Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
An Investigation of the Distribution of Power in the APB and FASB

The method of self-regulation exercised by the accounting profession has been increasingly criticized in recent years with one of the most direct assaults contained in the Metcalf Staff Report, The Accounting Establishment: A Staff Study [1976]. There it is implied that effective control over policy making boards is held by several large accounting firms (the Big Eight). This power is claimed to derive from the disproportionate representation on the Accounting Principles Board (APB) and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) maintained by the Big Eight, along with alleged control over board funding, staffing of research support groups, and representation on the overseeing Financial Accounting Foundation. Although no evidence of actual manipulation is presented, the subcommittee staff attempts to make a convincing case against the accounting establishment based on potential usurpations of the system by the Big Eight. Instigated by these and previous criticisms of private-sector policymaking in accounting, a number of changes have been made in the structure and composition of the policymaking mechanism. The accounting profession has become much more sensitive to its public image, desiring at least to convey the appearance that the standard-setting process is equitable to all interested constituencies. Thus, although bloc voting has not yet been documented (e.g., see Brown [1981]), it is still considered desirable to reduce any ostensible control by a single group such as the Big Eight. Accountants therefore should be concerned about
A Novel Lipolytic Enzyme Located in the Outer Membrane of Pseudomonas aeruginosa

ABSTRACT A lipase-negative deletion mutant of Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 still showed extracellular lipolytic activity toward short-chain p-nitrophenylesters. By screening a genomic DNA library of P. aeruginosa PAO1, an esterase gene, estA, was identified, cloned, and sequenced, revealing an open reading frame of 1,941 bp. The product ofestA is a 69.5-kDa protein, which is probably processed by removal of an N-terminal signal peptide to yield a 67-kDa mature protein. A molecular mass of 66 kDa was determined for35S-labeled EstA by sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and autoradiography. The amino acid sequence of EstA indicated that the esterase is a member of a novel GDSL family of lipolytic enzymes. The estA gene showed high similarity to an open reading frame of unknown function located in thetrpE-trpG region of P. putida and to a gene encoding an outer membrane esterase of Salmonella typhimurium. Amino acid sequence alignments led us to predict that this esterase is an autotransporter protein which possesses a carboxy-terminal β-barrel domain, allowing the secretion of the amino-terminal passenger domain harboring the catalytic activity. Expression of estA in P. aeruginosa andEscherichia coli and subsequent cell fractionation revealed that the enzyme was associated with the cellular membranes. Trypsin treatment of whole cells released a significant amount of esterase, indicating that the enzyme was located in the outer membrane with the catalytic domain exposed to the surface. To our knowledge, this esterase is unique in that it exemplifies in P. aeruginosa(i) the first enzyme identified in the outer membrane and (ii) the first example of a type IV secretion mechanism.
Economic Performance of Contracts in Electricity Markets: A Fuzzy and Multiple Criteria Approach

In competitive electricity markets, consumers and suppliers are exposed to price risk, quantity risk, and other risks such as credit risk. These risks can be managed through an adequate portfolio of contracts. The goal of the approach proposed is to help a market player to appraise portfolios of contracts from the point of view of the economic performance-which measures the potentiality of gains and the potentiality of losses-taking into account the multidimensional aspect of risk, the vagueness and nuances of the decision maker's preferences, and the different kinds of uncertainties. The three steps proposed are portfolio construction, portfolio evaluation, and portfolio ranking. This requires modeling of uncertainties, contracts, and the decision maker's preferences. The example of a large consumer of electric energy and a comparison with the value-at-risk system are presented. The proposed approach is applied to appraise different strategies for a Swiss utility.
A Perspective on the Kinetics of Covalent and Irreversible Inhibition

