Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of growth mechanisms of clusters in a silane discharge with the use of a fluid model

A one-dimensional fluid model was developed to study the formation of dust nanoparticles in a low-pressure capacitively coupled radio-frequency silane (SiH/sub 4/) discharge. In this model, the particle balances, the electron energy balance, and the Poisson equation are solved self-consistently. A set of 66 species, including neutrals, radicals, ions, and electrons, are incorporated. A total of 111 reactions are described in the model, comprising electron impact reactions with silanes, neutral-neutral, and ion-neutral reactions. Plasma conditions are typically those used for the deposition of amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). The model includes the formation of silicon hydrides (Si/sub n/H/sub m/) containing up to 12 silicon atoms. Anion-induced chain reactions are considered to be the main pathway leading to cluster formation.
Sedation-Free Colonoscopy Using an Upper Endoscope Is Tolerable and Effective in Patients with Low Body Mass Index: A Prospective Randomized Study

OBJECTIVE:Small-caliber upper endoscopes can be used safely and effectively for sedation-free colonoscopy. The objective of the study is to assess the efficacy of a small-caliber upper endoscope (9.2 mm) comparing with a standard colonoscope (12.2 mm). METHODS:In a prospective trial, patients undergoing sedation-free colonoscopy were randomly assigned to the upper endoscope (E) or the standard colonoscope (C). Outcome measures included patient self-assessed pain score (4-point scale), endoscopist-assessed pain score (4-point scale), cecal intubation rate, difficult cecal intubation rate (>900 s), number of polyps detected, and complication rates.RESULTS:A total of 244 patients were entered. Clinical characteristics were not different between the two groups. Cecal intubation was achieved in 91.0% of the patients in each group. The mean patient self-assessed pain score (SD) was significantly lower in the E group compared with the C group: 1.44 (0.81) versus 2.08 (1.10), p < 0.001. The mean endoscopist assessment of patient pain score (SD) was significantly lower in the E group compared with the C group as well: 1.27 (0.67) versus 1.58 (0.90), p = 0.003. In patients with low body mass index (BMI < 22 kg/m2), the cecal intubation rate was significantly higher in the E group (97.7% vs 79.4%, p = 0.026) and the difficult cecal intubation rate was significantly lower in the E group (9.3% vs 32.4%, p = 0.011). There were no significant differences in the number of polyps detected and complication rates between the two groups.CONCLUSION:A small-caliber upper endoscope is tolerable and effective for sedation-free colonoscopy, especially in patients with low BMI.
Sick in the Head? Pathogen Concerns Bias Implicit Perceptions of Mental Illness

Biases against the mentally ill are historically and cross-culturally pervasive, suggesting they may have an evolutionary basis. The prevailing view is that people seek to distance themselves from the mentally ill because they are perceived as dangerous, violent, and incompetent. However, because of similarities between sickness behaviors and symptoms of some mental disorders, it was hypothesized that mental illness stigma could be partially explained as a function of behavioral immune system biases designed to avoid potential sources of contagion. In two experiments, it was found that mental illness was implicitly associated more with disease than danger. In Experiment 1, this implicit association was exacerbated among people who have had their biological immune system activated by a recent illness. In Experiment 2, experimentally priming disease salience increased implicit association between mental illness and disease. Implications for the evolutionary origins of prejudice and the prevention of mental illness stigma are discussed.
Tariffs, Capital Controls, and Equilibrium Real Exchange Rates

A general equilibrium intertemporal model with optimizing consumers and producers is developed to analyze how the equilibrium real exchange rate reacts to changes in the degree of restrictions to intra- and intertemporal trade. In particular, the effects of changes in the level of import tariffs and of changes in taxes on foreign borrowing on the path of equilibrium real exchange rates are investigated. In the case of import tariffs, both temporary and anticipated changes are considered. It is shown that in this intertemporal framework equilibrium, real exchange rates can exhibit interesting and convoluted behavior. In particular, results that contradict the traditional wisdom can be obtained. A number of extensions are also discussed.
Protecting Privacy Against Structural De-anonymization Attacks in Social Networks

