Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nitrogenous Derivatives of Phosphorus and the Origins of Life: Plausible Prebiotic Phosphorylating Agents in Water

Phosphorylation under plausible prebiotic conditions continues to be one of the defining issues for the role of phosphorus in the origins of life processes. In this review, we cover the reactions of alternative forms of phosphate, specifically the nitrogenous versions of phosphate (and other forms of reduced phosphorus species) from a prebiotic, synthetic organic and biochemistry perspective. The ease with which such amidophosphates or phosphoramidate derivatives phosphorylate a wide variety of substrates suggests that alternative forms of phosphate could have played a role in overcoming the “phosphorylation in water problem”. We submit that serious consideration should be given to the search for primordial sources of nitrogenous versions of phosphate and other versions of phosphorus.
Not Only Helpless but also Hopeless: Changing Dynamics of Urban Poverty in Turkey, the Case of Sultanbeyli, Istanbul

This paper is an attempt to understand the changing characteristics of urban poverty in Turkey since 1980. First, it analyses how the urban poor in Turkey had adopted aggressive survival strategies by strengthening their solidarity networks on religious, ethnic and cultural bases until the 2000s. Then it sheds light on how those networks have dissolved later on thanks to a set of internal and external factors and concludes that Turkey now faces deepening poverty levels and engendering new forms and dynamics of poverty. This paper is based on the Sultanbeyli district of Istanbul, a district almost entirely composed of unauthorized houses whose population grew at an unprecedented rate after 1980; and it is a perfect case for the study of issues relating to migration, urbanization and poverty in Turkish cities.
Organization of common synaptic drive to motoneurones during fictive locomotion in the spinal cat

The basic locomotor rhythm in the cat is generated by a neuronal network in the spinal cord. The exact organization of this network and its drive to the spinal motoneurones is unknown. The purpose of the present study was to use time (cumulant density) and frequency domain (coherence) analysis to examine the organization of the last order drive to motoneurones during fictive locomotion (evoked by application of nialamide and dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA)) in the spinal cat. In all cats, narrow central synchronization peaks (half‐width < 3 ms) were observed in cumulants estimated between electroneurograms (ENGs) of close synergists, but not between nerves belonging to muscles acting on different joints or to antagonistic muscles. Coherence was not observed at frequencies above 100 Hz and was mainly observed between synergists. Intracellular recording was obtained from a population of 70 lumbar motoneurones. Significant short‐term synchronization was observed between the individual intracellular recordings and the ENGs recorded from nerves of the same pool and of close synergists. Recordings from 34 pairs of motoneurones (10 pairs belonged to the same motor pool, 11 pairs to close synergists and 13 pairs to antagonistic pools) failed to reveal any short‐lasting synchronization. These data demonstrate that short‐term synchronization during fictive locomotion is relatively weak and is restricted to close synergists. In addition, coherence analysis failed to identify any specific rhythmic component in the locomotor drive that could be associated with this synchronization. These results resemble findings obtained during human treadmill walking and imply that the spinal interneurones participating in the generation of the locomotor rhythm are themselves weakly synchronized. The restricted synchronization within the locomotor drive to motoneuronal pools may be a feature of the locomotor generating networks that is related to the ability of these networks to produce highly adaptive patterns of muscle activity during locomotion.
A peg free hand shape authentication scheme with radon transform

The hand shape authentication has been widely used on the biometrics field with an extensive range of potential applications since it is the well-suited with respect to security facility. The aim of this paper is to improve the accuracy and robustness of the hand based authentication system. In this paper, a hand shape authentication with a fixed angle radon transformation and a centroid scheme is proposed to achieve high accuracy and robustness with translation and rotation invariancy. Furthermore, the hand shape feature vector is developed using the radon transform with centroid to represent hand geometry, avoiding the more complicated and liable to errors of hand landmark extraction. This scheme can handle variability of hand's position, translation and rotation, especially in a peg free system with the help of centroid and radon transformation. The experimental results are promising and confirm the usefulness of the proposed approach for personal authentication by implementing the real hand geometry verification/identification system and it has proven to work effectively and competitively with low false acceptance and false rejection rates.
Weather, fertility, and land: land curse in economic development in a unified growth theory

We consider fertility choice and weather in analyzing the effect of farmland abundance in economic development. We find that quality-adjusted agricultural land abundance may confer a type of "resource curse", in that it prolongs the tenure of an economy in the Malthusian regime. This lends new insights to Unified Growth Theory (Galor, 2011) by elucidating a particular determinant of the differential timing of the transition from Malthusian stagnation to industrialization. Moreover, opposite to the Matsuyama (1992) model, good weather is found to be a blessing for a small open economy, while it is a curse for a closed economy.
Imprinted Igf2r silencing depends on continuous Airn lncRNA expression and is not restricted to a developmental window

