Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
STATE-SPACE VERSUS MULTIPLE REGRESSION FOR FORECASTING URBAN WATER DEMAND

State-space and multiple regression methods were compared with each other and with simple monthly averages for the accuracy of their short-term forecasts of urban water demand. Seven sets of 24 monthly forecasts of water demand were computed. Each set is based on a different 7-year historic period, using a total of 15 years of monthly data. Based on a variety of measures of forecast error, the state-space models exhibited less bias than the other models, whereas the size of a typical forecast error was about the same for state-space and simple monthly averages. Forecast errors showed considerable variability within both state-space and multiple regression. The mean absolute forecast error ranged from 7.4 to 14.8% for multiple regression, and from 3.6 to 13.1% for state-space. For this sample data, the multiple regression model forecasts were least accurate and also had larger biases than the other methods.
Risk and Value in Labour and Capital Markets: The UK Corporate Economy, 1980-2005

The paper sets out a theoretical model linking stock market financial risk to labour market conditions, including labour intensity and the risk arising from the specification of labour contracts. A value added analysis is conducted combining national and firm level accounts data to examine the relationship between the share of value and the share of risk, contrasting manufacturing and service industries. In conjunction with a firm level analysis, empirical support for the model is established showing rational trade-offs between the risk and value appropriations of investors and employees and a less rational accumulation of structured debt finance as the UK economy has shifted from manufacturing to services in the last 30 years. The shift to services, flexibility and deregulation has tended to promote labour intensity, inflexibility of cost structures, and, as a consequence greater financial risk.
Electrochemotherapy of unresectable cutaneous tumours with reduced dosages of intravenous bleomycin: analysis of 57 patients from the International Network for Sharing Practices of Electrochemotherapy registry

Electrochemotherapy (ECT) is currently used to treat unresectable superficial tumours of different histotypes through the combination of cytotoxic chemotherapy and local application of electric pulses. In 2006, a collaborative project defined the ESOPE (European Standard Operating Procedures of Electrochemotherapy) guidelines to standardize the procedure. The International Network for Sharing Practices of Electrochemotherapy (InspECT) aims to refine the ESOPE and improve clinical practice. Limiting patient exposure to systemic chemotherapy would be advisable to ameliorate ECT safety profile.
THE RELATIONSHIP AMONG E-MARKETING STRATEGY AND SUCCESS OF INTERNATIONALIZATION PROCESS OF THE SMEs IN EMERGING ECONOMIES

In the last decades, remote technologies changed the networks and communication behavior of a company. Although the number of researches analyzing the importance of internet to the expansion abroad is constantly growing (Gilmore, Gallagher, & Henry, 2007), the influence of e-marketing strategy on the success of internationalization process remains an unexplored scientific topic. The known theories of firm’s internationalization are not able to set the light on the speed and success of internationalization process from the internet technologies and e-marketing perspective. Therefore, this article presents an empirical testing of Revisited Internationalization Model (Skudiene, Auruskeviciene, & Sukeviciute, 2015) and a quantitative analysis of the relationship among e-marketing strategy and success of internationalization process.
The effectiveness of “scratch and save” promotions: the moderating roles of price consciousness and expected savings

Purpose – The main purpose of this paper is to examine consumer perceptions of “scratch and save” (SAS) promotions, which are popular store‐level promotional tools. This paper particularly focuses on investigating the moderating effects of consumers' price consciousness and savings expectations.Design/methodology/approach – Two laboratory experimental studies were employed to examine consumer responses to SAS promotions.Findings – The results of two experiments show that SAS promotions positively affect consumer perceptions of offer value and store prices, and consumers' intentions to shop and spread positive word‐of‐mouth. In particular, the effects of SAS promotions are moderated by consumer price consciousness and expected savings. Furthermore, the first study shows that the level of claimed savings of SAS promotions does not favorably affect consumer reactions. The second study also shows that consumers' discounting of expected savings increases as the level of claimed savings of SAS promotions increa.
After Market Pricing Performance of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs): Indian IPO Market 2002–2006

