Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Disruption and Overexpression of Arabidopsis Phytosulfokine Receptor Gene Affects Cellular Longevity and Potential for Growth1

Phytosulfokine (PSK), a 5-amino acid sulfated peptide that has been identified in conditioned medium of plant cell cultures, promotes cellular growth in vitro via binding to the membrane-localized PSK receptor. Here, we report that loss-of-function and gain-of-function mutations of the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) PSK receptor gene (AtPSKR1) alter cellular longevity and potential for growth without interfering with basic morphogenesis of plants. Although mutant pskr1-1 plants exhibit morphologically normal growth until 3 weeks after germination, individual pskr1-1 cells gradually lose their potential to form calluses as tissues mature. Shortly after a pskr1-1 callus forms, it loses potential for growth, resulting in formation of a smaller callus than the wild type. Leaves of pskr1-1 plants exhibit premature senescence after bolting. Leaves of AtPSKR1ox plants exhibit greater longevity and significantly greater potential for callus formation than leaves of wild-type plants, irrespective of their age. Calluses derived from AtPSKR1ox plants maintain their potential for growth longer than wild-type calluses. Combined with our finding that PSK precursor genes are more strongly expressed in mature plant parts than in immature plant parts, the available evidence indicates that PSK signaling affects cellular longevity and potential for growth and thereby exerts a pleiotropic effect on cultured tissue in response to environmental hormonal conditions.
Exploration, exploitation, and financial performance: analysis of S&P 500 corporations

The literature suggests that established firms need to balance their exploration and exploitation activities in order to achieve superior performance. Yet, previous empirical research has modeled this balance as the interaction of orthogonal activities. In this study, we show that there is a trade‐off between exploration and exploitation and that the optimal balance between exploration and exploitation depends upon environmental conditions. Using a novel methodology to measure the relative exploration versus exploitation orientation, we find an inverted U‐shaped relationship between the relative share of explorative orientation and financial performance. This relationship is positively moderated by the R&D intensity of the industry in which the firm operates. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Measurement Is Essential for Improving Diagnosis and Reducing Diagnostic Error: A Report From the Institute of Medicine.

Nearly all patients will experience a diagnostic error in their lifetime, sometimes with devastating consequences. That conclusion by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in a recently released report, “Improving Diagnosis in Health Care,” should mobilize collaboration among patients, health care professionals and organizations, government, and the private sector to improve the diagnostic process.1 Diagnostic errors have received less attention than other medical errors, even though correct diagnosis is fundamental to subsequent choices. Diagnostic errors occur in every health care setting and clinical area. The committee that was constituted to address this issue was charged with evaluating diagnostic error as a quality problem and examining the epidemiology, burden of harm, economic costs, and ways to address the problem. The committee’s recommendations are organized around 8 goals for improving diagnoses and reducing errors that require active participation from all stakeholders. This Viewpoint highlights the critical role that measurement plays in achieving these goals.
Profitability Evaluation of Maize Storage Techniques by Farmers and Traders in Kwara State, Nigeria

The study examined the benefit of using local (LS), semi-modern (SMS), and modern storage (MS) among maize farmers and traders in Kwara State, Nigeria. Multi-stage sampling technique was used to choose 188 maize farmers and 182 traders. Structured questionnaires were administered to collect data. Descriptive, budgetary, partial budget and marginal analysis were used for analysis. Some farmers (37.9%) used LS while 46% of the traders used SMS. The MS usage was profitable, with gross margin of N12,435/tn. MS had the highest difference in gross margin and highest marginal rate of return. MS is therefore highly recommended to be used.
Book Review: New Methods for the Analysis of Change