The imprinted Airn macro long non-coding (lnc) RNA is an established example of a cis-silencing lncRNA. Airn expression is necessary to initiate paternal-specific silencing of the Igf2r gene, which is followed by gain of a somatic DNA methylation imprint on the silent Igf2r promoter. However, the developmental requirements for Airn initiation of Igf2r silencing and the role of Airn or DNA methylation in maintaining stable Igf2r repression have not been investigated. Here, we use inducible systems to control Airn expression during mouse embryonic stem cell (ESC) differentiation. By turning Airn expression off during ESC differentiation, we show that continuous Airn expression is needed to maintain Igf2r silencing, but only until the paternal Igf2r promoter is methylated. By conditionally turning Airn expression on, we show that Airn initiation of Igf2r silencing is not limited to one developmental ‘window of opportunity’ and can be maintained in the absence of DNA methylation. Together, this study shows that Airn expression is both necessary and sufficient to silence Igf2r throughout ESC differentiation and that the somatic methylation imprint, although not required to initiate or maintain silencing, adds a secondary layer of repressive epigenetic information.
Antenna Arrangement Suitable for Full-Duplex MIMO

In this paper, we introduce an interference suppression technique that combines a multiple-input multiple-output antenna arrangement with eigen-beamforming suitable for space division duplex relay that uses separate transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) in relay stations (RSs) to realize full-duplex communication. The proposed technique degenerates the rank of the interference channel matrix to basically one at the RSs by careful arrangement of the antenna, which allows the Tx and Rx arrays to use nearly zero space weights. This scheme offers significant interference suppression while consuming only one degree of spatial division multiplexing freedom. To implement this scheme, we adopt the end-fire arrangement, where all antenna elements are arranged in line. In line-of-sight environments, this arrangement degenerates the rank of the interference channel matrix. The results of a numerical analysis and an experiment show that the proposed method can reduce the interference by up to 75.2 and 36.5 dB, respectively. The simulation using measured data clarifies that the proposed system attains 1.81 times higher capacity (12.1 b/s/Hz) than the conventional system.
Intracoding and Refresh With Compression-Oriented Video Epitomic Priors

In video compression, intracoding plays an important role in terms of coding efficiency and error resilience and has been an attractive research topic since the standardization of H.264/AVC. In this paper, we propose a high-performance intracoding scheme with the help of epitomic priors. Different from intracoding in H.264/AVC and other video standards, we construct image epitomes as coding priors and use them to generate predictions of intrablocks at the encoder. In addition, we losslessly code and transmit the image epitomes to the decoder. We perform compression-oriented video epitomic analysis and search for the best epitomic priors by using the expectation maximization algorithm. The resulting image epitomes for a video sequence can be viewed as the base layer in spatially scalable video coding. Experiments show that our proposed intracoding scheme improves the state of the art by an average of 0.53 dB in PSNR. Simulations under a packet loss environment also demonstrate that intrarefresh with epitomic priors outperforms random intrarefresh by up to 2 dB, leading to better subjective quality.
Foreign direct investment, financial development, and economic growth: the case of Malaysia

This paper presents, within an endogenous growth model, an analysis of the interaction between foreign direct investment (FDI) and financial development in promoting Malaysia's economic growth. Using a co-integration framework, this study estimates a dynamic endogenous growth function that includes the impact of FDI and financial sector evolution as well as some locational determinants for the sample period spanning from 1970 to 2001. The empirical evidence suggests that foreign direct investment, labour, investment, and government expenditure play a pivotal role in local economic prosperity. More importantly, it is found that the interaction between FDI and financial development exerts a significant effect on the growth performance of Malaysia. Perhaps the strongest result to emerge from our study is the significant role played by FDI–finance interaction in the growth process.
Environmental Regulation and Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence from South Korea

This paper studies how environmental regulation shapes the pattern of foreign direct investment (FDI), and thereby assesses the pollution haven hypothesis. Conflicting results exist in the case studies examining the most advanced countries, partly due to the deterrent effect of clean technology adoptions on industry migration. To minimize the clean technology effect, we examine the pattern of South Korean FDI over 2000–2007, the period that Korean firms relied on old production technologies despite facing rapidly strengthened environmental standards. A difference-in-differences type identification strategy circumvents other potential confounders. We find strong evidence that polluting industries tend to invest more in countries with laxer environmental regulations in terms of both the amount of investment (intensive margin) and the number of new foreign affiliates (extensive margin). A similar finding is obtained when imports are analyzed.
The Value of Adaptive Regret Management in Retirement

