Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The phenology of growth and reproduction in plants

Abstract The study of phenological aspects of plants involves the observation, recording and interpretation of the timing of their life history events. This review considers the phenology of leafing, flowering and fruit production in a range of species and communities. The selective forces (both abiotic and biotic) that influence the timing of these events are discussed. Within the limits imposed by phylogenetic constraints, the phenological patterns (timing, frequency, duration, degree of synchrony, etc.) of each phase are probably the result of a compromise between a variety of selective pressures, such as seasonal climatic changes, resource availability, and the presence of pollinators, predators and seed dispersers. Many studies on flowering times stress the role of interactions between plant species which share pollinators or predators. The timing of fruiting plays a key role in controlling the abundance and variety of obligate frugivores in many tropical communities. The importance of long-term recording is stressed, particularly in species which fruit irregularly. An understanding of the phenology of plants is crucial to the understanding of community function and diversity.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Affect and its Role for Renewable Energy Acceptance

To foster a socially accepted energy transition, it is essential to gain insights into motives for acceptance or rejection of technologies related to renewable energies. The study aims to shed light on the emotional evaluation of renewable energy technologies and in how far the affective responses are correlated with the acceptance of those technologies. An empirical study is conducted in which a semantic differential is used to assess emotional evaluation of wind power, solar power (PV) and biomass for electricity production. Furthermore, general acceptance of the technologies was assessed. It was found that not only did the technologies differ in terms of emotional responses they evoked, but that those responses also varied significantly between groups of high and low levels of acceptance concerning the respective energy technology. By analyzing spontaneous associations with the three energy sources, possible reasons for the affective evaluations were identified, which can provide essential topics for the communication about those technologies. Overall, the three renewable energy technologies revealed different emotional evaluations which might considerably impact the overall acceptance. It is argued that knowledge about such affective perceptions is useful to tailor energy technology development in early phases and to steer public information and communication strategies.
The Use of Transfer Payments by Immigrants

This paper uses data from the 1976 Survey of Income and Education to compare the receipt of transfers by families headed by male and female immigrants and those headed by native-born Americans. The average level of transfers is found to be considerably higher among families headed by immigrants, but this is almost entirely the result of the higher average age of family members among the immigrant group — a reflection of the large inflows of immigrants into the U.S. during the pre-1924 period. When age and other factors are held constant, immigrant families are found to be considerably less likely to rely on welfare than native families, and their receipts from social insurance programs are found to be only slightly higher.
F-tests for lag length selection in augmented Dickey–Fuller regressions: some Monte Carlo evidence

This paper investigates the empirical performance of sequential f-tests as a criterion for selecting the lag length in Augmented Dickey-Fuller regressions. This criterion performs approximately as well as the AIC and a criterion based on eliminating residual autocorrelation. However, no single criterion is clearly superior to the other two.
Ecosystem Ethics: An Ethical Analysis of Orchestrators' Ultimate Power and the Dilemma of Ecosystem Ruling

Ecosystems, platforms and app stores have become a de factomodel for the modern software business. In the curated marketplaces of software ecosystems, independent software vendors are able to distribute their products and services to the customers. As the software industry has a tendency towards the winner-takes-all phenomenon, often only few of the competing ecosystems survive and share the market. As the software vendors are depending on the ecosystems to be able to publish their offerings, the orchestrators have achieved ultimate power to decide who are eligible to work and who are not. This study presents an ethical discussion on the ecosystem ruling dilemma: ecosystem focal company’s right to orchestrate what they offer against restricting liberty of independent software vendors. In the analysis, John Rawls’ theory of justice is used as a framing philosophical concept.
An OAIS-Based Hospital Information System on the Cloud: Analysis of a NoSQL Column-Oriented Approach

The Open Archive Information System (OAIS) is a reference model for organizing people and resources in a system, and it is already adopted in care centers and medical systems to efficiently manage clinical data, medical personnel, and patients. Archival storage systems are typically implemented using traditional relational database systems, but the relation-oriented technology strongly limits the efficiency in the management of huge amount of patients’ clinical data, especially in emerging cloud-based, that are distributed. In this paper, we present an OAIS healthcare architecture useful to manage a huge amount of HL7 clinical documents in a scalable way. Specifically, it is based on a NoSQL column-oriented Data Base Management System deployed in the cloud, thus to benefit from a big tables and wide rows available over a virtual distributed infrastructure. We developed a prototype of the proposed architecture at the IRCCS, and we evaluated its efficiency in a real case of study.
Intergenic flip flop, a method for systematic gene disruption and cloning in yeast

