Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A rmative Action , Caste and the Marriage Market

This study investigates the role of a strong social norm caste on the marriage market in India and how it responds to economic changes. A jobs-based a rmative action policy, the implementation of the Mandal Commission report in December 1993, di erentially a ects incomes across cohorts for treated castes. This is used to separately identify the e ects of caste and income on marital partner choice and the distribution of the match surplus using a di erence-in-di erences strategy. The a rmative action policy is found to have an asymmetric e ect across genders male members of the treated group are found to attract more desirable spouses and get a higher share of the marital match surplus while there is no similar e ect for women. A structural model of the marriage market based on Choo & Siow(2006) is used to investigate the marital welfare e ects of the policy while controlling for selection e ects. Similar results are found. These ndings suggest that the marriage market and intra household decision making plays a signi cant role in determining the distribution of welfare changes from economic shocks.
Providing Vehicular Infotainment Service Using VHF/UHF TV Bands via Spatial Spectrum Reuse

In this paper, we identify the potential of the television bands to be used for providing vehicular infotainment service. Specifically, content delivery from the roadside unit to vehicular users is conducted by exploiting the spectrum holes, which is also referred to as spatial spectrum reuse. In this manner, the spectrum utilization efficiency is improved and the digital television service is not interfered. We first give a thorough description on such vehicular content delivery network and indicate the major design issues. After that, we respectively develop user and resource models tailored for our scenario by considering their characteristics and formulate the resource allocation as a system throughput maximization problem based on these models. For practical implementation, we devise a vehicular content delivery protocol incorporating a dynamic spectrum access algorithm and a maximal frame size design method, both of which aim at throughput and spectrum efficiency enhancement. Extensive simulations are conducted and the numerical results show the system performance is improved with our approaches.
Active demethylation of individual genes in intracytoplasmic sperm injection rabbit embryos

Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), as an assisted reproduction technique, has been widely used in animal and human. However, its possible effect on epigenetic changes has not been well studied. To investigate whether ICSI can induce aberrant DNA methylation changes in rabbit preimplantation embryos, we examined the methylation status of the SP‐A promoter region and the satellite sequence Rsat IIE by bisulfite‐sequencing technology. The SP‐A promoter region was extensively demethylated before the first round of DNA replication commences, and the unmethylated status was maintained until morula when dynamic remethylation occurred. A similar but more moderate demethylation process was observed in satellite sequence Rsat IIE. These results are in contrast with the previous reports of no active demethylation in normal rabbit embryos, suggesting that the active demethylation we observed may be induced by ICSI. Mol. Reprod. Dev. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Assembly and interactions of cotJ‐encoded proteins, constituents of the inner layers of the Bacillus subtilis spore coat

During Bacillus subtilis endospore formation, a complex protein coat is assembled around the maturing spore. The coat is made up of more than two dozen proteins that form an outer layer, which provides chemical resistance, and an inner layer, which may play a role in the activation of germination. A third, amorphous layer of the coat occupies the space between the inner coat and the cortex, and is referred to as the undercoat. Although several coat proteins have been characterized, little is known about their interactions during assembly of the coat. We show here that at least two open reading frames of the cotJ operon (cotJA and cotJC) encode spore coat proteins. We suggest that CotJC is a component of the undercoat, since we found that its assembly onto the forespore is not prevented by mutations that block both inner and outer coat assembly, and because CotJC is more accessible to antibody staining in spores lacking both of these coat layers. Assembly of CotJC into the coat is dependent upon expression of cotJA. Conversely, CotJA is not detected in the coats of a cotJC insertional mutant. Co‐immunoprecipitation was used to demonstrate the formation of complexes containing CotJA and CotJC 6 h after the onset of sporulation. Experiments with the yeast two‐hybrid system indicate that CotJC may interact with itself and with CotJA. We suggest that interaction of CotJA with CotJC is required for the assembly of both CotJA and CotJC into the spore coat.
Hedonic Prices and the Benefits of Public Projects

When lot side is endogenous, hedonic prices do not provide a correct benefit measure of a large public project even if population is homogeneous. Except for some polar cases where they yield correct estimates, the use of hedonic prices results in over-estimation. The results are extended to cases of heterogeneous populations. The short-run benefits with fixed lot size are also examined.
CMOS-MEMS transverse-mode square plate resonator with high Q and low motional impedance

