Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sex differences in yolk hormones depend on maternal social status in Leghorn chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus)

Maternal hormones are known to be present in avian eggs and can have beneficial effects on chick development. Recently, differences in avian yolk steroid concentrations between the sexes have been demonstrated, and in this context steroids have been proposed to be part of the avian sex–determining mechanism. In our study, we show that it is very unlikely that androgen concentrations alone are the decisive part of the sex–determining mechanism. We found that sex–specific differences in the yolk hormones strongly depend on the social rank of the mother. First, dominant females, but not subdominant females, allocated significantly more testosterone to male eggs than to female eggs. Second, subordinate females increased the testosterone concentrations of female eggs. This pattern of yolk hormone deposition can be functionally explained. In polygynous species such as the chicken, reproductive success is more variable in males than in females. Parental investment in sons or daughters is therefore expected to occur in direct relation to parental rearing capacities. We found that the social status of a hen was indeed negatively correlated with her maternal capacities (for example, body mass, egg mass). Differential androgen deposition might thus provide a mechanism for adaptive maternal investment depending on both the sex of the egg and the social status of the mother.
Robust consensus of multi-agent systems under directed information exchanges

This paper considers the problem of robust consensus for a basic class of multi-agent systems with bounded disturbances and with directed information flow. A necessary and sufficient condition on the robust consensus is first presented, which is then applied to the analysis, control and decision making problems in the noise environments. In particular, we will show how a soft control technique will synchronize a group of autonomous mobile agents without changing the existing local rule of interactions, and without assuming any kind of connectivity conditions on the system trajectories.
Internal Auditors’ Perceptions of Their Role in Environmental, Social and Governance Assurance and Consulting

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature and extent of internal audit functions’ (IAFs) involvement in environmental, social and governance assurance (ESG) and consulting in Australia. To identify emerging priorities, and the profession’s capacity to respond to these, the paper also explores internal audit practitioners’ perceptions of the current and future importance of these issues and the adequacy of their skills and expertise in meeting the challenges associated with their involvement in these areas. Design/methodology/approach - – Data were collected from 100 Chief Audit Executives and internal audit service provider partners through a survey. Findings - – Governance issues are a key area of focus for respondents’ assurance and consulting efforts, followed by social and environmental issues, respectively. While governance issues are perceived to be of greatest current importance to IAFs, environmental issues are most commonly expected to increase in importance over the next five years, and are reported to be in greatest need of further development of IAFs’ skills and expertise. Research limitations/implications - – As the corporate landscape and expectations around transparency and accountability increase, the internal audit profession needs to address the current perceived skills gap in their ability to provide assurance and consulting on ESG issues to ensure their continued relevance and ability to meet stakeholders’ needs and expectations in providing effective integrated assurance and in contributing to internal improvements. Originality/value - – This paper provides initial empirical evidence of the nature and extent of internal audit’s involvement in ESG assurance and consulting.
Organisational commitment in the era of the new psychological contract

The aim of this study was to investigate organisational commitment in an organisation that had recently experienced organisational restructuring (a merger). The psychological contract that exists between employees and organisations is brittle due to many organisational changes that stem from organisational restructuring. When psychological contracts are breached, employees may experience reduced commitment to the organisation. The target population for this study consisted of all employees working at three recently-merged higher education institutions in the Nelson Mandela Metropolis (n=100) and a selfadministered questionnaire was distributed amongst staff. The results indicated that an increase in the number of positive human resource management (HRM) practices reported by respondents correlated with a decrease in violation and breach of the psychological contract, despite organisational restructuring. It was further revealed that effective management of the psychological contract is crucial during organisational restructuring, in order to maintain the commitment and loyalty of employees.
Reflections on the implementation of the Gifted and Talented policy in England, 1999–2011

The landscape of gifted and talented education in England has changed in the past decade when the UK government launched an education programme for ‘gifted and talented’ pupils as part of its Excellence in Cities policy initiative. The policy was initially intended to raise educational achievement of higher ability pupils in secondary schools in socially deprived urban areas and was subsequently extended to all age groups and schools in England. This article reports the findings of official reports and reviews and includes the reflections of a local authority adviser of a large education district within a socially deprived area of London. The adviser had the responsibility for implementing the policy through working with schools and practising teachers.
Macro Dynamics in a Model with Uncertainty

