Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation on Performance of Change Point Algorithm in Time Series Dynamical Regimes and Effect of Data Characteristics

 Abstract — In this paper, Bayesian online inference in models of data series are constructed by change-points algorithm, which separated the observed time series into independent series and study the change and variation of the regime of the data with related statistical characteristics. variation of statistical characteristics of time series data often represent separated phenomena in the some dynamical system, like a change in state of brain dynamical re ﬂ ected in EEG signal data measurement or a change in important regime of data in many dynamical system. In this paper, prediction algorithm for studying change point location in some time series data is simulated. It is verified that pattern of proposed distribution of data has important factor on simpler and smother fluctuation of hazard rate parameter and also for better identification of change point locations. Finally, the conditions of how the time series distribution effect on factors in this approach are explained and validated with different time series databases for some dynamical system.
Dividends and Politics (Revised)

Influential contributors to debates concerning corporate governance assert that it is impossible to understand key trends without taking politics into account. This proposition has, however, remained largely untested. This paper therefore offers an empirical study of the relation between politics and corporate governance, with the focus being on the determinants of dividend policy in publicly quoted United Kingdom (U.K.) companies between 1950 and the present. The departure point is the well-known partial adjustment model of dividend policy, which we augment to take into account the ideological orientation of the party in power and other potentially salient proxies for politics (e.g. tax policy and dividend controls). The model is tested by reference to aggregate annual data on earnings and dividends. The results indicate that the political placement of the party in office lacks explanatory power. Moreover, even when politics manifests itself in regulation explicitly designed to regulate corporate behaviour, political variables generally do not correlate in the predicted direction with dividend pay-outs. The evidence therefore is inconsistent with the proposition that politics shape corporate governance.
Do insect pests perform better on highly defended plants? Costs and benefits of induced detoxification defences in the aphid Sitobion avenae

Induced defences are a typical case of phenotypic plasticity, involving benefits for ‘plastic’ phenotypes under environments with variable degree of stress. Defence induction, in turn, could be energetically expensive incurring costs on growth and reproduction. In this study, we investigated the genetic variation and induction of detoxification enzymes mediated by wheat chemical defences (hydroxamic acids; Hx), and their metabolic and fitness costs using five multilocus genotypes of the grain aphid (Sitobion avenae). Cytochrome P450 monooxygenases and glutathione S‐transferases activities were seen to increase with Hx levels, whereas esterases activity and standard metabolic rate increased in wheat hosts with low Hx levels. Additionally, the intrinsic rate of increase (a fitness proxy) increased in highly defended hosts. However, we did not find significant genetic variation or genotype–host interaction for any studied trait. Therefore, aphids feeding on host plants with elevated chemical defences appeared to reduce their detoxification costs and to increase their reproductive performance, which we interpret as a novel adaptation to defended plants. In brief, this study supports the notion that aphids perform better on highly defended host plants, probably related to the selective pressures during the colonization of New World agroecosystems, characterized by highly defended host plants.
Aboveground carbon loss in natural and managed tropical forests from 2000 to 2012

Tropical forests provide global climate regulation ecosystem services and their clearing is a significant source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and resultant radiative forcing of climate change. However, consensus on pan-tropical forest carbon dynamics is lacking. We present a new estimate that employs recommended good practices to quantify gross tropical forest aboveground carbon (AGC) loss from 2000 to 2012 through the integration of Landsat-derived tree canopy cover, height, intactness and forest cover loss and GLAS-lidar derived forest biomass. An unbiased estimate of forest loss area is produced using a stratified random sample with strata derived from a wall-to-wall 30 m forest cover loss map. Our sample-based results separate the gross loss of forest AGC into losses from natural forests (0.59 PgC yr−1) and losses from managed forests (0.43 PgC yr−1) including plantations, agroforestry systems and subsistence agriculture. Latin America accounts for 43% of gross AGC loss and 54% of natural forest AGC loss, with Brazil experiencing the highest AGC loss for both categories at national scales. We estimate gross tropical forest AGC loss and natural forest loss to account for 11% and 6% of global year 2012 CO2 emissions, respectively. Given recent trends, natural forests will likely constitute an increasingly smaller proportion of tropical forest GHG emissions and of global emissions as fossil fuel consumption increases, with implications for the valuation of co-benefits in tropical forest conservation.
Highly efficient in vitro translation of authentic affinity-purified messenger ribonucleoprotein complexes

