Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Acute toxicity of pyrithione antifouling biocides and joint toxicity with copper to red sea bream (Pagrus major) and toy shrimp (Heptacarpus futilirostris)

We evaluated the median lethal concentrations (LC50s) of the pyrithione (PT) antifoulants copper pyrithione (CuPT) and zinc pyrithione (ZnPT) to a teleost, red sea bream (Pagrus major), and a crustacean, toy shrimp (Heptacarpus futilirostris). The 96‐h LC50 values of CuPT and ZnPT, on the basis of actual concentrations, were 9.3 and 98.2 μg/L, respectively, for red sea bream and 2.5 and 120 μg/L, respectively, for toy shrimp. Histological observations revealed that the secondary lamellae of the gill filaments of the experimental fish were heavily damaged after exposure to the PTs, suggesting that fatal hypoxemia was one cause of death. Because CuPT and ZnPT are usually used in combination with Cu, we also estimated the joint toxicities of the PTs with Cu using the LC50 values of the PTs and those of Cu (84.4 and 113 μg/L for red sea bream and toy shrimp, respectively). The results suggested that the joint toxicity of the ZnPT and Cu mixture is more than the additive toxicities of CuPT and Cu, especially in toy shrimp. The enhancement of toxicity in the mixture was inferred to be caused by conversion of ZnPT to the more toxic CuPT in the presence of Cu.
Hydration of nitriles to amides by a chitin-supported ruthenium catalyst

Chitin-supported ruthenium (Ru/chitin) promotes the hydration of nitriles to carboxamides under aqueous conditions. The nitrile hydration can be performed on a gram-scale and is compatible with the presence of various functional groups including olefins, aldehydes, carboxylic esters and nitro and benzyloxycarbonyl groups. The Ru/chitin catalyst is easily prepared from commercially available chitin, ruthenium(III) chloride and sodium borohydride. Analysis of Ru/chitin by high-resolution transmission electron microscopy indicates the presence of ruthenium nanoparticles on the chitin support.
The Soil Microbiome Influences Grapevine-Associated Microbiota

ABSTRACT Grapevine is a well-studied, economically relevant crop, whose associated bacteria could influence its organoleptic properties. In this study, the spatial and temporal dynamics of the bacterial communities associated with grapevine organs (leaves, flowers, grapes, and roots) and soils were characterized over two growing seasons to determine the influence of vine cultivar, edaphic parameters, vine developmental stage (dormancy, flowering, preharvest), and vineyard. Belowground bacterial communities differed significantly from those aboveground, and yet the communities associated with leaves, flowers, and grapes shared a greater proportion of taxa with soil communities than with each other, suggesting that soil may serve as a bacterial reservoir. A subset of soil microorganisms, including root colonizers significantly enriched in plant growth-promoting bacteria and related functional genes, were selected by the grapevine. In addition to plant selective pressure, the structure of soil and root microbiota was significantly influenced by soil pH and C:N ratio, and changes in leaf- and grape-associated microbiota were correlated with soil carbon and showed interannual variation even at small spatial scales. Diazotrophic bacteria, e.g., Rhizobiaceae and Bradyrhizobium spp. , were significantly more abundant in soil samples and root samples of specific vineyards. Vine-associated microbial assemblages were influenced by myriad factors that shape their composition and structure, but the majority of organ-associated taxa originated in the soil, and their distribution reflected the influence of highly localized biogeographic factors and vineyard management. IMPORTANCE Vine-associated bacterial communities may play specific roles in the productivity and disease resistance of their host plant. Also, the bacterial communities on grapes have the potential to influence the organoleptic properties of the wine, contributing to a regional terroir. Understanding that factors that influence these bacteria may provide insights into management practices to shape and craft individual wine properties. We show that soil serves as a key source of vine-associated bacteria and that edaphic factors and vineyard-specific properties can influence the native grapevine microbiome preharvest. Vine-associated bacterial communities may play specific roles in the productivity and disease resistance of their host plant. Also, the bacterial communities on grapes have the potential to influence the organoleptic properties of the wine, contributing to a regional terroir. Understanding that factors that influence these bacteria may provide insights into management practices to shape and craft individual wine properties. We show that soil serves as a key source of vine-associated bacteria and that edaphic factors and vineyard-specific properties can influence the native grapevine microbiome preharvest.
Innovation in an Uncertain Institutional Environment: Private Software Entrepreneurs in Hangzhou, China

