Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Effects of cytogenin, a novel microbial product, on embryonic and tumor cell-induced angiogenic responses in vivo.

Cytogenin (8-hydroxy-3-hydroxymethyl-6-methoxyisocoumarin) is a new microbial product with antitumor and antirheumatoid arthritis effects in vivo when administered orally, although its mechanism(s) of action is not known well. Both neoplasia and rheumatoid arthritis are referred to as angiogenesis-dependent diseases. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of cytogenin on both physiological and pathological angiogenesis, using the growing chick embryo chorioallantoic membrane and mouse dorsal air sac assay systems, respectively. The microbial product at doses up to 100 micrograms/egg did not significantly affect embryonic angiogenesis when topically placed on the surface of the chorioallantoic membrane, suggesting that it has no effect on the physiological (or normal) angiogenic response. By contrast, systemic administration of cytogenin (100 mg/kg p.o., for 5 consecutive days) significantly suppressed angiogenesis induced by malignant tumor cells (S-180), one of pathological neovascularization, in a mouse dorsal air sac assay system. Pharmacokinetic studies in mice revealed that the maximal concentration of cytogenin in plasma after a single 100 mg/kg oral dose of the compound was 32 microM. In vitro experiments involving cultured vascular endothelial cells showed that cytogenin at concentrations determined by pharmacokinetic study, had little effect on plasminogen activator secretion, tube formation and the proliferation of endothelial cells. These results suggest that cytogenin is a novel oral antiangiogenic agent, that the mechanism of its antiangiogenic action contributes to its suppressive effects on both tumor growth and rheumatoid arthritis that we previously found, and that it could be developed as a potential therapeutic agent for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and other angiogenesis-dependent disorders such as diabetic retinopathy.
EE/CS148, Unsupervised Learning of Categories Final Project Report

In this report we present an implementation of a method for unsupervised learning of unlabeled images; that is a system that automatically groups images (or parts of them) in different categories depending on the object they contain. We implemented a part of the method that is presented by Grauman and Darrel’s paper: “Unsupervised Learning of Categories from Sets of Partially Matching Image Features” [1]. The results of our implementation experiments are not very satisfying, even for a small number of categories, but there are still some improvements that our system admits, and through tuning of some parameters it could give more satisfying results.
Macroeconomic Announcements and Private Information in the Foreign Exchange Market

This study investigates the existence of private information in the spot foreign exchange market by examining the impact of macroeconomic announcements on banks' currency pricing behavior. Using 5 years of indicative GBP/USD data and 11 U.S. macroeconomic announcements, we find that the price information share gap between the top 10 banks and the rest of the banks increases during the announcements compared to benchmark time. This is supportive evidence for the existence of private information on fundamentals in foreign exchange markets.
Phishing URL detection-based feature selection to classifiers

Phishing is an online scandalous act that occurs when a malevolent web page impersonates as legitimate web page in the intension of exploiting the confidential information from the user. Phishing attack continues to pose serious risk for web users and annoying threat in the field of electronic commerce. Feature selection is the process of removing unrelated features and thus reduces the dimensionality of the feature. This paper focuses on identifying the foremost features that categorise legitimate websites from phishing websites based on feature selection. In real world identifying phishing URL with low computational time and accuracy is very important and thus feature selection is considered in this work. A comparative study is carried out on different data mining classifiers before and after feature selection and the performance are evaluated in terms of accuracy and computational rate. The results indicate that the proposed approach detects phishing websites with considerable accuracy.
Credit Channels and Consumption in Europe: Empirical Evidence

This paper studies the macroeconomic relevance of credit channels of monetary policy by examining the impact of the external finance premium (EFP), that may vary over the business cycle, on private consumption in Europe. A consumption model incorporates credit channels by assuming that liquidity-constrained consumers not only use current income for financing their consumption, but also external finance, which availability depends on the EFP. The empirical analysis shows an accelerator effect of the EFP on consumption for Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. In contrast, for France, the United Kingdom and Belgium no evidence in favour of this financial propagation mechanism has been found.
COFFEE: coexist wifi for ZigBee networks: a frequency overlay approach

The 2.4 GHz ISM band is becoming increasingly over crowded with the ubiquitous usage of WiFi and ZigBee systems. WiFi Access Points (APs) are widely used in urban area for ubiquitous Internet access. Most of them, such as IEEE 802.11g [7] system, are leveraging OFDM communication scheme, and working at the frequency band from 2.402 to 2.482 GHz. The OFDM systems divide the 20 MHz bandwidth into 64 orthogonal subcarriers, and use 52 of them for data transmission. Meanwhile, the Wireless Senor Networks (WSNs) are also applied for real time and long term environmental monitoring in urban area such as urban sensing (e.g., City See) [10], as well as medical health care applications [13]. Unfortunately, the WSNs also select the crowded 2.4 GHz ISM band for communications, which is an over crowded spectrum band.
A Quarter-Century Review of Human Resource Management in the U.S.: The Growth in Importance of the International Perspective **

