Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Placental Site Nodules and Plaques A Clinicopathologic Analysis of 20 Cases

The clinical and pathological features of 20 cases of a nodular or plaquelike trophoblastic lesion at the placental site, which we have designated “placental site nodule or plaque” (PSN-P), are described. The lesions occurred in patients 27 to 45 years of age, and were discovered in an endometrial curettage specimen performed because of menorrhagia or irregular uterine bleeding, or were incidental findings in curettage or hysterectomy specimens. They were grossly visible in five cases. Microscopic examination disclosed single or multiple, mostly well-circumscribed, oval, or plaquelike, variably cellular nodules that were characteristically extensively hyalinized. The lesional cells typically had abundant cytoplasm that was amphophilic, eosinophilic, or occasionally vacuolated, and irregular, often degenerative-appearing nuclei; mitotic figures were absent or rare. Immunohistochemical staining for human placental lactogen was focally positive in all but one specimen stained; most of the lesional cells stained for cytokeratin.An uneventful follow-up of 1 to 7 years was obtained in 14 cases, including five in which the only treatment was dilatation and curettage. The major lesion to be differentiated from the PSN-P is the placental site trophoblastic tumor. Features favoring the former diagnosis include its usually small size, circumscription, extensive hyalinization, degenerative appearance, and mitotic inactivity. These features, as well as the absence of squamous cells, help distinguish PSN-P from the rare hyalinizing squamous cell carcinoma of the cervix. The available evidence indicates that PSN-P is benign.
Detection of West Nile Virus in Stable Flies (Diptera: Muscidae) Parasitizing Juvenile American White Pelicans

ABSTRACT Stable flies, Stomoxys calcitrans (L.) (Diptera: Muscidae), an economically important pest of livestock and humans, were observed parasitizing prefledged American white pelicans, Pelecanus erythrorhynchos (Pelecaniformes: Pelecanidae), in a pelican breeding colony in northeastern Montana where die-offs attributed to West Nile virus (family Flavividae, genus Flavivirus, WNV) have occurred since 2002. Engorged and unengorged flies were collected off nine moribund chicks. Of 29 blood-engorged flies testing positive for vertebrate DNA, all 29 contained pelican DNA. Virus isolation was performed on 60 pools (1,176 flies) of unengorged flies using Vero cell plaque assay. Eighteen pools were positive for WNV for an estimated infection rate of 18.0 per 1,000 flies. Fifty-four percent (36/67) of abdomens from blood-engorged flies tested positive for WNV. Pelican viremia levels from the blood-engorged fly abdomens revealed that at least one of the ill pelicans circulated a viremia capable of infecting Culex mosquito vectors. Stable flies may be involved in WNV transmission within the pelican breeding colony by serving as either a mechanical vector or as a source for oral infection if ingested by predators.
Recognition of Indian license plate number from live stream videos

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been employed in many developed countries for traffic management, automatic speed control, tracking stolen cars and also in automatic toll systems for improving the traffic control. ALPR is a surveillance system that extracts the information from the vehicle license plate by capturing the images. Human intervention to recognize the license plates results in delays and cases of missing out certain violations. Automating the process from surveillance cameras is challenging as the system must deal with different angles, distance, resolution and illumination conditions. In this paper, we compare the accuracy of three well known approaches to detect license plates under Indian conditions. We have selected OpenALPR, k-NN and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based techniques, adapted them for local conditions, compared their accuracy on both still images and live stream videos. Our analysis demonstrates that the CNN based approach is the most suitable for recognizing number plates in India.
N-[4-(4-Nitrophenoxy)phenyl]acetamide

