Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Credit Rating Agencies

In the United States and Europe faulty credit ratings and flawed rating processes are widely perceived as being among the key contributors to the global financial crisis. That has brought them under intense scrutiny and led to proposals for radical reforms. The ongoing debate, while centered in major developed markets, will also influence policy choices in emerging economies: whether to focus on strengthening the reliability of ratings or on creating alternative mechanisms and institutions that can perform more effectively the role that in developed markets has traditionally been conferred on credit rating agencies.
Ultrasonic detection of cavitation at catheter tips.

To assist in the identification of inner heart structures during ultrasonic cardiac diagnosis, various liquids have been injected through catheters into heart chambers. Each injection produces a cloud of ultrasonic echoes within the blood‐filled catheterized chamber. An experimental procedure involving injection of fluids into a test chamber under controlled hydrostatic pressure has shown that cavitation is the primary source of these echoes. Acoustic impedance difference between the injected fluid and the blood can contribute to echo production but is insignificant for commonly used fluids injected under normal conditions. Turbulence resulting from the injection produced no detectable echoes. [This work was supported in part by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. ]
Implications of a behavioral weight loss program for obese, sedentary women: A focus on mood enhancement and exercise enjoyment

Abstract The benefits of a 6‐month behavioral weight loss program were investigated by examining mood changes after a graded exercise test (GXT), changes in exercise enjoyment, and the relation of mood and enjoyment to program success. Obese, sedentary, postmenopausal women completed a demographic questionnaire, and physical and psychological measures. Women who completed the program (n = 25) significantly decreased their body weight and body mass index and reported significantly less tension and confusion post‐GXT when measured both at the beginning and end of the program. Although their exercise enjoyment increased, their exercise‐related mood changes appeared to be independent of enjoyment. Finally, women who completed the program initially reported more positive mood changes post‐GXT than did dropouts (n = 7). In conclusion, mood alteration may be a factor leading to successful completion of a behavioral weight loss program by obese women
The Real Effects of Managerial Narratives: Evidence from a Quarter-Billion Words

We show that a firm’s investments are associated with the qualitative content of its rivals’ Management Discussion and Analysis (MD&A) disclosures: a firm invests more when its rivals’ MD&A disclosures are more optimistic. We also find that the sensitivity of a firm’s investments to its rivals’ qualitative MD&A content varies cross-sectionally: the association between the firm’s investments and the optimism in its rivals’ MD&A disclosures is stronger when MD&A disclosures are more certain, rivals are better governed and their industry is less concentrated. We conclude that qualitative MD&A disclosures contain useful information for corporate investments.
Long-distance transport of signals during symbiosis

Legumes enter nodule symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria (rhizobia), whereas most flowering plants establish symbiotic associations with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. Once first steps of symbiosis are initiated, nodule formation and mycorrhization in legumes is negatively controlled by a shoot-derived inhibitor (SDI), a phenomenon termed autoregulation. According to current views, autoregulation of nodulation and mycorrhization in legumes is regulated in a similar way. CLE peptides induced in response to rhizobial nodulation signals (Nod factors) have been proposed to represent the ascending long-distance signals to the shoot. Although not proven yet, these CLE peptides are likely perceived by leucine-rich repeat (LRR) autoregulation receptor kinases in the shoot. Autoregulation of mycorrhization in non-legumes is reminiscent to the phenomenon of “systemic acquired resistance” in plant-pathogen interactions.
Phosphatase RNAi screen in mouse astrocytes identifies new regulators of NF- κ B signaling

Summary Regulation of NF- κ B activation is controlled by a series of kinases, however the roles of phosphatases in regulating this pathway are poorly understood. We report a systematic RNAi screen of phosphatases that modulate NF- κ B activity. Nineteen of 250 phosphatase genes were identified as regulators of NF- κ B signaling in astrocytes. RNAi selectively regulates endogenous chemokine and cytokine expression. Co-immunoprecipitation identified associations of distinct protein phosphatase 2A core or holoenzymes with the IKK, NF- κ B, and TRAF2 complexes. Dephosphorylation of these complexes leads to modulation of NF- κ B transcriptional activity. In contrast to IKK and NF- κ B, TRAF2 phosphorylation has not been well elucidated. We show the Thr 117 residue in TRAF2 is phosphorylated following TNF α stimulation. This phosphorylation process is modulated by PP2A and is required for TRAF2 functional activity. These results provide direct evidence for TNF-induced TRAF2 phosphorylation and demonstrate that phosphorylation is regulated at multiple levels in the NF- κ B pathway.
Seeing Is Not Enough for Sustained Visual Attention

