Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Infrared 3-4 μm Spectroscopic Investigations of a Large Sample of Nearby Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies

We present infrared L-band (3-4 μm) nuclear spectra of a large sample of nearby ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs). ULIRGs classified optically as non-Seyfert galaxies (LINERs, H II regions, and unclassified) are our main targets. Using the 3.3 μm polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) emission and absorption features at 3.1 μm due to ice-covered dust and at 3.4 μm produced by bare carbonaceous dust, we search for signatures of powerful AGNs deeply buried along virtually all lines of sight. The 3.3 μm PAH emission, the signatures of starbursts, is detected in all but two non-Seyfert ULIRGs, but the estimated starburst magnitudes can account for only a small fraction of the infrared luminosities. Three LINER ULIRGs show spectra typical of almost pure buried AGNs, namely, strong absorption features with very small equivalent width PAH emission. Besides these three sources, 14 LINER and three H II ULIRGs' nuclei show strong absorption features whose absolute optical depths suggest an energy source more centrally concentrated than the surrounding dust, such as a buried AGN. In total, 17 out of 27 (63%) LINER and 3 out of 13 (23%) H II ULIRGs' nuclei show some degree of evidence for powerful buried AGNs, suggesting that powerful buried AGNs may be more common in LINER ULIRGs than in H II ULIRGs. The evidence of AGNs is found in non-Seyfert ULIRGs with both warm and cool far-infrared colors. These spectra are compared with those of 15 ULIRGs' nuclei with optical Seyfert signatures taken for comparison. The overall spectral properties suggest that the total amount of dust around buried AGNs in non-Seyfert ULIRGs is systematically larger than that around AGNs in Seyfert 2 ULIRGs. We argue that the optical (non)detectability of Seyfert signatures in ULIRGs is highly dependent on how deeply buried the AGNs are, and that it is essential to properly evaluate the energetic importance of buried AGNs in non-Seyfert ULIRGs.
Activation of M1 and M4 muscarinic receptors as potential treatments for Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and schizophrenia (SZ) are neurological disorders with overlapping symptomatology, including both cognitive deficits and behavioral disturbances. Current clinical treatments for both disorders have limited efficacy accompanied by dose-limiting side effects, and ultimately fail to adequately address the broad range of symptoms observed. Novel therapeutic options for AD and SZ are needed to better manage the spectrum of symptoms with reduced adverse-effect liability. Substantial evidence suggests that activation of muscarinic acetylcholine receptors (mAChRs) has the potential to treat both cognitive and psychosis-related symptoms associated with numerous central nervous system (CNS) disorders. However, use of nonselective modulators of mAChRs is hampered by dose-limiting peripheral side effects that limit their clinical utility. In order to maintain the clinical efficacy without the adverse-effect liability, efforts have been focused on the discovery of compounds that selectively modulate the centrally located M1 and M4 mAChR subtypes. Previous drug discovery attempts have been thwarted by the highly conserved nature of the acetylcholine site across mAChR subtypes. However, current efforts by our laboratory and others have now focused on modulators that bind to allosteric sites on mAChRs, allowing these compounds to display unprecedented subtype selectivity. Over the past couple of decades, the discovery of small molecules capable of selectively targeting the M1 or M4 mAChR subtypes has allowed researchers to elucidate the roles of these receptors in regulating cognitive and behavioral disturbances in preclinical animal models. Here, we provide an overview of these promising preclinical and clinical studies, which suggest that M1- and M4-selective modulators represent viable novel targets with the potential to successfully address a broad range of symptoms observed in patients with AD and SZ.
Betweeness-Centrality of Grid Networks

Importance of estimating the centrality of the nodes in large networks has recently attracted increased interest. Betweenness is one of the most important centrality indices, which basically counts the number of shortest paths going through a node. Betweenness has been used in diverse applications such as social network analysis or route planning. In this paper we find a formula to obtain the betweeness-centrality for grids.
How global is your c-suite?

The globalization of companies can be and frequently has been looked at in different ways: in terms of the internationalization of sales or assets, cross-border supply chains or shared services, organizational structures, functional policies (marketing standardization versus customization) and so on. In this article, the authors look at much less-studied individual measures of globalization: the extent to which the executives who head the worlds largest corporations at the CEO level and at the level of the managers listed as reporting directly to the CEO are native or not to the country where the corporation is headquartered. Some studies indicate that national diversity in the top management team can be associated with better performance. Whats more, the presence or absence of nonnative executives in a companys top management team can send a signal to employees outside the home country about the long-term career prospects for foreign middle managers already in the company as well as for potential hires. The basic pattern emerging from the authors research, both at the CEO and the top management team level, is unmistakable: Even at the worlds largest companies, natives generally rule the roost. In 2013, 67 of the Fortune Global 500 companies (13%, or about one in eight) had a foreign-born CEO. The share has barely budged since 2008. Looking at the full top management teams, the authors found that on average 15% of the top management team members, excluding the CEO, are nonnatives. The authors examine some of the possible reasons for this and look for correlations that may explain why certain countries have higher rates of nonnative CEOs. They then examine several levers for enhancing a companys ability to deal with international differences and distances
Physical Activity during Winter in Old-Old Women Associated with Physical Performance after One Year: A Prospective Study

