Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Transcriptome‐based profiling of yolk sac‐derived macrophages reveals a role for Irf8 in macrophage maturation

Recent studies have shown that tissue macrophages (MΦ) arise from embryonic progenitors of the yolk sac (YS) and fetal liver and colonize tissues before birth. Further studies have proposed that developmentally distinct tissue MΦ can be identified based on the differential expression of F4/80 and CD11b, but whether a characteristic transcriptional profile exists is largely unknown. Here, we took advantage of an inducible fate‐mapping system that facilitated the identification of CD45+c‐kit−CX3CR1+F4/80+ (A2) progenitors of the YS as the source of F4/80hi but not CD11bhi MΦ. Large‐scale transcriptional profiling of MΦ precursors from the YS stage to adulthood allowed for building computational models for F4/80hi tissue macrophages being direct descendants of A2 progenitors. We further identified a distinct molecular signature of F4/80hi and CD11bhi MΦ and found that Irf8 was vital for MΦ maturation. Our data provide new cellular and molecular insights into the origin and developmental pathways of tissue MΦ.
Cardiac Amyloid Imaging with 18F-Florbetaben PET: A Pilot Study

Our aim was to determine the feasibility of 18F-florbetaben PET in diagnosing cardiac amyloidosis. Methods: 18F-florbetaben PET was performed on 14 patients: 5 amyloid light chain, 5 amyloid transthyretin, and 4 control with hypertensive heart disease. Qualitative and quantitative assessments of 18F-florbetaben activity were performed using the SUVmean of the left ventricular myocardium and blood pool and calculation of target-to-background SUV ratio. Myocardial 18F-forbetaben retention was also calculated as the percentage mean myocardial SUV change between 0 and 5 min and 15 and 20 min after radiotracer injection. Global left ventricular longitudinal and right ventricular free wall longitudinal strain were calculated using 2-dimensional speckle-tracking echocardiography. Results: Target-to-background SUV ratio and percentage myocardial 18F-forbetaben retention were higher in amyloid patients than in hypertensive controls. A cutoff of 40% was able to differentiate between cardiac amyloid patients and hypertensive controls. Percentage myocardial 18F-forbetaben retention was an independent determinant of both global left ventricular longitudinal and right ventricular free wall longitudinal strain via an inverse curve relationship. Conclusion: 18F-florbetaben PET imaging can accurately identify and differentiate between cardiac amyloidosis and hypertensive heart disease. Percentage myocardial 18F-florbetaben retention was an independent determinant of myocardial dysfunction in cardiac amyloidosis.
The Impact of Consumption Goals on Flat-Rate Choice

Flat rates are a dominant pricing scheme in many consumer service industries that largely benefit service providers: Many customers exhibit a bias and choose flat rates even though a pay-per-use plan would be less expensive for them. Yet, whereas the degree of flat-rate bias varies strongly across services, no study has determined whether consumers’ consumption goals might influence its extent. The authors argue and show that consuming services to attain hedonic gratification leads to a significantly higher flat-rate bias than using services to fulfill utilitarian needs. The three well-known flat-rate bias effects (taximeter, insurance, and overestimation) fully mediate the relationship between the consumption goal and flat-rate bias. In three experimental studies, the authors consistently show that these findings apply across different services, for a service that relies on natural variance in customers’ consumption goals, and for the same service framed as hedonic, utilitarian, or a hybrid. These findings show that managers need to be aware of major “natural” industry differences in the level of flat-rate bias. However, service providers can also actively manage and increase consumers’ hedonic consumption goals for their services and thus increase their share of flat-rate contracts. A further experiment shows that the hedonization tactic has no negative side effects on consumers’ price perceptions in terms of willingness to pay (WTP). Service providers can benefit from hedonizing their services as long as it is compatible with their value proposition.
Reduction in exhaled nitric oxide tracks improved patient inhaler compliance in difficult asthma–a case study

ABSTRACT Introduction: Exhaled nitric oxide is believed be a useful surrogate for airways inflammation while non-adherence with therapy is known to be associated with worsening of asthma control. Case: We present the case of a 49-year-old female with steroid-dependent asthma and an exacerbation rate of >20/year. She was enrolled in a 3-month-long prospective study using a validated diagnostic inhaler device that provided objective evidence of inhaler compliance. Fractional exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO), peak expiratory flow rates, asthma control questionnaires were measured throughout the study period. Peripheral eosinophil count was obtained prior to the study, during the study, and immediately afterwards. Results: Improvement in compliance at the end of the study led to significant improvements in lung function peak expiratory flow rate (PEFR), and objective scores of asthma. There was an observed improvement in PEFR after 4 weeks, with an associated decrease in FeNO from 92 to 9 ppb that plateaued over the remainder of the study. Her eosinophil count was 0.79 × 109/litre prior to starting in the study, 0.37 × 109/litre after 2 months, and 0.1 × 109/litre at the end of the study. Conclusion: We believe that this is the first case study to objectively prove that improvements in compliance can lead to dramatic reductions in the overall inflammatory airway response and in particular that improvements in patient compliance are mirrored by marked reduction in FeNO levels. These changes occurred in tandem with an observed clinical improvement in our patient.
Mapping the domain of the fragmented field of internal branding