We have developed a strategy named Intergenic Flip Flop which, for each gene, allows us to produce in one experiment both a disrupting cassette and a plasmid for gap repair. The same method can also be used to insert a reporter gene downstream from the promoter. This approach extends the polymerase chain reaction (PCR)‐based strategy proposed by Maftahi et al. 1996. Our method consists of PCR amplification of the two flanking intergenic regions of the open reading frame (ORF) of interest, using two sets of oligonucleotides. Each PCR product is flanked by two short defined nucleotidic sequences with a unique restriction site, allowing subsequent hybridization between them. The association of the two amplimers by the complementary sequences either in the same orientation as in genomic DNA or in the opposite orientation, allows the generation, after PCR, of two distinct cassettes which can be cloned into suitable vectors. When the amplimer in the head‐to‐tail orientation is cloned in a vector containing a selective marker for yeast such as G418 resistance, it provides a disrupting cassette after cleavage at the unique restriction site introduced by the PCR between the two intergenic amplimers. The amplimer with a direct orientation cloned into a yeast vector, after cleavage at the unique restriction site between the intergenic regions, permits cloning by gap repair of the gene of interest in yeast. Finally, a reporter gene can be inserted in the same plasmid. We report here the successful application of this strategy to an ORF of chromosome XIV of Saccharomyces cerevisiae: N1216.
What Inventory Behavior Tells Us About Business Cycles

Manufacturers' finished goods inventories move less than shipments over the business cycle. We argue that this requires marginal cost to be more procyclical than is conventionally measured. We construct, for six manufacturing industries, alternative measures of marginal cost that attribute high-frequency productivity shocks to procyclical work effort, and find that they are much more successful in accounting for inventory behavior. The difference is attributable to cyclicality in the shadow price of labor, not to diminishing returns in fact, parametric evidence suggests that the short-run slope of marginal cost is close to zero for five of the six industries. Moreover, while our measures of marginal cost are procyclical relative to output price, they are too persistent for intertemporal substitution to be important. We conclude that countercyclical markups are chiefly responsible for the sluggish response of inventory stocks over the cycle.
Down‐regulation of human alloimmune responses by genetically engineered expression of CD95 ligand on stimulatory and target cells

Transgenic expression of apoptosis‐inducing molecules could be a strategy to protect cells and tissues from destruction by apoptosis‐susceptible effector T cells. Some evidence for the potencyof this approach has been obtained in mouse and rat transplantation models. However, limited data are available on the capacity of apoptosis‐inducing molecules to modulate human alloimmune responses. In this study we analyzed the in vitro consequences of an interaction of human T cells with allogeneic 293 cells and 293 transfectants stably expressing high levels of the apoptosis‐inducing CD95 ligand (CD95L). Both, CD95L– and CD95L+ 293 cells were able to activate allogeneic T cells as demonstrated by comparable CD25 expression at day 2 of culture. The analysisof viable T cells at day 7, however, revealed anti‐293 cytotoxic activity only in cultures that had been stimulated with CD95L– 293 cells. Alloactivated effector T cells lysed CD95L– and CD95L+ 293 targets with similar efficiency when tested in a 4‐h 51Cr‐release assay. Prolongation of the effector phase to 20 h resulted in a further increase in the destruction of CD95L– target cells, whereas lysis of CD95L+ targets remained low. These data suggest that genetically engineered expression of CD95L on cells or tissues could be an approach to control human T cell reactivity towards allografts. During the induction of an alloimmune response depletion of cytotoxic precursor cells may be obtained by overexpressing CD95L on stimulatory cells; CD95L expression on graft tissue might limit T cell‐mediated destruction of the transplant during the effector phase of the response.
La Charte de la langue française

This paper inderlines in a cursory way some questions of interpretation that seem to arise from Quebec's new Charter of the French Language. The Charter breaks new ground in legal terminology. Some of the new terms and phrases introduced raise definitional problems, notably the concept of a "business undertaking". The task of specifying the meaning of words and phrases used in the Charter has been left to the Cabinet, through an usually wide delegation of regulation-making power. However, the reconstructed French Language Board (Office de la langue francaise) has also been granted significant regulation-making authority, which may in some cases overlap with that of the Cabinet. The nature and extent of rights and obligations that seem to arise under the Charter may be difficult to ascertain. In particular, the effect or provisions as to the language of standard form contracts, and the manner of enforcing them, seem fraught with uncertainty. While the Charter obviously confirm the principles underlying the previous Official Language Act of 1974, it achieves greater clarity and consistency in stating those policies. In some respects, it allows for more flexibility than the earlier Act. The enforcement provisions of the Charter place greater emphasis on coercive action as regards the language of business. The Charter also breaks new ground by introducing a form of joint management of language conditions at work. In order to allow innovations to settle down, it is suggested that uncertainties be resolved by accumulated experience rather than through over-hasty amending legislation.
Domestic and Foreign Country Bias in International Equity Portfolios