The past quarter century has witnessed many developments in the research and practice of managing human resources in the United States. In this article, we briefly describe two major areas in which these developments have been unfolding: strategic human resource management and international human resource management. Across these two areas of activity, HRM in the U. S. has evolved to encompass a greater appreciation of issues associated with: the systemic character of human resource management, the role that context plays in shaping HR policies and practices, the importance of demonstrating the effectiveness of HR policies and practices, the value of addressing the concerns of multiple stakeholders, the need for partnership in managing human resources, the complexity of managing human resources in multinational enterprises, and the challenge of developing theories and frameworks that provide new and useful insights about how to address all of these issues. We conclude with a brief summary and our thoughts about the future of HRM in the U.S. context and the continued importance of the international perspective.
Integrated high-performance data compression in the IBM z13

The IBM zEnterprise® Data Compression (zEDC) feature provides integrated high-performance data compression to the IBM z13™ and zEnterprise EC12 and BC12 processors. zEDC is a combined hardware feature (zEDC Express) and z/OS® software solution that provides high-performance, industry-standard-compliant compression and decompression. The zEDC Express device and the z/OS device support have been designed to provide compatibility with the zlib open source library for both compression and decompression. The base z/OS operating system and z/OS middleware significantly exploit the zEDC technology to provide access to this compression technology across a wide range of applications. This paper provides an overview of the zEDC Express hardware feature, the different z/OS device driver interfaces for using zEDC, including zlib, and discusses how this support was integrated into different aspects of the z/OS software stack.
Design of Dual-Polarized Frequency Selective Structure With Quasi-Elliptic Bandpass Response

This letter is concerned with the design of a dual-polarized frequency selective structure (FSS) consisting of a two-dimensional periodic array of dielectric-filled concentric waveguides. The operating principle and design guidelines of this dual-polarized structure are explained. A design example is provided, which shows a good agreement between simulated and measured results. It is demonstrated that the proposed FSS exhibits quasi-elliptical frequency response under dual polarizations, and its filtering performance is insensitive to the incident angle of incoming plane waves.
Nonfragile Fault-Tolerant Fuzzy Observer-Based Controller Design for Nonlinear Systems

The problem of actuator fault estimation and fault-tolerant control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems using Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy models is investigated. A design procedure for nonfragile proportional-integral (PI) observer is proposed to estimate the states of the nonlinear system and reconstruct the abrupt (modeled as step-like faults) and incipient fault signals. Subsequently, a nonfragile fault-tolerant controller is constructed, which is informed by the PI observer. Sufficient conditions of the existence of the PI observer and the fault-tolerant controller are provided in the form of linear matrix inequalities. The proposed fault-tolerant control architecture is tested on two numerical examples.
What Explains the Extent and Content of Social and Environmental Disclosures on Corporate Websites: A Study of Social and Environmental Reporting in Swedish Listed Corporations

The demand for information and transparency from corporations has increased over the last few years. Today, there are other information dissemination channels besides annual financial statements. One important channel is the Internet. The aim of this study is to explain the extent and content of social disclosure information on corporations' websites. The empirical data in this study is based on annual financial statements and such websites. A multi-theoretical framework is used in order to explain the extent and content of social disclosures on corporate websites. The findings support the positive correlation of size and profitability with the content of social disclosure information on these websites. In general, State-owned corporations disclose more social information on their websites than privately owned corporations do. There are significant differences between different industries. This is true regarding not only the extent of social disclosures, but also their content. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.
Problem business loans rise at large banks

