Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Licensing and regulation of the cannabis market in England and Wales: Towards a cost-benefit analysis

This study sets out the potential costs and benefits of a move to a licensed, taxed and regulated cannabis market in England and Wales. It identifies at least 17 sources of social cost/benefit and gives indicative estimates of annual net external benefit for 13 of them. We stress the important role of product regulation as a means of controlling the chemical properties of the cannabis product. Research in neuroscience has demonstrated the harmful effects of one cannabis constituent (THC) and the protective role of another (CBD). Given the strong upward trend in THC and downward trend in CBD in the illegal cannabis market, the possibility of product regulation is a potential advantage of a licensed and regulated system of supply. Three alternative scenarios are used, based on different assumptions about the responsiveness of demand to the policy change. We find that net benefits are likely to be positive and modest in size, except in the case of highly responsive demand (where, however, there is a great deal of uncertainty associated with the estimates). By far the largest effect is projected to be the net budgetary improvement for government, from new tax revenue and reduced policing and criminal justice costs.
Social Servicescape: The Impact of Social Factors on Restaurant Image and Behavioral Intentions

While most previous research has focused on the physical service environment, research on the social aspect in the service environment is scant. This study examined how social factors (employees, other customers, social crowding, and rapport) in the service environment influence restaurant image and customers’ behavioral intentions. Based on past research, a theoretical framework was developed and the data collected from online surveys was analyzed through structural equation modeling. Our findings, based on a survey of 500 participants, suggest that social factors influence restaurant image and, consequently, behavioral intentions.
Valence Electron States of Carbon Materials studied by TEM-SXES

X-ray emission spectroscopy is widely used as a practical tool for compositional analysis and/or elemental mapping analysis in electron microscopes. The characteristic X-rays originate form electronic transitions from valence bands (VB, bonding electron states) to inner-shell electron levels inform us energy states of bonding electrons. Those X-ray energies are ranged in ultrasoft or soft X-ray region form about 0.01 to a few keV. Thus, soft-X-ray emission spectroscopy (SXES) combined with electron microscopy should be the best way for evaluating bonding states of identified specimen areas of newly developed functional materials. For that purpose, we have introduced compact SXES instruments, which are composed of varied line spacing gratings combined with area detectors, to transmission electron microscopes (TEM) [1,2], electron-probe micro-analyzer [3] and scanning electron microscope [4].
Ca2+ and calmodulin-dependent protein phosphatase from Leishmania donovani

A protein phosphatase exclusively dependent upon micromolar amounts of Ca2+ and calmodulin has been identified and partially purified from Leishmania spp. Complete obliteration of its activity is observed in the presence of calmodulin antagonists such as trifluoperazine, fluphenazine and calmidazolium. Relative insensitivity to okadaic acid and lack of activation in the absence of Ca2+ and calmodulin distinguishes this enzyme from PP1, PP2A and PP2C-type protein phosphatases. Cross-reactivity of the enzyme was observed with antibodies that recognize both the A and B chains of calcineurin, a PP2B type Ca2+ and calmodulin-dependent phosphatase from brain. FK506, an immunosuppresive drug that inhibits the enzyme from other sources inhibited the enzyme only in the presence of exogenous FK binding protein, whereas Cyclosporin A inhibited the enzyme in crude preparations. Taken together these results reveal the presence of a Ca2+ and calmodulin-dependent phosphatase from Leishmania. This is the first report of the presence of a PP2B-type protein phosphatase from a pathogenic protozoa.
Face Recognition and the Emergence of Smart Photography

This article examines face recognition as a key instance of the emergence of smart photography. Smart photography, drawing on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Ambient Intelligence (AmI) manifests a ‘habit of mind’ (Karen Barad), or a way of thinking that is humanist in so far as it is predicated on human and machine autonomy, and representationalist in its quest for unmediated objects-in-themselves. Faces are among the objects that smart photography seeks (autonomously) to represent. By examining two of the principal algorithms of face recognition technology, the article will show how ways of seeing allied to ways of thinking that are also, ultimately, discriminatory and essentialist, materialise through software. Finally, if the ‘smart’ in smart photography means learning to discriminate between classes of faces that are fixed, essentialised and ultimately elusive (the stereotypical face of terror is both gendered and racialised) then how could smart be made smarter? This is a question of politics rather than progress.
The Real Output Losses Associated with Modern Banking Crises

