Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A meta-analysis of human acellular dermis and submuscular tissue expander breast reconstruction.

A Meta-Analysis of Human Acellular Dermis and Submuscular Tissue Expander Breast Reconstruction Sir: W are writing in response to the article, “A MetaAnalysis of Human Acellular Dermis and Submuscular Tissue Expander Breast Reconstruction,” by Kim et al. (Plast Reconstr Surg. 2012;129:28–41). 1 In this study, the authors performed two separate analyses. In the first, pooled estimates of complication rates for each procedure were calculated from 48 studies, 42 of which analyzed only one of the procedures. The second was a meta-analysis of six of these studies that compared both procedures. Kim et al. concluded that acellular dermal matrix reconstruction causes more complications, but their analyses do not support this conclusion. Although the meta-analysis showed significant differences for four of the six measured outcomes, the other analysis showed no significant differences between complication rates for any of the six outcomes, indicating that the studies included in the meta-analysis are not representative of all available data. Theauthorsuseduncontrolledcohort studies in theanalysis, which has a high potential to introduce bias in the analysis, and an assessment of study quality was not conducted to address this. Likewise, sensitivity analyses were not conducted to address whether removing studies of lower quality, such as those with a lot of missing data, affected results. Although Kim et al. stated that they conducted a sensitivity analysis, they did not present the results. This is of particular concern given the significant amount of heterogeneity among the studies. Without results of sensitivity analyses to address this, it cannot be known whether pooling results was appropriate.2,3 Finally, although the authors present their search terms, they do not explicitly state the Boolean operators they used. The authors mention using the reference list of publications to manually identify 22 articles suitable for their analysis, but they do not report the details of this strategy. Moreover, MEDLINE was the only database used. These issues raise concern about the comprehensiveness of the search according to the established guidelines.4,5 Based on the foregoing limitations, results of this study and their interpretations should be viewed with caution. DOI: 10.1097/PRS.0b013e31826d9e2e
The Conditional Capital Asset Pricing Model: Evidence from Karachi Stock Exchange

This is an attempt to empirically investigate the risk and return relationship of individual stocks traded at Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE), the main equity market in Pakistan. The analysis is based on daily as well as monthly data of 49 companies and KSE 100 index is used as market factor covering the period from July 1993 to December 2004. The natural startingpoint of this study is to test the adequacy of the standard Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) of Sharpe (1964) and Lintner (1965). The empirical findings do not support the standard CAPM model as a model to explain assets pricing in Pakistani equity market. The critical condition of CAPM—that there is a positive trade-off between risk and return—is rejected and residual risk plays some role in pricing risky assets. This allows for the return distribution to vary over time. The empirical results of the conditional CAPM, with time variation in market risk and risk premium, are more supported by the KSE data, where lagged macroeconomic variables, mostly containing business cycle information, are used for conditioning information. The information set includes the first lag of the following business cycle variables: market return, call money rate, term structure, inflation rate, foreign exchange rate, growth in industrial production, growth in real consumption, and growth in oil prices. In a nutshell, the results confirm the hypothesis that risk premium is time-varying type in Pakistani stock market and it strengthens the notion that rational asset pricing is working, although inefficiencies are also present in unconditional and conditional settings. The observation is that the dynamic size and book-to-market value coefficient explain the cross-section of expected returns in a few sub-periods. The conditional approach to testing the CAPM and the three-factor CAPM shows that the asset prices relationship is better explained by accommodating business cycle variables as information set. The findings of the conditional three-factor CAPM also give support to the fact that time-varying firm attributes have only a limited role in Pakistani market to explain the asset price behaviour.
The CEO succession decision in listed family firms

This thesis contributes to our understanding of CEO succession decisions in family firms with an incumbent family CEO. The successor choice may be a manifestation of conflicts of interests between the controlling family and the minority shareholders. Previous research has focused on the consequences of the CEO succession on firm performance; it has not studied the factors that determine the choice of the successor, the shareholder reaction to this choice, nor methodological concerns particularly relating to adjusting board independence for links the directors have to the controlling family, thin trading and confounding events. Thus, our objectives are: (i) to highlight key methodological concerns and propose ways of addressing these, (ii) to identify the determinants of the CEO successor choice between a family and a nonfamily CEO and (iii) to examine the stock market reaction to the succession announcement. Our sample comprises 283 succession announcements in listed family firms from France, Germany and the UK during 2001-2010. We find that reported board independence is overstated compared to our proposed measure of adjusted board independence. Two factors are found to influence the CEO successor choice. First, while reported board independence has no impact on the successor choice, our adjusted measure of de facto independence reduces the likelihood of a family successor, implying that the former is a biased measure. Second, cross-listed French firms are less likely to appoint another family CEO, confirming the bonding hypothesis of Coffee (1999). Our event study presents new evidence on the drivers of the stock market reaction to the succession announcement in family firms. Investors only react to the announcement of a nonfamily CEO successor, which is met by positive cumulative abnormal returns (CARs). Poor past performance elicits more positive CARs to the announcement of a nonfamily CEO. Two other factors, on interaction with past performance, drive the stock market reaction to the latter announcement. Accordingly, in poorly performing firms, the greater the adjusted board independence, the less positive are the CARs when a nonfamily CEO is announced, whereas, more positive CARs are observed for firms that offer greater shareholder protection. The key policy implication of these results is that definitions for board independence in the codes of best practice must account for directors’ links to the controlling shareholders.
TAK1 Regulates Reactive Oxygen Species and Cell Death in Keratinocytes, Which Is Essential for Skin Integrity*