Sustained visual attention is crucial to many developmental outcomes. We demonstrate that, consistent with the developmental systems view, sustained visual attention emerges from and is tightly tied to sensory motor coordination. We examined whether changes in manual behavior alter toddlers’ eye gaze by giving one group of children heavy toys that were hard to pick up, while giving another group of children perceptually identical toys that were lighter, easy to pick up and hold. We found a tight temporal coupling between the dynamics of visual attention and the dynamics of manual activities on objects, a relation that cannot be explained by interest alone. In the Heavy condition, toddlers looked at objects just as much as did toddlers in the Light condition but did so through many brief glances, whereas in Light condition looks to the objects were longer and sustained. We discuss the implication of hand-eye coordination in the development of visual attention.
CYP 2 B 6 , CYP 2 D 6 , and CYP 3 A 4 Catalyze the Primary Oxidative Metabolism of Perhexiline Enantiomers by Human Liver Microsomes

The cytochrome P450 (P450)-mediated 4-monohydroxylations of the individual enantiomers of the racemic antianginal agent perhexiline (PHX) were investigated in human liver microsomes (HLMs) to identify stereoselective differences in metabolism and to determine the contribution of the polymorphic enzyme CYP2D6 and other P450s to the intrinsic clearance of each enantiomer. The cis-, trans1-, and trans2-4-monohydroxylation rates of ( )and ( )-PHX by human liver microsomes from three extensive metabolizers (EMs), two intermediate metabolizers (IMs), and two poor metabolizers (PMs) of CYP2D6 were measured with a high-performance liquid chromatography assay. P450 isoform-specific inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies directed against P450 isoforms, and recombinantly expressed human P450 enzymes were used to define the P450 isoform profile of PHX 4-monohydroxylations. The total in vitro intrinsic clearance values (mean S.D.) of ( )and ( )-PHX were 1376 330 and 2475 321, 230 225 and 482 437, and 63.4 1.6 and 54.6 1.2 l/min/mg for the EM, IM, and PM HLMs, respectively. CYP2D6 catalyzes the formation of cis-OH( )-PHX and trans1-OH-( )-PHX from ( )-PHX and cis-OH-( )PHX from ( )-PHX with high affinity. CYP2B6 and CYP3A4 each catalyze the trans1and trans2-4-monohydroxylation of both ( )and ( )-PHX with low affinity. Both enantiomers of PHX are subject to significant polymorphic metabolism by CYP2D6, although this enzyme exhibits distinct stereoselectivity with respect to the conformation of metabolites and the rate at which they are formed. CYP2B6 and CYP3A4 are minor contributors to the intrinsic P450mediated hepatic clearance of both enantiomers of PHX, except in
Is corruption an efficient grease?: a cross-country aggregate analysis

This paper tests whether corruption can be viewed as some efficient grease in the wheels of otherwise deficient institutional frameworks. It does so by analysing the interaction between aggregate efficiency, corruption, and other dimensions of governance on a panel of 62 countries both developed and developing. Using three measures of corruption and five measures of other aspects of governance, we repeatedly observe that corruption is always detrimental in countries whose institutions are efficient, but that it may be positively associated with efficiency in countries whose institutions are ineffective. We thus find evidence of the grease the wheels hypothesis.
Analysis of New Workers' Compensation Claims in the Department of Defense Civilian Workforce, 2000–2012

Objective: This study of Department of Defense (DoD) civilian employees Workers' Compensation (WC) claims for chargeback year 2000 through 2012 aimed to analyze the frequency, rates, and costs of WC claims representing 5% of the DoD annual personnel budget. Methods: A multiyear cross-sectional study of WC claims data identified the top five most frequent causes, natures, and anatomical sites; changes in frequency, worker age, costs, and time were evaluated for trends. Results: The annual frequency and rate of new DoD WC claims decreased over time, whereas costs per new claim have increased. New claim frequencies, rates, and costs aggregated in older age groups. Conclusions: The increasing trend in costs of each claim and the overall program costs presents a need for case management. Analysis of WC claims data is necessary to help target injury prevention efforts and reduce program costs.
A study on the origin of intraretinal action potential of the cyprinid fish by means of pencil-type microelectrode.

