Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756. By P. G. M. Dickson. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1967. Pp. xix, 580. $16.00

The author of this work carefully explains that his hero certainly was not a merchant prince or even an important personage. In fact this constitutes Jean Pellet's value for us, since he represents a class of middling rich Atlantic-oriented merchants, an evocation of that which the author labels "the first surge of capitalism. " Cavignac denies that capitalism was visible in the seventeenth century —a bizarre assertion to those of us with some interest in early modern business history. This strange concept is not the author's main interest, however. He presents us with three worthwhile contributions: a sort of manual explaining technical aspects of the kinds of operations in which men like Pellet were engaged; a business history of Jean Pellet; and some comments on the social and legal facets of the Pellet family's Me. The work is sumptuously illustrated and provides us with several interesting transcriptions of parts of the account books and other family and business papers from the voluminous archival materials the author examined. All of these contributions are useful but none of them is really satisfactory. By far the largest portion of the work is taken up with a general study of commerce in eighteenth-century Bordeaux, leading us to wonder whether this portion is supposed to stand on its own merits or is intended merely to provide a background for the proper understanding of Jean Pellet. Many technical sections, for example the one on credit operations, are better treated in works well known to economic historians. The author's style is rather staccato and heavy, reading at times like an outline for a book. But the figure of Jean Pellet is an interesting one, and there is no doubt he does represent an important group. He was a Protestant, highly successful in his Antilles ventures; he dealt in a wide variety of Atlantic imports and exports, and he handled some European trade as well. He also acted as the Spanish agent of the Company of Caracas in Bordeaux, and (later) dabbled successfully in money-lending. He was worth about two million livres toward the end of his career. If I had a graduate student about to embark on work in early modern French commerce I would be glad to recommend this work to him as a guide.
New dermal substitutes

The quality of skin wound healing can be improved by the application of scaffolds as skin replacement materials. Although the clinical requirements for the function of such materials are defined, the translation of these requirements into physical and mechanobiological properties of scaffolds is difficult. Natural as well as constructed biological materials and synthetic substitutes are discussed. Furthermore, new techniques such as electrospinning and solid freeform fabrication as well as new types of materials such as self‐assembling peptides are reviewed with regard to their potential role in the production of skin substitute materials.
Democracy, Legitimacy and Soft Modes of Governance in the EU: The Empirical Turn

Abstract During the past few years, the European Union (EU) has made increasing use of the so‐called soft modes of governance (SMG), modes based on voluntary and non‐sanctioning forms of public action, where state and non‐state actors interact in extensive networks to solve complex social problems. This article deals with the issue of the democratic credentials of soft modes of governance at the EU level. Starting by recognizing that they entail an authoritative allocation of values that have a wide societal reach, the article argues that a careful examination of the democratic legitimacy of these soft modes of governance needs to take into account their diverse nature. By pointing out different theoretical concepts of democracy, the article elaborates an analytical framework based on a series of yardsticks for the assessment of the democratic legitimacy of SMGs in the EU, thus providing a much‐needed conceptual clarification for a research agenda that is ultimately an empirical one.
Unsupervised Segmentation of Nonstationary Data using Triplet Markov Chains

An important issue in statistical image and signal segmentation consists in estimating the hidden variables of interest. For this purpose, various Bayesian estimation algorithms have been developed, particularly in the framework of hidden Markov chains, thanks to their efficient theory that allows one to recover the hidden variables from the observed ones even for large data. However, such models fail to handle nonstationary data in the unsupervised context. In this paper, we show how the recent triplet Markov chains, which are strictly more general models with comparable computational complexity, can be used to overcome this limit through two different ways: (i) in a Bayesian context by considering the switches of the hidden variables regime depending on an additional Markov process; and, (ii) by introducing Dempster-Shafer theory to model the lack of precision of the hidden process prior distributions, which is the origin of data nonstationarity. Furthermore, this study analyzes both approaches in order to determine which one is better-suited for nonstationary data. Experimental results are shown for sampled data and noised images.
An Eclectic Explanation of Shopfloor Control Using Efficiency and Power Theories