An integrated CMOS-MEMS transverse-mode square plate resonator centered at 6.52 MHz has been demonstrated with Q's ranging from 800 to 1,900, and specifically with the lowest motional impedance of 35 kΩ compared to any other CMOS-MEMS counterparts to date by the combination of large transduction area and pull-in mechanism to achieve deep-submicron electrode-to-resonator gap spacing using a foundry-oriented CMOS-MEMS process. In addition, such a resonator is formed by metal/oxide composite structure where the residual stress often seen in CMOS layers is greatly alleviated and where SiO2 with positive temperature coefficient of Young's Modulus (TCE) offers an effective temperature compensation scheme, therefore greatly improving its thermal stability as compared with mere-metal resonators under the same fabrication technologies.
HDAC activity regulates entry of mesoderm cells into the cardiac muscle lineage

Class II histone deacetylases (HDAC4, HDAC5, HDAC7 and HDAC9) have been shown to interact with myocyte enhancer factors 2 (MEF2s) and play an important role in the repression of cardiac hypertrophy. We examined the role of HDACs during the differentiation of P19 embryonic carcinoma stem cells into cardiomyoctyes. Treatment of aggregated P19 cells with the HDAC inhibitor trichostatin A induced the entry of mesodermal cells into the cardiac muscle lineage, shown by the upregulation of transcripts Nkx2-5, MEF2C, GATA4 and cardiac α-actin. Furthermore, the overexpression of HDAC4 inhibited cardiomyogenesis, shown by the downregulation of cardiac muscle gene expression. Class II HDAC activity is inhibited through phosphorylation by Ca2+/calmodulin-dependent kinase (CaMK). Expression of an activated CaMKIV in P19 cells upregulated the expression of Nkx2-5, GATA4 and MEF2C, enhanced cardiac muscle development, and activated a MEF2-responsive promoter. Moreover, inhibition of CaMK signaling downregulated GATA4 expression. Finally, P19 cells constitutively expressing a dominant-negative form of MEF2C, capable of binding class II HDACs, underwent cardiomyogenesis more efficiently than control cells, implying the relief of an inhibitor. Our results suggest that HDAC activity regulates the specification of mesoderm cells into cardiomyoblasts by inhibiting the expression of GATA4 and Nkx2-5 in a stem cell model system.
A review and comparative study of innovation policy and knowledge transfer: An Anglo-French perspectives

Abstract In Europe, knowledge transfer between industry and higher education underachieves when compared directly with the United States and Japan. Europe is usually considered among the best world performers in terms of research capacity, but this potential often fails to transform into innovative products and services and the potential contribution to economic growth is lost. Despite this shortfall in knowledge transfer, academia enjoys strong industrial links across Europe and can demonstrate high numbers of enduring industrial relationships. This paper draws on research and policy literature from the UK and French channel regions to present the respective regional innovation and economic policy in an attempt to frame why this shortfall in knowledge transfer exists. Regional development is considered within a European, national and regional context. Innovation and knowledge transfer are positioned as economic development factors, and are described through the approaches and activities of the regions.
High speed efficient advanced encryption standard implementation

Cryptography is the science of secure data transmission through an insecure channel. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is the most widely and secure symmetric key cryptographic algorithm today. The complexity of AES is dominated by the substitution box (S-box) transformation which is considered as one of the most complicated and costly part of the system because it is the only non-linear structure. In this article, we present high speed efficient AES architecture. We have used pipeline technique to allow a parallel processing in order to obtain high throughput. In addition, 5-stage pipeline S-box design using combinational logic is introduced to increase the speed and the maximum operating frequency. Furthermore, pipeline registers are inserted in optimal placements to reduce the occupied area and reach an efficient architecture. The proposed design had been successfully implemented in virtex-6 FPGA device using Xilinx ISE 14.7. It achieves a throughput of 79Gbps and occupied 4830 slices memory.
Child daycare policy in Japan: an examination of the program and its impacts

Recent reforms with regard to Japan's child daycare policies have moved in the direction of deregulation, increased privatization and private/public partnerships. These reforms have substantially increased the availability of diversity of child daycare services. However, initiatives creating diversity have introduced issues of lack of equal access to highly desired services as, with privatization, higher quality services may cost more. Also, in municipally-provided care, parents are paying a greater proportion of the cost of childcare. These factors create a situation where poorer parents may not be able to afford the best care. The dominant Liberal Democratic Party has been reluctant to substantially increase national expenditures for child daycare and other supportive family policies. While it has provided initiatives that have eased the predicament of some working women, it has not resolved the cultural issue of utilizing women in a secondary role in employment and emphasizing the mother's responsibility (increasingly a working mother) as a caregiver of young children. As a result, family size remains substantially below the measure of population replacement.
Trust-aware recommendation for improving aggregate diversity

Recommender systems are becoming increasingly important and prevalent because of the ability of solving information overload. In recent years, researchers are paying increasing attention to aggregate diversity as a key metric beyond accuracy, because improving aggregate recommendation diversity may increase long tails and sales diversity. Trust is often used to improve recommendation accuracy. However, how to utilize trust to improve aggregate recommendation diversity is unexplored. In this paper, we focus on solving this problem and propose a novel trust-aware recommendation method by incorporating time factor into similarity computation. The rationale underlying the proposed method is that, trustees with later creation time of trust relation can bring more diverse items to recommend to their trustors than other trustees with earlier creation time of trust relation. Through relevant experiments on publicly available dataset, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the baseline method in terms of aggregate diversity while maintaining almost the same recall.
Isolation and Identification of Plasma Membrane from Light-Grown Winter Rye Seedlings (Secale cereale L. cv Puma).