Limits on information have deep economic impact and affect the conduct of economic policy. In the present paper we explore the effect of substantive uncertainty. A macro model is then derived in order to make this condition work at micro economic level too: the investment function implies an interaction between real and financial aspects; the labor market is ruled by imperfect competition; agents are boundedly rational and make their forecasts according to a Markov regime switching rule; and finally monetary authorities learns about the NAIRU. As a result we obtain a model which is mostly keynesian in nature, whose implications can nevertheless be compared with the new neoclassical synthesis models. Simulations are carried out and show the possible appearence of endogenous fluctuations, persistence of oscillations, and the emergence of a trade-off between the control of inflation and the cyclicality of the economy.
Using Appreciative Inquiry to Engage the Citizenry: Four Potential Challenges for Public Administrators

In the United States, calls for new citizen engagement strategies have continued to grow at the local government level. One answer is Appreciative Inquiry. As part of a larger study conducted in 2007, the question was posed to public administrators, “What challenges do you see regarding using an Appreciative Inquiry approach to increase citizen participation in local government? ” Findings based on a content analysis of the data identified four challenges in particular. Discussion suggests public managers need to be aware of these challenges but depending on local conditions they can be mitigated or overcome.
A miniaturized nebulization catheter for improved gene delivery to the mouse lung

The available methods for administration of gene delivery systems to the lungs of small animals via nebulization have several drawbacks. These include lack of control over the delivered dose and a negative impact on the stability of the formulation. This paper describes a new nebulization catheter device for the administration of plasmid‐based gene delivery systems (polyplexes) as aerosols to the mouse lung in vivo.
Speckle noise removal in ultrasound medical imaging using envelope based time domain deconvolution

The quality of the ultrasound medical images is usually degraded by two important problems - the transducer influence and the speckle noise. To remove the multiplicative speckle noise, in this paper it is presented a method based on a blind, time-domain, deconvolution algorithm. The proposed approach uses the envelope of the acquired radio-frequency signals for the numerical implementation. It is a two steps blind deconvolution, where firstly, the point spread function is automatically estimated from the measured data, and secondly, the data are reconstructed in a non-blind way using proposed algorithm. It has a nonlinear implementation which at each step intends to eliminate the most important part of speckle noise and blur as possible. The results on real image tests are compared with Tikhonov regularization. Our method shows better results for scatters detection and speckle noise removal.
HUMAN ENDOTOXEMIA: A MODEL FOR MECHANISTIC INSIGHT AND THERAPEUTIC TARGETING

The diversity of phenotypic manifestations, comorbidities, and therapeutic algorithms in patients with severe inflammation have confounded efforts to translate mechanistic insights from the bench top to the bedside. This dilemma has negatively impacted upon many therapeutic interventions that exhibited seemingly well-reasoned preclinical portfolios. Prudence urges the assessment of potent immunoregulatory therapies, wherever possible, in models that replicate the clinical phenotype absent overt manifestations of genetically or environmentally modified processes. The healthy human model of endotoxin administration (systemic or endobronchial) provides such an opportunity and has been used to great advantage for gaining insight into mechanisms of disease and for determination of therapeutic signal strength. When thoughtfully interpreted, the model may provide proof of principle as well as lessen the unpredictability of clinical responses. Although the broad characteristics of this model are well described in the literature, it is recognized that this model does not fully replicate the magnitude of initial inflammatory stress nor the latent spectrum of inflammation/sepsis-inducible organ system pathologies. Nevertheless, the similarities between the early, transient clinical phenotype, inducible physiochemical change, and biochemical pathway activation of this model to the early hyperdynamic phase of resuscitated injury and infection are striking. Rational testing of a therapeutic mechanism requires a quantifiable and reproducibly altered marker of the hypothetical mechanism. Given the modest nature of endotoxin induced insult, interventions that demonstrate target specific efficacy in conjunction with attenuated phenotype responses are more likely to exhibit efficacy within lower risk patient populations. By contrast, the model cannot predict clinical efficacy among higher risk patients nor in those who have endured extended periods of inflammatory stress.
Interpreting the unexpected: the case of AIDS policy making in Britain

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the reactions of a government faced with an unpredictable and unexpected crisis with possible catastrophic long-term effects: the AIDS epidemic in the United Kingdom in the 1980s. First, the AIDS epidemic is defined as a case study of government forced to cope with uncertainty, moral ambiguity and the knowledge that there are no solutions, only ways of limiting the damage. Second, it examines the evolution of policy of British ministers, who initially preferred to ignore evidence of AIDS but were forced to act by signals threatening a popular backlash. They did so by creating a programme of action based on the advice and values of the medical profession and public health experts. The conclusion argues that this kind of policy response may be generalisable. When societies are faced with problems that do not appear to be soluble but which may imperil social cohesion they seek to create an elite consensus to treat them as technical matters, so insulating the policy process from possible disruptive populist pressures.
Coagglomeration, Clusters, and the Scale and Composition of Cities

