Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Twitter and Public Reasoning Around Social Contention: The Case of #15ott in Italy

This paper addresses the use of Twitter for public reasoning and opinion making around issues related to social contention. It specifically focuses on the Italian chapter of the 15 October 2011 polycentric protest for Global Change. By exploring Twitter streams, the study follows four specific lines of investigation: the positioning of the Italian #15ott hashtagged Twitter stream among other Twitter streams relevant to the protest, conversational dynamics over time, networking and news media dynamics, and processes of meaning construction. The findings show that Twitter usage related to social contention is not only functional to generate alternative information flows with organizational and logistic purposes. It also bolsters processes of public reasoning and opinion making activated not only by collective advocacy actors and media channels but also by individuals not necessarily involved in offline protest action.
The effect of nitrogen fertilization and anti-fungal plant protection on sugar beet yielding

Sugar beet yielding and, thus, the profitability of its cultivation depends on various conditions. These are mainly a dose of nitrogen fertilizing and anti-fungal plant protection. Based on the research carried out in a private-owned farm in Biała commune, Opole province, Poland, it was observed that the most important factors influencing plant development and root yield of sugar beets (var. Kassandra and Cortina) were genetic features of the investigated varieties and fungal control. They increased considerably root yield and sugar content. The doubled nitrogen dose from 90 to 180 kg N/ha enhanced a slight, statistically insignificant, root yield increase and a lower sugar content in beet roots. The three-year research showed that weather conditions during the vegetation period had a decisive effect on sugar beet plants development and fungal infestation. The variety Cortina was characterized with a significantly higher yield and a higher content of treacle forming compounds in the roots. The increase of N rate from 90 to 180 kg N/ha caused a significant increase of average root mass, leaves and dry ma�er yield and potassium and N-αNH2 in roots, but it also lowered sugar content. In the years with favorable conditions for fungal infestation, the use of fungicides helped to obtain a higher leaf/root ratio, higher root mass, higher root and leaf yield and higher dry ma�er and sugar yields. However, it did not have an effect on the content of chemical compounds producing treacle in sugar beet roots.
Entrepreneurial Skills, Significant Differences between Serbian and German Entrepreneurs

An extensive literature review reveals various authors acknowledge skills have an impact on entrepreneurial success. However, a lack of consensus regarding the main skills an entrepreneur needs is apparent. In this study, a contribution is made to the debate with empirical data and analysis, in two steps: by testing mean differences and reducing data with a principal components analysis. A sample of 394 potential entrepreneurs was administered the SAT-ECENT questionnaire, testing four skills: readiness to change, learning capacity, impact on people, and stress tolerance. The questionnaires were administered in Serbia (n = 190) and in Germany (n = 204). In this paper, evidence about two main issues is presented: Entrepreneurial skills vary significantly across countries, and the skill tolerance to stress plays an important role in explaining the variance in the development of entrepreneurial skills in the two countries. Discussion is focused on the research implications and relevance of the findings as well as the practical implications for entrepreneurship promotion programs.
Valuation Weights, Linear Dynamics and Accounting Conservatism: An Empirical Analysis

Residual income models provide an important theoretical link between equity valuation and financial statement variables. While various researchers have developed models of how accounting policy impacts on the structure of these models, empirical support for these models is at best weak and frequently contradictory. In this paper, we develop an analytical model, which identifies the dependency between valuation weights in residual income models and the associated structure of earnings information dynamics and accounting conservatism. In contrast to many earlier studies, we find strong evidence of conservatism in our reformulation of the linear dynamics. We proceed to test our predictions of the dependency of the weights on two measures of conservatism, the conventional measure of price-to-book ratio and the recent measure of a C-Score index developed by Khan and Watts (2009) and find that the empirical results accord well with our theoretical predictions in the case of the former but not the latter measure.
Mechanical stretching promotes the differentiation of BMSC into pelvic floor ligament fibroblasts

