Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dealing with Venture Capitalists: Shopping Around or Exclusive Negotiation

We study the fund-raising strategy of an entrepreneur when investors have private information about his project’s profitability. The entrepreneur cares about monetary profits and about the probability to obtain financing. If he contacts both venture capitalists (VCs) simultaneously, he obtains high monetary profits. If he commits to a period of exclusive negotiation with one VC, he increases the probability to obtain financing but deal terms deteriorate. The optimal negotiation strategy results from this tradeoff. We also solve for the equilibrium financial contracts and obtain implications for VCs’ portfolios and entrepreneurs’ deals.
Circulating estradiol and mortality in men with systolic chronic heart failure.

CONTEXT Androgen deficiency is common in men with chronic heart failure (HF) and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Estrogens are formed by the aromatization of androgens; therefore, abnormal estrogen metabolism would be anticipated in HF. OBJECTIVE To examine the relationship between serum concentration of estradiol and mortality in men with chronic HF and reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A prospective observational study at 2 tertiary cardiology centers (Wroclaw and Zabrze, Poland) of 501 men (mean [SD] age, 58 [12] years) with chronic HF, LVEF of 28% (SD, 8%), and New York Heart Association [NYHA] classes 1, 2, 3, and 4 of 52, 231, 181, and 37, respectively, who were recruited between January 1, 2002, and May 31, 2006. Cohort was divided into quintiles of serum estradiol (quintile 1, < 12.90 pg/mL; quintile 2, 12.90-21.79 pg/mL; quintile 3, 21.80-30.11 pg/mL; quintile 4, 30.12-37.39 pg/mL; and quintile 5, > or = 37.40 pg/mL). Quintile 3 was considered prospectively as the reference group. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Serum concentrations of estradiol and androgens (total testosterone and dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate [DHEA-S]) were measured using immunoassays. RESULTS Among 501 men with chronic HF, 171 deaths (34%) occurred during the 3-year follow-up. Compared with quintile 3, men in the lowest and highest estradiol quintiles had increased mortality (adjusted hazard ratio [HR], 4.17; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.33-7.45 and HR, 2.33; 95% CI, 1.30-4.18; respectively; P < .001). These 2 quintiles had different clinical characteristics (quintile 1: increased serum total testosterone, decreased serum DHEA-S, advanced NYHA class, impaired renal function, and decreased total fat tissue mass; and quintile 5: increased serum bilirubin and liver enzymes, and decreased serum sodium; all P < .05 vs quintile 3). For increasing estradiol quintiles, 3-year survival rates adjusted for clinical variables and androgens were 44.6% (95% CI, 24.4%-63.0%), 65.8% (95% CI, 47.3%-79.2%), 82.4% (95% CI, 69.4%-90.2%), 79.0% (95% CI, 65.5%-87.6%), and 63.6% (95% CI, 46.6%-76.5%); respectively (P < .001). CONCLUSION Among men with chronic HF and reduced LVEF, high and low concentrations of estradiol compared with the middle quintile of estradiol are related to an increased mortality.
Immigration or Welfare? The Progressive’s Dilemma Revisited

Previous cross-national research on the link between immigration and the welfare state has focused exclusively on the relationship between the size of a country’s foreign-born population and support for redistribution, neglecting that people vary in their responses to immigration. In this article, the authors revisit the progressive’s dilemma by testing its theoretical proposition—that immigration and welfare are incompatible—in two novel ways. First, the authors conduct an individual-level analysis that demonstrates that, for most Europeans, supporting both immigration and welfare is unlikely. Second, the authors assess whether country-level immigration is associated with the salience of different immigration-welfare attitudes but find little evidence that immigration measured at the country level produces the most exclusive attitudes.
MAMMALS OF THE UPPER HENTY RIVER REGION , WESTERN TASMANIA by

