Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Ghana Community Network Services Ltd (GCNet): Implementation Challenges

Clift (2006) confirms that, “The information-age, led by Internet content, software, technology, and connectivity, is changing society and the way we can best meet public challenges. E-democracy, e-Governance, and public net-work are three interrelated concepts that will help us map out our opportunity to more effectively participate, govern, and do public work. ” This chapter pays particular attention to the e-Governance concept example with emphasis on Ghana’s benchmark trade facilitation e-governance initiative, the GCNET, which has emboldened the government’s e-government programme. The reader has the benefit of knowing about the initiative’s genesis and implementation challenges including the obvious challenges of creation and displaying a will to change within the governmentthe provision of political will; overcoming the resistance to change, and creating an ICTaware-citizenry. The question is whether this initiative has been an enabler, as ICT tools are meant to be, in positively developing Ghana’s trade facilitation process. Views from some stake holders; attempts to improve the system and recommendations are also considered.
Staurosporine: An Effective Inhibitor for Ca2+/Calmodulin‐Dependent Protein Kinase II

Abstract: We investigated the effect of staurosporine on Ca2+/calmodulin‐dependent protein kinase II (CaM kinase II) purified from rat brain. (a) Staurosporine (10–100 nM) inhibited the activity of CaM kinase II. The half‐maximal and maximal inhibitory concentrations were 20 and 100 nM, respectively. (b) The inhibition with staurosporine was of the noncompetitive type with respect to ATP, calmodulin, and phosphate acceptor (β‐casein). (c) Staurosporine suppressed the autophosphorylation of α‐ and β‐subunits of CaM kinase II at concentrations similar to those at which the enzyme activity was inhibited. (d) Staurosporine also attenuated the Ca2+ calmodulin‐independent activity of the autophosphorylated CaM kinase II. These results suggest that staurosporine inhibits CaM kinase II by interacting with the catalytic domain, distinct from the ATP‐binding site or substrate‐binding site, of the enzyme and that staurosporine is an effective inhibitor for CaM kinase II in the cell system.
Analysis of the Inhibition of MyoD Activity by ITF-2B and Full-length E12/E47*

MyoD heterodimerizes with E type factors (E12/E47 and ITF-2A/ITF-2B) and binds E box sequences within promoters of muscle-specific genes. In transient transfection assays, MyoD activates transcription in the presence of ITF-2A but not ITF-2B, which contains a 182-amino acid N-terminal extension. The first 83 amino acids of the inhibitory N terminus of ITF-2B show high sequence homology to the N terminus of full-length E12/E47. Previous studies that showed activation of MyoD by E12 used an artificially N-terminally truncated form. Here we show that the full-length form of E12 inhibits MyoD function. A conserved α-helix motif, capable of interacting with the transcriptional machinery, was not essential for inhibition. Furthermore, the fusion of N-terminal ITF-2B sequences or non-inhibiting ITF-2A sequences to truncated E12 was sufficient in converting the activator into an inhibitor. Overexpression of ITF-2B did not inhibit C2C12 myogenesis or affect levels of endogenous muscle gene expression, consistent with the finding that inhibitory E type proteins are present in muscle. Furthermore, we found that MyoD co-transfected with either ITF-2B or ITF-2A converted fibroblasts into myoblasts with the same frequency. Our findings suggest that the ability of E type proteins to inhibit MyoD activity is dependent on the context of the E box.
Determinants of Online Information Credibility: A Case of Korean Medical Tourism Industry 1

The aim of this paper is to propose a new model for enhancing medical tourism destination image. The model considers the credibility of both supplier-based official websites and buyer-based private SNS, which influences medical tourism destination image. Medical tourism websites provide supplier-based information storage, while SNS information about Korean medical tourism contains buyerbased information. These two channels play important factors in positioning Korea as a medical tourism destination.
Respiratory syncytial virus hospitalisation trends in children with haemodynamically significant heart disease, 1997–2012

