Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On the Relationship between Globalisation and the Economic Participation of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study assesses the relationship between globalisation and the economic participation of women (EPW) in 47 Sub-Saharan African countries for the period 1990-2013. Two indicators are used to measure EPW, namely, the: female labour force participation and employment rates. The empirical evidence is based on Panel-corrected Standard Errors and Fixed Effects regressions. The findings show that the positive effect of the overall globalisation index on EPW is dampened by its political component and driven by its economic and social components, with a higher positive magnitude from the former or economic globalisation. For the most part, the findings are robust to the control for several structural and institutional characteristics: varying conditioning information sets, changes in the growth of urban population, government consumption, legal systems, resource wealth, health, technological advancement, political strife and conflicts, income levels and levels of industrialisation. An extended analysis by unbundling globalisation shows that the positive incidence of social globalisation is driven by information flow (compared to personal contact and cultural proximity) while the positive effect of economic globalisation is driven by actual flows (relative to restrictions). Policy implications are discussed.
Energy expenditure estimated by accelerometry and doubly labeled water: do they agree?

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to compare energy expenditure derived from regression equations determined from accelerometry with energy expenditure obtained from the doubly labeled water method (DLW). METHODS Thirteen subjects participated in a 7-d protocol during which total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) was measured with DLW. Simultaneously, during the 7 d, subjects wore a Tritrac-R3D and an Actigraph (ACT). Pearson and concordance correlations and one-sample t-tests were used to determine the agreement of six Tritrac and eight ACT regression equations that convert body acceleration to energy expenditure with the DLW measurements. RESULTS Tritrac TDEE determined from the different Tritrac regression equations under- and overestimated TDEE determined with DLW that ranged from -10 to +101%. For ACT, the percent difference between DLW and ACT-TDEE determined with the regression equation developed by Hendelman and Swartz were not statistically significantly different from zero. The mean of the difference was -2 and -4%, but the range of the difference was large for both equations, -29 to +24%. TDEE determined with the six other ACT equations were significantly different compared with DLW. CONCLUSION Of the 14 different regression equations from the literature, only two developed for ACT compared favorably with DLW; however, the difference in TDEE between these two methods was variable and rather large. These results reemphasize the difficulty in converting body movement into energy expenditure on an individual basis from accelerometry. These results imply that researchers may want to avoid using accelerometers to predict energy expenditure in free-living conditions, instead using these instruments only to measure patterns of physical activity.
A survivability-based backup approach for controllers in multi-controller SDN against failures

Software-defined networking (SDN) develops a logically centralized control plane by abstracting the underlying network forwarding devices, which makes the control of network traffic more flexible and more intelligent. In SDN, a switch can only work according to the rule of the flow tables received from its controller. Once the controller breaks down, the switch cannot transmit the incoming data packet which cannot be matched in the flow table. The SDN network can be severely affected by the controller failure. In this regard, we are committed to design a proper backup approach for SDN controllers to reduce the loss brought by controller failures. Besides, we attach great importance to the survivability of the control network under network failures. In this paper, we first formulate the survivability of control network. Then we propose a backup approach for controllers based on the survivability model. The network delay is considered in the backup approach. Simulation is conducted to verify the validity and efficiency of our approach. Results show our backup approach guarantees that the controller failures can be effectively recovered. Comparison results between our approach and other existing approaches prove that the approach can effectively reduce the link loss brought by network failures when the backup controller replaces the failed controller to manage the network.
Oxidative Stress Activates the Human Histidine Decarboxylase Promoter in AGS Gastric Cancer Cells*

Oxidant stress is thought to play a role in the pathogenesis of many gastric disorders. We have recently reported that histidine decarboxylase (HDC) promoter activity is stimulated by gastrin through a protein kinase C- and extracellular signal-regulating kinase (ERK)-dependent pathway in gastric cancer (AGS-B) cells, and this transcriptional response is mediated by a downstream cis-acting element, the gastrin response element (GAS-RE). To study the mechanism through which oxidant stress affects gastric cells, we examined the effects of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) on HDC promoter activity and intracellular signaling in AGS-B cells. H2O2(10 mm) specifically activated the HDC promoter 10–12-fold, and this activation was blocked by both mannitol andN-acetylcysteine. Hydrogen peroxide treatment of AGS-B cells increased the phosphorylation and kinase activity of ERK-1 and ERK-2, but did not affect Jun kinase tyrosine phosphorylation or kinase activity. In addition, treatment of AGS-B cells with H2O2 resulted in increasedc-fos/c-jun mRNA expression and AP-1 activity, and also led to increased phosphorylation of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) and Shc. H2O2-dependent stimulation of HDC promoter activity was completely inhibited by kinase-deficient ERKs, dominant-negative (N17 and N15) Ras, and dominant-negative Raf, and partially blocked by a dominant-negative EGFR mutant. In contrast, protein kinase C blockade did not inhibit H2O2-dependent induction of the HDC promoter. Finally, deletion analysis demonstrated that the H2O2 response element could be mapped to the GAS-RE (nucleotides 2 to 24) of the basal HDC promoter. Overall, these studies suggest that oxidant stress activates the HDC promoter through the GAS-RE, and through an Ras-, Raf-, and ERK-dependent pathway at least partially involving the EGFR.
Design and analysis of C-band siw directional coupler