This study investigates the real output losses associated with modern banking crises. We find a remarkable diversity of experience. In a number of instances banking crises have not been associated with any significant reduction in the growth of real, per capita GDP. Often, this has been the case in mature and developed economies. On the other hand, estimated output losses are extremely large for some other countriesÑamounting to several years of lost GDP. Interestingly, such large losses can be associated with banking crises that were designated as non-systemic. Our sample mean and median output loss estimates are also big. For the average sample country, the estimated present discounted value of crisis-related output losses is bounded between 63% and 302% of real, per capita GDP in the last year before the crisis onset. Average loss estimates are this large primarily because we find evidence that post-crisis economic slowdowns often persist long after the crisis is officially over. Such delayed costs have been largely overlooked in previous empirical work and resultantly our loss estimates are much larger than those that have appeared elsewhere.
Communication Strategies in Caring for the Underserved

Physicians face numerous challenges in caring for underserved patients. These include both structural barriers, such as the increasing ranks of the uninsured, and contextual barriers. Contextual problems are embedded within the communication between doctors and patients. Communication between doctors and poor patients fails principally because of inadequately shared information and a power asymmetry in the relationship. This paper addresses specific strategies which practitioners and educators can use to improve communication with poor patients and assist in their empowerment. These strategies include employing attentive patient care, attending to the use of jargon, and using self-empowering language.
A comparative study of CPU power consumption models for cloud simulation frameworks

In this paper a comparative study of CPU power models that have been widely used in cloud simulation environments is conducted. Generic CPU power models for the estimation of the energy consumption of CPU servers have been proposed in cloud simulation frameworks, since estimations of the energy consumption of cloud computing infrastructures can be obtained through simulation experimentation. The main characteristic of these models is that they have low computational complexity and can be applied to a wide range of modern CPU servers. A recently proposed CPU power consumption model, based on a third degree polynomial, is examined and evaluated. A comparative study based on available CPU power measurements of CPU servers, obtained from SPEC benchmark, is conducted. Additionally, experimentation on three CPU servers is performed and power measurements are obtained for various workloads in order evaluate the estimations of the different CPU power models.
What drives the R&D capacity growth of foreign subsidiaries? A study of MNE subsidiaries in Korea

We propose and test a model of antecedents of research and development (R&D) capacity growth in foreign subsidiaries of multinational enterprises (MNEs) which considers subsidiaries’ knowledge sourcing activities as well as aspects of headquarters–subsidiary relationships. An analysis of survey data collected from 118 foreign subsidiaries in South Korea reveals that their R&D capacity growth is positively related to external knowledge sourcing, but only marginally associated with internal knowledge sourcing. We also find that subsidiaries’ R&D capacity growth is positively related to their managerial autonomy. Furthermore, cultural distance between MNE home and host countries has a marginal negative effect on R&D capacity growth and weakens the link between internal knowledge sourcing and R&D capacity growth. Overall, our results suggest that researchers, managers, and policy-makers who are concerned with the growth of R&D activities by MNE foreign subsidiaries should consider knowledge sourcing dimensions and relational factors not in an isolated manner, but in concert.
Competition and Contestability in Canada's Financial System: Empirical Results

This paper presents empirical assessments of the competitiveness in the Canadian banking, trust company, and mortgage company industries, which support the view that parts of Canada's financial system exhibit characteristics of contestability. Since asset concentrations in Canada's financial system do not seem to be decreasing, and since it has long been believed that financial industry concentration impairs competitiveness, making such assessments seems worthwhile. The authors use a nonstructural estimation technique to evaluate the elasticity of total revenues with respect to changes in input prices. The significantly positive values of the elasticity measure indicate that Canada's financial system does not exhibit monopoly power.
Managing the community response to bioterrorist threats

To date, biological weapons have proven to be more of a psychological threat than a physical danger, and while they may someday result in significant mortality they would seem always to create larger numbers of psychological illness. At least in the United States, they have proven to be weapons not of mass destruction but of mass psychogenic illness.
The Evolution of Union Politics for Atypical Employees: A Comparison between German and Austrian Trade Unions in the Private Service Sector

Since the early 1980s, most European unions have faced substantial decline in membership levels. Although the majority of unions were reluctant to organize atypical employees until recently, some of them have begun recruiting atypical employees as one possible solution to tackle the membership losses. Comparing the largest service sector unions in Austria and Germany, the GPA and Verdi, the article addresses three major problems unions are confronted with in organizing atypical employees in general, and dependent self-employed workers in particular. Following a most-similar-country design, the article examines whether and how the strategic responses to this problem by the two unions differ.
Does Migration Make Rural Households More Productive? Evidence from Mexico

Abstract The migration of labour out of rural areas and the flow of remittances from migrants to rural households are an increasingly important feature of less developed countries. This paper explores ways in which migration influences incomes and productivity of land and human capital in rural households over time, using new household survey data from Mexico. Our findings suggest that a massive increase in migration to the United States increased per-capita incomes via remittances and also by raising land productivity in migrant-sending households. They do not support the pessimistic view that migration discourages production in migrant-sending economies, nor the view implicit in separable agricultural household models that migration and remittances influence household incomes but not production.
Physical activity during pregnancy and infant’s birth weight: results from the 3D Birth Cohort