TAYLOR, R.J., BRYANT, S.L. , PEMBERTON, D. & NORTON, T.W. , 1985 (31:vii): Mammals of the Upper Henty River Region, Western Tasmania. Pap.Proc. R. Soc. Tasm. 119:7-14. ISSN 0080-4703. Department of Zoology, University of Tasmania, Hobart, Tasmania 7001 and lForestry Department, Australian National University, Canberra, A.C. T. 2601, Australia. A mammal survey was conducted in the Upper Henty River Region in western Tasmania. The area had been subject to much disturbance from mining, forestry and frequent fires and was covered by a maze of roads and tracks. Nineteen native species (including bats) were recorded. Four of the species listed in 1983 as occurring in the Lower Gordon Region, 80 km south ofthe present study area, were not recorded during our survey. It is considered that three of these species would probably have been found in the area with further searching. The fourth species, Mastacomysfuscus, is thought not to be present due to increased fire frequency in the sedgeland areas compared with the Lower Gordon Region. Potorous tridactylus is recorded for the first time from rainforest. Microhabitat selection by Rattus /utreo/us and Pseudomys higginsi differed from that previously reported. Disturbance from road construction led to the creation ofa new food source for Thylogale billardierii. The abundance of tracks in the area increased ease of movement for carnivorous mammals. Only one introduced species Felis catus, which is also known to occur in the Lower Gordon, was recorded. Disturbance had thus not led to an invasion of exotics.
Emotions, violence and counterproductive work behavior

E has long played a central role in research and theory concerning human aggression and violence. Thinking in experimental and social psychology has evolved from an initial focus on frustration mainly as a situational condition (Dollard, Doob, Miller, Mowrer, & Sears, 1939) to more modern theories that incorporate a variety of negative emotional states in response to situational frustration and other environmental conditions and events (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Berkowitz, 1998). Parallel to the social psychology work on human aggression, emotion has also been central in much organizational work on workplace aggression and the broader concept of counterproductive work behavior (CWB). Injustice and stressful conditions have been specifically linked to negative emotions and both aggression and CWB (e.g., Fox, Spector, & Miles, 2001). It has been recognized that aggressive acts can occur for a variety of reasons, and a distinction has been made between affective aggression that is associated with negative emotion and instrumental aggression that is not (Neuman & Baron, 1997). Affective, or “hot,” aggression has as its primary goal the injury of a target, whether physical or psychological, at times impulsively and immediately during the experience of negative emotion in response to provocation. With instrumental, or “cold,” aggression, harm of another may be a means to desired ends. In work organizations, instrumental aggression may be the chosen path toward status, power, perks, assignments, bonuses, promotions, and reputation, that is, “getting ahead” (Neuman & Baron, 2005). Our focus in this chapter will be on affective aggression and CWB, in which harm of another person or an organization is the primary goal.
Deep fisher faces

Most current state-of-the-art methods for unconstrained face recognition use deep convolutional neural networks. Recently, it has been proposed to augment the typically used softmax cross-entropy loss by adding a center loss trying to minimize the distance between the face images and their class centers. In this work we further extend the center (intra-class) loss with an inter-class loss reminiscent of the popular early face recognition approach Fisherfaces . To this end we add a term that directly optimizes the distances of the class centers appearing in a batch in dependence of the input images. We evaluate the new loss on two popular databases for unconstrained face recognition, the Labeled Faces in the Wild and the Youtube Faces database. In both cases the new loss achieves competitive results.
The study of the circannual relationship between the activity of the epiphysis and gonads in rats of different sex and age.