This 3-year longitudinal study examined the associations between regret management, everyday activities, and retirement satisfaction among recent retirees. We hypothesized that the regulation of a severe life regret can facilitate activity engagement and retirement satisfaction, but only if retirees manage their regrets adaptively by either increasing effort and commitment when possessing favorable opportunities or disengaging when opportunity is unfavorable. Cross-sectional analyses demonstrated that the highest baseline levels of activity (e.g., volunteering, traveling) and retirement satisfaction were observed among participants who perceived favorable opportunities for addressing their life regrets and had high levels of engagement. Longitudinal analyses showed that this pattern was also associated with increases in activity engagement. In contrast, disengagement protected individuals with unfavorable opportunity from 3-year declines in retirement satisfaction. These findings indicate that adaptive regulation of regrets can both contribute to gains and prevent losses in the early stages of retirement, which may have lasting consequences on retirees' quality of life.
The effects of the global economic crisis on women in the informal economy: research findings from WIEGO and the Inclusive Cities partners

Findings from a recent study on the impact of the economic crisis on informal workers in Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa reveal that transmission of the crisis to the informal economy is hitting poor women hard. Women constitute the majority of the informal workforce in most developing countries, and predominate its poorest and most vulnerable ranks. Evidence from four informal sectors suggests that income and employment trends during the crisis – decreasing demand and wages aggravated by rising competition – are strongest in the poorest-paying and lowest barrier-to-entry informal sectors and sub-sectors where women are concentrated. The crisis is compounding women's paid and unpaid informal work burden. As a result, the relative socio-economic vulnerability of poor working women and their families is deteriorating during the crisis.
The Influences of Financial Statement Recognition and Analyst Coverage on the Market's Valuation of R&D Capital

Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 141 (SFAS No. 141)'s requirement that an acquirer in a business combination estimate the fair value of the target's separately identifiable assets and liabilities (including research and development capital) provides a rare occasion where estimated fair values of U.S. firms' research and development (R&D) capital based on private information about their R&D activities are publicly disclosed. The degree to which equity values impound the estimated fair values of R&D depends upon the extent to which the private information implicit in the R&D estimates is reflected in investor expectations. Financial statement recognition of R&D capital and analyst activities have been cited as alternative mechanisms by which private information about firms' R&D activities can be revealed to investors. I investigate the degree to which both mechanisms lead to the public revelation of the private information implicit in the R&D fair value estimates by examining whether financia.
Application of Metagenomic Sequencing to Food Safety: Detection of Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia coli on Fresh Bagged Spinach

ABSTRACT Culture-independent diagnostics reduce the reliance on traditional (and slower) culture-based methodologies. Here we capitalize on advances in next-generation sequencing (NGS) to apply this approach to food pathogen detection utilizing NGS as an analytical tool. In this study, spiking spinach with Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) following an established FDA culture-based protocol was used in conjunction with shotgun metagenomic sequencing to determine the limits of detection, sensitivity, and specificity levels and to obtain information on the microbiology of the protocol. We show that an expected level of contamination (∼10 CFU/100 g) could be adequately detected (including key virulence determinants and strain-level specificity) within 8 h of enrichment at a sequencing depth of 10,000,000 reads. We also rationalize the relative benefit of static versus shaking culture conditions and the addition of selected antimicrobial agents, thereby validating the long-standing culture-based parameters behind such protocols. Moreover, the shotgun metagenomic approach was informative regarding the dynamics of microbial communities during the enrichment process, including initial surveys of the microbial loads associated with bagged spinach; the microbes found included key genera such as Pseudomonas, Pantoea, and Exiguobacterium. Collectively, our metagenomic study highlights and considers various parameters required for transitioning to such sequencing-based diagnostics for food safety and the potential to develop better enrichment processes in a high-throughput manner not previously possible. Future studies will investigate new species-specific DNA signature target regimens, rational design of medium components in concert with judicious use of additives, such as antibiotics, and alterations in the sample processing protocol to enhance detection.
The Effect of the Board Composition and its Monitoring Committees on Earnings Management: Evidence from Spain

We test whether corporate governance mechanisms promoted by best practice codes are effective in constraining earnings manipulation for a Spanish sample of quoted companies during the period 1999-2001. In particular, we analyse the association between earnings management and two key aspects of corporate governance: board composition and the existence of board monitoring committees. Our results show that board composition significantly determines earnings manipulation practices. However, the main role in constraining such practices is not played by independent directors, as UK and US based research suggests, but by institutional directors. No correlation is found between the existence of an independent audit committee and earnings management measures. Finally, the existence and composition of a nomination committee affects the role of independent directors in constraining earnings manipulation. Copyright (c) 2007 The Authors; Journal compilation (c) 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Identifying the Productive and Influential Bloggers in a Community

