Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bound-state solutions, invariant scalar products, and conserved currents for a class of two-body relativistic systems.

The simplest two-body relativistic system with direct interaction, described by two first-class constraints, is investigated. After a description of the multitime approach (canonical quantization without gauge fixings), the two coupled integro-differential wave equations are solved. The elementary solutions for the bound states are found and are shown to transform as irreducible representations of the Poincare group. Invariant scalar products are introduced assuring the unitarity of the representations and some of the associated conserved currents are discussed. The initial data problem has been solved by means of a quantum canonical transformation, which transforms the integro-differential equations into differential equations.
Nonsyndromic hearing loss DFNA10 and a novel mutation of EYA4: Evidence for correlation of normal cardiac phenotype with truncating mutations of the Eya domain

Dominant, truncating mutations of eyes absent 4 (EYA4) on chromosome 6q23 can cause either nonsyndromic hearing loss DFNA10 or hearing loss with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). It has been proposed that truncations of the C‐terminal Eya domain cause DFNA10 whereas upstream truncations of the N‐terminal variable region cause hearing loss with DCM. Here we report an extended family co‐segregating autosomal dominant, postlingual‐onset, progressive, sensorineural hearing loss (SNHL) with a novel frameshift mutation, 1490insAA, of EYA4. The 1490insAA allele is predicted to encode a truncated protein with an intact N‐terminal variable region, but lacking the entire C‐terminal Eya domain. Clinical studies including electrocardiography, echocardiography, and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the heart in nine affected family members revealed no DCM or associated abnormalities and confirmed their nonsyndromic phenotype. These are the first definitive cardiac evaluations of DFNA10 hearing loss to support a correlation of EYA4 mutation position with the presence or absence of DCM. These results will facilitate the counseling of patients with these phenotypes and EYA4 mutations. Published 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
NHS boards: knowing the ‘what’ but not the ‘how’

Boards of directors play an increasingly fundamental role in British NHS trusts as well as other parts of the public sector. This study shows that their effectiveness is compromised by issues related to internal dynamics, processes, responsibility, overall functions and performance. The focus of governance, therefore, needs to shift from structural concerns to the multiple collective aspects of a board's behaviour.
El Niño, Host Plant Growth, and Migratory Butterfly Abundance in a Changing Climate

In the wet forests of Panama, El Niño typically brings a more prolonged and severe dry season. Interestingly, many trees and lianas that comprise the wet forests increase their productivity as a response to El Niño. Here, we quantify the abundance of migrating Marpesia chiron butterflies over 17 yr and the production of new leaves of their hostplants over 9 yr to test the generality of the El Niño migration syndrome, i.e., whether increased abundance of migrating insects and productivity of their food plants are associated with El Niño and La Niña events. We find that the quantity of M. chiron migrating across the Panama Canal was directly proportional to the sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly of the Pacific Ocean, which characterizes El Niño and La Niña events. We also find that production of new leaves by its larval host trees, namely Brosimum alicastrum, Artocarpus altilis, and Ficus citrifolia, was directly proportional to the SST anomaly, with greater leaf flushing occurring during the period of the annual butterfly migration that followed an El Niño event. Combining these and our previously published results for the migratory butterfly Aphrissa statira and its host lianas, we conclude that dry season rainfall and photosynthetically active radiation can serve as primary drivers of larval food production and insect population outbreaks in Neotropical wet forests, with drier years resulting in enhanced plant productivity and herbivore abundance. Insect populations should closely track changes in both frequency and amplitude of the El Niño Southern Oscillation with climate change.
Life‐history predicts past and present population connectivity in two sympatric sea stars

Abstract Life‐history traits, especially the mode and duration of larval development, are expected to strongly influence the population connectivity and phylogeography of marine species. Comparative analysis of sympatric, closely related species with differing life histories provides the opportunity to specifically investigate these mechanisms of evolution but have been equivocal in this regard. Here, we sample two sympatric sea stars across the same geographic range in temperate waters of Australia. Using a combination of mitochondrial DNA sequences, nuclear DNA sequences, and microsatellite genotypes, we show that the benthic‐developing sea star, Parvulastra exigua, has lower levels of within‐ and among‐population genetic diversity, more inferred genetic clusters, and higher levels of hierarchical and pairwise population structure than Meridiastra calcar, a species with planktonic development. While both species have populations that have diverged since the middle of the second glacial period of the Pleistocene, most P. exigua populations have origins after the last glacial maxima (LGM), whereas most M. calcar populations diverged long before the LGM. Our results indicate that phylogenetic patterns of these two species are consistent with predicted dispersal abilities; the benthic‐developing P. exigua shows a pattern of extirpation during the LGM with subsequent recolonization, whereas the planktonic‐developing M. calcar shows a pattern of persistence and isolation during the LGM with subsequent post‐Pleistocene introgression.
Agency Costs, Family Ties, and Firm Efficiency