textabstractThe thesis deals with innovation and entrepreneurship in China. Despite an institutional environment characterized by high levels of uncertainty, innovation thrives even in the technology-based sectors. The research asks for explanations how innovative capabilities are developed in such an adverse institutional environment. For analyzing the institutional environment the research relies on comparative institutional approaches while approaches from the capabilities and resource-based theories, innovation management and China studies are used for explaining the behaviour of firms. The thesis is based on 2 years of extensive field research in cooperation with 45 Chinese entrepreneurs and Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. The findings suggest that Chinese entrepreneurs develop particular innovative capabilities in response to particular technical, market and institutional opportunities and constraints. One of the key insights is that innovation, in a broad understanding, can take place in an environment with institutional uncertainty and limited formal protection of intellectual property rights. On the one hand, institutional uncertainty creates both restrictions and incentives for innovation, and, on the other hand, firms are able to develop specific innovative capabilities that manage sectoral constraints while fighting off institutional constraints.
HEART RATE VARIABILITY DURING nNOS INHIBITION IN SPONTANEOUSLY HYPERTENSIVE RATS

PURPOSE: The current study investigated role of nitric oxide (NO), produced by neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) on heart rate variability (HRV) in spontaneously hypertensive rats (SHR). METODS: The selective neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS) inhibition was performed by application of 7-Nitroindazole (7NI) in conscious normotensive Wistar rats (n=10) and in SHR (n=10), intravenously in a dose 2mg/kg/h. Blood pressure wave was registered directly through a femoral artery catheter in a control period and during nNOS inhibition. In spectrograms of heart rate, derived by FFT algorithm, spectral power (P) in the low (LF), mid (MF) and high (HF) frequency band were studied. Throughout relation, PMF/PHF the sympatho-vagal balance was determined. RESULTS: The nNOS derivate NO in Wistar rats decreased PMF from 1.39±0.34 to 0.43±0.03 ms 2 , p<0.05 and altered PMF/PHF ratio from 0.80±0.1 to 0.44±0.03, (p<0.05). In SHR, nNOS inhibition did not affect HRV. CONCLUSIONS: The absence of inhibiting action of nNOS-derived NO on sympathetic neurotransmission in normotensive rats led to a decrease of sympathetically mediated oscillations in heart rate and to displacement of sympatho-vagal balance. The lack of effect of nNOS-derived NO inhibition in SHR on the HRV may be a result of the impaired nNOS signaling pathway in SHR.
MERCOSUR: objectives and achievements

The Southern Common Market (Mercado Commun del Sur, MERCOSUR) is one of the most important examples of renewed world-wide interest in regional trade agreements. It may be seen as a consolidation of unilateral reforms undertaken in conjunction with major macroeconomic adjustments. The paper reviews the objectives of MERCOSUR and assesses its achievements. It concludes that considerable progress has been made to achieving a customs union and even beyond that towards a common (but not European Union-style single) market, but there are a number of areas where progress is still to be made.
Banking System Resilience and Financial Stability

This paper while emphasising the importance of the concept of financial stability in the wake of recent global financial crisis attempts to highlight the significance of the soundness of banking sector in emerging economies where banking sector constitutes a lion’s share in the financial system. Attempt is made to define financial stability in backdrop of the ongoing definition debate for financial stability. Another contribution of this study is that, employing the appropriate key determinants of banking sector soundness, the paper models a basic axiomatic form of banking stability index (BSI) in the context of an emerging economy banking sector.
Strategies Used by Hippocampal- and Caudate-Putamen-Lesioned Rats in a Learning Task

In rats, hippocampal lesions result in impairment of spatial navigation, although other learning abilities remain unaltered. When learning a left/right discrimination task, rats can use a spatial strategy (with external maze landmarks-Situation 1) or are forced to use an egocentric strategy (without external or internal maze cues-Situation 2). Little is known about the extrahippocampal systems involved in the utilization of egocentric strategy. It is suggested that striatum could play an important role in the learning abilities that are spared after hippocampal lesion. The aim of our study was to investigate which strategy is used by rats bearing hippocampal or caudate-putamen lesions in the acquisition of a left/right discrimination task in an elevated T-maze in both Situations 1 and 2. We also investigated the effect of each lesion on the reversal of discrimination in both situations. Acquisition was not altered in any of the situations; however, a transfer test showed that hippocampal-lesioned rats used a different strategy (egocentric) from control animals (spatial) in Situation 1. In addition, reversal of the discrimination was impaired in Situation 2. Caudate-putamen lesion produced a transient effect on reversal of discrimination only in the egocentric task (Situation 2), but did not impair acquisition of the task in either situation, thus suggesting that the animals were able to use either strategy.
Failure of routine axillary nodal sampling to predict survival outcomes in lymph node-negative (N0) breast cancer.

