Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Wolfram syndrome 1 (Wfs1) gene expression in the normal mouse visual system

Wolfram syndrome (OMIM 222300) is a neurodegenerative disorder defined by insulin‐dependent diabetes mellitus and progressive optic atrophy. This syndrome has been attributed to mutations in the WFS1 gene, which codes for a putative multi‐spanning membrane glycoprotein of the endoplasmic reticulum. The function of WFS1 (wolframin), the distribution of this protein in the mammalian visual system, and the pathogenesis of optic atrophy in Wolfram syndrome are unclear. In this study we made a detailed analysis of the distribution of Wfs1 mRNA and protein in the normal mouse visual system by using in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry. The mRNA and protein were observed in the retina, optic nerve, and brain. In the retina, Wfs1 expression was strong in amacrine and Müller cells, and moderate in photoreceptors and horizontal cells. In addition, it was detectable in bipolar and retinal ganglion cells. Interestingly, moderate Wfs1 expression was seen in the optic nerve, particularly in astrocytes, while little Wfs1 was expressed in the optic chiasm or optic tract. In the brain, moderate Wfs1 expression was observed in the zonal, superficial gray, and intermediate gray layers of the superior colliculus, in the dorsomedial part of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, and in layer II of the primary and secondary visual cortices. Thus, Wfs1 mRNA and protein were widely distributed in the normal mouse visual system. This evidence may provide clues as to the physiological role of Wfs1 protein in the biology of vision, and help to explain the selective vulnerability of the optic nerve to WFS1 loss‐of‐function. J. Comp. Neurol. 510:1–23, 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Face recognition with shared-specific dictionary learning and locality-constrained sparse representation

In this paper, we propose a novel face recognition method that embeds the locality-constrained sparse representation in the dictionary learning framework. The shared-specific dictionary learning is employed to explicitly learn class-specific dictionary for each class that captures the most discriminative features of this class, and simultaneously learn a shared dictionary, whose atoms are shared by all the classes and only contribute to representation of the data rather than discrimination. By further integrating the local similarity information that lies between the test image and the atoms of class-specific dictionaries instead of training images, the classification performance can be improved significantly. The experimental results on the ORL, AR, and Extended Yale B databases verify the superiority of our method.
Ownership Structure, Speculation, and Shareholder Intervention

An institution holding shares in a firm can use information about the firm both for trading ("speculation") and for deciding whether to intervene to improve firm performance. Intervention increases the value of the institution's existing shareholdings, but intervention only increases the institution's trading profits if it enhances the precision of the institution's information relative to that of uninformed traders. Thus, the ability to speculate can increase or decrease institutional intervention. We examine key factors that affect the intervention decision, the usefulness of "short-swing" provisions and restricted shares in encouraging institutional intervention, and implications for ownership structure across different firms. Copyright The American Finance Association 1998.
The Micro-Foundations of Party Competition and Issue Ownership: The Reciprocal Effects of Citizens’ Issue Salience and Party Attachments

While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens’ issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience – that is, debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave panel survey data from Germany and Great Britain, this study analyzes the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue salience and their party support, and concludes that citizens’ issue priorities both influence and are influenced by their party attachments and, moreover, that these effects are linked to parties’ long-term associative issue ownership. This effect is strongest among supporters of a small issue-orientated niche party, the German Greens.
Protective effects of Ampelopsis brevipedunculata against in vitro hepatic stellate cells system and thioacetamide-induced liver fibrosis rat model