Privacy is a core concern of online social networks. Probably the corner stone challenge is the amount of identi able information contained in social network meta-data: the underlying graph structure. Sanitized social network information is occasionally shared with third parties, such as business partners and researchers. Previous research developed de-anonymization attacks that can re-identify social network users in such datasets by using public data sources, e.g., obtained by crawling other networks. A strong class of such attacks considered in this dissertation solely consider structural information of the social graph, and achieve large-scale re-identi cation. This yields the need for solutions protecting user privacy in social networks. In this thesis, I consider client-side solutions that involve users only, and can be adopted gradually within existing services. Speci cally, I investigate the use of an identity management technique called identity separation as a tool for tackling de-anonymization attacks, and analyze several settings of the technique. Initially, my experiments focus on measuring the e ectiveness of basic, non-cooperative identity separation mechanisms. Then, I experimentally check if multiple cooperation models can improve overall protection. Finally, I evaluate several strategies where the focus is on protecting the individual privacy of participants. Some of these strategies provide feasible protection in case of the state-of-the-art attack, while others have theoretical guarantees. Besides, I also contribute to the analysis of attack algorithms: I propose methods for measuring anonymity, and characterize how the initialization of these algorithms can a ect the overall performance of the attack.
Is Stellar Hedge Fund Performance for Real?

We apply a robust bootstrap to evaluate the performance of a large universe of hedge funds. Our bootstrap estimates indicate that the performance of the top hedge funds cannot be attributed to chance alone. This is true even after adjusting for back fill bias, serial correlation, and structural breaks. Also, we find that hedge fund alpha differences persist over three year horizons. However, an investment strategy designed around this will run into difficulties as the persistence is often confined to small funds that are effectively closed to new inflows. Moreover, Bayesian estimates suggest that standard alphas may be overestimated by 41% for the average top fund.
Human Development Quality and Its Problems in Indonesia

Human development has been the main theme of the world along with the publication of the Human Development Report first time by the United Nations in 1990. Development orientation shifted from economic development which only focuses on simply revenue growth to be human-oriented development. One of the indicators used to measure the success rate of development of a society is the Human Development Index (HDI). HDI value created by the United Nations for Development Programme in 2010, ranked Indonesia at 108 of 169 countries with a HDI score of 0.600. This score is better than the score in 2009 of 0.593, with a rank at 111. This study examines the effect of economic growth, income distribution, income per capita, population growth rate, unemployment rate, the number of poor, local government budget allocations for education, local government budget allocations for health, local government budget allocations for the environment, local government budget allocations for housing and public facilities, the implementation of regional autonomy, the implementation of the Law no. 20 of 2003 on National Education System toward human development quality in Indonesia? This study uses panel regression methods and the data cross of 26 (twenty six) provinces in Indonesia as well as the data series from 1993-2009. The results showed there were six variables that affect significantly i.e : economic growth, per capita income, population growth, growth in the unemployment, allocation of education fund and dummy of regional autonomy toward human development quality. From the six variables, only per capita income, allocation of government funds spent on education and dummy of regional autonomy are positively related to human development quality, and in the meantime; economic growth, population growth, and growth in the unemployment is negatively related to human development quality. Variables income distribution, the number of poor, local government allocation of funds expended for health sector, local government allocation of funds expended for environmental, local government allocation of funds expended for housing and public facilities, as well as dummy Act No.20 of 2003 about the national education system had no significant effect toward human development quality.
Participation of 414DDDD417 and 432KPAR435 in the thermostability of mercuric reductase isolated from the deep brine environment of atlantis II in the red sea

APA Citation Eid, A. (2014). Participation of 414DDDD417 and 432KPAR435 in the thermostability of mercuric reductase isolated from the deep brine environment of atlantis II in the red sea [Master's Thesis, the American University in Cairo]. AUC Knowledge Fountain. https://fount.aucegypt. edu/etds/1182 MLA Citation Eid, Ayman. Participation of 414DDDD417 and 432KPAR435 in the thermostability of mercuric reductase isolated from the deep brine environment of atlantis II in the red sea. 2014. American University in Cairo, Master's Thesis. AUC Knowledge Fountain. https://fount.aucegypt. edu/etds/1182
The Role of External Monitoring in Firm Valuation: The Case of R&D Capitalization

We investigate whether the use of a high quality auditor and increased regulatory monitoring of R&D reporting influence both the level of R&D expenditure capitalized by Australian companies from 1992 to 2002 and the market's perception of the reliability of these figures. The results indicate that firms with a higher quality auditor capitalize lower levels of R&D costs and that in the period following increased regulatory monitoring, firms capitalize fewer R&D costs. Analysis of the value relevance of R&D expenditure indicates that the market positively values R&D costs when expensed as incurred. These results are consistent using both price and returns models. Results are less persistent for capitalized R&D amounts. The finding from the returns model indicates that the quality of the auditor appears to enhance the reliability of capitalized R&D costs while the price model suggests that the cumulative R&D asset is less relevant in the period following ASC monitoring.
An empirical analysis of inter-organisational value co-creation in a supply chain: a process perspective