An effective method for the isolation of plasma membrane from light-grown winter rye seedlings (Secale cereale L. cv Puma) was established using a liquid two-polymer phase separation. The conditions for the specific partition of plasma membrane into the polyethylene glycol-enriched upper phase were examined, including variations in the polymer concentration, buffer system, pH, and NaCl addition in the phase partition system. The most effective phase partition system for the isolation of plasma membrane from winter rye consisted of 5.6/5.6% (w/w) polyethylene glycol 4000/dextran T500 in 0.25 molar sucrose-10 millimolar potassium phosphate-30 millimolar NaCl (pH 7.8), repeated once. When the isolated plasma membrane was centrifuged on a linear sucrose density gradient, a single band was found at the 34% (w/w) sucrose layer (1.141 grams per cubic centimeter) which co-fractionated with the pH 6.5-ATPase.Identification of plasma membrane was performed by the combination of phosphotungstic acid-chromic acid stain and specific binding of N-1-naphthylphthalamic acid. Based on morphometrical observations after phosphotungstic acid-chromic acid stain, the isolated plasma membrane consisted mostly of vesicles of high purity. The isolated plasma membrane also showed extremely high specificity for N-1-naphthylphthalamic acidbinding, 10-fold higher than other membranes. It was also confirmed that there is a distinct difference in properties between plasma membrane and other membranes. The endomembranes such as from chloroplasts, mitochondria, and endoplasmic reticulum were observed to be highly sensitive to Zn(2+) ion and lower pH, which resulted in an abrupt aggregation of membranes. On the contrary, plasma membrane was very stable to these treatments and no aggregation was observed. These unique properties of isolated plasma membrane are generally observed in a wide variety of plant species and can be utilized for the assessment of the purity of preparations of isolated plasma membranes and for their identification.
Social Determinants and Reproductive Factors of the Menopausal Symptoms among Women in Tabriz - Iran

Background: Menopause is a natural event in which different degrees of psychosomatic changes occur. The social, demographic and behavioral factors in different nations have a significant effect on symptoms of menopause. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between the personal, demographic, social and reproductive factors with symptoms of menopause and the frequency of the mental and physical symptoms of menopause among women in Tabriz, Northwest of Iran. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in the clinics and health centers of Tabriz, East Azerbaijan and Iran. A total of 300 women aged 40-60 years filled a questionnaire on the socio demographic variables, reproductive history and symptoms checklist. Results: Among the symptoms, muscle and joint pain (68.7%), and increased facial hair (20.5%) were the most and the least common ones respectively. According to participants, as age increases, the symptoms worsen (p=0.003). The frequency of the symptoms of the employed women was less than those of retired ones and housewives (p=0.001). The physical and mental symptoms had negative relation with educational status (p<0.05). An increase in the number of the children, the history of the oral contraceptive use and dysmenorrhea had positive relation with the frequency of the symptoms. Conclusion: The quality of life of the women during menopause worsens with an increase in age and number of children, whereas it improves with higher educational levels and employment.
Fast and Efficient Depth Map Estimation from Light Fields

The paper presents an algorithm for depth map estimation from the light field images in relatively small amount of time, using only single thread on CPU. The proposed method improves existing principle of line fitting in 4- dimensional light field space. Line fitting is based on color values comparison using kernel density estimation. Our method utilizes result of Semi-Global Matching (SGM) with Census transform-based matching cost as a border initialization for line fitting. It provides a significant reduction of computations needed to find the best depth match. With the suggested evaluation metric we show that proposed method is applicable for efficient depth map estimation while preserving low computational time compared to others.
Impact of Microfinance on Women Empowerment in the Matrilineal Tribal Society of India: An Analysis Using Propensity Score Matching and Difference-in-Difference