Measures of problem loans at commercial banks declined over much of the period since the trough of the last recession in 1991. Bank supervisors have expressed concern, however, about increases in problem business loans at large banks in recent quarters. The tables provide perspective on recent trends in problem-loan ratios by presenting measures of problem commercial and industrial loans since 1991. One measure of problem loans is the percentage of loans that are nonperforming. Nonperforming loans include those that are 90 days or more past due or no longer accruing interest. Another measure is the net charge-off rate: loans charged off as losses, minus recoveries by banks on loans previously charged off, as a percentage of loans. Net charge-offs tend to reflect more serious loan problems, because only some loans classified as nonperforming are later charged off as losses. Recent trends in nonperforming loan rates vary by bank size. The large increases in nonperforming loan rates in recent quarters are concentrated among the banks with total assets greater than $10 billion, which accounted for 77.5 percent of the commercial and industrial loans of all commercial banks in the second quarter of 2000. For instance, the nonperforming loan rate for banks with total assets above $20 billion has risen progressively from 0.75 percent in 1997 (mean of quarterly ratios) to 1.42 percent in the second quarter of 2000. This rate has also increased substantially since 1997 for banks with total assets between $10 billion and $20 billion. The nonperforming loan ratios in the first two quarters of 2000 for these two groups of large banks are comparable to the nonperforming ratios for banks of similar size in 1994, early in the current expansion. In contrast, the average nonperforming loan rates have not risen in recent quarters among banks with total assets less than $1 billion, which accounted for 11.2 percent of commercial and industrial loans in the second quarter of 2000. Net charge-off ratios (at annual rates) have risen since the mid-1990s at banks with total assets over $1 billion. Among smaller banks, charge-off rates in the first two quarters of 2000 were about the same as the charge-off rates for banks of similar size in the mid-1990s. These patterns support the view that recent adverse trends in problem loan ratios are concentrated among the relatively large banks. —R. Alton Gilbert
Exercise-Induced Asthma: Nutritional Management

Exercise-induced asthma (EIA) refers to the transient narrowing of the airways following strenuous exercise in asthmatic and otherwise healthy individuals. Despite the heterogeneous treatment options for patients with EIA, there remains a substantial burden of unaddressed disease, even with optimal treatment. Epidemiological studies indicate that patients frequently resort to complementary and alternative therapies while being treated for asthma and other chronic health conditions. There is now convincing evidence that many dietary factors such as increased omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids, antioxidant intake and caffeine, and a sodium-restricted diet can reduce the severity of EIA. It is important that these dietary therapies be safe, effective, and likely to be used by individuals with EIA. This review will critically examine whether dietary modification represents a beneficial intervention for asthmatic individuals with EIA.
Challenges Facing Implementation of Public Private Partnership Projects in Nairobi City County

This study addresses the issues that challenge the implementation of the public private partnership projects in Nairobi City County. Like all projects, implementation stage is always faced with challenges that have to be overcome to realize the desired outcome-in this case Nairobi City County has to be able to face the challenging situations which have to be dealt with in order to realize its development plan. This study has identified those challenges. The general objective was to find out the challenges that face the implementation of Public Private Partnership Projects in Nairobi City County. The specific objectives were: the examination of policy framework; institutional framework; legal framework; project planning; and project cost sharing among partners in a PPP at Nairobi City County. The problem being lack of effective policy, institutional and legal frameworks or poor planning of PPP projects. The Primary data was collected using interview guide and use of questionnaires while secondary data was collected through desk research. Through stratified sampling, Finance and Economic Sector was selected to participate in the study. This is the sector that deals with PPP project implementation. The study used primary data, which was gathered from respondents using a structured questionnaire, which was analyzed using descriptive statistics. Staffs of departments whose functions use the PPP strategy were given questionnaires that they filled and responded accordingly. The study found out that despite PPP Projects being under the Finance and Economic Sector most of the staff were not actively involved in PPP Project selection, the PPP Policy, Institutional and Legal frameworks are not adequate enough to permit effective implementation of PPP Projects. Equally the level of involvement of staff in project planning is also on a very low scale. In terms of Cost sharing respondents felt that it does not play a major role in PPP project implementation. The study also studied the contract agreements, minutes of council and/or county resolutions and quarterly reports to get secondary data. Content analysis was used to analyze the data collected. The study concluded that the main challenges facing the implementation of PPP Projects at Nairobi City County are ineffective policy, institutional and legal framework. The study recommends that staff in the relevant sector dealing with PPP be fully involved in project implementation from the policy formulation stage through planning to project completion stage. The staff also needs to be trained on Project Management. Key words; Projects; Public private partnerships; cost sharing; legal; institutional and policy frameworks
Building innovative models of territorial governance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine public‐private partnerships with a particular focus on the impact that such partnerships have on territorial governance. These organizations are spread all over the world with the goal of promoting community participation and sustainable development, and engaging citizens and organizations in the decision making of local governance. This situation underlines important changes in governance and territorial governance models.Design/methodology/approach – A mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches are used. Analysing the existing literature, the paper focuses on specific type of public‐private partnership: the Local Action Group (LAG). Specifically, this study focuses on 63 Italian LAGs, in order to highlight their role in the challenges that local governance has to face.Findings – Findings suggest that public‐private partnerships can represent a new model of governance – the Partnership Governance – with features that differentiate this form from other.
The impact of perceived innovativeness on maintaining a buyer–seller relationship in health care markets: A cross-cultural study

