Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nigella sativa protects against ischaemia/reperfusion injury in rat kidneys.

BACKGROUND Renal ischaemia followed by reperfusion leads to acute renal failure in both native kidneys and renal allografts, which is a complex pathophysiologic process involving hypoxia and free radical (FR) damage. The oil of Nigella sativa (NSO) has been subjected to considerable pharmacological investigations that have revealed its antioxidant activity in different conditions. But there is no previously reported study about its effect on ischaemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury of kidneys. The aim of this study was to investigate the possible effects of NSO in I/R-induced renal injury in rats. METHODS Thirty healthy male Wistar albino rats were randomly assigned to one of the following groups: control, sham, I/R, NSO+I/R, I/R+NSO and NSO. I/R, NSO+I/R and I/R+NSO rats were subjected to bilateral renal ischaemia followed by reperfusion and then all the rats were killed and kidney function tests, serum and tissue oxidants and antioxidants were determined and histopathological examinations were performed. RESULTS Pre- and post-treatment with NSO produced reduction in serum levels of blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and creatinine caused by I/R and significantly improved serum enzymatic activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathion peroxidase (GSH-Px) and also tissue enzymatic activities of catalase (CAT), SOD and GSH-Px. NSO treatment resulted in lower total oxidant status (TOS) and higher total antioxidant capacity (TAC) levels and also significant reduction in serum and tissue malondialdehyde (MDA), nitric oxide (NO) and protein carbonyl content (PCC) that were increased by renal I/R injury. The kidneys of untreated ischaemic rats had a higher histopathological score, while treatment with NSO nearly preserved the normal morphology of the kidney. CONCLUSIONS In view of previous observations and our data, with the potent FR scavenger and antioxidant properties, NSO seems to be a highly promising agent for protecting tissues from oxidative damage and preventing organ damage due to renal I/R.
Prepayment, Default, and the Valuation of Mortgage Pass-through Securities

This article investigates the interaction of prepayment and default decisions in the valuation of mortgage pass-through securities. Even though a mortgage pass-through security is typically guaranteed by a financial intermediary, default decisions affect the timing of its cash flows and, therefore, its value. The authors also investigate the equilibrium valuation of the default insurance provided by the financial intermediary. The equilibrium insurance fee varies with prevailing interest rates, with prepayment possibilities, and, most significantly, with the volatility and value of the underlying mortgaged house. To the extent that a fixed insurance fee is charged, the authors' analysis suggests that default insurance is not properly priced. Copyright 1992 by University of Chicago Press.
The Evolution of China’s City Size Distribution: Empirical Evidence from 1949 to 2008

This paper studies the evolution of China’s city size distribution, measured by non-agricultural population, from 1949 to 2008. We employ time series Gini coefficients, panel unit root test of Gibrat’s law, and analysis of distribution dynamics, to check the robustness of our findings. We find that although China’s city size distribution presented different patterns of growth in the short run, it has shown an approximately parallel growth model in the long run. This indicates that the parallel growth rule of city size distribution also applies to developing countries, though it might work differently there. In countries with relatively mature and complete urban systems, the parallel growth results from similar growth rates in all the cities. In developing countries experiencing rapid urbanization, the parallel growth mainly results from the emergence and rise of a large number of new cities, which offsets the fast growth rate of large cities. This also demonstrates that government policy aiming at affecting city size may be misleading.
Direct power control with hybrid approach for active power filter applications

Hybrid control approach for pq instantaneous power theory applied to the 3-phase 4-wire active power filter is proposed. The control methods lead to a simple technique inherited from the conventional direct control method and offer a good dynamic response for active filtering in power system. With the goal to simplify the implementation, 2 methods — i.e. best vector selection and angle-based vector selection — are tested and evaluated. The two methods are compared according to the computation time required for the digital implementation. The analysis is verified using the PSIM simulation software.
submitter : A DMA-train for precision measurement of sub-10 nm aerosol dynamics

Abstract. Measurements of aerosol dynamics in the sub-10 nm size range are crucially important for quantifying the impact of new particle formation onto the global budget of cloud condensation nuclei. Here we present the development and characterization of a differential mobility analyzer train (DMA-train), operating six DMAs in parallel for high-time-resolution particle-size-distribution measurements below 10 nm. The DMAs are operated at six different but fixed voltages and hence sizes, together with six state-of-the-art condensation particle counters (CPCs). Two Airmodus A10 particle size magnifiers (PSM) are used for channels below 2.5 nm while sizes above 2.5 nm are detected by TSI 3776 butanol-based or TSI 3788 water-based CPCs. We report the transfer functions and characteristics of six identical Grimm S-DMAs as well as the calibration of a butanol-based TSI model 3776 CPC, a water-based TSI model 3788 CPC and an Airmodus A10 PSM. We find cutoff diameters similar to those reported in the literature. The performance of the DMA-train is tested with a rapidly changing aerosol of a tungsten oxide particle generator during warmup. Additionally we report a measurement of new particle formation taken during a nucleation event in the CLOUD chamber experiment at CERN. We find that the DMA-train is able to bridge the gap between currently well-established measurement techniques in the cluster–particle transition regime, providing high time resolution and accurate size information of neutral and charged particles even at atmospheric particle concentrations.
Informing Systems, Interventions, and Innovations

