Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Who Gains More from Which Infrastructure in Rural People's Republic of China?

The importance of infrastructure in economic development has been increasingly recognized by governments, development institutions, and the research community. Despite a sizable literature on its efficiency and growth effects, the distributive impacts of infrastructure have been largely overlooked, with a few recent exceptions. This is regrettable, particularly given the overwhelming concern about inequality and inclusive growth all over the world. This paper will: (i) demonstrate the deficiency of conventional approaches to modelling inequality; (ii) extend the Mincer earnings function so that both growth and distributive effects of infrastructure can be evaluated; and (iii) fit the extended model to a large sample of individual-level data from rural People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the period of 1989–2011, providing estimates of growth and the distributive impacts of specific physical infrastructures—telephone, tap water and electricity. All these infrastructures are found to promote rural income growth, helping narrow the rural–urban gap, which is the dominant component of the PRC’s overall inequality. Further, the poor are found to gain more than the rich, implying benign distributive effects of these infrastructures. In addition, males, the more experienced, the better educated, and to some extent the married benefited more than their counterparts, especially from telephones. Finally, some of these subpopulation effects have become more significant in recent years and are larger in central PRC, possibly because infrastructure helps open up more opportunities for those with better education or more experience. The empirical results are robust to different definitions of the experience variable, consideration of the mortality selection bias, reconstruction of the telephone data, and possible reverse causality.
Cartilage Tissue Engineering: The Role of Extracellular Matrix (ECM) and Novel Strategies

Articular cartilage is a hyaline cartilage that consists primarily of extracellular matrix with a sparse population of cells, lacking blood vessels, lymphatic vessels and nerves. The only cell type within cartilage is the chondrocyte and has a low level of metabolic activity with little or no cell division and is the responsible for maintaining in a low-turnover state the unique composition and organization of the matrix that was determined during embryonic and postnatal development. The biological and mechanical properties of articular cartilage depend on the interactions between the chondrocytes and the matrix that maintain the tissue. Chon‐ drocytes form the macromolecular framework of the tissue matrix from three classes of molecules: collagens, proteoglycans, and non-collagenous proteins and maintain the extrac‐ ellular matrix (ECM) by low-turnover replacement of certain matrix proteins [1, 2].
Identification and Preliminary Characterization of a Ca2+- Dependent High-Affinity Binding Site for Inositol-1,4,5-Trisphosphate from Chenopodium rubrum

Using a radioligand-binding assay we have identified a Ca2+- dependent high-affinity D-myo-inositol-1,4,5-trisphosphate (InsP3) binding site in a membrane vesicle preparation from Chenopodium rubrum. Millimolar concentrations of Ca2+ were required to observe specific binding of [3H]InsP3. A stable equilibrium between bound and free ligand was established within 5 min and bound [3H]InsP3 could be completely displaced by InsP3 in a time- and concentration-dependent manner. Displacement assays indicated a single class of binding sites with an estimated dissociation constant of 142 [plus or minus] 17 nM. Other inositol phosphates bound to the receptor with much lower affinity. The glycosaminoglycan heparin was an effective competitor for the binding site (inhibitor concentration for 50% displacement = 534 nM). ATP at higher, although physiologically relevant, concentrations (inhibitor concentration for 50% displacement = 241 [mu]M) also displaced [3H]InsP3 from the receptor. Recent studies in animals have highlighted the importance of Ca2+ regulation of InsP3-induced Ca2+ release. The potential for the operation of similar regulatory mechanisms in plants is discussed.
Service-Oriented Design of an Enterprise Architecture in Home Telecare