The paper identifies four control mechanisms on the shopfloor and explains their determinants. By enriching contingency and transaction cost theories with power notions, several hypotheses are tested in a dataset composed of 329 Spanish firms in the food and electronic industries. Results show that shopfloor control is shaped by efficiency concerns, power asymmetries and interdependences between control modes. In particular, control mechanisms depend on several structural traits of the firm and labour transaction attributes. However, managers’ opportunism also plays an important role through its effect on workers’ opportunism. This fact calls for the internalization of principals’ opportunistic behaviour in efficiency-driven organizational theories. Furthermore, control mechanisms also show specific interdependences through their relations with certain labour transaction attributes and organizational traits. In fact, the level of human capital can at the same time be the outcome and the cause of certain control mechanisms. A relevant by-product is therefore that the level of human capital is not necessarily the main reason — as suggested by transaction cost economics — to internalize a labour transaction within the firm.
Community Ecology Perspectives on the Structural and Functional Evolution of Consumer Electronics

This article describes how biological ecology models are adapted to analyze the dynamic structure and function of a consumer electronic product “community. ” Treating an entire group of interdependent and continually evolving electronic devices as an ecological community provides a basis for more comprehensive analyses of the energy, material, and waste flows associated with household consumption than would be possible using conventional per product approaches. Results show that, similar to a maturing natural community, the average U.S. household electronic product community evolved from a low‐diversity structure dominated by a few products to a highly diverse, evenly distributed community of products between 1990 and 2010. The maturing community of household electronics experienced increased functionality at a community and product level resulting, in part, from introduction of new products, but primarily as a result of increasing ownership of multifunctional products. Multifunctional mobile products are driving increased functionality in a manner similar to a broadly adaptive invasive species, but the community's high functional redundancy, as the result of device convergence, resembles a stable natural community. These results suggest that future strategies to encourage green design, production, and consumption of consumer electronics should focus on minimizing the total number of products owned by maximizing multifunctionality with convergent device design.
Faces of Governance of Production Cooperatives: An Exploratory Study of Ten French Cooperatives

One of the main characteristics of French worker cooperatives is the principle of collective entrepreneurship. The aim of this article is to understand how it is applied, and in particular how the board of directors and the managing director work together. To answer this question, an exploratory study focused on ten French worker cooperatives in 1998 and 1999, during which we conducted interviews with their managing directors. The results show that three forms of collective entrepreneurship can be distinguished and that these forms depend on the context and the management of these worker cooperatives.
Measuring Global Economic Interdependence: A Hierarchical Network Approach

This paper investigates the business cycle co-movement across countries and regions since 1950 as a measure for quantifying the economic interdependence in the ongoing globalisation process. Our methodological approach is based on analysis of a correlation matrix and the networks it contains. Such an approach summarises the interaction and interdependence of all elements, and it represents a more accurate measure of the global interdependence involved in an economic system. Our results show (1) the dynamics of interdependence has been driven more by synchronisation in regional growth patterns than by the synchronisation of the world economy, and (2) world crisis periods dramatically increase the global co-movement in the world economy.
Historical review of lymphomas

Introduction While lymphoma history begins with the description of Hodgkin's disease in 1832, almost all the significant events in the field have occurred in the past 60 years. Lymphoma (together with acute leukaemia) played an essential role in the birth of medical oncology and contributed greatly to our understanding of the malignant transformation. The clinical discipline profited from the explosive growth of immunology after World War II and the clinic, in turn, provided the scientist with many insights. Curiously, Hodgkin's disease, a therapeutic triumph, only reluctantly yielded its pathogenetic secrets, while the much less therapeutically tractable non-Hodgkin's lymphomas readily disclosed a spectrum of detailed pathogenetic mechanisms of malignancy. Except for those with symptomatic advanced disease or the elderly, most patients with Hodgkin's disease are now cured by fastidious irradiation and/or combination chemotherapy, based on an accurate knowledge of disease distribution obtained from sophisticated diagnostic study; the major challenge today is reduction of late lethal second neoplasms and cardiac complications of therapy. A variety of different misadventures in immunoglobulin (Ig) gene assembly, involving oncogene regulators of mitosis, programmed cell death and differentiation, have been defined at the molecular level and probably determine the specific nonHodgkin's lymphoma subtype.
Pensions and Wages: A Test for Equalizing Differences