Distinguishing two components of the preference for geographical proximity – the domestic country bias assessing investors’ holdings within the domestic market, and the foreign country bias assessing investors’ bilateral holdings within a particular host, I document a number of stylized facts related to international equity portfolios. First, investors in emerging countries hold systematically larger shares in their local markets compared to investors in developed countries. Second, while investors generally allocate trivial shares to most of the available destinations and completely disregard the remaining ones, I report several positive country bias ratios suggesting that the source country's investors overweigh the destination market. Third, the portfolio equity held in only a small number of destination markets generates much of countries’ existing foreign assets. I refer to this observation as the geographical shrinkage suggesting that the domestic bias coexists with an equally imperfect diversification of investors’ foreign asset holdings.
The Asset Management Industry in China: Its Past Performance and Future Prospects

After 20 years of rapid growth, the asset management industry in China has reached total assets under management of $2.8 trillion—and more than $6.12 trillion when trust and bank wealth-management products are included. In its early development years, the industry experienced much growing pain. With the joint efforts of regulators and market participants over the past 20 years, China’s asset management industry has substantially improved. In this article, the authors review the industry’s historical development, composition, competition among various sub-industries, and key players, as well as its institutional and regulatory environment. It would be difficult to understand the past, present, or future of this industry without knowing the political economy as well as the ideological background of China’s economy in general and its capital market in particular. The authors review the background of the political economy to aid readers in understanding the mindset and perspectives of regulators, policymakers, and key players in this space. The authors also discuss future opportunities in the asset management industry, as the massive household wealth created during China’s 30 years of fast economic growth continues to look for reliable vehicles for investment. Outbound investment from China is a growing trend.
A Distributed Streaming Framework for Connection Discovery Using Shared Videos

With the advances in mobile devices and the popularity of social networks, users can share multimedia content anytime, anywhere. One of the most important types of emerging content is video, which is commonly shared on platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. User connections, which indicate whether two users are follower/followee or have the same interests, are essential to improve services and information relevant to users for many social media applications. But they are normally hidden due to users’ privacy concerns or are kept confidential by social media sites. Using user-shared content is an alternative way to discover user connections. This article proposes to use user-shared videos for connection discovery with the Bag of Feature Tagging method and proposes a distributed streaming computation framework to facilitate the analytics. Exploiting the uniqueness of shared videos, the proposed framework is divided into Streaming processing and Online and Offline Computation. With experiments using a dataset from Twitter, it has been proved that the proposed method using user-shared videos for connection discovery is feasible. And the proposed computation framework significantly accelerates the analytics, reducing the processing time to only 32% for follower/followee recommendation. It has also been proved that comparable performance can be achieved with only partial data for each video and leads to more efficient computation.
A fine-tuned control-theoretic approach for dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP

Commercial implementations of adaptive streaming systems are either too aggressive or too conservative, not being able to efficiently deliver video content to the client. Because of these issues, a great number of adaptive streaming systems have been proposed in the academia. They employ different strategies, to select the proper video level that the server should send to the client. One trend is the use of control theory, because it guarantees system stability, and enables simulation and tuning of the system prior to its implementation. However, the current proposals that employ control theory do not take full advantage of this technique, because they do not thoroughly analyze the system parameters and their influence on the overall system performance. Therefore, it is possible that they use suboptimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a control-theoretic approach for selecting the video quality in a DASH environment. We use a controller added to a state machine, to improve the QoE and to maximize bandwidth utilization. We also present a comparison of several system settings performances, by changing the controller types, their gains, and the state machine parameters. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed system for buffer time control and video level smoothness, and that it outperforms a current proposal in the academia.
The Brazilian Economy in 1994-1999: From the Real Plan to Inflation Targets

This paper investigates the three main events that shook the Brazilian economy in 1994-1999, a period that represented a turning point in the country's economic history. These events were the implementation of the Real Plan in 1994, the devaluation crisis in 1999, and the subsequent adoption of inflation targets. The principal contributions of this period were the drastic reduction of high inflation rates - the biggest problem in Brazil since the 1970s - and the reorientation towards economic growth, which were also supported by a privatisation programme, the openness of the economy to foreign capital, a trade liberalisation process, and the ongoing fiscal adjustments. Nevertheless, the period also left its scars, such as high budget and current account deficits, accompanied by a policy of elevated interest rates and, until 1999, a highly appreciated exchange rate. The paper concludes with a cautiously optimistic evaluation of the country's economic future based on the accomplishments of the 1990s and the possibility of a long-term commitment to low inflation targets.
Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies (SACCOS) As a Source Of Financing Agriculture. Challenges and Lessons Learnt