According to ongoing scholarly work in the information systems discipline, Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) are top-priorities gaining a great deal of attention in both industry and academia. Both approaches aim at convergence in order to bring business-oriented and technology-oriented stakeholders closer together and enable business system engineering in an increasingly viable manner. In our paper, we claim that only a holistic and complete approach to business system engineering is capable of creating sustainable value by facilitating the emergence of new and innovative electronic business models within and between organisational borders. Therefore, we provide a service-oriented methodology combining two well-established and promising approaches, the Semantic Object Model (SOM) and the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). With this combined methodology, we are able to cover the design of an entire enterprise architecture. By addressing a business system in Home Telecare and deriving a business process model, which can eventually be controlled and executed by machines; in particular by composed web services, the full potential of a process-centric SOA is exploited. The guided design of enterprise architectures is highly relevant for both practitioners and researchers in the field of information systems.
Scanning electron microscopy of Neoechinorhynchus sp. (Acanthocephala: Neoechinorhynchidae), a possible new species of intestinal parasite of the Tallfin croaker Micropogonias altipinnis (Günther, 1864)

We describe an unidentified species of the genus Neoechinorhynchus occurring in the intestine of the marine fish Micropogonias altipinnis using scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The genus Neoechinorhynchus occurs mostly in freshwater fishes; this may be the first report of its occurrence in the marine fish genus Micropogonias and the New World Sciaenidae. The specimens collected have characteristics typical of the genus. The mean length of the trunk is 9.5 mm. The proboscis is short and subcylindrical measuring 70 µm in length and 50 µm in diameter near the base. The proboscis has three rings of curved spines each with six spines. The anterior spines are long measuring a mean of 55 µm in length, 9 µm in width, and 7 µm in depth, and are supported by simple unmodified roots. The spines of the middle ring are smaller and equivalent to 70% of the roots of the anterior spines. The spines of the posterior ring are much smaller than those of the anterior ring. The body surface lacks spines and consists of a series of folds. The estuarine habits of M. altipinnis and its ability to tolerate fresh waters may have facilitated its infection with a species of the primarily freshwater genus Neoechinorhynchus, as well as the possibility that this parasite can infect human beings from the consumption of this kind of croaker.
Necrostatin-1 attenuates early brain injury after subarachnoid hemorrhage in rats by inhibiting necroptosis

Necroptosis is programmed cell death that has been recently proposed and reported to be involved in several neurologic diseases. However, the role of necroptosis in early brain injury after subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is still unknown. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether necroptosis was involved in SAH-induced early brain injury, and to assess the possible neuroprotective effect of necrostatin-1 using an endovascular perforation rat model of SAH. Our results showed that the expression levels of necroptosis-related proteins including RIP1, RIP3 and MLKL in the basal cortex all increased at 3 hours after SAH (P<0.05) and peaked at 48 hours after SAH (P<0.05). However, they were greatly reduced after treatment with necrostatin-1 (P<0.05). Concurrently, neurologic outcomes were significantly improved after necrostatin-1 treatment (P<0.05). Furthermore, brain edema, blood–brain barrier disruption, necrotic cell death and neuroinflammation were also greatly inhibited after necrostatin-1 treatment. These results indicate that necroptosis is an important mechanism of cell death involved in the early brain injury after experimental SAH. Necrostatin-1 perhaps can serve as a promising neuroprotective agent for SAH treatment.
Predicting treatment response in social anxiety disorder from functional magnetic resonance imaging.

CONTEXT Current behavioral measures poorly predict treatment outcome in social anxiety disorder (SAD). To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine neuroimaging-based treatment prediction in SAD. OBJECTIVE To measure brain activation in patients with SAD as a biomarker to predict subsequent response to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). DESIGN Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data were collected prior to CBT intervention. Changes in clinical status were regressed on brain responses and tested for selectivity for social stimuli. SETTING Patients were treated with protocol-based CBT at anxiety disorder programs at Boston University or Massachusetts General Hospital and underwent neuroimaging data collection at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. PATIENTS Thirty-nine medication-free patients meeting DSM-IV criteria for the generalized subtype of SAD. INTERVENTIONS Brain responses to angry vs neutral faces or emotional vs neutral scenes were examined with fMRI prior to initiation of CBT. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Whole-brain regression analyses with differential fMRI responses for angry vs neutral faces and changes in Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale score as the treatment outcome measure. RESULTS Pretreatment responses significantly predicted subsequent treatment outcome of patients selectively for social stimuli and particularly in regions of higher-order visual cortex. Combining the brain measures with information on clinical severity accounted for more than 40% of the variance in treatment response and substantially exceeded predictions based on clinical measures at baseline. Prediction success was unaffected by testing for potential confounding factors such as depression severity at baseline. CONCLUSIONS The results suggest that brain imaging can provide biomarkers that substantially improve predictions for the success of cognitive behavioral interventions and more generally suggest that such biomarkers may offer evidence-based, personalized medicine approaches for optimally selecting among treatment options for a patient.
Stress-shortening relations and myocardial blood flow in compensated and failing canine hearts with pressure-overload hypertrophy.