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to build a comprehensive conceptual framework of internal branding, to demarcate this field from employer branding and to develop an updated definition of internal branding that incorporates the findings of the literature review and emerging views in branding. Design/methodology/approach – This research conducts a systematic review of the internal branding and employer branding literature following previously established procedures. Findings – The major findings of this research are that internal branding comprises five key components within a supportive corporate culture, namely, brand ideologies, brand leadership, brand-centred human resource management (HRM), internal brand communication and internal brand communities; and that internal branding is related yet distinct from employer branding in its discipline, focus, components, outcomes and the role of the brand. The paper concludes with a comprehensive definition of internal branding derived from the conceptual .
HR Strategy and Its aligning with organizational strategy and human capabilities

With rapid changes in the business environment, organizations are increasingly looking at human resources as a unique asset that can provide sustained competitive advantage. As much as, people are viewed among the most important resources to firms, HR strategy would be central to achieve competitive advantages . Firms should view HR strategy as an important tool for integrating competencies inside organization and for matching employment capabilities with organizational strategy, and investigate how various combinations of capabilities can lead to competitive advantage. So, it is believed to be important that the management of the human resources should be in perfect fit with the management of the organization as a whole and its strategic plans. The purpose of this paper is to examine the matching of HR strategy with organizational strategy and HR capabilities in a sample of Iranian firms. In this paper at first by reviewing of related approaches in .
Flexible approach to patients satisfaction: a case of Indian private hospitals

Access, availability, quality and cost-effective healthcare services are the cornerstone of modern healthcare services both for patients as well as service providers. Hence, customer satisfaction is becoming increasingly important for organisational survival, as it instils confidence, generates goodwill and also reduces average length of stay of patients. This increases profitability by streamlining cost of services and increasing the market base. Suitable satisfaction drivers have been identified in the past. A new customer satisfaction index using information, process, service and expectations, has been developed in this research. Preliminary study was conducted for 180 patients in Delhi/NCR of India to measure the effectiveness of service facilities provided to patients. The analysis suggests an acceptable and generic model for researchers/managers to pave the way for potential improvements in the private healthcare industry as well as open new avenues for research.
The importance of trust vis‐à‐vis reliance in business relationships: some international findings

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the levels of trust and reliance in different international business markets. The paper aims to obtain empirical evidence regarding the importance of relational aspects (trust) vis‐a‐vis organisational ones (reliance) for building long‐term business relationships.Design/methodology/approach – This is an exploratory study to examine trust and reliance in the manufacturing and construction industries of four countries: UK, India, Pakistan, and Poland. Statistical analysis is based on a data sample of 501 responses collected through a survey of buying and selling relationships.Findings – Although varying across countries, stable relationships with high levels of both trust and reliance exist widely in business markets. Exclusively trust‐based business relationships, i.e. those which are mainly driven by individual‐level aspects, are very rare. However, both trust and reliance are significant for building relationships with long‐term perspectives.Practical.
The Complexity of the Travelling Repairman Problem

Le probleme du reparateur itinerant consiste en la donnee d'un ensemble fini de points, et des temps de parcours entre ces points. Le but est de trouver une trajectoire qui passe par tous ces points et qui minimise la duree totale du trajet. On etudie ce probleme dans le cas ou tous les points sont alignes, et on presente une solution polynomiale. Si le retard maximum pour chaque point est borne, le probleme devient NP-complet, mais il peut etre resolu avec un algorithme pseudo-polynome
An Approach To Sentiment Analysis Using Lexicons With Comparative Analysis of Different Techniques

The World Wide Web is growing at an astonishing rate. This has resulted in enormous increase in online communication. The online communication data consist of feedback, comments and reviews that are posted on internet by internet users. To analyze such opinionated data sentiment analysis is required. Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing technique which classifies the data into positive, negative and neutral. This paper proposes a framework for sentiment analysis using dictionary-based approach and brings out a comparative study on sentiment analysis techniques including machine learning technique and lexicon based technique. The comparisons are majorly drawn based on features such as preprocessing, technique employed, dictionary, datasets, and soft-computing approaches. An approach to sentiment analysis using dictionary-based approach incorporating fuzzy logic is proposed.
Obstacle avoidance locomotor tasks: adaptation, memory and skill transfer