Mice with a keratinocyte-specific deletion of Tak1 exhibit severe skin inflammation due to hypersensitivity to tumor necrosis factor (TNF) killing. Here we have examined the mechanisms underlying this hypersensitivity. We found that TAK1 deficiency up-regulates reactive oxygen species (ROS) resulting in cell death upon TNF or oxidative stress challenge. Because blockade of NF-κB did not increase ROS or did not sensitize cells to oxidative stress in keratinocytes TAK1 regulates ROS mainly through the mechanisms other than those mediated by NF-κB. We found that c-Jun was decreased in TAK1-deficient keratinocytes and that ectopic expression of c-Jun could partially inhibit TNF-induced increase of ROS and cell death. Finally, we show that, in an in vivo setting, the antioxidant treatment could reduce an inflammatory condition in keratinocyte-specific Tak1 deletion mice. Thus, TAK1 regulates ROS partially through c-Jun, which is important for preventing ROS-induced skin inflammation.
Multinational Retailers and Consumers in China: Transferring Organizational Practices from the United Kingdom and Japan

List of Tables List of Images Preface Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors Introduction China's Retail Sector in Context Transferring Human Resource Practices from the United Kingdom to China with Q.Huang Shopfloor Perceptions of Employment Practices at UK-Store in China Transferring Organizational Practices: A Diachronic Perspective from China Transferring Organizational Practices and the Dynamics of Hybridization: Japanese Retail Multinationals in China Multinational Retailers in China: Proliferating 'MCJobs' or Developing Skills? One Store, Two Employment Systems: Core, Periphery and Flexibility in China's Retail Sector with Q.Huang The Rhetoric of the Consumer and Customer Control in China Concluding Comments
Accurate Linking of Lake Erie Water Level with Shoreline Datum Using GPS Buoy and Satellite Altimetry

There is a need to accurately link the water level to the shoreline vertical datum for various applications including coastal management, lake/river/estuary/wetland hydrological or storm surge modeling/forecasting. Coastal topography is historically surveyed and referenced to the predetermined vertical datum in terms of orthometric heights, or the heights above the geoid, which is poorly known in terms of accuracy and lack of adequate spatial resolution for coastal applications such as estuary or storm surge modeling. We demonstrate an accurate linking of the lake surface to a shoreline datum using satellite techniques, including GPS buoy and satellite altimetry, water level gauges, and local geoid and lake circulation models. The possible error sources are analyzed and an error budget is reported in this study. An innovated method to estimate geoid height near the water level gauge using a GPS buoy is proposed. It is found that at a 95% confidence interval, the method is consistent with the National Geodetic Survey GEOID03 geoid model. The lake surface represented using a lake circulation model provided by the Great Lakes Forecasting Systems is also verified with kriging based on the data (1999 - 2001) from the water level gauge, and TOPEX/POSEIDON altimeter. Mean discrepancies of 2.7 and 7.2 cm are found with the data from the gauges around Lake Erie, and from the combination of the gauges and the altimeter, respectively. It reveals that the current dominant limitation of more accurate linking of water surface to shoreline is the insufficient knowledge of geoid in the current models. Further improvement is feasible through more accurate and higher resolution modeling of the lake geoid.
The Dynamics of Market Structure and Market Size in Two Health Services Industries

The relationship between the size of a market and the competitiveness of the market has been of long-standing interest to IO economists. Empirical studies have used the relationship between the size of the geographic market and both the number of firms in the market and the average sales of the firms to draw inferences about the degree of competition in the market. This paper extends this framework to incorporate the analysis of entry and exit flows. A key implication of recent entry and exit models is that current market structure will likely depend upon the history of past participation. The paper explores these issues empirically by examining producer dynamics for two health service industries, dentistry and chiropractic services. We find that the number of potential entrants and past number of incumbent firms are correlated with current market structure. The empirical results also show that as market size increases the number of firms rises less than proportionately, firm size increases, and average productivity increases. However, the magnitude of the correlations are sensitive to the inclusion of the market history variables.
The Bank Lending Channel of Monetary Policy in Nepal: Evidence from Bank Level Data

