Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cooperation resources, absorptive capacity and firm-level innovation

This thesis addresses how firms learn to innovate by using external information and knowledge in the face of limited absorptive capacity. Innovation is an interactive process that requires firms to reach beyond their boundary in search of external knowledge. However, very little is known about this process in developing countries. Using data from a developing country, Nigeria, I provide fresh evidence to the effect that interactive learning generally helps firm-level innovation. However, the positive relationship is contingent upon a firm's current level of innovativeness. As firms become more innovative, it seems less useful for them to rely on a broad spectrum of external sources. Going beyond the limits of the empirical analyses, a new agent based model (ABM) is developed to shed more light on the relationship between interactive learning, absorptive capacity and innovation. Following the notion that networks are a basic infrastructure for knowledge diffusion, the ABM analyses the role of absorptive capacity in the evolution and benefits of innovation networks under different knowledge regimes. Social capital is de-emphasised and firms ally purely for knowledge sharing. Absorptive capacity, which is itself influenced by cognitive distance, drives partner selection. Besides eliciting empirically observed network properties, the model simulation offers novel insight on the coevolutionary process between networks, industrial dynamics and absorptive capacity. In the early stages of an industry when knowledge is highly tacit, firms benefit more from centralised network positions; the reverse is the case as the industry becomes more mature. And firms’ absorptive capacity indeed influences the rate and direction of network evolution. Networks emerge or change depending on firms’ partnership decisions, which are shaped by their absorptive capacity and that of the potential partners. I put forward some implications for policy and practice based on the empirical and simulation results.
Association Between the 7‐Day Moving Average for Nutrition and Growth in Very Low Birth Weight Infants

BACKGROUND Very low birth weight (VLBW) infants remain at risk for postnatal growth restriction. Clinicians may have difficulty identifying growth patterns resulting from nutrition interventions, impeding prompt management changes intended to increase growth velocity. This study aimed to quantify the association between growth and nutrition intake through 7-day moving averages (SDMAs). METHODS The first 6 weeks of daily nutrition intake and growth measurements were collected from VLBW infants admitted to a level 4 neonatal intensive care unit (2011-2014). The association between SDMA for energy and macronutrients and subsequent 7-day growth velocities for weight, length, and head circumference were determined using mixed effects linear regression. Analyses were adjusted for fluid intake, infant characteristics, and comorbid conditions. RESULTS Detailed enteral and parenteral caloric provisions were ascertained for 115 infants (n = 4643 patient-days). Each 10-kcal/kg/d increase over 7 days was independently associated with increased weight (1.7 g/kg/d), length (0.4 mm/wk), and head circumference (0.9 mm/wk; P < .001, for weight and head circumference; P = .041 for length). Each 1 g/kg/d macronutrient increase was also associated with increased weight (protein, P = .027; fat and carbohydrates, P < .001), increased length (fat, P = .032), and increased head circumference (fat and carbohydrates, P < .001). CONCLUSIONS The SDMA identifies clinically meaningful associations among total energy, macronutrient dosing, and growth in VLBW infants. Whether SDMA is a clinically useful tool for providing clinicians with prompt feedback to improve growth warrants further attention.
The utility of calcium phosphate cement in cranioplasty following retromastoid craniectomy for cranial neuralgias

Abstract Background. Following retromastoid craniectomy for microvascular decompression of the fifth or seventh cranial nerve, the preferred method and value of cranioplasty remains disputed. Methods. In this study, we report the functional outcome of calcium phosphate cranioplasty following first-time microvascular decompression in 79 consecutive patients who underwent operations over a one-year period. Results. No patient experienced a deep infection, cerebrospinal fluid leak or undue incisional pain at long-term follow-up. Additionally, all patients stated that they were satisfied with the cosmetic outcome. Discussion. Although this technique is unlikely to affect the rates of infection and postoperative pain, we believe that the low rate of CSF leak provides a unique advantage over other currently used methods of closing retromastoid craniectomies.
Access and Quality in Education in Resettlement Schools: The Case Study of Zvivingwi Secondary School in Gutu District, Masvingo Province in Zimbabwe.