The clinical and commercial success of covalent drugs has prompted a renewed and more deliberate pursuit of covalent and irreversible mechanisms within drug discovery. A covalent mechanism can produce potent inhibition in a biochemical, cellular, or in vivo setting. In many cases, teams choose to focus on the consequences of the covalent event, defined by an IC50 value. In a biochemical assay, the IC50 may simply reflect the target protein concentration in the assay. What has received less attention is the importance of the rate of covalent modification, defined by kinact/KI. The kinact/KI is a rate constant describing the efficiency of covalent bond formation resulting from the potency (KI) of the first reversible binding event and the maximum potential rate (kinact) of inactivation. In this perspective, it is proposed that the kinact/KI should be employed as a critical parameter to identify covalent inhibitors, interpret structure-activity relationships (SARs), translate activity from biochemical assays to the cell, and more accurately define selectivity. It is also proposed that a physiologically relevant kinact/KI and an (unbound) AUC generated from a pharmacokinetic profile reflecting direct exposure of the inhibitor to the target protein are two critical determinants of in vivo covalent occupancy. A simple equation is presented to define this relationship and improve the interpretation of covalent and irreversible kinetics.
Os Efeitos Do E-Commerce Naprodutividade Das Firmas Comerciais No Brasil

With the emergence of the internet, the e-commerce grows on daily basis, in Brazil and in the world. In 2007 was still very low by Brazilian trade firms, even considering only firms with 20 or more employees. Only 855 firms adopted this practice in a total of 38.339 firms. The set up of this kind of innovation allows reduction of transaction costs, but, in the other hand, it demands logistics and information technology upgrades, and also qualified personnel. Theses improvements could dealt by public policies.The current studied developed a pioneering evaluation of the effects of e-commerce in the Brazilian economy. More specifically, the effects of adoption of this kind of innovation in the productivity of wholesale and retail firms were analyzed. The studied followed an econometric methodology that tries to control the possible effects of endogeneity and self-selection bias. In other words, it tries to control the possible bias caused by the fact that the choice of adoption or not e-commerce might be influenced by the productivity. The study used microdata of the 2007 Annual Trade Survey (Pesquisa Annual de Comercio), by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics(Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica, the Brazilian nacional statistics agency). The methodology was used by Bertschek, Fryges and Kaiser (2004) to evaluate the impact of business-to-business e-commerce on the productivity of German firms. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)
Time series matching for biometric visual passwords

User authentication through silent utterance of a secret phrase, a biometric visual password, has been previously attempted mainly using image based features extracted from video. Using state of the art face tracking, this problem can be framed as a high dimensional time series matching problem covering the motion of a select set of lip points. One major advantage is the small amount of training data needed. We deploy the time and shape correspondence (TSC) matching algorithm given its superior performance when dealing with multidimensional signals with shape and in the presence of noise. We report the results of a user study with 22 participants uttering the password "siggraph rocks". This data base along with other human action data bases we created for gait and gestures are made publicly available for comparison studies by other researchers.
HRM practices for human and social capital development: effects on innovation capabilities

This paper analyzes the effect of systems of human resource management (HRM) practices on a company's innovation capabilities. To date, few studies have analyzed the way a firm may be more innovative by using specific sets of high-performance HRM practices from an intellectual capital-based view of the firm. From an extensive literature review, a model was established and tested through structural equation modelling, using the statistical technique of partial least squares. The study was applied to a sample of technological firms in Spain and the results show that high-profile personal HRM practices positively influence human capital while collaborative HRM practices influence social capital, which, in turn, affect innovation capabilities by means of, respectively, total and partial mediating effects. Managerial and HRM implications of these results are drawn by the authors, highlighting the idea of paying increased attention to managing firms with a focus on strategic intangible assets in order to gain competitive advantages based on innovation.
Arithmetic-BICM for Seamless Rate Adaptation for Wireless Communication Systems

Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) has been widely used in capacity-achieving communication systems. In this paper, we propose an enhanced BICM, namely, arithmetic-BICM (A-BICM), which is able to achieve high channel throughput and seamless rate adaptation in time-varying wireless channels. The A-BICM generates modulation symbols through arithmetic weighted sum operations, and it adapts to data rate via adjusting the number of transmitted symbols. Our contributions in the design of A-BICM are twofold. First, we use an extrinsic information transfer chart to analyze a demapping procedure, and this facilitates the selection of the weighting multiset, which is a key design parameter in A-BICM mapping. Second, we employ a systematic channel code in A-BICM and design an adaptation scheme to strike a balance between the performances in both high- and low-SNR regions. Simulation results show that the A-BICM outperforms the conventional BICM with length-864 low-density parity check coding in both additive white Gaussian noise and fading channels. The experiments in real WLAN environments reveal that A-BICM achieves 42.1% and 20.9% throughput gain over conventional BICM and hybrid automatic repeat request rate adaptation schemes. Furthermore, the channel coding rate and its constellation in A-BICM do not need to change within a fairly wide SNR region from 1 to 30 dB to reduce communication overhead.
The effects of prehospital plasma on patients with injury: A prehospital plasma resuscitation

BACKGROUND The prehospital resuscitation of the exsanguinating patient with trauma is time and resource dependent. Rural trauma care magnifies these factors because transportation time to definitive care is increased. To address the early resuscitation needs and trauma-induced coagulopathy in the exsanguinating patient with trauma an aeromedical prehospital thawed plasma–first transfusion protocol was used. METHODS Retrospective review of trauma and flight registries between February 1, 2009, and May 31, 2011, was performed. The study population included all patients with traumatic injury transported by rotary wing aircraft who met criteria for massive transfusion protocol RESULTS A total of 59 patients identified over 28 months met criteria for initiation of aeromedical initiation of prehospital blood product resuscitation. Nine patients received thawed plasma–first protocol compared with 50 controls. The prehospital plasma group was more commonly on warfarin (22 vs. 2%, p = 0.036) and had a greater degree of coagulopathy measured by international normalized ratio at baseline (2.6 vs. 1.5, p = 0.004) and trauma center arrival (1.6 vs. 1.3, p < 0.001). The prehospital plasma group had a predicted mortality nearly three times greater than controls based on Trauma and Injury Severity Score (0.24 vs. 0.66, p = 0.005). The use of prehospital plasma resuscitation led to a plasma–red blood cell ratio that more closely approximated a 1:1 resuscitation en route (1.3:1.0 vs. not applicable, p < 0.001), at 30 minutes (1.3:1.0 vs. 0.14:1.0, p < 0.001), at 6 hours (0.95:1.0 vs. 0.42:1.0, p < 0.001), and at 24 hours (1.0:1.0 vs. 0.45:1.0, p < 0.001). An equivalent amount of packed red blood cells were transfused between the groups. Despite more significant hypotension, less crystalloid was used in the prehospital thawed plasma group, through 24 hours after injury (6.3 vs. 16.4 L, p = 0.001). CONCLUSION Use of plasma-first resuscitation in the helicopter system creates a field ready, mobile blood bank, allowing early resuscitation of the patient demonstrating need for massive transfusion. There was early treatment of trauma-induced coagulopathy. Although there was not a survival benefit demonstrated, there was resultant damage control resuscitation extending to 24 hours in the plasma-first cohort. LEVEL OF EVIDENCE Therapeutic study, level IV.
Design and implementation of a novel real time target tracking scheme for passive SONARs using MVDR beam forming and Kalman filtering

Target detection and tracking are the essential functions of modern SONAR systems. Once the direction of arrival is estimated the target is tracked continuously in bearing and the target spectral information is used for classifying the target. A continuous and reliable tracking method is essential for getting the spectral information and classification of the target. Conventional tracking methods use the split beam correlation technique by forming two half beams and correlating between them to detect the path delay between the two beams and then estimate the accurate bearing. This scheme does not offer good performance at low signal to noise ratios and fails when a scenario has two targets crossing each other. In this paper we propose a scheme which addresses these problems by employing (Minimum Variance Distortionless Response) MVDR based tracking and a Kalman smoother to refine the track. The kalman filter gets input from the MVDR based tracker and may also be used to predict a target trajectory when there is a cluttered target scenario when the MVDR based tracker does not provide reliable inputs.
A mixed-integer convex optimization framework for robust multilegged robot locomotion planning over challenging terrain