Aim To evaluate the association between maternal physical activity and infant’s birth weight or risk of inappropriate weight for gestational age (GA), and whether this association differs by infant’s sex, maternal body mass index (BMI) or pregnancy complications in a prospective cohort study. Methods 1913 pregnant women from the 3D Birth Cohort (Québec, Canada) completed the Pregnancy Physical Activity Questionnaire at each trimester. Energy expenditure (metabolic equivalent of task (MET)*hours/week) for total activity, sports and exercise and vigorous intensity activities was calculated. The associations with birth weight and risk of inappropriate weight for GA were evaluated by regression modelling. Interactions were tested with infant’s sex, maternal prepregnancy BMI, gestational diabetes, hypertensive disorders and prematurity. Results Each 1 MET/hours/week increase in sports and exercise in the first trimester was associated with a 2.5 g reduction in infant’s birth weight (95% CI −4.8 to −0.3) but was not associated with the risk of small weight for GA. In contrast, although not significant, a 17% reduction in the risk of large weight for GA was observed with increasing sports and exercise. Furthermore, in women with subsequent pre-eclampsia (but not normotensive or hypertensive women), each 1 MET/hours/week increment spent in any vigorous exercise in the first trimester reduced the infant’s birth weight by 19.8 g (95% CI −35.2 to −4.3). Conclusions Pregnant women with higher sports and exercise levels in the first trimester delivered infants with a lower birth weight. The risk of reducing infant’s birth weight with vigorous exercise in women who develop pre-eclampsia later in pregnancy requires evaluation.
Semester structure with time slots for self-learning and project-based learning

The engineering department of the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University, Germany, introduced a new semester structure, in which three weeks of the semester are reserved for self-learning exercises and project-based learning. They alternate with four weeks of regular lectures, classroom exercises, and hands-on laboratory exercises in a 4-1-4-1-4-1-structure. The structure is used for self-learning exercises in the first study year to overcome problems with academic performance and promote self-learning as a personal qualification. From the second year on, projects are carried out in the three reserved weeks. This allows time for working on challenging problems. This article describes the motivation for introducing the new semester structure, explains the structure itself and the teaching formats employed, and presents experiences with projects and evaluation results.
Assessing the Impact of World War I on the City of London

The interwar years saw the rise of New York to challenge London as the world's leading provider of financial services. This paper will show that the current explanations fail to identify a key factor in New York's rise. The City was prevented from operating a full capacity by a capital issues embargo, imposed by the Bank of England to support the pound. As a result, New York was able to enter the sector with little competition from London, and expand rapidly to issue over half of the global capital exported abroad in the 1920s. Without the embargo, this would not have been possible, as the London merchant banks were the most productive producers in the industry, a position built up over the previous half century. This result challenges the consensus that the return to gold was good for the City. The merchant banks suffered and lost business, suggesting that this policy was even more disastrous than is currently thought.
How knowledge exploration distance influences the quality of innovation

This paper explores how the boundaries of knowledge exploration influence a firm's innovation capability. A conceptual framework integrating the concepts of external knowledge determines the firm's innovation quality. We hypothesise that both geographical and technological knowledge diversity have curvilinear (inverted-U) relationships with the presence of innovation quality. The hypotheses were tested by analysing the citations of 259,804 patents issued by the US telecommunication industry from 1998 to 2008. The results show that geographical diversity had the predicted curvilinear relationship with innovation quality but that technological diversity had a positive linear relationship with innovation quality.
Does imaginal exposure exacerbate PTSD symptoms?

Symptom exacerbation (i.e., treatment side effects) has often been neglected in the psychotherapy literature. Although prolonged exposure has gained empirical support for the treatment of chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), some have expressed concem that imaginal exposure, a component of this therapy, may cause symptom exacerbation, leading to inferior outcome or dropout. In the present study, symptom exacerbation was examined in 76 women with chronic PTSD. To define a "reliable" exacerbation, we used a method incorporating the standard deviation and test-retest reliability of each outcome measure. Only a minority of participants exhibited reliable symptom exacerbation. Individuals who reported symptom exacerbation benefited comparably from treatment. Further, symptom exacerbation was unrelated to dropout. Thus, although a minority of individuals experienced a temporary symptom exacerbation, this exacerbation was unrelated to outcome.
Requirement of a Myocardin-Related Transcription Factor for Development of Mammary Myoepithelial Cells

