Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Market Structure and Price Transmission in the U.S. Corn Exporting Process

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the market structure of the corn exporting industry in the U.S. and the price transmission from corn cash prices at the export ports in the U.S. Gulf to CIF prices at the import ports in Japan. Based on the arguments of Asymmetric Price Transmission (APT), the market share of the U.S. grain exporting companies is investigated in order to illustrate the market structure, and the price transmission is estimated by applying the Threshold Autoregressive (TAR）Model and M (Momentum)-TAR Model. The main conclusions are as follows. The market concentration was relatively small in the 1980s and the first half of 1990s due to restructuring and consolidation of grain exporting companies. In the last half of 1990s and the 2000s, however, the market became less competitive and the market concentration got larger. The inference results using TAR and M-TAR models show that corn prices were transmitted more rapidly when the input-output price differences were squeezed than when they were stretched, which is so called positive APT, in the sample of the last half of 1990s and the 2000s, although the corn prices were transmitted symmetrically in the sample of the 1980s and the first half of 1990s. The Error Correction Model (ECM), in which the results of inferences by using TAR and M-TAR models were incorporated, was applied to find which factors have impacts on CIF import price changes. It was revealed that the Gulf cash prices mainly 3 months ago and the ocean freight rates 2-3 months ago most significantly affected the changes in CIF prices.
Formation of complex AChR aggregates in vitro requires α‐dystrobrevin

Efficient function at the neuromuscular junction requires high‐density aggregates of acetylcholine receptors (AChRs) to be precisely aligned with the motor nerve terminal. A collaborative effort between the motor neuron and muscle intrinsic factors drives the formation and maintenance of these AChR aggregates. α‐Dystrobrevin (αDB), a cytoplasmic protein found at the postsynaptic membrane, has been implicated in the regulation of AChR aggregate density and patterning. To investigate the contribution of αDB to the muscle intrinsic program regulating AChR aggregate development, we analyzed the formation of complex, pretzel‐like AChR aggregates on primary muscle cell cultures derived from αDB knockout (αDB‐KO) mice in the absence of nerve or agrin. In myotubes lacking αDB, complex AChR aggregates failed to form, whereas aggregates formed readily in wildtype myotubes. Five major isoforms of αDB are expressed in skeletal muscle: αDB1, αDB1(−), αDB2, αDB2(−), and αDB3. Expression of αDB1 or αDB1(−) in αDB‐KO myotubes restored formation of complex AChR aggregates similar to those in wildtype myotubes. In contrast, individual expression of αDB2, αDB2(−), αDB3, or an αDB1 phosphorylation mutant resulted in the formation of few, if any, complex AChR aggregates. Collectively, these data suggest that αDB is a significant component of the muscle intrinsic program that mediates the formation of complex AChR aggregates and that αDB's tyrosine phosphorylation sites are of particular functional importance to this program. Although the muscle intrinsic program appears to influence synaptogenesis, the formation of complex mature AChR aggregates in αDB‐KO mice (with the motor neuron present) suggests the motor neuron, not the muscle intrinsic program, is the major stimulus driving the maturation of AChRs from plaque to pretzel in vivo. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Develop Neurobiol 2009
HYPOTHALAMIC DIGOXIN, CEREBRAL DOMINANCE, AND MITOCHONDRIAL FUNCTION/FREE RADICAL METABOLISM

