Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Activity of nAChRs containing α9 subunits modulates synapse stabilization via bidirectional signaling programs

Although the synaptogenic program for cholinergic synapses of the neuromuscular junction is well known, little is known of the identity or dynamic expression patterns of proteins involved in non‐neuromuscular nicotinic synapse development. We have previously demonstrated abnormal presynaptic terminal morphology following loss of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) α9 subunit expression in adult cochleae. However, the molecular mechanisms underlying these changes have remained obscure. To better understand synapse formation and the role of cholinergic activity in the synaptogenesis of the inner ear, we exploit the nAChR α9 subunit null mouse. In this mouse, functional acetylcholine (ACh) neurotransmission to the hair cells is completely silenced. Results demonstrate a premature, effusive innervation to the synaptic pole of the outer hair cells in α9 null mice coinciding with delayed expression of cell adhesion proteins during the period of effusive contact. Collapse of the ectopic innervation coincides with an age‐related hyperexpression pattern in the null mice. In addition, we document changes in expression of presynaptic vesicle recycling/trafficking machinery in the α9 null mice that suggests a bidirectional information flow between the target of the neural innervation (the hair cells) and the presynaptic terminal that is modified by hair cell nAChR activity. Loss of nAChR activity may alter transcriptional activity, as CREB binding protein expression is decreased coincident with the increased expression of N‐Cadherin in the adult α9 null mice. Finally, by using mice expressing the nondesensitizing α9 L9′T point mutant nAChR subunit, we show that increased nAChR activity drives synaptic hyperinnervation. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol, 2009
Mr. Harrington, self-rated health and the canadian chicken.

The simplest way to find out how healthy people are is to ask them. The question: "Would you rate your health as excellent, very good, good, fair or poor? " is quick and easy (and cheap) to administer, and correlates well with more objective indicators of health (such as subsequent death). But there are significant cross-national differences in response patterns. Canadians are much less likely than Americans to provide extreme responses - excellent or poor. International comparisons yield more striking examples. Americans rate their health among the highest in the OECD, despite mortality measures that are among the worst. The Japanese, with the world's best mortality measures, rate their health near the bottom. Can self-reports be standardized for these cultural effects?
The Influence of the Shariah Supervision Board on Corporate Social Responsibility Disclosure by Islamic Banks of Gulf Co-Operation Council Countries

This paper examines empirically the influence of the Shariah supervisory board (SSB) and its characteristics on the level of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure in a sample of 53 Islamic banks operating in Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries for the year 2008 based on a disclosure index from the Islamic perspective. Using content analysis, the descriptive statistics show that there is an increase in CSR information disclosed in the annual reports of Islamic banks. In addition, using multiple regression analysis and after accounting for bank size, financial performance and economic performance, the findings indicate that the combination of SSB attributes has a significant positive influence on CSR disclosure. This means that the characteristics of SSB are important factors in determining the level of CSR disclosure.Keywords: Islamic Banks, Shariah Supervision Board, Corporate Social Responsibility, DisclosureJEL Classification: G21, M14, M41, Z12
FRAMEWORK OF PERFORMANCE INDICATORS FOR MANAGING ROAD INFRASTRUCTURE AND PAVEMENTS

Performance measures are the basic input to a variety of decision processes and activities in infrastructure management. These include charting progress toward achieving operational, sectoral, and policy objectives; assessing whether users are receiving services that they want at the level of quality that they are willing to pay for; and comparing competing or alternative service producers to determine the most efficient provision arrangement for infrastructure services. A framework is presented for defining consistent measures of infrastructure performance, particularly for roads and pavements. The framework identifies relevant indicators and the linkages between them. Because there are changes over time in information needs and in the types of agencies using performance indicators as well as in their relationships to one another, a framework is needed to maintain consistency in the information bases used and to update the indicators to ensure relevance. Performance is measured at five major levels: (a) service quality and reliability from a user's point of view; (b) network size and condition from a facility's point of view; (c) operational efficiency and productivity from a service provider's perspective; (d) sectoral performance measures such as investment, pricing, and provision arrangements; and (e) institutional performance indicators such as the effectiveness of the expenditure program, enforcement of vehicle weights and dimensions, and so forth. These are applied to the management of pavements with a listing of all the road network and user indicators but defining the measures and data quality only for the pavement component.
Development strategy of rail freight transportation under financial crisis