Abstract Context: Ampelopsis brevipedunculata Maxim (Vitaceae) is a traditional medicinal herb used for treating liver disorders. Objective: The hepatoprotective effects of A. brevipedunculata ethanol extract (ABE) was investigated in experimental models of fibrosis. Materials and methods: Hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) system in vitro and thioacetamide (TAA)-induced liver fibrosis rat model in vivo were used. Sprague–Dawley rats were divided into five groups of eight each (control, TAA, TAA with ABE 10 mg/kg, ABE 100 mg/kg and silymarin 50 mg/kg groups, respectively). Fibrosis was induced except to the control group by TAA (200 mg/kg, i.p.) twice per week for 13 weeks. ABE and silymarin was administered orally six times per week from the 7th week to the 13th week. Results: In HSC-T6 cells, ABE (0.1 mg/mL) and silymarin (0.05 mg/mL) significantly (p < 0.01) induced apoptosis (12.94 ± 5.72% and 14.9 ± 3.8%, respectively) compared with control group (7.51 ± 1.26%). The expression of fibrosis related genes (TGF-β, α-SMA and Col1A1) in HSC-T6 cells were significantly (p < 0.01) downregulated in ABE-treated groups compared with control group. In in vivo studies, ABE (10 and 100 mg/kg) treatment ameliorated the altered levels of serum biomarkers significantly (p < 0.01 and p < 0.001) in TAA-induced groups. Further, ABE (10 and 100 mg/kg) significantly (p < 0.01) attenuated the altered histopathological findings, glutathione content and the accumulation of hydroxyproline. Conclusion: These results collectively indicate that ABE can potentially be developed as a therapeutic agent in the treatment of hepatic fibrosis.
Molecular analysis of the SNF8 gene of Saccharomyces cerevisiae

Mutations in the SNF8 gene impair derepresson of the SUC2 gene, encoding invertase, in response to glucose limitation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We report here the cloning of the SNF8 gene by complementation. Sequence analysis predicts a 26 936‐dalton product. Disruption of the chromosomal locus caused a five‐fold decrease in invertase derepression, defective growth on raffinose, and a sporulation defect in homozygous diploids. Genetic analysis of the interactions of the snf8 null mutation with spt6/ssn20 and ssn6 suppressors distinguished SNF8 from the groups, SNF1, SNF4 and SNF2, SNF5, SNF6. Notably, the snf8 ssn6 double mutants were extremely sick. Mutations of SNF8 and SNF7 showed similar phenotypes and genetic interactions, and the double mutant combination caused no additional phenotypic impairment. These findings suggest that SNF7 and SNF8 are functionally related. The complete nucleotide sequence of SNF8 has been deposited in GenBank under accession number U10361.
Constructing Social Media Knowledge Graphs with Social Scientists

John Paul Vargheese, Peter Travers, Jeff Pan Computing Science University of Aberdeen Kings College Aberdeen, AB24 5UA, UK jpvargheese@acm.org peter.travers@abdn.ac. uk jeff.z. pan@abdn.ac. uk Kathryn Vincent, Claire Wallace, Anna Kabedeva School of Social Science University of Aberdeen Kings College Aberdeen, AB24 3QY, UK k.l. vincent@abdn.ac. uk claire.wallace@abdn.ac. uk anna.kabedeva. 11@aberdeen.ac. uk
Nurturing and Growing Innovative Start-Ups: The Role of Policy as Integrator

Nurturing and growing innovative start-ups have become an important point on the political agenda. After the dotcom bubble, however, many financial schemes and incubation initiatives initiated, in the mid-nineties, were cancelled or down scaled. There was a consensus that innovative start-ups need more than just money. Networking and coaching were identified as additional needs. Besides this, there is a change in the intensity and nature of these needs during the different stages of the early life cycle. In this paper we make an in-depth study of three approaches to nurture and grow innovative start-ups. Each of these initiatives embeds in a very different national innovation system: Chalmers Innovation in Sweden and Anvar/Banque de Developpement des PMEs in France, and Sitra's PreSeed Service in Finland. Each approach is compared in terms of its financing, networking, and coaching support, along the different stages of the start-up's life cycle.
Rupture of membranes before 26 weeks of gestation: Outcome of 148 consecutive cases