Abstract Objective The aim of the study was to evaluate the trends in respiratory syncytial virus-related hospitalisations and associated outcomes in children with haemodynamically significant heart disease in the United States of America. Study design The Kids’ Inpatient Databases (1997–2012) were used to estimate the incidence of respiratory syncytial virus hospitalisation among children ⩽24 months with or without haemodynamically significant heart disease. Weighted multivariable logistic regression and chi-square tests were used to evaluate the trends over time and factors associated with hospitalisation, comparing eras before and after publication of the 2003 American Academy of Pediatrics palivizumab immunoprophylaxis guidelines. Secondary outcomes included in-hospital mortality, morbidity, length of stay, and cost. Results Overall, 549,265 respiratory syncytial virus-related hospitalisations were evaluated, including 2518 (0.5%) in children with haemodynamically significant heart disease. The incidence of respiratory syncytial virus hospitalisation in children with haemodynamically significant heart disease decreased by 36% when comparing pre- and post-palivizumab guideline eras versus an 8% decline in children without haemodynamically significant heart disease (p<0.001). Children with haemodynamically significant heart disease had higher rates of respiratory syncytial virus-associated mortality (4.9 versus 0.1%, p<0.001) and morbidity (31.5 versus 3.5%, p<0.001) and longer hospital length of stay (17.9 versus 3.9 days, p<0.001) compared with children without haemodynamically significant heart disease. The mean cost of respiratory syncytial virus hospitalisation in 2009 was $58,166 (95% CI:$46,017, $70,315). Conclusions These data provide stakeholders with a means to evaluate the cost–utility of various immunoprophylaxis strategies.
Low noise Si based monolithic transimpedance amplifiers for 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps applications

Design information is given for developing microwave and millimeter-wave silicon based low noise broadband monolithic transimpedance amplifiers. The required layout optimizations for SiGe HBTs and CMOS devices are described and the foundry selection criteria we employed are reported. An efficient high frequency passive devices implementation and high frequency connectivity solutions with external circuitry are also considered. The full design of two CMOS monolithic circuits and three HBT ultra wide band MMICs circuits under fabrication is then described.
Risk-Taking Behaviors Engaged in By Early Adolescents While on School Property

Purpose. This longitudinal study was guided by a Youth Resilience Framework. The study purpose was to examine the influence of protective resources, contextual factors, and risk factors in middle childhood (grades 4–6) on health-risk behaviors (e.g., smoking cigarettes, using marijuana, drinking alcohol, carrying a weapon) engaged in on school property by early adolescents (grade 7) who live in rural central Texas. Methods. Students in grades 4 to 6, a majority of whom were Mexican American (54.3%) and male (56.4%), completed surveys annually until the 7th grade. Generalized estimating equations were run to determine predictors of 7th graders’ health-risk behaviors on school property. Results. Engaging in healthy behaviors, knowing others cared about them, and having a sense of competence in middle childhood (grades 4–6) were found to be protective factors, while having a large family size and the expectation that they would not complete school were found to be risk factors for engaging in health risk behaviors in 7th grade. Practice Implications. These findings show the influence of family and schools as environments that can offer protection from health-risk behaviors in early adolescence.
Integrating Cluster Information for Cross-Frame Semantic Role Labeling

Recent systems for semantic role labeling are very dependent on the specific predicates and corpora on which they are trained, but labeling new data is expensive. We study which features and classifiers are best able to generalize to unseen predicates from new semantic frames. We find that automatically derived cluster information is especially helpful in this setting, and that a relatively simple a posteriori classifier outperforms Maximum Entropy. This material is based upon work supported by from the National Institute of Health grant number 2ROERR0928309, a National Science Foundation grant number #5-41984-A and a National Science Foundation grant number E1A0080124 . Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of above named organizations.
Oligopolistic Price Competition and Adverse Price Effect in Online Retailing Markets

Abstract: The majority of theoretical vertical differentiation models in the literature derive equilibrium prices that exhibit what we call an ''adverse price effect:'' for a low quality firm, the equilibrium price may decrease when the product quality increases. This seemingly counterintuitive theoretical result has received little attention in the literature. In order to check whether this result is simply an artifact of model assumptions (such as a duopoly under absence of differentiation costs), we present an oligopoly model with a general cost structure, and derive closed-form solutions for two special cases. Our model shows that the adverse price effect continues to hold in a more general setting and we derive conditions under which such an adverse price effect occurs. We then attempt to find empirical evidence of this phenomenon using data from the online retailing (e-tailing) industry where e-tailers selling identical products mainly differentiate with their service offerings. Our analytical and empirical results offer guidelines to e-tailers on how to price their products and decide their service offerings. The results may also have implications for firms in other industries that are characterized by vertical differentiation.
High open-circuit voltage in heterojunction photovoltaics containing a printed colloidal quantum-dot photosensitive layer