This paper is motivated by the apparent belief that IPOs are underpriced on the initial listing day and thereafter underperforms compared to the market benchmark. While evaluation of the listing day performance seems straightforward on surface, it actually invokes several complications for the subsequent performance measurement. This paper focuses on the evaluation of price performance of IPOs up to a period of 36 months including the listing day. It also examines the usefulness of IPO characteristics at the time of issue to seek an explanation for the post-issue price performance. The paper presents fresh evidence on IPO performance, i.e., short-run underpricing and long-run underperformance for 92 Indian IPOs issued during the period 2002–2006. It is reported that on an average the Indian IPOs are underpriced to the tune of 46.55 per cent on the listing day (listing day return vis-à-vis issue price) compared to the market index. Another contribution of this paper is the evaluation of the long-run post-issue price performance of Indian IPOs. The long-run performance of IPOs up to a period of 36 months are measured by using the two most promising evaluation techniques, i.e., wealth relative (WR) and buy-and-hold abnormal rate of return (BHAR), both being adjusted with market index, CNX-Nifty. Further, the results evidence that the underperformance is most pronounced during the initial year of trading, i.e., up to 12 months from the listing date followed by over�performance. To get possible explanations for long-run underperformance for Indian IPOs, factors like underpricing rate (listing day return), offer size, leverage at IPO date, ex-ante uncertainty, timing of issue, age of IPO firm, rate of subscription, promoter groups retention, and price-to-book value (as proxy for growth) are considered. Evidence is found, that initial day return, offer size, leverage at IPO date, ex-ante uncertainty, and timing of issue are statistically significant in influencing underperformance. However, there is no evidence favourable to the age of the IPO firm, rate of subscription, promoter group's retention, and price-to-book value impact on the long-run underperformance. The empirical results suggest that the investors who are investing in IPOs through direct subscription are earning a positive market-adjusted return throughout the period of study. But investors who have bought shares on the IPO listing day are earning negative returns up to 12 months from the listing date and expect to earn positive market-adjusted return thereafter. For future research, we suggest the extension of this analysis for additional explanatory variables including issue fundamental characteristics of IPO firms. The scope of the research study could even be improved by extending the time period of study prior to 2002.
Increased Constrictor Tone Induced by Ouabain Treatment in Rats

Abstract: Ouabain (Oua)-induced hypertension in rodents provides a model to study cardiovascular changes associated with human hypertension. We examined vascular function in rats after a long-term treatment with Oua. Systolic blood pressure was measured by tail-cuff plethysmography in male Sprague–Dawley rats treated with Oua (∼25 µg/d) or placebo for 8 weeks. Blood pressure increased in Oua-treated animals, reaching 30% above baseline systolic blood pressure after 7 weeks. At the end of treatment, vascular responses were studied in mesenteric resistance arteries (MRAs) by wire myography. Contraction to potassium chloride in intact and denuded arteries showed greater sensitivity in Oua-treated animals. Contraction to phenylephrine and relaxation to acetylcholine were similar between groups with a lower response to sodium nitroprusside in Oua-treated arteries. Sensitivity to endothelin-1 was higher in Oua-treated arteries. Na+-K+ ATPase activity was decreased in MRAs from Oua-treated animals, whereas protein expression of the Na+-K+ ATPase &agr;2 isoform was increased in heart and unchanged in mesenteric artery. Preincubation with indomethacin (10−5 M) or N&ohgr;-nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (10−4 M) abolished the differences in potassium chloride response and Na+-K+ ATPase activity. Changes in MRAs are consistent with enhanced vascular smooth muscle cell reactivity, a contributor to the increased vascular tone observed in this model of hypertension.
Immune protection against HSV-2 in B-cell-deficient mice.

The role of antibody in protection of the vaginal mucosa and sensory ganglia against HSV-2 infection was examined using HSV- immune, B-cell-deficient muMT mice. Significantly higher virus titers were detected in the vaginal mucosae of immune muMT mice compared to immune C57BL/6J mice 24 h after HSV-2 rechallenge. However, virus was rapidly cleared in immune muMT mice, and the infection was resolved with only a 2-day delay. Passive transfer of immune serum to immune muMT mice prior to rechallenge resulted in HSV-specific vaginal IgG levels comparable to those of immune C57BL/6J mice. Although transferred antibody failed to prevent reinfection of the majority of recipients, vaginal virus titers at 24 h and clearance kinetics were similar to those of immune C57BL/6J controls. Following vaginal rechallenge, HSV-2 did not spread to the sensory ganglia of immune C57BL/6J mice nor was the rechallenge virus detected in the ganglia of the majority of immune muMT mice. However, protection was severely compromised by T-cell depletion of immune C57BL/6J mice. These results suggest that HSV-specific antibody limits, but does not prevent, infection of the genital epithelia. Further, prevention of virus spread to the sensory ganglia in immune animals requires vigorous T-cell immune responses.
Demand management in agri-food supply chains : an analysis of the characteristics and problems and a framework for improvement

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report findings from a major UK research project covering six agri‐food supply chains, each spanning from farm to consumer.Design/methodology/approach – The paper gives an overview of relevant literature out of which three research questions are posed. The research methodology is then outlined, followed by an overview of the methods used to collect and analyse the case study data. A summary of the research findings is then presented followed by a discussion of the findings in the context of the research questions. The paper concludes with an assessment of the validity of the research followed by some tentative suggestions regarding the need for, and potential benefits of, improving demand management in agri‐food chains.Findings – The research has found that demand management is an area, which in practice is beset by difficulties and inefficiencies, which in turn affects the operational performance of the supply chains. Analysis of the characteristics of demand alo.
An Empirical Study of Deformable Part Model with fast feature pyramid