1. Pencil-type microelectrodes consisting of a superfine inner pipette and a Ringer-filled outer pipette (5μ) were applied to the retina of the Cyprinid fish (Cyprinus auratus) to record the intraretinal action potentials (EIRG's). 2. The configuration of the EIRG was typical of Svaetichin's cone action potential. The depth for maximal EIRG's was 80-90μ from the vitreous side and 160-170μ from the distal tips of rods, and appeared histologically to be proximal to the receptors.3. When an electrode was used with its inner pipette protruded a fixed length out of the tip of the outer pipette, both pipettes recorded similar EIRG's depending upon the depth of their insertion into the retina. With a tip distance of less than 30μ, the simultaneously recorded EIRG's through both pipettes were usually so identical that it was difficult to obtain their separate tracings.4. It was concluded that the EIRG has its main origin in a retinal layer proximal to the receptors and that the recording of the EIRG may not be intracellular.
Contraceptive Methods and Informed Consent among Women Receiving Medications with Potential for Adverse Fetal Effects: A Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Idaho (WWAMI) Region Study

Background: Increasing diabetes, hypertension, and hypercholesterolemia rates expose some young women to medications with potential adverse fetal effects, such as angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACE-Is), angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs), and statins. This study examined whether quality improvement (QI) interventions promote informed consent and contraception to minimize risks with use of ACE-I/ARB/statins. Methods: This longitudinal cohort study at 7 clinics abstracted medical records of 328 women aged 18 to 44 with ≥1 prescription for ACE-I/ARB/statins and ≥1 visit for hypertension, diabetes, or hypercholesterolemia during the previous year. We measured informed consent documentation and contraceptive methods before and after QI interventions in which providers contacted their patients to discuss medication risks and benefits. Results: Of 179 women who were not surgically sterilized, only 11.7% had documented informed consent related to the risks of ACE-I/ARB/statin use. One hundred fifty-eight women were eligible for the QI intervention (not surgically sterilized, no documented informed consent); only 76 (48.1%) received the intervention. Before the intervention, 23.7% of these 76 were “at risk” of an adverse fetal effect. After the intervention, only 7.9% (P ≤ .001) were “at risk” because some women started contraception, discontinued ACE-I/ARB/statins, or changed drug class. Conclusions: Women prescribed ACE-I/ARB/statins were not consistently using contraception or were not consistently informed of the risks. Provider-implemented QI interventions improved care but were difficult to accomplish, suggesting that new interventions are needed.
Dominant-negative Effects of the N-terminal Half of Prion Protein on Neurotoxicity of Prion Protein-like Protein/Doppel in Mice*

Prion protein-like protein/doppel is neurotoxic, causing ataxia and Purkinje cell degeneration in mice, whereas prion protein antagonizes doppel-induced neurodegeneration. Doppel is homologous to the C-terminal half of prion protein but lacks the amino acid sequences corresponding to the N-terminal half of prion protein. We show here that transgenic mice expressing a fusion protein consisting of the N-terminal half, corresponding to residues 1-124, of prion protein and doppel in neurons failed to develop any neurological signs for up to 730 days in a background devoid of prion protein. In addition, the fusion protein prolonged the onset of ataxia in mice expressing exogenous doppel. These results suggested that the N-terminal part of prion protein has a neuroprotective potential acting both cis and trans on doppel. We also show that prion protein lacking the pre-octapeptide repeat (Δ25-50) or octapeptide repeat (Δ51-90) region alone could not impair the antagonistic function against doppel.
The Functional Age Profile: An Objective Decision Criterion for the Assessment of Pilot Performance Capacities and Capabilities

The initial development of a computer-based information-processing performance battery with aviation-relevant task structures is reported. It is shown that the currently existing prototype is sensitive to individual differences within chronological age groups as well as to age-related changes across different age groups. The utilization of such a test battery for the longitudinal assessment of aviator performance capabilities is discussed.
The impact of Islamic beliefs on consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions of life insurance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of Islamic beliefs in moderating consumers’ attitudes and purchase intentions of conventional and Islamic life insurance. Second, it investigates the role of Islamic beliefs in moderating the relationship between the attitude toward conventional/Islamic life insurance and purchase intentions of these types of services. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire was administered online in a Muslim liberal country where both types of insurance are offered. Based on a total sample of 207 responses, ANOVA tests and a structural Equation Modeling were used to test the research hypotheses. Findings – Results show that: the higher (lower) the Islamic beliefs of individuals, the less (more) favorable their attitude will be toward conventional life insurance and the more (less) favorable their attitude will be toward Islamic life insurance; the higher (lower) the Islamic beliefs of individuals, the weaker (stronger) their purchase intentions for con.
An Improved Approach for Text-Independent Speaker Recognition

This paper presents new Speaker Identification and Speaker Verification systems based on the use of new feature vectors extracted from the speech signal. The proposed structure combine between the most successful Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients and new features which are the Short Time Zero Crossing Rate of the signal. A comparison between speaker recognition systems based on Gaussian mixture models using the well known Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients and the novel systems based on the use of a combination between both reduced Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients features vectors and Short Time Zero Crossing Rate features is given. This comparison proves that the use of the new reduced feature vectors help to improve the system’s performance and also help to reduce the time and memory complexity of the system which is required for realistic applications that suffer from computational resource limitation. The experiments were performed on speakers from TIMIT database for different training durations. The suggested systems performances are evaluated against the baseline systems. The increase of the proposed systems performances are well observed for identification experiments and the decrease of Equal Error Rates are also remarkable for verification experiments. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach which avoids the use of more complex algorithms or the combination of different approaches requiring lengthy calculation.
Do Survivin and HER-2/neu Play a Role in Rheumatoid Arthritis?