Within four to seven years, electricity generated from solar cells will cost less than grid electricity, making it the cleanest, cheapest, and most abundant energy source on the planet. The rise of solar energy, however, could come to an untimely end if current solar cell technologies fail to meet the staggering manufacturing volumes needed to sustain current growth rates. Nanostructured donor/acceptor photovoltaics utilizing small molecule organics or conjugated polymers offer processing advantages that might enable high-throughput, large-area production. However, power conversion efficiencies of these structures have remained low, due in large part to low open-circuit voltages (VOC). Using printing methods, we deposit a layer of colloidal cadmium selenide (CdSe) quantum dots (QDs) onto a wide band-gap organic hole-transporting thin film of N,N'-bis(3-methylphenyl)-N,N'-bis-(phenyl)-9,9-spirobiuorene (spiro-TPD) in order to form a unique planar heterojunction photovoltaic device. This structure is found to produce much higher VOC than previously predicted for donor/acceptor heterojunction photovoltaics. Absorption and charge generation occur primarily in the QD layer and indium tin oxide (ITO) provides the top contact, allowing for exceptional device stability and full transparency below the QD bandgap of 2.0 eV. Overall power conversion efficiencies remain low at 0.03% because only a small percentage of the incident light is absorbed (4% at the rst QD excitonic peak of 2.1 eV) and ll factors are near 0.4, yet VOC is 1.3V. The high VOC is remarkable for an architecture with symmetric electrodes and exceeds the offset between the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) of the acceptor (near 5.2 eV) and the lowest unoccupied molecular (LUMO) orbital of the QDs (near 4.6 eV). The internal quantum efficiency (IQE) exhibits a strong dependence on QD lm thickness and reaches a maximum of 30% at a thickness of 3-4 monolayers, indicating that transport losses dominate photocurrent generation for QD thicknesses above 4-5 monolayers. From the bias-dependence of quantum efficiency, we identify an intensity-independent compensation voltage V0 of 1.5 V that represents the maximum attainable VOC. Investigation of the bias-dependence of the photocurrent decay transients identifies charge diffusion as the dominant mechanism responsible for photocurrent generation and reveals a vast discrepancy between the time constant associated with charge extraction (0.6 s, measured at 0V) and that of recombination (0.4 [mu]s, measured at 2 V). An alternative model for VOC is presented that considers the dark current in forward bias as the critical mechanism determining VOC. We conclude that suppression of recombination across the spiro-TPD heterojunction interface forces recombination to occur predominantly in the QD lm. Electroluminescence from the QD layer recombination that hole injection from spiro-TPD into the QD layer and recombination in the QD layer is, in part, responsible for current ow in forward bias. Because the device…
Vision based motion generation for humanoid robots

This manuscript present my research activities on real-time vision-based behaviors for complex robots such as humanoids. The underlying main scientific question structuring this work is the following: "What are the decisional processes which make possible for a humanoid robot to generate motion in real-time based upon visual information ? " In soccer humans can decide to kick a ball while running and when all the other players are constantly moving. When recast as an optimization problem for a humanoid robot, finding a solution for such behavior is generally computationally hard. For instance, the problem of visual search consider in this work is NP-complete. The first part of this work is concerned about real-time motion generation. Starting from the general constraints that a humanoid robot has to fulfill to generate a feasible motion, some core problems are presented. From this several contributions allowing a humanoid robot to react to change in the environment are presented. They revolve around walking pattern generation, whole body motion for obstacle avoidance, and real-time foot-step planning in constrained environment. The second part of this work is concerned about real-time acquisition of knowledge on the environment through computer vision. Two main behaviors are considered: visual-search and visual object model construction. They are considered as a whole taking into account the model of the sensor, the motion cost, the mechanical constraints of the robot, the geometry of the environment as well as the limitation of the vision processes. In addition contributions on coupling Self Localization and Map Building with walking, real-time foot-steps generation based on visual servoing are presented. Finally the core technologies developed in the previous contexts were used in different applications: Human-Robot interaction, tele-operation, human behavior analysis. Based upon the feedback of several integrated demonstrators on the humanoid robot HRP-2, the last part of this thesis tries to draw some directions where innovative ideas may break some current technical locks in humanoid robotics.
Detection of nocturnal hypoglycemic episodes (natural occurrence) in children with Type 1 diabetes using an optimal Bayesian neural network algorithm

Hypoglycemia or low blood glucose is dangerous and can result in unconsciousness, seizures and even death. It is a common and serious side effect of insulin therapy in patients with diabetes. HypoMon is a non-invasive monitor that measures some physiological parameters continuously to provide detection of hypoglycemic episodes in Type 1 diabetes mellitus patients (T1DM). Based on heart rate and corrected QT interval of the ECG signal, we have continued to develop Bayesian neural network detection algorithms to recognize the presence of hypoglycemic episodes. From a clinical study of 16 children with T1DM, natural occurrence of nocturnal hypoglycemic episodes are associated with increased heart rates (1.033±0.242 vs. 1.082±0.298, P<0.06) and increased corrected QT intervals (1.031±0.086 vs. 1.060±0.084, P<0.001). The overall data were organized into a training set (8 patients) and a test set (another 8 patients) randomly selected. Using the optimal Bayesian neural network with 10 hidden nodes which was derived from the training set with the highest log evidence, the sensitivity (true positive) value for detection of hypoglycemia in the test set is 89.2%.
9.6 A 2.7-to-4.3GHz, 0.16psrms-jitter, −246.8dB-FOM, digital fractional-N sampling PLL in 28nm CMOS