This study is an evaluation of the impact of microfinance on women empowerment conducted upon clients of the matrilineal tribal society of India that exists in its north east region. It covers a period of five years, where in, data is compiled for 300 microfinance women clients (experimental group [EG]) and 150 non-microfinance women clients (control group [CG)]). For impact evaluation, Propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Difference-in-Difference (DinD) techniques are applied. PSM ensures a matched sample by balancing the EG and CG on covariates and DinD, the impact of microfinance through economic and sociopolitical outcomes. The study highlights that microfinance has a positive impact on income, expenditure and savings. It led to an improvement in asset structure, increased access to livestock, micro machines, family wealth and family savings, education decision-making, improved mobility, communication skills, voicing of concerns, self confidence, increased political participation to promote gender equality, etc. In addition, microfinance amount and profile of the clients are important components in influencing impact. Overall, microfinance is a potent tool of women empowerment even in matrilineal tribal settings.
STARTS: STAtic regression test selection

Regression testing is an important part of software development, but it can be very time consuming. Regression test selection (RTS) aims to speed up regression testing by running only impacted tests—the subset of tests that can change behavior due to code changes. We present STARTS, a tool for STAtic Regression Test Selection. Unlike dynamic RTS, STARTS requires no code instrumentation or runtime information to find impacted tests; instead, STARTS uses only compile-time information. Specifically, STARTS builds a dependency graph of program types and finds, as impacted, tests that can reach some changed type in the transitive closure of the dependency graph. STARTS is a Maven plugin that can be easily integrated into any Maven-based Java project. We find that STARTS selects on average 35.2% of tests, leading to an end-to-end runtime that is on average 81.0% of running all the tests. A video demo of STARTS can be found at https://youtu.be/PCNtk8jphrM.
Maximizing the Rigor of Action Research: Why Would You Want To? How Could You?

Since the late 1980s, much has been written about the meaning of action research (AR), and the basic cycle of planning, action, observation, and reflection has been used to improve practice in many fields of human endeavor, including education and management. This article examines the meanings of rigor when the term is applied to AR and discusses some of the strategies recommended to improve rigor. Focusing questions for the article include the following: What is AR? Who does it, with whom, and for what purposes? Why and how can one make the framework/method itself more rigorous? How can one make data interpretation more rigorous? What about theory building? What about the dilemma of group involvement with rigor for the Ph.D. student and thesis writer? The author's experiences in achieving an AR Ph.D., examining AR theses, and generating and using a daisy model of AR with several groups of staff are used.
[Systematic review of delayed auditory feedback effectiveness for stuttering reduction].

PURPOSE To perform a systematic review of studies related to the effects of delayed auditory feedback on speech fluency in individuals who stutter. RESEARCH STRATEGY Concepts of the Cochrane Handbook were followed: formulation of initial question (theme to be reviewed), location and selection of studies (PubMed database) and compatibilization among researchers (aiming to minimize possible citation losses). SELECTION CRITERIA The following were excluded: citations in languages other than English, citations that did not allow access to full text, repeated citations due to the overlap of keywords, studies developed exclusively with fluent individuals, case reports, reviews of the literature, letters to the editor, and texts that were not directly related to the theme. Hence, texts that were related to treatment with delayed auditory feedback (DAF) and frequency-altered feedback (FAF) were analyzed. DATA ANALYSIS Data were analyzed according to research indicators and according to study quality markers. RESULTS The results indicated that the use of altered auditory feedback devices for the reduction of stuttering events still do not have robust support for their applicability. Methodological variability does not allow a consistent answer, or a trend about the effectiveness of the device, to be drawn. CONCLUSION Although the limitations in the studies prevent generalizations about the effectiveness of the device for the reduction of stuttering, these same limitations are important resources for future research planning.
Real Life Treatment of Hepatocellular Carcinoma: Impact of Deviation from Guidelines for Recommended Therapy.

BACKGROUND Real life management of hepatocellular carcinoma occasionally deviates from guidelines for recommended therapy. AIMS To evaluate how frequent this deviation happens in our center and assess its impact on outcome. MATERIALS AND METHODS The treatment of 770 patients (87% males, mean age 57.8 years) was analyzed and the effect of deviation on outcome over 36 months was examined. RESULTS Of Barcelona Clinic liver cancer stages 0 and A patients, 65.8% received resection, ablation, liver transplantation or transarterial chemoembolisation for unresectable tumors more than 5 cm in diameter, and 34.2% received treatment recommended for later stages. Of stage B patients, 62.2% received recommended therapy, 34.3% of patients received supportive therapy or sorafenib and 3.5% received upward treatment stage migration. Among stage C patients, 7.6% received sorafenib, and most (79.2%) were given supportive care. Deviation from recommended therapy occurred in 34.2%, 37.7%, and 92.4% in stages 0-A, B and C. Survival of stage 0-A patients who received downwards treatment stage migration was lower than those who received recommended treatment (p <0.001). Upward treatment stage migration in stages B, C and D did not improve survival compared to those who received recommended treatment. CONCLUSIONS Deviation from recommended therapy had a negative impact on survival in Barcelona Clinic liver cancer stage A patients.