The American subprime mortgage crisis began to appear in 2007. As the crisis broke out, China has been affected. Chinese Railway has been among the industries to be influenced most by the spreading subprime mortgage crisis. Facing the financial crisis, Chinese government released expanding domestic demand policy which put strengthening the railway construction in the first place. Thus, railway transportation will be faced up to opportunities and challenges. Under the circumstances, the paper analyzes the present situation of railway freight transport. The SWOT analysis has been adopted to analyze the developing trend of the railway freight transport. Based on the result, freight transport development strategy has been made about railway line capacity, freight facilities, freight operating layout, freight process optimization and freight transport dispatching. A case study of Chengdu Railway Bureau has been analyzed.
The Nociceptor Ion Channel TRPA1 Is Potentiated and Inactivated by Permeating Calcium Ions*

The transient receptor potential A1 (TRPA1) channel is the molecular target for environmental irritants and pungent chemicals, such as cinnamaldehyde and mustard oil. Extracellular Ca2+ is a key regulator of TRPA1 activity, both potentiating and subsequently inactivating it. In this report, we provide evidence that the effect of extracellular Ca2+ on these processes is indirect and can be entirely attributed to entry through TRPA1 and subsequent elevation of intracellular calcium. Specifically, we found that in a pore mutant of TRPA1, D918A, in which Ca2+ permeability was greatly reduced, extracellular Ca2+ produced neither potentiation nor inactivation. Both processes were restored by reducing intracellular Ca2+ buffering, which allowed intracellular Ca2+ levels to become elevated upon entry through D918A channels. Application of Ca2+ to the cytosolic face of excised patches was sufficient to produce both potentiation and inactivation of TRPA1 channels. Moreover, in whole cell recordings, elevation of intracellular Ca2+ by UV uncaging of 1-(4,5-dimethoxy-2-nitrophenyl)-EDTA-potentiated TRPA1 currents. In addition, our data show that potentiation and inactivation are independent processes. TRPA1 currents could be inactivated by Mg2+, Ba2+, and Ca2+ but potentiated only by Ba2+ and Ca2+. Saturating activation by cinnamaldehyde or mustard oil occluded potentiation but did not interfere with inactivation. Last, neither process was affected by mutation of a putative intracellular Ca2+-binding EF-hand motif. In conclusion, we have further clarified the mechanisms of potentiation and inactivation of TRPA1 using the D918A pore mutant, an important tool for investigating the contribution of Ca2+ influx through TRPA1 to nociceptive signaling.
Lower mortality in patients with the DD genotype of the angiotensin-converting enzyme gene after acute myocardial infarction

Objective — The angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) gene insertion/deletion (I/D) polymorphism has been associated with different serum ACE concentrations and cardiac ACE activity.We assessed whether the ACE gene I/D polymorphism influenced cardiac mortality in Japanese patients with acute myocardial infarction. Methods and results — The ACE gene I/D polymorphism was determined in 441 consecutive patients with a first myocardial infarction.There were 69 patients (16%) with the DD genotype, 194 patients (44%) with the ID genotype, and 178 patients (40%) with the II genotype. During a mean follow-up of 9.4 months, there were 49 cardiac deaths (DD, n = 4; ID, n = 26; II, n = 19). The DD genotype was significantly associated with a lower mortality than the other genotypes (p = 0.0363) by Cox regression analysis adjusted for age, sex, site of myocardial infarction, Killip functional class, reperfusion therapy during acute phase, ACE inhibitor use, and beta-blocker use. Conclusions — In a selected cohort of Japanese patients, the DD genotype was associated with a significantly lower cardiac mortality after a first myocardial infarction.
Deep Clustering-Based Beamforming for Separation with Unknown Number of Sources

This paper extends a deep clustering algorithm for use with time-frequency masking-based beamforming and perform separation with an unknown number of sources. Deep clustering is a recently proposed single-channel source separation al-gorithm, which projects inputs into the embedding space and performs clustering in the embedding domain. In deep clustering, bi-directional long short-term memory (BLSTM) recurrent neural networks are trained to make embedding vectors orthogonal for different speakers and concurrent for the same speaker. Then, by clustering the embedding vectors at test time, we can estimate time-frequency masks for separation. In this paper, we extend the deep clustering algorithm to a multiple microphone setup and incorporate deep clustering-based time-frequency mask estimation into masking-based beamforming, which has been shown to be more effective than masking for automatic speech recognition. Moreover, we perform source counting by computing the rank of the covariance matrix of the embedding vectors. With our proposed approach, we can perform masking-based beamforming in a multiple-speaker case without knowing the number of speakers. Experimental re-sults show that our proposed deep clustering-based beamformer achieves comparable source separation performance to that obtained with a complex Gaussian mixture model-based beam-former, which requires the number of sources in advance for mask estimation.
Client Relationship Marketing Practices: An Exploratory Study of the Legal Industry

