Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Constitutive endocytosis and recycling of the neuronal glutamate transporter, excitatory amino acid carrier 1

The neuronal glutamate transporter, excitatory amino acid carrier 1 (EAAC1), has a diverse array of physiologic and metabolic functions. There is evidence that there is a relatively large intracellular pool of EAAC1 both in vivo and in vitro, that EAAC1 cycles on and off the plasma membrane, and that EAAC1 cell surface expression can be rapidly regulated by intracellular signals. Despite the possible relevance of EAAC1 trafficking to both physiologic and pathologic processes, the cellular machinery involved has not been defined. In the present study, we found that agents that disrupt clathrin‐dependent endocytosis or plasma membrane cholesterol increased steady‐state levels of biotinylated EAAC1 in C6 glioma cells and primary neuronal cultures. Acute depletion of cholesterol increased the Vmax for EAAC1‐mediated activity and had no effect on Na+‐dependent glycine transport in the same system. These agents also impaired endocytosis as measured using a reversible biotinylating reagent. Co‐expression with dominant‐negative variants of dynamin or the clathrin adaptor, epidermal growth factor receptor pathway substrate clone 15, increased the steady‐state levels of biotinylated myc‐EAAC1. EAAC1 immunoreactivity was found in a subcellular fraction enriched in early endosome antigen 1 (EEA1) isolated by differential centrifugation and partially co‐localized with EEA1. Co‐expression of a dominant‐negative variant of Rab11 (Rab11 S25N) reduced steady‐state levels of biotinylated myc‐EAAC1 and slowed constitutive delivery of myc‐EAAC1 to the plasma membrane. Together, these observations suggest that EAAC1 is constitutively internalized via a clathrin‐ and dynamin‐dependent pathway into early endosomes and that EAAC1 is trafficked back to the cell surface via the endocytic recycling compartment in a Rab11‐dependent mechanism. As one defines the machinery required for constitutive trafficking of EAAC1, it may be possible to determine how intracellular signals regulate EAAC1 cell surface expression.
US Analyst Regulation and the Earnings Forecast Bias Around the World

We examine the spillover effects of the Global Analyst Research Settlement (or Global Settlement) on analysts’ earnings forecasts in 40 developed and emerging markets. Prior to the Global Settlement, analysts generally made overly optimistic forecasts, this bias tending to be higher in countries with less investor protection. This forecast bias declined significantly after passage of the Global Settlement, the spillover effect being stronger for countries with lower investor protection. The spillover effect is also stronger for countries with a more significant presence of the analysts of the 12 banks directly involved in the Global Settlement.
Improving Willingness to Pay Estimates for Quality Improvements through Joint Estimation with Quality Perceptions

Willingness to pay for quality change may depend on heterogeneous perceived quality levels. Contingent valuation studies should include measures of quality perceptions as covariates in the willingness to pay model in order to avoid omitted variable bias. Variation in quality perceptions across respondents leads to a potential endogeneity of quality perceptions. I address the potential for endogeneity bias using an instrumental variables approach in which a measure of quality perceptions is included as a determinant of willingness to pay and is simultaneously determined by various exogenous factors. The willingness to pay model is estimated jointly with quality perceptions allowing for correlation of the error terms. Using data on willingness to pay for water quality improvements in the Neuse River in North Carolina, I reject exogeneity of perceived quality. Correcting for endogeneity improves the measurement of willingness to pay by differentiating willingness to pay among respondents with heterogeneous quality perceptions.
Glass ceiling and double disadvantage effects: women in the US labour market

Gender pay issues in the US labour market are examined using 1990 and 2000 US Census data for three groups: the native born, immigrants from English-speaking countries and immigrants from non-English-speaking countries. Quantile regression estimates reveal different patterns of wage effects across the wage distribution. Females have lower rates of pay across the entire wage scale. There is minimal evidence of glass ceiling effects. Immigrant women from non-English-speaking countries are argued to experience a double disadvantage effect.
The double entry constraint, structural modeling and econometric estimation

