Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
New mouse model to study islet transplantation in insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus

Background. Islet transplantation studies with diabetic rodents frequently use treatment with diabetogens such as alloxan or streptozotocin to render hosts hyperglycemic. These chemicals produce unwanted toxic side effects, which complicate interpretations of damage produced by hyperglycemia versus direct toxin-induced damage. A mouse that spontaneously developed insulin-sensitive diabetes without &bgr;-cell autoimmunity would provide an excellent vehicle for testing &bgr;-cell replacement protocols. The Ins2Akita mutation disrupts normal insulin processing and causes a failure in secretion of mature insulins, which results in the early development of hyperglycemia. This report examines the insulin sensitivity of mice that carry Ins2Akita and their responsiveness to engraftment with syngeneic pancreatic islets. Methods. Ten-week-old C57BL/6J-Ins2Akita/+ males were given 1 unit of insulin to determine insulin sensitivity. Also, 10-week-old, hyperglycemic B6-Ins2Akita/+ received either 400 islets isolated from syngeneic C57BL/6J males (n=7) or from allogeneic BALB/cJ males (n=5) under the renal capsule. These mice were followed for 8 weeks after engraftment or until remission of euglycemia. Nephrectomy of the graft-containing kidney was performed on mice that remained euglycemic. These mice were then followed for 2 weeks for return of hyperglycemia. Results. B6-Ins2Akita/+ mice are insulin responsive. Insulin treatment of hyperglycemic B6-Ins2Akita/+ males significantly lowered blood glucose values within 1 hr. In addition, B6-Ins2Akita/+ recipients of syngeneic islet grafts reversed their diabetic state in less than 72 hr. These islet-engrafted mice remained normoglycemic until removal of the graft-containing kidney. Removal of the graft resulted in a return to hyperglycemia. Mice that received allogeneic grafts efficiently rejected the graft. Conclusions. Our data support the hypothesis that B6-Ins2Akita/+ mice are insulin sensitive and provide an excellent model for islet transplantation studies. In addition, the reduced &bgr;-cell mass and the absence of &bgr;-cell autoimmunity, coupled to the fact that these mice also reject allografts, suggest that these mice may be useful for a variety of other applications, including testing functionality of human islets prepared for transplantation and perhaps also for exploring &bgr;-cell restorative therapy using pancreatic islet stem cells.
Multilayer perceptron, fuzzy sets, and classification

A fuzzy neural network model based on the multilayer perceptron, using the backpropagation algorithm, and capable of fuzzy classification of patterns is described. The input vector consists of membership values to linguistic properties while the output vector is defined in terms of fuzzy class membership values. This allows efficient modeling of fuzzy uncertain patterns with appropriate weights being assigned to the backpropagated errors depending upon the membership values at the corresponding outputs. During training, the learning rate is gradually decreased in discrete steps until the network converges to a minimum error solution. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on a speech recognition problem. The results are compared with those of the conventional MLP, the Bayes classifier, and other related models.
One-dimensional metallic behavior of the stripe phase in La2-xSrxCuO4

Using an exact diagonalization method within the dynamical mean-field theory we found stable stripe phases in the two-dimensional Hubbard model doped by 0.03<delta<0.2 holes, with a crossover from diagonal to vertical site-centered stripes at doping delta approximately 0.05. The doping dependence of the size of magnetic domains and chemical potential shift Delta&mgr; approximately -delta(2) are in quantitative agreement with the experimental results for La2-xSrxCuO4. The one-dimensional metallic behavior along the domain walls explains the observed suppression of spectral weight along the Brillouin zone diagonal.
Do Legislatures Matter in Budgetary Reform?

A recurring problem in the implementation of budgetary reforms at the state level is whether and how to engage legislatures in the effort. This paper posits that legislatures are critical for effective implementation and that different legislative institutional arrangements may have differential effects on both legislative and agency implementation. Drawing on a multistate survey, the analysis shows that higher levels of legislative responsibility for budgeting as well as legislative engagement in oversight of performance information are significantly associated with increased use of performance measures in making budgetary decisions both at the legislative and agency levels.
Programming a Smalltalk VM in Coq

We describe an experimental attempt at verification of Smalltalk VM using mechanized proof. Only the native code generation part is verified. The generator is developed in the Coq proof assistant and is largely based on the CompCert compiler backend. The resulting VM successfully runs the ANSI test suite on a number of targets with different ISAs.
Direct torque control of brush less DC motor drive with modified switching algorithm

