Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Biosurfactant Production by Bacteria Isolated from Seawater for Remediation of Environments Contaminated with Oil Products

Biosurfactant Production by Bacteria Isolated from Seawater for Remediation of Environments Contaminated with oil Products Ana Helena Mendonça Resende, Nathália Maria Padilha da Rocha e Silva, Raquel Diniz Rufin, Juliana Moura de Luna, Leonie Asfora Sarubbo a Center of Sciences and Technology, Catholic University of Pernambuco b Northeast Biotechnology Network, Federal Rural University of Pernambuco Brazil c Advanced Institute of Technology and Innovation – IATI anahmresende@gmail.com
Institutional Legacies and Firm Dynamics: The Growth and Internationalization of UK and German Law Firms

This article addresses the question of how economic actors (re)shape their organizational and institutional contexts as their activities internationalize. By focusing on law firms, we choose a professional activity that has been regarded as highly determined by the national distinctiveness of professional and legal systems and would lead us to expect strong institutional legacies on firm dynamics. The comparative study of the growth and internationalization of corporate law firms in the UK and Germany presented in this article, however, refutes this view. The results reveal that in both settings ‘institutional pockets’ of corporate lawyers existed whose entrepreneurial orientations and international reach were much stronger than among other subgroups of the profession. From the 1970s onwards, these lawyers and law firms engaged in redefining their organizational and institutional contexts with the aim of positioning themselves in ways that would allow them to seize upon the emerging international markets for legal services. They did so in different ways and at different times in each country. We conclude that internationalization of UK and German law firms bears traces of institutional legacies as well as signs of path-modification, and that international markets for legal services may be more differentiated and less dominated by Anglo-Saxon law firms and conceptions of law than has been so far recognized.
The Intergenerational Transmission of Social Skills and Psychosocial Problems among Parents and their Young Adult Children

The primary aim of this study was to examine the potential intergenerational transmission of social skills and psychosocial problems (i.e., loneliness and anxiety) among a sample of 255 father-mother-adult child triads. These associations, along with the indirect effects of social skills and psychosocial problems, were examined using structural equation modeling. Results indicated that fathers' social skills and loneliness are predictive of their adult children's social skills, mothers' loneliness is predictive of their adult children's loneliness; and fathers' and mothers' anxiety is predictive of their adult children's anxiety. Additionally, lower social skills were significantly associated with greater loneliness and anxiety for all family members. Finally, there was no evidence of indirect effects for parents' social skills or psychosocial problems on their adult children's social skills or psychosocial problems, through parents' psychosocial problems or adult child social skill, respectively. Implications for social skills and psychosocial problems on a family level are discussed.
The Effect of Maps-Enhanced Novel Movement Models on Pedestrian Navigation Performance

In this paper the question of “how much the a priori knowledge of floor plans will assist navigation in challenging indoor environments? ” will be investigated. Additionally, the effect of different levels of accuracy of floor plans on the overall estimation process will be studied. In particular, the effect of wrong a priori knowledge of maps and floor plans on navigation accuracy will also be illustrated. The knowledge of floor plans is used to make the prediction step of sequential Bayesian estimation [AMGC02] more realistic. A combination of two movement models assisted with the knowledge of floor plans, operating at the microscopic level and suitable for pedestrian navigation are developed to be used in the prediction step. The constituents are a Map-Enhanced Stochastic Behavioral Movement Model to characterize more random motion and a Diffusion Movement Model to characterize a geographic goal a pedestrian might walk towards. A top-level Markov process is used to determine whether to currently use the stochastic behavioral or the diffusion model; therefore, the model switches between motion that is more goal oriented (diffusion model) or stochastic. Both models use the a priori knowledge of floor plans differently. The technique through which the knowledge of floor plans is included in each of the two movement models will be explained. Additionally, the effect of the knowledge of various densities of walls on the overall estimation process will be analyzed.
Intraductal Papillary Mucinous Tumors of the Pancreas: Features With Multimodality Imaging

The radiologic diagnosis of intraductal papillary mucinous tumor (IPMT) of the pancreas is important to establish because of its malignant potential and in order to determine the site of tumor origin and its extent. These pancreatic tumors are recognized more often now than previously because of the increasing use of imaging modalities such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance cholangiopancreatography. The main features of IPMT are given in this pictorial essay, with illustrations provided from a series of 50 patients with a surgically proven diagnosis of IPMT.
Retrieving Lévy Processes from Option Prices: Regularization of an Ill-posed Inverse Problem