Collins and Sayer’s New Methods for the Analysis of Change is a follow-up to Collins and Horn’s (1991) Best Methods for the Analysis of Change. The latter is a collection of papers presented at the 1989 “Best Methods for the Analysis of Change? ” conference in Los Angeles. Back then, researchers were predominantly using analytic techniques that focused on interindividual variability (e.g., repeated-measures ANOVA, lagged regression), techniques that effectively ignore change as manifested in intraindividual variability. Best Methods summarized the then-current state-of-the science of change measurement and encouraged researchers to adopt analytic approaches that emphasize intraindividual change. The 1990s witnessed an explosion of developments that built on earlier work in areas such as latent growth modeling (e.g., McArdle, 1988; McArdle & Epstein, 1987), multilevel modeling (e.g., Bryk & Raundebush, 1987; Rogosa & Willett, 1985), longitudinal factorial invariance (e.g., Cunningham, 1982; Meredith, 1993; Nesselroade, 1983), latent class analysis (e.g., Clogg & Goodman, 1984), and longitudinal analyses with missing data (e.g., Allison, 1987; McArdle & Hamagami, 1991). Papers presented at the 1998 “New Methods for the Analysis of Change” conference at Pennsylvania State University (which I was fortunate to attend) summarized developments in these and other areas and provided theoretical frameworks for future developments. Collins and Sayer’s New Methods is based largely on papers presented at this 1998 Penn State conference. Collins and Sayer correctly point out that there is no linear order to the chapters in New Methods, nor is there a single apparent best order. Rather, each chapter can stand on its own. Nevertheless (and as in the previous Best Methods), the editors identify five themes and discuss how each chapter relates to one or more of them. These themes are a focus on (a) intraindividual change per se, (b) measurement (i.e., psychometric) issues, (c) approaches to disentangling stability and change over time, (d) providing a larger organizing theoretical framework that integrates seemingly distinct analytic approaches, and (e) treatment of missing data. Obviously, each chapter relates to at least one theme but most relate to two or more. For example, Sayer and Cumsille’s chapter on second-order latent growth models discusses measurement issues (e.g., longitudinal measurement equivalence) related to intraindividual-level stability and change over time. As a second example, Raudenbush’s chapter provides a broad theoretical framework for models of intraindividual change that integrates what have been known variously as hierarchical linear, random coefficient, multilevel, latent growth, mixed, and covariance components models. The Rovine and Molenaar chapter has a similar objective, representing various analytic submodels as specific instances of what they refer to as a general linear mixed model. In addition to this organizing framework, the editors also provide useful introductions to chapters or sets of chapters to
Importance of organisational factors and managerial power on Tunisian listed firms

This paper specifies the relationship between CEO power and organisational characteristics and examines their involvement on the firm's performance. Moreover, this paper highlights the implication of managerial power on firm performance when CEO is involved in the appointment of new membership and at the same time in a shareholding of the firm. We select 39 Tunisian listed firms for the period of eight years (2000-2007) and we measure CEO power by Adams et al. (2005) index. According to empirical results, Tunisian firms are more performing when their CEOs are powerful. The results also confirm the weakness of the board attributes to enhance the firm performance when the Tunisian governance system explains largely this result.
Salinomycin decreases doxorubicin resistance in hepatocellular carcinoma cells by inhibiting the β-catenin/TCF complex association via FOXO3a activation

Doxorubicin is a conventional and effective chemotherapy drug against hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). However, during long-term doxorubicin monotherapy, HCC cells may eventually develop acquired-resistance to doxorubicin which results in recurrence and a poor prognosis. Salinomycin, an ionophore antibiotic, was recently reported to selectively kill human cancer stem cells (CSCs) which were response for chemoresistance. In this study, salinomycin was found to exert synergistic cytotoxicity with doxorubicin in HCC cells and be capable of inhibiting doxorubicin-induced epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), an important cellular process involved in the acquired chemoresistance of tumors. Further experiments revealed that FOXO3a, a multifunctional transcription factor that can be activated by salinomycin, was vital in mediating doxorubicin-induced EMT. In addition, activated FOXO3a disturbed the interaction between β-catenin and TCF and inhibited the expression of β-catenin/TCF target genes (ZEB1, c-Myc and CyclinD1), which played important roles in doxorubicin-induced EMT in HCC cells. Finally, the enhanced curative efficacy of combination treatment of doxorubicin and salinomycin for HCC was confirmed in established xenograft models. In summary, the present study identifies a new doxorubicin-based chemotherapy for advanced HCC and provides a potential anti-cancer strategy targeting FOXO3a and related cell pathway molecules.
A psychometric analysis of the Ottawa self-injury inventory-f

ABSTRACT Objective: This study seeks to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Ottawa Self-Injury Inventory-Functions (OSI-F) for assessing nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), a condition for further study in the DSM-5. Participants: Participants included 345 students who indicated a history of self-injury in a university counseling center over six semesters from August 2009 to May 2012. Method: Participants completed the OSI-F as a measure on the psychological intake for the university counseling center. Results: Factor analysis, Cronbach's alpha coefficients, independent sample t tests, and correlations were examined and demonstrated adequate reliability and validity. Conclusions: A three-factor solution emerged from the restructured OSI-F relating to Affect Regulation, Exhilaration, and Release. Affect regulation dimensions were predictive of continuing to self-injure and related to depression, anxiety, and overall mental health. Additionally, women were more likely to attribute self-injuring to affect regulation.
ELD-Net: An Efficient Deep Learning Architecture for Accurate Saliency Detection

Recent advances in saliency detection have utilized deep learning to obtain high-level features to detect salient regions in scenes. These advances have yielded results superior to those reported in past work, which involved the use of hand-crafted low-level features for saliency detection. In this paper, we propose ELD-Net, a unified deep learning framework for accurate and efficient saliency detection. We show that hand-crafted features can provide complementary information to enhance saliency detection that uses only high-level features. Our method uses both low-level and high-level features for saliency detection. High-level features are extracted using GoogLeNet, and low-level features evaluate the relative importance of a local region using its differences from other regions in an image. The two feature maps are independently encoded by the convolutional and the ReLU layers. The encoded low-level and high-level features are then combined by concatenation and convolution. Finally, a linear fully connected layer is used to evaluate the saliency of a queried region. A full resolution saliency map is obtained by querying the saliency of each local region of an image. Since the high-level features are encoded at low resolution, and the encoded high-level features can be reused for every query region, our ELD-Net is very fast. Our experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning-based saliency detection methods.
Chart Success and Innovation in the Music Industry: Does Organizational Form Matter?