The performance of an object detection system relies heavily on two components: an object model to capture the compositional relationship among the object body and its parts, and a feature representation to describe object appearance. In this work, we present an empirical study of combining two state-of-the-art such components: Deformable Part Model (DPM), a proven effective and flexible part-based object model which originally adopts Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature, and Aggregated Channel Features (ACF), a unified feature representation framework with fast pyramid calculation which is originally used in a rigid template matching scheme. DPM is known to work but slow, at the same time ACF has previously been shown to yield a massive speedup with only a minor loss in accuracy compared to competing features including HOG. By combining the two, our hope is to achieve the best of both worlds: the object structure representation power of DPM and the computational efficiency of ACF. Our experiments show that while ACF with heterogeneous feature channels could improve the accuracy of DPM, the run time benefit introduced by fast pyramid approximation is rather limited.
Reducing the Number of Elements in Linear and Planar Antenna Arrays With Sparseness Constrained Optimization

The synthesis of sparse antenna arrays has many practical applications in situations where the weight, size and cost of antennas are limited. In this communication the antenna array synthesis problem, with minimum number of elements, is studied from the new perspective of sparseness constrained optimization. The number of antenna elements in the array can be efficiently reduced by casting the array synthesis problem into the framework of sparseness constrained optimization and solving with the Bayesian compressive sensing (BCS) inversion algorithm. Numerical examples of both linear and planar arrays are presented to show the high efficiency of achieving the desired radiation pattern with a minimum number of antenna elements.
Effects of Market-Related Assets on Innovativeness and Operational Performance in SMEs

Resource-based theory (RBT) has not been systematically applied to strategizing the market-related assets of the firm. By examining the role of these intangible assets in the context of small business management, the authors attempt, in this article, to put forward an environment–resources–performance contingency model, synthesizing the various findings in the literature on ‘marketing assets of SMEs’. The conceptual framework is deployed to assess innovativeness and operational superiority through market-related assets within 64 small and medium-sized firms operating in the Finnish meat-processing industry. The empirical results indicate strong positive associations between the key constructs involved, and further indicate that these relationships have a contingency-specific profile. The implications of these findings for practice and research are discussed.
Diffusion-Weighted Imaging, MR Angiography, and Baseline Data in a Systematic Multicenter Analysis of 3,301 MRI Scans of Ischemic Stroke Patients—Neuroradiological Review Within the MRI-GENIE Study

Background: Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) serves as a cornerstone in defining stroke phenotype and etiological subtype through examination of ischemic stroke lesion appearance and is therefore an essential tool in linking genetic traits and stroke. Building on baseline MRI examinations from the centralized and structured radiological assessments of ischemic stroke patients in the Stroke Genetics Network, the results of the MRI-Genetics Interface Exploration (MRI-GENIE) study are described in this work. Methods: The MRI-GENIE study included patients with symptoms caused by ischemic stroke (N = 3,301) from 12 international centers. We established and used a structured reporting protocol for all assessments. Two neuroradiologists, using a blinded evaluation protocol, independently reviewed the baseline diffusion-weighted images (DWIs) and magnetic resonance angiography images to determine acute lesion and vascular occlusion characteristics. Results: In this systematic multicenter radiological analysis of clinical MRI from 3,301 acute ischemic stroke patients according to a structured prespecified protocol, we identified that anterior circulation infarcts were most prevalent (67.4%), that infarcts in the middle cerebral artery (MCA) territory were the most common, and that the majority of large artery occlusions 0 to 48 h from ictus were in the MCA territory. Multiple acute lesions in one or several vascular territories were common (11%). Of 2,238 patients with unilateral DWI lesions, 52.6% had left-sided infarct lateralization (P = 0.013 for χ2 test). Conclusions: This large-scale analysis of a multicenter MRI-based cohort of AIS patients presents a unique imaging framework facilitating the relationship between imaging and genetics for advancing the knowledge of genetic traits linked to ischemic stroke.
Bafilomycin A1 Attenuates Osteoclast Acidification and Formation, Accompanied by Increased Levels of SQSTM1/p62 Protein