BACKGROUND The relationship between the activity of the epiphysis and gonads in rats of different sex and age in different seasons of the year was determined by studying the levels of melatonin and testosterone in the blood plasma. Determination of the levels of melatonin and testosterone in the serum of rats was carried out by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. To assess the relationship between the levels of melatonin and testosterone the correlation coefficient was calculated. Based on the study of the levels of melatonin and testosterone in serum the circannual relationship between the activity of the pineal gland and gonads in males of reproductive age has been determined. In females, the relationship between the levels of melatonin and testosterone without the circannual dependence has been determined. The strongest correlation between melatonin and testosterone is present in males at the age of 9 months in autumn, and it corresponds to the human age of 29-30 years.
Predictors of Job Satisfaction among Emerging Adults in Alberta, Canada

This study explores the aspect of satisfaction with jobs and career, and the predictors of job satisfaction among the emerging adults in Alberta. Obtaining data from the 2003 Alberta High School Graduate Survey among a sample of 1,030 emerging adults from Alberta, the paper examines the predictors of job satisfaction among the emerging adults, which are self-esteem, happiness, work-reward preferences, valued job characteristics, income, education, occupational categories, and other demographic variables. Using structural equation modeling, a job satisfaction model has been developed. The findings indicate that self-esteem and valued job characteristics are direct and strongest predictors of job satisfaction among the emerging adults. In addition, happiness and income positively predicts job satisfaction. The variable ‘work-reward preferences’ does not directly predict job satisfaction, but is rather mediated through self-esteem and valued job characteristics. Discussion includes limitation, future research direction, and policy implications.
Sensitivity analysis of parameters controlling oscillatory signalling in the NFk B pathway : the roles of IKK and I k B a

Analysis of cellular signalling interactions is expected to create an enormous informatics challenge, perhaps even greater than that of analysing the genome. A key step in the evolution towards a more quantitative understanding of signalling is to specify explicitly the kinetics of all chemical reaction steps in a pathway. We have reconstructed a model of the nuclear factor, kB (NF-kB) signalling pathway, containing 64 parameters and 26 variables, including steps in which the activation of the NF-kB transcription factor is intimately associated with the phosphorylation and ubiquitination of its inhibitor kB by a membrane-associated kinase, and its translocation from the cytoplasm to the nucleus. We apply sensitivity analysis to the model. This identifies those parameters in this (IkB)/NF-kB signalling system (containing only induced IkBa isoform) that most affect the oscillatory concentration of nuclear NF-kB (in terms of both period and amplitude). The intention is to provide guidance on which proteins are likely to be most significant as drug targets or should be exploited for further, more detailed experiments. The sensitivity coefficients were found to be strongly dependent upon the magnitude of the parameter change studied, indicating the highly non-linear nature of the system. Of the 64 parameters in the model, only eight to nine exerted a major control on nuclear NF-kB oscillations, and each of these involved as reaction participants either the IkB kinase (IKK) or IkBa, directly. This means that the dominant dynamics of the pathway can be reflected, in addition to that of nuclear NF-kB itself, by just two of the other pathway variables. This is conveniently observed in a phase-plane plot.
THE DIFFUSION OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY ACROSS SPACE: A NEW APPROACH

Dynamic spatial theory has been a fruitful approach to understanding economic phenomena involving time and space. However, several central questions still remain unresolved in this field. The identification of the social optimal allocation of economic activity across time and space is particularly problematic, not been ensured yet in economic growth. Developing a monotone method, we study the optimal solution of the spatial Ramsey model. Under fairly general assumptions, we prove the existence of unique social optimum. Considering a numerical implementation of our algorithm, we study the role played by capital mobility in the neoclassical growth environment. With capital irreversibility and economic openness, space allows for transitional dynamics. Moreover, in this context, capital mobility is beneficial as well in terms of social welfare and inequality. We also consider an application of our method to an extension of the spatial Ramsey model for optimal land-use planning.
RESONANT H− PHOTODETACHMENT: ENHANCED PHOTODESTRUCTION AND CONSEQUENCES FOR RADIATIVE FEEDBACK

