Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
PHYTOCHEMICAL EVALUATION, IN VITRO ANTIOXIDANT AND ANTIBACTERIAL POTENTIAL OF INDIGOFERA ASPALATHOIDES

Objective: Phytochemistry is a study and exploration of metabolic products of plants possessing high medicinal values. The metabolites produced provide protection against microbial infections and infectious diseases. The inappropriate and indiscriminate use of antimicrobials has increased the prevalence of multidrug resistant microorganisms ushering the need for an alternate antimicrobial agent. Indigofera aspalathoides, a common shrub belonging to Fabaceae family was preferred for its phytochemical constituents was enumerated have not been evaluated its antioxidant and antibacterial potential. Methods: The preliminary screening of I.aspalathoides extract was validated using solvent extraction to check for the presence of flavonoids, alkaloids, glycosides, polyphenolics, tannins and terpenoids using various assays specific for each compound. The radical scavenging activity of the extract was performed using DPPH assay and the percent inhibition was calculated. The human pathogenic bacteria were used for assay by well diffusion method against five MTCC strains. Results: The results indicated a reasonable antibacterial potential and significant antioxidant activity, thus supporting its traditional medicinal practices. In free radical scavenging assay, 63.51% inhibition was observed in methanolic extract compared to other extracts. The antibacterial assessment of different extracts was tested against Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria using well diffusion method. Among the various extracts, methanol extract showed maximum inhibition against Acinetobacter baumannii (21%), followed by Escherichia coli(14.94%), Staphylococcus aureus (13.63%)and Klebsiella pneumonia (12.35%). The least activity was observed in Pseudomonas aeruginosa (8%). Conclusion: Thecrude extract of I.aspalathoides contains severalbioactive phytochemicals that possessed medicinal properties such as antioxidant and antibacterial activities. The active ingredient should be subjected to further purification so as to responsible may further be serve as an alternative drug of choice.
Fundamental links between genes and elements: evolutionary implications of ecological stoichiometry

Organisms require elements to live and reproduce. We already know that availability of certain elements [e.g. phosphorus (P)] is highly variable spatiotemporally. In addition, there is variability in demand for various elements ontogenetically, as well as phylogenetically. Nonetheless, we know little about the underlying causes for such variation. In this study, we surveyed the literature to identify genes involved in the homeostasis of one biogenic element, P. Evidence from the literature suggests that variation in the environmental supply of P affects expression of highly conserved genes (e.g. the phosphate transporter system). In addition, we found evidence for genetic variation in the acquisition, assimilation, and allocation of P. Such effects of P supply should impinge on fitness, and drive evolutionary change. Further understanding of the inter‐ and intraspecific fitness consequences to imbalances in the availability of P in relation to other biogenic elements may be useful to disentangle primary mechanisms driving diversifications. We argue that studying the interactions between stoichiometric constraints and underlying genes is relevant to the majority of organisms, and conclude by furnishing information on designing and interpreting experiments using this approach.
Technology Gap, Catching-up and Outward Orientation: Analysis of 63 countries

This paper examines the determinants of technological catching-up across 63 countries over the period 1982-2000 using a two staged approach. In the first stage, a measure of the technology gap between countries and the global technology frontier is computed. A positive growth of this measure is interpreted as technological catching-up. In the second stage, technology gap and technological catching-up are regressed against trade openness, FDI inflows and FDI outflows, domestic R&D, and human capital. Two main findings emerge. First, technologically backward countries catch-up faster. Second, FDI inflows, trade openness and human capital have positive effects on closing the technology gap.
Design & Analysis of a Portable Exoskeleton Structure for Rehabilitation – A Mechatronic Approach

We are developing an exoskeleton device (Exorn) for rehabilitation purpose of neuromuscular and stroke patients. It has 10 Degrees of freedom to control those joints starting from shoulder griddle to wrist. From the biomechanics view human joint have 7 Degrees of freedom. In this design we have increased it to provide much redundancy to the human arm. This design is being developed considering portability and flexibility of the total system. Due to having 10 Degrees of freedom it can provide motion in several ways at the time of exercise. Portability of the system is used to make it proficient as an assistive device for paralyzed people. This paper describes a kinematic view of the exoskeleton device (Exorn) as well as torque level of general human arm. A comparative study is also being done to analyze the system effectively for general people.
Automatic Architectural Design of Wide-Issue Counterflow Pipelines