This paper examines the bank lending channel of monetary policy transmission in Nepal using data during 2003-2012. Using the dynamic Arellano-Bond GMM estimation with annual data of 25 Nepalese commercial banks, this study tries to estimate the loan supply responses of Nepalese commercial banks, depending on their balance sheet characteristics. The main results suggest that banks play a role in Nepal's monetary transmission mechanism. Empirical result shows that the bank lending decreases after a monetary tightening. Bank size is found to have significant impact on loan supply in Nepal. Similarly, liquidity in the case of private sector banks is also playing a significant role in bank lending in response to monetary policy changes. But, capitalization is found to have no significant impact on bank lending. The bank loan supply is also found to be significantly affected by gross domestic product.
Gaya Hidup Hijau: Membeli E-Ticket

Be green in style is popular today. There are several activities of â€œgreen chicâ€; eco fashions, go online shopping, and buy local. Purpose of this study was to describe consumer behavior in Surabaya consuming e-ticketing services in business aviation low cost carrier (LCC) as one of green in style. Using the elements of consumer behavior study; 5W 1H. In this research, respondents are who had bought and used e-ticketing services in business aviation low cost carrier (LCC) in Surabaya at least 2 times in the last 1 year, buying and using the services of low cost carrier airlines (LCC) with buy e-ticketing service for personal gain, based in Surabaya, graduate a minimum high school education. Analysis use frequency tables, tables percentage bar charts and cross tabulations method. This research result showed that e-ticketing service users in the business aviation low cost carrier (LCC) most were women. Respondents use e-ticketing service for holidays. The reason uses e-ticketing services because of practical. Respondents usually frequent purchases and travel by purchasing tickets using e-ticketing service between 2-4 times in the last 1 year. At the end, majority of respondents were satisfied after using e-ticketing service due to time saving and practical. Keywords: Green marketing, green lifestyle, consumer behavior, online shopping for e-ticketing.
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES WINNERS AND LOSERS FROM ENACTING THE FINANCIAL MODERNIZATION STATUE

Previous studies of the announcement effects of relaxing administrative and legislative restraints show that signal events leading up to the enactment of the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) increased the prices of several classes of financial-institution stocks. An unsettled question is whether the gains observed for these stocks arise mainly from projected increases in efficiency or from reductions in customer or competitor bargaining power. This paper documents that the value increase came at the expense of customers and competitors. The stock prices of credit-constrained customers declined during FSMA event windows and experienced significant increases in beta in the wake of its enactment. These findings reinforce evidence in the literature on bank mergers that large-bank consolidation is adversely affecting access to credit for capital-constrained firms. Kenneth A. Carow Indiana University kcarow@iupui.edu Edward J. Kane Department of Finance Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA 02458 and NBER edward.kane@bc.edu Rajesh P. Narayanan Ohio University narayana@ohio.edu Draft of October 5, 2005 1 WINNERS AND LOSERS FROM ENACTING THE FINANCIAL MODERNIZATION STATUTE Previous studies of the announcement effects of relaxing administrative and legislative restraints show that signal events leading up to the enactment of the Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) increased the prices of several classes of financial-institution stocks. An unsettled question is whether the gains observed for these stocks arise from projected increases in efficiency or from reductions in customer or competitor bargaining power. This paper documents that the value increase came at the expense of customers and competitors. The stock prices of credit-constrained customers declined during FSMA event windows and experienced significant increases in beta in the wake of its enactment. These findings reinforce evidence in the literature on bank mergers that large-bank consolidation is adversely affecting access to credit for capitalconstrained firms.
Workers' financial participation : East-West experiences

This work focuses on pay schemes which provide, in addition to fixed pay, a variable portion of remuneration linked to some measure of enterprise performance. The authors describe the experience of ten countries, discussing advantages and disadvantages of different schemes, the economic, institutional and organizational contexts which encourage their development, and the characteristics of schemes that make them more or less favourable to workers.
One-Shot Learning in Discriminative Neural Networks

We consider the task of one-shot learning of visual categories. In this paper we explore a Bayesian procedure for updating a pretrained convnet to classify a novel image category for which data is limited. We decompose this convnet into a fixed feature extractor and softmax classifier. We assume that the target weights for the new task come from the same distribution as the pretrained softmax weights, which we model as a multivariate Gaussian. By using this as a prior for the new weights, we demonstrate competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods whilst also being consistent with 'normal' methods for training deep networks on large data.
DNA damage and nucleotide excision repair capacity in healthy individuals