The present study assessed the biochemical differences of free radical metabolism and mitochondrial function between right hemispheric dominant and left hemispheric dominant individuals. The following parameters were measured: (1) plasma HMG CoA reductase activity, (2) isoprenoid metabolites--digoxin and ubiquinone, (3) plasma magnesium and RBC membrane Na+-K+ ATPase activity, (4) lipid peroxidation products--malondialdehyde, hydroperoxides and conjugated dienes, and NO, (5) reduced glutathione, and (6) activity of superoxide dismutase, catalase, GSH peroxidase, and GSH reductase. The results showed that right hemispheric dominant individuals had (i) increased plasma HMG CoA reductase activity and elevated digoxin levels, (ii) decreased plasma magnesium and RBC membrane Na+-K+ ATPase activity, (iii) reduced ubiquinone levels, (iv) with increased levels of lipid peroxidation products and NO, (v) decreased levels of reduced glutathione and free radical scavenging enzymes, and (vi) increased tryptophan and reduced tyrosine levels. Left hemispheric dominant individuals had the opposite patterns. Right hemispheric dominance represents a hyperdigoxinemic state with membrane sodium-potassium ATPase inhibition and increased lipid peroxidation. Left hemispheric dominance represents the reverse pattern with hypodigoxinemic/membrane sodium-potassium ATPase stimulation and decreased lipid peroxidation. Cerebral dominance can regulate mitochondrial function and free radical metabolism.
Bioenergy and Latin America: A Multi-Country Perspective

This publication provides a description of the status of bioenergy (Use of biomass feedstock from agriculture, forest & waste for uses in transport, heat & electricity) in several countries of Latin America. This Report has been edited by the JRC IET Renewables & Energy Efficiency Unit in cooperation with the Agricultural Research Institute (INTA) of Argentina. This publication is partly based on the experience of EUROCLIMA Project and on technical contacts developed through the JRC participation at the IEA (International Energy Agency) Bioenergy Task 43 on Biomass feedstock for energy use. This Report includes papers on bioenergy status & perspectives from institutions from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, or from other international players such as IEA, FAO, INAAS & CEA France. Special attention is paid to the status of bioenergy in Brazil & Argentina, but also in other Latin American countries with different resource availability & policy drivers and to the agro-environmental assessment of bioenergy.
Hemispheric asymmetries of motor versus nonmotor processes during (visuo)motor control

Language and certain aspects of motor control are typically served by the left hemisphere, whereas visuospatial and attentional control are lateralized to the right. Here a (visuo)motor tracing task was used to identify hemispheric lateralization beyond the general, contralateral organization of the motor system. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was applied in 40 male right‐handers (19–30 yrs) during line tracing with dominant and nondominant hand, with and without visual guidance. Results revealed a network of areas activating more in the right than left hemisphere, irrespective of the effector. Inferior portions of frontal gyrus and parietal lobe overlapped largely with a previously described ventral attention network responding to unexpected or behaviourally relevant stimuli. This demonstrates a hitherto unreported functionality of this circuit that also seems to activate when spatial information is continuously exploited to adapt motor behaviour. Second, activation of left dorsal premotor and postcentral regions during tracing with the nondominant left hand was more pronounced than that in their right hemisphere homologues during tracing with the dominant right hand. These activation asymmetries of motor areas ipsilateral to the moving hand could not be explained by asymmetries in skill performance, the degree of handedness, or interhemispheric interactions. The latter was measured by a double‐pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation paradigm, whereby a conditioning stimulus was applied over one hemisphere and a test stimulus over the other. We propose that the left premotor areas contain action representations strongly related to movement implementation which are also accessed during movements performed with the left body side. Hum Brain Mapp, 2011. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The Saccharomyces CDC13 protein is a single-strand TG1-3 telomeric DNA-binding protein in vitro that affects telomere behavior in vivo.