The key proposition of the paper lies in the treatment of financial statements as a matrix of endogenous information codetermined by double entry. To account for the highly structured information set in econometric estimation, we develop a generalised structural system for use with accounting variables, within which the deterministic relationships governing financial statement articulation are clearly defined. The framework is used to formulate fully identified models that are consistent with the underlying duality that characterises the generating process of accounting data. To demonstrate the efficacy of the approach, we consider the model of equity pricing in Penman and Yehuda (2009), and the model of investment sensitivity to operating cash flow in Fazzari, Hubbart and Petersen (1988) and Kaplan and Zingales (1997). By comparison with the more traditional estimation methods, the structural system is shown to yield estimates with increased precision that adhere to double entry rules.
Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women's Movements in East Central Europe

With the collapse of state socialism, women in Eastern and Central Europe are now faced with more than the double burden of paid and domestic labor. Soaring unemployment is driving women out of the workplace, and nationalist ideologues are urging them to reassume their “primary responsibility”—to produce babies for the nation. Lack of childcare and attacks upon abortion rights are narrowing choices. Can these issues provide the catalyst for transforming the embryonic women’s groups into something like a mass women’s movement? Or will the current allergy to feminism prevail? Many women now claim to have suffered from “too much emancipation” under socialism, and are seeking what they see as new forms of freedom in femininity and maternity. Barbara Einhorn’s timely account of women’s position before and after the demise of state socialism in Eastern Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary shows how the issues of gender are today at the heart of potentially explosive processes of social and political transformation. Her book provides incisive sociological, economic and political analysis, along with perceptive commentary on the ways in which the changes in women’s daily lives are being represented in literature and in the media.
Discrete-Valued Neural Networks Using Variational Inference

The increasing demand for neural networks (NNs) being employed on embedded devices has led to plenty of research investigating methods for training low precision NNs. While most methods involve a quantization step, we propose a principled Bayesian approach where we first infer a distribution over a discrete weight space from which we subsequently derive hardware-friendly low precision NNs. To this end, we introduce a probabilistic forward pass to approximate the intractable variational objective that allows us to optimize over discrete-valued weight distributions for NNs with sign activation functions. In our experiments, we show that our model achieves state of the art performance on several real world data sets. In addition, the resulting models exhibit a substantial amount of sparsity that can be utilized to further reduce the computational costs for inference.
Mechanism for pressor response to nonexertional heating in the conscious rat.

The purpose of this study was to determine the systemic hemodynamic mechanism(s) underlying the pressor response to nonexertional heat stress in the unrestrained conscious rat. After a 60-min control period [ambient temperature (Ta) 24 degrees C], male Sprague-Dawley rats (260-340 g) were exposed to a Ta of 42 degrees C until a colonic temperature (Tc) of 41 degrees C was attained. As Tc rose from control levels (38.1 +/- 0.1 degrees C) to 41 degrees C, mean arterial blood pressure (carotid artery catheter, n = 33) increased from 124 +/- 2 to 151 +/- 2 mmHg (P less than 0.05). During this period, heart rate increased (395 +/- 5 to 430 +/- 6 beats/min, P less than 0.05) and stroke volume remained unchanged. As a result, ascending aorta blood flow velocity (Doppler flow probe, n = 8), used as an index of cardiac output, did not change from control levels during heating, but there was a progressive Tc-dependent increase in systemic vascular resistance (+30% at end heating, P less than 0.05). This systemic vasoconstrictor response was associated with decreases in blood flow (-31 +/- 9 and -21 +/- 5%) and increases in vascular resistance (94 +/- 16 and 53 +/- 8%; all P less than 0.05) in the superior mesenteric and renal arteries (n = 8 each) and increases in plasma norepinephrine (303 +/- 37 to 1,237 +/- 262 pg/ml) and epinephrine (148 +/- 28 to 708 +/- 145 pg/ml) concentrations (n = 12, P less than 0.05). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
Gangliosides are receptors for murine polyoma virus and SV40

