Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Statin-sensitive endocytosis of albumin by glomerular podocytes.

Glomerular podocytes are critical regulators of glomerular permeability via the slit diaphragm and may play a role in cleaning the glomerular filter. Whether podocytes are able to endocytose proteins is uncertain. We studied protein endocytosis in conditionally immortalized mouse and human podocytes using FITC-albumin by direct quantitative assay and by fluorescence microscopy and electron microscopy in mouse podocytes. Furthermore, in vivo uptake was studied in human, rat, and mouse podocytes. Both mouse and human podocytes displayed specific one-site binding for FITC-albumin with K(d) of 0.91 or 0.44 mg/ml and B(max) of 3.15 or 0.81 microg/mg cell protein, respectively. In addition, they showed avid endocytosis of FITC-albumin with K(m) of 9.48 or 4.5 mg/ml and V(max) of 474.3 or 97.4 microg.mg cell protein(-1). h(-1), respectively. Immunoglobulin and transferrin were inefficient competitors of this process, indicating some specificity for albumin. Accumulation of endocytosed albumin could be demonstrated in intracellular vesicles by fluorescence confocal microscopy and electron microscopy. Endocytosis was sensitive to pretreatment with simvastatin. In vivo accumulation of albumin was found in all three species but was most pronounced in the rat. We conclude that podocytes are able to endocytose protein in a statin-sensitive manner. This function is likely to be highly significant in health and disease. In addition, protein endocytosis by podocytes may represent a useful, measurable phenotypic characteristic against which potentially injurious or beneficial interventions can be assessed.
Mid-Cretaceous amber fossils illuminate the past diversity of tropical lizards

Exquisitely preserved fossil lizards from 99-million-year-old Burmese amber provide new insights into paleotropical diversity. Modern tropical forests harbor an enormous diversity of squamates, but fossilization in such environments is uncommon and little is known about tropical lizard assemblages of the Mesozoic. We report the oldest lizard assemblage preserved in amber, providing insight into the poorly preserved but potentially diverse mid-Cretaceous paleotropics. Twelve specimens from the Albian-Cenomanian boundary of Myanmar (99 Ma) preserve fine details of soft tissue and osteology, and high-resolution x-ray computed tomography permits detailed comparisons to extant and extinct lizards. The extraordinary preservation allows several specimens to be confidently assigned to groups including stem Gekkota and stem Chamaleonidae. Other taxa are assignable to crown clades on the basis of similar traits. The detailed preservation of osteological and soft tissue characters in these specimens may facilitate their precise phylogenetic placement, making them useful calibration points for molecular divergence time estimates and potential keys for resolving conflicts in higher-order squamate relationships.
The behavioral sequence of information education services industry in Taiwan: relationship bonding tactics, relationship quality and behavioral loyalty

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to summarize existing evidence about the behavioral sequence of relationship marketing at the individual customer level, and to offer a conceptual model of the impact of particular behaviors that signal whether customers remain with or defect from the company.Design/methodology/approach – Based on the SEM tool of Lisrel (Linear Structure Relation), this study develops and empirically tests a model examining the relations among relationship bonding tactics, perceived relationship investments, customer satisfaction, trust, commitment and customer behavioral loyalty, as relationship duration was used as a controllable variable in a relationship marketing system.Findings – Based on a sample collected from PC school, the largest information services institute in Taiwan, the results show that all three kinds of relationship bonding tactic do have significant influence on perceived relationship investment except for financial ones. Besides, the results show that customer sat.
The Effects of the Fast Track Program on Serious Problem Outcomes at the End of Elementary School

This study examines the effects of the Fast Track program, which is a multicomponent, intensive intervention for children with early-onset conduct problems and continues from 1st grade through high school. Prior research has shown that Fast Track produces small positive effect sizes on children's social and behavioral outcomes at the end of 1st and 3rd grades in comparison to control children. This study addresses the important question of whether this intervention reduces cases of serious problems that can occur during the 4th- and 5th-grade years. Fast Track did have a significant but modest influence on children's rates of social competence and social cognition problems, problems with involvement with deviant peers, and conduct problems in the home and community, compared to children in the control condition. There was no evidence of intervention impact on children's serious problems in the school setting at Grades 4 and 5. This evaluation indicates that Fast Track has continued to influence certain key areas of children's adjustment throughout the elementary school years, reducing children's likelihood of emerging as cases with problems in their social, peer, or home functioning. The stage is set to examine potential prevention effects on these youths' serious antisocial behaviors during adolescence.
The politics of evidence: A response to Rulli and D'Odorico