The Informing Science Institute (ISI) is an informing system, designed using informing science principles, for the express purpose of informing researchers who study problems related to informing. The ISI provides several informing channels, including peer reviewed journals, conferences, books, and outreach activities. The ISI seeks to resonate with university researchers to provide rigorous and relevant information about informing research. The ISI prints and electronically publishes peer reviewed scientific literature concerning the transdiscipline of informing science at no charge to the authors or readers, with open access for all, in eight academic journals. This paper discusses what informing science is, the need for a transdiscipline, the channels of the ISI informing system, and describes the clients of the ISI. This paper also analyzes the authors, institutions, and countries of origin for every ISI paper published between 1998 and 2009, as well as reporting interviews with the Editor-In-Chiefs of each ISI journal. Introduction Academic research today is often conducted through the myopic lens of one discipline or another, using the approaches favored by a specific discipline, and with the results published in journals dedicated to and commonly only read by one discipline. There are many complex
Consuming Space, Nature and Culture: Patrimonial Discussions in the Hyper-Modern Era

Abstract This paper reflects on what is called the process of ‘patrimonialization’ of culture and nature currently taking place in the Western mountainous inlands of the Spanish Eastern Pyrenees. Landscapes, as cultural and historical formations, are presently being commodified and connected to global networks of consumption dominated by urban and ‘postmaterialistic’ values. Conservation policies, ski resorts and cultural museums are mushrooming in previously ‘abandoned’ agricultural fields or vacated factories. This shift from agriculture, ranching and industry, to conservation and services marks the connection of the Pyrenean valleys to global modernity and to the hyper-modern era. These processes of transformation have been depicted generally as structural processes of unilateral redefinition of the urban–rural divide: redefinition that results in direct urban appropriation. Rural populations, however, are far from passive subjects of external influences. The analysis of local agency suggests a more complicated picture in which local economic and cultural choices are included as explanatory variables. The story of the connection of these spaces to regional and global networks is not only a story about local dispossession, but also about local ingenuity. The globalization of the economy in the early 1970s disempowered and relegated these areas to the periphery of the economic system. The consolidation of a global modernity articulated around the need to provide leisure has opened a venue for these areas to reconnect themselves to the central networks and to attract large amounts of resources from these urban-dominated economic systems.
PINwI: pedestrian indoor navigation without infrastructure

Navigation in larger unfamiliar buildings like town halls, airports, shopping malls or other public indoor locations is often difficult for humans. Due to the high amount of infrastructure needed for indoor positioning, just a few navigation services for indoor environments exist. Therefore in many of these buildings 'YOU-ARE-HERE' (YAH) maps are provided, often located at the entrance or other key places, to facilitate orientation and navigation within the building, but they have the disadvantages of being stationary. In this paper, we try to overcome these problems by presenting PINwI (Pedestrian Indoor Navigation without Infrastructure), an application that allows the user of a mobile camera device with integrated compass and accelerometer to utilize a photo of such an indoor YAH-map to navigate through the corresponding building. Using a dead reckoning approach, we enrich stationary analog YAH-maps with basic location functionality and turn them into a digital and dynamic medium that can help decision making while taking turns or estimating distances.
Lessons learned and success of initiatives to rehabilitate degraded forests in Guangdong Province, China

The rehabilitation of degraded forests is widely recognized, with a consensus that technical, economic, environmental and social factors must all be considered in practice. Rehabilitating degraded forests has been being one of the Guangdong Provincial Government's most important priorities. Several successful efforts and a holistic approach have been made to rehabilitate the degraded forest landscape and increase forest cover. This paper assesses the characteristics of eight rehabilitation initiatives identified in Guangdong Province, their outcomes and influencing factors, and sustainability of technical, social–economic, long-term management and financing factors using a literature search and 22 case studies obtained by means of questionnaires and interviews. The case studies help to elucidate implementation activities and outcomes on the ground. The objective of this paper is to draw strategic lessons for sustaining and guiding current and future efforts both within China and elsewhere in the world.
First Report of Vibrio harveyi Infection in Diseased Common Dentex ( Dentex dentex ) Cultured in Turkey *