This article aims to identify and examine the responsibilities of the marketing specialists and legal practitioners in the legal industry at different stages of the client relationship development process. A conceptual framework is proposed to analyse the single case study of this research. The relationship marketing practices of a global law firm were examined through fifteen in-depth semi-structured interviews with key personnel. Ten client relationship marketing practices were identified. Whereas organising and attending social events, managing the communications or interactions process, managing the cross-selling, service recovery, changing the impression, truly understanding clients' businesses and industries and other small little gestures are similar to the findings of Claycomb and Martin (2002), social bonds beyond the professional level, treating every job seriously regardless of the size, and utilising client relationship management software were three practices that emerged from this study. Although the ten practices presented are pivotal in contributing to a successful client relationship, further research is needed to examine the effects of each practice and the quality of the client relationship. This article demonstrates that in order to succeed in the highly competitive marketplace, law firms need to understand not only the potential outcomes of each relationship marketing practice but also how to practice it systematically. A new relationship development process model incorporating the essence of the customer relationship life cycle was developed and its practicality was confirmed by the research findings.
Effects of International Diversity and Product Diversity on the Performance of Multinational Firms

This study examined the relationships among international diversity, product diversity, and firm performance. For a sample of large American industrial multinational enterprises (MNEs), it showed a consistent quadratic relationship between product diversification and MNE performance but minimal performance differences across different measures of international diversity. Analysis of the interactions of international diversity and product diversity indicates a weak effect from increasing internationalization on the performance effect of product diversity.
Impression management in financial reports surrounding CEO turnover

This study focuses on whether new management uses impression management to influence the presentation of performance in the firm’s annual reports surrounding a changeover in CEO. The study considers the use or non-use of graphs for presenting information as well as distortions in the graphs. Overall there is some evidence for impression management, but it is not strong. Thus impression management as implemented through graphs does not appear to be used as widely in New Zealand as in other jurisdictions where it has been studied.
Hospital acquired blood stream infection as an adverse outcome for patients admitted to hospital with other principle diagnosis

Background: Hospital acquired infections (HAI) have emerged as an important public health problem and are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. They affect both developed and resource-poor countries and constitute a significant burden both for the patient and for the health care system. Specific objectives in this study are assessment of HAI rate among patients admitted with other principle diagnosis, to identifying the causative agents of hospital acquired infections and to identify some possible risk factors associated with each type of infection, both health related and non-health related. Patients and Methods: The study was done on selected diagnosis groups during year 2010. The infections were found among 250 patients (43.6% males) have been exposed to episodes of infections. Median age of patients was 56. Data were abstracted from the archived patients’ files in medical record department using the annually infection control log-book prepared by the infection control department. The Data collected were demographic information about the patients (age and sex), clinical condition (diagnosis and the length of hospital stay) and possible risk factors for infection as smoking, diabetes mellitus, hypertension and exposure to invasive devices or exposure to surgical procedures. Results: Liver diseases 22.8%, cardiac diseases 22.8%, Gastro-Intestinal System diseases 20%, urinary system diseases 13.6%, and endocrinal disorder 13.6% Prostate gland diseases 7.2%. Episodes of infections caused by 9 types of organisms divided into 47.2% for blood stream infection and 52.8% for other types. 66% acquired blood stream infection were exposed to central venous line. Conclusion: Most common type of HAIs was blood stream infections. Liver, cardiac diseases and gastro-intestinal diseased patients show more proportion of HAIs while urinary system and prostate disease patients show less proportion of HAIs. Gram negative bacilli were the most common organisms found in our study (60%).
Breeding Technologies in U.S. Meat Goat Production: Who are the Adopters and How Does Adoption Impact Productivity?

Adoption of advanced breeding technologies and management practices (BTMP) in U.S. meat goat production and their impact were examined. Adopters generally had larger-scale operations, used rotational grazing and/or dry lot systems, and sold larger percentages of animals for breeding and show purposes. Farmer demographics and farm variables also influenced adoption. Complementarity of adoption was found—adopters of one BTMP tended to adopt other BTMPs. Measures of productivity and profitability were not affected by adoption. Goat breed, farmer experience, production system used, and specialization influenced productivity, and farm size had the greatest influence on enterprise profitability.
Sexual harassment induces a temporary fitness cost but does not constrain the acquisition of environmental information in fruit flies

Across animals, sexual harassment induces fitness costs for females and males. However, little is known about the cognitive costs involved, i.e. whether it constrains learning processes, which could ultimately affect an individual's fitness. Here we evaluate the acquisition of environmental information in groups of fruit flies challenged with various levels of male sexual harassment. We show that, although high sexual harassment induces a temporary fitness cost for females, all fly groups of both sexes exhibit similar levels of learning. This suggests that, in fruit flies, the fitness benefits of acquiring environmental information are not affected by the fitness costs of sexual harassment, and that selection may favour cognition even in unfavourable social contexts. Our study provides novel insights into the relationship between sexual conflicts and cognition and the evolution of female counterstrategies against male sexual harassment.
Psycho-social dysfunction: perceived and enacted stigma among tuberculosis patients registered under revised national tuberculosis control programme.