We welcome Rulli and D’Odorico’s response to our introduction to the Journal for Peasant Studies (JPS) Forum on Global Land Grabbing (Scoones et al. 2013) in which we discussed the ‘literature rush’ that has accompanied the global ‘land rush’. We outlined a series of concerns with the data being used in this literature – concerns both with the data itself and with its uncritical deployment in popular and academic studies. We called for a second phase of land grab research that would ground abstract calculations of imprecise global averages in favour of concrete, situated and transparent research that could address critical questions such as what is actually happening, who is winning and losing, and why. With our discussion of the ‘politics of evidence’ we called for research that would extend beyond the fixation on ‘killer facts’ – the headline-grabbing numbers. Instead, ground-truthing and generating traceable datasets are essential. Rulli and D’Odorico (2013) do not express any disagreement with these points. Rather, they object to a short section on the role of data that references a criticism of their work made by Fred Pearce in The New Scientist (2013). Marc Edelman also referenced this criticism in his article for the same Forum (Edelman 2013). Fred Pearce’s criticisms of Rulli et al. (2013) are cited twice in the same Forum because we considered them important. The primary objection raised by Pearce, with which we agree, was that although Rulli et al. published their article in one of the most well-respected sources for scientific publications in the English-speaking world, they did not go far enough in stressing how problematic their data were. They did not provide a definition of what constitutes a land grab, and their discussion of data was confined to a short note on methods at the end of the article. Rulli et al. then based a new set of calculations on this data and appeared to estimate global water grabbing to a level of precision astounding for such variable and uncertain local events as rainfall, crop production and irrigation. True, Rulli et al. use the term ‘scenario’, which is, as they point out in their comment, a valid strategy for evaluating potential outcomes, but the term ‘scenario’ is only applied to the choice of irrigation strategy (no irrigation, irrigation at the same rate as the rest of the country, and irrigation rates that maximize crop production) and not to several other elements that are also ‘scenarios’: whether the data for land grabbing are accurate, whether the land will be put to production, or what
Cost Horizons and Certainty Equivalents: An Approach to Stochastic Programming of Heating Oil

Scheduling heating oil production is an important management problem. It is also a complex one. Weather and demand uncertainties, allocation of production between different refineries, joint-and by-product relations, storage limitations, maintenance of minimal supplies and many other factors need to be considered. This paper is concerned with one of an integrated series of operations research studies directed toward improvement in such scheduling methods. Emphasis is on essentials of the mathematical model. Institutional features and other phases of the OR studies are brought in only as required.
Cognitive functioning during highly active antiretroviral therapy interruption in human immunodeficiency virus type 1 infection

Although no longer considered therapeutically beneficial, antiretroviral treatment interruptions (TIs) still occur frequently among patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection for a variety of reasons. TIs typically result in viral rebound and worsening immunosuppression, which in turn are risk factors for neurocognitive decline and dementia. We sought to determine the extent of neurocognitive risk with TIs and subsequent reintroduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) by using a comprehensive, sensitive neuropsychological assessment and by concurrently determining changes in plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) viral load and CD4 counts. Prospective, serial, clinical evaluations including neuropsychological (NP) testing and measurement of plasma HIV RNA and CD4 count and mood state were performed on HIV-1—infected individuals (N=11) at three time points: (1) prior to a TI, while on HAART; (2) after TIs averaging 6 months; and (3) after reinitiating HAART therapy. During TI, plasma HIV RNA increased and CD4 counts declined significantly, but NP performance did not change. Following reinitiation of HAART, viral loads fell below pre-TI levels, and CD4 counts rose. Improved viral suppression and immune restoration with reinitiation of HAART resulted in significant improvement in neurocognitive performance. No changes on comprehensive questionnaires of mood state were observed in relation to TI. NP performance and mood state remained stable during TIs despite worsened viral loads and CD4 counts. Because “practice effects” are generally greatest between the first and second NP testing sessions, improvement at the third, post-TI time point was unlikely to be accounted for by practice. TIs of up to 6 months appear to be neurocognitively and psychiatrically safe for most patients.
HYPER: A Hybrid High-Performance Framework for Network Function Virtualization