In the present work, Vibrio harveyi was consistently isolated from diseased common dentex (Dentex dentex) cultured in Turkey. The outbreak occurred in July (2013), following the transportation of common dentex juveniles from hatchery to offshore floating cages. Five moribund cultured common dentex individuals, about 20-25 g in weight, were selected from the said floating cages and samples were taken from internal organs including liver, spleen, kidney and eye tissue. A total of eight pure cultures were obtained and identified through basic biochemical characterisation as well as 16S rRNA gene sequencing. To our knowledge, this is the first report of Vibrio harveyi infection in cultured common dentex in Turkey.
A Metafrontier Analysis of Technical Efficiency of Selected European Agricultures

Technical efficiency refers to the situation where it is impossible for a firm to produce, with the given know-how, (1) a larger output from the same inputs or (2) the same output with less of one or more inputs without increasing the amount of other inputs. In practice, the interest is on the relative position in terms of efficiency of a particular firm with respect to others. Therefore, technical efficiency is characterised by the relationship between observed production and some ideal or potential production (Greene, 1993). Although the beginning of the efficiency work can be traced to the 1950s (Farrell, 1957), there have been a growing interest on its use in benchmarking performance, predominantly as a means of identifying best practice and improving the efficiency of resource use within the agricultural industry (e.g., Defra 2004, SAC 2009). This paper deals with the estimation of technical efficiency for the agricultural sectors in several European countries and moreover, it aims to compare the efficiency amongst them using a metafrontier analysis. The use of this type of analysis is justified because a frontier, which represents the best available technology within a particular region/country cannot be strictly compared across other regions/countries, unless they operate under the same production set. The metafrontier analysis has been developed in a number of studies (Battese and Rao, 2002; Nkamleu et al., 2006; Chen and Song, 2006; O‟Donnell et al., 2008.) The metafrontier analysis in this paper, which uses data from the Farm Accountancy data Network (FADN), was focused on four farm types: two specialised farming types (i.e., specialist cereals, oilseed and protein crops and specialist dairying) and two more mixed farming sets (i.e., general field cropping and mixed farms), and was applied to a total of 11 countries namely Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. For most of the countries the information was available from 1995 until 2007, excepting Hungary and Poland, for which it was available only since 2004. Also note that not all the farm types were available for all the countries. The structure of the paper is as follows: it starts presenting an overview of the metafrontier analysis used to compare technical efficiency amongst the European countries. It is followed by the empirical work, which comprises a description of the data used, the estimation and discussion of the results. Finally we present conclusions.
Dynamic Determinantal Point Processes

The determinantal point process (DPP) has been receiving increasing attention in machine learning as a generative model of subsets consisting of relevant and diverse items. Recently, there has been a significant progress in developing efficient algorithms for learning the kernel matrix that characterizes a DPP. Here, we propose a dynamic DPP, which is a DPP whose kernel can change over time, and develop efficient learning algorithms for the dynamic DPP. In the dynamic DPP, the kernel depends on the subsets selected in the past, but we assume a particular structure in the dependency to allow efficient learning. We also assume that the kernel has a low rank and exploit a recently proposed learning algorithm for the DPP with low-rank factorization, but also show that its bottleneck computation can be reduced from O(M2 K) time to O(M K2) time, where M is the number of items under consideration, and K is the rank of the kernel, which can be set smaller than M by orders of magnitude.
Civic Education and Political Knowledge in Australia

As part of the renewed emphasis on national identity and citizenship, interest in civic education in Australia has increased. Although both Labor and Liberal national governments have been committed to introducing civic education, there is little research to show that the politically knowledgeable citizen is the more sophisticated and competent citizen. This paper uses survey data collected in 1996 to examine the extent of political knowledge in Australia and to analyse its consequences for political literacy, competence, and participation. The results show that the median citizen could answer two out of seven factual questions correctly, with women, the young and those with less education being more likely to provide incorrect answers. The relationship between knowledge and attitudes and behaviour shows that factual knowledge increases political literacy and, to a lesser extent, competence. However, knowledge has little effect on political participation, a major goal for civic education among politicians.
Designing a Two-Sided Platform: When To Increase Search Costs?