The asymmetric unit of the title compound, C14H12N2O4, contains two molecules that differ principally in the orientation of the acetamide substituent to the adjacent benzene ring with dihedral angles of 44.77 (7) and 19.06 (7)°. The dihedral angles between the benzene rings are 64.46 (4) and 80.84 (4)°. In the crystal, classical N—H⋯O hydrogen bonds form C(4) chains along [100]. These chains are interlinked by C—H⋯O contacts forming R 2 2(10) rings. In the crystal, π–π interactions are observed with a distance of 3.5976 (18) Å between the centroids of the nitro-substituted benzene rings of one type of molecule.
Do Foreigners Cushion Native Jobs? The Case of European Regions in the 1990s

This paper investigates whether foreigners cushion native labour during the phases of the economic cycle. The theoretical model, based on the work of Blanchard and Katz (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 0(1): 1-75, 1992), assumes that foreigners supply labour with a higher wage elasticity than natives. The empirical analysis, based on an unbalanced panel of 161 European regions during 1988-97, shows that following a labour demand shock the variability of native employment growth is lower the higher the proportion of foreign citizens in the local labour force. These results suggest that foreigners absorb some of the effects of the shock, shielding natives from its full impact. The analysis also reveals that the main channel mediating this 'cushioning' effect is the inter-regional migration of foreign workers, followed (as a far distant second) by their higher/lower unemployment rates.
Consumer Preferences for Local Food Products in North Carolina

With growing interests and concerns about nutrition and health, it has become increasingly important to understand what is preferred – extending consumer expenditure dollars towards organic or towards local food products. We address this issue by evaluating the perceptions of North Carolina consumer choices for organic, local and/or other ‘labeled’ food products. We investigate these preferences by conducting consumer focus groups in five locations throughout the state from three regions - Coastal, Piedmont, and Mountain. Forty-five participants were asked to participate in a 30 to 60 minute focus group assessing their attitudes about and perceptions of organic and/or local food products. Consistent patterns in all groups revealed that although females served as primary food purchasers, several households shared responsibilities based on their household preferences for local foods. Most individuals made the distinction between organic and local through labeling and held a stronger preference for local foods versus organic foods.
THE J APANESE C RISIS - A C ASE O F S TRATEGIC FAILURE?

This paper provides an alternative insight into Japan’s current economic problems. We concentrate upon the role played by the economy’s central actors, namely Japan’s transnational corporations. Since the early 1980’s, Japan’s transnationals have become dominant players in the global economy, and now have a higher rate of physical investment in new, overseas greenfield sites than their competitors. This has had detrimental consequences for Japan’s domestic economy, particularly for small firms who operate in keiretsu networks. This has led to concerns about the ‘hollowing out’ of Japan’s domestic industry raising the possibility of long-term industrial decline and ‘strategic failure’. Throughout the 1990’s, the Japanese economy has been plagued by a number of economic crises. The 1989 Tokyo stock market crash was subsequently followed by a collapse in property values (1991), recession (1991‐3), stagnant growth, a fiscal and financial crisis (1997) and recession again (1998‐9). For Japan, these problems of economic stagnation are a new, unwelcome experience. The post-war years have been an extremely successful period of economic growth for the Japanese economy. The foundations for this success were laid by the State pursuing a unique industrial strategy that not only complemented Japan’s co-operative style of industrial organisation, but also encouraged investment in ‘strategic’ industries and a nurturing of Japan’s small business sector. Indeed, during the 1970’s and 1980’s, Japan’s ‘Developmental State’ had become accepted as a role model for industrialisation and economic development ( Johnson, 1982). Although initially surprised by Japan’s recent decline, many Western commentators have tried to explain the crisis with the standard tools of economic analysis. Typically, the mainstream argument is that the high post-war growth rates of Japan (and her East Asian neighbours) were the result of a State sponsored high investment policy rather than improvements in productivity (Krugman, 1994). Hence, the slowdown of the 1990’s merely reflects one of the first rules of economics ‐ the law of diminishing returns. Since ( Japanese) businesses are no longer able to generate the high returns of the recent past, they have been unable to repay loans thus creating problems for the financial sector. In addition, because Japan is a highly regulated economy ‐ possibly
A Neural Network Assembly Memory Model with Maximum-Likelihood Recall and Recognition Properties