ABSTRACT The mammary gland consists of a branched ductal system comprised of milk-producing epithelial cells that form ductile tubules surrounded by a myoepithelial cell layer that provides contractility required for milk ejection. Myoepithelial cells bear a striking resemblance to smooth muscle cells, but they are derived from a different embryonic cell lineage, and little is known of the mechanisms that control their differentiation. Members of the myocardin family of transcriptional coactivators cooperate with serum response factor to activate smooth muscle gene expression. We show that female mice homozygous for a loss-of-function mutation of the myocardin-related transcription factor A (MRTF-A) gene are unable to effectively nurse their offspring due to a failure in maintenance of the differentiated state of mammary myoepithelial cells during lactation, resulting in apoptosis of this cell population, a consequent inability to release milk, and premature involution. The phenotype of MRTF-A mutant mice reveals a specific and essential role for MRTF-A in mammary myoepithelial cell differentiation and points to commonalities in the transcriptional mechanisms that control differentiation of smooth muscle and myoepithelial cells.
Inducible expression of the regulatory protein kinase CK2β subunit: Incorporation into complexes with catalytic CK2 subunits and re‐examination of the effects of CK2β on cell proliferation

The regulatory subunit of protein kinase CK2, designated CK2β, exists both free in cells and in complexes with the CK2 catalytic subunits. Growing evidence suggests that CK2β has functions dependent and independent of the CK2 catalytic subunits. There have been indications that CK2β has functions associated with DNA damage responses and in the control of cell proliferation. For example, transient and stable constitutive overexpression of CK2β in mammalian cells was previously shown to perturb cell cycle progression and to attenuate proliferation. To systematically investigate the molecular mechanisms responsible for these effects of CK2β on cell proliferation, we generated human osteosarcoma U2OS cell lines with tetracycline‐regulated expression of CK2β. Increased expression of CK2β results in increases in total cellular CK2 activity, but no changes in cell cycle profiles or proliferation. Furthermore, following exposure to ultraviolet radiation, p53 induction was identical regardless of the levels of CK2β in cells. Mouse 3T3‐L1 cells stably transfected with CK2β also showed no alterations in cell proliferation. The differences between these results and those previously reported emphasize the complex nature of CK2β and its cellular functions. Furthermore, these results indicate that increased expression of CK2β is not by itself sufficient to effect alterations in cell proliferation. J. Cell. Biochem. 84: 84–99, 2002. © 2001 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Perceptuo-motor interactions across and within phonemic categories

Past studies have demonstrated that reaction times in producing CV syllables are modulated by audio distractors participants hear while preparing their responses. Galantucci et al. [5] showed that participants respond faster on trials with identical response-distractor pairs than when the response and distractor differ in voicing or articulator. The dynamical model of phonological planning developed in [9] attributes these differences in reaction times to phonological parameters of a distractor exciting or inhibiting the planning of a response. A so far untested prediction of the model is that within-category phonetic variation in the voicing parameter of the distractors still gives rise to congruency effects of the articulator. We report new results which show effects of response-distractor articulator congruency for distractors with varying voice onset times. These results extend previous findings by pursuing predictions concerning withincategory variability of distractor stimuli.
A Sensitive Alternative for MicroRNA In Situ Hybridizations Using Probes of 2′-O-Methyl RNA + LNA

The use of short, high-affinity probes consisting of a combination of DNA and locked nucleic acid (LNA) has enabled the specific detection of microRNAs (miRNAs) by in situ hybridization (ISH). However, detection of low–copy number miRNAs is still not always possible. Here the authors show that probes consisting of 2′-O-methyl RNAs (2OMe) and LNA at every third base (2:1 ratio), under optimized hybridization conditions, excluding yeast RNA from the hybridization buffer, can provide superior performance in detection of miRNA targets in terms of sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio compared to DNA + LNA probes. Furthermore, they show that hybridizations can be performed in buffers of 4M urea instead of 50% formamide, thereby yielding an equally specific but nontoxic assay. The use of 2OMe + LNA–based probes and the optimized ISH assay enable simple and fast detection of low–copy number miRNA targets, such as miR-130a in mouse brain.
Malignancy in patients with sickle cell disease

Malignancy in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) has been previously reported, but the types of cancer and its incidence remain undefined. With the advent of hydroxyurea therapy, there is concern about increasing the cancer risk for patients with SCD. The International Association of Sickle Cell Nurses and Physician Assistants identified 52 cases of cancer (49 patients) among 16,613 patients with SCD followed at 52 institutions. The median age at malignancy diagnosis was 34 years (range, 14 months–62 years). Twenty‐one cases (40%) occurred in pediatric patients, primarily leukemia (n = 7) or Wilms' tumor (n = 5), with 15 children surviving. Most adults had solid tumors, especially carcinomas, and only nine were known to be alive. Three patients received hydroxyurea before the diagnosis of malignancy. These data provide essential baseline information for the accurate interpretation of future reports of malignancy in patients with SCD, especially those receiving hydroxyurea therapy. Am. J. Hematol. 74:249–253, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.