Abstract Aims: To assess the outcome of preterm prelabor rupture of the membranes (PPROM) before 26 weeks of gestation and to develop a prediction model for survival. Methods: 148 consecutive cases of PPROM before 26 weeks of gestation, collected between 1988 and 1996, were retrospectively analyzed. A multivariate analysis (generalized estimating equations) of 21 process and 5 short and long term outcome variables was performed. Results: 40 out of 148 children (27 ％) died before or during birth, 57 (38.5 ％) of the children survived more than 28 days, from which still 5 died after one month. Amongst the 52 survivors (35.1 ％), the Bayley Mental Development Index and Psychomotor Development In- dex at a corrected age of 7 months was normal in respectively 85.7％ and 75.5％ of the cases. At 6–7 years of age, 24 out of 33 children (73 ％) performed adequately at school. Sex, gestational age at PPROM, birth weight, the administration of steroids and interactions of steroid administration with sex and with gestational age at the time of PPROM largely determined the chances of survival. Conclusions: Overall fetal survival after PPROM before 26 weeks of gestation was 35.1 ％. Survival can be predicted with an accuracy of 75 ％, a sensitivity of 85％and a specificity of 60 ％. More than 70％of the survivors behaved and performed adequately at school age, but 27％ require special long-term attention and care.
Security Strategies of Both Players in Asymmetric Information Zero-Sum Stochastic Games with an Informed Controller

This paper considers a zero-sum two-player asymmetric information stochastic game where only one player knows the system state, and the transition law is controlled by the informed player only. For the informed player, it has been shown that the security strategy only depends on the belief and the current stage. We provide LP formulations whose size is only linear in the size of the uninformed player's action set to compute both history based and belief based security strategies. For the uninformed player, we focus on the regret, the difference between 0 and the future payoff guaranteed by the uninformed player in every possible state. Regret is a real vector of the same size as the belief, and depends only on the action of the informed player and the strategy of the uninformed player. This paper shows that the uninformed player has a security strategy that only depends on the regret and the current stage. LP formulations are then given to compute the history based security strategy, the regret at every stage, and the regret based security strategy. The size of the LP formulations are again linear in the size of the uninformed player action set. Finally, an intrusion detection problem is studied to demonstrate the main results in this paper.
Accounting for conditional leptokurtosis and closing days effects in FIGARCH models of daily exchange rates

This paper, estimates FIGARCH models introduced by Baillie et al. (1996a) for the four major daily exchange rates against the USD (DEM, FRF, YEN and the GBP). The former contributions are extended by accounting for the observed kurtosis through a Student- t based maximum likelihood estimation and by including variables capturing the effect of closing days. These estimations suggest that the introduction of these features improves the goodness of fit properties of the model on the one hand, and may lead to different interest parameters estimates on the other hand. In particular, it is shown that in the case of the DEM, volatility shocks may display much less persistence than documented by previous studies. Finally, it is shown that an ARFIMA-FIGARCH framework turns out to be relevant for all the currencies (except the GBP), without inducing any significant changes in the inference of the stochastic volatility process.
Discrete Sine Transform for Multi-Scales Realized Volatility Measures