Polyoma virus (Py) and simian virus 40 (SV40) travel from the plasma membrane to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) from where they enter the cytosol and then the nucleus to initiate infection. Here we demonstrate that specific gangliosides can serve as plasma membrane receptors for these viruses, GD1a and GT1b for Py and GM1 for SV40. Binding and flotation assays were used to show that addition of these gangliosides to phospholipid vesicles allowed specific binding of the respective viruses. The crystal structure of polyoma VP1 with a sialic acid‐containing oligosaccharide was used to derive a model of how the two terminal sugars (sialic acid‐α2,3‐galactose) in one branch of GD1a and GT1b are recognized by the virus. A rat cell line deficient in ganglioside synthesis is poorly infectible by polyoma and SV40, but addition of the appropriate gangliosides greatly facilitates virus uptake, transport to the ER and infection. Lipid binding sites for polyoma are shown to be present in rough ER membranes, suggesting that the virus travel with the ganglioside(s) from the plasma membranes to the ER.
Stochastic Frontier Analysis Of Singapore Manufacturing Industries

Previous papers on Singapore manufacturing productivity have focused almost exclusively on total factor productivity (TFP) growth rates and ignored the problem of measuring the extent of learning-by-doing. In this paper, we examine an alternative measure: the rate of technical efficiency change. Using data from 1974–1998, a translog production frontier is estimated. Following a conceptual framework popularised by Bauer (1990), productivity growth is decomposed into components arising from technical progress, technical efficiency change, a scale economies effect and an allocative inefficiency effect.
Categorical Perception of Mandarin Chinese Tones 1-2 and Tones 1-4: Effects of Aging and Signal Duration.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the aging effect on the categorical perception of Mandarin Chinese tones with varied fundamental frequency (F0) contours and signal duration. Method Both younger and older native Chinese listeners with normal hearing were recruited in 2 experiments: tone identification and tone discrimination on a series of stimuli with the F0 contour systematically varying from the flat tone to the rising-falling tones. Apart from F0 contour, tone duration was manipulated at 3 levels: 100, 200, and 400 ms. Results Results suggested that, compared with younger listeners, older listeners performed with shallower slope in the identification function and smaller peakedness in the discrimination function, particularly for Tones 1 and 2, whereas for Tones 1 and 4, comparable categorical perception was found between younger and older listeners. Conclusions The current study suggested that longer duration facilitated categorical perception in the flat-rising tones for the older listeners. Such an aging effect was not found with the flat-falling tones, suggesting that the aging-related deficit in categorical perception might relate to different tone types. Aging resulted in less categoricality of Mandarin tone perception for the flat-rising tones with short duration like 100 ms, possibly due to the aging-related decline in temporal processing.
Resistance training enhances the stability of sensorimotor coordination

Strategies for the control of human movement are constrained by the neuroanatomical characteristics of the motor system. In particular, there is evidence that the capacity of muscles for producing force has a strong influence on the stability of coordination in certain movement tasks. In the present experiment, our aim was to determine whether physiological adaptations that cause relatively long–lasting changes in the ability of muscles to produce force can influence the stability of coordination in a systematic manner. We assessed the effects of resistance training on the performance of a difficult coordination task that required participants to synchronize or syncopate movements of their index finger with an auditory metronome. Our results revealed that training that increased isometric finger strength also enhanced the stability of movement coordination. These changes were accompanied by alterations in muscle recruitment patterns. In particular, the trained muscles were recruited in a more consistent fashion following the programme of resistance training. These results indicate that resistance training produces functional adaptations of the neuroanatomical constraints that underlie the control of voluntary movement.
Urban Transport and Sustainability: The Key Challenges