Saccharomyces telomeres consist of approximately 300 bp of C1-3A/TG1-3 DNA. Cells lacking the activity of the essential gene CDC13 display a cell cycle arrest mediated by the DNA damage sensing, RAD9 cell cycle checkpoint, presumably because they exhibit strand-specific loss of telomeric and telomere-adjacent DNA [Garvik, B. , Carson, M. & Hartwell, L. (1995) Mol. Celi. Biol. 15,6128-6138]. Cdc13p expressed in Escherichia coli or overexpressed in yeast bound specifically to single-strand TG1-3 DNA. The specificity of binding displayed by Cdc13p in vitro indicates that in vivo it could bind to both the short, constitutive single-strand TG1-3 tails thought to be present at telomeres at most times in the cell cycle as well as to the long single-strand TG1-3 tails that are intermediates in telomere replication. Genes located near yeast telomeres are transcriptionally repressed, a phenomenon known as telomere position effect. Cells overexpressing a mutant form of Cdc13p had reduced telomere position effect at high temperatures. These data suggest that Cdc13p functions by binding directly to telomeric DNA, thereby limiting its accessibility to degradation and transcription as well as masking it from factors that detect damaged DNA.
Evidence for a prostate cancer-susceptibility locus on chromosome 20.

Recent studies suggest that hereditary prostate cancer is a complex disease involving multiple susceptibility genes and variable phenotypic expression. While conducting a genomewide search on 162 North American families with > or =3 members affected with prostate cancer (PRCA), we found evidence for linkage to chromosome 20q13 with two-point parametric LOD scores >1 at multiple sites, with the highest two-point LOD score of 2.69 for marker D20S196. The maximum multipoint NPL score for the entire data set was 3.02 (P=.002) at D20S887. On the basis of findings from previous reports, families were stratified by the presence (n=116) or absence (n=46) of male-to-male transmission, average age of diagnosis (<66 years, n=73; > or =66 years, n=89), and number of affected individuals (<5, n=101; > or =5, n=61) for further analysis. The strongest evidence of linkage was evident with the pedigrees having <5 family members affected with prostate cancer (multipoint NPL 3.22, P=.00079), a later average age of diagnosis (multipoint NPL 3.40, P=.0006), and no male-to-male transmission (multipoint NPL 3.94, P=.00007). The group of patients having all three of these characteristics (n=19) had a multipoint NPL score of 3.69 (P=.0001). These results demonstrate evidence for a PRCA susceptibility locus in a subset of families that is distinct from the groups more likely to be linked to previously identified loci.
Evaluation of Cellulolytic Enzyme Supplementation on Production Indices and Nutrient Utilization of Laying Hens Fed Soybean Hull Based Diets

A 120-day feeding trial was conducted to evaluate cellulolytic enzyme supplementation on production indices and nutrient utilization of laying hens fed soybean hull based diets. Seven experimental layers diets were formulated incorporating soybean hull meal at 0%, 10%, 20%, 30% (without enzyme supplementation) and 10, 20 and 30% (with 2.0% enzyme supplementation) dietary levels respectively. One hundred and forty seven (147), Shikka brown layers already 12 months in lay were divided into 7 groups of 21 birds each and randomly assigned to the 7 treatment diets in a completely randomized design (CRD). There were significant differences (P 0.05) among the groups in body weight, egg yolk colour, shell thickness, albumen and yolk indices, horizontal and oblong circumferences and digestibility of dry matter and ash respectively. The group on 30% dietary level of soybean hull meal (without enzyme supplementation) performed significantly (P<0.05) better than the other groups in hen-day egg production, feed cost/dozen eggs and egg weight. The results of this experiment suggest that 2.0% "safzyme" cellulolytic enzyme supplementation at 30% dietary level of soybean hull meal in layer diet could not significantly affect the performance of laying hens.
Research on Text-Reducing Method Based on the Improved KNN Algorithm

There are relevance and redundancy of the feature words in the text vector space, so we proposed a text-reducing method based on the improved KNN algorithm in this paper. Vector polymer theory and feature selection methods were used to reducing the dimension of vector space. Feature words would have more ability to represent categories after feature selection. Experiments proved, the improved KNN algorithm were used in text-reducing not only can reducing the dimension of vector space more effectively, but also can improving the speed and accuracy of the text classify.
Financialisation of the Commodity Markets. Conclusions from the VARX DCC GARCH

