Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Association between Environmental Lead Exposure and High School Educational Outcomes in Four Communities in New South Wales, Australia

The associations between environmental lead exposure and high school educational outcomes in four communities located in New South Wales, Australia, were examined in this ecological study. A mixed model analysis was performed to account for each school’s results being more similar than results for other schools. The effect of environmental lead exposure on mean results for five educational outcomes was examined. ‘Leaded’ schools with more than five per cent of students living in the highest lead risk areas were tested against non-leaded ‘comparison’ schools that were matched by a pre-defined socio-educational advantage rating. A small disadvantage was found for leaded schools for four out of five outcomes, which was statistically significant for three outcomes: Higher School Certificate English (p < 0.01), School Certificate Mathematics (p < 0.05), and Australian Tertiary Admissions Rank eligibility rate (p < 0.01). This study adds to the large body of evidence in Australia and elsewhere supporting the importance of primary prevention to protect health at multiple stages of development.
Energy Status Related to Production and Reproduction in Dairy Cows Prevention of Decreased Fertility and Detection of Cows at Risk

Decreased fertility in dairy cows is widespread and economically undesirable. Current management strategies to prevent decreased fertility are exploiting the close relationship between negative energy balance in transition cows and subsequent decreased fertility. However, there is a continuous need for more information regarding the effects of different strategies on fertility. This thesis evaluated the effect of supplemental feeding with glycerol or propylene glycol, the usefulness of measuring metabolic indicators in blood samples to predict decreased fertility and investigated potential risk factors. In two field studies, the metabolic status, milk yield and fertility of cows in 17 herds, fed either a glycerol or propylene glycol supplement or no supplement (control) 0-21 days after calving, were evaluated. A separate study evaluated the accuracy of metabolic indicators when used to predict decreased fertility. The results were based on a single blood sample taken in early lactation and different test cut-off values were applied. Finally, potential risk factors for decreased fertility related to housing, feeding and the cow herself, were evaluated in approximately 750 Swedish herds. Cows fed glycerol produced significantly 1 kg more milk during the first 90 days in milk and cows fed propylene glycol tended to produce more milk without a subsequent decrease in metabolic status or fertility. The test performance of the metabolic indicators was in general low and was influenced by cow parity, cow breed and the prevalence of decreased fertility in the population studied. Cows experiencing a change in system (e.g. in housing or milking system or from conventional to organic production) had lower fertility than cows not experiencing such a change. In addition, cows with severe claw lesions and cows displaying a rise in somatic cell counts had a lower probability of pregnancy at first insemination. In conclusion, supplemental feeding with glycerol or propylene glycol, as a general strategy in a herd, does not seem to influence fertility or energy status and could increase milk yield. Measures to prevent a decrease in fertility could be more effective if applied to cows in physiological imbalance, rather than all cows in a herd. However, the use of metabolic indicators in a single blood sample may not be optimal for detecting cows at risk. The identified risk factors for decreased fertility could be used when devising preventive strategies.
An NFC-Enabled Anti-Counterfeiting System for Wine Industry

Wine counterfeiting is not a new problem, however, the situation in China has been going worse even after Hong Kong manifested itself as a wine trading and distribution center with abolishing all taxes on wine in 2008. The most basic method, printing a fake label with a subtly misspelled brand name or a slightly different logo in hopes of fooling wine consumers, has been common to other luxury-goods markets prone to counterfeiting. More ambitious counterfeiters might remove an authentic label and place it on a bottle with a similar shape, usually from the same vineyard, which contains a cheaper wine. Savvy buyers could identify if the cork does not match the label, but how many normal consumers like us could manage to identify the fake with only eye scanning? NFC facilitates processing of wine products information, making it a promising technology for anti-counterfeiting. The proposed system is aimed at relatively high-end consumer products like wine, and it helps protect genuine wine by maintaining the product pedigree such as the transaction records and the supply chain integrity. As such, consumers can safeguard their stake by authenticating a specific wine with their NFC-enabled smartphones before making payment at retail points. NFC has emerged as a potential tool to combat wine and spirit counterfeiting, undermining international wine trading market and even the global economy hugely. Recently, a number of anti-counterfeiting approaches have been proposed and adopted utilising different authentication technologies for such purpose. The project presents an NFC-enabled anti-counterfeiting system, and addresses possible implementation issues, such as tag selection, tag programming and encryption, setup of back-end database servers and the design of NFC mobile application.
Biochemical and functional characteristics of the human leukocyte membrane antigen family LFA‐1, Mo‐1 and p!50,95