We propose a model for analyzing an intermediary’s incentives to increase the search costs incurred by consumers looking for sellers (stores). First, we show that the quality of the search service offered to consumers is more likely to be degraded (i.e. the probability that consumers find their favorite store in the first round of search is less than 1) when the intermediary derives higher revenues from consumers shopping at the lesser-known store relative to revenues from consumers shopping at the more popular store. Second, the intermediary may have an incentive to degrade the quality of search even further when its design decision influences the prices charged by stores. By altering the composition of demand faced by stores, the intermediary can force the latter to price lower and thereby increase total consumer traffic.
A 12.42μA 0.192ppm/°C high PSRR curvature-compensated CMOS bandgap voltage reference

A high order curvature-compensated CMOS bandgap voltage reference(BGR) is presented in TSMC 0. 35μm CMOS technology with low power low temperature-coefficient(TC) and high power supply rejection ratio(PSRR). The design is used in low dropout regulators which is applied in implanted chips. TC is compensated by adjusting resistor ratio which have different temperature characteristics. A PSRR enhance circuit is inserted in this circuit to maintain a constant gate-source voltage in the current mirror. A TC is 0.192ppm/°C at 3.3V supply and a line regulation is 4.5ppm/V at room temperature. The circuit has a constant voltage of 1.14 V. The circuit performs a PSRR property of 106dB@1kHz and 46dB@1MHz. The circuit consumes a maximum supply current of 12. 42μA and start-up time is 2. 04μs.
The Extent of the World Coffee Market

This paper employs a novel method to determine whether the prices of various types of coffee are co-integrated. In the spirit of Stigler's arbitrage definition of the market, an attempt is made to test whether all the prices co-integrate in pairs, implying that there is a single market for coffee. This test for co-integration is carried out using both linear and non-linear approaches. This finding demonstrates that the conclusions drawn from the linear and non-linear tests may be drastically different.
Attrition of Knowledge Workforce in Healthcare in Northern parts of India – Health Information Technology as a Plausible Retention Strategy

Faced with a global shortage of skilled health workers due to attrition, countries are struggling to build and maintain optimum knowledge workforce in healthcare for delivering quality healthcare services. Forces that affect healthcare professionals’ turnover needs to be addressed before a competent uniformly adoptable strategy could be proposed for mitigating the problem. In this study we investigate the effects of the socio–demographic characteristics on attrition of healthcare knowledge workforce in northern parts of India that have a wide gradient of rural and urban belt, taking into account both public and private healthcare organizations.
Impact of Anxiety and Depression on Physical Health Condition and Disability in an Elderly Korean Population

Objective This study aimed to investigate the longitudinal effects of anxiety, depression, and their comorbidity on physical disorders and disability in an elderly Korean population. Methods In total, 1,204 community-dwelling elders were evaluated at baseline, and of these 909 (75%) were re-assessed two years later. Anxiety and depression were identified at baseline using questions from the community version of the Geriatric Mental State diagnostic schedule (GMS-B3). Participants were assessed for functional disability and for 11 physical disorders both at baseline and at follow-up. Results Anxiety alone was associated with the incidence of heart disease, depression alone with the incidence of asthma, and comorbid anxiety and depression with incidence of eyesight problem, persistent cough, asthma, hypertension, heart disease, and gastrointestinal problems. Comorbid anxiety and depression were associated with an increase in the number of physical disorders and the degree of disability during the two-year follow-up, compared to anxiety or depression alone or the absence of anxiety or depression. Conclusion Anxiety, depression, and particularly their comorbidity should be assessed in the elderly population considering their longitudinal effects on physical disorders and disability. Future study is required to determine whether interventions aimed at these disorders can mitigate their impacts.
Health Systems and Their Assessment: A Methodological Proposal of the Synthetic Outcome Measure

The effectiveness of health systems is an area of constant interest for public health researchers and practitioners. The varied approach to effectiveness itself has resulted in numerous methodological proposals related to its measurement. The limitations of the currently used methods lead to a constant search for better tools for the assessment of health systems. This article shows the possibilities of using the health system synthetic outcome measure (SOM) for this purpose. It is an original tool using 41 indicators referring to the epidemiological situation, health behaviors, and factors related to the health-care system, which allows a relatively quick and easy assessment of the health system in terms of its effectiveness. Construction of the measure of health system functioning in such a way allowed its presentation in dynamic perspective, i.e., assessing not only the health system itself in a given moment of time but also changes in the value of the effectiveness measures. In order to demonstrate the cognitive value of the SOM, the analysis of the effectiveness of health systems in 21 countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the transformation period was carried out. The mean SOM values calculated on the basis of the component measures allowed to differentiate countries in terms of the effectiveness of their health systems. Considering the whole period, a similar level of health system effects can be observed in Slovenia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Macedonia, and Albania. In the middle group, Hungary, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia, Estonia, Bulgaria, Belarus, and Armenia were found. The third group, weakest in terms of achieved effects, was formed by health systems in countries like Ukraine, Moldova, and Russia. The presented method allows for the analysis of the health system outcomes from a comparative angle, eliminating arbitrariness of pinpointing a model solution as a potential reference point in the assessment of the systems. The measure, with the use of additional statistical tools to establish correlations with elements of the external and internal environment of a health system, allows for conducting analyses of conditions for differences in the effects of health system operation and circumstances for the effectiveness of reform processes.