The global economy is highly dependent on commodity prices, which are, by and large, the outcome of market-specific supply and demand fundamentals. As a result, driven by different determinants, financial assets and commodity prices should be negligibly correlated. However, systematically growing engagement of noncommercial investors equipped with financial engineering innovations on commodity markets, generous inflow of capital resulting from the necessity for wider diversification of investment portfolios combined with the strengthening influence of purely financial and speculative motives have led in the 2000â€™s to a much stronger correlation between the financial and commodity markets, sparking a heated debate on the commodity markets financialisation. The empirical analysis presented here supports the claim that since 2005 commodity markets have been under heavier influence of macroeconomic, financial and speculative determinants. However, the process loses on strength since 2011. Results of the Varx Dcc Garch model with leverage effect and multivariate t error distribution demonstrate that the inclusion of the commodity marketsâ€™ growing sensitivity to macroeconomic conditions, financial markets turmoil and the impact of speculative aspects alters the dynamic conditional correlation path between commodities and the financial markets from 2005 to 2011 signaling the process of financialisation. Additional conclusions are drawn regarding the stability of the market interdependence as well as the parameter estimates.
Genetic interplay between human longevity and metabolic pathways — a large‐scale eQTL study

Human longevity is a complex phenotype influenced by genetic and environmental components. Unraveling the contribution of genetic vs. nongenetic factors to longevity is a challenging task. Here, we conducted a large‐scale RNA‐sequencing‐based expression quantitative trait loci study (eQTL) with subsequent heritability analysis. The investigation was performed on blood samples from 244 individuals from Germany and Denmark, representing various age groups including long‐lived subjects up to the age of 104 years. Our eQTL‐based approach revealed for the first time that human longevity is associated with a depletion of metabolic pathways in a genotype‐dependent and independent manner. Further analyses indicated that 20% of the differentially expressed genes are influenced by genetic variants in cis. The subsequent study of twins showed that the transcriptional activity of a third of the differentially regulated genes is heritable. These findings suggest that longevity‐associated biological processes such as altered metabolism are, to a certain extent, also the driving force of longevity rather than just a consequence of old age.
Robust Pose Estimation for Multirotor UAVs Using Off-Board Monocular Vision

This paper deals with the problem of pose estimation (or motion estimation) for multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by using only an off-board camera. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) is often adopted to solve this problem. However, the accuracy and robustness of an EKF are limited partly by the usage of an existing linear constant-velocity process model applicable to many rigid objects. For such a reason, a nonlinear constant-velocity process model featured with the characteristics of multirotor UAVs is proposed in this paper, the superiority of which is explained from the perspective of observability. With the new process model and a generic camera model, a practical EKF method suitable for conventional cameras and fish-eye cameras is then proposed. By taking EKF implementation into account, a general correspondence method that could handle any number of feature points is further designed. Simulation and real experiments show that the proposed EKF method is more robust against noise and occlusion than currently employed filtering methods.
Micro- and Macroeconomic Implications of Heterogeneity in the Production of Human Capital

We derive a tractable nonlinear earnings function that we estimate separately individual by individual using NLSY79 data. We obtain three ability measures, a rate of skill depreciation, a time discount rate, and a population-wide estimate of the human capital rental rate. We utilize these parameters to verify a number of heretofore untested theorems based on the life cycle model. We show how these human capital production function parameters relate to cognitive ability, personality traits, and family background. Finally, we show that accounting for individual-specific heterogeneity dramatically reduces estimates of population-wide persistence of permanent and transitory shocks by over 50 percent.
Potential application as screening and drug designing tools of cytoarchitectural deficiencies present in three animal models of schizophrenia