Cell-free systems are widely used to study mechanisms and regulation of translation, but the use of in vitro transcribed (IVT) mRNAs as translation substrates limits their efficiency and utility. Here, we present an approach for in vitro translation of messenger ribonucleoprotein (mRNP) complexes affinity purified in association with tagged mRNAs expressed in mammalian cells. We show that in vitro translation of purified mRNPs is much more efficient than that achieved using standard IVT mRNA substrates and is compatible with physiological ionic conditions. The high efficiency of affinity-purified mRNP in vitro translation is attributable to both copurified protein components and proper mRNA processing and modification. Further, we use translation inhibitors to show that translation of purified mRNPs consists of separable phases of run-off elongation by copurified ribosomes and de novo initiation by ribosomes present in the translation extracts. We expect that this in vitro system will enhance mechanistic studies of eukaryotic translation and translation-associated processes by allowing the use of endogenous mRNPs as translation substrates under physiological buffer conditions.
An introduction to the potential of social networking sites in education

This paper reviews Social Networking Sites (SNS) that have become available via the Internet in the light of usability for teaching and learning. Membership rules relating to entries for some popular sites, such as “Facebook” and “MySpace” are reviewed. Characteristics of these sites are reviewed and then compared to evaluate the trust and privacy issues of shared information available to any given social group. Trust and privacy plays a critical role when SNS are used for the purpose of teaching and learning. Thus, the negative and positive aspects of SNS are reviewed in detail. This knowledge will form the basis to assist with regulating SNS for teaching and learning. Publication Details This conference paper was originally published as Griffith, S and Liyanage, L, An introduction to the potential of social networking sites in education, Proceedings of the Emerging Technologies Conference, University of Wollongong, 18-21 June 2008. This conference paper is available at Research Online: http://ro.uow. edu.au/etc08/9
Attentional Characteristics of Infants and Toddlers With Williams Syndrome During Triadic Interactions

Two studies were conducted to consider the looking behavior of infants and toddlers with Williams syndrome (WS). In Study 1, the looking behavior of a 10-month-old girl with WS during play sessions with her mother and with a stranger was compared to that of 2 groups of infants who were developing normally (ND), 1 matched for chronological age and the other for developmental age. The infant with WS spent more than twice as much time looking at her mother as the infants in either contrast group did. She also spent twice as much time looking at the stranger. In addition, during 78% of this time, her gaze at the stranger was coded as extremely intense. Looks of this intensity were virtually never made by the ND infants. In Study 2, the looking behavior of 31 individuals with WS ages 8 to 43 months during a genetics evaluation was compared to that of 319 control children in the same age range (242 with developmental delay due to causes other than WS). Twenty-three of the 25 participants with WS aged 33 months or younger demonstrated extended and intense looking at the geneticist. In contrast, none of the control participants looked extensively or intently at the geneticist. Findings are discussed in the context of previous research on arousal and focused attention during normal development and on temperament and personality of older children and adults with WS. It is argued that the unusual looking patterns evidenced by infants and toddlers with WS presage the unusual temperament and personality of older individuals with WS, and the possibility of a genetic basis for these behaviors is addressed.
The Behavior of Green Exchange Traded Funds

