Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Combinatorial Synthesis of Peptide Arrays onto a Microchip

Arrays promise to advance biology through parallel screening for binding partners. We show the combinatorial in situ synthesis of 40,000 peptide spots per square centimeter on a microchip. Our variant Merrifield synthesis immobilizes activated amino acids as monomers within particles, which are successively attracted by electric fields generated on each pixel electrode of the chip. With all different amino acids addressed, particles are melted at once to initiate coupling. Repetitive coupling cycles should allow for the translation of whole proteomes into arrays of overlapping peptides that could be used for proteome research and antibody profiling.
Health care during financial crisis : what can we learn from the Indonesian National Socioeconomic Survey?

This paper presents the results of a trend analysis of key health indicators in Indonesia. The analysis is based on data from the National Socioeconomic Survey for Indonesia (SUSENAS) for the years 1995, 1997, and 1998. The analysis is part of an effort to monitor the impact of the country's current economic crisis on health outcomes and to identify groups that may have benefited or been disadvantaged in recent years. The economic crisis could affect health outcomes in a number of ways. Changes in employment patterns and incomes that occurred as a result of the crisis are likely to have had an effect on health outcomes and the demand for health care. In this paper, the authors attempt to analyze the health information available through the SUSENAS to establish baselines against which to compare future trends and possible impacts on the health sector. The paper discusses some possible hypotheses for how the crisis may be affecting health care utilization.
Effect of technology adoption on performance of youth led micro and Small enterprises (mses)

Despite the great role that micro and small enterprise (MSE) sector play in wealth generation, employment creation and poverty reduction and the Government’s effort to promote the sector, the MSE operators seem to be lagging behind in technology adoption. This study aimed at finding out the effect of technology adoption on youth led MSE performance. A descriptive research design was used to carry out the study. Stratified random sampling technique was employed to select a sample of 119 out of the target population of 396. A questionnaire was the main instrument for collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS software. From the study, it was revealed that those enterprises which used the four forms of technology adoption experienced improved enterprise performance. However the study found that use of appropriate technology was found not doing much to enhance youth led MSE performance due to insufficient finances and irrelevant skills; that quality improvement techniques are not being made use of due to lack of relevant skills and inefficient machines; that conformance to legal requirements is a major handicap to youth led MSEs due to too high license fee; that financial resource management has weak effect on MSEs due to insufficient funds and that ability to secure appropriate business location is hindered by too high rents charged. The study is important as it will give direction on areas to prioritize the expenditure of the donors and policy makers so as to effectively promote youth led MSE’s development.
The Degree of Urbanization of a Species Affects How Intensively It Is Studied: A Global Perspective

The expansion of urban areas is currently one of the most important worldwide landscape changes. This process, termed urbanization, has important ecological effects and is known to alter many aspects of the biology of organisms (including birds). However, human-nature interactions can also be affected by this process. We hypothesized that urbanization can particularly affect how intensively we investigate birds. We predict that species living in close proximity to humans will be more easily or preferably studied, thus promoting a bias in research effort towards urban birds. In order to test this hypothesis we have collected a detailed database of urban and non-urban avian communities including information from five biogeographic realms and more than 750 bird species. We obtained four different indicators of research effort (two previously considered and two new ones) as well as information on different confounding factors that are known to affect research effort such as conservation status, body mass, distribution range and phylogeny, in addition to the previously unconsidered historical factor of year of description of the species. We found a positive and significant association between the degree of urbanization of a species and how frequently it is investigated. We also found the expected effect for biogeographic realm, body mass and distribution range, and year of description, but not for conservation status. In addition, we found a strong correlation among all research effort variables which support the use of Google Scholar as a reliable source for these kind of studies. Our findings suggest that urbanization is not only affecting the biology of organisms but also how we study them. These results might have important implications if this research bias is maintained in the long term. Future investigation should aim at exploring the ultimate reasons for this research bias towards urban birds and whether it is also happening for other groups of organisms.
Limitations to Inter-Organizational Knowledge Acquisition: The Paradox of Corporate Venture Capital

By highlighting conditions under which viable interorganizational relationships do not materialize, we explore the limitations of interorganizational knowledge acquisition. In the empirical context of corporate venture capital (CVC), we analyze a sample of 1,646 start-up-stage ventures that received funding during the 1990s. Under a regime of weak intellectual property protection (IPP), an entrepreneur-CVC investment relationship is less likely to form when the entrepreneurial invention targets the same industry as corporate products. In contrast, under a strong IPP regime, industry overlap is associated with an increase in the likelihood of an investment relationship. Our findings suggest that many relationships do not form because the corporation will not invest unless the entrepreneur discloses his or her invention, and the entrepreneur may be wary of doing so, fearing imitation. To the extent that a CVC has greater capability and inclination to target same-industry ventures, such industry overlap would exacerbate imitation concerns under a weak IPP regime, yet facilitate an investment relationship under a strong IPP regime. Beyond CVC, this insight may explain patterns of other interorganizational relationships, including research and development alliances and technology licensing between start-ups and incumbents.
The role of glucocorticoids in sodium retention in cirrhotic patients: A double blind, randomized, crossover study