In Zimbabwe, the discourse on access and quality in education has been a raging one since the colonial days of bottlenecks and outright discrimination against black Zimbabweans in education. The doors to education were declared open to all at independence in 1980 with the new Zimbabwe government’s enunciated policy of education for all. It is an uncontested fact that strides were made soon after independence to address issues of quality and access in education. However, with the prosecution of the fast track land reform programme the dream for access and quality in education became a nightmare. Whilst trust schools, boarding schools, urban and some rural day schools have a comparative advantage in terms of resources like infrastructure and qualified and relatively motivated human resource, emerging resettlement schools bear the brunt of hastened and impromptu establishment. It is the contention of this paper that resettlement schools like Zvivingwi, established in the last decade, are a facade of the schools envisioned by many Zimbabweans at independence. These schools reel from abject shortage of everything except pupils. It would be recommended that government should show creativity in mobilising resources to intervene, failing which, most of the resettlement schools like Zvivingwi, risk closure as public confidence in them wanes. The researcher made use of a questionnaire and interviewed critical stakeholders at the school like headmaster, teachers, parents, pupils and education officers. School records and other critical documents were also made use of.
E1B 19K Blocks Bax Oligomerization and Tumor Necrosis Factor Alpha-Mediated Apoptosis

ABSTRACT Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α)-mediated death signaling causes the recruitment of monomeric pro- apoptotic Bax into a 500-kDa protein complex. The adenovirus Bcl-2 homologue, E1B 19K, inhibits TNF-α-mediated apoptosis, interacts with Bax, and blocked the formation of the 500-kDa Bax complex. TNF-α and truncated Bid induced Bax-Bax cross-linking, indicative of oligomerization, and E1B 19K expression during infection inhibited this TNF-α-mediated Bax oligomerization. TNF-α signaled conformation changes at the Bax amino and carboxy termini. Exposure of the Bax amino terminus facilitates E1B 19K-Bax binding, which prevented exposure of the carboxy-terminal Bax Bcl-2 homology region 2 epitope. Inhibition of Bax oligomerization by E1B 19K is an activity that bears striking similarity to the means by which bacterial immunity proteins block pore formation by bacterial toxins which have structural homology to Bax.
Characterization of a flat plate antenna for OAM generation in the millimeter frequency band

The use of electromagnetic waves bearing orbital angular momentum in the radio frequency range is a growing subject, as well as the design of antennas enable to produce such waves. The aim of this paper is to present the characterization in an anechoic chamber, of a new type of antenna using a flat plate, designed to generate an electromagnetic wave bearing orbital angular momentum in the millimeter frequency band.
Extreme Returns, Downside Risk, and Optimal Asset Allocation

The issue of asset allocation is important to every investor, but because of common, yet questionable, assumptions, these allocations may be significantly biased. Perhaps the most common investor assumption is normality or lognormality of asset returns. Evidence indicates, however, that return distributions often have fat tails (i.e., are leptokurtic). If so, how far from optimality are these “optimal” allocations?
Relative Income and Subjective Wellbeing: Intra-National and Inter-National Comparisons by Settlement and Country Type

We extend the Easterlin Paradox (EP) literature in two key respects, testing whether inter-national as well as intra-national income comparisons matter for subjective wellbeing, and testing whether these effects differ by settlement-type as well as by country-type. We confirm the intra-national EP predictions (that subjective wellbeing is left unchanged by an equi-proportionate rise in all intra-country incomes) across four developed country settlement types ranging from rural areas to large cities. The EP result also holds for rural areas in transitional countries but not for larger settlement sizes in those countries. For all country-settlement types, we confirm the importance also of inter-national income comparisons in determining people’s subjective wellbeing. Again, however, the effect is less prominent in larger transitional country cities. We also show that once we control for personal characteristics and income-related factors, we cannot reject the presence of a spatial equilibrium in life satisfaction. Our results indicate that each individual government that wishes to raise the life satisfaction of its residents still needs to boost those residents’ incomes in order to raise their subjective wellbeing. However, at least amongst developed countries, this practice results in an international Prisoners Dilemma in which mean life satisfaction stays stable despite rising global incomes.
A Mathematical Study of Non-Newtonian Micropolar Fluid in Arterial Blood Flow Through Composite Stenosis