ABSTRACT This article provides an overview of trends in demand for urban transport, considers their implications for the achievement of a set of urban transport policy objectives, and summarizes the principal problems which are likely to arise. It notes in particular the challenge of meeting climate change goals, which is likely to dominate the development of urban transport policy over the next four decades. It considers the range of policy instruments available, and summarizes evidence on their effectiveness. On this basis it argues that a package of policy instruments is needed, and provides evidence of good practice in the design of such packages. It reviews the barriers to the design and implementation of such packages, and summarizes international guidance on ways of overcoming these barriers. Finally, in a concluding section, it identifies the principal areas in which innovations are needed in urban transport policy and, in its role in providing the context for a special issue on modeling, suggests the resulting requirements for model development.
Financial Decision Making in Family Firms

Adapting the theory of planned behavior to the area of financial choices in family firms, we argue that these choices in family firms are largely affected by family norms, attitude, perceived behavioral control, and behavioral intentions. A time-lagged sample, estimated via structural equation modeling of 118 German family firms, supports a behavioral approach to the study of financing decisions. Specifically, we show that family norms and attitude toward external debt and external equity affect behavioral intention to use the respective financing choices, which in turn affects financing behavior. Perceived behavioral control, however, was shown to negatively affect behavioral intentions to use external equity and was positively related to the use of internal funds. Implications of these capital structure decisions and ideas for future research are discussed.
Strain-specific sequences required for yeast [PSI+] prion propagation

Amyloid polymorphism underlies the prion strain phenomenon where a single protein polypeptide adopts different chain-folding patterns to form self-propagating cross-β structures. Three strains of the yeast prion [PSI], namely [VH], [VK], and [VL], have been previously characterized and are amyloid conformers of the yeast translation termination factor Sup35. Here we define specific sequences of the Sup35 protein that are necessary for in vivo propagation of each of these prion strains. By sequential substitution of residues 5–55 of Sup35 by proline and insertion of glycine at alternate sites in this segment, specific mutations have been identified that interfere selectively with the propagation of each of the three prion strains in yeast: the [VH] strain requires amino acid residues 7–21; [VK] requires residues 9–37; and [VL] requires residues 5 to at least 52. Minimal polypeptide segments capable of encoding prion conformations were defined by assembly of recombinant Sup35 fragments on purified prion nuclei to form amyloid fibers in vitro, whose infectivity was assayed in yeast. For the [VK] and [VL] strains, the minimal fragments approximately coincide with the strain-specific sequences defined by mutations of the N-terminal portion of the intact Sup35 (1–685); and for the [VH] strain, a longer Sup (1–53) fragment is required. Polymorphic structures of other amyloids might similarly involve different stretches of polypeptides to form cross-β amyloid cores with distinct molecular recognition surfaces.
Effectiveness of breastfeeding peer counseling in a low-income, predominantly Latina population: a randomized controlled trial.

BACKGROUND Breastfeeding peer counseling has improved breastfeeding rates in developing countries; however, its impact in this country has not been adequately evaluated. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of an existing, breastfeeding peer counseling program within the United States. DESIGN Randomized, prospective, controlled trial in which participants were recruited prenatally and randomly assigned to receive either routine breastfeeding education or routine breastfeeding education plus peer counseling. SETTING An urban hospital serving a large population of low-income Latinas. PARTICIPANTS Pregnant women (< or =26 weeks' gestation) were recruited from the hospital's prenatal clinic. Inclusion criteria specified that participants be low income, be considering breastfeeding, have delivered a healthy, full-term singleton, and have access to a telephone. Intervention Breastfeeding peer counseling services included 1 prenatal home visit, daily perinatal visits, 3 postpartum home visits, and telephone contact as needed. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Breastfeeding rates at birth and 1, 3, and 6 months postpartum. RESULTS The proportion not initiating breastfeeding was significantly lower in the intervention group than among controls (8/90 [9%] vs 17/75 [23%]; relative risk, 0.39; 95% confidence interval, 0.18-0.86). The probability of stopping breastfeeding also tended to be lower in the intervention group at both 1 month (36% vs 49%; relative risk, 0.72; 95% confidence interval, 0.50-1.05) and 3 months (56% vs 71%; relative risk, 0.78; 95% confidence interval, 0.61-1.00). CONCLUSION These findings demonstrate that, in the United States, peer counselors can significantly improve breastfeeding initiation rates and have an impact on breastfeeding rates at 1 and 3 months post partum.
Global challenges to replicating HR: The role of people, processes, and systems