Network function virtualization (NFV) offers the potential for both enhancing service delivery flexibility and reducing overall costs by virtualizing network functions that are traditionally implemented in dedicated hardware. However, the flexibility of NFV comes with considerable compromises since virtual machine carried functions could introduce significant performance overhead. In this paper, we present a novel high-performance framework called HYPER, which combines programmable hardware infrastructure and traditional software infrastructure in NFV to achieve both high performance and flexibility for supporting virtualized network functions (VNFs). In HYPER, we design a mediator layer to hide underlying infrastructure heterogeneity from the NFV orchestrator to simplify VNF management. In addition, we design a SLA-aware service chaining algorithm in HYPER to leverage the benefits of the hybrid infrastructure to fulfill both functional and performance requirements from service subscribers (or tenants). To optimize resource utilization efficiency, we also introduce a performance-aware VNF placement algorithm in HYPER, which accommodates both resource and performance requirements in placing VNFs. We implement HYPER in a testbed based on OpenStack and ONetCard. Experimental results show that HYPER reduces the forwarding latency of a service chain by 40% to 67% compared with data plane development kit -based implementation, while maintaining the flexibility of VNF management.
Latency effect in a variable speed control on torsional response of elastic drive systems

Torsional vibration issues in elastic drive systems are a well-known topic also in the industrial field. The torque pulsations produced by the drive are the main causes of these torsional resonance excitations. However, it will be analysed in this paper how some side-effects in the control strategy, like the latencies, are critical as the torque ripple. Indeed, the suppression of this vibrations phenomenon cannot be achieved correctly without analysing and quantifying the time-delays that affect the system. This paper aims to provide both a comprehensive analysis on such latencies and introduces a method to proof the relationship between the damping capability of the process and the time-delays. It will be defined a process damping coefficient in order to explain the relations between the electrical damping, related to the control architecture, the latencies and the mechanical damping.
The Impact of Implementing JIT on Employees′ Job Attitudes

Presents survey results describing the effect that adopting Just‐in‐Time (JIT) manufacturing methods had on the job attitudes of production line workers at a Hewlett‐Packard plant. JIT manufacturing is one of the latest Japanese management techniques to be adopted and implemented by Western companies. The operational benefits of adopting JIT have been widely documented; however, uneasiness has occasionally been expressed concerning the human impact of changing from a traditional manufacturing structure to a JIT philosophy. Unfortunately, little empirical evidence is available concerning the effect on workers of changing to a JIT manufacturing scheme. Workers on an electronic assembly line completed written questionnaires in the late 1980s when JIT was begun, and again two years later after the production line had stabilized. Even though drastic changes occurred in the work environment, generally positive changes in attitudes occurred during the implementation period. In addition, no significant drop‐off i.
Does Insurance Market Activity Promote Economic Growth? Country Study for Industrial and Developing Countries

Insurance market activity, both as a financial intermediary and a provider of risk transfer and indemnification, may contribute to economic growth by allowing different risks to be managed more efficiently and by mobilizing domestic savings. During the past decade, there has been faster growth in insurance market activity, particularly in emerging markets given the process of liberalization and financial integration, which raises questions about its impact on economic growth. The author tests whether there is a causal relationship between insurance market activity (life and nonlife insurance) and economic growth. Using the generalized method of moments for dynamic models of panel data for 56 countries and for the 1976-2004 period, he finds robust evidence of a causal relationship between insurance market activity and economic growth. Both life and nonlife insurance have a positive and significant causal effect on economic growth. High-income countries drive the results in the case of life insurance. On the other hand, both high-income and developing countries drive the results in the case of nonlife insurance.
Optimal reception, performance bound, and cutoff rate analysis of references-assisted coherent CDMA communications with applications

Coherent spread-spectrum communications with transmitted reference-based, also called pilot-based, channel estimation is considered for code-division multiple-access (CDMA) communications over fading channels. Both noncontiguous time-division multiplexed reference symbol-based and continuous code-division multiplexed channel-based schemes are described. Assuming mean square error or optimal robust channel estimation, we derive the optimal receiver structure with a maximum-likelihood convolutional decoder. In addition, the Bhattacharyya bound and the cutoff rate of the reference-assisted coherent communications are derived. These analytical results are used for evaluating system performance and for selecting parameters such as coding rate and the data to reference power ratio to optimize system performance. Simulation results are given showing that the reverse link performance in a CDMA system can be significantly improved by using the reference-assisted coherent communication instead of noncoherent reception of orthogonally coded signal.
Corporate Diversification and Firm Value: Evidence from Post-1997 Data

In 1997, SFAS 131 established a new segment-reporting standard for US public companies. Using measures of diversification based on the diversity in segment-industry characteristics and controlling for endogeneity of the diversification decision, we document a diversification premium in our post-1997 period. We find significant positive effects of cash flow diversity, leverage diversity and profitability diversity on excess value, consistent with the efficient internal capital market hypothesis. We also find that the size of the diversification premium in the post-1997 data is negatively correlated with the degree of diversification and positively correlated with firm size. In contrast, we find that the pre-1998 data typically generates a diversification discount, but the effect is statistically less significant when endogeneity is controlled for. Thus, the diversification discount documented in earlier studies can be an artifact of the pre-1998 data or a failure to control for endogeneity.
Luxury Cruise Travelers