The unsteady and incompressible flow of non-Newtonian fluid through co mposite stenosis is investigated in the present study. The micropolar fluid is treated as a blood flow model. Mild stenosis and slip velocity are also taken into account. The governing equations are given in cylindrical coordinates system. Analytic solutions o f velocity and volumetric flow flux are developed interms of modified Bessel functions. The expressions for the impedance (flow r esistance) λ, the wall shear stress distribution in the stenotic region Tw and the shearing stress at the stenosis throat Ts are also given. Impact of involved pertinent parameters is sketched and examined by the resistance of impedance and shear stress. The stream lines are also made for different sundry parameters.
Counseling men with prostate cancer: a nomogram for predicting the presence of small, moderately differentiated, confined tumors.

PURPOSE Men diagnosed with clinically localized prostate cancer have a number of treatment options available, including watchful waiting, radical prostatectomy and radiation therapy. With the widespread use of serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) testing, prostate cancers are being diagnosed earlier in their natural history, with many tumors being small and of little health risk to the patient, at least in the short term. To better counsel men diagnosed with prostate cancer, we developed a statistical model that accurately predicts the presence of small moderately differentiated, confined cancer based on clinical variables (serum PSA, clinical stage, prostate biopsy Gleason grade and ultrasound volume) and variables derived from the analysis of systematic biopsies. MATERIALS AND METHODS The analysis included 409 patients diagnosed by systematic needle biopsy with clinical stages T1c or T2a N0 or NX and M0 or MX prostate cancer who were treated solely with radical prostatectomy at 1 of 2 institutions. Additional biopsy features included number and percentage of biopsy cores involved with cancer and high grade cancer, in addition to total length of biopsy cores involved. Indolent cancer was defined as pathologically organ confined cancer 0.5 cc or less in volume and without poorly differentiated elements. Logistic regression was used to construct several prediction models and the resulting nomograms. RESULTS Overall 80 (20%) of the patients had indolent cancer. The nomogram predicted the presence of an indolent cancer with discrimination (area under the receiver operating characteristics curves) for various models ranging from 0.64 to 0.79. Calibration of the models appeared good. CONCLUSIONS Nomograms incorporating pretreatment variables (clinical stage, Gleason grade, PSA and the amount of cancer in a systematic biopsy specimen) can predict the probability that a man with prostate cancer has an indolent tumor. These nomograms have good discriminatory ability and calibration, and may benefit the patient and clinician when the various treatment options for prostate cancer are being considered.
The economics of anaerobic digester operation on a Minnesota dairy farm

Anaerobic digesters for livestock operations are receiving attention for energy production and odor control. A farm-based digester went into operation in September 1999, on an 800-cow dairy farm in Minnesota. The goals of this paper are to analyze the contribution that a digester system can make to dairy farm profitability, and to demonstrate the impact of government and utility subsidies on profitability. Results indicate that the current selling price of electricity is not sufficient to justify building an anaerobic digester in most cases unless there is a subsidy or significant nonenergy market benefits. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.
Targeting 4-1BB Costimulation to the Tumor Stroma with Bispecific Aptamer Conjugates Enhances the Therapeutic Index of Tumor Immunotherapy