In this work, the author analyzes agency costs and their effect on efficiency in the context of small family firms. In particular, the author examines the effect that factors such as self-management, having related managers, and family employees exert on firm efficiency. The author offers some reasoning that may help to clarify agency problems for small firms. The author uses stochastic frontiers to measure and explain efficiency. The author’s focus is on small firms in the fishing sector, which are very important entities for the development of certain local communities.
It's Not What You Know, but Who You Know: the Role of Connections in Academic Promotion

This paper analyzes the role of academic networks for academic promotion. We use data from all promotions to associate and full professor positions in Spain between 2002 and 2006. During this period members of promotion committees were randomly selected out of the pool of eligible professors in the eld. We nd that candidates have better chances of success if they are assigned to a committee that (randomly) includes a member in the same academic network (coauthor, thesis advisor, common advisor, common aliation, etc.). Candidates chances of success are more than 25% higher if one of the evaluators (out of seven) comes from the same university. The magnitude of this eect is equivalent to an increase in one standard deviation in the number of ISI publications. The eect is twice as large if one of the evaluators happens to be a coauthor. These results are robust to controlling for evaluators and candidates similarity of research interests. The evidence is consistent with the existence of favoritism: promoted candidates with a connection in the committee have a signicantly worse post-examination publication record compared to other promoted candidates.
Heterogeneity at the JME 6p11–12 Locus: Absence of Mutations in the EFHC1 Gene in Linked Dutch Families

Summary: Purpose: The EFHC1 gene, encoding a protein with a Ca2+‐sensing EF‐hand motif, is localized at 6p12 and was recently reported as mutated in six Mexican juvenile myoclonic epilepsy (JME) families linked to this region. We had previously confirmed linkage between JME and 6p11‐12 in 18 Dutch families, and shown exclusionary lod scores at 6p21.3. We therefore evaluated the relevance of EFHC1 in our set of 6p11‐12–linked families.
The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote

Reporting data and predicting trends through the 2008 campaign, this classroom-tested volume offers again James E. Campbell's "theory of the predictable campaign," incorporating the fundamental conditions that systematically affect the presidential vote: political competition, presidential incumbency, and election-year economic conditions. Campbell's cogent thinking and clear style present students with a readable survey of presidential elections and political scientists' ways of studying them. "The American Campaign" also shows how and why journalists have mistakenly assigned a pattern of unpredictability and critical significance to the vagaries of individual campaigns. This excellent election-year text provides: a summary and assessment of each of the serious predictive models of presidential election outcomes; a historical summary of many of America's important presidential elections; and a significant new contribution to the understanding of presidential campaigns and how they matter.
Arm Training Induced Brain Plasticity in Stroke Studied with Serial Positron Emission Tomography

We used serial positron emission tomography (PET) to study training-induced brain plasticity after severe hemiparetic stroke. Ten patients were randomized to either task-oriented arm training or to a control group and scanned before and after 22.6 +/- 1.6 days of treatment using passive movements as an activation paradigm. Increases of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) were assessed using statistical parametric mapping (SPM99). Before treatment, all stroke patients revealed bilateral activation of the inferior parietal cortex (IPC). After task-oriented arm training, activation was found bilaterally in IPC and premotor cortex, but also in the contralateral sensorimotor cortex (SMC). The control group only showed weak activation of the ipsilateral IPC. After treatment, the training group revealed relatively more activation bilaterally in IPC, premotor areas, and in the contralateral SMC. Five normal subjects showed no statistical significant differences between two separate PET studies. In this group of patients, task-oriented arm training induced functional brain reorganization in bilateral sensory and motor systems.
The Revolution of Ideas: Widespread Patenting and Invention During the English Industrial Revolution

Sectors of the English economy recognized as technological leaders have records of accelerated patent activity soon after 1760. But the patent record also reveals considerable inventive activity during the same period in industries not normally associated with advancing technology. It is therefore unlikely that there was a “leading technological sector. ” The widespread increase in patenting is consistent with macroeconomic causes of accelerated invention.
Decision Complexity as a Barrier to Annuitization

We show that people have difficulty valuing annuities, and this, instead of a preference for lumpsums, helps explain observed low annuity demand. Although the median price at which people are willing to sell an annuity stream is close to the actuarial value, many responses diverge greatly from optimizing behavior. Moreover, people will pay substantially less to buy than to sell annuities. We conclude that boundedly rational consumers adopt “buy low, sell high” heuristics when confronting a complex trade-off. This suggests that many consumers do not make optimizing decisions, underscoring the difficulty of explaining cross-sectional annuity valuation differences using standard models.
An experimental study on large-scale web categorization