For C band receptor applications, an efficient and compact sized four port directional coupler has been designed using Substrate Integrated Waveguide technique. Dielectric filled waveguide (DFW) devices replace the microstrip devices as they are inefficient at high frequencies. With the help of via holes, DFW is converted to Substrate Integrated Waveguide (SIW) to considerably reduce the dielectric losses and the high cost of manufacturing involved in conventional waveguides. The proposed directional coupler can be implemented at satellite and radar reception applications. The miniaturized circuit offers planar integration with other circuits. The proposed circuit exhibits efficient insertion loss and return loss characteristics in the operating band that ranges from 5.5 GHz to 8 GHz with a central resonant frequency of 7 GHz.
Perceptions of Risk and Safety in the ICU: A Qualitative Study of Cognitive Processes Relating to Staffing*

Objectives: The aims of this study were to 1) examine individual professionals’ perceptions of staffing risks and safe staffing in intensive care and 2) identify and examine the cognitive processes that underlie these perceptions. Design: Qualitative case study methodology with nurses, doctors, and physiotherapists. Setting: Three mixed medical and surgical adult ICUs, each on a separate hospital site within a 1,200-bed academic, tertiary London hospital group. Subjects: Forty-four ICU team members of diverse professional backgrounds and seniority. Interventions: None. Main Results: Four themes (individual, team, unit, and organizational) were identified. Individual care provision was influenced by the pragmatist versus perfectionist stance of individuals and team dynamics by the concept of an “A” team and interdisciplinary tensions. Perceptions of safety hinged around the importance of achieving a “dynamic balance” influenced by the burden of prevailing circumstances and the clinical status of patients. Organizationally, professionals’ risk perceptions affected their willingness to take personal responsibility for interactions beyond the unit. Conclusions: This study drew on cognitive research, specifically theories of cognitive dissonance, psychological safety, and situational awareness to explain how professionals’ cognitive processes impacted on ICU behaviors. Our results may have implications for relationships, management, and leadership in ICU. First, patient care delivery may be affected by professionals’ perfectionist or pragmatic approach. Perfectionists’ team role may be compromised and they may experience cognitive dissonance and subsequent isolation/stress. Second, psychological safety in a team may be improved within the confines of a perceived “A” team but diminished by interdisciplinary tensions. Third, counter intuitively, higher “situational” awareness for some individuals increased their stress and anxiety. Finally, our results suggest that professionals have varying concepts of where their personal responsibility to minimize risk begins and ends, which we have termed “risk horizons” and that these horizons may affect their behavior both within and beyond the unit.
Do Tunisian firms manage earnings to attain thresholds

The purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which Tunisian listed firms manage their results to avoid losses and earning decreases, and to investigate the determinants of such behaviour. The factors which we selected were derived from the positive accounting theory applied to the earnings management thresholds. Based on a panel data of 375 firm-year observations during the period 2002-2014, we provide evidence that firms tend to engage in earnings management to avoid reporting losses and earnings decreases. Considering earnings management incentives, the results reveal that growth opportunities have positive effect on earnings management thresholds, suggesting that Tunisian firms manage earnings around thresholds in a signalling purpose rather than opportunistic one. We also found that firm size and taxes have negative effect, which confirm the political costs hypothesis that larger firms tend to report earnings lower than last year in order to pay lower taxes.
Evaluation of a new low cost software level fault tolerance technique to cope with soft errors

Increasing soft error rates make the protection of combinational logic against transient faults in future technologies a major issue for the fault tolerance community. Since not every transient fault leads to an error at application level, software level fault tolerance has been proposed by several authors as a better approach. In this paper, a new software level technique to detect and correct errors due to transient faults is proposed and compared to a classic one, and the costs of detection and correction for both approaches are compared and discussed.
Traffic identification using flexible neural trees