// Bing Zhao 1, * , Junmin Wang 2, 1, * , Chenchen Ren 1 , Mengcai Hu 1 , Huiyan Wu 1 , Lulu Chen 1 , Xiaojun Liu 3 , Luwen Wang 1 , Feng Xu 1 , Xueqin Zheng 1 , Juan Chen 1 and Shihong Cui 1 1 Third Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan Province 450052, China 2 Department of Human Anatomy, Basic Medical College of Zhengzhou University, Zhengzhou, Henan Province 450052, China 3 Henan Medical Equipment Inspection Institute, Zhengzhou, Henan Province 450052, China * These authors have contributed equally to this work Correspondence to: Shihong Cui, email: shihongcui@126.com Keywords: mechanical stretch; BMSC; KDM4B; LOX; elastin Received: December 28, 2016 Accepted: July 24, 2017 Published: February 07, 2018 ABSTRACT Pelvic floor dysfunction (PFD) is a prevalent and debilitating condition in aging women that is associated with weakened pelvic connective tissue. Fibroblasts are the main component of pelvic connective tissue and play a vital role in the maintenance of the pelvic organ. Mechanical stretching is a known modulator leading to the proliferation and differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs). In this paper, we measured the lysyl oxidase (LOX), elastin and KDM4B expression in cultured BMSCs under different cyclic mechanical stretch (CMS) conditions via Western blot assays. Our findings indicated that the expression of these proteins was significantly higher in the CMS group than in the normal control group, and 10% CMS at a 0.5 Hz frequency had the best stimulatory effect. We further evaluated the influence of KDM4B on LOX and elastin expression via knockdown and overexpression of KDM4B in BMSCs. Chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP)-PCR analysis was performed to determine how H3K9me3 and KDM4B affect the regulatory regions of LOX and elastin in BMSCs subjected to 10% CMS combined with KDM4B knockdown. Finally, we verified the expression of KDM4B under CMS in vivo by subcutaneously transplanting KDM4B- overexpressing BMSCs into mice via immunofluorescence assays. The results showed that activating KDM4B by mechanical stretching increased the protein and gene expression levels of LOX and elastin and induced more LOX-positive cells in the BMSCs. These data suggest that CMS contributes to the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) into fibroblasts, which indicates its potential use as a cell-based therapy for PFD.
Conceptualization of safety leadership in Malaysia's manufacturing companies

In the new global economy, workplace safety has become a central issue among companies all over the world. It is becoming difficult to ignore that this trend has also been happening in Malaysia especially the manufacturing sector. The worrying trend can be seen from the increasing number of workplace accident reported by Department of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH), Malaysia in manufacturing companies. In recent years, researchers have shown an interest in studying the role of safety leadership to reduce workplace accidents. It is found that safety leadership plays a significant role in ensuring a safe and sound workplace. Due to this concern, this paper attempts to provide a conceptualization of safety leadership from the perspective of Malaysia’s manufacturing sector. It is proposed that positive safety leadership leads to reduction of workplace accidents. In response to this matter, it is hypothesized that the higher level of safety leadership will affect the lower level of workplace accidents. A questionnaire from Wu et al. (2008) will be adopted to explain the conceptualization of safety leadership, it is expected that the concept of safety leadership practiced in Malaysia’s manufacturing sector has a similar meaning from the perspective of western researchers.
Private Provision of a Public Good: Cooperation and Altruism of Internet Forum Users

We run an experiment with users of internet message boards. We find that forum users cooperate more with partners of their own forum than with partners from a different forum but they are equally altruistic when they made a gift to a partner of their forum or from another one. We also find that individuals are more active in the forums, the more altruistic they are; however, we find no relation between activity in the forum and cooperation. These results suggest that the public good provided in internet forums is mainly provided by a group of unconditional altruistic group of users, and that the feeling of community supports the cooperation in that provision.
Fiscal Policy Effects on Economic Growth: Short Run vs Long Run

There are two important aspects to take into account while analysing fiscal policy effects on economic growth. First, it should be made clear whether Keynesian short-run or classical long-run effects are the object of interest. Second, the relations between different fiscal and macroeconomic variables should be identified A± all possible simultaneous changes in other fiscal and macroeconomic indicators should be taken account of while analysing the effect of any fiscal policy decision on economic growth. As demonstrated in this article, Keynesian principles do not seem to hold as fiscal policy cannot have any remarkable impact on economy in a short run. But it is confirmed that in the long run, expansionary fiscal policies are not beneficial to the economy generally. For a government it is essential to recognise that changes in different revenue and expenditure categories may have the same impact on budget balance and on total government revenue and expenditure but they have different effects on economic growth in the long run. For example, fiscal policy decisions have different effects depending on whether to save increased revenue, to spend it for current expenditure or to use it for public investment.
Distribution and biological properties of oceanic water masses around the South Island, New Zealand