Serial changes in left ventricular (LV) size and function during the adaptation to chronic pressure overload and the transition to pump failure were studied in 16 conscious dogs (aortic bands placed at 8 weeks of age). Echocardiographic data at baseline and at 3, 6, 9, and 12 months after banding revealed a progressive increase in LV mass in all dogs. In six dogs with LV pump failure, there was a progressive decline in circumferential fiber shortening (29 +/- 4% at 12 months); this was significantly less than that seen in five littermate controls (38 +/- 3%, p less than 0.05). The average LV to body weight ratio in this group was 9.8 +/- 2.7 g/kg. In 10 dogs without pump failure (compensated LVH group), shortening exceeded that seen in the controls (43 +/- 4%, p less than 0.05); the LV to body weight ratio was 7.7 +/- 1.0 g/kg. At 12 months (cardiac catheterization), the LV end-diastolic pressure was higher in the failure (25 +/- 15 mm Hg) than in the compensated group (8 +/- 5 mm Hg, p less than 0.05); mean systolic stress was also higher in the failure group (313 +/- 67 g/cm2) than in the compensated group (202 +/- 53 g/cm2, p less than 0.05). The transmural distribution of myocardial blood flow was measured (at 12 months) with the radioactive microsphere technique; flow data were then related to an index of demand (a stress-time index). There was preferential blood flow to the subendocardial layers in the control (endo/epi = 1.28) and compensated hearts (endo/epi = 1.10), but in the failure group there was a relative decrease in subendocardial flow (endo/epi = 0.92). However, the absolute values for subendocardial flow in the normal, compensated, and failure groups were 77 +/- 54, 125 +/- 48, and 113 +/- 64 ml/min/100 g; the stress-time indexes in the subendocardial shell were 38 +/- 11, 74 +/- 19, and 93 +/- 34 g sec.10(2)/cm2/min. Despite what appears to be a marginal balance between blood flow and the stress time index in the failure group, the myocardial high energy phosphates were not depleted and the inoptropic state was not depressed. In this model of LV hypertrophy, the observed differences in fiber shortening can be explained on the basis of the inverse afterload-shortening relation; pump failure was due to an inadequate LV hypertrophy with afterload excess. (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
Sleep Electroencephalogram in Seasonal Disorder and in Control Women: Effects Light Treatment and Sleep Deprivation

The role of sleep regulation in Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) was studied in 11 female SAD patients and eight controls in winter before and after light treatment (LT, 6000 lux, 10-14h, 5 days). The sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded at baseline and after the total sleep deprivation (TSD) of a 40-h constant routine. The well-known effects of TSD on sleep parameters and on EEG power spectra were replicated, indicating normal homeostatic sleep regulation in SAD. Sleep improved after LT in both groups. Since the condition following LT was the second session, these improvements may be an order effect and~or an effect of LT itself After LT, sleep EEG spectra of SAD patients, but not of controls, showed modifications resembling those of recovery sleep. Since only SAD patients curtailed their sleep while remitting during the LT period, these EEG modifications can be explained by normal sleep regulation alone. We conclude that the robust antidepressant effect of LT in SAD is unlikely to be mediated by changes in sleep, and that sleep regulatory mechanisms are not a crucial factor in the pathogenesis of winter depression.
Vacuolar H+-Pyrophosphatase and Cytosolic Soluble Pyrophosphatases Cooperatively Regulate Pyrophosphate Levels in Arabidopsis thaliana