Conventional direct torque control (DTC) of BLDC motor drive is quite cumbersome, because it operates on trapezoidal back EMF. The conventional DTC gives high torque ripple and switching frequency is variable due to bang-bang controllers. In this article, a new direct torque control scheme is proposed to a BLDC motor. This paper focuses to provide better direct torque control mechanism without using co-ordinate transformation and a new modified switching table is proposed with decoupled stator flux linkages. The Proposed DTC is developed based on error produced from torque hysteresis controller and sector information of flux space vector. The sector of flux space vector is obtained by estimating the rotor position of BLDC motor using hall sensors. In this paper, operation of BLDC motor drive in forward and reverse motoring conditions was exhibited. The proposed method is simulated in MATLAB software, Simulation results are provided for forward and reverse motoring and it provides less torque ripple in steady state.
Symbolic Verification of MOS Circuits

The program MOSSYM simulates the behavior of a MOS circuit represented as a switch-level network symbolically. That is, during simulator operation the user can set an input to either 0, 1, or a Boolean variable. The simulator then computes the behavior of the circuit as a function of the past and present input variables. By using heuristically efficient Boolean function manipulation algorithms, the verification of a circuit by symbolic simulation can proceed much more quickly than by exhaustive logic simulation. In this paper we present our concept of symbolic simulation, derive an algorithm for switch-level symbolic simulation, and present experimental measurements from MOSSYM. 1This paper was presented at the 1985 Chapel Hill Conference on VLSI. 2This research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Contracts Agency ARPA Order Number 3597.
Capital Markets Research And The Goodwill Debate

This paper provides a review of capital markets research relevant to the goodwill accounting debate. Results indicate that the reported goodwill asset under United States GAAP is associated with share values, but there is no clear evidence of a similar association for goodwill amortisation. Similarly, there is no clear evidence of a competitive disadvantage associated with the requirement to amortise goodwill.
Conservative Management of Acute Epidural Hematoma in a Pediatric Age Group

Objective: Craniotomy and evacuation is the standard treatment of acute epidural hematoma (EDH). Here, the authors report their experience in nonoperative management of acute EDH in children with mild head injury. Methods: The authors retrospectively reviewed charts of patients with conservatively treated EDH at the Department of Neurosurgery, King Abdulla University Hospital, Irbid, Jordan, between August 2003 and October 2007. All patients had a Glasgow Coma Scale score of 14 or 15, and an initial computerized tomography (CT) scan demonstrating an EDH with or without skull fractures. Follow-up included neurological examination and brain CT. Results: Six children (3 boys, 3 girls) with acute EDH were successfully managed at our department without surgical intervention. The Glasgow Outcome Scale score of all patients was 5, with no posttraumatic sequelae. Follow-up brain CT showed complete resolution of the EDH within 2–3 months. Conclusions: Our results demonstrated that pediatric EDH can be managed nonoperatively. The pronounced increase in the number of CT examinations for patients with head injuries has resulted in a greater proportion of EDH detected in conscious patients. We recommend such treatment be performed in specialized pediatric neurosurgical centers under close neurological observation.
Capital Budgeting for Interrelated Projects: A Real Options Approach

Abstract This paper explores the effect of project interrelationships on investment decisions and project values in a real options framework. We examine in detail the mutually exclusive case where a firm may invest in the development stage of two projects and then may select only a single project to implement. The firm can develop the projects in parallel or in sequence. The choice of development policy depends on the relative values of the embedded options for each strategy. Sequential development is shown to be superior to parallel development when projects have highly correlated values, and when they require a large commitment of capital for development, are short term in nature, and have relatively low volatility. We also show that the optimal ordering of sequential projects does not always begin with the most profitable project.
Evaluating Peacekeeping Missions

National Research Council With the end of the Soviet-U.S. rivalry ushering in what may be termed a "new world disorder," international peacekeeping has climbed to the top of the agenda of the United Nations (UN) and many national governments. Yet, despite the increasing resort to peacekeeping, there is little systematic understanding of its appropriate application. Particularly important are understanding what these missions can accomplish and determining the extent to which they have, in fact, achieved these goals. Progress depends on advances in conceptualization and analysis. Scholars, however, disagree about how to think about peacekeeping and how its impact should be evaluated. A number of the issues on which analysts differ were raised in RobertJohansen's 1994 Mershon International Studies Review examination of Paul Diehl's 1993 book, International Peacekeeping. Johansen took issue with Diehl's two criteria for evaluating peacekeeping operations, namely, that they (1) limit armed conflict, and (2) promote conflict resolution. These criteria, according toJohansen (1994:308), "ask more of peacekeeping forces than reasonably can be expected because they are not designed for the purpose[s] of [preventing war in general and] resolving underlying conflicts. " He claimed that Diehl's criteria misrepresented the "real purpose of peacekeeping" and missed many of the main benefits of these missions. In short, Diehl and Johansen differed on the appropriate framework for analysis and on standards for evaluation. At issue were what goals the missions could be expected to achieve, whether impacts should be evaluated in the short or long term, whether to assess effects on the local people or the governing parties, and whether to impose external standards that can be used to evaluate many cases or to develop mission-specific evaluation criteria. Moreover, analysts disagreed on the methodological problems of how to isolate specific impacts of missions and how to define appropriate comparison conditions.
Cross-Country Evidence on Public Sector Retrenchment