Abstract The distribution of phytoplankton and the diversity of environmental conditions for their growth around the South Island, New Zealand, were examined in May 1989 by way of chlorophyll a fluorescence profiling in combination with discrete sample analysis of nutrients and particulates, CTD‐profiles, and concurrent satellite images of sea surface temperature (SST). A composite of 7 overlaid SST images from the period of the cruise emphasised the strong north‐south and east‐west gradients in the oceanic environment. Water column sampling coupled with SST imagery was used to examine the frontal structure in Cook Strait, upwelling along the West Coast, gradients across the Solander Trough and through Foveaux Strait, and oceanographic features associated with the Subtropical Convergence off the East Coast and over Chatham Rise. A correlation analysis of the near‐surface water properties showed the zonal relationships between nutrients, nutrient ratios, and temperature, but also underscored the strong loc.
Numerical simulation of three-dimensional enhanced oil recovery and its application for horizontal wells

In this paper, a numerical approximation is put forward to solve the simulation of three-phase (water, oil and gas) problem of permeation fluid mechanics, where the flow is driven to move by injecting ternary compound flooding in porous media. After the mechanical model formulated, then different computational algorithms are structured including a fully implicit procedure, an implicit procedure for the pressure and an implicit/explicit program respective for the pressure and the concentration. Then the pressure, the saturation and the concentrations of chemical components and petroleum acid are computed by using an upstream sequence, a difference iterative algorithm of implicit upwind fractional step and interpolation calculations of relative permeability. The software is finished and is generalized in industrial applications, such as in analysis and simulation of national major oil-fields, which shows the illustration with high order of accuracy, runs on a combination partition of ten-meter step and of one hundred and fifty thousand nodes and simulates on the interval of tens of years. This gives rise to outstanding economic benefits and social benefits in China. Numerical analysis and convergence argument in l 2 norm are given for a simplified model in consideration of capillary force and an efficient tool is presented to solve an international famous problem formulated by Jr. Douglas, J.
Design of a mobile aerosol research laboratory and data processing tools for effective stationary and mobile field measurements

Abstract. A compact mobile aerosol research laboratory (MoLa) for stationary and mobile measurements of aerosol and trace gas characteristics was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) in Mainz, Germany. Major efforts were made to design an aerosol inlet system which is optimized and characterised for both, stationary and mobile measurements using a particle loss modelling approach. The instrumentation on board allows the determination of a multitude of physical and chemical aerosol parameters, for example particle number and mass concentration (PM1/2.5/10), particle size distributions in the diameter range 6 nm up to 32 μm, and chemical composition of the sub-micron aerosol. Furthermore, trace gas concentrations of O3, SO2, CO, CO2, NO, NO2 and water vapour as well as meteorological parameters like temperature, relative humidity, pressure, wind, solar radiation and precipitation are measured together with various housekeeping parameters. All instruments collect data with high time resolution in the second to minute-range. The measurement platform, as well as data acquisition and handling tools, are optimized for efficient application to various measurement settings. The mobile laboratory is designed to be used for mobile investigation of anthropogenically influenced environments. Possible applications include pollutant mapping, chasing of mobile sources or Lagrangian-type measurements in emission plumes, but also stationary measurements with possible frequent position changes and a well-characterised instrument setup. In addition to the design and features of the mobile laboratory, its inlet system and instrumentation as well as examples of applications of this platform are presented. Challenges associated with such measurements and approaches to extract the desired information from the mobile datasets are discussed.
The relationship between the use of strategic human capital, the design of the management control system and organisational performance: an empirical study in the Greek context.

This study examines, within the context of Greece, the relationship between the four attributes (importance, behavioural uncertainty, firm specificity and spread) of Strategic Human Capital (SHC), the design/use of Management Control Systems (MCSs) and organisational performance. It utilises both Transaction Cost Economics (TCS) and contingency theory to develop the theoretical background of the study, since both analyse the function of management control. This study extends the model of Widener (2004) a step further by incorporating organisational performance. It supports the proposed model of Widener, by verifying the positive influence of the four components of SHC to the personnel controls and non-traditional results controls and their negative influence on the use of traditional results controls.
Simulation of monthly rainfall totals