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate green exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and propose a market-wide proxy for green returns and a green volatility factor. Design/methodology/approach - Identifying a unique sample of green funds, this paper investigates the time-series behavior of returns for these investment vehicles and their associated conditional volatility dynamics via GARCH methodology. In this study, green ETFs are defined as index funds replicating market indices that invest in stocks exhibiting positive environmental, social, and governance characteristics. Findings - Cumulative market-wide green returns are found to be positive from inception year 2005 through 2008. Estimating a t-GARCH (1,1) specification, the author finds strong evidence in favor of volatility persistence for the 15 green ETFs identified in this study. Additionally, the results suggest that a 1 percent volatility-based value-at-risk forecast ranges from $24,150 through $26,000 on a daily basis. Finally, the empirical evidence provides support for weak-form market efficiency when examining the green universe of stocks. Research limitations/implications - Green ETFs are relatively recent financial instruments and exhibit important implications for volatility timing strategies and the cross-section of green stock returns. Practical implications - Knowledge of green price behavior is important in constructing optimal hedging and risk management strategies. Social implications - Green ETFs provide a natural channel for sustainable investing. Originality/value - Green ETFs exhibit the advantage of including many companies that have undertaken positive measures towards the global environment in their respective business models. This paper provides the first investigation of green ETFs.
Histone deacetylases 1 and 2 regulate autophagy flux and skeletal muscle homeostasis in mice

Maintenance of skeletal muscle structure and function requires efficient and precise metabolic control. Autophagy plays a key role in metabolic homeostasis of diverse tissues by recycling cellular constituents, particularly under conditions of caloric restriction, thereby normalizing cellular metabolism. Here we show that histone deacetylases (HDACs) 1 and 2 control skeletal muscle homeostasis and autophagy flux in mice. Skeletal muscle-specific deletion of both HDAC1 and HDAC2 results in perinatal lethality of a subset of mice, accompanied by mitochondrial abnormalities and sarcomere degeneration. Mutant mice that survive the first day of life develop a progressive myopathy characterized by muscle degeneration and regeneration, and abnormal metabolism resulting from a blockade to autophagy. HDAC1 and HDAC2 regulate skeletal muscle autophagy by mediating the induction of autophagic gene expression and the formation of autophagosomes, such that myofibers of mice lacking these HDACs accumulate toxic autophagic intermediates. Strikingly, feeding HDAC1/2 mutant mice a high-fat diet from the weaning age releases the block in autophagy and prevents myopathy in adult mice. These findings reveal an unprecedented and essential role for HDAC1 and HDAC2 in maintenance of skeletal muscle structure and function and show that, at least in some pathological conditions, myopathy may be mitigated by dietary modifications.
ICT and Productivity Growth in the United Kingdom

This paper develops new estimates of investment in and output of information and communications technology (ICT). These new estimates imply that GDP growth has been significantly understated, particularly since 1994. A growth accounting approach is employed to measure the contribution of ICT to the growth of both aggregate output and aggregate input. On both counts, the contribution of ICT has been rising over time. From 1989 to 1998, ICT output contributed a fifth of overall GDP growth. Since 1989, 55% of capital deepening has been contributed by ICT capital, and 90% since 1994. ICT capital deepening accounts for 25% of the growth of labour productivity over 1989-98 and 48% over 1994-98. But even when output growth is adjusted for the new ICT estimates, both labour productivity and TFP growth are still found to slow after 1994.
Sphingosine 1-Phosphate (S1P) Signaling Is Required for Maintenance of Hair Cells Mainly via Activation of S1P2

Hearing requires the transduction of vibrational forces by specialized epithelial cells in the cochlea known as hair cells. The human ear contains a finite number of terminally differentiated hair cells that, once lost by noise-induced damage or toxic insult, can never be regenerated. We report here that sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) signaling, mainly via activation of its cognate receptor S1P2, is required for the maintenance of vestibular and cochlear hair cells in vivo. Two S1P receptors, S1P2 and S1P3, were found to be expressed in the cochlea by reverse transcription-PCR and in situ hybridization. Mice that are null for both these receptors uniformly display progressive cochlear and vestibular defects with hair cell loss, resulting in complete deafness by 4 weeks of age and, with complete penetrance, balance defects of increasing severity. This study reveals the previously unknown role of S1P signaling in the maintenance of cochlear and vestibular integrity and suggests a means for therapeutic intervention in degenerative hearing loss.
Cutaneous manifestations of thyroid cancer: a report of four cases and review of the literature