Background: The development of new treatment alternatives for schizophrenia has been prevented by the unknown etiology of the illness and the divergence of results in the field. However, consistent neuropathological findings are emerging from anatomical areas known to be at the core of schizophrenia. If these deficiencies are replicated in animal models then such anomalies could become the target for a new generation of drugs. Objective: To determine if the methylazoxymethanol acetate (MAM) model, the heterozygote reeler mouse (HRM) and NMDA-antagonists treated rats replicate neuropathological deficits encountered in patients with schizophrenia and to establish if such changes could lead the search for developing novel treatment alternatives. Methods: Databases including MEDLINE, Cochrane and Ovid were searched; search terms included neuropathology, schizophrenia and animal models. Results/conclusions: NMDA-antagonist treated animals partially replicate schizophrenia anomalies in parvalbumin positive interneurons. In contrast, neuroanatomical deficiencies replicated by the MAM model and the HRM in the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex seem promising targets for future pharmacological research in schizophrenia. Such neuroanatomical findings along with evidence from molecules and genes associated with schizophrenia suggest new drugs should aim to correct deficits in the formation of dendrites and axons that seems to be implicated in this illness pathophysiology.
Comparing patient and nurse specialist reports of causative factors of depression related to heart failure.

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to compare participants' and a psychiatric nurse specialist's reports on factors precipitating depression and to validate a depression screening instrument. DESIGN AND METHODS Participants were screened for and asked to self-report causative factors of their depression. Participants with moderately severe and severe depressive symptoms received a psychiatric nurse specialist assessment. FINDINGS Participants self-reported several causative factors of depression. The psychiatric nurse specialist discovered these plus additional factors. The screening instrument was found to be reliable and valid for the measurement of depressive symptoms. PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS Participant self-report identifies many causative factors of depression. The psychiatric nurse specialist identifies additional factors, allowing individualized diagnoses and treatments.
Bifurcations of the Common Level Sets of Atomic hydrogen in van der Waals Potential

The classical dynamics of a hydrogen atom in a generalized van der Waals potential is investigated. In order to carry out the analytical and numerical investigations for a range of parametric values, we removed the singularity of the problem using Levi–Civita regularization and converted the problem into that of two coupled sextic anharmonic oscillators. We give a complete description of the real phase space structure of the converted system and give also an explicit periodic solution for singular common-level sets of the first integrals. All generic bifurcations of Liouville tori were determined theoretically. Numerical investigations are carried out for all generic bifurcations and we observe chaos-order-chaos transition when one of the system parameters is varied.
Stochastic Models in Acceptance Testing for Complex Machines

The stochastic models of complex machines are built and used in acceptance testing to estimate the technical state of the machines after they have been assembled. The modelling method is based on the multivariate analysis of time series values of the machine diagnostic parameters. The working hypothesis is the following. The non-stationary time series of informative diagnostic machine parameters which characterize the working capacity and reliability of the machine are connected with each other by the stationary statistical dependencies. Identification of the changes in the dependencies is the basis for the proposed information technology to check the performance of the tested machines.
Bank Lending Margins in the Euro Area: The Effects of Financial Fragmentation and ECB Policies

In the present paper we study the determinants of the margins paid by euro-area non-financial corporations (NFCs) for their bank loans on top of the rates they earn for their deposits (bank lending margins). We use panel VAR techniques, in order to test for causality relationships and produce impulse response functions for eleven euro-area countries from 2003:1 to 2014:12. The countries are separated into two groups (distressed and non-distressed), in order to examine for heterogeneities in the relationships between lending margins; the period is also separated with reference to the peak of the global financial crisis (before and after the collapse of Lehman in September 2008). We find that significant heterogeneities existed even before the global financial crisis and remained in its aftermath, although the magnitude and the direction of the effects exercised by the explanatory variables have changed. Furthermore, apart from finding that market concentration and the prudence of banks’ management increase the lending margins NFCs pay for their loans, there is evidence of substitution effects between financing obtained from banks and corporate bond markets. The provision of ample liquidity from the ECB, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis was found to be effective only for the core countries, suggesting that further policy actions are needed in order to reduce the fragmentation of bank lending and promote financial integration to the benefit of the euro-area real economy.