Abstract Objective. Cirrhotic patients have an increased ratio of urinary cortisol to cortisone metabolites, indicating decreased renal 11-β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase type-2 activity. This suggests that cortisol – by activation of the mineralocorticoid receptor – may contribute to the abnormal sodium retention evident in cirrhosis. The aim was to elucidate the role of glucocorticoids in sodium retention in decompensated cirrhotic patients. Methods. A randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover study was performed in nine patients with alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. A washout interval of 14 days separated the two periods. After a basal period of 36 h, dexamethasone (0.5 mg every 6 h) or placebo was given for two days. Urine was collected for 12 h periods, and the concentrations of sodium, potassium, creatinine, cortisol and cortisol metabolites were determined. Blood samples for hemoglobin, glucose, sodium, potassium, creatinine, aldosterone and cortisol were obtained daily. Results. Dexamethasone treatment decreased S-cortisol 92.3% (82.9–93.4%) (median and range) compared with that in the basal period. Natriuresis (dexamethasone – placebo) increased 55.1 (−26.4–168.7) mmol/day (median and range). No statistically significant differences (dexamethasone – placebo) were found in changes in body weight (0.00 (−0.45–2.20) kg/day), diuresis (0.56 (−0.35–1.43) L/day) or mean arterial pressure (8.33 (−16.0–41.3) mmHg) (median and range) in reference to the preceding 24 h basal period. Conclusion. These results indicate that endogenous glucocorticoids contribute to the sodium retention in patients with alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver.
Performance of Mergers and Acquisitions in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Comparative Perspective

This study provides new evidence on the nature of value creation in M&A activity based on a sample of giant pharmaceutical M&As and independent non‐M&A rival firms. Relying on multiple indicators of performance, their post‐M&A performance was compared with their pre‐M&A performance as well as with the performance of other major pharmaceutical firms that have not been involved in M&A activity. Based on three measures of operating M&A performance, it has been noted in general that no value creation was realized in the sample M&As in terms of research productivity, return on investment, and profit margin. The sample M&As had lower research productivity than that of both pre‐M&A and independent non‐M&Arival firms. In a similar vein, with regard to return on investment, M&As were not better than their pre‐M&A firms, but performed relatively better than their non‐M&A rivals. As far as the profit margin is concerned, the sample M&As, however, appeared to have better performance than pre‐M&Afirms and almost on par with the non‐M&A rivals.
The Effects of Horizontal Merger Operating Efficiencies on Rivals, Customers, and Suppliers

We study how operating efficiencies in horizontal mergers affect market reactions of merging firms' rivals, customers, and suppliers. We measure operating efficiency gains using projections disclosed by merging firms' insiders. Higher efficiency gains are associated with lower announcement returns to merging firms' rivals (due to increased equilibrium output of merging firms), higher returns to their customers (due to lower equilibrium price of merging firms' output), and higher returns to their suppliers (due to the merged firm's higher equilibrium demand for inputs). Our results suggest that the pass-through of efficiency gains along merging firms' supply chains is as important as the effects of post-merger changes in market power.
Empowerment for healthy nutrition in German communities: a study framework

Empowerment is seen as a key strategy for sustainable health promotion efforts. However, there is only limited research on how to link the empowerment approach to the promotion of healthy eating, which is a major current public health issue. The article presents the development of a study framework for implementing and evaluating an empowerment intervention for healthy nutrition. This framework was created for a community intervention study meaning to involve elderly citizens in Bavaria, Germany. The study protocol was developed in an iterative process basing on (i) literature reviews on the topics empowerment in relation to healthy nutrition and mixed-methods evaluation, (ii) workshops with empowerment and public health experts and (iii) consultations with local community representatives. Through these measures we identified good practice criteria as well as specific challenges of integrating empowerment and healthy nutrition, e.g. engaging people in healthy nutrition, reconciling participants' nutrition preferences with public health nutrition priorities and evaluating bottom-up activities in the community. Consequences for the study design were deducted from the literature and the consultations, e.g. practical recommendations as to how power could be gradually assigned to group members. A qualitative mixed-method evaluation design was chosen to capture emergent empowerment processes. The study framework presented here is the first on empowerment and nutrition to provide explicit guidance on how empowerment may be applied to healthy nutrition and implemented and evaluated in the community context.
Sex Differences in Perception of Temporal Order