There is growing urge by farmers to form Savings Credit and Cooperative Societies (SACCOs) in Uganda and Mbarara District is no exception. There are over 100 registered SACCOs (District Commercial officer- Mbarara District). Majority of the members of these cooperative societies are farmers who have savings and in most cases do not have collateral to stake in commercial banks and other financial institutions to access Loans. The paper seeks to discuss the contribution of SACCOs as a source of financing agriculture, challenges faced by the SACCOs, lessons learnt and the way forward. This is an empirical study that will be based on what is on ground. It will use some empirical data and will rely mostly on primary data other than secondary data. Agriculture is a back bone of Uganda’s Economy. Almost 70% of Uganda’s exports are agro-based (The New Vision) and the agriculture sector employs 73.3% of the active labour force compared to services which employ 22.5% and industry only 4.2%. There have been concerted efforts by government to improve agriculture and make the agriculture sector more attractive. The many strategies employed by government to make agriculture more attractive include, mechanization, improved seed distribution, farmers education and provision of soft loans. In a bid to finance agriculture, the government of Uganda has encouraged and promoted cooperative societies as an engine to accelerate the accessibility of loans from these cooperative societies which in this case are SACCOs. The aim of promoting these SACCOs is because in developing countries like Uganda, there are low levels of saving culture owing to poor underdeveloped stock markets, dominance of urban based commercial banks, Micro Deposit Taking Institutions (MDIs) and non regulated Micro finance institutions in the financial markets as vehicles for savings. Hence Savings and Credit Cooperatives (SACCOs) are intended to offer an alternative to improve the above un- desirable situation in low income countries especially helping members who in most cases are farmers. Savings and Credit Co-operatives (SACCOs) are community membership-based financial institutions that are formed and owned by their members in promotion of their economic interests. These institutions mobilize and intermediate savings exclusively with in their membership under the co-operative statute 1991. Furthermore, they are one of the several types of cooperatives that are unique micro finance institutions categorized under tier four in the financial market and therefore not regulated by Bank of Uganda. Therefore, Savings and Credit Co-Operatives (SACCOs), one of the several types of co-operatives are unique, legal, member-based Micro-Finance Institutions (MFIs) and unlike many other Micro-Finance Institutions, SACCO owners are also the users of the service that the SACCOs offer.
Importance of technical and fundamental analysis in the European foreign exchange market

This article presents findings of a questionnaire and an interview survey on the perceived importance of chartist/technical and fundamental analysis among foreign exchange traders and financial journalists in Frankfurt, London, Vienna, and Zurich. Results confirm that most traders use both forecasting approaches, and that the shorter the forecasting horizon, the more important chartist/technical analysis is. Financial journalists put more emphasis on fundamental analysis than do foreign exchange traders. Results indicate that the importance of chartism may have increased over the last decade. Regarding the use of chartist/technical and fundamental analysis on seven forecasting horizons, four distinct clusters of traders can be identified. Forecasting styles and the overall importance attached to fundamental versus chartist/technical analysis vary across different trading locations. Foreign exchange traders mention a series of psychological motives and consequences of the use of chartism. Copyright @ 2001 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. All rights reserved.
The amount of sonic hedgehog in multiple sclerosis white matter is decreased and cleavage to the signaling peptide is deficient

We have demonstrated that sonic hedgehog (Shh), vital for oligodendrocyte development, is present in both gray and white matter of normal human brain. Both the 45 kDa precursor protein and the 20 kDa N-terminal sonic hedgehog signaling portion (ShhN) were demonstrated by immunoblot and a partial purification has been achieved. In gray matter from brains of multiple sclerosis (MS) victims, the total amount of Shh was less than normals and the signaling 20 kDa protein was greatly reduced. In white matter homogenates, prepared from MS victims, only the 45 kDa precursor protein was found. None of the 20 kDa signaling protein was detected, suggesting that the 45 kDa signaling protein was not cleaved in the autocatalytic reaction carried out by the C -terminal portion. The 45 kDa protein and a small amount of the 20 kDa ShhN was detected in isolated MS myelin by Western blot, demonstrating some cleavage was possible. The cleavage of the 45 kDa protein was demonstrated in normal myelin in vitro, but not in myelin prepared from MS brain.