Vacuolar H+-pyrophosphatase and cytosolic soluble pyrophosphatases play the leading and supportive role, respectively, in PPi homeostasis in Arabidopsis. Inorganic pyrophosphate (PPi) is a phosphate donor and energy source. Many metabolic reactions that generate PPi are suppressed by high levels of PPi. Here, we investigated how proper levels of cytosolic PPi are maintained, focusing on soluble pyrophosphatases (AtPPa1 to AtPPa5; hereafter PPa1 to PPa5) and vacuolar H+-pyrophosphatase (H+-PPase, AtVHP1/FUGU5) in Arabidopsis thaliana. In planta, five PPa isozymes tagged with GFP were detected in the cytosol and nuclei. Immunochemical analyses revealed a high abundance of PPa1 and the absence of PPa3 in vegetative tissue. In addition, the heterologous expression of each PPa restored growth in a soluble PPase-defective yeast strain. Although the quadruple knockout mutant plant ppa1 ppa2 ppa4 ppa5 showed no obvious phenotypes, H+-PPase and PPa1 double mutants (fugu5 ppa1) exhibited significant phenotypes, including dwarfism, high PPi concentrations, ectopic starch accumulation, decreased cellulose and callose levels, and structural cell wall defects. Altered cell arrangements and weakened cell walls in the root tip were particularly evident in fugu5 ppa1 and were more severe than in fugu5. Our results indicate that H+-PPase is essential for maintaining adequate PPi levels and that the cytosolic PPa isozymes, particularly PPa1, prevent increases in PPi concentrations to toxic levels. We discuss fugu5 ppa1 phenotypes in relation to metabolic reactions and PPi homeostasis.
Digital Slate : Replacing the Paper Notepad

"Save paper, save trees" is a hot agenda in today's world. This paper presents an ingenuous approach to achieve the motto, by proposing a software-only design, through modeling a paper notepad digitally. It describes the financial and social significance of this model underlining its implementation. The paper also briefs about the underlying hardware selected for the design implementation. The hardware utilizes ARM processor and is quite portable. Its known as Mini2440 FriendlyARM. Throughout the paper, optimization (power, memory etc.) has been primarily focused yielding to a recommendable solution.
Task and task‐free FMRI reproducibility comparison for motor network identification

Test‐retest reliability of individual functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results is of importance in clinical practice and longitudinal experiments. While several studies have investigated reliability of task‐induced motor network activation, less is known about the reliability of the task‐free motor network. Here, we investigate the reproducibility of task‐free fMRI, and compare it to motor task activity. Sixteen healthy subjects participated in this study with a test‐retest interval of seven weeks. The task‐free motor network was assessed with a univariate, seed‐voxel‐based correlation analysis. Reproducibility was tested by means of intraclass correlation (ICC) values and ratio of overlap. Higher ICC values and a better overlap were found for task fMRI as compared to task‐free fMRI. Furthermore, ratio of overlap improved for task fMRI at higher thresholds, while it decreased for task‐free fMRI, suggesting a less focal spatial pattern of the motor network during resting state. However, for both techniques the most active voxels were located in the primary motor cortex. This indicates that, just like task fMRI, task‐free fMRI can properly identify critical brain areas for motor task performance. Although both fMRI techniques are able to detect the motor network, resting‐state fMRI is less reliable than task fMRI. Hum Brain Mapp 35:340–352, 2014. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Reorder Buffer Deflate Core Deflate Core Deflate Core FIFO FIFO Accelerator Function Unit FPGA Interface Unit Processor Reorder Buffer Reorder Buffer QPI + PCIe Arbiter ( Write ) FIFO Write Queue Arbiter