Abstract This article focuses on the importance of perceived innovativeness, as well as corporate reputation, for the buyer–seller relationship and, therefore, enhances previous studies of customer satisfaction and loyalty. A conceptual model is extended within the commitment–trust framework. A set of research propositions is evaluated using data from three Western markets (Finland, Germany, and Spain) and the Russian transition economy. Our study enlarges existing models on service quality expectations and customer satisfaction in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, and challenges the importance of innovativeness and corporate reputation. We find that expectations in products and services impact the perceived value for money in Russia and Germany only. The perceived innovativeness of the vendors turns out to be relevant in three out of four cultures. Among our study's managerial implications is that the values in exchange are clearly related to the cultural values of the customers. Hence, not only the concept of utility, but also the concepts of value in use and values in exchange need cultural embedded marketing interpretations. Also, we derive a set of rules of thumb to guide practitioners in improving their business.
Structure-activity relationship for antibacterial action of phenolic and aromatic nitro compounds. An attempt at systematic identification of new antibacterial agents.

A structure-activity relationship between antibacterial activity and the energy of the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) of phenolic and aromatic nitro compounds was derived based on results obtained with eight strains of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. The reliability of the correlation was confirmed by measuring the minimum inhibitory concentration at various pH values of the medium ; it was found that the undissociated molecular species having a low lying LUMO is essential for strong antibacterial activity. Based on the above results, 2, 4, 6-trinitroanisole was examined, and it proved to have a remarkably strong antibacterial activity (200 times stronger than that of 2, 4, 6-trinitrophenol).
Path of Improving Industrial Technological Innovation Capability

Nowadays China? s industrial technological innovation capability is still lower. The research of enhancement path of industrial technological capability based on introduction-mode technological leapfrogging is important and crucial. The article proposes the conceptual model of the path from enterprises? introduction-mode technological leapfrogging to industrial technological innovation capability improving, puts forward 10 hypothesis based on conceptual model, collects the data and information by distributing questionnaires to enterprises in Tianjin city, applies SPSS 19.0 to test the reliability and validity of the questionnaires, applies AMOS 17.0 to analyze the data and test the model, and eventually finds the path from enterprises? introduction-mode technological leapfrogging to industrial technological innovation capability improving.
Running head : PTSD RISK FACTORS Risk Factors for the Development of PTSD

There have not been a great deal of studies done on all of the risk factors for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), however the research that has been done has provided copious amounts of information to our understanding of what exactly increases the risk for developing this disorder. Some of the most well known risk factors for PTSD are genetics, ethnicity, previous trauma, previous psychological conditions, personality, and social support. Eight studies were reviewed to gain a stronger understanding of the role each of these factors play in the development of PTSD.
The yin and yang of introducing a sales culture: the Amalgam Bank Case

Purpose – The purpose of this study was to explore the introduction of a “sales culture” at one of the ten largest US banks. Identifying and analyzing the existing human relations problems should enable constructive competitive improvements to be made in the future. Design/methodology/approach – The major findings of our interviews with tellers and customer service representatives are compared to how the managers presented the sales culture, as well as the relevant cultural literature. The metaphor of the yin and the yang will be used to shed light on the tense and fluctuating interconnection of certain phenomenon. Findings – Amalgam Bank’s sales did increase, but unanticipated problems also surfaced. The new sales duties slowed service and irritated customers. The teller referral quota proved unrealistic. The sales incentive point system provided little motivation. The negative tended to be stressed in sales meetings. When employees raised concerns, their managers replied with silencing behaviors. Furthe.
Design of high-performance networked real-time control systems

The performance of a networked control system (NCS) is affected directly and indirectly by time delays generated in network communication. This paper addresses these time delays, their effects on system performance and the measures taken in an NCS design. For a time delay that is random but less than one sampling interval T, we model the system as a time-invariant control system with constant time delay T. For a time delay that is random and greater than one sampling interval T, we consider the system as a control system with packet drop and model it as a jump linear control system. Based on the above models, we propose a systematic method to improve the control system quality of performance by choosing a proper sampling interval to reduce data transmission, optimally scheduling to minimise packet loss and optimising controller design in case of packet loss. The simulation results and lab experiments demonstrate that the design method results in high performance in networked real-time control system.