Application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) design is a promising approach for meeting the performance and cost goals of a system. ASIPs are especially promising for embedded systems (e.g., digital cameras, cellular phones, etc.) where a small increase in performance and decrease in cost can have a large impact on a product's viability. Sutherland, Sproull, and Molnar have proposed a novel pipeline organization called the Counterflow Pipeline (CFP) that is appropriate for ASIP design. We have extended the CFP to a wide-issue architecture for designing custom instruction-level parallel (ILP) processors. In this paper, we first outline our extensions to the CFP to support automatic design of application-specific ILP processors. Second, we present a design system that automatically customizes a wide-issue counterflow pipeline (WCFP) to the resource and data flow requirements of a software pipeline loop. Finally, we show that custom WCFP's achieve cycles per operation measurements that are competitive with custom VLIW organizations at a lower design complexity.
Word Sense Induction and Disambiguation Rivaling Supervised Methods

Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) aims to determine the meaning of a word in context and successful approaches are known to benefit many applications in Natural Language Processing. Although, supervised learning has been shown to provide superior WSD performance, current sense-annotated corpora do not contain a sufficient number of instances per word type to train supervised systems for all words. While unsupervised techniques have been proposed to overcome this data sparsity problem, such techniques have not outperformed supervised methods. In this paper, we propose a new approach to building semi-supervised WSD systems that combines a small amount of sense-annotated data with information from Word Sense Induction, a fully-unsupervised technique that automatically learns the different senses of a word based on how it is used. In three experiments, we show how sense induction models may be effectively combined to ultimately produce highperformance semi-supervised WSD systems that exceed the performance of state-of-the-art supervised WSD techniques trained on the same sense-annotated data. We anticipate that our results and released software will also benefit evaluation practices for sense induction systems and those working in low-resource languages by demonstrating how to quickly produce accurate WSD systems with minimal annotation effort.
FOR FISCAL POLICY CFI Optimal Exchange Rate Targeting with Large Labor Unions by Vincenzo Cuciniello and Luisa Lambertini May 2009 Center for Fiscal Policy Working

We study whether monetary policy should target the exchange rate in a twocountry model with non-atomistic wage setters, non-traded goods and different degrees of exchange-rate pass through. Commitment to an exchange rate target reduces the labor market distortion. Large labor unions anticipate that higher wages depreciate the exchange rate, which triggers an increase in the interest rate and restrain wage demands. However, reduced exchange rate flexibility worsens the distortion stemming from preset pricing. Targeting the nominal exchange rate will be optimal when the labor market distortion is larger than the preset-pricing one. This result arises with cooperation both under producer and local currency pricing, even though the optimal degree of exchange-rate targeting is higher under local currency pricing. In the Nash equilibrium, the terms-of-trade effect raises optimal wage mark-ups thereby reducing the optimal weight on the exchange rate target. The terms-of-trade effect is stronger as openness and substitutability among Home and Foreign goods increase. JEL Classification: F3, F41, E52 Address of corresponding author: Luisa Lambertini, EPFL CDM CFI, ODY 2 04, Station 5, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. E-mail: luisa.lambertini@epfl.ch ∗We thank Philippe Bacchetta, Chiara Forlati, Stefano Gnocchi, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and seminar participants at the University of Lausanne and at the Workshop on Macroeconomics policies and labour market institutions in Milan for very helpful comments on earlier drafts. Vincenzo Cuciniello thanks the CFI for financial support and for the stimulating research environment. The usual disclaimer applies.
The Effects of New Ventures' Resource Strategies on Angels' Investing Outcomes: Big Gains and Big Losses in Angel Investments

Based on a sample of 539 angel investors, we empirically test the impact of new ventures resource acquisition/allocation strategies in different development stages on angels abnormal returns and their extremeness. Our exploratory findings suggest that at early stages of development, ventures whose entrepreneurs focus more on resource acquisition/allocation strategies tend to not only give angel investors lower returns, but also pull angels returns back to the industry average. Furthermore, these effects at early stages are more visible than those at late stages of the ventures.
Probit Models with Binary Endogenous Regressors