On duration judgments lasting seconds to minutes, which are thought to be cognitively mediated, women typically perceive time intervals as longer than men do. On a perceptual level in the milliseconds range, few reports indicate higher acuity of temporal processing in men than in women. In this study, sex differences in the perception of temporal order of two acoustic stimuli were identified in neuralogically healthy subjects, as well as in brain-injured patients with lesions in either the left or the right hemisphere. Women needed longer interstimulus intervals than men before they were able to indicate the correct temporal order of two clicks. Neurobiological evidence and findings on cognitive strategies are discussed to explain the apparent psychophysical sex differences.
A Study of a Social Content Model for Sustainable Development in the Fast Fashion Industry

Abstract Due to an increase in clothes consumption and a decrease in the trend cycle, middle-class consumers generally prefer clothes that are cheap and trendy. The share of global SPA (Specialty store retailer of Private label Apparel) brands in the world fashion market is steadily expanding. However, SPA clothes emphasize trends, resulting in disposal after a season regardless of the quality. Today, the growth of fashion waste raises serious environmental concerns. This study develops sustainable social content for fast fashion. The fast fashion industry has not yet made suitable efforts to achieve sustainability, even though serious environmental pollution is produced by fast fashion. This study investigates the possibility that fashion social content can focus on environmentally friendly products, customer service, fair employment opportunities, fair allocation of profits, diversity of quality and design, and ecosystem promotion. The study provides data to execute a new marketing strategy for sustainable development of global a SPA brand. The qualitative research of the present study was conducted via one-on-one in-depth interviews. The subjects of the qualitative research were individuals who had extensive knowledge about the subject of this research and were employed in the fast fashion and ethical fashion industries. After the qualitative interviews, 200 students were surveyed, and 166 were chosen as research subjects. The results are as follows. First, five sub-themes, including fair-trade storytelling, independent designers, an eco-friendly identity, understanding differences in reform and redesign, and changes in consumer perception, are investigated through in-depth interviews. Second, based on a consumer survey about the intent to participate in different programs, such as 1:1 sponsorship, eco-friendly design sourcing, a reform style contest, redesign consulting, and an eco-fashion gallery, eco-friendly design sourcing programs have the highest intent to participate of all the studied sustainable social programs. The present study is a timely investigation because there has been an increase in the social awareness of benefit sharing. Moreover, consumer perception of the environment is on the rise in South Korea. This study is a pioneer in applying social sustainability, which has until now been used in the fields of environmental, economic, and social research, to fashion social content. The implications for fast fashion firms that care about the ecological consumers are discussed, as are opportunities for further research.
User Perspectives on Location Efficient Mortgages & Car Sharing

A burgeoning population seeking relatively affordable housing is placing high demands on outlying, auto-dependent residential markets. Simultaneously, public policies addressing housing, transportation, and land use aim to increase homeownership, decrease drive-alone travel, and harness outlying development. A relatively new mortgage lending procedure aims to address each of these public policy aims synergistically by allowing low-and moderate-income households the opportunity to purchase homes in transit-accessible neighborhoods that would otherwise be unobtainable because of cost. The goal of this research is to evaluate this initiative, as well as position it within the broader goals of smart growth, describe its application, and comment on its prospects. This report constitutes a primer of the current state of knowledge about these unique loan programs.
Semantic image understanding : from pixel to word

The aim of semantic image understanding is to reveal the semantic meaning behind the image pixel. This thesis investigates problems related to semantic image understanding, and have made the following contributions. Our first contribution is to propose the usage of histogram matching in Multiple Kernel Learning. We treat the two-dimensional kernel matrix as an image and transfer the histogram matching algorithm in image processing to kernel matrix. Experiments on various computer vision and machine learning datasets have shown that our method can always boost the performance of state of the art MKL methods. Our second contribution is to advocate the segment-then-recognize strategy in pixel-level semantic image understanding. We have developed a new framework which tries to integrate semantic segmentation with low-level segmentation for proposing object consistent regions. We have also developed a novel method trying to integrate semantic segmentation with interactive segmentation. We found this segment-then-recognize strategy also works well on medical image data, where we designed a novel polar space random field model for proposing gland-like regions. In the realm of image-level semantic image understanding, our contribution is a novel way to utilize the random forest. Most of the previous works utilizing random forest store the posterior probabilities at each leaf node, and each random tree in the random forest is considered to be independent from each other. In contrast, we store the training samples instead of the posterior probabilities at each leaf node. We consider the random forest as a whole and propose the concept of semantic nearest neighbor and semantic similarity measure. Based on these two concepts, we devise novel methods for image annotation and image retrieval tasks.
High Growth Young Firms: Contribution to Job, Output and Productivity Growth

