to provide flexibility.
Sex differences in the representation of call stimuli in a songbird secondary auditory area

Understanding how communication sounds are encoded in the central auditory system is critical to deciphering the neural bases of acoustic communication. Songbirds use learned or unlearned vocalizations in a variety of social interactions. They have telencephalic auditory areas specialized for processing natural sounds and considered as playing a critical role in the discrimination of behaviorally relevant vocal sounds. The zebra finch, a highly social songbird species, forms lifelong pair bonds. Only male zebra finches sing. However, both sexes produce the distance call when placed in visual isolation. This call is sexually dimorphic, is learned only in males and provides support for individual recognition in both sexes. Here, we assessed whether auditory processing of distance calls differs between paired males and females by recording spiking activity in a secondary auditory area, the caudolateral mesopallium (CLM), while presenting the distance calls of a variety of individuals, including the bird itself, the mate, familiar and unfamiliar males and females. In males, the CLM is potentially involved in auditory feedback processing important for vocal learning. Based on both the analyses of spike rates and temporal aspects of discharges, our results clearly indicate that call-evoked responses of CLM neurons are sexually dimorphic, being stronger, lasting longer, and conveying more information about calls in males than in females. In addition, how auditory responses vary among call types differ between sexes. In females, response strength differs between familiar male and female calls. In males, temporal features of responses reveal a sensitivity to the bird's own call. These findings provide evidence that sexual dimorphism occurs in higher-order processing areas within the auditory system. They suggest a sexual dimorphism in the function of the CLM, contributing to transmit information about the self-generated calls in males and to storage of information about the bird's auditory experience in females.
Novel Transcription Factor-Like Function of Human Matrix Metalloproteinase 3 Regulating the CTGF/CCN2 Gene

ABSTRACT Matrix metalloproteinase 3 (MMP3) is well known as a secretory endopeptidase that degrades extracellular matrices. Recent reports indicated the presence of MMPs in the nucleus (A. J. Kwon et al., FASEB J. 18:690-692, 2004); however, its function has not been well investigated. Here, we report a novel function of human nuclear MMP3 as a trans regulator of connective tissue growth factor (CCN2/CTGF). Initially, we cloned MMP3 cDNA as a DNA-binding factor for the CCN2/CTGF gene. An interaction between MMP3 and transcription enhancer dominant in chondrocytes (TRENDIC) in the CCN2/CTGF promoter was confirmed by a gel shift assay and chromatin immunoprecipitation. The CCN2/CTGF promoter was activated by overexpressed MMP3, whereas a TRENDIC mutant promoter lost the response. Also, the knocking down of MMP3 suppressed CCN2/CTGF expression. By cytochemical and histochemical analyses, MMP3 was detected in the nuclei of chondrocytic cells in culture and also in the nuclei of normal and osteoarthritic chondrocytes in vivo. The nuclear translocation of externally added recombinant MMP3 and six putative nuclear localization signals in MMP3 also were shown. Furthermore, we determined that heterochromatin protein gamma coordinately regulates CCN2/CTGF by interacting with MMP3. The involvement of this novel role of MMP3 in the development, tissue remodeling, and pathology of arthritic diseases through CCN2/CTGF regulation thus is suggested.
Calculating the ecological impacts of animal‐borne instruments on aquatic organisms