High-performance phase-locked-loops (PLLs) are key building blocks for many modern ICs. The sub-sampling PLL proposed in [1] uses a reference clock REF to sample a high-frequency VCO and converts phase/timing error into voltage. The steep dv/dt slope of the VCO helps to realize a high phase-detection gain and greatly suppresses the noise of loop components succeeding the phase detector, leading to low in-band phase noise and good PLL Figure-Of-Merit (FOM). However, the original design in [1] is analog and limited to integer-N (int-N) operation. It is desirable to extend it to more versatile fractional-N (frac-N) mode, and to make it digital for greater flexibility and more advanced digital calibration. This work presents a new 28nm CMOS digital frac-N sampling PLL design that achieved 0.16ps rms jitter with 8.2mW and a state-of-the-art frac-N PLL FOM of -246.8dB.
Dancing the two-step: Collaborating with intermediary organizations as research partners to help implement workplace health and safety interventions.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effect of the involvement of intermediaries who were research partners on three intervention studies. The projects crossed four sectors: manufacturing, transportation, service sector, and electrical-utilities sectors. The interventions were participative ergonomic programs. The study attempts to further our understanding of collaborative workplace-based research between researchers and intermediary organizations; to analyze this collaboration in terms of knowledge transfer; and to further our understanding of the successes and challenges with such a process. PARTICIPANTS The intermediary organizations were provincial health and safety associations (HSAs). They have workplaces as their clients and acted as direct links between the researchers and workplaces. METHODS Data was collected from observations, emails, research-meeting minutes, and 36 qualitative interviews. Interviewees were managers, and consultants from the collaborating associations, 17 company representatives and seven researchers. RESULTS The article describes how the collaborations were created, the structure of the partnerships, the difficulties, the benefits, and challenges to both the researchers and intermediaries. The evidence of knowledge utilization between the researchers and HSAs was tracked as a proxy-measure of impact of this collaborative method, also called Mode 2 research. CONCLUSION Despite the difficulties, both the researchers and the health and safety specialists agreed that the results of the research made the process worthwhile.
Fault Detection and Safety in Closed-Loop Artificial Pancreas Systems

Continuous subcutaneous insulin infusion pumps and continuous glucose monitors enable individuals with type 1 diabetes to achieve tighter blood glucose control and are critical components in a closed-loop artificial pancreas. Insulin infusion sets can fail and continuous glucose monitor sensor signals can suffer from a variety of anomalies, including signal dropout and pressure-induced sensor attenuations. In addition to hardware-based failures, software and human-induced errors can cause safety-related problems. Techniques for fault detection, safety analyses, and remote monitoring techniques that have been applied in other industries and applications, such as chemical process plants and commercial aircraft, are discussed and placed in the context of a closed-loop artificial pancreas.
The Paradoxical Effects of AMPK on Insulin Gene Expression and Glucose‐Induced Insulin Secretion

The activation of AMP‐activated protein kinase (AMPK) is known to repress the expression of the insulin gene and glucose‐stimulated insulin secretion (GSIS). However, the mechanisms by which this occurs, as well as the effects of AMPK activation on glucolipotoxicity‐induced β‐cell dysfunction, have not been elucidated. To investigate the effects of 5‐amino‐4‐imidazolecarboxamide ribonucleotide (AICAR) and peroxisome proliferator‐activated receptorγ‐coactivator‐1α (PGC‐1α) on β‐cell‐specific genes under glucolipotoxic conditions, we performed real‐time PCR and measured insulin secretion by primary islets. To study these effects in vivo, we administered AICAR for 10 days (1 mg/g body weight) to 90% pancreatectomized hyperglycemic mice. The exposure of isolated rat and human islets to glucolipotoxic conditions and the overexpression of PGC‐1α suppressed insulin and NEUROD1 mRNA expression. However, the expression of these genes was preserved by AICAR treatment and by PGC‐1α inhibition. Exposure of isolated islets to glucolipotoxic conditions for 3 days decreased GSIS, which was also well maintained by AICAR treatment and by PGC‐1α inhibition. The administration of AICAR to 90% pancreatectomized hyperglycemic mice improved glucose tolerance and insulin secretion. These results indicate that treatment of islets with an AMPK agonist under glucolipotoxic conditions protects against glucolipotoxicity‐induced β‐cell dysfunction. A better understanding of the functions of molecules such as PGC‐1α and AMPK, which play key roles in intracellular fuel regulation, could herald a new era for the treatment of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus by providing protection against glucolipotoxicity. J. Cell. Biochem. 117: 239–246, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.