Recent research shows that the job creating prowess of small firms in the U.S. is better attributed to startups and young firms that are small. But most startups and young firms either fail or don’t create jobs. A small proportion of young firms grow rapidly and they account for the long lasting contribution of startups to job growth. High growth firms are not well understood in terms of either theory or evidence. Although the evidence of their role in job creation is mounting, little is known about their life cycle dynamics, or their contribution to other key outcomes such as real output growth and productivity. In this paper, we enhance the Longitudinal Business Database with gross output (real revenue) measures. We find that the patterns for high output growth firms largely mimic those for high employment growth firms. High growth output firms are disproportionately young and make disproportionate contributions to output and productivity growth. The share of activity accounted for by high growth output and employment firms varies substantially across industries – in the post 2000 period the share of activity accounted for by high growth firms is significantly higher in the High Tech and Energy related industries. A firm in a small business intensive industry is less likely to be a high output growth firm but small business intensive industries don’t have significantly smaller shares of either employment or output activity accounted for by high growth firms.
HOMOTOPY COLIMITS VIA THE BAR CONSTRUCTION

The purpose of this expository note is to give explicit proofs for some well-known results on homotopy colimits. As described in Shulman’s excellent paper [Shu06], we may think of homotopy colimits in two distinct ways: “globally” as left derived functors of the colimit, and “locally” by taking cofibrant replacement of each level of the diagram, and then applying a bar construction (the Bousfield-Kan formula). Our focus here will be on this second approach, and in particular the situations where it is unnecessary to make the objects cofibrant.
Protein-kinase-C-mediated β-catenin phosphorylation negatively regulates the Wnt/β-catenin pathway

Normally, the Wnt/β-catenin pathway controls developmental processes and homeostasis, but abnormal activation of this pathway is a frequent event during the development of cancer. The key mechanism in regulation of the Wnt/β-catenin pathway is the amino-terminal phosphorylation of β-catenin, marking it for proteasomal degradation. Here we present small-molecule-based identification of protein kinase C (PKC)-mediated β-catenin phosphorylation as a novel mechanism regulating the Wnt/β-catenin pathway. We used a cell-based chemical screen to identify A23187, which inhibits the Wnt/β-catenin pathway. PKC was activated by A23187 treatment and subsequently phosphorylated N-terminal serine (Ser) residues of β-catenin, which promoted β-catenin degradation. Moreover, the depletion of PKCα inhibited the phosphorylation and degradation of β-catenin. Therefore, our findings suggest that the PKC pathway negatively regulates the β-catenin level outside of the Wnt/β-catenin pathway.
Assessing Marketing in Small and Medium‐sized Enterprises

Reports the findings of a study of marketing practice in five furniture manufacturing firms in the north‐east region of the Irish Republic. The research uses six models developed by Carson and reveals that the quality of marketing within the firms can be differentiated through the application of the models. This study supports the application of the models as a means of assessing marketing in small and medium‐sized enterprises, but the findings suggest that the models should be refined in relation to strategy, long‐term planning and the firm′s description of its environment. The research proposes a new set of criteria to be used for deciding the classification “sophisticated marketing”. Whereas the Carson research was longitudinal, this study was synchronic. Suggests that the models could be of value to those working with small and medium‐sized firms, including consultants and lending agencies, many of whom may be consulted at a critical period for a firm when there would not be time for a longitudinal study.
Fibrinolytic activity in hemiplegic patients.

The fibrinolytic activity after venous occlusion of the arms and the legs for 20 min has been studied in 19 patients with hemiplegia. The patients were divided into three groups according to degree of mobilization. In normals the fibrinolytic activity induced by venous occlusion is markedly higher (4 to 6 times) in the arms than in the legs. A marked fibrinolytic activity developed after venous occlusion of the arms in all but one of the patients. In contrast with normals, the patients confined to bed had almost the same fibrinolytic activity in the legs as in the arms, while in patients who were partly mobilized the activity of the legs, compared with that of the arms, decreased with increasing degree of mobilization. No difference was found between paralysed and non-paralysed arms and legs. The lower local fibrinolytic activity after venous occlusion of the legs, compared with that of the arms in normals, may therefore be due to emptying of the activator from the vessel wall, as a consequence of the habitually vertical position of human beings, a position favouring venous stasis.