Sample selection and endogeneity are frequent causes of biases in non-experimental empirical studies. In binary models a standard solution involves complex multivariate models. A simple approximation has been shown to work well in bivariate models. This paper extends the approximation to a trivariate model. Simulations show that the approximation outperforms full maximum likelihood while a least squares approximation may be severely biased. The methods are used to estimate the influence of trust in the parliament and politicians on voting- propensity. No previous studies have allowed for endogeneity of trust on voting and it is shown to severely affect the results.
Schema Discovery

Structured data is distinguished from unstructured data by the presence of a schema describing the logical structure and semantics of the data. The schema is th e means through which we understand and query the underlying data. The schema permits the more sophi ticated structured queries that are not possible over schema-less data. Most systems assume that th e schema is predefined and is an accurate reflection of the data. This assumption is often not valid in n etworked databases that may contain data originating from many sources and may not be valid within leg acy databases where the semantics of data have evolved over time. As a result, querying and tasks that d epend on structured queries (including data integration and schema mapping) may not be effective. I n this paper, we consider the problem of discovering schemas from data. We focus on discovering prop erties of data that can be exploited in querying and transforming data. Finally, we very briefly con sider the suitability of mining approaches to the task of schema discovery.
Practical Implementations of Speaker-Adaptive Training

Speaker Adaptive Training (SAT) has been shown to achieve signiicant word error reductions relative to the common Speaker Independent (SI) training paradigm, but its high requirements in disk I/O and space make it impractical for training on more than a couple hundred speakers. In the 1996 Hub-4 evaluation, the 38 hours of broadcast news training data consist of approximately 2000 speakers, half of them having less than 20 seconds of speech. In this paper we propose three implementations of SAT that are practical for training sets with a few thousands of speakers. First we present a two-pass SAT procedure that is mathematically equivalent to the original SAT method, with signiicantly reduced requirements in disk space, but essentially double the training time. Then we describe the Inverse Transform SAT (ITSAT) and the Least Squares SAT (LSSAT), two approximations to the SAT parameter estimation with time and space requirements that match those of common SI training. We show that the ITSAT method suuers only 1% degradation relative to the original SAT method.
Combustion engine air path: Fault-accommodation with sliding mode control framework

This paper investigates second order sliding mode control. The use of the super twisting algorithm for the combustion engine air path is to achieve fault-tolerance and to enhance the chattering phenomenon. Comparing to the adaptive sliding mode controller (ASMC), the obtained results showed good performances for actuator fault-accommodation even in the presence of uncertainties on model parameters.
Nonlinear robust control to maximize energy capture in a variable speed wind turbine

The emergence of wind turbine systems for electric power generation can help satisfy the growing global demand. To maximize wind energy captured in variable speed wind turbines at low to medium wind speeds, a robust control strategy is presented. The proposed strategy simultaneously controls the blade pitch and tip speed ratio, via the rotor angular speed, to an optimum point at which the efficiency constant (or power coefficient) is maximum. The control method allows for aerodynamic rotor power maximization without the restrictions of exact wind turbine model knowledge. A series of numerical results show that the wind turbine can be controlled to achieve maximum energy capture.
Post Keynesian econometrics, microeconomics and the theory of the firm

This is the first of two volumes celebrating Keynes’s contribution to economics, and the development of post Keynesian economics in recent years. It reinstates the importance of Keynesian economics and its revival since the end of the 1980s, and the book’s authoritative chapters are presented by an outstanding group of international contributors.
Intracellular Ferritin Accumulation in Neural and Extraneural Tissue Characterizes a Neurodegenerative Disease Associated with a Mutation in the Ferritin Light Polypeptide Gene

Abnormal accumulation of ferritin was found to be associated with an autosomal dominant slowly progressing neurodegenerative disease clinically characterized by tremor, cerebellar ataxia, parkinsonism and pyramidal signs, behavioral disturbances, and cognitive decline. These symptoms may appear sequentially over a period of 4 decades. Pathologically, intranuclear and intracytoplasmic bodies were found in glia and subsets of neurons in the central nervous system as well as in extraneural tissue. Biochemical analyses of these bodies isolated from the striatum and cerebellar cortex revealed that ferritin light polypeptide (FTL) and ferritin heavy polypeptide (FTH1) were the main constituents. Molecular genetic studies revealed a 2-bp insertion mutation in exon 4 of the FTL gene. The resulting mutant polypeptide is predicted to have a carboxy terminus that is altered in amino-acid sequence and length. In tissue sections, the bodies were immunolabeled by anti-ferritin and anti-ubiquitin antibodies and were stained by Perls' method for ferric iron. Synthetic peptides homologous to the altered and wild-type carboxy termini were used to raise polyclonal antibodies. These novel antibodies as well as an antibody recognizing FTH1 immunolabeled the bodies. This study of this disorder has provided additional knowledge and insights in the growing area of ferritin-related neurodegeneration.
Assessing the Demand for Food in Europe by the Year 2010