Interindividual differences in DNA repair capacity (DRC) represent an important source of variability in genome integrity and thus influence health risk. In the last decade, DRC measurement has attracted attention as a potential biomarker in cancer prediction. Aim of the present exploratory study was to characterize the variability in DNA damage and DRC on 100 healthy individuals and to identify biological, lifestyle, or genetic factors modulating these parameters. The ultimate goal was to obtain reference data from cancer‐free population, which may constitute background for further investigations on cancer patients. The endogenous DNA damage was measured as a level of DNA single‐strand breaks and DRC, specific for nucleotide excision repair (NER), was evaluated using modified comet assay, following the challenge of peripheral blood mononuclear cells with benzo[a]pyrene diolepoxide. Additionally, genetic polymorphisms in NER genes (XPA, XPC, XPD, and XPG) were assessed. We have observed a substantial interindividual variability for both examined parameters. DNA damage was significantly affected by gender and alcohol consumption (P = 0.003 and P = 0.012, respectively), whereas DRC was associated with family history of cancer (P = 0.012). The stratification according to common variants in NER genes showed that DNA damage was significantly modulated by the presence of the variant T allele of XPC Ala499Val polymorphism (P = 0.01), while DRC was modulated by the presence of the A allele of XPA G23A polymorphism (P = 0.048). Our results indicate the range of endogenous DNA single‐strand breaks and capacity of NER in healthy volunteers as well as the role of potentially relevant confounders. Environ. Mol. Mutagen. 2011. © 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Direct payments: a national survey of direct payments policy and practice

Direct payments give greater control to people assessed as needing social care or support and form a key part of the agenda for the developing social care system. But they also raise many challenges – for the individuals holding the budgets, for the people they employ, their families and other unpaid carers, local authority staff and the organisations set up to support them. As more people take up the opportunity to purchase their own services, including employing their own personal assistants, so the commissioning, provision and regulating functions of social care agencies may need to change. This report describes how local authorities across the UK are responding to the practical challenges of policy change.
Assessment of the Impacts of Standards and Labeling Programs inMexico (four products).

ASSESSMENT OF THE IMPACTS OF STANDARDS AND LABELING PROGRAMS IN MEXICO (FOUR PRODUCTS) Under Subcontract No. 6720261with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Gerencia de Uso de Energia Electrica (IIE) Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico January, 2006 Itha Sanchez, Henry Chu REP. No. 12933 ITF FN LBNL 001
Involvement of the N‐terminus of Kir6.2 in coupling to the sulphonylurea receptor

1 ATP‐sensitive potassium (KATP) channels are composed of pore‐forming Kir6.2 and regulatory SUR subunits. ATP inhibits the channel by interacting with Kir6.2, while sulphonylureas block channel activity by interaction with a high‐affinity site on SUR1 and a low‐affinity site on Kir6.2. MgADP and diazoxide interact with SUR1 to promote channel activity. 2 We examined the effect of N‐terminal deletions of Kir6.2 on the channel open probability, ATP sensitivity and sulphonylurea sensitivity by recording macroscopic currents in membrane patches excised from Xenopus oocytes expressing wild‐type or mutant Kir6.2/SUR1. 3 A 14 amino acid N‐terminal deletion (ΔN14) did not affect the gating, ATP sensitivity or tolbutamide block of a truncated isoform of Kir6.2, Kir6.2ΔC26, expressed in the absence of SUR1. Thus, the N‐terminal deletion does not alter the intrinsic properties of Kir6.2. 4 When Kir6.2ΔN14 was coexpressed with SUR1, the resulting KATP channels had a higher open probability (Po= 0·7) and a lower ATP sensitivity (Ki= 196 μM) than wild‐type (Kir6.2/SUR1) channels (Po= 0·32, Ki= 28 μM). High‐affinity tolbutamide block was also abolished. 5 Truncation of five or nine amino acids from the N‐terminus of Kir6.2 also enhanced the open probability, and reduced both the ATP sensitivity and the fraction of high‐affinity tolbutamide block, although to a lesser extent than for the ΔN14 deletion. Site‐directed mutagenesis suggests that hydrophobic residues in Kir6.2 may be involved in this effect. 6 The reduced ATP sensitivity of Kir6.2ΔN14 may be explained by the increased Po. However, when the Po was decreased (by ATP), tolbutamide was unable to block Kir6.2ΔN14/SUR1‐K719A,K1385M currents, despite the fact that the drug inhibited Kir6.2‐C166S/SUR1‐K719A,K1385M currents (which in the absence of ATP have a Po of > 0·8 and are not blocked by tolbutamide). Thus the N‐terminus of Kir6.2 may be involved in coupling sulphonylurea binding to SUR1 to closure of the Kir6.2 pore.