We propose a stable nonparametric method for constructing an option pricing model of exponential Levy type, consistent with a given data set of option prices. After demonstrating the ill-posedness of the usual and least squares version of this inverse problem, we suggest to regularize the calibration problem by reformulating it as the problem of finding an exponential Levy model that minimizes the sum of the pricing error and the relative entropy with respect to a prior exponential Levy model. We prove the existence of solutions for the regularized problem and show that it yields solutions which are continuous with respect to the data, stable with respect to the choice of prior, and which converge to the minimum entropy least squares solution of the initial problem when the noise level in the data vanishes.
Design for a longitudinal density monitor for the LHC

Synchrotron radiation is currently used on the LHC for beam imaging and for monitoring the proton population in the 3 microsecond abort gap. In addition to these existing detectors, a study has been initiated to provide longitudinal density profiles of the LHC beams with a high dynamic range and a 50ps time resolution. This would allow for the precise measurement both of the bunch shape and the number of particles in the bunch tail or drifting into ghost bunches. A solution is proposed based on counting synchrotron light photons with two fast avalanche photo-diodes (APD) operated in Geiger mode. One is free-running but heavily attenuated and can be used to measure the core of the bunch. The other is much more sensitive, for measurement of the bunch tails, but must be gated off during the passage of the bunch to prevent the detector from being swamped. An algorithm is then applied to combine the two measurements and correct for the detector dead-time, afterpulsing and pileup effects. Initial results from laboratory testing of this system are described here.
Obstacle-avoiding rectilinear Steiner tree construction based on Steiner point selection

For the obstacle-avoiding rectilinear Steiner minimal tree (OARSMT) problem, this paper presents a Steiner-point based algorithm to achieve the best practical performance in wirelength and run time. Unlike many previous works, the Steiner-based framework is more focused on the usage of Steiner points instead of the handling of obstacles. This paper also proposes a new concept of Steiner point locations to provide an effective as well as efficient way to generate desirable Steiner point candidates. Experimental results show that this algorithm achieves the best solution quality in Θ(n log n) empirical time, which was originally generated by applying the maze routing on an Ω(n2)-space graph. The Steiner-point based framework and the new concept of Steiner point locations can be applied to future research on the OARSMT problem and its generations, such as the multi-layer OARSMT problem. Categories and Subject Descriptors: B.7. 2 [Integrated Circuits]: Design Aids General Terms: Algorithms, Performance, Design
Physical activity of underweight, normal weight and overweight Polish adolescents

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationships of classmate and teacher support during physical education (PE) lessons on moderate-to-vigorous physical activity of 14–16 year-old students whom were underweight, normal weight and overweight. The cross-sectional sample for the study concerned data from 1702 girls and 1547 boys, recruited from 12 junior high schools in Poznan, Poland. Based on their body mass index (BMI) values, the participants were assigned to weight categories: underweight, normal weight and overweight. We determined the levels of physical activity, and teacher and classmate support, by means of a questionnaire-based survey. The 3-way interaction effect of gender, weight and support from teachers was statistically significant (p ≤ .05); the 3-way interaction effect of gender, weight status and support from classmates approached significance (p = .0526). This research concluded that supporting students during the PE process may play an important role in determining one’s level of physical activity.
Recalled parental bonding, adult attachment style, and personality disorders in child molesters: A comparative study

This article studies recalled parental bonding, adult attachment style, and personality disorders in child molesters and reports on the findings of two separate studies. The first study examines differences between a group of 84 child molesters and 80 matched normal control subjects. This study found that the antisocial and the schizoid personality disorders are typical for the molester group, and that at an interpersonal level this group can be typified by recollections of an uncaring father and mother, recollections of an elevated level of autonomy emanating from the father, and insecure current attachment patterns. The second study compares a subgroup of personality-disordered child molesters to a subgroup without personality disorders. This study revealed that recollections of the role of the father in parenting are decisive. The personality-disordered group reports that the father was both more uncaring and granted more autonomy. Regarding current adult attachment style, an avoidant and anxious-ambivalent attachment style characterised the disordered subgroup. We argue that the results can be useful for treatment. Since recalled parental experiences play a role in the development of personality disorders and child molestation, psychotherapists should integrate interpersonal tools into treatment, especially in therapeutic work with child molesters who received less parental sensitivity and suffer from personality disorders.
CBP and p300 are cytoplasmic E4 polyubiquitin ligases for p53