Data compression techniques have been widely used to reduce data storage and movement overhead, especially in the big data era. While FPGAs are well suited to accelerate the computation-intensive lossless compression algorithms, big data compression with parallel requests intrinsically poses two challenges to the overall system throughput. First, scaling existing single-engine FPGA compression accelerator designs already encounters bottlenecks which will result in lower clock frequency, saturated throughput and lower area efficiency. Second, when such FPGA compression accelerators are integrated with the processors, the overall system throughput is typically limited by the communication between a CPU and an FPGA. We propose a novel multi-way parallel and fully pipelined architecture to achieve high-throughput lossless compression on modern Intel-Altera HARPv2 platforms. To compensate for the compression ratio loss in a multi-way design, we implement novel techniques, such as a better data feeding method and a hash chain to increase the hash dictionary history. Our accelerator kernel itself can achieve a compression throughput of 12.8 GB/s (2.3x better than the current record throughput) and a comparable compression ratio of 2.03 for standard benchmark data. Our approach enables design scalability without a reduction in clock frequency and also improves the performance per area efficiency (up to 1.5x). Moreover, we exploit the high CPU-FPGA communication bandwidth of HARPv2 platforms to improve the compression throughput of the overall system, which can achieve an average practical endto-end throughput of 10.0 GB/s (up to 12 GB/s for larger input files) on HARPv2.
Search Engine-inspired Ranking Algorithm for Trading Networks

Ranking algorithms based on link structure of the network are well-known methods in web search engines to improve the quality of the searches. The most famous ones are PageRank and HITS. PageRank uses probability of random surfers to visit a page as the score of that page, and HITS instead of produces one score, proposes using two scores, authority and hub scores, where the authority scores describe the degree of popularity of pages and hub scores describe the quality of hyperlinks on pages. In this paper, we show the differences between WWW network and trading network, and use these differences to create a ranking algorithm for trading networks. We test our proposed method with international trading data from United Nations. The similarity measures between vectors of proposed algorithm and vector of standard measure give promising results.
Comparing Student Performance on the Old vs New Versions of the NAPLEX

Objective. To determine if the new 2016 version of the North American Pharmacy Licensure Examination (NAPLEX) affected scores when controlling for student performance on other measures using data from one institution. Methods. There were 201 records from the classes of 2014-2016. Doubly robust estimation using weighted propensity scores was used to compare NAPLEX scaled scores and pass rates while considering student performance on other measures. Of the potential controllers of student performance: Pharmacy Curricular Outcomes Assessment (PCOA), scaled composite scores from the Pharmacy College Admission Test (PCAT), and P3 Grade Point Average (GPA). Only PCOA and P3 GPA were found to be appropriate for propensity scoring. Results. The weighted NAPLEX scaled scores did not significantly drop from the old (2014-2015) to the new (2016) version of NAPLEX. The change in pass rates between the new and old versions of NAPLEX were also non-significant. Conclusion. Using data from one institution, the new version itself of the NAPLEX did not have a significant effect on NAPLEX scores or first-time pass rates when controlling for student performance on other measures. Colleges are encouraged to repeat this analysis with pooled data and larger sample sizes.
A Functional Approach to Standard Binary Heaps

This paper describes a new and purely functional implementation technique of binary heaps. A binary heap is a tree-based data structure that implements priority queue operations (insert, remove, minimum/maximum) and guarantees at worst logarithmic running time for them. Approaches and ideas described in this paper present a simple and asymptotically optimal implementation of immutable binary heap.
Application of Cathodoluminescence Microscopy and Spectroscopy in Geosciences

Abstract Cathodoluminescence (CL) microscopy and spectroscopy are luminescence techniques with widespread applications in geosciences. Many rock-forming and accessory minerals show CL characteristics, which can be successfully used in geoscientific research. One of the most spectacular applications is the visualization of growth textures and other internal structures that are not discernable with other analytical techniques. In addition, information from CL imaging and spectroscopy can be used for the reconstruction of processes of mineral formation and alteration to provide information about the real structure of minerals and materials, and to prove the presence and type of lattice incorporation of several trace elements. In the present article, an overview about CL properties of selected minerals is given, and several examples of applications discussed. The presented data illustrate that best results are achieved when luminescence studies are performed under standardized conditions and combined with other analytical techniques with high sensitivity and high spatial resolution.