This article reports the results from a survey of public sector employment retrenchment episodes across a wide variety of developing and transition economies. The information collected and analyzed is primarily from internal World Bank documents and in-depth interviews with World Bank staff having operational information about experiences in specific countries. Using the information collected on 41 retrenchment programs across 37 countries, the article analyzes the relationships between the factors leading to retrenchment, the scope and nature of retrenchment, and the methods used to accomplish the retrenchment. The discussion of methods includes an analysis of the mix of involuntary and voluntary employment reduction programs, the compensation schemes offered, and the extent of targeting of specific types of workers. Although relevant quantitative information is limited, the article also attempts to evaluate the outcome of the programs on several dimensions. The most striking findings relate to analysis of the factors leading a significant fraction of programs to rehire workers separated from the public sector (thereby defeating the programs' objective). In addition, the article relates program characteristics to calculated summary financial payback indicators and to the nature of the labor market adjustment. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.
Motivationalizing organizational learning

This work focuses on the crucial role of individuals in the process of knowledge generation, transfer, and retention in project-based organization and proposes an alternative perspective of organizational learning framework. Learning motivation is argued to be the most vital antecedent to organizational learning process. By motivationalizing organizational learning, we have the benefit of understanding why or why don't individual employees engage in organizational learning activities and hence be more capable of suggesting appropriate organizational learning interventions.
CHD3 protein recognizes and regulates methylated histone H3 lysines 4 and 27 over a subset of targets in the rice genome

Histone lysine methylation is an important component of the epigenetic system demarcating transcriptionally active and inactive chromatin domains. It is of primary importance in understanding how different histone lysine methylation marks and a specific combination of them are read and interpreted by chromatin proteins to regulate gene expression. In this paper, we report that the rice CHD3 protein CHR729 that was required for many aspects of plant development can interact with dimethylated histone H3 lysine 4 (H3K4me2, a mark associated with moderately expressed or repressed genes) and with trimethylated histone H3 lysine 27 (H3K27me3, a mark associated with repressed genes), respectively, through the chromodomains and the plant homeodomain (PHD) finger of the protein. A mutation or down-regulation of the gene provoked a decrease of H3K27me3 and H3K4me3 (a mark associated with active genes). Genome-wide analysis revealed that H3K27me3 and H3K4me3, respectively, were lost from about 56 and 23% of marked loci, which correspond mostly to under-expressed or repressed genes. In the mutant, a higher-than-expected proportion of down-regulated genes lost H3K4me3, among which many encode DNA-binding transcription factors. These results suggest that the rice CHD3 protein is a bifunctional chromatin regulator able to recognize and modulate H3K4 and H3K27 methylation over repressed or tissue-specific genes, which may be associated with regulation of a gene transcription program of plant development.
Inequality and political violence: A review of the literature

Does economic inequality breed political violence? For almost half a century, scholars have tried to test this assumption, finding little empirical support for a statistical relationship between the two variables. This article provides a critical review of this literature, starting out with the link between so-called vertical (inter-individual) inequality and conflict. I argue that the lack of empirical results can largely be attributed to the almost exclusive focus on individual-level differences in terms of income or land. Group identity is critical to recruitment and maintaining allegiance to a military organization. Hence, we should focus the attention on the relevant form of inequality—that between groups, or so-called horizontal inequalities. In contrast to the studies focusing on vertical inequality, an emerging quantitative literature on horizontal inequalities and conflict has found a positive link, which is more in line with the evidence from several case studies. However, measuring horizontal inequalities is a clear challenge, and there is a need for additional studies to qualify the initial findings. I conclude by suggesting some avenues for future research.
Test Driven domain modelling