Schrand and colleagues report the efficacy in five murine tumor models of an immunotherapeutic approach whereby systemic administration of tumor stroma-targeted 4-1BB aptamer conjugates, which target disseminated tumor lesions, elicits potent antitumor immunity with minimal dose-limiting toxicity. Despite the recent successes of using immune modulatory Abs in patients with cancer, autoimmune pathologies resulting from the activation of self-reactive T cells preclude the dose escalations necessary to fully exploit their therapeutic potential. To reduce the observed and expected toxicities associated with immune modulation, here we describe a clinically feasible and broadly applicable approach to limit immune costimulation to the disseminated tumor lesions of the patient, whereby an agonistic 4-1BB oligonucleotide aptamer is targeted to the tumor stroma by conjugation to an aptamer that binds to a broadly expressed stromal product, VEGF. This approach was predicated on the premise that by targeting the costimulatory ligands to products secreted into the tumor stroma, the T cells will be costimulated before their engagement of the MHC–peptide complex on the tumor cell, thereby obviating the need to target the costimulatory ligands to noninternalizing cell surface products expressed on the tumor cells. Underscoring the potency of stroma-targeted costimulation and the broad spectrum of tumors secreting VEGF, in preclinical murine tumor models, systemic administration of the VEGF-targeted 4-1BB aptamer conjugates engendered potent antitumor immunity against multiple unrelated tumors in subcutaneous, postsurgical lung metastasis, methylcholantrene-induced fibrosarcoma, and oncogene-induced autochthonous glioma models, and exhibited a superior therapeutic index compared with nontargeted administration of an agonistic 4-1BB Ab or 4-1BB aptamer. Cancer Immunol Res; 2(9); 867–77. ©2014 AACR.
The Bail System: An Economic Approach

WIDESPREAD dissatisfaction with the current state of criminal justice in the U.S. has revived interest in the long-standing problem of determining what to do with a person charged with a crime between the time of his arrest and trial. ' Should the accused be released or detained during this time interval? What factors are relevant to this decision? What requirements, if any, should be imposed on the accused as a condition of his release? The fundamental issue these questions raise is the difficulty of reconciling the defendant's rights to freedom before his guilt has been formally adjudicated with the community's interest in protecting itself from possible future harm.2 In practice, most societies try to resolve this conflict by means of a bail system that establishes rules and procedures to guide decisions on whether or not to release a defendant. These rules may specify which classes of defendants are eligible for release, and require an eligible defendant to make a monetary payment to the court, pledge an asset that will be forfeited if he does not appear for trial, or have a third party assume responsibility for his presence at trial.
Anxiety in Functional Pain Disorders

Aff ective processes can interact with nociception and pain at a variety of levels—pain generation, pain modulation, and pain response. Th ese relationships are found with pain regardless of its source, but there has been a special focus on the role of aff ective processes in functional pain disorders. Th is emphasis is due not only to a lack of good peripheral biological models for generation of symptoms in these disorders but also to empirical fi ndings of increased comorbidity of functional syndromes with psychiatric disorders such as anxiety and depression. Anxiety is the negative aff ect most often identifi ed as being linked with functional disorders, and this chapter will review the theory and evidence regarding the role of anxiety in the development, persistence, and treatment of functional syndromes. How we approach such issues as the role of anxiety in functional pain disorders has shifted considerably with the development of aff ective neuroscience as a predominant paradigm for studying emotion. It is important to recognize that negative aff ect can be studied from multiple Anxiety in Functional Pain Disorders
Detecting an abrupt change of finite duration

This paper addresses the detection of a suddenly arriving signal of finite duration. In contrast to the traditional abrupt change detection framework where the post-change period is assumed to be infinitely long, the detection of a suddenly arriving short signal should be done before it disappears. Hence, the maximum delay for detection should be upper bounded and the traditional quickest change detection criterion is compromised. The new proposed optimality criterion promotes the maximization of the signal detection probability provided that the detection delay and the false alarm rate are upper bounded. A suboptimal detection algorithm based on a window limited cumulative sum test with a variable threshold is offered. The proposed method is analyzed theoretically and by simulation in case of Gaussian observations. A finite variable threshold is necessary to optimize the proposed algorithm which outperforms the conventional CUSUM test. It is shown that the resulting algorithm coincides with the finite moving average one.
Expression of Two Succinyl-CoA Synthetases with Different Nucleotide Specificities in Mammalian Tissues*