In this study new realized volatility measures based on Multi-Scale regression and Discrete Sine Transform (DST) approaches are presented. We show that Multi-Scales estimators similar to that recently proposed by Zhang (2004) can be constructed within a simple regression based approach by exploiting the linear relation existing between the market microstructure bias and the realized volatilities computed at different frequencies. These regression based estimators can be further improved and robustified by using the DST approach to prefilter market microstructure noise. The motivation for the DST approach rests on its ability to diagonalize MA type of processes which arise naturally in discrete time models of tick-by-tick returns with market microstructure noise. Hence, the DST provides a natural orthonormal basis decomposition of observed returns which permits to optimally disentangle the volatility signal of the underlying price process from the market microstructure noise. Robustness of the DST approach with respect to more general dependent structure of the microstructure noise is also analytically shown. Then, the combination of such Multi-Scale regression approach with the DST gives us a Multi-Scales DST realized volatility estimator which is robust against a wide class of noise contaminations and model misspecifications. Thanks to the DST orthogonalization which also allows us to analytically derive closed form expressions for the Cramer-Rao bounds of MA(1)processes, an evaluation of the absolute efficiency of volatility estimators under the i.i. d. noise assumption becomes available, indicating that the Multi-Scales DST estimator possesses a finite sample variance very close to the optimal Cramer-Rao bounds. Monte Carlo simulations based on realistic models for price dynamics and market microstructure effects, show the superiority of DST estimators, compared to alternative volatility proxies for a wide range of noise to signal ratios and different types of noise contaminations. Empirical analysis based on six years of tick-by-tick data for S&P 500 index-future, FIB 30, and 30 years U.S. Treasury Bond future, confirms the accuracy and robustness of DST estimators on different types of real data.
Physical Activity in Women with Young Children: How Can We Assess “Anything That's Not Sitting”?

ABSTRACT Current physical activity (PA) questionnaires fail to assess accurately daily activities typically undertaken by women, particularly women with young children (WYC). The aims of this study were to explore perceptions of PA and daily activities, and to identify methods for improving self-report PA questionnaires for WYC. Data were collected from 69 WYC (mean age = 35 ± 5 yrs) via seven focus groups. Facilitators asked questions about perceptions of PA and factors related to self-reporting activities. Two independent researchers thematically analyzed the focus group transcripts. Most participants perceived differences in the meaning of PA and exercise, but many reported difficulty categorizing discrete activities related to childcare, household and occupational tasks because they were often being performed simultaneously and in short bouts. Recommendations for improving physical activity questionnaires for WYC included: the use of interview-administered questionnaires, clarifying category definitions in questionnaire instructions, assessing sedentary and low-intensity activities, providing multiple, relevant examples of activities for each activity category and assessing activities separately for weekdays and weekend days.
Residential mobility and migration of the separated

Separation is known to have a disruptive effect on the housing careers of those involved, mainly because a decrease in resources causes (temporary) downward moves on the housing ladder. Little is known about the geographies of the residential mobility behaviour of the separated. Applying a hazard analysis to retrospective life-course data for the Netherlands, we investigate three hypotheses: individuals who experienced separation move more often than do steady singles and people in intact couple relationships, they are less likely to move over long distances, and they move more often to cities than people in intact couple relationships. The results show that separation leads to an increase in mobility, to moves over short distance for men with children, and to a prevalence of the city as a destination of moves.
A simple solution for sticky cap and sticky floor

We show an analytical approach to sticky cap and sticky floor according to the Bond Market Model, a recently introduced version of the multi-factor Gaussian Heath–Jarrow–Morton model that is particularly easy to manage and calibrate. This solution allows having a comprehensive approach even for this class of Interest Rates' exotic derivatives that are fully path-dependent.
The Determinants of Child Labour: The Role of Primary Product Specialization

The paper tests predictions of a traditional intra-household bargaining model which, under reasonable assumptions, shows that lack of bargaining power in the value chain significantly reduces the capacity of obtaining benefits from increased product demand arising from trade liberalization and therefore is positively associated with child labor. Cross-sectional and panel negative binomial estimates in a sample of emerging countries support this hypothesis showing that proxies of the labor force bargaining power in the international division of labor (such as the share of primary product exports) are significantly related to child labor, net of the effect of traditional controls such as parental income, the quality of education, international aid and trade liberalization. The positive impact of the share of primary product exports on child labor outlines a potential paradox. The paradox suggests that trade liberalisation has not always straightforward positive effects on social indicators and that its short run effects on income distribution and distribution of skills and market power across countries need to be carefully evaluated.
Accumulation and filtering of nanoparticles in microchannels using electrohydrodynamically induced vortical flows