Cutaneous metastases from thyroid carcinoma are rare. This report describes four cases of thyroid carcinoma metastatic to the skin. Two cases were medullary carcinoma and two were papillary thyroid carcinoma. In two cases, skin metastases were the presenting feature of the underlying thyroid carcinoma. Examination of the skin lesions by conventional light microscopy suggested the possibility of metastatic carcinoma and immunohistochemical tests confirmed the diagnosis. Subsequent investigations identified primary thyroid lesions. In two cases, the skin metastasis was the first evidence of the recurrence of known thyroid carcinoma. These cases identify a novel presentation of thyroid carcinoma.
Preferred Appeals as a Reflection of Culture: Mobile Phones Advertising in Vietnam

This study is an initial step to consider whether international brands should create global images or tailor the images to the local culture. Its objective is to explore the preferences of Vietnamese consumers on advertising appeals related to mobile phones and to see if those preferences reflect specific dimensions of the Vietnamese culture. Survey findings indicate that the consumers' preferences for advertising appeals do reflect the Vietnamese culture in power distance, masculinity and uncertainty avoidance. However, appeals related to collectivity and emotionality are less preferred to individuality and rationality, respectively. Differences among subgroups of consumers in terms of gender, age and price segments have also been identified.
Preparing Food at Home: What is the Labor Cost?

Food demand is an important component of the agricultural sector and much food preparation occurs in the home. While there is much information about the market cost of food, there has been no information about the preparation cost of food at home because there has been no data available on the quantity of time spent in food preparation. Using newly released time diary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this paper provides the first known estimates of the cost of time in food preparation at home. We also consider a demographic profile comparable with someone who may be on Food Stamps and following the recipes based on the USDA Thrifty Food Plan, which is designed to help low income groups on Food Stamps.
Screen Space Rendering Solution for Multiphase SPH Simulation

Fluid simulation using meshless methods has increasingly become a robust way to solve mechanics problems that require dealing with large deformations, and has become very popular in many applications such as naval engineering, mechanical engineering, movies and games. One of the main methods is the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). This work has two main goals: to propose a multiphase SPH formulation by extending the work of Silva et al. and to propose a shader based render solution for this kind of simulation. The proposed SPH method was able to simulate multiphase fluids with up to one million particles and the renderer was able to generate visually plausible results up to 60fps.
Identi ¢ cation of a second site compensatory mutation in the Fe-protein that allows diazotrophic growth of Azotobacter vinelandii UW 97

Azotobacter vinelandii UW97 is defective in nitrogen fixation due to a replacement of serine at position 44 by phenylalanine in the Fe-protein [Pulakat, L. , Hausman, B.S., Lei, S. and Gavini, N. (1996) J. Biol. Chem. 271, 1884^1889]. Serine residue 44 is located in a conserved domain that links the nucleotide binding site and the MoFe-protein docking surface of the Fe-protein. Therefore, it is possible that the loss of function by A. vinelandii UW97-Fe-protein may be caused by global conformational disruption or disruption of the conformational change upon MgATP binding. To determine whether it is possible to generate a functional nitrogenase complex via a compensating second site mutation(s) in the Fe-protein, we have attempted to isolate genetic revertants of A. vinelandii UW97 that can grow on nitrogen-free medium. One such revertant, designated A vinelandii BG9, encoded a Fe-protein that retained the Ser44Phe mutation and also had a second mutation that caused the replacement of a lysine at position 170 by glutamic acid. Lysine 170 is highly conserved and is located in a conserved region of the Fe-protein. This region is implicated in stabilizing the MgATP-induced conformation of the Fe-protein and in docking to the MoFe-protein. Further complementation analysis showed that the Fe-protein mutant that retained serine 44 but contained the substitution of lysine at position 170 by glutamic acid was also non-functional. Thus, neither Ser44Phe nor Lys170Glu mutants of Fe-protein were functional; however, the Fe-protein in A. vinelandii BG9 that contained both substitutions could support diazotrophic growth on the strain. ß 2000 Federation of European Biochemical Societies. Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
GraphD: Distributed Vertex-Centric Graph Processing Beyond the Memory Limit