Traditional traffic classification techniques like port-based and payload-based techniques are becoming ineffective owning to more and more Internet applications using dynamic port number and encryption techniques. Therefore, in the past few years, many researches have addressed machine learning-based techniques. Most researches of machine learning-based traffic identification use traffic samples collected on key nodes of networks for their learning. These samples do not have accurate application information i. e. the ground truth which is crucial for machine learning algorithms. In this paper, we first designed a distributed host based traffic collecting platform (DHTCP) to gather traffic samples with accurate application information on user hosts. Then we built a data set using DHTCP, and applied Flexible Neural Trees (FNT) — a special kind of artificial neural network which has been successfully applied in many areas, for traffic identification. Web and P2P traffics were studied in our work. Although the proposed technique is at an early stage of development, experimental results show that it is a promising solution of Internet traffic identification.
A Ranker Ensemble for Multi-objective Job Recommendation in an Item Cold Start Setting

Real-life recommender systems often have multiple objectives, and considering only a single stakeholder's perspective can be inadequate. ACM Recsys 2017 challenge requires such a multi-objective job recommender system taking into account job seeker satisfaction, recruiter satisfaction, balance between relevance and revenue, and scalability in a primarily item cold start setting. In this paper, we discuss our findings, and a possible solution to this problem. Making use of interaction profiles and content data, a hybrid of ranking algorithms is proposed to optimize the required objectives. This solution was able to achieve 8th position during A/B testing, and some of the ideas can be useful in a more complex ensemble.
Quantitative analysis of subharmonic imaging using microbubbles in contrast imaging

Second-harmonic imaging (SecHI) has been widely used to improve the contrast of microbubbles with respect to tissue since microbubbles have a large second-harmonic response. Unlike tissue, microbubbles can also have a response at subharmonic frequency. In order to take advantage of subharmonics in contrast imaging, the image quality of subharmonic imaging (SubHI) and SecHI are analyzed through quantitative comparisons. Nonlinear tissue and bubble responses are simulated for numerical analysis. SubHI and SecHI modes are implemented on a Logiq 9 scanner (GE Healthcare, Milwaukee, WI, USA). Images of a flow phantom (ATS laboratories, CT, USA) with Sonazoid (GE Healthcare, Oslo, Norway) microbubbles are presented. The contrast-to-tissue ratio (CTR) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are calculated with variations of the bubble concentration and the depth of the vessel tube. The experimental results agree well with the simulations. The CTR at the subharmonic frequency can be higher than the value in second-harmonics. For deep-lying bubbles, the CTR for SubHI is 15 dB higher than for SecHI. Although the SNR at the subharmonic frequency can be lower than that at the second-harmonic frequency, it is suggested that SubHI with high blood-to-tissue contrast may be useful when the sensitivity is a major concern.
Inflammatory Bowel Disease in Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis: A Robust yet Changing Relationship

Background:Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) has a well-established association with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and may represent a distinctive phenotype. It is unknown whether changes in the clinical and endoscopic presentation of newly diagnosed IBD among patients with PSC might have occurred over time. Methods:Initial clinical and endoscopic presentations of IBD in PSC were studied for 2 different time periods: 1993 to 1997 (early cohort) compared with 2003 to 2007 (recent cohort). Results:The baseline characteristics were similar in the 57 early cohort and 72 recent cohort patients. Compared with the recent cohort, alkaline phosphatase concentrations were higher in the early cohort (7.1 versus 2.6 × upper limit of normal, P = 0.0001). PSC was diagnosed before IBD in the recent cohort compared with the early cohort (50% versus 35%, P = 0.0009). The initial clinical and endoscopic presentations of IBD were similar in the 2 cohorts. The majority of patients had mild pancolitis, whereas rectal sparing and backwash ileitis were detected in one third and one fourth of patients, respectively. In addition, no differences in IBD outcomes or PSC characteristics were revealed. Immunomodulators and biological treatments were more commonly used in the recent cohort when compared with the early cohort (90% versus 56%, P = 0.03, and 13% versus 4%, P = 0.08, respectively). Conclusions:IBD in PSC has unique characteristics, and the clinical features of this unique presentation have remained stable over time. A shift in the timing of diagnosis of the 2 diseases has occurred in recent years, with PSC being more often diagnosed first.
Dataset Selection for Controlling Swarms by Visual Demonstration

Agent-based modeling is a paradigm of modeling dynamic systems of interacting agents that are individually governed by specified behavioral rules. Training a model of such agents to produce an emergent behavior by specification of the emergent (as opposed to agent) behavior is easier from a demonstration perspective. Without the involvement of manual behavior specification via code or reliance on a defined taxonomy of possible behaviors, the demonstrator specifies spatial motion of the agents over time, and retrieves agent-level parameters required to execute that motion. A framework for reproducing emergent behavior, given an abstract demonstration, is discussed in existing work. Our work extends that framework by addressing the variation in reproduced behavior over several executions of the framework. The cause for such variation is identified to be the capacity of training data to represent the demonstration. Addressing this problem produces more favorable (more similar to the demonstration) replicated emergent behaviors. Our work is evaluated using demonstrations and visual features as in the aforementioned work. Experimental results show an improvement in the coherence between demonstrated behavior, and the corresponding replicated behavior produced by the framework.
Transcriptional-Metabolic Networks in β-Carotene-Enriched Potato Tubers: The Long and Winding Road to the Golden Phenotype1[C][W][OA]