Vacuolar proton pump H+‐adenosine triphosphatases (V‐ATPases) play an important role in osteoclast function. Further understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of V‐ATPase inhibition is vital for the development of anti‐resorptive drugs specifically targeting osteoclast V‐ATPases. In this study, we observed that bafilomycin A1, a naturally‐occurring inhibitor of V‐ATPases, increased the protein level of SQSTM1/p62, a known negative regulator of osteoclast formation. Consistently, we found that bafilomycin A1 diminishes the intracellular accumulation of the acidotropic probe lysotracker in osteoclast‐like cells; indicative of reduced acidification. Further, bafilomycin A1 inhibits osteoclast formation with attenuation of cell fusion and multi‐nucleation of osteoclast‐like cells during osteoclast differentiation. Taken together, these data indicate that bafilomycin A1 attenuates osteoclast differentiation in part via increased levels of SQSTM1/p62 protein, providing further mechanistic insight into the effect of V‐ATPase inhibition in osteoclasts. J. Cell. Biochem. 117: 1464–1470, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The Shaping of Personality: Genes, Environments, and Chance Encounters

I started my career as a clinical psychologist with an interest in personality assessment. But a loss of faith in psychoanalytic theory, projective tests, and clinical case studies in general led to a shift in my interests to personality research. Subsequent jobs at research institutes and universities allowed me to indulge in science. I developed the trait-state concept and its application in tests for affect measurement. For 10 years I did experimental research in the field of sensory deprivation. The sensation seeking idea and tests evolved from this work but soon expanded to many other areas. Research in the biological basis of sensation seeking started with genetic and psychophysiological research, but research conducted in other laboratories also pointed to a psychopharmacological basis for the trait. Over the last several decades, I have formulated a psychobiological model for personality. I have used factor analysis and the biosocial model to develop an "alternative-five" factorial trait structure for personality.
Insecticidal Activity of Artemisia vulgaris Essential Oil and Transcriptome Analysis of Tribolium castaneum in Response to Oil Exposure

Red flour beetle (Tribolium castaneum) is one of the most destructive pests of stored cereals worldwide. The essential oil (EO) of Artemisia vulgaris (mugwort) is known to be a strong toxicant that inhibits the growth, development, and reproduction of T. castaneum. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying the toxic effects of A. vulgaris EO on T. castaneum remain unclear. Here, two detoxifying enzymes, carboxylesterase (CarEs) and cytochrome oxidase P450 (CYPs), were dramatically increased in red flour beetle larvae when they were exposed to A. vulgaris EO. Further, 758 genes were differentially expressed between EO treated and control samples. Based on Gene Ontology (GO) analysis, numerous differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were enriched for terms related to the regulation of biological processes, response to stimulus, and antigen processing and presentation. Our results indicated that A. vulgaris EO disturbed the antioxidant activity in larvae and partially inhibited serine protease (SP), cathepsin (CAT), and lipase signaling pathways, thus disrupting larval development and reproduction as well as down-regulating the stress response. Moreover, these DEGs showed that A. vulgaris indirectly affected the development and reproduction of beetles by inducing the expression of genes encoding copper-zinc-superoxide dismutase (CuZnSOD), heme peroxidase (HPX), antioxidant enzymes, and transcription factors. Moreover, the majority of DEGs were mapped to the drug metabolism pathway in the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) database. Notably, the following genes were detected: 6 odorant binding proteins (OBPs), 5 chemosensory proteins (CSPs), 14 CYPs, 3 esterases (ESTs), 5 glutathione S-transferases (GSTs), 6 UDP-glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs), and 2 multidrug resistance proteins (MRPs), of which 8 CYPs, 2 ESTs, 2 GSTs, and 3 UGTs were up-regulated dramatically after exposure to A. vulgaris EO. The residual DEGs were significantly down-regulated in EO exposed larvae, implying that partial compensation of metabolism detoxification existed in treated beetles. Furthermore, A. vulgaris EO induced overexpression of OBP/CYP, and RNAi against these genes significantly increased mortality of larvae exposed to EO, providing further evidence for the involvement of OBP/CYP in EO metabolic detoxification in T. castaneum. Our results provide an overview of the transcriptomic changes in T. castaneum in response to A. vulgaris EO.
Psychological stress, coping, and symptoms of disordered eating in a community sample of young Australian women.

OBJECTIVE To investigate the relationships among stress, coping, and symptoms of disordered eating in a community sample of young Australian women. METHOD A longitudinal study design was employed. Two mail-out surveys, assessing perceived psychological stress, coping strategies, body weight dissatisfaction, dieting, and disordered eating behaviors, were completed 6 months apart by 415 young women selected from a cohort of the Women's Health Australia Study. RESULTS Strong cross-sectional relationships among the study variables were found. Results of longitudinal analyses, however, demonstrated only tenuous relationships among stress, coping, and later symptoms of disordered eating. DISCUSSION These results did not support the hypothesis that stress and coping strategies would predict disordered eating over time. Some evidence was found for a modest reverse relationship between stress and disordered eating. Although contrary to generally accepted theoretical models of disordered eating, these findings are consistent with those of the few previous longitudinal studies reported. Theoretical implications are discussed.