To write software we have to know requirements; to know requirements we have to know domain; to know the domain we have to analyze and model one. We propose a methodology for applying Test Driven Modelling in engineering of domains, requirements and software. We will restrict ourselves here to enterprise information systems and therefore to business domains. As common for Software Factories, domain models (as well as all other models) are software artefacts, not only documentation artefacts. In our approach Test Driven Modelling utilizes Test Driven Development for domain modelling. Domain models engineered in this way are used as Domain Specific Language for specifying software requirements. The hypothesis is that such domain models can be used for validation of requirements and verification of software, lead developments towards Software Factories, and increase dependability of software.
Carbon tax, corporate carbon profile and financial return

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the impact of the proposed carbon tax on the financial market return of Australian firms. It also considers the differential tax effect on individual firms with different carbon profiles, including factors such as emissions costs, carbon disclosure and climate-change policies. Design/methodology/approach – Utilising the event-study method, the authors examine the market reaction to seven key carbon legislative information events that occurred from February 2011 to November 2011. The sample includes 48 different firms whose emissions-related data are available from Carbon Disclosure Project reports; thus, 336 firm-event observations are used for the cross-sectional analysis. Findings – The paper documents evidence that the proposed tax has an overall negative impact on shareholder wealth as measured by abnormal returns. The negative impact varies across sectors, with the most significant effect found in the materials, industrial and financial sectors. It was also fo.
Levels of Intracellular Protein and Messenger RNA of Mucin and Lysozyme in Normal Human Nasal and Polyp Epithelium

Objectives: Mucus hypersecretion is a characteristic feature in chronic sinusitis with nasal polyps. The objective of this study is to examine whether the polyp epithelium itself contributes to a certain extent to the increased mucous secretions in chronic sinusitis with nasal polyps, and if it does, to determine which mucin genes are responsible for the increased mucin secretion.
Mining the web to detect place names

With the aim to improve the quality of gazetteers for geographic information retrieval systems, we present a method to detect place names employed by people submitting information to Web resources. We investigate how often people refer to a place using locative phrases in web queries and address the problem of defining cognitively significant place names. We propose Web mining as a means to decide whether a given particular named entity is in fact a place.
Factors and Correlates of Employment Growth in the Canadian Urban System, 1971–1991

The objective of this paper is to examine a number of hypotheses concerning the factors or correlates of employment growth in the Canadian urban system—a set of 152 urban areas having populations of more than ten thousand inhabitants which comprises 77.4 percent of the national population. Do observed patterns of sectoral employment growth obey some sort of underlying logic? More specifically, do the rates of employment growth that are found in individual urban areas vary significantly according to one or more of the following attributes of an urban area: a) the region in which it is located; b) its population size; c) its relative proximity to a major metropolitan area; d) its socioeconomic characteristics? While approaches involving a, e and f yield promising results, it is clear that there are few immutable laws that permit one to predict where employment growth will occur within the urban system. Perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of the analyses conducted involves the instability of the results from one decade to another; one decade’s category of winners is often the other decade’s category of losers.
Recognising new market opportunities and selecting appropriate segments

Many destinations encounter problems when attempting to adopt a strategic approach to planning. If destinations misread target markets and fail to provide the experiences desired by tourists, they face the danger of falling revenue, adverse impacts on their image and a disenchanted travel trade sector that may make recommendations to its clients to travel elsewhere. This article examines how destinations are able to use a tourism-specific version of the strategic window of opportunity model to identify opportunities for participating in new, rapidly growing markets. The utility of the model is demonstrated by examining how the steps suggested in the model were used in Cairns, Australia, to develop its Chinese market sector. This article contributes to a gap in the literature regarding strategies that may be used by destinations searching for new markets.
Demand Forecast Sharing in Supply Chains

This paper examines the incentives of a manufacturer and a retailer to share their demand forecasts. The demand at the retailer is a linearly decreasing function of price. The manufacturer sets the wholesale price first, and the retailer sets the retail price after observing the wholesale price. Both players set their prices based on their forecasts of demand. In the make‐to‐order scenario, the manufacturer sets the production quantity after observing the actual demand; in the make‐to‐stock scenario, the manufacturer sets the production quantity before the demand is realized. In the make‐to‐order scenario, we show that sharing the forecast unconditionally by the retailer with the manufacturer benefits the manufacturer but hurts the retailer. We also demonstrate that a side payment contract cannot induce Pareto‐optimal information sharing equilibrium, but a discount based wholesale price contract can. The social welfare as well as consumer surplus is higher under the discount contract, compared with under no information sharing. In the make‐to‐stock scenario, the manufacturer realizes additional benefits in the form of savings in inventory holding and shortage costs when forecasts are shared. If the savings from inventory holding and shortage costs because of information sharing are sufficiently high, then a side payment contract that induces Pareto‐optimal information sharing is feasible in the make‐to‐stock scenario. We also provide additional managerial insights with the help of a computational study.