Social networking has become one of the most important trends on the Web, leading to the development of several social applications such as blogs. Blogs are locations on the Web where individuals are provided with the ability to express their opinion, experience, and knowledge about a product, an event, or any other subject. The tremendous popularity of these services has rendered the problem of identifying the most influential bloggers significant, since its solution can lead to numerous major benefits for commerce, advertising, and searching. The current works on this topic either ignore temporal aspects or they fail to gracefully incorporate recency, productivity, and influence at the same time. This paper investigates the issue of identifying bloggers who are both productive and influential by introducing the blogger's productivity index and blogger's influence index. The proposed metrics are evaluated against the state-of-the-art influential blogger identification methods by employing data collected from a real-world community blog site. The obtained results confirm that the new methods are able to identify significant patterns in the bloggers' behavior.
On Optimum Tariff Structures

This is an essay in welfare statics—in the strictest sense of the term. It seeks to apply to a classic problem in tariff theory a tool of considerable power and generality forged by Professor Paul A. Samuelson in his Foundations of Economic Analysis.1 The tool to which I refer is a community’s “possibility locus. ” Some of its salient properties are indicated in the first of the sections that follow. In the second I introduce a closely related concept, the community’s “efficiency locus. ” The third is concerned with their application to the problem of determining optimum tariff structures, and discusses the argument—due essentially to Bickerdike2 and Edgeworth,3 writing at the turn of the century, but recently revived by a distinguished band of contemporary economists: Professor Lerner,4 Mr. Kaldor,5 Professor de Scitovszky,6 Mrs. Robinson,7 and Mr. Kahn8—that it is, in the absence of retaliation, always possible for a full-employment country to turn the terms of trade in its favour by imposing a “small” protective tariff on imports, and to benefit itself thereby. In the fourth section I examine rather critically Mr. Kahn’s revival of Bickerdike’s theory that the “small” tariff may, in fact, be quite a “large” one. A mathematical note concludes the paper. The treatment throughout differs essentially from that of Mr. Little’s article on “Welfare and Tariffs”9 in that the existence of no criterion is assumed on the basis of which interpersonal comparisons of well-being can be made.
Where, Wherefore, and How? - Contrasting Two Surveillance Contexts According to Acceptance

Surveillance technologies are used all over the world for various reasons. In urban environments, surveillance technologies are predominantly used for detecting or preventing crimes. Simultaneously, an increasing number of technologies are used for medical monitoring at home, but also at clinical facilities, and at public environments for assuring patients’ medical safety. An intensive policy discussion about perceived advantages (especially increasing safety) and perceived barriers (in particular the invasion of privacy) comes along with the use of surveillance technologies. In this paper, it is examined where and for which contexts the use of surveillance technologies is accepted and under which conditions safety or privacy is perceived as more important. We investigate the acceptance of surveillance technologies for medical and crime surveillance scenarios using a conjoint analysis approach including four relevant aspects: location of surveillance, increase in safety, invasion of privacy, and the applied camera type. Results show both, context independent findings as well as context-sensitive findings: e.g., for crime surveillance, the location is most important followed by the trade-off between privacy and safety, while these three factors are of similar importance for medical surveillance. From a practical viewpoint, the findings might contribute to a differentiated surveillance policy in cities.
Resilience Pivots: Stability and Identity in a Social-Ecological-Cultural

How is cultural resilience achieved in the face of significant social and ecological change? Is resilience compatible with changed structures, functions, and feedbacks as long as identity is maintained? The concept of cultural resilience has been less explored than its older siblings ecological resilience, social resilience, and social-ecological resilience. We seek to redress the balance, drawing from resilience thinking to examine how a New Zealand Māori tribal group of landowners retained strong cultural identity and connectedness to their land despite enduring significant changes in land use, economy, tenure, and governance. The landowners negotiated radical transformations in the ecology and land use of their home lands on terms that supported matters of cultural importance. The key resilience concepts of adaptation and transformation were helpful in analyzing the trajectory of change, but fell short of representing the elements of stability that supported the cultural resilience of the landowners. The concept of resilience pivots was designed to address this conceptual gap, and to offer another heuristic to resilience thinking by focusing on stability rather than change. Resilience pivots are those elements of a resilient system that remain stable despite adaptation or even transformation of other elements of that system, and in doing so support the maintenance of the system's distinctive identity.