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an inflammatory joint disease characterized by hyperplasia of synovial tissue and pannus formation growing invasively into the cartilage, followed by cartilage and bone destruction. In RA, the proliferation of synovial fibroblasts and their invasive growth are due to impairment in the regulation of the cell cycle. Survivin belongs to the apoptosis-inhibiting proteins (IAP) family and regulates the inflammatory and destructive process inside the joints of patients with RA. RA Synovial Fibroblasts (SFs) over express the ErbB2/HER2 member of the epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptor family relative to normal fibroblasts. The aim was to study the role of survivin and HER-2/neu in the pathogenesis of RA and the association between their level and the presence of erosion in RA patients and evaluation of the possible influence of the ongoing treatment on their serum level. In this study, serum survivin and serum HER-2/neu levels were measured in 35 erosive and non-erosive RA patients and compared with age and sex matched healthy population. There was a statistically significant difference in serum HER-2/neu between RA patients and controls and also between RA patients treated with methotrexate and those treated with methotrexate and others. There was a statistically significant difference in the serum level of survivin between erosive and non-erosive RA patients.
Do Foreign Investors Help the Price Discovery Process? Evidence from Korea

Using the unique datasets of the Korean Stock Exchange (KSE), this paper finds that foreign ownership and trading activity negatively affects the price discovery process of common stocks. In contrast, the trading activity of domestic investors enhances information efficiency of intraday prices. Sectoral foreign holdings exhibit a negative information spillover, and at the same time dilute the effects of firm-specific foreign holdings on information efficiency. Finally, it is foreign trades with the market that mainly deteriorate the market quality of the KSE.
Learning to Generate a Table-of-Contents with Supportive Knowledge

In the text summarization field, a table-of-contents is a type of indicative summary that is especially suited for locating information in a long document, or a set of documents. It is also a useful summary for a reader to quickly get an overview of the entire contents. The current models for generating a table-of-contents produced relatively low quality output with many meaningless titles, or titles that have no overlapping meaning with the corresponding contents. This problem may be due to the lack of semantic information and topic information in those models. In this research, we propose to integrate supportive knowledge into the learning models to improve the quality of titles in a generated table-of-contents. The supportive knowledge is derived from a hierarchical clustering of words, which is built from a large collection of raw text, and a topic model, which is directly estimated from the training data. The relatively good results of the experiments showed that the semantic and topic information supplied by supportive knowledge have good effects on title generation, and therefore, they help to improve the quality of the generated table-of-contents.
Astrocyte calcium waves: What they are and what they do

Several lines of evidence indicate that the elaborated calcium signals and the occurrence of calcium waves in astrocytes provide these cells with a specific form of excitability. The identification of the cellular and molecular steps involved in the triggering and transmission of Ca2+ waves between astrocytes resulted in the identification of two pathways mediating this form of intercellular communication. One of them involves the direct communication between the cytosols of two adjoining cells through gap junction channels, while the other depends upon the release of “gliotransmitters” that activates membrane receptors on neighboring cells. In this review we summarize evidence in favor of these two mechanisms of Ca2+ wave transmission and we discuss that they may not be mutually exclusive, but are likely to work in conjunction to coordinate the activity of a group of cells. To address a key question regarding the functional consequences following the passage of a Ca2+ wave, we list, in this review, some of the potential intracellular targets of these Ca2+ transients in astrocytes, and discuss the functional consequences of the activation of these targets for the interactions that astrocytes maintain with themselves and with other cellular partners, including those at the glial/vasculature interface and at perisynaptic sites where astrocytic processes tightly interact with neurons. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Experimental evaluation of regression model-based walking speed estimation using lower body-mounted IMU

This study provides a concurrent comparison of regression model-based walking speed estimation accuracy using lower body mounted inertial sensors. The comparison is based on different sets of variables, features, mounting locations and regression methods. An experimental evaluation was performed on 15 healthy subjects during free walking trials. Our results show better accuracy of Gaussian process regression compared to least square regression using Lasso. Among the variables, external acceleration tends to provide improved accuracy. By using both time-domain and frequency-domain features, waist and ankle-mounted sensors result in similar accuracies: 4.5% for the waist and 4.9% for the ankle. When using only frequency-domain features, estimation accuracy based on a waist-mounted sensor suffers more compared to the one from ankle.