Animal‐borne instruments provide researchers with valuable data to address important questions on wildlife ecology and conservation. However, these devices have known impacts on animal behaviour and energetics. Tags deployed on migrating animals may reduce reproductive output through increased energy demands or cause phenological mismatches of foraging and nesting events. For marine organisms, the only tagging guidelines that exist are based on lift and thrust impacts on birds – concepts that do not translate well to aquatic animals. Herein, we provide guidelines on assessing drag from animal‐borne instruments and discuss the ecological impacts on marine organisms. Of particular concern is the effect of drag from instruments to the welfare of the animals and for the applicability of collected data to wild populations. To help understand how drag from electronic tags affects marine animals in the wild, we used marine turtles as model aquatic organisms and conducted wind tunnel experiments to measure the fluid drag of various marine turtle body types with and without commercially available electronic tags (e.g. satellite, TDR, video cameras). We quantified the drag associated with carrying biotelemetry devices of varying frontal area and design (squared or tear drop shaped) and generated contour plots depicting percentage drag increase as a framework for evaluating tag drag by scientists and wildlife managers. Then, using concepts of fluid dynamics, we derived a universal equation estimating drag impacts from instruments across marine taxa. The drag of the marine turtle casts was measured in wind speeds from 2 to 30 m s−1 (Re 3·0 × 104–1·9 × 106), equivalent to 0·1–1·9 m s−1 in seawater. The drag coefficient (CD) of the marine turtles ranged from 0·11 to 0·22, which is typical of other large, air‐breathing, marine vertebrates (0·08–0·26). The CD of tags in reference to the turtle casts was 0·91 ± 0·18 and most tags caused minimal additional drag (<5%) to adult animals, but the same devices increased the drag for juveniles significantly (>100%). The sensitivity of aquatic animals to instrument drag is a dynamic relationship between the fluid flow patterns, or CD, and the frontal area ratio of the animal and tag. In this paper, we have outlined methods for quantifying the drag costs from animal‐borne instrumentation considering the instrument retention time (time to release from the animal) and the activity of the instrumented animal. With this valuable tool, researchers can quantify the drag costs from animal‐borne instrumentation and choose appropriate tags for their intended study organism and question. Reducing drag will ultimately reduce the impact on the instrumented animals and lead to greater biological realism in the collected data.
Australia's adoption of outcomes based education: A

Education Strategies, MelbourneSince the development of the Keating Government's national statementsand profiles, during the early to mid 90s, all Australian states andterritories, to a greater or lesser degree, have adopted an outcomes-basededucation approach to school curriculum. Drawing on the writings of theUS academic, William Spady, and in opposition to the more traditional,academic and competitive model of curriculum, OBE promotes a new-ageand progressive approach to teaching and learning. OBE is based on adevelopmental and constructivist philosophy of education and, as a result,more formal methods of teaching, competitive assessment and placing thedisciplines centre stage give way to a situation where teachers 'facilitate',students are described as 'knowledge navigators' and dispositions andattitudes take priority over received knowledge. The paper offers
Predicting Cement Compressive Strength Using Double-Layer Multi-expression Programming

This paper presents a novel algorithm named Double-layer Multi-expression Programming (DMEP). Then DMEP model is applied to the prediction of 28-day Portland cement compressive strength. We compare DMEP model with other four soft computing models, namely Multi-Expression Programming model (MEP), Gene Expression Programming model (GEP), Neural Networks model (NN) and Fuzzy logic model (FL) on 28-day cement strength prediction. The experiment results show that DMEP model has a lower rate in RMSE and MAE, and the prediction average percentage error of the cement strength data using DMEP model is reduced to 2.18%, which is lower than other four models. The results obtained from the computational tests demonstrate that DMEP is a promising technique for the prediction of cement strength.
A corner stitching compliant B∗-tree representation and its applications to analog placement

Modern circuit placement, especially analog placement, often needs to consider various constraints, such as symmetry, proximity, preplaced, variant, fixed-boundary, minimum separation, boundary, and fixed-outline constraints, for better electrical effects and higher performance. To handle these diverse constraints, topo-logical floorplan representations are pervasively used because of their higher flexibility and smaller solution space. Due to their intrinsic limitation in deriving module adjacency information directly from the representations themselves, however, they might incur difficulties in handling related constraints. In this paper, we work on B∗-trees, which have been shown to be most effective and efficient for floor-plan/placement problems, and present a corner stitching compliant B∗-tree (CB-tree, for short) to remedy the significant deficiency in its module adjacency handling. A CB-tree is a B∗-tree integrated with modified corner stitching to offer much higher flexibility/efficiency, especially for adjacent module identification/packing. Compared with the previous works, CB-trees can achieve the lowest time complexity for module packing with the aforementioned constraints. Experimental results show that the CB-trees achieve the best solution quality and consume the least running time for industrial designs with various constraints. In particular, our work provides key insights into the handling of comprehensive placement constraints with a topological representation.
Modified FCM approach for MR brain image segmentation

Image segmentation is defined as action of splitting an image into band of pixels. Aim of this process is to group pixels into regions. This is used in locating objects in satellite images, face recognition, iris recognition, agricultural imaging, medical imaging. Clustering is process that make group of similar objects and is widely used technique for brain tumour detection. Fuzzy C means clustering is testified to be good as compared to other technique. Drawback of this method is time required is large for convergence. So this time can be minimized by improving cluster center and membership value updating criteria. Magnetic Resonance brain images various types like Craniopharyngioma, Ependymoma, CNS-lymphoma, Pineal tumour, germinoma, Glioblastoma can be used.
On the origin of stars in bulges and elliptical galaxies