This paper introduces an optimization-based framework for robust multilegged walking motion planning. Previous approaches use fixed gait sequences, and rely on Zero Moment Point (ZMP) to guarantee dynamic stability. While this combination works well on flat ground, it does not generalize to uneven terrain requiring aggressive gait or gait transition. To overcome such difficulties, in this paper, we present an optimization framework, that can plan both the contact location and gait sequence simultaneously in a mixed-integer convex optimization program. Moreover, we rely on the Contact Wrench Cone (CWC) stability criterion, which generalizes the ZMP criterion to uneven terrain with friction cone constraints, and we plan the walking motion together with the angular momentum through a convex optimization program. Our approach is successfully tested on a LittleDog quadruped over simulated scenarios. We show that on the flat ground, our planner generates a periodic gait, same as Central Pattern Generator + ZMP planner; while on uneven terrain, our planner can successfully generate a motion containing different gaits, with a center-of-mass motion that respects the friction cone constraints, which are violated by ZMP planners. This improvement clearly demonstrates the advantage of our approach over traditional planning strategies.
Dietary fat and physiological determinants of plasma chylomicron remnant homoeostasis in normolipidaemic subjects: insight into atherogenic risk

Abstract TAG depleted remnants of postprandial chylomicrons are a risk factor for atherosclerosis. Recent studies have demonstrated that in the fasted state, the majority of chylomicrons are small enough for transcytosis to arterial subendothelial space and accelerate atherogenesis. However, the size distribution of chylomicrons in the absorptive state is unclear. This study explored in normolipidaemic subjects the postprandial distribution of the chylomicron marker, apoB-48, in a TAG-rich lipoprotein plasma fraction (Svedberg flotation rate (Sf>400), in partially hydrolysed remnants (Sf 20–400) and in a TAG-deplete fraction (Sf<20), following ingestion of isoenergetic meals with either palm oil (PO), rice bran or coconut oil. Results from this study show that the majority of fasting chylomicrons are within the potentially pro-atherogenic Sf<20 fraction (70–75 %). Following the ingestion of test meals, chylomicronaemia was also principally distributed within the Sf<20 fraction. However, approximately 40 % of subjects demonstrated exaggerated postprandial lipaemia specifically in response to the SFA-rich PO meal, with a transient shift to more buoyant chylomicron fractions. The latter demonstrates that heterogeneity in the magnitude and duration of hyper-remnantaemia is dependent on both the nature of the meal fatty acids ingested and possible metabolic determinants that influence chylomicron metabolism. The study findings reiterate that fasting plasma TAG is a poor indicator of atherogenic chylomicron remnant homoeostasis and emphasises the merits of considering specifically, chylomicron remnant abundance and kinetics in the context of atherogenic risk. Few studies address the latter, despite the majority of life being spent in the postprandial and absorptive state.
The Pricing of Catastrophe Equity Put Options with Default Risk

In this paper, we present a pricing model for catastrophe equity put options with default risk by assuming that the default of the option issuer may occur at any time prior to maturity of the option. Catastrophic events are assumed to occur according to a doubly stochastic Poisson process, and stock price is affected by the catastrophe losses, which follow the compound doubly stochastic Poisson process. As for default risk, we adopt typical structural approaches, and we also allow the correlation between the underlying stock and the assets of the option issuer. Under this framework, we derive a pricing formula for catastrophe equity put options with default risk. Finally, numerical analysis is presented to illustrate effects of default risk on catastrophe equity put option prices.
Helper T-Cell Subsets in Uveitis