Cities are neither completely specialized nor completely diverse. However, prior research has focused almost entirely on the polar cases of complete specialization and complete diversity. This paper develops a model that can also generate the intermediate case of cities that feature the coagglomeration of some but not all industries, thus giving theoretical foundations to the analysis of business clusters. The analysis sharply challenges the conventional wisdom that the size and composition of cities are necessarily driven primarily by agglomerative efficiencies.
Physical Layer Authentication Enhancement Using Two-Dimensional Channel Quantization

A novel physical layer authentication enhancement scheme is proposed in this paper by integrating multipath delay characteristics of wireless channels into the channel impulse response (CIR)-based physical layer authentication framework. In order to simplify the decision rule for authentication, a two-dimensional (2-D) quantization method is developed to preprocess the channel variations. More specifically, two one-bit quantizers are used to quantize the temporal channel variations in the dimensions of channel amplitude and path delay, respectively. Under a simple hypothesis testing, a new test statistic is developed based on the sum of outputs of the two quantizers. For performance analysis, false alarm rate (FAR) and probability of detection (PD) are defined based on the developed test statistic, and their closed-form expressions are derived as well. An optimization problem is defined for finding optimal parameters of the proposed scheme based on exhaustive search method. Monte Carlo simulations are utilized to evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme. Compared with other existing method in the literature, the proposed scheme outperforms significantly in spoofing detection.
Platelet Proteome Analysis Reveals Integrin-dependent Aggregation Defects in Patients with Myelodysplastic Syndromes*

Bleeding complications are a significant clinical problem in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes even at sufficient platelet counts (>50,000/μl). However, the underlying pathology of this hemorrhagic diathesis is still unknown. Here, we analyzed the platelet proteome of patients with myelodysplastic syndromes by quantitative two-dimensional difference gel electrophoresis followed by mass spectrometric protein identification. Proteins identified with lower concentrations, such as Talin-1, Vinculin, Myosin-9, Filmain-A, and Actin play critical roles in integrin αIIbβ3 signaling and thus platelet aggregation. Despite normal agonist receptor expression, calcium flux, and granule release upon activation, the activation capacity of integrin αIIbβ3 was diminished in myelodysplastic syndrome platelets. Förster resonance energy transfer analysis showed a reduced co-localization of Talin-1 to the integrin's β3-subunit, which is required for receptor activation and fibrinogen binding. In addition, platelet spreading on immobilized fibrinogen was incomplete, and platelet aggregation assays confirmed a general defect in integrin-dependent platelet aggregation in patients with myelodysplastic syndromes. Our data provide novel aspects on the molecular pathology of impaired platelet function in myelodysplastic syndromes and suggest a mechanism of defective integrin αIIbβ3 signaling that may contribute to the hemorrhagic diathesis observed in these patients.
WHEN DO ADAPTIVE PLASTICITY AND GENETIC EVOLUTION PREVENT EXTINCTION OF A DENSITY‐REGULATED POPULATION?

We study the dynamics of evolutionary recovery after an abrupt environmental shift in a density‐regulated population with evolving plasticity. Maladaptation to the new environment initially causes the population to decline, until adaptive phenotypic plasticity and genetic evolution restore positive population growth rate. We assume that selection on a quantitative trait is density‐independent and that the initial cost of plasticity is much lower than the benefit of the initial plastic response. The initial partially adaptive plasticity reduces the effective magnitude of the environmental shift, whereas evolution of plasticity increases the rate of adaptation. Both effects greatly facilitate population persistence. In contrast, density dependence of population growth always hinders persistence. With θ‐logistic population regulation, a lower value of θ produces a faster initial population decline and a higher extinction risk.
Food tourism, niche markets and products in rural tourism: combining the intimacy model and the experience economy as a rural development strategy

The countryside hosts an increasing number of alternative food networks: rural tourists can play an important role in acting as both consumer and “cultural broker” between these networks. This paper provides a theoretical framework for niche marketing food specialties in rural tourism by combining two different consumer behavioural theories, the “experience economy” and the “intimacy” model, representing a reorientation from classical marketing thinking. It explores the meaning of local food, including the pursuit of reconnection with nature, resilience to globalisation, the role of local food in reinforcing personal identity, the search for freshness, taste and authenticity, support for local producers, and environmental concerns. It considers the challenges for rural entrepreneurs and policy makers in marketing food specialties and rural regions to the post-modern consumer. Using examples derived mostly from secondary literature it identifies seven dimensions that elevate food products to an appealing culinary niche, namely, coherence, anti-capitalistic attitude, struggle against extinction, personal signature, mutual-disclosure, rituals of spatial and physical proximity, and sustainability-related practices. Food providers may use these features to signal food distinctiveness to rural tourists; policy makers can include them in their regional development models to enhance rural tourism without altering historically, socially, and environmentally layered culinary traditions.
Governance Modes and Interests: Higher Education and Innovation Policy in Austria1