For nearly 50 years, succinyl-CoA synthetase in animals was thought to be specific for guanine nucleotides. Recently, we purified and characterized both an ADP-forming succinyl-CoA synthetase from pigeon breast muscle and the GDP-forming enzyme from liver (Johnson, J. D., Muhonen, W. W., and Lambeth, D. O. (1998) J. Biol. Chem. 273, 27573–27579). Using the sequences of the pigeon enzymes as queries in BLAST searches, we obtained genetic evidence that both enzymes are expressed in a wide range of animal species (Johnson, J. D., Mehus, J. G., Tews, K., Milavetz, B. I., and Lambeth, D. O. (1998) J. Biol. Chem. 273, 27580–27586). Here we extend those observations by presenting data from Western and Northern blots and enzymatic assays showing that both proteins are widely expressed in mammals with the relative amounts varying from tissue to tissue. We suggest that both succinyl-CoA synthetases catalyze the reverse reaction in the citric acid cycle in which the ADP-forming enzyme augments ATP production, whereas the GDP-forming enzyme supports GTP-dependent anabolic processes. Widely accepted shuttle mechanisms are invoked to explain how transport of P-enolpyruvate across mitochondrial membranes can transfer high energy phosphate between the cytosol and mitochondrial matrix.
Extreme Correlation of Stock and Bond Futures Markets: International Evidence

Using daily stock and bond futures data of three developed markets (the U.S., the UK and Germany), this study explores time-varying extreme correlation of stock-bond futures markets. There is evidence of positive extreme correlation between stock and bond futures markets in the U.S. and the UK when both markets are extremely bullish or bearish. By contrast, German stock-bond futures extreme correlation is negative, which suggests most diversification potentials of German bond futures market when German stock index futures market plunges. Macroeconomic news, the business cycle and the stock market uncertainty all significantly affect the median stock-bond futures correlation. By contrast, only the stock market uncertainty (perhaps as a measure of investor sentiment) still significantly affects the extreme stock-bond futures correlation, when the stock market is extremely bearish.
Influence of fungal elicitation on glycyrrhizin production in transformed cell cultures of Abrus precatorius Linn

Background: Glycyrrhizin, obtained from Abrus precatorius (Indian liquorice), is a phytoconstituent of importance for pharmaceutical and food industries. Materials and Methods: High producing and fast growing cell lines of A. precatorius were developed by transformation with Agrobacterium tumefaciens for glycyrrhizin production. Its maximum transformation efficiency of 85% was obtained by infecting leaves with A. tumefaciens MTCC-431 supplemented with 50 μM acetosyringone. Thorough culture growth kinetics with sugar consumption profiles was established. Results: A twofold increase in glycyrrhizin productivity was obtained in transformed A. precatorius cell suspension cultures over the untransformed cultures. The fungal elicitors prepared from Aspergillus niger and Rhizopus stolonifer were tested at different concentrations to enhance glycyrrhizin production in transformed cell suspension cultures of A. precatorius. Maximum enhancement of 4.9- and 3.8-fold in glycyrrhizin contents, were obtained with A. niger (7.5% v/v) and R. stolonifer (5.0% v/v), respectively, on the 5th day after elicitor treatment. Conclusion: This study indicates the prospective of the amalgamation of elicitation methodology with transformed cell cultures for the large-scale production of glycyrrhizin.
Crisis Resistance of Tourist Demand

This article addresses tourist demand during the persisting economic downturn between 2008 and 2013, within the context of expenditures on other consumer goods, taking into account different types of vacations and focusing on the “why” of the development of this demand over time. The research approach is a micro-analysis of data that are partly longitudinal and partly cross-sectional. The findings show that holidays, in particular the main summer holiday, can be positioned closer to being a necessary good than to being a luxury good, at least during an economic downturn. Many vacationers are prepared to sacrifice expenditures on a variety of products just so as to keep on going on holiday. The major explanation is the high essentiality of vacations for a better quality of life. The influence of income and personal economic situation on tourist demand at the micro-level during an economic downturn is relatively minor or nonexistent.