The human leukocyte function‐associated (LFA‐1) antigen, the monocyte differentiation antigen Mo‐1 which is characterized as the C3bi receptor and the glycoprotein p150,95 are characterized biochemically. Immunoprecipitations carried out with 6 different monoclonal antibodies (mAb) against LFA‐1 indicated that four mAb (SPV‐ L1, SPV‐L5, SPV‐L7 and SPV‐L11) were directed against the a chain, whereas mAb CLB54 and MHM‐23 were found to react with the common β chain of LFA‐1, Mo‐1 and p150,95. LFA‐1 and Mo‐1 expressed on KG‐1 cells or lymphocytes, monocytes and granulocytes from one donor were homogeneous. Interestingly the a chain of p150,95 showed heterogeneity. The molecular weight of the a chain expressed on monocytes was consistently higher than that of the α chain on granulocytes. The β subunits of LFA‐1 and Mo‐1 (as detected by mAb Bear‐1) are not only similar in molecular weight and isoelectric focusing patterns, but it is demonstrated here that they are also identically glycosylated and have similar protein backbones as judged by tryptic peptide mapping. In spite of their structural similarities, LFA‐1 and Mo‐1 differ completely in some of their biological functions. Anti‐LFA‐1 mAb strongly inhibited monocyte‐dependent T cell proliferation induced by tetanus toxoid or Helix pomatia hemocyanin and pokeweed mitogen‐driven specific antibody production in vitro, whereas the anti‐Mo‐1 antibody Bear‐1 was ineffective. These results suggest that the differences in these biological functions of LFA‐1 and Mo‐1 may be related to their different a subunits, which may recognize specific counter structures.
What Do Economists Know? An Empirical Study of Experts' Expectations

For more than three decades, economic columnist Joseph A. Livingston has canvassed a panel of economists twice a year, eliciting their six-month and twelve-month forecasts for more than a dozen key variables. This study analyzes whether the experts' predictions are unbiased, and whether complete use was made of all relevant, known information (unbiasedness and completeness being necessary conditions for fully rational expectations). Little bias was found in either the half-year or full-year predictions, but extensive underutilization of information-particularly data on monetary growth-occurred. "To prophecy is extremely difficult-especially with respect to the future. " Chinese proverb Do ECONOMISTS' EXPECTATIONS regarding key price and nonprice variables utilize all known, relevant information, in an unbiased, efficient manner? This is a worthy subject for research, for several reasons. Properties of experts' predictions likely form an upper bound for those of laymen. Further, as John Muth [14] has noted, "the character of dynamic processes is typically very sensitive to the way expectations are influenced by the actual course of events" (p. 316); hence, we need to know precisely how events do affect expectations. Finally, the common practice of replacing a variable's (generally unobserved) expectation with a proxy based on its past values will be unbiased (and will not cause bias in other
Influence of programming style in transformation bad smells: mining of ETL repositories

ABSTRACT Bad smells affect maintainability and performance of model-to-model transformations. There are studies that define a set of transformation bad smells, and some of them propose techniques to recognize and – according to their complexity – fix them in a (semi)automated way. In academia it is necessary to make students aware of this subject and provide them with guidelines to improve the quality of their transformations. This paper presents the most common bad smells made by master students from Universidad de los Andes, and compares them with those from publicly available repositories of Epsilon transformation language transformations, with the purpose of knowing whether programming style affects the incidence of smells. Three concrete contributions are presented: (i) two new bad smells that enrich the existing catalogs; (ii) a process that includes the automated extraction of transformation metrics and bad smells metrics from the repositories, and a statistical analysis that helps in identifying the relation between such metrics; and (iii) a tool that automatizes the process. From the statistical analysis, we conclude that, students must be encouraged and guided to develop maintainable declarative transformations. At this point, our tool has been proved to be very useful to help improve the quality of students’ transformations.
China as a Global Manufacturing Powerhouse: Strategic Considerations and Structural Adjustment

This study examines the nature and consequences of China's rise to the center of world economic affairs through manufacturing-led development. Our historical analysis shows that China is still well short of the point in its developmental process where its growth might be reasonably expected to slow, or the energy, resource and carbon intensity of growth to recede. The study argues that the current trajectory of industrialization will have to be altered when China becomes more actively engaged in dealing with structural issues at home and abroad against the background of the unwinding of global imbalances. One profitable strategy that China might employ would be to approximate the incredibly fruitful mass-market integration efforts of the USA that eventually elevated it to its position of global primacy. The cyclical re-emergence of excess capacity in Chinese heavy industry, serious questions about the medium term ability of other major regions to accommodate further large gains in Chinese market share, and the stark conflict between the contemporary style of industrial development and the health of the biosphere indicate strongly that now is the time to catalyze the required adjustment and reform processes that will underpin sustainable long-run prosperity.
Public finance, government spending and economic growth: the case of local governments in Brazil