The observed distribution of non-zero rainfall totals for a given month is often modelled using a maximum likelihood estimate for the Gamma distribution. In this paper we show that a Gamma distribution can be regarded as a zero order approximation to a density distribution constructed by a series of associated Laguerre polynomials. The coefficients of the series are easily calculated and used to improve the shape of the initial approximation by adjusting higher order moments. We show that this more general method models joint probability distributions for two or more months and in particular that the series model does not require an assumption of independence between months. Finally we explore how the series method generates simulated data that is statistically indistinguishable from the observed data. We illustrate our methods on a case study at Mawson Lakes and although monthly correlations may not be significant we note that the rainfall records at Koonamore Station show many significant correlations for successive months.
Effect Of Priming Of Seeds Of Medicago Sativa ‘Bami’ With Gibberellic Acid On Germination, Seedlings Growth And Antioxidant Enzymes Activity Under Salinity Stress

Abstract The experiment was conducted in order to study effects of seeds priming with gibberellic acid (GA3) at 0, 3, 5 and 8 mM on germination, growth and antioxidant enzymes activity in alfalfa seedlings under salinity stress (200 mM NaCl). All control seeds germinated. The rate of germinated seeds was reduced to 48% in the presence of NaCl, and increased to 76% after seeds priming with 5 mM GA3. Priming with 5 mM GA3 was also correlated with an increase of dry weight of seedlings derived from both stressed and non-stressed seeds as well as with the reduction of electrolyte leakage (EL) and malondialdehyde (MDA) level in salt stressed seedlings. The activity of superoxide dismutase, catalase, guaiacol peroxidase and ascorbate peroxidase in primed and non-primed seeds increased in the presence of NaCl and after priming of seeds with 5 mM GA3, whereas only small effect on glutathione reductase activity in both primed and non-primed seeds was observed. The total ascorbate level was higher in both stressed and non-stressed seedlings from primed seeds. These results suggest that GA3 priming might increase the salt tolerance of alfalfa seedlings through enhancing the activities of antioxidant enzymes and reducing the membrane damage as estimated using biomarkers, EL index and MDA content.
Ideational Pathways: Toward a New Approach for Studying the Life of Ideas

Abstract What is the life of an idea? How do some ideas result in creative outcomes? People interested in creativity often want to know the answers to these questions. Although there are numerous methods and measures for assessing creative persons and products, there is little by way of methods for documenting and analysing the trajectories of ideas. The purpose of this paper is to address this need by introducing a new approach for tracing and analysing ideational pathways. Ideational pathways refer to the trajectory of ideas in temporal and spatial dimensions. That is, how ideas travel through time and space and whether those ideas end up resulting in creative outcomes. We open the paper by providing a theoretical and conceptual background for ideational pathways. We then introduce an emerging approach for tracing these pathways and apply it to two examples. We close by discussing implications and directions for future research.
Congenital Nephron Deficit is a Risk Factor for Renal Disease

Background: Congenitally low nephron number, often associated with low birth weight, has been shown to be a risk factor for hypertension and cardiovascular disease in humans. Epidemiological studies have also linked it to development of chronic kidney disease (CKD) but this has been difficult to verify experimentally. Previously, we showed that rats with congenitally low nephron number did not develop CKD by 11 months of follow-up. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that animals with congenital nephron deficit have a higher risk for development of kidney disease when exposed to postnatal insults. Methods: Pregnant Sprague-Dawley rats were exposed to low protein (LP) versus control diet to induce decreased nephron numbers. Offspring from each group were either stressed by unilateral nephrectomy (UN) and high salt diet (HS), or exposed to standard salt diet and sham surgery. Results: Forty-two percent of stressed animals in both C and LP groups died of renal failure compared to no mortality in nonstressed animals (P = 0.0001). By 6 months of age, non-stressed LP animals did not develop significant renal disease. However, stressed LP animals had significant decrease in kidney function (P = 0.033), high albumin excretion (P = 0.012), and extensive renal histologic damage. The changes tended to be more severe in males. Conclusions: Congenital low nephron number in our model does not result in CKD by 6 months of life. However, they have increased risk for development of CKD when exposed to postnatal insults, and the risk depends on the severity of deficit.
Integrating advance order information in make-to-stock production systems

Increased cooperation between supply chain partners and information technology are enabling the availability of advance order information for contract suppliers. Control mechanisms that take into account this availability are necessary in order to achieve the potential improvements in performance. We investigate the structure of optimal control policies for a discrete-time make-to-stock queue with advance order information. Since the optimal policy does not have a simple structure, we then propose a heuristic policy which is an extension of the base stock system that incorporates advance order information through a release lead time parameter. In order to quantify the benefits due to advance order information, we investigate the performance of the proposed mechanism and benchmark it against against the optimal control policy.