Background. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether the decline of physical activity during winter influences physical performances (after 1 year) in old-old women. Methods. Fifty-three Japanese women (mean age: 78.4 ± 3.2 years) participated in this study. Data of physical activity was collected by using an accelerometer at baseline and 3-month follow-up, and participants who decreased step counts in this period were defined as declining groups. We measured grip strength, knee extensor strength, total length of the center of gravity, hip walking distance, and maximum walking speed to evaluate physical performances at baseline and 1-year follow-up. Repeated-measures analysis of variance determined the difference in physical performance between declining groups and maintenance group with maintained or improved step counts. Results. Daily step counts for 22 older women (41.5%) decreased during winter. A statistically significant interaction effect between group and time was found for maximum walking speed (F(1,50) = 5.23, p = 0.03). Post hoc comparisons revealed that walking speed in the maintenance group significantly increased compared with baseline (p = 0.01); the declining group showed no significant change (p = 0.44). Conclusion. Change of physical activity during winter influences the physical performance level after 1 year in community-dwelling old-old women, particularly its effect on maximum walking speed.
Mouse Model of Hyperkinesis Implicates SNAP-25 in Behavioral Regulation

Although hyperkinesis is expressed in several neurological disorders, the biological basis of this phenotype is unknown. The mouse mutant coloboma (Cm/+) exhibits profound spontaneous locomotor hyperactivity resulting from a deletion mutation. This deletion encompasses several genes including Snap, which encodes SNAP-25, a nerve terminal protein involved in neurotransmitter release. Administration of amphetamine, a drug that acts presynaptically, markedly reduced the locomotor activity in coloboma mice but increased the activity of control mice implicating presynaptic function in the behavioral abnormality. In contrast, the psychostimulant methylphenidate increased locomotor activity in both coloboma and control mice. When a transgene encoding SNAP-25 was bred into the coloboma strain to complement the Snap deletion, the hyperactivity expressed by these mice was rescued, returning these corrected mice to normal levels of locomotor activity. These results demonstrate that the hyperactivity exhibited by these mice is the result of abnormalities in presynaptic function specifically attributable to deficits in SNAP-25 expression.
A lightweight protocol for the generation and distribution of secure e-coupons

A form of advertisement which is becoming very popular on the web is based on electronic coupon (e-coupon) distribution. E-coupons are the digital analogue of paper coupons which are used to provide customers with discounts or gift in order to incentive the purchase of some products. Nowadays, the potential of digital coupons has not been fully exploited on the web. This is mostly due to the lack of "efficient" techniques to handle the generation and distribution of e-coupons. In this paper we discuss models and protocols for e-coupons satisfying a number of security requirements. Our protocol is lightweight and preserves the privacy of the users, since it does not require any registration phase.
Multiscale Analysis of Landscape Heterogeneity: Scale Variance and Pattern Metrics

Abstract A major goal of landscape ecology is to understand the formation, dynamics, and maintenance of spatial heterogeneity. Spatial heterogeneity is the most fundamental characteristic of all landscapes, and scale multiplicity is inherent in spatial heterogeneity. Thus, multiscale analysis is imperative for understanding the structure, function and dynamics of landscapes. Although a number of methods have been used for multiscale analysis in landscape ecology since the 1980s, the effectiveness of many of them, including some commonly used ones, is not clear or questionable. In this paper, we discuss two approaches to multiscale analysis of landscape heterogeneity: the direct and indirect approaches. We will focus on scale variance and semivariance methods in the first approach and 17 landscape metrics in the second. The results show that scale variance is potentially a powerful method to detect and describe multiple-scale structures of landscapes, while semivariance analysis may often fail to do so especially if landscape variability is dominant at broad scales over fine scales. Landscape metrics respond to changing grain size rather differently, and these changes are reflective of the modifiable areal unit problem as well as multiple-scale structures in landscape pattern. Interestingly, some metrics (e.g., the number of patches, patch density, total edge, edge density, mean patch size, patch size coefficient of variation) exhibit consistent, predictable patterns over a wide range of grain sizes, whereas others (e.g., patch diversity, contagion, landscape fractal dimension) have nonlinear response curves. The two approaches to multiple-scale analysis are complementary, and their pros and cons still need to be further investigated systematically.
Combinatorial approximation algorithms for the maximum directed cut problem