Under competitive environments, supply chain enterprises seek to upstream and downstream firms to collaborate and co-create additional values. This study seeks to identify the process and the mechanism of value co-creation and to realise relational value. From a sample of 110 supplier and client relationships, we empirically examine how the value co-creation process works. Our model identifies bilateral idiosyncratic investment and resource interdependence as two important steps in the value co-creation process as well as verifies the effects of value co-creation on partnership quality. The implications and limitations of the research are presented, and suggestions for future research on inter-firm value co-creation research are provided.
Effective two-step method for face hallucination based on sparse compensation on over-complete patches

Sparse representation has been successfully applied to image d using low- and high-resolution training face images based on sparse representation. In this study, the sparse residual compensation is adopted to face hallucination. Firstly, a global face image is constructed by optimal coefficients of the interpolated training images. Secondly, the high-resolution residual image (local face image) is found by using an over-complete patch dictionary and the sparse representation. Finally, a hallucinated face image is obtained by combining these two steps. In addition, the more details of the face image in high frequency parts are recovered using a residual compensation strategy. In the authors’ experimental work, it is observed that balance sparsity parameter (λ) has affected the residual compensation. Further, the proposed algorithm can acquire a high-resolution image even though the number of training image pairs is comparatively smaller. The experiments show that the authors’ method is more effective than the other existing two-step face hallucination methods.
Enhanced Measles Virus cDNA Rescue and Gene Expression after Heat Shock

ABSTRACT Rescue of negative-stranded RNA viruses from full-length genomic cDNA clones is an essential technology for genetic analysis of this class of viruses. Using this technology in our studies of measles virus (MV), we found that the efficiency of the measles virus rescue procedure (F. Radecke et al., EMBO J. 14:5773–5784, 1995) could be improved by modifying the procedure in two ways. First, we found that coculture of transfected 293-3-46 cells with a monolayer of Vero cells increased the number of virus-producing cultures about 20-fold. Second, we determined that heat shock treatment increased the average number of transfected cultures that produced virus another two- to threefold. In addition, heat shock increased the number of plaques produced by positive cultures. The effect of heat shock on rescue led us to test the effect on transient expression from an MV minireplicon. Heat shock increased the level of reporter gene expression when either minireplicon DNA or RNA was used regardless of whether complementation was provided by cotransfection with expression plasmids or infection with MV helper virus. In addition, we found that MV minireplicon gene expression could be stimulated by cotransfection with an Hsp72 expression plasmid, indicating that hsp72 likely plays a role in the effect of heat shock.
The Membrane-associated Inhibitor of Apoptosis Protein, BRUCE/Apollon, Antagonizes Both the Precursor and Mature Forms of Smac and Caspase-9*

Smac/DIABLO, HtrA2/Omi, and caspase-9 play key roles in the initiation of apoptosis. The inhibitor of apoptosis proteins (IAPs) are believed to bind to the N-terminal IAP binding motifs of the mature (proteolytically processed) forms of Smac, HtrA2, and caspase-9. However, we show here that BRUCE/Apollon, a 528-kDa IAP whose degradation promotes apoptosis, associates with their precursors as well as the mature forms by binding to regions in addition to the IAP binding motif. Through these associations, BRUCE promotes the degradation of Smac and inhibits the activity of caspase-9 but not the effector caspase, caspase-3. In response to apoptotic stimuli, BRUCE is degraded by proteasomes and/or cleaved by caspases and HtrA2 depending on the specific stimulus and the cell type. These results suggest that the ability of BRUCE to antagonize both the precursor and mature forms of Smac and caspase-9 is an important mechanism for the prevention of apoptosis under normal conditions.
Congo Red Absorption by Rhizobium leguminosarum

Congo red absorption is generally considered a contraindication of Rhizobium. However, R. leguminosarum takes up the dye on yeast extract-mannitol agar. The uptake of congo red varies among strains of R. leguminosarum, as shown elsewhere with strains of R. trifolii and R. meliloti. Congo red absorption does not distinguish rhizobia from other bacteria, but may be useful as a strain marker.
Temporal Grounding Graphs for Language Understanding with Accrued Visual-Linguistic Context