We investigate the stellar composition of bulges and elliptical galaxies as predicted by the cold dark matter paradigm using semi-analytical modelling. We argue that spheroid stars are built up of two main components, merger and quiescent, according to the origin of the stars. The merger component is formed during major mergers by gas driven to the centre, while the quiescent component is formed in gaseous discs and added later to the spheroid during major mergers. Galaxies more massive than M C = 3 × 10 10 Mhave on average only a 15 per cent merger component in their spheroids, while smaller galaxies can have up to 30 per cent. The merger component increases with redshift due to mergers involving more gas. However, we do not find mergers with gas fraction above ∼40 per cent of the remnants mass. Generally, the gas fraction is a decreasing function of the redshift at which the merger occurs and the mass of the remnant, with more massive remnants having smaller gas fraction and hence smaller merger components. This trend is independent of the environment of the galaxy with the only impact of the environment being that galaxies less massive than M C have slightly larger merger components in dense environments. The fraction of stars in bulges for galaxies more massive than M C is larger than 50 per cent. We find that the majority of stars in galaxies more massive than M C reside within bulges and ellipticals independent of redshift and that the fraction increases with redshift. The most massive galaxies at each redshift are elliptical galaxies.
Deep Recurrent Neural Networks for Acoustic Modelling

We present a novel deep Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model for acoustic modelling in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). We term our contribution as a TC-DNN-BLSTM-DNN model, the model combines a Deep Neural Network (DNN) with Time Convolution (TC), followed by a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM), and a final DNN. The first DNN acts as a feature processor to our model, the BLSTM then generates a context from the sequence acoustic signal, and the final DNN takes the context and models the posterior probabilities of the acoustic states. We achieve a 3.47 WER on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) eval92 task or more than 8% relative improvement over the baseline DNN models.
Producer Responsibility Organizations Development and Operations

Extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations are now in effect in 27 European Union member states and are applicable to up to 100 million tonnes of waste packaging, batteries, automobiles, and electrical and electronic products annually. This article investigates the implementation of EPR through a case study of European Recycling Platform (ERP) UK Ltd., the UK arm of one of the largest producer responsibility organizations (PROs) in Europe, recycling more than 1.5 million tonnes of waste electrical and electronic equipment to date.
Don't Try: Civil Jury Verdicts in System Geared to Settlement

Our system of civil procedure is extremely elaborate, with rules for everything from service of process through argument on appeal -- but we don't use it. Only one or two percent of litigated disputes are adjudicated by a jury or a judge. Some cases are dismissed, voluntarily or involuntarily, but the great majority are resolved by settlement. In this article, Professors Gross and Syverud look at two samples of civil cases that did go to jury trial in California, in 1985-86, and 1990-91. The data show, among other things, that the work of these courts is dominated by personal injury cases; that these trials are very expensive and risky; and that the parties in these cases are generally not playing with their own money: the plaintiffs are financed by contingent-fee attorneys, and the defendants are financed by liability insurers. In terms of outcomes, the data show that verdicts tend to all-out victories for one side or the other rather than compromises. The authors describe the role of the jury trial in our settlement-dominated system of litigation. They argue that the cost and uncertainty of trials are used deliberately by lawyers and judges to persuade litigants to settle; that the inducements to do so are so successful that attempts to further reduce the trial rate are unlikely to work; and that the cases that do go to trial nonetheless are unrepresentative of the mass of civil litigation, and dominated by those disputes that are the most peculiar, the most intractable, and the most unpredictable.
Induction of Specific Cytotoxic Lymphocytes in Mice Vaccinated with Brucella abortus RB51

ABSTRACT A safe, more sensitive, nonradioactive, neutral red uptake assay was adopted to replace the traditional 51Cr release assay for detection of Brucella-specific cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) activity. Our studies indicated that Brucella abortus strain RB51 vaccination of mice induced specific CTLs against both strain RB51- and strain 2308-infected J774.A1 macrophages but not against Listeria monocytogenes-infected J774.A1 cells. The antigen-specific cytotoxic activity was exerted by T lymphocytes but not by NK cells. CD3+ CD4+ T cells secreted the highest level of gamma interferon (IFN-γ) and were able to exert a low but significant level of specific lysis of Brucella-infected macrophages. They also exerted a low level of nonspecific lysis of noninfected macrophages. In contrast, CD3+CD8+ T cells secreted low levels of IFN-γ but demonstrated high levels of specific lysis ofBrucella-infected macrophages with no nonspecific lysis. These findings indicate that B. abortus strain RB51 vaccination of mice induces specific CTLs and suggest that CD3+ CD4+ and CD3+ CD8+T cells play a synergistic role in the anti-Brucellaactivity.
Comparison of hematological parameters in untreated and treated subclinical hypothyroidism and primary hypothyroidism patients