The hydrogen negative ion plays a crucial role in the formation of hydrogen molecules in the early universe. Cooling through excitation of H2 drives the formation of the first cosmological objects. The H2 molecules are produced primarily by a reaction sequence initiated by H−. We explore the influence of enhanced photodestruction rates that arise due to absorption by resonance states of H− lying near 11 eV. We examine the feedback effects that occur in radiation fields characteristic of Population III stars, blackbody sources, power-law spectra, and the hydrogen Lyman modulated sawtooth spectra of the high-redshift intergalactic medium.
BGP: Branched Gaussian processes for identifying gene-specific branching dynamics in single cell data

High-throughput single-cell gene expression experiments can be used to uncover branching dynamics in cell populations undergoing differentiation through use of pseudotime methods. We develop the branching Gaussian process (BGP), a non-parametric model that is able to identify branching dynamics for individual genes and provides an estimate of branching times for each gene with an associated credible region. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on both synthetic data and a published single-cell gene expression hematopoiesis study. The method requires prior information about pseudotime and global cellular branching for each cell but the probabilistic nature of the method means that it is robust to errors in these global branch labels and can be used to discover early branching genes which diverge before the inferred global cell branching. The code is open-source and available at https://github.com/ManchesterBioinference/BranchedGP.
Reinforced stochastic gradient descent for deep neural network learning

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the high-dimensional parameter space. Therefore, it is highly desirable to design an efficient algorithm to escape from these saddle points and reach a parameter region of better generalization capabilities. Here, we propose a simple extension of SGD, namely reinforced SGD, which simply adds previous first-order gradients in a stochastic manner with a probability that increases with learning time. As verified in a simple synthetic dataset, this method significantly accelerates learning compared with the original SGD. Surprisingly, it dramatically reduces over-fitting effects, even compared with state-of-the-art adaptive learning algorithm---Adam. For a benchmark handwritten digits dataset, the learning performance is comparable to Adam, yet with an extra advantage of requiring one-fold less computer memory. The reinforced SGD is also compared with SGD with fixed or adaptive momentum parameter and Nesterov's momentum, which shows that the proposed framework is able to reach a similar generalization accuracy with less computational costs. Overall, our method introduces stochastic memory into gradients, which plays an important role in understanding how gradient-based training algorithms can work and its relationship with generalization abilities of deep networks.
Neurofilament light chain predicts disease activity in relapsing-remitting MS

Objective: To investigate whether serum neurofilament light chain (NF-L) and chitinase 3-like 1 (CHI3L1) predict disease activity in relapsing-remitting MS (RRMS). Methods: A cohort of 85 patients with RRMS were followed for 2 years (6 months without disease-modifying treatment and 18 months with interferon-beta 1a [IFNB-1a]). Expanded Disability Status Scale was scored at baseline and every 6 months thereafter. MRI was performed at baseline and monthly for 9 months and then at months 12 and 24. Serum samples were collected at baseline and months 3, 6, 12, and 24. We analyzed the serum levels of NF-L using a single-molecule array assay and CHI3L1 by ELISA and estimated the association with clinical and MRI disease activity using mixed-effects models. Results: NF-L levels were significantly higher in patients with new T1 gadolinium-enhancing lesions (37.3 pg/mL, interquartile range [IQR] 25.9–52.4) and new T2 lesions (37.3 pg/mL, IQR 25.1–48.5) compared with those without (28.0 pg/mL, IQR 21.9–36.4, β = 1.258, p < 0.001 and 27.7 pg/mL, IQR 21.8–35.1, β = 1.251, p < 0.001, respectively). NF-L levels were associated with the presence of T1 gadolinium-enhanced lesions up to 2 months before (p < 0.001) and 1 month after (p = 0.009) the time of biomarker measurement. NF-L levels fell after initiation of IFNB-1a treatment (p < 0.001). Changes in CHI3L1 were not associated with clinical or MRI disease activity or interferon-beta 1a treatment. Conclusion: Serum NF-L could be a promising biomarker for subclinical MRI activity and treatment response in RRMS. In clinically stable patients, serum NF-L may offer an alternative to MRI monitoring for subclinical disease activity. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT00360906.
Stability of reconstituted amoxicillin clavulanate potassium under simulated in-home storage conditions