Vitamin A deficiency is a public health problem in a large number of countries. Biofortification of major staple crops (wheat [Triticum aestivum], rice [Oryza sativa], maize [Zea mays], and potato [Solanum tuberosum]) with β-carotene has the potential to alleviate this nutritional problem. Previously, we engineered transgenic “Golden” potato tubers overexpressing three bacterial genes for β-carotene synthesis (CrtB, CrtI, and CrtY, encoding phytoene synthase, phytoene desaturase, and lycopene β-cyclase, respectively) and accumulating the highest amount of β-carotene in the four aforementioned crops. Here, we report the systematic quantitation of carotenoid metabolites and transcripts in 24 lines carrying six different transgene combinations under the control of the 35S and Patatin (Pat) promoters. Low levels of B-I expression are sufficient for interfering with leaf carotenogenesis, but not for β-carotene accumulation in tubers and calli, which requires high expression levels of all three genes under the control of the Pat promoter. Tubers expressing the B-I transgenes show large perturbations in the transcription of endogenous carotenoid genes, with only minor changes in carotenoid content, while the opposite phenotype (low levels of transcriptional perturbation and high carotenoid levels) is observed in Golden (Y-B-I) tubers. We used hierarchical clustering and pairwise correlation analysis, together with a new method for network correlation analysis, developed for this purpose, to assess the perturbations in transcript and metabolite levels in transgenic leaves and tubers. Through a “guilt-by-profiling” approach, we identified several endogenous genes for carotenoid biosynthesis likely to play a key regulatory role in Golden tubers, which are candidates for manipulations aimed at the further optimization of tuber carotenoid content.
MATSim Agent Heterogeneity and a One-Week Scenario

This report describes two MATSim extensions: inclusion of individual values of time and money and a week-long simulation period. Speeding-up week-long simulation, mechanisms for warm-starting the simulation combined with an explicit termination criterion are implemented. The extensions are applied in project Surprice to investigate equity effects with time-varying preferences in a road pricing context. First experiments’ results are provided and technical implementation details are given.
Regulation of E-cadherin/Catenin Association by Tyrosine Phosphorylation*

Alteration of cadherin-mediated cell-cell adhesion is frequently associated to tyrosine phosphorylation of p120- and β-catenins. We have examined the role of this modification in these proteins in the control of β-catenin/E-cadherin binding usingin vitro assays with recombinant proteins. Recombinant pp60c-src efficiently phosphorylated both catenins in vitro, with stoichiometries of 1.5 and 2.0 mol of phosphate/mol of protein for β-catenin and p120-catenin, respectively. pp60c-src phosphorylation had opposing effects on the affinities of β-catenin and p120 for the cytosolic domain of E-cadherin; it decreased (in the case of β-catenin) or increased (for p120) catenin/E-cadherin binding. However, a role for p120-catenin in the modulation of β-catenin/E-cadherin binding was not observed, since addition of phosphorylated p120-catenin did not modify the affinity of phosphorylated (or unphosphorylated) β-catenin for E-cadherin. The phosphorylated Tyr residues were identified as Tyr-86 and Tyr-654. Experiments using point mutants in these two residues indicated that, although Tyr-86 was a better substrate for pp60c-src , only modification of Tyr-654 was relevant for the interaction with E-cadherin. Transient transfections of different mutants demonstrated that Tyr-654 is phosphorylated in conditions in which adherens junctions are disrupted and evidenced that binding of β-catenin to E-cadherin in vivo is controlled by phosphorylation of β-catenin Tyr-654.
The evolution of neural network-based chart patterns: a preliminary study

A neural network-based chart pattern represents adaptive parametric features, including non-linear transformations, and a template that can be applied in the feature space. The search of neural network-based chart patterns has been underexposed despite its potential expressiveness. In this paper, we formulate a general chart pattern search problem to enable cross-representational quantitative comparison of various search schemes. We suggest a HyperNEAT framework applying state-of-the-art deep neural network techniques to find attractive neural network-based chart patterns; these techniques enable a fast evaluation and search of robust patterns, as well as bringing a performance gain. The proposed framework successfully found considerable patterns on the Korean stock market. We compared newly found patterns with those found by different search schemes, showing the proposed approach has potential.