p300 and CREB-binding protein (CBP) act as multifunctional regulators of p53 via acetylase and polyubiquitin ligase (E4) activities. Prior work in vitro has shown that the N-terminal 595 aa of p300 encode both generic ubiquitin ligase (E3) and p53-directed E4 functions. Analysis of p300 or CBP-deficient cells revealed that both coactivators were required for endogenous p53 polyubiquitination and the normally rapid turnover of p53 in unstressed cells. Unexpectedly, p300/CBP ubiquitin ligase activities were absent in nuclear extracts and exclusively cytoplasmic. Consistent with the cytoplasmic localization of its E3/E4 activity, CBP deficiency specifically stabilized cytoplasmic, but not nuclear p53. The N-terminal 616 aa of CBP, which includes the conserved Zn2+-binding C/H1-TAZ1 domain, was the minimal domain sufficient to destabilize p53 in vivo, and it included within an intrinsic E3 autoubiquitination activity and, in a two-step E4 assay, exhibited robust E4 activity for p53. Cytoplasmic compartmentalization of p300/CBP's ubiquitination function reconciles seemingly opposed functions and explains how a futile cycle is avoided—cytoplasmic p300/CBP E4 activities ubiquitinate and destabilize p53, while physically separate nuclear p300/CBP activities, such as p53 acetylation, activate p53.
Towards a transgenic mouse model of sickle cell disease: hemoglobin SAD.

In order to obtain a transgenic mouse model of sickle cell disease, we have synthesized a novel human beta‐globin gene, beta SAD, designed to increase the polymerization of the transgenic human hemoglobin S (Hb S) in vivo. beta SAD (beta S‐Antilles‐D Punjab) includes the beta 6Val substitution of the beta S chain, as well as two other mutations, Antilles (beta 23Ile) and D Punjab (beta 121Gln) each of which promotes the polymerization of Hb S in human. The beta SAD gene and the human alpha 2‐globin gene, each linked to the beta‐globin locus control region (LCR) were co‐introduced into the mouse germ line. In one of the five transgenic lines obtained, SAD‐1, red blood cells contained 19% human Hb SAD (alpha 2 human 1 beta 2SAD) and mouse‐human hybrids in addition to mouse hemoglobin. Adult SAD‐1 transgenic mice were not anemic but had some abnormal features of erythrocytes and slightly enlarged spleens. Their erythrocytes displayed sickling upon deoxygenation in vitro. SAD‐1 neonates were anemic and many did not survive. In order to generate adult mice with a more severe sickle cell syndrome, crosses between the SAD progeny and homozygous for beta‐thalassemic mice were performed. Hemoglobin SAD was increased to 26% in beta‐thal/SAD‐1 mice which exhibited: (i) abnormal erythrocytes with regard to shape and density; (ii) an enlarged spleen and a high reticulocyte count indicating an increased erythropoiesis; (iii) mortality upon hypoxia; (iv) polymerization of hemolysate similar to that obtained in human homozygous sickle cell disease; and (v) anemia and mortality during development.
Model order reduction by a statistical metric

In this paper groups of coherent generators are identified based on a correlation metric. The main contribution is related to the rapid, simple, and reliable identification of coherent generators, which may be aggregated in order to constitute equivalent generators, thus reducing the dimensionality of the original model. Different levels of aggregation may be attained and results demonstrate the proposal's liability.
Undergraduate Research Projects: Practice and Perceptions

Undergraduate research forms an integral part of higher education, and the research project in particular represents an important component of the undergraduate degree. This study investigated current practice and student and supervisor perceptions of undergraduate research, using both online surveys and telephone interviews. Important differences between student and supervisor perceptions of undergraduate research were identified. In particular, whilst both students and supervisors viewed the research project as a collaborative process, students reported that the project was more student led than supervisors rated it as being. Students were also more likely than supervisors to view activities as part of the supervisor role or to believe that the supervisor should act as a mentor. Students were less likely than supervisors to report that the research project enhanced skill development or that they were members of the departmental or psychological research community. There were no differences between supervisor estimates and direct student ratings of student satisfaction. Students were more satisfied if they believed that their project was student (as opposed to supervisor) led and that it advanced knowledge in the subject area.
What’s in a Name? Probabilistic Inference of Religious Community from South Asian Names

Fine-grained data on religious communities are often considered sensitive in South Asia and consequently remain inaccessible. Yet without such data, statistical research on communal relations and group-based inequality remains superficial, hampering the development of appropriate policy measures to prevent further social exclusion on the basis of religion. The open-source algorithm introduced in this article provides a workaround by probabilistically exploiting the communal connotations of names; it transforms name lists—which are readily available—into a new source of demographic data. The algorithm proves highly accurate in identifying Muslim population shares in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, but could be employed more widely across South Asia. It potentially enables more detailed analyses in economics, development studies, and political science as well as better sampling procedures in sociology and anthropology. This article describes the algorithm, evaluates its accuracy, reflects on ethical implications, and introduces a sample data set; the software itself is available in an online supplement to this article.
A Scalable Failure Recovery Model for Tree-based Overlay Networks