We present an approach for the accumulation and filtering of nano‐ and microparticles in microfluidic devices that is based on the generation of electric traveling waves in the radio‐frequency range. Upon application of the electric field via a microelectrode array, complex particle trajectories and particle accumulation are observed in well‐defined regions in a microchannel. Through the quantitative mapping of the 3‐D flow pattern using two‐focus fluorescence cross‐correlation spectroscopy, two vortices could be identified as one of the sources of the force field that induces the formation of particle clouds. Dielectrophoretic forces that directly act on the particles are the second source of the force field. A thorough 2‐D finite element analysis identifies the electric traveling wave mechanism as the cause for the unexpected flow behavior observed. Based on these findings, strategies are discussed, first, for avoiding the vortices to optimize electrohydrodynamic micropumps and, secondly, for utilizing the vortices in the development of microdevices for efficient particle accumulation, separation, and filtering. Such devices may find numerous biomedical applications when highly diluted nano‐ and microsuspensions have to be processed.
Essential Air Service (EAS)

This report discusses Congress' establishment of the Essential Air Service (EAS), a program to ensure that small communities that were served by certificated air carriers before the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 would continue to receive scheduled passenger service, with subsidies if necessary. Deregulation gave airlines almost total freedom to determine which domestic markets to serve and what airfares to charge, which raised the concern that communities with relatively low passenger levels would lose service as carriers shifted their operations to serve larger and often more profitable markets.
Volatility Trading: What Is the Role of the Long-Run Volatility Component?

Abstract We study an investor’s asset allocation problem with a recursive utility and with tradable volatility that follows a 2-factor stochastic volatility model. Consistent with previous findings under the additive utility, we show that the investor can benefit substantially from volatility trading due to hedging demand. Unlike existing studies, we find that the impact of elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) on investment decisions is of 1st-order importance. Moreover, the investor can incur significant economic losses due to model and/or parameter misspecifications where the EIS better captures the investor’s attitude toward risk than the risk aversion parameter.
Is plasticity across seasons adaptive in the annual cleistogamous plant Lamium amplexicaule?

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Many angiosperms exhibit cleistogamy, the production of both cleistogamous flowers (CL), which remain closed and obligately self-pollinated, and chasmogamous flowers (CH), which are potentially open-pollinated. The CH proportion can be plastic. Plasticity is adaptive if environmental changes can be reliably assessed and responded to with an appropriate phenotype and if plastic genotypes have higher fitness in variable environments than non-plastic ones. METHODS We studied the plastic response of four natural populations from northern and southern France of an annual cleistogamous plant, Lamium amplexicaule, to predictable seasonal variation. Plants were grown in a semi-controlled environment in spring and in autumn. We assessed the variation in flower number, phenology and cleistogamy-related traits, which were all plastic with respect to season. The CH proportion was higher in spring than in autumn in all four populations. KEY RESULTS We showed significant stabilizing selection for cleistogamy traits, with higher optimal CH proportions and more pronounced stabilizing selection in spring than in autumn. Observed CH proportions were close to the predicted optimal CH proportions in each season except in autumn for southern populations, which do not experience the autumnal growing season in nature. CONCLUSIONS These results are consistent with adaptive plasticity across seasons of cleistogamy in L. amplexicaule.We propose that adaptive plasticity of cleistogamy could be driven by pollination environment variation, with CL flowers providing reproductive assurance when pollinators are scarce and CH flowers reducing the inbreeding depression in offspring when pollinators are abundant.
Substance Versus Politics: Through the Dark Mirror of Governance Reform

This article explores recent initiatives by the states to reform governance of public higher education. It synthesizes theoretical and empirical literature to suggest that richer understanding might result from “qualitative heuristic” treatment of multiple case studies. It proposes that data be analyzed to weigh the main and residual effects of political and instrumental goals of key actors in reform. Five exploratory case studies of state governance reform are summarized. Political factors were found to outweigh instrumental factors in most of the cases. The authors conclude with a discussion of fluidity in the political environment, noting that solutions seem to be continuously moving targets.