The impact of local government spending on output growth is estimated using a panel of Brazilian municipalities during 1985-1994. Attention is focused on three expenditure categories, housing/urbanization, health/sanitation, and transport services, which are expected to be growth-enhancing, and their sources of finance (local taxes, intergovernmental transfers, and borrowing). The determinants of these spending categories are also examined. The size of the municipality, measured by the resident population, is shown to affect government spending nonlinearly. This is a contribution to the recent empirical literature on the linkages between decentralized government spending, public finances, and economic growth at the local, rather than national, level.
Algorithms for explaining forecast revisions

Forecasts are routinely revised, and these revisions are often the subject of informal analysis and discussion. This paper argues (1) that forecast revisions are analyzed because they help forecasters and forecast users to evaluate forecasts and forecasting procedures, and (2) that these analyses can be sharpened by using the forecasting model to systematically express its forecast revision as the sum of components identified with specific subsets of new information, such as data revisions and forecast errors. An algorithm for this purpose is explained and illustrated.
High-mobility group box 1 protein induces HIV-1 expression from persistently infected cells

Background:Necrosis is a frequent condition during AIDS, notably in organs targetted by opportunistic infections. Soluble factors released by necrotic cells are important for signalling cell damage, but little is known concerning their effect on HIV-1 replication. We focused on HMGB1, an abundant component of the chromatin that is released from necrotic cells and can act as a pro-inflammatory mediator. Materials and methods:A native form of HMGB1 was obtained from necrotic Hela cells, whereas a purified recombinant HMGB1 was generated in Escherichia coli. ACH-2 and U1 cells were used as models of persistent HIV-1 infection in lymphocytes and monocytes. Reactivation from latency was also investigated ex vivo using peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) collected from HIV-1-infected patients controlled by HAART. HIV-1 expression was quantified by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, real-time reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction and branched DNA techniques. Flow cytometry and blocking experiments were used to identify the receptor used by HMGB1. Chromatin immunoprecipitation was used to investigate long-terminal repeat activation upon stimulation by HMGB1. Results:HMGB1 increased HIV-1 transcription in chronically infected cells, a process that did not require de-novo protein synthesis. HIV-1 induction relied on HMGB1 interaction with the receptor for advanced glycation end-products. The activation pathway involved p38 and extracellular signal-related kinase as well as nuclear factor kappa B binding to the HIV-1 promoter. Finally, HMGB1 reactivated HIV-1 from latently infected PBMC collected in aviraemic HIV-infected patients. Conclusion:This work establishes for the first time a link between necrosis and HIV-1 replication, which involves HMGB1, a soluble mediator released by damaged cells.
Hepatocyte Nuclear Factor-4 Is a Novel Downstream Target of Insulin via FKHR as a Signal-regulated Transcriptional Inhibitor*

Previous studies have shown that FKHR, a member of the forkhead family of transcription factors, acts as a DNA binding-independent cofactor of nuclear receptors, including estrogen, retinoid, and thyroid hormone receptors, in addition to the original function as a DNA binding transcription factor that redistributes from the nucleus to the cytoplasm by insulin-induced phosphorylation. Here, we demonstrated the physical interaction of FKHR with hepatocyte nuclear factor (HNF)-4, a member of steroid/thyroid nuclear receptor superfamily, and the repression of HNF-4 transactivation by FKHR. FKHR interacted with the DNA binding domain of HNF-4 and inhibited HNF-4 binding to the cognate DNA. Furthermore, the binding affinity of HNF-4 with phosphorylated FKHR significantly decreased in comparison to that with unphosphorylated FKHR. Therefore, a phosphorylation of FKHR by insulin followed by its dissociation from HNF-4 and the redistribution of FKHR from the nucleus to the cytoplasm would expect to induce the transcriptional activation of HNF-4 by facilitating to the access of HNF-4 to its DNA element. Indeed, most intriguingly, insulin stimulation reversed the repression of HNF-4 transcriptional activity by phosphorylation-sensitive (wild-type) FKHR, but not by phosphorylation-deficient FKHR. These results suggest that insulin regulates the transcriptional activity of HNF-4 via FKHR as a signal-regulated transcriptional inhibitor.
Template Preparation Affects 16S rRNA High-Throughput Sequencing Analysis of Phyllosphere Microbial Communities