We propose GraphD, an out-of-core Pregel-like system targeting efficient big graph processing with a small cluster of commodity PCs connected by Gigabit Ethernet, an environment affordable to most users. This is in contrast to some recent efforts for out-of-core graph computation with specialized hardware. In our setting, a vertex-centric program is often data-intensive, since the CPU cost of calculating a message value is negligible compared with the network cost of transmitting that message. As a result, network bandwidth is usually the bottleneck, and out-of-core execution would not sacrifice performance if disk IO overhead can be hidden by message transmission, which is achieved by GraphD through the parallelism of computation and communication. GraphD streams edge and message data on local disks, and thus consumes negligible memory space. For a broad class of Pregel algorithms where message combiner is applicable, GraphD completely eliminates the need of any expensive external-memory join or group-by, which is required by existing systems such as Pregelix and Chaos. Extensive experiments show that GraphD beats existing out-of-core systems by orders of magnitude, and achieves comparable performance to in-memory systems running with adequate memory.
D-chiro-inositol is more effective than myo-inositol in preventing folate-resistant mouse neural tube defects.

BACKGROUND Among mouse genetic mutants that develop neural tube defects (NTDs), some respond to folic acid administration during early pregnancy, whereas NTDs in other mutants are not prevented. This parallels human NTDs, in which up to 30% of cases may be resistant to folic acid. Most spina bifida cases in the folic acid-resistant 'curly tail' mouse can be prevented by treatment with inositol early in embryonic development. Here, the effectiveness and safety during pregnancy of two isomers, myo- and D-chiro-inositol, in preventing mouse NTDs was compared. METHODS AND RESULTS Inositol was administered either directly to embryos in vitro, or to pregnant females by s.c. or oral routes. Although D-chiro- and myo-inositol both reduced the frequency of spina bifida in curly tail mice by all routes of administration, D-chiro-inositol consistently exhibited the more potent effect, reducing spina bifida by 73-86% in utero compared with a 53-56% reduction with myo-inositol. Pathological analysis revealed no association of either myo- or D-chiro-inositol with reduced litter size or fetal malformation. CONCLUSIONS D-chiro-inositol offers a safe and effective method for preventing folic acid-resistant NTDs in the curly tail mouse. This raises the possibility of using inositol as an adjunct therapy to folic acid for prevention of NTDs in humans.
Leverage, Risk, Market Structure and Profitability

THIS paper attempts to analyze and measure the relationships among leverage, market structure, risk and profitability. It develops a theoretical model relating these variables and then tests the model using cross-section data on 228 United States manufacturing firms. An additional test is made using data from 85 industries with both tests covering the 1960's. Recently numerous studies have tested the relationship between market structure and rate of return (Hall and Weiss, 1967; Samuels and Smyth, 1968; Fisher and Hall, 1969; Shepherd 1971, 1972; Stigler, 1963; Kilpatrick, 1968; Collins and Preston, 1969; and Gale, 1972). Several of these authors have included a risk variable or a financial structure variable or both in a linear regression model. They have commonly represented the degree of risk by the variability of profits over time (hereafter denoted "o"). 'More recently, Gale (1972) has used financial structure (measured as the equity to assets ratio) to represent risk. Still other economists suggest that leverage may have an independent influence on the rate of return, unrelated to risk (Stigler, 1963; Scherer, 1970; Jean, 1970). At this point a more general test may resolve the alternative hypotheses. This paper will test both the Gale hypothesis and the Stigler, et al. hypotheses using a simultaneous 3-equation model.