The aim of this study was to explore the neural basis of adaptation, memory and skill transfer during human stepping over obstacles. Whilst walking on a treadmill, subjects had to perform uni‐ and bilateral obstacle steps. Acoustic feedback information about foot clearance was provided. Non‐noxious electrical stimuli were applied to the right tibial nerve during the mid‐stance phase of the right leg, i.e. ‘prior’ to the right or ‘during’ the left leg swing over the obstacle. The electromyogram (EMG) responses evoked by these stimuli in arm and leg muscles are known to reflect the neural coordination during normal and obstacle steps. The leading and trailing legs rapidly adapted foot clearance during obstacle steps with small further changes when the same obstacle condition was repeated. This adaptation was associated with a corresponding decrease in arm and leg muscle reflex EMG responses. Arm (but not leg) muscle EMG responses were greater when the stimulus was applied ‘during’ obstacle crossing by the left leg leading compared with stimulation ‘prior’ to right leg swing over the obstacle. A corresponding difference existed in arm muscle background EMG. The results indicate that, firstly, the somatosensory information gained by the performance and adaptation of uni‐ and bilateral obstacle stepping becomes transferred to the trailing leg in a context‐specific manner. Secondly, EMG activity in arm and leg muscles parallels biomechanical adaptation of foot clearance. Thirdly, a consistently high EMG activity in the arm muscles during swing over the obstacle is required for equilibrium control. Thus, such a precision locomotor task is achieved by a context‐specific, coordinated activation of arm and leg muscles for performance and equilibrium control that includes adaptation, memory and skill transfer.
THE CYTOLOGICAL EFFECT OF ECDYSTERONE ON THE MIDGUT CELLS OF THE FLESH-FLY SARCOPHAGA BULLATA

Larvae of the flesh-fly, Sarcophaga bullata, were injected with the synthetic moulting hormone ecdysterone or saline at the beginning of the third and final larval instar. One group was left untreated. The ecdysterone-injected larvae showed an increase in number of secondary lysosomes in the midgut epithelial cells similar to that observed at the onset of metamorphosis, an event which would normally occur about 48 hr later in these larvae.
AtGRP7 is involved in the regulation of abscisic acid and stress responses in arabidopsis

The Arabidopsis AtGRP7 gene, encoding a glycine-rich RNA-binding protein, has been shown to be involved in the regulation of a circadian-regulated negative feedback loop. However, little is known about the role of AtGRP7 in mediating abscisic acid (ABA) and stress responses. Here, we show that AtGRP7 plays a role in both. AtGRP7 was repressed by ABA, high salt and mannitol. Disruption of AtGRP7 by T-DNA insertion led to hypersensitive responses to ABA in both seed germination and root growth assays. The atgrp7-1 mutant was also hypersensitive to osmotic stress conditions, such as high salt and high concentrations of mannitol. In addition, the atgrp7-1 mutant plants accumulated significantly higher transcript levels of two ABA-and stress-inducible genes, RD29A and RAB18, compared with the wild-type plants. Taken together, these results suggest that AtGRP7 is involved in the regulation of ABA and stress responses.
Teaming Up: Making the Most of Diverse Representations for a Novel Personalized Speech Retrieval Application

In addition to the increasing number of publicly available multimedia documents generated and searched every day, there is also a large corpora of personalized videos, images and spoken recordings, stored on users’ private devices and/or in their personal accounts in the cloud. Retrieving spoken items via voice commonly involves supervised indexing approaches such as large vocabulary speech recognition. When these items are personalized recordings, diverse and personalized content causes recognition systems to experience mis-matches mostly in vocabulary and language model components, and sometimes even in the language users use. All of these contribute to retrieval task performing very poorly. Alternatively, common audio patterns can be captured and used for exampler-based retrieval in an unsupervised fashion but this approach has its limitations as well. In this work we explore supervised, unsupervised and fusion techniques to perform the retrieval of short personalized spoken utterances. On a small collection of personal recordings, we find that when fusing word, phoneme and unsupervised frame based systems, we can improve accuracy on the top retrieved item approximately 3% above the best performing individual system. Besides demonstrating this improvement on our initial collection, we hope to attract community’s interest to such novel personalized retrieval applications.
Conformational Stability of Mammalian Prion Protein Amyloid Fibrils Is Dictated by a Packing Polymorphism within the Core Region

The putative eukaryotic translation initiation factor 5A (eIF5A) is a highly conserved and essential protein present in all organisms except bacteria. To be activated, eIF5A requires the conversion of a specific residue of lysine into hypusine. This hypusine modification occurs posttranslationally in two enzymatic steps, and the polyamine spermidine is the substrate. Despite having an essential function in translation elongation, the critical role played by eIF5A remains unclear. In addition to demonstrating genetic interactions with translation factors, eIF5A mutants genetically interact with mutations in YPT1, which encodes an essential protein involved in endoplasmic reticulum (ER)-to-Golgi vesicle transport. In this study, we investigated the correlation between the function of eIF5A in translation and secretion in yeast. The results of in vivo translocation assays and genetic interaction analyses suggest a specific role for eIF5A in the cotranslational translocation of proteins into the ER, but not in the posttranslational pathway. Additionally, we observed that a block in eIF5A activation up-regulates stress-induced chaperones, which also occurs when SRP function is lost. Finally, loss of eIF5A function affects binding of the ribosomenascent chain complex to SRP. These results link eIF5A function in translation with a role of SRP in the cell and may help explain the dual effects of eIF5A in differential and general translation.
Using athletes' world rankings to assess countries' performance.