In this issue of Annals of Surgery, Anthony Polednak of the Connecticut Tumor Registry presents the largest study to date that evaluates a significant sample of patients from various population-based cancer registries in the United States. In this paper, he elucidates the relationship between long-term survival in node-negative breast cancer patients and number of lymph nodes dissected for pathology examination at initial treatment.
Impact of Banking Competition on Lending Technologies

For the past 20 years, scholars have extensively discussed the impact of banking competition on the choice between transactional and relationship lending technologies, both empirically and theoretically, but have not yet come to a resolution. This study addresses this question using a new approach to relationship lending: a measure of the actual level of soft information banks use at the time of loan pricing. Using this new approach, the authors conclude that banks prefer to implement relationship lending technology when competition is weak. In addition, with regard to the shape of the relationship between competition and relationship banking, they find that, in accordance with extant theoretical conclusions, this relationship is nonlinear and concave.
Determinants of health insurance participation among informal sector workers in rural Tanzania

Health insurance schemes established to improve health financing in Tanzania faces many challenges including low acceptability. Therefore, the study to assess the determinants of health insurance participation among informal sector workers in rural Tanzania was undertaken. The general objective of the study was to assess issues that influence the readiness of informal sector workers to enroll in the health insurance scheme necessary for designing a pro equity health financing system. Specific objectives were to identify the reasons for participation in particular health insurance scheme; to identify the overall attitudes of the informal sector workers towards health insurance schemes and to estimate the informal sector workers enrolment into health insurance schemes. A sample of 250 respondents participated in this study. The binary logistic regression technique was used to examine the likelihood of an informal sector worker to be willing to enroll into health insurance scheme. The study showed that the acceptability of the health insurance scheme among the informal sector workers is enhanced by affordability, accessibility and quality of health services and is worsened by misconceptions, mistrust and lack of knowledge about such schemes. The overall attitude was that the health insurance should be universal, voluntary and financed by using tax shillings. Debt (p < 0.01), debt to income ratio (p < 0.05) and experience in the current occupation (p < 0.05) were strong predictors of willingness to join health insurance. Sex, income and number of dependants were not good predictors of willingness to join health insurance (p > 0.1). The policy implication of these results include the need of increasing flexibility of the scheme through innovative approaches of collecting premiums, improving affordability, establishing health financing tax and accreditation system for health facilities. These measures will enhance acceptability and deeper penetration of health insurance schemes in rural areas.
Multi-channel LSTM-CNN model for Vietnamese sentiment analysis

Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) have shown the state of the art results for sentiment analysis in English corpus. However, there are not many studies of this approach for Vietnamese corpus. In our work, CNN and LSTM are employed to generate information channels for Vietnamese sentiment analysis. Because each deep learning model (e.g. CNN, LSTM) has a particular advantage, this scenario provides a novel and efficient way for integrating the advantages of CNN and LSTM. In addition, we introduced a Vietnamese corpus, which collected comments/reviews from Vietnamese commercial web pages and was annotated by three human annotators. We evaluated our approach on our corpus and VLSP corpus. According to the experimental results, the proposed model outperforms SVM, LSTM, and CNN on the two datasets.
The Effect of Auditor Reputation on Stock Returns - the Case of Arthur Andersen

We examine the consequences for the stock price movement of Andersen's German clients of several news events during the Enron crisis that were potentially damaging to the reputation of Enron's auditor Andersen. It seems to be likely that there may not only have been reputation-damaging effects of the selected events for the US arm of Andersen but also negative reputation spillovers to Andersen's worldwide organisation. Contrary to the results of several US-studies there is no indication of significant negative average abnormal returns around the announcement of the shredding of Enron-related documents by Andersen in January 2002. However, our empirical evidence suggests that the share prices of Andersen's German clients were on average negatively affected by the event in December 2001 when Andersen's CEO Berardino admitted an error in judgement concerning the Enron audit in the US-Congress. Our results further suggest that in Germany the other Top Tier auditors' reputation was negatively affected by the Andersen specific event in December 2001 as well, although to a lesser extent than Andersen's reputation. However, contrary to Andersen's reputation, it seems as if the other Top Tier auditors' reputation suffered an additional erosion around the announcement of the indictment against Andersen in March 2002.
Precipitation recycling in the Amazon basin

SUMMARY Precipitation recycling is the contribution of evaporation within a region to precipitation in that same region. The recycling rate is a diagnostic measure of the potential for interactions between land surface hydrology and regional climate. In this paper we present a model for describing the seasonal and spatial variability of the recycling process. The precipitation recycling ratio, p, is the basic variable in describing the recycling process. p is the fraction of precipitation at a certain location and time which is contributed by evaporation within the region under study. The recycling model is applied in studying the hydrologic cycle in the Amazon basin. It is estimated that about 25% of all the rain that falls in the Amazon basin is contributed by evaporation within the basin. This estimate is based on analysis of a data set supplied by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts. The same analysis is repeated using a different data set from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Based on this data set, the recycling ratio is estimated to be 35%. The seasonal variability of the recycling ratio is small compared with the yearly average. The new estimates of the recycling ratio are compared with results of previous studies, and the differences are explained.
Determination of para-Phenylenediamine (PPD) in Henna in the United Arab Emirates