Helper T-cell (Th cell) subsets were originally reported by Mossman and colleagues in 1986, who described two types of mouse CD4+ T-cell clones distinguished by their patterns of cytokine production (figure 1). Th1 cells are responsible for cellular immunity and mainly produce interleukin-2 (IL-2), interferon(IFN), and tumor necrosis factor (TNF). Th2 cells, in contrast, are responsible for humoral immunity, and mainly produce IL-4, IL-5, IL-6, and IL-13. Although IL-10 was originally described as a product of Th2 cells, it is now clear that Th1 cells also produce IL-10. Many cells other than CD4+ cells—such as CD8+ cells, monocytes, B cells, natural killer (NK) cells, mast cells, and eosinophils— also produce Th1 and Th2 cytokines. Some investigators suggest, therefore, that these cytokines should be called type 1or Th1-like cytokine and type 2or Th2-like cytokine, respectively. Both Th1 and Th2 cells mature from a naive Th cell type (Thp; precursor Th cell) through Th0 cells, which produce both Th1 and Th2 cytokines. The subset imbalances appear to contribute to the pathogenesis of several diseases. Rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, for example, are considered to be Th1cell-mediated diseases. In contrast, allergic diseases and systemic lupus erythematosus are thought to be Th2-cell-mediated diseases. Chen and associates found a third T-cell type, Th3, which has a unique pattern of cytokine production in experimental allergic (autoimmune) encephalomyelitis (EAE; an animal model of multiple sclerosis). Th3 cells have also been investigated in an experimental autoimmune model of insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus and in human autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and colitis. This cell type is assumed to play a role in immunosuppression of the Th1 response via
Mixed-Asset Portfolio Composition with Long-Term Holding Periods and Uncertainty

Executive Summary. A bootstrap analysis is used to estimate confidence intervals for the optimum level of real estate investment in mixed-asset portfolios over a five-year holding period. The data used in the study extends from 1973 to 1994. Lengthening the holding period to five years provides much narrower confidence intervals in comparison to those generated in earlier studies that examined shorter holding periods of one year or less. The optimum amount of real estate in mixed-asset portfolios was remarkably stable at all levels of investor risk preference along the efficient frontier when investors held their portfolios for five years. Furthermore, the estimates of optimum real estate composition produced by the bootstrap are highly consistent with the behavior of pension fund managers. This suggests that the markets are efficient and fund managers are exactly where they should be in terms of real estate investment.
Tumor size and postoperative kidney function following radical nephrectomy

Background: Chronic kidney disease (CKD) following nephrectomy for kidney tumors is common, and both patient and tumor characteristics may affect postoperative kidney function. Several studies have reported that surgery for large tumors is associated with a lower likelihood of postoperative CKD, but others have reported CKD to be more common before surgery in patients with large tumors. Objective: The aim of this study was to clarify inconsistencies in the literature regarding the prognostic significance of tumor size for postoperative kidney function. Study design and setting: We analyzed data from 944 kidney cancer patients managed with radical nephrectomy between January 2012 and December 2013, and 242 living kidney donors who underwent surgery between January 2011 and December 2014 in the Australian states of Queensland and Victoria. Multivariable logistic regression was used to assess the primary outcome of CKD upstaging. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate causal models, to delineate the influence of patient and tumor characteristics on postoperative kidney function. Results: We determined that a significant interaction between age and tumor size (P=0.03) led to the observed inverse association between large tumor size and CKD upstaging, and was accentuated by other forms of selection bias. Subgrouping patients by age and tumor size demonstrated that all patients aged ≥65 years were at increased risk of CKD upstaging, regardless of tumor size. Risk of CKD upstaging was comparable between age-matched living donors and kidney cancer patients. Conclusion: Larger tumors are unlikely to confer a protective effect with respect to postoperative kidney function. The reason for the previously reported inconsistency is likely a combination of the analytical approach and selection bias.