Phyllosphere microbial communities are highly diverse and have important ecological implications; in that context, bacterial identification based on 16S rRNA genes is an important research issue. In studies of phyllosphere microbial communities, microporous filtration and centrifugation are used to collect microorganism samples, but it is unclear which one has a better collection efficiency. In this study, we compared these two microorganism collection methods and investigated the effects of the DNA extraction process on the estimation of microbial community composition and organization. The following four treatments were examined: (A) filtration, resuspension, and direct PCR; (B) filtration, DNA isolation, and PCR; (C) centrifugation, resuspension, and direct PCR; (D) centrifugation, DNA isolation, and PCR. Our results showed that the percentage of chloroplast sequence contaminants was affected by the DNA extraction process. The bacterial compositions clearly differed between treatments A and C, suggesting that the collection method has an influence on the determination of community structure. Compared with treatments B and D, treatments A and C resulted in higher Shannon index values, indicating that the DNA extraction process might reduce the observed phyllosphere microbial alpha diversity. However, with respect to community structure, treatments B and D yielded very similar results, suggesting that the DNA extraction process erases the effect of the collection method. Our findings provide key information to ensure accurate estimates of diversity and community composition in studies of phyllosphere microorganisms.
Using a phytoplankton growth model to predict the fractionation of stable carbon isotopes

In the preceding paper in this issue, a phytoplankton growth model based on an analogy with chemical kinetics (the CR model) was re-derived, and a comparison made with the growth rate of cultured phytoplankton assemblages extracted from temperate lakes. In this paper, further derivation of the CR model leads to the same model of carbon isotope fractionation used by Rau et al. (Afar Ecol. Prog. Ser., 133, 275-285, 1996). Both the CR and Rau et al. models are compatible with the observation that isotope fractionation during phytoplankton growth, epsilon (p), is proportional to the growth rate, mu, divided by the extracellular carbon concentration, C. The CR model is then used to explain the observation that the initial slope of epsilon (p) divided by mu /C is a negative linear function of the cellular carbon to surface area ratio of the phytoplankton cell. The CR model applies the same model framework to predict both phytoplankton growth and stable isotope fractionation. The ability of the CR model to predict two measurable phenomena increases its usefulness, and also our confidence in its predictive capabilities.
It's about time: policy time

This article evaluates time perception in public policy by developing and characterising the concept of ‘policy time’. Research in time-related public policy literature portrays two main trends: (1) the pragmatic trend – short-term policy based on a pre-determined schedule as opposed to response-oriented policy; and (2) the normative trend – long-term policy inspired by ‘the voice of the future’ and/or by ‘public interest values’ and/or by ‘avoiding uncertainty’. This article offers a different approach to policy time management: instead of dealing with long-term policy vs. short-term policy it suggests juxtaposing ‘tactical policy time’ and ‘strategic policy time’. Tactical policy time is defined as ‘taking a specific time-related plan or action aimed at achieving a defined policy result’. Strategic policy time is defined as ‘taking a specific time-related plan or action with the aim of coping better with uncertainty in the future’. The concepts of tactical policy time and strategic policy time allow us to characterise ‘policy time’ as ‘time-related planning or action aiming to achieve a defined policy result and/or to cope better with an uncertain future. The application of these concepts is investigated in the context of centre–periphery relations.
Organizations: An Empirical Analysis

provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide. Abstract: The literature on volunteering has strongly increased over the last few years. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence on the determinants of environmental participation. This empirical study analyses a cross-section of individuals using micro-data from the World Values Survey wave III (1995-1997), which covers 38 countries, to investigate this question. The results suggest that individuals’ active participation in environmental organizations is influenced not only by socio-demographic and socio-economic factors, but also by political attitudes. Furthermore, we observe regional differences. Interestingly, environmental participation seems to be a more important channel for action in developing countries, where weak and dysfunctional states make people pursue their goals through non-governmental sector activities. We also find that a higher level of perceived corruption promotes participation in environmental organizations, which shows that individuals take action when they feel that the government is corrupt. Abstract: The literature on volunteering has strongly increased over the last few years. However, there is still a lack of substantial empirical evidence on the determinants of environmental participation. This empirical study analyses a cross-section of individuals using micro-data from the World Values Survey wave III (1995-1997), which covers 38 countries, to investigate this question. The results suggest that individuals’ active participation in environmental organizations is influenced not only by socio-demographic and socio-economic factors, but also by political attitudes. Furthermore, we observe regional differences. Interestingly, environmental participation seems to be a more important channel for action in developing countries, where weak and dysfunctional states make people pursue their goals through non-governmental sector activities. We also find that a higher level of perceived corruption promotes participation in environmental organizations, which shows that individuals take action when they feel that the government is corrupt.
An alternative double-sided two-way ranging method

Symmetric double-sided two-way ranging is a well-known technique to deal with clock drift in time-of-flight measurements between unsynchronised devices. However, the requirement for symmetric reply delays is often not feasible. This paper presents an alternative way to process double-sided two-way ranging measurements that eliminates the need for this impractical constraint. The error of the proposed method is of the same order of magnitude as the best case error of symmetric double-sided two-way ranging. Crucially, the error depends only on the clock drift of one of the devices, which can be exploited if one of the device has a better timing reference than the other.