It has been shown that a neural network model recently proposed to describe basic memory performance is based on a ternary/binary coding/decoding algorithm which leads to a new neural network assembly memory model (NNAMM) providing maximum-likelihood recall/recognition properties and implying a new memory unit architecture with Hopfield two-layer network, N-channel time gate, auxiliary reference memory, and two nested feedback loops. For the data coding used, conditions are found under which a version of Hopfied network implements maximum-likelihood convolutional decoding algorithm and, simultaneously, linear statistical classifier of arbitrary binary vectors with respect to Hamming distance between vector analyzed and reference vector given. In addition to basic memory performance and etc, the model explicitly describes the dependence on time of memory trace retrieval, gives a possibility of one-trial learning, metamemory simulation, generalized knowledge representation, and distinct description of conscious and unconscious mental processes. It has been shown that an assembly memory unit may be viewed as a model of a smallest inseparable part or an 'atom' of consciousness. Some nontraditional neurobiological backgrounds (dynamic spatiotemporal synchrony, properties of time dependent and error detector neurons, early precise spike firing, etc) and the model's application to solve some interdisciplinary problems from different scientific fields are discussed.
Use and awareness of electronic information services by academic staff at Leeds Metropolitan University - A qualitative study

Reports results of an investigation, undertaken at Leeds Metropolitan University, to study the awareness and extent to which university academic staff use and assimilate electronic information services (EISs) into their work. The research was conducted using two methods: a quantitative study involving a questionnaire mailed to a random stratified sample of 200 university staff (of which 101 were returned); and a qualitative study. The present report is based on the findings of the quantitative study, which addressed four specific areas: the characteristics of the respondents (age, gender, faculty); the perceived level of the information technology (IT) literacy of staff; the frequency of use by academic staff of different EISs offered by the university; and academic staff’s perception of student use. The study also investigated a number of further areas, including: how academic staff at the university obtain information for their work; what they do with the information they obtain; how aware are university staff of EISs; how confident are academic staff in using EISs and the barriers that exist to their use; the extent to which academic staff are integrating the use of EISs into students’ educational experience; and what the university can do to support staff better in their use of EISs. It is concluded from the results that the internet is the most popular information source but the factors affecting use at the expense of subscription-based services are complex. University staff, especially those with low level IT skills, frequently use the internet because it is easy to access and provides instant results. However, users who are aware and are confident in using subscription-based services still prefer to use the internet for a variety of reasons. It is clear that for those members of staff who used EISs regularly, the initial impetus had often come from either their own research or after embarking on some form of professional development such as a PhD. Once they have seen the value of these services in their own work, they began to incorporate them into their own teaching.
Identification and classification of cocci bacterial cells in digital microscopic images

In cytology, automating the feature extraction process yields an objective, quantitative, detailed and reproducible computation of cell morphofunctional characteristics and allows the analysis of a large quantity of images. The objective of the present study is to develop an automatic tool to identify and classify the different types of cocci bacterial cells in digital microscopic cell images. Geometric features are used to identify the arrangement of cocci bacterial cells, namely cocci, diplococci, streptococci, tetrad, sarcinae and staphylococci using 3σ, K-NN and Neural network classifiers. The current methods rely on the subjective reading of profiles by a human expert based on the various manual staining methods. In this paper, we propose a method for cocci bacterial cell classification by segmenting digital bacterial cell images and extracting geometric and statistical features for cell classification. The experimental results are compared with the manual results obtained by microbiology expert and other methods in the literature.
Linear CMOS $LC$ -VCO Based on Triple-Coupled Inductors and Its Application to 40-GHz Phase-Locked Loop