Abstract In recent years, media industries are increasingly regarded as key settings for traditional organizations to draw lessons upon (Markides, 2006) as far as innovation strategies are concerned, due to the structural changes they are witnessing, and to the high pace of introduction of new products. Our research addresses different innovation strategies by investigating the competitive dynamics in the launch of new artists in the US music market, between 1991 and 2005. Our results show that, in a creative setting affected by growing environmental turbulence, established firms (majors) tend to adopt an emerging organizational form, by establishing partnerships with independent organizations (indies), in order to systematically introduce new products. Our results also show that the partnership is a winning form only when it is specifically aimed at exploration, that is to say, when it refers to the launch of new albums by previously unpublished artist.
Sequential labelling of microdamage in bone using chelating agents

Basic fuchsin labels microcracks, but a series of stains is required to differentiate between preexisting and test‐induced microcracks and to label their growth in vitro. Basic fuchsin and five chelating agents—alizarin complexone, calcein, calcein blue, oxytetracycline, and xylenol orange—were randomly assigned to label microcracks in sequential rib sections from 10 donors. The density, length, and location of the microcracks did not differ significantly between he six stains, suggesting that each was equally effective in detecting microcracks. Paired specimens of trabecular bone were machined from bovine tibiae, stained with oxytetracycline, and fatigued in compression. One specimen from each pair was then stained with xylenol orange. Preexisting microdamage was stained with oxytetracycline, propagating microcracks with both stains and new, test‐initiated damage with xylenol orange. Chelating agents are site‐specific markers of the initiation and growth of microcracks.
Quartet Inference from SNP Data Under the Coalescent Model

MOTIVATION Increasing attention has been devoted to estimation of species-level phylogenetic relationships under the coalescent model. However, existing methods either use summary statistics (gene trees) to carry out estimation, ignoring an important source of variability in the estimates, or involve computationally intensive Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms that do not scale well to whole-genome datasets. RESULTS We develop a method to infer relationships among quartets of taxa under the coalescent model using techniques from algebraic statistics. Uncertainty in the estimated relationships is quantified using the nonparametric bootstrap. The performance of our method is assessed with simulated data. We then describe how our method could be used for species tree inference in larger taxon samples, and demonstrate its utility using datasets for Sistrurus rattlesnakes and for soybeans. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The method to infer the phylogenetic relationship among quartets is implemented in the software SVDquartets, available at www.stat.osu.edu/∼lkubatko/software/SVDquartets.
Computer-Aided Diagnosis in Chest Radiography: Preliminary Experience

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES.Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) schemes for chest radiography are being developed with which to alert radiologists to possible lesions, and thus potentially improve diagnostic accuracy. However, CAD schemes have not been tested on a large number of clinical cases. The authors identify design parameters that would be required for development of an intelligent workstation. METHODS.Computer-aided diagnosis programs were applied for the automated detection of lung nodules, cardiomegaly, and interstitial infiltrates to 310 consecutive chest radiographs, and were analyzed for potential usefulness and limitations. Computer-aided diagnosis output was evaluated by radiologists and physicists for accuracy and technical problems, respectively. RESULTS.Approximately 70% of the results were judged to be potentially acceptable; however, the number of false-positive findings was relatively high. Technical problems included failure to detect subtle abnormalities and the occurrence of false-positive detections caused by normal anatomical structures. CONCLUSION.Computer-aided diagnosis has the potential to be a valuable aid to radiologists in clinical practice, if certain technical problems can be overcome and if optimal operating points can be defined for clinical use.
How do repeat suicide attempters differ from first timers? An exploratory record based analysis