Data on household consumption provided by the European Comparison Project for 1999 are used to estimate the parameters of the cross-country Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) for two aggregates food and non-food. The estimates are highly significant. AIDS specified with parameter estimates is used for assessing food demand in 2010. Four alternative price trends are considered, each assuming 2% real per capita income growth p.a. in Western Europe and 4% in 12 EU accession countries (ACs). Food consumption will be rising 2.6% p.a. in ACs, and the ACs' share in all-Europe food consumption will increase from 13.6% (1999) to 16-17% (2010).
A Unified Event Coreference Resolution by Integrating Multiple Resolvers

Event coreference is an important and complicated task in cascaded event template extraction and other natural language processing tasks. Despite its importance, it was merely discussed in previous studies. In this paper, we present a globally optimized coreference resolution system dedicated to various sophisticated event coreference phenomena. Seven resolvers for both event and object coreference cases are utilized, which include three new resolvers for event coreference resolution. Three enhancements are further proposed at both mention pair detection and chain formation levels. First, the object coreference resolvers are used to effectively reduce the false positive cases for event coreference. Second, A revised instance selection scheme is proposed to improve link level mention-pair model performances. Last but not least, an efficient and globally optimized graph partitioning model is employed for coreference chain formation using spectral partitioning which allows the incorporation of pronoun coreference information. The three techniques contribute to a significant improvement of 8.54% in B 3 F-score for event coreference resolution on OntoNotes 2.0 corpus.
Antibody responses to surface antigens of Plasmodium falciparum gametocyte‐infected erythrocytes and their relation to gametocytaemia

Background An essential element for continuing transmission of Plasmodium falciparum is the availability of mature gametocytes in human peripheral circulation for uptake by mosquitoes. Natural immune responses to circulating gametocytes may play a role in reducing transmission from humans to mosquitoes. Methods Here, antibody recognition of the surface of mature intra-erythrocytic gametocytes produced either by a laboratory-adapted parasite, 3D7, or by a recent clinical isolate of Kenyan origin (HL1204), was evaluated longitudinally in a cohort of Ghanaian school children by flow cytometry. Results This showed that a proportion of children exhibited antibody responses that recognised gametocyte surface antigens on one or both parasite lines. A subset of the children maintained detectable anti-gametocyte surface antigen (GSA) antibody levels during the five week study period. There was indicative evidence that children with anti-GSA antibodies present at enrolment were less likely to have patent gametocytaemia at subsequent visits (OR=0.29, 95% CI: 0.06–1.05; p=0.034). Conclusions Our data support the existence of antigens on the surface of gametocyte – infected erythrocytes, but further studies are needed to confirm whether antibodies against them reduce gametocyte carriage. The identification of GSA would allow their evaluation as potential anti-gametocyte vaccine candidates and/or biomarkers for gametocyte carriage.
Approaching integrated urban-rural development in China: The changing institutional roles

Ever since the twenty-first century, the Chinese government has been undertaking a series of rural-favored policies and measures to promote comprehensive development in rural China. The fundamental purpose is to accomplish integrated urban-rural development (IURD) given the ever enlarging urban-rural inequalities during the post-reform era. Considering the long time biased policies against the countryside, the paper aims to examine the institutional roles in approaching the IURD. IURD at provincial level in China is assessed by the principal component analysis of selected variables which represent the socioeconomic integration between urban and rural areas. The institutional roles in promoting IURD include three aspects: decentralization in directing local rural development; employment, social security system and material circulation system which influence the free production factor flows between urban and rural areas; education, medical treatment and culture system which influence public services between urban and rural areas. We carry out panel data analysis to investigate the relationship between institutions and IURD at provincial level in China in the period 1980-2010. The analysis also controls variables such as locational factors, population density, per capita GDP in each province. The data mainly refers to Comprehensive Statistical Data and Materials on 60 Years of New China and National Statistical Yearbooks in recent years. Research results show significant and dynamic roles of institution in promoting IURD at different time periods.