T HE Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) has provoked considerable debate about the desirability of various retirement plan provisions and the appropriate role of government in regulating the private pension plan contract. Among the issues debated is the question of who presently pays for private retirement benefits, and who should. An answer to at least the first of these questions is provided by the theory of "equalizing differences. " In competitive markets, a firm that provides pension benefits should pay lower wages than one that does not, thereby offering the same equilibrium value of total compensation to all workers of equal productivity. By the same token, firms that offer pension benefits on relatively desirable terms are expected to offer lower wage rates than firms offering pension benefits on very restricted terms. These simple notions imply that (1) workers pay for their own pensions by accepting lower wages, and (2) government regulation of the content of private pension plans may not significantly alter labor costs or the expected lifetime income of workers. From this perspective, contributions to private pension plans serve the exclusive purpose of enabling individuals to reallocate their resources over time according to their diverse tastes, and do not affect total labor compensation. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the empirical validity of the equalizing differences hypothesis. By examining the relationship between wages and pension plans, we also hope to improve our ability to account for wage differentials. Contributions to private retirement plans have grown rapidly in recent years-from 1.7% to nearly 4.0% of private sector wages between 1950 and 1979, and coverage has increased from 22% to more than 45% of all private wage and salary workers. ' Most previous studies of wage determination have ignored fringe benefits, let alone pension plans.2 But if the growth of pension plans continues and the equalizing differences hypothesis is correct, continuing neglect of pension provisions implies an increasing inability to account for wage differentials across firms, industries, occupations, race, sex, and age, or by the same token, an increasing tendency to attribute such differences to the wrong factors. The paper begins by reviewing the properties of competitive equilibriuni in labor markets in which compensation consists of current and deferred wages.3 Building on this foundation, we demonstrate how the annual cost of a pension plan depends on its various provisions, including vesting, early retirement, normal retirement, and benefit formula. With data on the earnings and pension provisions of individual workers in 133 large firms, we find some support for the equalizing differences hypothesis. We also observe that the extent of equalization diminishes with age, suggesting a redistribution of compensation from younger to older workers.
Embedded ties and the acquisition of competitive advantage

Purpose – Drawing on embeddedness theory, the purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive model that explains the incremental innovation process in the supplier‐manufacturer relationship.Design/methodology/approach – Utilizing the partial least squared (PLS) technique, this study examines the incremental innovation process through the theoretical lens of the embeddedness perspective.Findings – The overall picture emerging from this study indicates that establishing an embedded tie between a manufacturer and a primary supplier enables the creation of informal coordination mechanisms, including trust, joint problem‐solving, and commitment. These coordination mechanisms safeguard the transfer of knowledge and lead the partners to joint action. Such joint action provides an interactive forum for developing innovation capabilities that allow firms to enhance their incremental innovation performance.Research limitations/implications – From an academic perspective, this study is the first to examine the .
Visualization viewpoints: beyond geovisualization

The cartographic community realizes that the problems presented by the need to understand complex data can't be solved with maps alone, although they are convinced of their visual strength in complex circumstances. The community, and especially the commission on visualization and virtual environments of the International Cartographic Association, has taken a different approach to mapping. In practice, we should view geovisualization activities in the context of the geoprofessional's working approach. Geodata and software from all types of sources are now linked in geodata infrastructures established on local, national, and international levels. Users solve their problems with services and data available via the infrastructure and no longer need to have all data and software locally available. We should keep reaching to other technology-oriented disciplines, but we need to strive to make geovisualization knowledge common in application fields
CCR5 Expression Levels Influence NFAT Translocation, IL-2 Production, and Subsequent Signaling Events during T Lymphocyte Activation1

Ligands of CCR5, the major coreceptor of HIV-1, costimulate T lymphocyte activation. However, the full impact of CCR5 expression on T cell responses remains unknown. Here, we show that compared with CCR5+/+, T cells from CCR5−/− mice secrete lower amounts of IL-2, and a similar phenotype is observed in humans who lack CCR5 expression (CCR5-Δ32/Δ32 homozygotes) as well as after Ab-mediated blockade of CCR5 in human T cells genetically intact for CCR5 expression. Conversely, overexpression of CCR5 in human T cells results in enhanced IL-2 production. CCR5 surface levels correlate positively with IL-2 protein and mRNA abundance, suggesting that CCR5 affects IL-2 gene regulation. Signaling via CCR5 resulted in NFAT transactivation in T cells that was blocked by Abs against CCR5 agonists, suggesting a link between CCR5 and downstream pathways that influence IL-2 expression. Furthermore, murine T cells lacking CCR5 had reduced levels of intranuclear NFAT following activation. Accordingly, CCR5 expression also promoted IL-2-dependent events, including CD25 expression, STAT5 phosphorylation, and T cell proliferation. We therefore suggest that by influencing a NFAT-mediated pathway that regulates IL-2 production and IL-2-dependent events, CCR5 may play a critical role in T cell responses. In accord with our prior inferences from genetic-epidemiologic studies, such CCR5-dependent responses might constitute a viral entry-independent mechanism by which CCR5 may influence HIV-AIDS pathogenesis.
When organizational relocation means family relocation: An emerging issue for strategic human resource management