Henna is very popular in the United Arab Emirates (UAE); it is part of the culture and traditions. Allergy to natural henna is not usual; however the addition of para-phenylenediamine (PPD) to the natural henna increases the risk of allergic contact dermatitis. The objectives of the study were to identify the presence and concentration of PPD in henna available in UAE. Fifteen henna salons were selected randomly from three cities in UAE. Twenty five henna samples were acquired from these selected salons. The presence of PPD in henna samples was determined qualitatively and quantitatively using High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC). The study showed that PPD was present in all of the black henna samples at concentrations ranging between 0.4% and 29.5% and higher than that recommended for hair dyes in most of the black henna samples. The presence of PPD in the black henna increases the risk of allergic contact dermatitis among users of black henna and a number of cases have already been reported in UAE.
The Role of Heirs in Family Businesses: The Case of Carvajal

In this article we study why, contrary to international empirical evidence, CEO successions at Carvajal have been successful, although all the CEOs have belonged to the founding family. We develop a theoretical model which explains, given certain conditions, that the efforts of heirs can be similar to those of the founder and greater than outsiders’. We point out the importance of private knowledge, the non-monetary benefit of managing the firm, and the personal abilities, as determinants of the productivity achieved by family management.
Optimal Debt Bias in Corporate Income Taxation

I present a rationale for a government to discriminate between debt and equity financing when taxing corporate income. For risk-averse entrepreneurs, equity generates more surplus than debt, because it provides financing and insurance. A government seeking to extract surplus from entrepreneurs would naturally tax equity-generated income more than debt-generated income. I also establish a less obvious reason why the government might want to extract surplus from entrepreneurs. It is well understood that when the quality of projects is unobservable to investors, risk-averse entrepreneurs with higher-return projects might retain a larger share of equity to signal their type (Leland and Pyle (1977)). I show that in such an adverse selection set-ting, while competitive investors are constrained to offer actuarially fair terms, the government can use taxes to discriminate between types. This degree of freedom allows manipulation of the relevant incentive constraints so that a lower level of debt suffices for separation, and an increase in overall efficiency can be obtained. Since entrepreneurs separate along their debt-to-equity ratios, the optimal non-linear tax schedule to achieve the desired discrimination is isomorphic to one that taxes debt-generated income at a lower rate than equity-generated income.
How Do Small Businesses Pay for a Minimum Wage Increase?

The impact of changes in the minimum wage on employment is a politically charged topic that has been researched extensively. This paper analyzes what small business owners intend to do in the short term to pay for such an increase in labor costs. Since there are multiple ways a business can compensate for an increase in labor costs in lieu of adjusting labor levels, our survey asks the business owners to rank a list of possible funding sources by likelihood. Using a sample of 1294 privately-held US firms over the period of May 10, 2014 to May 15, 2014, we find that small businesses respond differently to minimum wage hikes than large businesses and that small businesses plan to pay for minimum wage hikes using the following methods, in the following order: 1) increase prices to customers, 2) reduce hours, 3) layoffs, 4) reduce other costs, 5) reduce profits to owners/investors.
The Prospective Joint Effects of Self-Regulation and Impulsive Processes on Early Adolescence Alcohol Use.

OBJECTIVE Dual-process models propose that behavior is influenced by the interactive effect of impulsive (automatic) and self-regulatory (controlled) processes. Elaborations of this model posit that the effect of impulsive processes on alcohol use is influenced by capacity and motivation to self-regulate. The interactive effect of these three processes on drinking has not previously been tested. The goal of this study was to provide a developmental extension of this model to early adolescent alcohol use and to test the three-way interaction between impulsive processes (implicit alcohol cognition), self-regulatory capacity (inhibitory and activation control), and self-regulatory motivation (negative alcohol outcome expectancies [AOE]) in a 1-year prospective prediction of adolescent alcohol use. METHOD Adolescents (N = 325; 54% girls, mean age = 13.6 years at baseline) completed the Single Category Implicit Association Test and self-reports of alcohol expectancies and use. Inhibitory and activation control were based on parental report. RESULTS Negative AOE and inhibitory/activation control were supported as moderators of the effect of implicit alcohol cognition on 1-year prospective alcohol use. As expected, weak implicit negative alcohol cognition was associated with elevated alcohol use when both negative AOE and inhibitory control were low. Contrary to hypothesis, when activation control was high, weak implicit negative alcohol cognition was unrelated to alcohol use if negative AOE were high (p = .72) (vs. low, p <.01). Activation control may reflect the ability to plan ahead and act pro-socially. CONCLUSIONS Our study supports current theory suggesting alcohol use is influenced by a complex interplay of impulsive and self-regulatory processes.