ABSTRACT Governance has become one of the central concepts in political science, but what is absent is the question: Which modes of governance produce which policy output? This paper develops a classification scheme for modes of governance in all dimensions of public policy and then applies it empirically in four Austrian case studies concerning higher education and innovation. We extend the scholarly discussion on governance to the factor interests and argue that this analytical factor needs to be taken into account in future research in order to understand the modes of governance in policy processes.
Accounting Conservatism and the Valuation of Accounting Numbers: Evidence on the Feltham-Ohlson (1996) Model

We empirically investigate the effects of accounting conservatism on (1) the stock market valuation of operating assets in the context of the Feltham-Ohlson (1996) model and (2) the weight on operating assets in the Feltham-Ohlson abnormal operating earnings dynamics (hereafter referred to as the LIM conservatism parameter). Consistent with the Feltham-Ohlson (1996) model, we find that accounting-based conservatism proxies are positively related to the valuation weight on operating assets. Furthermore, the accounting-based conservatism proxies have incremental explanatory power even after controlling for (1) size, (2) book value (or sales) growth, and (3) leverage. These results are robust with respect to alternative empirical specifications of the valuation model and the choice of proxies for accounting conservatism. We also find, consistent with prior research but not with the Feltham-Ohlson model, that the sign of the LIM conservatism parameter is on-average negative. We provide evidence on the types of firms for which the linear information dynamics appears to hold better or worse. More specifically, the firms with negative values of the parameter are significantly smaller, less profitable and experiencing lower growth rates than firms with positive values of the parameter. Moreover, the relation between accounting-based conservatism proxies and the LIM conservatism parameter is fairly strong for the subsample of firms with high levels of profitability.
Quality of Code Can Be Planned and Automatically Controlled

Quality of Code is an important and critical health indicator of any software development project. However, due to the complexity and ambiguousness of calculating this indicator it is rarely used in commercial contracts. As programmers are much more motivated with respect to the delivery of functionality than quality of code beneath it,they often produce low-quality code, which leads to post-delivery and maintenance problems. The proposed mechanism eliminates this lack of attention to Quality of Code. The results achieved after the implementation of the mechanism are more motivated programmers, higher project sponsor confidence and a predicted Quality of Code.
Serological and virological characterization of HIV‐1 group O infection in Cameroon

ObjectivesTo study the presence of HIV-1 group O infection among HIV-infected people in Cameroon and to further characterize the HIV-1 group O infections. Design and methodsDuring a 2-year survey (1994–1995), all samples tested positive in screening methods in the National Reference and Public Health Laboratory, Centre Pasteur, Yaoundé, Cameroon were identified as HIV-1 group M, HIV-1 group O or HIV-2 by using a serological algorithm. HIV-1 group M and HIV- 1 group O were distinguished on the basis of competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) reactivity against gp41 group M recombinant protein. HIV-1 group O infections were confirmed by using group O-specific V3 synthetic peptides. HIV-1 group O strains were isolated by lymphocyte cocultures, proviral DNA was amplified with specific primers, and sequencing was performed on the C2V3 and gag regions. ResultsOf the 8331 screened samples, 3193 were HIV-reactive, 2376 (74%) of which were considered to belong to group M. The 817 (26%) that had reacted poorly or not at all against group M gp41 were further characterized: 10 were confirmed as HIV-2 and 82 as HIV-1 group O, the others being indeterminate (n=285) or negative (n=440). The frequency of group O relative to group M ranged from 1% in Far North province to 6.3% in the capital. There was no difference in sex, age or frequency of clinical manifestations between group M and group O infections. Group O infection was confirmed in a subset of cases by polymerase chain reaction (n=14), with perfect concordance. Sequencing and phylogenetic analyses confirmed the high variability inside group O. ConclusionsGroup O and group M epidemiological patterns are known to be similar so the reason for the lower prevalence of group O remains to be found. The wide distribution of group O infection in all Cameroonian provinces underlines the importance of further characterizing the epidemic spread and diffusion of this group.
Why Is Support for Extreme Parties Underestimated by Surveys? A Latent Class Analysis

It is widely accepted that survey data tend to underestimate the levels of support for political parties or other groups that are perceived to advocate ‘extreme’ views. In this Note I propose the use of latent class analysis as a means by which this difficulty might be overcome and I illustrate it by an application to the case of support within Northern Ireland for Sinn Féin from survey data and apply latent class analysis to a recent dataset from Northern Ireland. The note concludes with some general remarks on the question of why surveys and elections disagree and the role of latent class analysis in explaining this phenomenon.