We describe several combinatorial algorithms for the maximum directed cut problem. Among our results is a simple linear time 9/20-approximation algorithm for the problem, and a somewhat slower ½-approximation algorithm that uses a bipartite matching routine. No better combinatorial approximation algorithms are known even for the easier maximum cut problem for undirected graphs. Our algorithms do not use linear programming, nor semidefinite programming. They are based on the observation that the maximum directed cut problem is equivalent to the problem of finding a maximum independent set in the line graph of the input graph, and that the linear programming relaxation of the problem is equivalent to the problem of finding a maximum fractional independent set of that line graph. The maximum fractional independent set problem can be easily reduced to a bipartite matching problem. As a consequence of this relation, we also get that the maximum directed cut problem for bipartite digraphs can be solved in polynomial time.
The Relationship between Market Orientation and Innovation in Mexican Manufacturing SMEâ€™s

The literature presents an extensive analysis and discussion about the relationship between market orientation and business performance, but the relationship between market orientation and innovation has not been deeply studied in the literature by academics in terms of management, strategy and marketing. Similarly, majority of empirical studies have been focused on the analysis and discussion of market orientation and innovation but in large companies in highly developed countries, but ignored those small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in countries under development. Therefore, this investigation has the objective of analyze the effects from market orientation onto SMEsâ€™ innovation level in a under development country, such as MA©xico. In this sense, the present empirical study used a sample size of 286 manufacturing SMEs, having 5-250 employers, from the state of Aguascalientes, MA©xico. The obtained results indicate that clientsâ€™ orientation, competence orientation and inter-functional coordination have a positive effect on the innovation level of manufacturing SMEs, in Aguascalientes, MA©xico.
V-SMART-Join: A Scalable MapReduce Framework for All-Pair Similarity Joins of Multisets and Vectors

This work proposes V-SMART-Join, a scalable MapReduce-based framework for discovering all pairs of similar entities. The V-SMART-Join framework is applicable to sets, multisets, and vectors. V-SMART-Join is motivated by the observed skew in the underlying distributions of Internet traffic, and is a family of 2-stage algorithms, where the first stage computes and joins the partial results, and the second stage computes the similarity exactly for all candidate pairs. The V-SMART-Join algorithms are very efficient and scalable in the number of entities, as well as their cardinalities. They were up to 30 times faster than the state of the art algorithm, VCL, when compared on a real dataset of a small size. We also established the scalability of the proposed algorithms by running them on a dataset of a realistic size, on which VCL never succeeded to finish. Experiments were run using real datasets of IPs and cookies, where each IP is represented as a multiset of cookies, and the goal is to discover similar IPs to identify Internet proxies.
A crosslinguistic and acquisitional perspective on intonational rises in French

This study compares rising contours produced in the context of contrastive topics by French natives and by low and high proficient learners of French with German as mother tongue. Results show a systematic pattern for French natives who mostly produced a final rise LH*, and hardly ever a bridge accent on the whole phrase. Our results on French natives seem to support earlier claims that tonal patterns with late dip alignments may be recruited for encoding contrast meaning. Results on French learners show a development in the acquisition of the prosody-semantics mapping principles (shifting the accent position from the phrase-initial mon to the phrase-final image) and, not surprisingly, differences in the phonetic implementation of the final rises. Crucially, the impact of phonological and phonetic transfer is more complex than expected: text-to-tune associations are not easy to reprogramme when a new accent location has to be learnt. However, once the phonology is learnt, the phonetic implementation starts being problematic.
Biochemical Assessment of Bone Health in Working Obese Egyptian Females with Metabolic Syndrome; the Effect of Weight Loss by Natural Dietary Therapies

AIM: To investigate the relation between bone parameters and the metabolic syndrome criteria, before and after the administration of two different natural dietary supplements in middle aged working obese Egyptian women suffering from metabolic syndrome (MetS). SUBJECTS AND METHODS: Fifty eight middle aged obese female volunteers suffering from metabolic syndrome were divided into two groups. During the first period, group (A) consumed a low caloric diet and nutritional supplement consisting of doum flour biscuits, while group (B) consumed whole meal wheat flour biscuit with the same instructions. During the second period, both supplements were omitted. Assessment of blood pressure, relevant anthropometric parameters, lipid accumulation product, fasting blood glucose, uric acid, 25 hydroxy vitamin D (25 (OH) D), parathyroid hormone (PTH) and bone-specific alkaline phosphatase were performed. RESULTS: Data showed that although both supplements improved the MetS criteria and the bone health parameters, the supplement containing the doum flour proved to be more effective. CONCLUSION: These results confirm the benefit of doum in improving bone health parameter [25 (OH) D/PTH axis] in the MetS patients, beside the MetS criteria. So, we can conclude that natural effective supplements lead towards the optimization of biochemical parameters in favor of a healthy outcome.
Enhanced Phosphatase Activity Attenuates α-Synucleinopathy in a Mouse Model