A robot's ability to understand or ground natural language instructions is fundamentally tied to its knowledge about the surrounding world. We present an approach to grounding natural language utterances in the context of factual information gathered through natural-language interactions and past visual observations. A probabilistic model estimates, from a natural language utterance, the objects,relations, and actions that the utterance refers to, the objectives for future robotic actions it implies, and generates a plan to execute those actions while updating a state representation to include newly acquired knowledge from the visual-linguistic context. Grounding a command necessitates a representation for past observations and interactions; however, maintaining the full context consisting of all possible observed objects, attributes, spatial relations, actions, etc., over time is intractable. Instead, our model, Temporal Grounding Graphs, maintains a learned state representation for a belief over factual groundings, those derived from natural-language interactions, and lazily infers new groundings from visual observations using the context implied by the utterance. This work significantly expands the range of language that a robot can understand by incorporating factual knowledge and observations of its workspace in its inference about the meaning and grounding of natural-language utterances.
Postprandial hypotension and orthostatic blood pressure responses in elderly Parkinson's disease patients

Objective: To investigate the change in systolic blood pressure (SBP) induced by meals and to compare their impact on the orthostatic SBP response in elderly Parkinson's disease with that in control patients. Design: Ten elderly patients suffering from Parkinson's disease were compared with 10 age-matched elderly control patients. Methods: The postprandial SBP change was measured by means of ambulatory blood pressure monitoring with the patient in the supine position. Orthostatic SBP responses were measured the next day by means of active standing and passive head-up tilting tests performed before and after the patients had their lunch. Results: In Parkinson's disease patients, a postprandial SBP drop of 27mmHg in the supine position was found compared with a drop of 8mmHg in controls. In Parkinson's disease patients, that drop was moderately correlated to the orthostatic SBP responses and significantly correlated to the preprandial supine baseline SBP level. The orthostatic fall in SBP was greater with passive than with active standing and with both it was greater in Parkinson's disease patients than in the control subjects. The fall in orthostatic blood pressure was reduced by a previous meal. In contrast, there was no difference in orthostatic heart rate responses between the patients and the controls. Conclusions: Parkinson's disease patients demonstrated a significant postprandial drop in SBP and a tendency towards orthostatic hypotension, which was not worsened by the meal, probably owing to a stronger sympathetic activation. Postprandial supine SBP change and orthostatic SBP responses were only moderately associated in Parkinson's disease patients. In addition to autonomic dysfunction, an increased baseline SBP level might contribute to both phenomena.
Fate of gravitational collapse in semiclassical gravity

While the outcome of gravitational collapse in classical general relativity is unquestionably a black hole, up to now no full and complete semiclassical description of black hole formation has been thoroughly investigated. Here we revisit the standard scenario for this process. By analyzing how semiclassical collapse proceeds we show that the very formation of a trapping horizon can be seriously questioned for a large set of, possibly realistic, scenarios. We emphasize that in principle the theoretical framework of semiclassical gravity certainly allows the formation of trapping horizons. What we are questioning here is the more subtle point of whether or not the standard black hole picture is appropriate for describing the end point of realistic collapse. Indeed if semiclassical physics were in some cases to prevent formation of the trapping horizon, then this suggests the possibility of new collapsed objects which can be much less problematic, making it unnecessary to confront the information paradox or the runaway end point problem.
In Vitro and In Vivo Effects of Soluble, Monovalent Globotriose on Bacterial Attachment and Colonization

ABSTRACT Epithelial cells lining the urinary tract are rich in globo series glycolipids, structurally defined by a Galα1,4Gal motif in the oligosaccharide moiety of this glycolipid family. This Galα1,4Gal motif is the attachment target for the P-fimbrial adhesin of uropathogenic Escherichia coli. We investigated the ability of a trisaccharide analog of this core motif, globotriose (Galα1,4Galβ1,4Glc), to interfere with uropathogen attachment and colonization in vitro and in vivo. We assessed the ability of globotriose to inhibit and reverse the binding and agglutination of a P-fimbriated strain of E. coli (JR1) using human erythrocytes and immortalized human colonic epithelial cells as targets. Globotriose (5 mg/ml) completely inhibited and reversed cell agglutination and caused a 10- to 100-fold reduction in JR1 binding to target cells, as determined by flow cytometry. In preparation for an in vivo efficacy study, we investigated the distribution and pharmacokinetics of globotriose in the BALB/c mouse. Globotriose was administered via the tail vein, targeting an instantaneous plasma concentration of 5 mg/ml, and in a different experiment, animals were gavaged at 10 times the intravenous (i.v.) dose. Globotriose was rapidly cleared from plasma (half-life [t1/2], 6 min) and slowly excreted via the kidney (t1/2, 4 h). Urine levels of >5 mg/ml were maintained from 4 to 12 h after the i.v. bolus dose, which resulted in a 1-log reduction in established bladder colonization by JR1. These results suggest that free, soluble globotriose is a feasible alternative therapy for urinary tract infections.