UNLABELLED There is a need for fair measures of country sport performance that include athletes who do not win medals. PURPOSE To develop a measure of country performance based on athlete ranks in the sport of swimming. METHODS Annual top-150 ranks in Olympic pool-swimming events were downloaded for 1990 through 2011. For each athlete of a given rank, a score representing the athlete's performance potential was estimated as the proportion of athletes of that rank who ever achieved top rank. A country's scores were calculated by summing its athletes' scores over all 32 events. Reliability and convergent validity were assessed via year-to-year correlations and correlations with medal counts at major competitions. The method was also applied to ranks at the 2012 Olympics to evaluate countries' swimming performance. RESULTS The performance score of an athlete of a given rank was closely approximated by 1/rank. This simpler score has 1 practical interpretation: An athlete ranked 7th (for example) has a chance of 1/7 of ever achieving top rank; for purposes of evaluating country performance, 7 such athletes are equivalent to 1 athlete of the top rank. Country scores obtained by summing 1/rank of the country's athletes had high reliability and validity. This approach produced scores for 168 countries at the Olympics, whereas only 17 countries won medals. CONCLUSIONS The authors used the sport of swimming to develop a fair and inclusive measure representing a country's performance potential. This measure should be suitable for assessing countries in any sports with world rankings or with athletes at major competitions.
Research on Active Harmonic Resister based on repetitive control technique

A control method named Active Harmonic Resistance (AHR) using repetitive control technique is proposed to suppress the resonance between the power capacitor and system inductance in power distribution network. Firstly, this paper explains the theory of AHR and its low voltage tracking precision. Secondly, the parameters design and stability analysis of repetitive controller applied in the voltage loop of AHR system are presented. At last, the simulation results show high voltage tracking accuracy and good resonance suppression of this control method.
Strategic Planning and Its Implications on SMEs in Bangladesh: An Empirical Study

Strategic plan is an important integral part and vital factor for long-tern success and sustainable development of any organization and also for SMEs. Without strategic plan an SME may journey towards an imaginary destination. The current study is an endeavor to highlight the present scenario of SMEs in Bangladesh, scope of strategic plan in SMEs, barriers to preparing strategic plan and ways to removal of the barriers and finally implications of strategic plan in SMES in Bangladesh. The paper found that sustainable development of SMEs highly depends on the preparation and implementation of strategic plan in SMEs in Bangladesh and strategic plan has direct impact on the growth of number of employees, volume of capital and return on sales of SMEs.
A cooperative scheduling algorithm for the coexistence of fixed satellite services and 5G cellular network

The increasing demand for higher data rates has accelerated research on the next generation of mobile cellular networks (5G). One of the key factors of 5G is the use of a larger bandwidth allocated in the millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency spectrum. In particular, one of the candidate bands is the portion of spectrum between 17 and 30 GHz that is currently used by other technologies such as fixed satellite services (FSS) and the cellular network backhaul. In this paper, we analyze the coexistence between mobile services and FSS considering the main characteristics of the mmWave spectrum recently investigated in the literature. Moreover, we present a novel cooperative scheduling algorithm based on a game theoretic framework that exploits the use of analog beamforming at the base stations (BS). Finally, we show that adopting this algorithm ensure that the system meets the regulatory recommendation concerning the interference level at the FSS and at the same time provides a good user spectral efficiency.
Application-oriented input design for room occupancy estimation algorithms

We consider the problem of occupancy estimation in buildings using available environmental information. In particular, we study the problem of how to collect data that is informative enough for occupancy estimation purposes. We thus propose an application-oriented input design approach for designing the ventilation signal to be used while collecting the system identification datasets. The main goal of the method is to guarantee a certain accuracy in the estimated occupancy levels while minimizing the experimental time and effort. To take into account potential limitations on the actuation signals we moreover formulate the problem as a recursive nonlinear and nonconvex optimization problem, solved then using exhaustive search methods. We finally corroborate the theoretical findings with some numerical examples, which results show that computing ventilation signals using experiment design concepts leads to occupancy estimator performing 4 times better in terms of Mean Square Error (MSE).