Backgrounds Thyroid hormones play an important physiological role in human metabolism. Erythrocyte abnormalities are frequently associated with thyroid disorder. However, they are rarely investigated and related to the subclinical and primary hypothyroidism in Kashmiri Patients. In this study an attempt was made to study hematological parameters in untreated and treated subclinical hypothyroidism and primary hypothyroidism patients. Methods This retrospective study included 600 subjects, among which were untreated subclinical hypothyroid (n=110), treated subclinical hypothyroid (n=110), untreated primary hypothyroid (n=100), treated primary hypothyroid (n=100) and euthyroid (n=180). This study was carried out at Department of Biochemistry, Government Medical College Srinagar. The hematological parameters and thyroid profile of the subjects were assessed by the Sysmex (Italy) and ECLIA (Germany) 2010 automatic analyzer. Mean, standard deviation (SD), analysis of variance (Two-way ANOVA), and multiple comparisons were used to report our results, with p<0.05 or p<0.01 considered as statistically significant. Results In this study group we compared the hematological parameters in these groups, untreated subclinical hypothyroid, treated subclinical hypothyroid, untreated primary hypothyroid, treated primary hypothyroid and euthyroid. We found that hematological parameters like Hb, RBC, MCV, HCT, RDW,RBC% were significantly increased in untreated subclinical hypothyroidism and untreated primary hypothyroidsm, with the p value being less than 0.05 whereas, in treated SCH & Pr. Hypothyroid, results were insignificant. The results reported in these groups as mean±SD, were statistically tested by ANOVA and multiple comparison tests. In untreated subclinical hypothyroid the values were: Hb (10.83±1.33 g/dl), RBC (4.21±0.66 106/µl), MCV (84.56±6.84 fL), HCT (38.5±2.2%), RDW (17.91±2.37 fL), RBC% (84.36±13.2%) and in untreated primary hypothyroid, Hb (10.73±0.86 g/dl), RBC (4.63±0.51 106/µl), MCV (83.34±6.92 fL), HCT (38.6±2.6%), RDW (14.93±5.47 fL), RBC% (92.63±10.30%) suggesting that these patients were at risk of anemia and other erythrocyte abnormalities. MCV is an inexpensive approach to study the types of anemia and explore related information like production, destruction, loss and morphological changes of RBC'S. Conclusion The thyroid dysfunction is frequently associated with anemia in subclinical hypothyroidism and primary hypothyroidism. Subclinical hypothyroidism (SCH) is associated with serious complications. Substantial numbers of patients with the risk of SCH could be getting converted into primary hypothyroidism. Such conditions should be identified and corrected. On the other hand, their presence could move to a thyroid dysfunction, allowing its early management.
The Genomic Sequence of the Oral Pathobiont Strain NI1060 Reveals Unique Strategies for Bacterial Competition and Pathogenicity

Strain NI1060 is an oral bacterium responsible for periodontitis in a murine ligature-induced disease model. To better understand its pathogenicity, we have determined the complete sequence of its 2,553,982 bp genome. Although closely related to Pasteurella pneumotropica, a pneumonia-associated rodent commensal based on its 16S rRNA, the NI1060 genomic content suggests that they are different species thriving on different energy sources via alternative metabolic pathways. Genomic and phylogenetic analyses showed that strain NI1060 is distinct from the genera currently described in the family Pasteurellaceae, and is likely to represent a novel species. In addition, we found putative virulence genes involved in lipooligosaccharide synthesis, adhesins and bacteriotoxic proteins. These genes are potentially important for host adaption and for the induction of dysbiosis through bacterial competition and pathogenicity. Importantly, strain NI1060 strongly stimulates Nod1, an innate immune receptor, but is defective in two peptidoglycan recycling genes due to a frameshift mutation. The in-depth analysis of its genome thus provides critical insights for the development of NI1060 as a prime model system for infectious disease.