Oral suspensions of antibiotics are mainly available as dry powders for reconstitution. Many reconstituted antibiotic suspension is to be kept refrigerated in order to get the optimal benefit from the drug. However, many patients do not keep to the specified storage conditions for different reasons like no refrigerator and irregular power supply that may result in various degrees of degradation of the product. Pharmacists are therefore challenged on how to counsel patients when there is no refrigeration or erratic power supply for refrigeration. This study investigated stability of amoxicillin-clavulanate potassium suspension in simulated in-home conditions of erratic power supply and no refrigeration. Amoxicilin clavulanate suspensions were reconstituted and stored in three different in-home storage conditions with temperature ranging between 5-29 o C over a period of 10 days. Samples from the suspension were assayed using a validated HPLC method. Percentage concentrations of amoxicillin-clavulanate potassium were over 90% up to fifth day, degradation was extensive by seventh day with amoxicillin concentration falling below 80% in two conditions while clavulanate had values less than 70% in all the three conditions. Reconstituted amoxicillin clavunate potassium stored at room temperature (27-29 o C) is stable for five days, use of reconstituted suspension that was not properly refrigerated after the fifth day should be discouraged.
An Ensemble of Classifiers Based on Positive and Unlabeled Data in One-Class Remote Sensing Classification

One-class remote sensing classification refers to the situations when users are only interested in one specific land type without considering other types. The positive and unlabeled learning (PUL) algorithm, which trains a binary classifier from positive and unlabeled data, has been shown to be promising in one-class classification. The implementation of PUL by a single classifier has been investigated. However, implementing PUL using multiple classifiers and creating classifier ensembles based on PUL have not been studied. In this research, we investigate the implementations of PUL using several classifiers, including generalized linear model, generalized additive model, multivariate adaptive regression splines, maximum entropy, backpropagation neural network, and support vector machine, as well as three ensemble methods based on majority vote, weighted average, and weighted vote combination rules. These methods are applied in classifying the urban areas from four remote sensing imagery of different spatial resolutions, including aerial photograph, Landsat 8, WorldView-3, and Gaofen-1. Experimental results show that classifiers can successfully extract the urban areas with high accuracies, and the ensemble methods based on weighted average and weighted vote generally outperform the individual classifiers on different datasets. We conclude that PUL is a promising method in one-class remote sensing classification, and the classifier ensemble based on PUL can significantly improve the accuracy.
DARK MATTER SUBSTRUCTURE DETECTION USING SPATIALLY RESOLVED SPECTROSCOPY OF LENSED DUSTY GALAXIES

We investigate how strong lensing of dusty, star-forming galaxies (DSFGs) by foreground galaxies can be used as a probe of dark matter halo substructure. We find that spatially resolved spectroscopy of lensed sources allows dramatic improvements to measurements of lens parameters. In particular, we find that modeling of the full, three-dimensional (angular position and radial velocity) data can significantly facilitate substructure detection, increasing the sensitivity of observables to lower mass subhalos. We carry out simulations of lensed dusty sources observed by early ALMA (Cycle 1) and use a Fisher matrix analysis to study the parameter degeneracies and mass detection limits of this method. We find that even with conservative assumptions, it is possible to detect galactic dark matter subhalos of ∼108 M☉ with high significance in most lensed DSFGs. Specifically, we find that in typical DSFG lenses, there is a ∼55% probability of detecting a substructure with M > 108 M☉ with more than 5σ detection significance in each lens, if the abundance of substructure is consistent with previous lensing results. The full ALMA array, with its significantly enhanced sensitivity and resolution, should improve these estimates considerably. Given the sample of ∼100 lenses provided by surveys such as the South Pole Telescope, our understanding of dark matter substructure in typical galaxy halos is poised to improve dramatically over the next few years.