α-Synuclein (α-Syn) is a key protein that accumulates as hyperphosphorylated aggregates in pathologic hallmark features of Parkinson's disease (PD) and other neurodegenerative disorders. Phosphorylation of this protein at serine 129 is believed to promote its aggregation and neurotoxicity, suggesting that this post-translational modification could be a therapeutic target. Here, we demonstrate that phosphoprotein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) dephosphorylates α-Syn at serine 129 and that this activity is greatly enhanced by carboxyl methylation of the catalytic C subunit of PP2A. α-Syn-transgenic mice raised on a diet supplemented with eicosanoyl-5-hydroxytryptamide, an agent that enhances PP2A methylation, dramatically reduced both α-Syn phosphorylation at Serine 129 and α-Syn aggregation in the brain. These biochemical changes were associated with enhanced neuronal activity, increased dendritic arborizations, and reduced astroglial and microglial activation, as well as improved motor performance. These findings support the notion that serine 129 phosphorylation of α-Syn is of pathogenetic significance and that promoting PP2A activity is a viable disease-modifying therapeutic strategy for α-synucleinopathies such as PD.
One-bit ADCs in wideband massive MIMO systems with OFDM transmission

We investigate the performance of wideband massive MIMO base stations that use one-bit ADCs for quantizing the uplink signal. Our main result is to show that the many taps of the frequency-selective channel make linear combiners asymptotically consistent and the quantization noise additive and Gaussian, which simplifies signal processing and enables the straightforward use of OFDM. We also find that single-carrier systems and OFDM systems are affected in the same way by one-bit quantizers in wideband systems because the distribution of the quantization noise becomes the same in both systems as the number of channel taps grows.
A Dynamic Oligopoly Structural Model for the Prescription Drug Market after Patent Expiration

Motivated by the slow diffusion of generic drugs and the increase in prices of brand-name drugs after generic entry, I incorporate consumer learning and consumer heterogeneity into an empirical dynamic oligopoly model. In the model, firms choose prices to maximize their expected total discounted profits. Moreover, generic firms make their entry decisions before patent expiration. The entry time of generics depends on the FDA random approval process. I apply this model to the market of clonidine. The demand side parameters are estimated in a previous paper (Ching (2003)). The supply side parameters are estimated and calibrated here. The model replicates the stylized facts fairly well. I confirm that consumer heterogeneity in price sensitivity plays an important role in explaining the brand-name pricing pattern. I also apply the model to examine the impact of a policy experiment, which shortens the expected approval time for generics. Although this experiment brings generics to the market sooner, it also reduces the number of generic entrants as the likelihood of entering a crowded market in the early periods increases. Given the change in the magnitude of the policy parameter, the experiment improves the rate of learning, and lowers the equilibrium generic prices throughout the period. However, it hardly raises the overall welfare
A Measure of Monetary Conditions

This paper explains why the overall stance of monetary policy is effected by both interest rates and the exchange rate, and hence why a Monetary Conditions Indicator can provide useful information about the stance of policy. Three output gap equations estimated in this paper reveal that the real interest rate and the real exchange rate both affect excess demand but that the real interest rate is the more powerful and faster acting policy transmission channel.
The Overuse of Mathematics in Economics: Nobel Resistance

Mathematics has become an integral part of 20th century economics. Mathematical techniques that were considered to be on the fringes of economics even a few decades ago are today considered mainstream economics. Economists presented considerable resistance in the past to the encroachment of mathematical methods in economics. This opposition in various forms continues today and may in fact be gaining momentum. This paper documents contemporary criticism of the overuse of mathematics in economics by, eminent mathematical economists and econometricians, especially Nobel laureates.
Balancing Financial and Non-Financial Performance Measures

Non-financial performance measures are often used for performance evaluation. They are especially relevant if the available financial performance measures not completely reflect the manager’s contribution to the firm’s total value. Then, non-financial performance measures serve as an indicator for the firm’s long-term performance and may therefore be included in incentive contracts. In the paper we analyze the incentive weights placed on non-financial performance measures and the firm’s short-term financial return. We determine the consequences of a non-contractable long-term financial return and of private pre-decision information for the incentive weights of non-financial performance measures. We explore the extent to which the strength of the statistical relation between the non-financial performance and the firm-value, and the limitations of financial data as a measure of total firm performance influence the incentive weights. Specifically, we determine conditions where the incentive weight of the short-term financial return increases, although the firm’s interest in the long-term financial return increases.