A linear CMOS <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$LC$ </tex-math></inline-formula> voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) utilizing triple-coupled inductors and a 40-GHz integer-N phase-locked loop (PLL) are fabricated in a standard 90-nm CMOS process. The VCO utilizes triple-coupled inductors to couple varactor pairs, which compensate each other to linearize the VCO gain. The triple-coupled <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$LC$ </tex-math></inline-formula> tank is theoretically analyzed using equivalent circuit models. With the triple-coupled inductors, there is no need for tuning-voltage shifting circuits or dc-block capacitors, suitable for high-performance millimeter-wave (mm-wave) VCO design. A 40-GHz PLL has also been design and built around this linear <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$LC$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-VCO to demonstrate a stable PLL with small loop bandwidth variations. The measured tuning bandwidth, phase noise, and figure of merit (FOM<inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$_{T}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) of the linear VCO is 15.8%, −100.7 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset, and −181.8 dBc/Hz, respectively. Utilizing the linear VCO, the experimental PLL is stably locked from 38.61 to 44.55 GHz. The PLL without output buffer consumes 76 mW from 1.5/1.0 V supplies. The measured in-band and out-band phase noise of the 40-GHz PLL are −81 dBc/Hz at 100-kHz offset, and −114.5 dBc/Hz at 10-MHz offset, respectively. Thanks to the proposed linearization method, the VCO gain shows very small variations, compared with reported works. The implemented PLL demonstrates good stabilities with small loop bandwidth variations across the operation frequency range.
Categorizing the Spanish Accommodation Sector

This work aims at clustering Spanish accommodation firms into representative groups and at determining the firm size indicators that characterize each group. By doing this, we strive to explain the different groups’ profitability by their firm size indicators, and conclude how such firm size indicators are useful to explain firms’ economic sustainability. We apply clustering and logistic regression analyses using year 2008 data from 197 firms to group Spanish accommodation firms in terms of their economic profitability and to determine the firm size indicators that characterize each group. These analyses show three groups of accommodation firms in Spain. Companies in the first group have a positive relationship of profits with operating revenues and assets, but a negative relationship of profits with the number of employees. Companies in the second group have profits positively influenced by the number of employees and negatively affected by assets. Finally, companies in the third group show a negative influence on profits exerted by operating revenues but are positively affected by the number of employees and assets. These findings can serve as a guide to know companies’ categories in the accommodation sector in terms of their economic profitability. This work also provides managers with useful information to improve the economic sustainability of these companies. This information could support strategic decisions about the competitive position of their firms and the volume of competitors with a similar economic profile.
Status-Dependent Vasotocin Modulation of Dominance and Subordination in the Weakly Electric Fish Gymnotus omarorum

Dominant-subordinate status emerges from agonistic encounters. The weakly electric fish, Gymnotus omarorum, displays a clear-cut example of non-breeding territorial aggression. The asymmetry in the behavior of dominants and subordinates is outstanding. Dominants are highly aggressive and subordinates signal submission in a precise sequence of locomotor and electric traits: retreating, decreasing their electric organ discharge rate, and emitting transient electric signals. The hypothalamic neuropeptide arginine-vasotocin (AVT) and its mammalian homolog arginine-vasopressin, are key modulators of social behavior, known to adapt their actions to different contexts. By analyzing the effects of pharmacological manipulations of the AVT system in both dominants and subordinates, we show evidence of distinct status-dependent actions of AVT. We demonstrate an endogenous effect of AVT on dominants' aggression levels: blocking the V1a AVT receptor induced a significant decrease in dominants' attack rate. AVT administered to subordinates enhanced the expression of the electric signals of submission, without affecting subordinates' locomotor displays. This study contributes a clear example of status-dependent AVT modulation of agonistic behavior in teleosts, and reveals distinctive activation patterns of the AVT system between dominants and subordinates.
Testing for Opaqueness in the European Banking Industry: Evidence from Bond Credit Ratings