Relocations of entire organizational units raise special family adjustment issues. This article reports on the reactions of employees and their families to such a relocation. Employees' adjustment was more strongly related to nonwork and family impacts of the move than to factors in the workplace. Adjustment was more difficult for families inexperienced in relocation, despite extensive company assistance programs.
Actin accumulation at sites of bacterial adhesion to tissue culture cells: basis of a new diagnostic test for enteropathogenic and enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli

Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) and enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) adhere to the intestinal mucosa and produce an attaching and effacing (AE) lesion in the brush border microvillous membrane; the AE lesion is characterized by localized destruction of microvilli and intimate attachment of bacteria to the apical enterocyte membrane. A similar lesion is seen when bacteria adhere in vitro to a variety of human tissue culture cell lines. In both cases, dense concentrations of microfilaments are present in the apical cytoplasm beneath attached bacteria. Using a fluorescein-labeled phallotoxin, we have shown that these microfilaments are composed of actin. Cells infected with EPEC and EHEC strains known from electron microscopic studies to produce the AE lesion all exhibited intense spots of fluorescence which corresponded in size and position with each adherent bacterium; cells infected with adherent E. coli strains known not to produce the AE lesion did not produce this striking pattern of fluorescence and were indistinguishable from uninfected control cells. These results indicate that such site-specific concentrations of cytoskeletal actin are characteristic of the AE membrane lesion and can form the basis of a simple, highly sensitive diagnostic test for EPEC and EHEC.
Public Policy and Population Distribution: Developing Appropriate Indicators of Settlement Patterns

In this paper we are concerned with the measurement of aspects of population distribution, or settlement patterns, and the use of these measures in public-policy contexts in particular. More specifically, we query the adequacy of the population-density indicator, which is widely used in statistical formulae such as those by which the British government allocates funding to English local authorities. Our approach is to work through a series of topics, starting with an introductory discussion of the ideas raised by analyses of population distribution, and followed by a section on issues involved in the measurement of settlement patterns. In the third section, we outline the types of public-policy concern which call for statistical indicators of settlement patterns, and then present a set of guidelines for measurements which will be of value in the specific context of British local-government finance-allocation systems. In the next three sections, these guidelines are used to assess the appropriateness of settlement-pattern indicators which are already in use in such systems, in each case moving on to outline an alternative form of measurement designed in the light of weaknesses of current indicators. In the penultimate section, we provide an empirical assessment of the new measures developed here, then in the final section we briefly review the appropriateness of the approach that has been adopted.
Automatic Registration of CT Volumes and Dual-Energy Digital Radiography for Detection of Cardiac and Lung Diseases

We are investigating image processing and analysis techniques to improve the ability of dual-energy digital radiography (DR) for the detection of cardiac calcification. Computed tomography (CT) is an established tool for the diagnosis of coronary artery diseases. Dual-energy digital radiography could be a cost-effective alternative. In this study, we use three-dimensional (3D) CT images as the "gold standard" to evaluate the DR X-ray images for calcification detection. To this purpose, we developed an automatic registration method for 3D CT volumes and two-dimensional (2D) X-ray images. We call this 3D-to-2D registration. We first use a 3D CT image volume to simulate X-ray projection images and then register them with X-ray images. The registered CT projection images are then used to aid the interpretation dual-energy X-ray images for the detection of cardiac calcification. We acquired both CT and X-ray images from patients with coronary artery diseases. Experimental results show that the 3D-to-2D registration is accurate and useful for this new application
Genetic differentiation and subspecies development of the giant panda as revealed by DNA fingerprinting

Over the last 100 years giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) have been separated into six completely isolated mountain ranges. DNA fingerprinting revealed different differentiation patterns in giant pandas, including early‐stage, late‐stage, recent divergence and recent genetic depression. A separation around 10 000 years ago resulted in highly significant differences in DNA fingerprints and morphological characteristics between Qinling and Sichuan populations. Supported by morphological differences, the genetic data were used to classify the Qinling population as a new subspecies, A. m. qinlingensis, while the Sichuan populations were classified into the original subspecies, A. m. melanoleuca. Thus, the Qinling population deserves management as a separate unit. In the Sichuan populations, two management units were defined, including Qionglai‐Minshan and Daxiangling‐Xiaoxiangling‐Liangshan. Our data suggest urgent measures are needed to establish green corridors between subpopulations in each mountain range to increase gene flow and genetic variation to ensure long‐term survival.