Background: Evidence indicates that repeat suicide attempters, as a group, may differ from 1st time attempters. The identification of repeat attempters is a powerful but underutilized clinical variable. Aims: In this research, we aimed to compare individuals with lifetime histories of multiple attempts with 1st time attempters to identify factors predictive of repeat attempts. Setting and Design: This was a retrospective record based study carried out at a teaching cum Tertiary Care Hospital in South India. Methods: Relevant data was extracted from the clinical records of 1st time attempters (n = 362) and repeat attempters (n = 61) presenting to a single Tertiary Care Center over a 4½ year period. They were compared on various sociodemographic and clinical parameters. The clinical measures included Presumptive Stressful Life Events Scale, Beck Hopelessness Scale, Coping Strategies Inventory – Short Form, and the Global Assessment of Functioning Scale. Statistical Analysis Used: First time attempters and repeaters were compared using appropriate inferential statistics. Logistic regression was used to identify independent predictors of repeat attempts. Results: The two groups did not significantly differ on sociodemographic characteristics. Repeat attempters were more likely to have given prior hints about their act (χ2 = 4.500, P = 0.034). In the final regression model, beck hopelessness score emerged as a significant predictor of repeat suicide attempts (odds ratio = 1.064, P = 0.020). Conclusion: Among suicide attempters presenting to the hospital, the presence of hopelessness is a predictor of repeat suicide attempts, independent of clinical depression. This highlights the importance of considering hopelessness in the assessment of suicidality with a view to minimize the risk of future attempts.
Fluctuating Asymmetry Analyses Revisited

In spite of a decade of furious activity and an increasingly bewildering array of analytical methods, essential requirements for a robust study of fluctuating asymmetry have not changed: judicious choice of traits, meticulous attention to measurement precision, visual inspection and tests for dubious data, appropriate tests and corrections for size-dependence, confirmation that subtle deviations from symmetry both exceed those expected due to measurement error and meet the criteria for ideal fluctuating asymmetry, and an open mind about alternative hypotheses. We review these requirements and try to clarify why they are so essential. Studies of fluctuating asymmetry face a number of serious challenges: a) random phenotypic variation arises for reasons other than developmental instability, b) all descriptors of FA estimate a variance and variances are estimated with much lower confidence than means (i.e., repeatability is lower), c) subtle departures from symmetry are typically so minute they are exceedingly difficult to measure reliably, d) measurement error and trait size interact in complex and mischievous ways, and e) tests for departures from normality are uncomfortably weak for small to modest sample sizes. We outline the foundations of these challenges and some of the ways they may be addressed. Persistent efforts to improve analytical tools nonetheless have yielded some useful advances: a) log transformations help remove the size-dependence of subtle asymmetries and the heterogeneity of variance that can arise from this size-dependence, b) proper critical values for the kurtosis statistic provide more reliable statistical tests, c) indexes that combine information from multiple traits yield more reliable estimates of individual developmental instability, and d) a generalization of Levene's test improves both the ease and the power of analyses testing for differences in fluctuating asymmetry among individuals, traits or groups. Finally, as an appendix, we provide a detailed worked example, with commentary, of a complete FA analysis. It outlines how care and common sense in preliminary analyses greatly improve the rigor of the final results. This appendix, and the data files for the analyses, are available as web supplements. Rev. 5/13/01 Palmer & Strobeck -3-
Delay Analytical Models for Opportunistic Routing in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Opportunistic routing (OR) is a promising technology for improving the throughput of wireless networks. In contrast to traditional routing techniques that forward messages along predetermined paths, OR schemes allow selection of a set of candidate nodes as potential next-hop forwarders to utilize the broadcast nature of the wireless medium. An analysis of transmission latency and signaling overhead depend on the number of hops required to transmit a packet from source to destination. In this paper, we propose three models to analyze the number of transmissions for successfully delivering a packet with three OR schemes: single-forwarder OR with known topologies, multiple-forwarder OR with known topologies, and multiple forwarder OR with unknown topologies. These models are useful in the network planning. The simulation results verified the accuracy and usability of the three models.
The Scope of Business Groups: A Penrosian Analysis

Organizations face trade-offs when designing growth strategies. With limited resources, managers have to decide in which type of business they want to deploy their resources. We integrate the Penrosian theory of the growth of the firm with institutional perspectives to analyze when business groups expand in different product areas, and when they expand abroad. The empirical results support our propositions concerning the resource to growth relationships. Business groups with institutionally embedded resources, such as managerial ties to government, tend to pursue domestic product diversification. On the other hand, business groups with non-location bound resources have higher degrees of internationalization.
Diversification Benefits of Treasury Inflation Protected Securities: An Empirical Puzzle

This paper empirically tests the benefits of Treasury inflation protected securities (TIPS) for investors. This study examines whether TIPS enhance the risk return characteristics of an investor's portfolio. The results of conditional spanning tests show that adding TIPS to any combined portfolio of stocks, Treasury bonds, Treasury bills, corporate bonds, and real estate provides investors with diversification benefits. This paper also shows that United Kingdom (UK) inflation-linked gilts (ILGs) enhance the risk return characteristics of an investor's portfolio. These findings hold in different economic and inflationary environments, and they confirm the prediction of economic theory that indexed bonds are important for investors who are vulnerable to inflation.