We present a scalable failure recovery model for data aggregations in large scale tree-based overlay networks (TB ¯ ONs). A TB ¯ ON is a network of hierarchically organized processes that exploits the logarithmic scaling properties of trees to provide scalable data multicast, gather, and in-network aggregation. TB ¯ ONs are commonly used in debugging and performance tools, system monitoring, information management systems, stream processing, and mobile ad hoc networks. Our recovery model leverages inherent information redundancies in TB ¯ ON computations. This redundant information is gathered from non-failed processes to compensate for computation and communication state lost due to failures. This state compensation strategy is attractive because: (1) it avoids the time and resource overheads of previous reliability approaches, which rely on explicit replication; (2) recovery is rapid and only involves a small subset of the network; and (3) it applies to many useful, complex computations. In this paper, we formalize the TB ¯ ON model and its fundamental properties to prove that our state compensation model properly preserves computational semantics across TB ¯ ON process failures. These properties lead to an efficient implementation of state compensation, which we use to empirically validate and evaluate recovery performance. We show that state compensation can recover from failures in extremely large TB ¯ ONs in milliseconds rendering practically no application service interruption.
Geluk in landen: Een empirische studie naar condities voor een gelukkige samenleving

textabstractJeremy Bentham (1789) was the founding father of utilitarianism, a social philosophy that stressed the importance of happiness (“the sum of pleasures and pains”). Bentham argued that policy-makers should strive for “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. Bentham’s utilitarianism, however, was only theoretical, as happiness was not yet measured in the 18th century. By now, social scientists have developed methods for measuring the kind of happiness that Bentham had in mind. Subjective enjoyment of life can not only be measured at the individual level, but average happiness can also be meaningfully compared across countries. This development has resulted in a new strand of research. Several national characteristics appear to correlate strongly and meaningfully with happiness, e.g. economic development, good governance and gender equality. These and many other research findings are collected in the ‘World Database of Happiness’. This dissertation adds to that growing body of knowledge exploring some new issues in a cross-sectional analysis of happiness in 150 nations around the year 2005 that covers about 95% of the world population. The following findings stand out: 1. Income inequality does not correlate with average happiness in nations. Surprisingly, even the poor are not unhappier in nations with great income inequality. 2. Modernity is an important determinant of average happiness in nations, despite the fact that modernization is often critizised in the sociological and the popular discours. 3. A high degree of religiousness in nations goes together with relatively low happines in rich nations. In poor nations, however, religiousness can turn out positively. Moreover, different religions affect happiness differently. 4. Enforcement of the death death penalty does not seem to undermine happiness, contradicting Bentham’s strong opposition to it. Again, this research has shown that the conditions of a happy society can be studied empirically. This means that a new, evidence-based, utilitarianism now exists that can be applied by policymakers.
What is the orientation of DNA polymerases on their templates?

ABL-Basic Research Program, NCI-Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center, Frederick, Maryland 21702-1201; Agouron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., San Diego, California 92121; Division of Infectious Diseases, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio 44106; and Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine and Rutgers University Chemistry Department, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854
A Partial Order Reduction Technique for Event-driven Multi-threaded Programs

Event-driven multi-threaded programming is fast becoming a preferred style of developing efficient and responsive applications. In this concurrency model, multiple threads execute concurrently, communicating through shared objects as well as by posting asynchronous events that are executed in their order of arrival. In this work, we consider partial order reduction (POR) for event-driven multi-threaded programs. The existing POR techniques treat event queues associated with threads as shared objects and thereby, reorder every pair of events handled on the same thread even if reordering them does not lead to different states. We do not treat event queues as shared objects and propose a new POR technique based on a novel backtracking set called the dependence-covering set. Events handled by the same thread are reordered by our POR technique only if necessary. We prove that exploring dependence-covering sets suffices to detect all deadlock cycles and assertion violations defined over local variables. To evaluate effectiveness of our POR scheme, we have implemented a dynamic algorithm to compute dependence-covering sets. On execution traces obtained from a few Android applications, we demonstrate that our technique explores many fewer transitions ---often orders of magnitude fewer--- compared to exploration based on persistent sets, wherein, event queues are considered as shared objects.
TLS point cloud segmentation based on points features

This article proposes a point cloud segmentation method by merely relying on the spatial and echo characteristics of the point cloud of the terrestrial laser scanning (TLS). Firstly, terrain point cloud and off-terrain point cloud will be separated according to their own spatial characteristics. Then further segmentation to the terrain point cloud part will be done based on the intensity of the echo energy or the reflectance of the echo of the target object. Results of the experiment carried out prove that: (1) progressive TIN can well segment terrain and off-terrain points; (2) segmentation by echo reflectance will achieve a more detailed segmentation of high precision.