OBJECTIVE To examine the perceived and enacted stigma experienced by TB patients and the community. METHODS We interviewed 276 TB patients registered for treatment during January-March 2004 in government health facilities of two Tuberculosis Units of south India. Data on perceived and enacted stigma were collected after two months of starting treatment, using a semi-structured interview schedule. In addition, four Focus Group Discussions were conducted among Directly Observed Treatment (DOT) providers and community members. Narrative summaries were also taken down to collect additional qualitative information. RESULTS Of the 276 patients, 190 (69%) were males. There was no significant difference between the genders in relation to social stigma. Perceived stigma was higher than enacted stigma in both genders and significantly higher among males (Low self esteem p < 0.05), change of behavior of community (p < 0.05), ashamed to cough in front of others (p < 0.05). CONCLUSION Considering the social and emotional impact of the disease, it is essential to adopt support strategies to enhance acceptance and for a successful health programme.
REVERSE LOGISTICS: A REVIEW OF LITERATURE

This paper reviews the practice in reverse logistics through published literature. The objective of this study is to encourage and provide researchers with future research directions in reverse logistics. Since supply chains are designed for forward flow, integrating product recovery into the network design poses a major challenge. An important assignment of top management is to analyse the obstacles of reverse logistics which could be vital to the survival of the industry in the future.
High Occupancy Vehicle Lanes – Worldwide Lessons for European Practitioners

This paper describes how Europe has long provided bus lanes and on-street bus priority measures. High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) programs expand this practice to include private shared-ride vehicles (carpools) and other priority vehicles. There are a few HOV lanes in operation in Europe, and the interest is growing in their potential applicability to congested urban roadways. With over 200 HOV lane projects now in use on streets and highways around the world, there are useful lessons to be learned by those considering the HOV option in the European context. The reasons for project successes and failures are outlined, with particular attention paid to the constraints and operational issues prevalent in the European environment. Critical issues such as enforcement, conversion from general purpose use, design, and underutilization are explored. The documented effectiveness of HOV facilities in influencing mode choice is summarized. Finally, the future of HOV priority within the urban transport system is discussed, touching on high-tech enforcement solutions, HOV priority within tolled facilities, and the integration of HOV initiatives within broader Transportation Demand Management programs.
Board Monitoring and Earnings Management

Following the international effort of strengthening corporate governance, this study investigates the impact of Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendation (ASX 2009) on the credibility of accounting information. By using 138 companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX), this study demonstrates that the independence and activities of sub-committee are negatively associated with earnings management represented by the discretionary accruals. The results of this study provide useful guidance to policy makers, practitioners and academics.
Voluntary Disclosure of Product Information: The Case of E-Book Samples

An important question in markets with asymmetric information is why in practice fewer sellers voluntarily disclose their private information than theory would predict. To better understand this discrepancy, I use data from an online self-publishing platform to examine the empirical relationship between pricing and voluntary disclosure. On this platform, I observe whether authors disclose characteristics of their e-books by offering free samples. In contrast to the prediction of theories of unraveling, I show that for e-books without a posted online rating, indicating that their quality is unknown to the market, offering a sample is associated with a lower price. I also show that for unrated e-books, fewer authors offer a sample while simultaneously setting a higher price than authors of rated e-books. These results can be explained by incorporating into a model a fraction of naive buyers who do not update their beliefs upon observing that a seller does not disclose. This gives low-quality sellers an incentive to conceal their quality by not disclosing and to set high prices to exploit naive buyers.
Correlation Between Morphology, Immunohistochemistry and Molecular Pathology in Hereditary and Sporadic Breast Cancer Cases

Breast cancer still represents a serious health problem and is currently the most frequent malignancy in the female population in developed countries. In Cyprus, there are 300 new cases annually. In the present study, histology, electron microscopy, immunohistochemistry, and Western blot analysis were used to investigate 100 cases of invasive breast carcinoma. In addition, mutation analysis for the BRCA1 gene was carried out in patient DNA from 26 families with multiple cases of breast/ovarian cancers. Of note are the results of molecular biology which show that there are no germline truncating mutations in the BRCA1 gene in these 26 Cypriot breast cancer families. Furthermore, Western blot analysis revealed the presence of multiple BRCA1 bands in homogenates of tumor and normal tissues, and immunoelectron microscopy showed the presence of nuclear staining for BRCA1 antibodies.