The question of whether banks are relatively more opaque than non-banking firms is empirically investigated by analyzing the disagreement between rating agencies (split ratings) on 2,473 bonds issued by European firms during the 1993–2003 period. Four main results emerge from the empirical analysis. First, fewer bank issues have split ratings overall, but the predicted probability of a split rating is higher for banks after controlling for risk and other issue characteristics. Second, subordinated bonds are subject to more disagreement between rating agencies. Third, bank opaqueness increases with financial assets and decreases with bank fixed assets. Fourth, bank opaqueness increases with bank size and capital ratio. The implications of these findings for regulatory policy are also discussed.
Glycoprotein IIb/IIIa Receptor Antagonist Tirofiban Inhibits Thrombin Generation during Cardiopulmonary Bypass in Baboons

Summary Platelets play a major role in coagulation mechanisms and anti-GPIIb-IIIa antibodies inhibit tissue-factor induced thrombin generation in in vitro studies. Tirofiban, a nonpeptide selective glycoprotein (GP) IIb/IIIa antagonist, preserves platelet number and function during cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) in baboons. We tested the hypothesis that platelet inhibition by tirofiban inhibits thrombin generation in vivo. Four groups of baboons (n = 7-12) were perfused for 60 min; all groups received heparin (300 units/kg). The controls received only heparin. The low dose (0.1 μg/kg/min) and high dose (0.3 μg/kg/min) infusion groups received tirofiban for 60 min before and 60 min during CPB. The bolus plus low dose infusion group received a 15 μg/kg bolus before starting CPB and a low dose infusion (0.1 mg/kg/min) only during CPB. At end of CPB, compared to control group (2.99 ± 0.36 nM), prothrombin fragment F1.2 levels were lower (p <0.05) in low dose infusion group (1.65 ± 0.14 nM, mean ± SE) and high dose infusion group (1.71 ± 0.19 nM), but not bolus plus infusion group (2.69 ± 0.49 nM); they remained significantly lower after protamine administration. At end of CPB, thrombin-antithrombin complex levels were lower in high dose infusion group (40.0 ± 11.2 ng/ml, p <0.05) compared to control group (76.2 ± 7.3 ng/ml). These studies indicate that tirofiban inhibits not only platelet aggregation but also thrombin generation in vivo during CPB, and that this effect is demonstrable even in the presence of intense heparin anticoagulation. They underscore the important inhibitory effect of GPIIb-IIIa antagonists on thrombin generation.
The Posterior Probability of Linkage Allowing for Linkage Disequilibrium and a New Estimate of Disequilibrium between a Trait and a Marker

The posterior probability of linkage (PPL) statistic has been developed as a method for the rigorous accumulation of evidence for or against linkage allowing for both intra- and inter-sample heterogeneity. To date, the method has assumed linkage equilibrium between alleles at the trait locus and the marker locus. We now generalize the PPL to allow for linkage disequilibrium (LD), by incorporating variable phase probabilities into the underlying linkage likelihood. This enables us to recover the marginal posterior density of the recombination fraction, integrating out nuisance parameters of the trait model, including the locus heterogeneity (admixture) parameter, as well as a vector of LD parameters. The marginal posterior density can then be updated across data subsets or new data as they become available, while allowing parameters of the trait model to vary between data sets. The method applies immediately to general pedigree structures and to markers with multiple alleles. In the case of SNPs, the likelihood is parameterized in terms of the standard single LD parameter D′; and it therefore affords a mechanism for estimation of D′ between the marker and the trait, again, without fixing the parameters of the trait model and allowing for updating across data sets. It is even possible to allow for a different associated allele in different populations, while accumulating information regarding the strength of LD. While a computationally efficient implementation for multi-allelic markers is still in progress, we have implemented a version of this new LD-PPL for SNPs and evaluated its performance in nuclear families. Our simulations show that LD-PPLs tend to be larger than PPLs (stronger evidence in favor of linkage/LD) with increased LD level, under a variety of generating models; while in the absence of linkage and LD, LD-PPLs tend to be smaller than PPLs (stronger evidence against linkage). The estimate of D′ also behaves well even in relatively small, heterogeneous samples.