Taxonomies of the Web typically have hundreds of thousands of categories and skewed category distribution over documents. It is not clear whether existing text classification technologies can perform well on and scale up to such large-scale applications. To understand this, we conducted the evaluation of several representative methods (Support Vector Machines, k-Nearest Neighbor and Naive Bayes) with Yahoo! taxonomies. In particular, we evaluated the effectiveness/efficiency tradeoff in classifiers with hierarchical setting compared to conventional (flat) setting, and tested popular threshold tuning strategies for their scalability and accuracy in large-scale classification problems.
Investigation of the use of eye tracking to examine tourism advertising effectiveness

Previous studies of printed marketing stimuli have used self-report measures to determine the relative preference for one advertisement among several different versions. This study uses TobiiTM eye-tracking hardware and software along with self-report measures to compare the relative effectiveness of two versions of a tourism magazine advertisement. Data were collected from 25 respondents in a laboratory-based study. Analysis of data shows significant differences between the two advertisements tested with agreement between the eye-tracking and self-report results. These results indicate that eye-tracking methods are useful for analysis of tourist advertising.
Supervised sparsity preserving projections for face recognition

Sparsity preserving projection (SPP) is a recently proposed unsupervised linear dimensionality reduction method for face recognition, which is based on the recently-emerged sparse representation theory. It aims to find a low-dimensional subspace to best preserve the global sparse reconstructive relationship of the original data. In this paper, we propose a supervised variation on SPP called supervised sparsity preserving projection (SSPP). The SSPP method explicitly takes into account the within-class weight as well as between-class weight and assigns different weights to them, which attempts to strengthen the discriminating power and generalization ability of embedded data representation. The effectiveness of the proposed SSPP method is verified on two standard face databases (Yale, AR).
Nitrite produced by Mycobacterium tuberculosis in human macrophages in physiologic oxygen impacts bacterial ATP consumption and gene expression

Significance Most people infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) suppress the pathogen’s replication without eradicating it. It is unknown how Mtb survives for decades in a hostile host environment. Respiration of nitrate to nitrite could help Mtb survive in hypoxic tissues but was not thought to be significant at physiologic oxygen tensions, nor was the resultant nitrite considered consequential to Mtb’s physiology. We found that Mtb infecting human macrophages in vitro produces copious nitrite at physiologic oxygen tensions. This slows Mtb’s growth and consumption of ATP and remodels its transcriptome differently than nitric oxide. Thus, respiration of nitrate and adaptation to nitrite are likely to play a prominent role in Mtb’s pathophysiology, whether or not the Mtb resides in hypoxic sites. In high enough concentrations, such as produced by inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS), reactive nitrogen species (RNS) can kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). Lesional macrophages in macaques and humans with tuberculosis express iNOS, and mice need iNOS to avoid succumbing rapidly to tuberculosis. However, Mtb’s own ability to produce RNS is rarely considered, perhaps because nitrate reduction to nitrite is only prominent in axenic Mtb cultures at oxygen tensions ≤1%. Here we found that cultures of Mtb-infected human macrophages cultured at physiologic oxygen tensions produced copious nitrite. Surprisingly, the nitrite arose from the Mtb, not the macrophages. Mtb responded to nitrite by ceasing growth; elevating levels of ATP through reduced consumption; and altering the expression of 120 genes associated with adaptation to acid, hypoxia, nitric oxide, oxidative stress, and iron deprivation. The transcriptomic effect of endogenous nitrite was distinct from that of nitric oxide. Thus, whether or not Mtb is hypoxic, the host expresses iNOS, or hypoxia impairs the action of iNOS, Mtb in vivo is likely to encounter RNS by producing nitrite. Endogenous nitrite may slow Mtb’s growth and prepare it to resist host stresses while the pathogen waits for immunopathology to promote its transmission.
Modelling the antecedents of innovation-based growth intentions in entrepreneurial ventures: the role of perceived regulatory conditions in the German renewable energies and disease management industries

This paper develops a model of regulatory and policy support effects on innovation-based growth intentions of entrepreneurs. Our empirical study consists of multiple embedded case studies from the German renewable energies and medical disease management industries, including 6 firm cases, 20 expert interviews and a survey of 47 entrepreneurs and managers. The results suggest regulatory complexity and reliability as well as the degree of policy supportiveness as the central influence constructs on the perceived feasibility and desirability of growth aspirations. For innovation and entrepreneurship policy, this implies (1) that regulatory frameworks and incentives should feature long-term continuity so as to reduce product development and investment risks, (2) that this may be flanked by demand- and supply-side instruments to address market anomalies and (3) that the implementation of regulatory and policy measures should be kept transparent and accessible to reduce perceived administrative complexity.
On the methodology of a conceptual framework for financial accounting Part 1: An historical and jurisprudential analysis