The purpose of this study was to understand the role of other customer perceptions (OCP) in the formation of luxury cruise travelers’ social value, brand attachment, and willingness to pay a price premium. Based on a literature review, theoretical causal relationships between study variables were proposed. During the theory-building process, it was hypothesized that travelers’ face-consciousness levels could play a moderating role in the relationship between OCP and social value. The proposed hypotheses were empirically tested using data collected from 342 U.S. travelers who had taken a luxury cruise. Based on the results of data analysis, it was found that all three dimensions of OCP are critical factors in the formation of social value. More importantly, it was revealed only face-conscious travelers feel social value when they identify with the other upper-class passengers on a luxury cruise. The managerial implications of these findings are discussed.
Remote atomic vapor magnetometer with Sub-pT resolution operating at ambient temperature

We have designed and characterized a Cesium vapor cell magnetometry system specifically aimed at meeting the challenges of remote interrogation. Standard single-mode telecom optical fibers are used for optical delivery and collection. The additional noise contribution due to optical polarization drift during propagation is mitigated by polarization and modal walk-off. We show that it is possible to obtain as low as 0.1 pT/Hz1/2 resolution at 1 Hz without temperature control over the ambient temperature range of -5 to 30 C.
A Competence-based Theory of the Firm

The research question of the article is: Does the competence-based view, representing a theory of sustaining competitive advantage, offer simultaneously a comprehensive theory of the firm? In order to develop an answer, it appears to be necessary to elaborate the theoretical basis of the competence-based view by delimitating this perspective from the resource-based one. The scrutiny suggests that the competence-based view represents a theory of the firm with other answers than current theories of the firm in use. Moreover, not all the answers of the competence-based view as to the theory of the firm are convincing. Therefore, fundamental weaknesses and shortcomings, which can be dispelled, are pointed out.
Why Do Countries Adopt Fiscal Rules?

This paper examines which economic, institutional and political characteristics of countries affect the likelihood that a numeral rule will be adopted as part of a fiscal strategy to limit the level of public debt. We estimate a panel binary response model over the period 1970-2012 for 110 countries, of which 58 opted to adopt such a rule. Our results suggest that the probability such a rule will be adopted is greater if a country has a high level of public debt, a relatively inflexible exchange rate regime, has already adopted inflation targeting, has deep credit markets, and if other countries already have adopted a debt rule. There are some differences in decision factors between high-income and lower-income countries, with the level of economic development and the openness of the economy playing opposite roles in each country group, and the impact of monetary unions on debt rule adoption being much stronger in the former group. The results are robust to testing for reverse causality, including by using different econometric techniques
The Effect of CRM Outsourcing on Shareholder Value: A Contingency Perspective

One central business activity that companies increasingly outsource is the information systems IS function. Previous research has shown that outsourcing of back-office IS generally has a positive effect on shareholder value of the outsourcing firm. Much less is known about the performance implications of outsourcing of another important IS function, namely, front-office customer relationship management CRM systems, where the vendor uses its own personnel and software to perform several CRM tasks. Previous, largely anecdotal evidence shows that the performance implications of outsourcing CRM range from very negative to very positive. To address this unsatisfactory state of knowledge, we provide and empirically test a contingency perspective on the performance implications of outsourcing CRM processes. We do so using the event-study methodology. The results are largely consistent with our contingency model. CRM outsourcing is more beneficial to firms that are high on information technology capabilities and low on marketing capabilities, and less beneficial when it concerns presales CRM. Similarly, although vendor economic distance has a positive influence on the outsourcing firm's shareholder value, vendor cultural distance has a negative influence. These effects are in turn significantly moderated by the type of CRM process outsourced. This paper was accepted by Sandra Slaughter, information systems.
Analysis of Financial Development and Economic Growth in Pakistan

The study is focused on the analysis of financial development and growth in Pakistan economy for the period of 1972-2011. Cointegration techniques and Granger causality test based on the block exogeneity (Wald test) has been applied for the analysis. The cointegration test confirmed the long run association among the inflation, credit to private sector, deposits, foreign direct investment, domestic savings and economic growth. The present study supports the “supply-leading” hypothesis in Pakistan economy. Granger causality test results show that there is bidirectional causality between inflation and growth, deposits and growth, and savings and growth. Furthermore, unidirectional causality is running from foreign direct investment to growth. The coefficient of the error correction has the correct sign and is statistically significant. The study also draws some conclusion and suggests some policy implications for the establishment of robust financial sector and setting up a strong growth trajectory of the economy.