Global firms often struggle to replicate practices among their culturally and geographically dispersed subsidiaries. Part of the reason for this is that certain practices, including human resource management (HRM) practices, are complex and context specific. In this study, we develop a framework to help identify how firms might overcome challenges of practice replication through alignment of information systems, application processes, and people. We find that managerial alignment of formal processes and systems, along with informal alignment of people (shared objectives), improve the capability of a multinational corporation (MNC) to replicate human resource practices across subsidiaries. We also discuss managerial implications.
Constraints facing small western firms in transitional markets

Purpose – To provide an Asia‐Pacific viewpoint of the key constraints associated with large geographic distances for smaller westerns firms entering central and eastern Europe (CEE), described as a turbulent transitional environment.Design/methodology/approach – An exploratory study was used within a qualitative methodology, using eight case studies across multiple industries. Semi‐structured interviews were the main method of data collection conducted in 2003/2004. Open, axial and selective coding was used for the analysis to identifying issues.Findings – Key internal constraints for smaller western firms (mindset of western management and middle management in CEE; and lack of management in CEE with decision‐making authority) related to managements' inability to recognize geographic and psychic distance as major external constraints. Largely overcome by enhancing communication between various functional groups; adapting organizational structure; maintaining frequent communicational; developing partnershi.
Sorbic and benzoic acid in non-preservative-added food products in Turkey

Sorbic acid (SA) and benzoic acid (BA) were determined in yoghurt, tomato and pepper paste, fruit juices, chocolates, soups and chips in Turkey by using high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC). Levels were compared with Turkish Food Codex limits. SA was detected only in 2 of 21 yoghurt samples, contrary to BA, which was found in all yoghurt samples but one, ranging from 10.5 to 159.9 mg/kg. Both SA and BA were detected also in 3 and 6 of 23 paste samples in a range of 18.1–526.4 and 21.7–1933.5 mg/kg, respectively. Only 1 of 23 fruit juices contained BA. SA was not detected in any chips, fruit juice, soup, or chocolate sample. Although 16.51% of the samples was not compliant with the Turkish Food Codex limits, estimated daily intake of BA or SA was below the acceptable daily intake.
Institutional Determinants of Employment Chances. The Structure of Unemployment in France and Sweden

Linked employer-employee data for Sweden and France are used to test competing hypotheses about the structure of unemployment in France and Sweden derived from a comparison of their welfare-state structures, labour-market institutions, and the linkages between their educational system and labour market. Contrary to standard predictions derived from welfare-state theory, the unemployment structure of France does not conform to the classic insider-outsider labour-market model that scholars generally attribute to conservative welfare-state regimes. Instead, France has a flexible two-tier labour market that produces relatively high entry rates into employment along with the strong age and educational gradients in exit rates that would be expected for a country with high firing costs. Even during the deep recession of the early 1990s, Sweden was also characterized by a strong age gradient in the rate of exit from an employer. However, Swedish rates do not show a strong education gradient, which is the expected consequence of Sweden's loosely linked school and work institutions, and extensive active labour-market policies. Active labour-market policies during the Swedish recession of the early 1990s appear to have further changed the shape of the age-unemployment curve in that country by raising the exit rate of older workers more than would have resulted from the dynamics of labour demand alone.