This is the first of a pair of papers which examine some important questions raised by the ‘conceptual framework’ (CF) project carried out by the FASB in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This project has not generally been considered a success, in spite of the magnitude of the resources at the FASB's disposal. The present paper provides a critique of the approach used by the FASB, by analysing the Board's methodology as it appears from key documents published by the Board in the course of the project, against a background of methodological insights available from studies of policy formulation (Lindblom, 1959) and of legal validity (Raz, 1979) - insights of which the FASB was apparently quite unaware. This analysis shows why the CF, insofar as it was intended to achieve its ostensible aim of conferring powers of standard setting on the FASB independent of those delegated to it by the SEC, was unsuccessful. The second paper extends the analysis based on jurisprudence into the field of ‘soft systems’ analysis.
A Proteomics Approach Highlights a Myriad of Transporters in the Arabidopsis thaliana Vacuolar Membrane

To better understand plant vacuolar functions and identify new transporters present on the tonoplast, a proteomic work was initiated on Arabidopsis thaliana. A procedure was developed to prepare highly purified vacuoles from protoplasts isolated from Arabidopsis cell cultures, and a proteomics approach was designed to identify the protein components present in both the membrane and soluble fractions of the vacuoles. This procedure allowed the identification of 650 proteins, 2/3 of which copurify with the hydrophobic membrane fraction and 1/3 with the soluble fraction. With regard to function, only 20% of the proteins identified were previously known to be associated with vacuolar activities.
Abbreviated Goal Management Training Shows Preliminary Evidence as a Neurorehabilitation Tool for HIV-associated Neurocognitive Disorders among Substance Users

Objective: Substance use disorders are highly comorbid with and contribute to the increased prevalence of neurocognitive dysfunction observed in HIV infection. Despite their adverse impact on everyday functioning, there are currently no compensatory-based neurorehabilitation interventions validated for use among HIV+ substance users (HIV/SUD). This study examined the effectiveness of goal management training (GMT) alone or GMT as part of a metacognitive training among HIV/SUD individuals with executive dysfunction. Methods: Ninety HIV/SUD individuals were randomized to a single 15-min session: (1) GMT (n = 30); (2) GMT plus metacognitive training (neurocognitive awareness; GMT + Meta; n = 30); or (3) active control (n = 30). Following a brief neurocognitive battery and study condition, participants performed a complex laboratory-based function task, Everyday Multitasking Test (Everyday MT), during which metacognition (awareness) was evaluated. Results: There was an increasing, but non-significant tendency for better Everyday MT performances across study conditions (Control ≤ GMT ≤ GMT + Meta; ps < .08). Post hoc analyses showed that GMT and GMT + Meta groups demonstrated small benefits (d = .20–.27) compared to the control arm but did not differ from one another (ds < .10). When GMT groups were combined, there were significant medium effect size benefits in Everyday MT performance and metacognitive task appraisals as compared to the control condition. Among participants who underwent GMT, benefits were most prominent in persons with poorer pre-training dual-tasking ability, depression, and methamphetamine use disorders (ds = .35–1.04). Conclusions: A brief compensatory strategy has benefits for everyday multitasking and metacognition among HIV+ substance users with executive dysfunction. Future work exploring more intensive trainings, potentially complimentary to other restorative approaches and/or pharmacological treatments, is warranted.
Energy Detection Under Interference Power Uncertainty

This letter concerns energy detection (ED) under interferences from surrounding users, where the challenge is that the distribution of the aggregate interference power has an unbounded support. With the assumption of log-normal large-scale fading of interferences and high interference-to-noise ratio, we derive an approximate but explicit expression for the decision threshold of ED that guarantees a given average false-alarm probability, and analyze its signal-to-interference ratio (SIR) wall. Simulation results verify the theoretical results and demonstrate that the proposed ED has a lower SIR wall and a better performance than the bounded worse behavior-based ED and the estimated background (interference and/or noise) power- based ED.
Evaluation of fault protection methods using ATP and MathCAD

This paper discusses combining the Alternative Transients Program (ATP) and MathCAD to teach protective relaying and to develop relay algorithms. A power system model is created in ATP with appropriate current and voltage measurements. The simulation output is converted to a COMTRADE format and imported into a detailed relay model implemented in MathCAD. The MathCAD model performs digital filtering calculations, symmetrical components calculations and models relay algorithms based on relay manufacturers published information. Focus here is on differential and ground fault protection for the common two bus, parallel line case. Emphasis is placed on fault detection and localization methods for ungrounded or high impedance grounded systems.