Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Divestment of Foreign Manufacturing Affiliates: Country Platforms, Multinational Plant Networks, and Foreign Investor Agglomeration

We develop hypotheses concerning the impact of multinational firms' international plant configuration and host country foreign investor agglomeration on the divesture of manufacturing affiliates, drawing on real option theory and location and agglomeration theory. We test our hypotheses on a comprehensive sample of 1080 Asian manufacturing affiliates of Japanese multinational firms in the electronics industry during the turbulent years preceding and into the Asian financial crisis (1995-1999). We find evidence that multinational firms both create flexibility options through maintaining a multinational plant network of platform affiliates in multiple Asian countries, and exercise this flexibility option through divestments and relocation of manufacturing activities within the network. Firms most responsive to Japanese investor agglomeration or inter-firm buyer-supplier agglomeration within vertical business groups have a higher probability of divesture, suggesting that agglomeration leads to 'adverse selection' of firms and affiliates with weaker competitiveness.
HOW DO MAGELLANIC PENGUINS COPE WITH VARIABILITY IN THEIR ACCESS TO PREY

Movements of animals provisioning offspring by central place foraging extend from short, highly local trips where food is brought back essentially unchanged from its normal condition to extensive interseasonal movement where the offspring are nourished from body reserves built up during the adult's absence from the breeding site. Here, appropriate strategies for maximizing lifetime reproductive success depend on the abundance and location of prey in relation to breeding sites and the energetics and speed of travel of the animal. Magellanic Penguins Spheniscus magellanicus undertake central place movements that are particularly variable during the incubation period; trips may last from a single day to over three weeks depending on colony locality. We reasoned that site-specific variability in prey distribution and abundance is responsible for this. Remote-sensing systems attached to 92 penguins from six different colonies over the species distributional range over the Patagonian Shelf were used to determine space use and foraging patterns in an attempt to understand the observed patterns. Birds in the north and south of the latitudinal range were essentially monophagic, feeding primarily on anchovies Engraulis anchoita and sprats Sprattus fuegensis, respectively, both species that are to be found relatively close to the colonies. Penguins in the center of the distributional range, where these pelagic school fish prey are essentially absent at that time of the year, traveled either north or south, to the same regions utilized by their conspecifics, presumably to exploit the same prey. A simple model is used to clarify patterns and can be used to predict which movement strategy is likely to be best according to colony location. During chick rearing, southerly movement of anchovies and northerly movement of sprats mean that Magellanic Penguins in the center of the distributional range may benefit, although the abundance of these fish is considered to be less than that closer to the Magellanic Penguin range limits. The extensive time involved in the foraging trips during incubation coupled with the postulated poorer prey conditions during the chick-rearing phase may help explain why Magellanic Penguin colony sizes in the center of the range are not elevated.
Infrared spectroscopy of hole-doped ABA-stacked trilayer graphene

Using infrared spectroscopy, we investigate bottom gated ABA-stacked trilayer graphene subject to an additional environment-induced p-type doping. We find that the Slonczewski-Weiss-McClure tight-binding model and the Kubo formula reproduce the gate voltage-modulated reflectivity spectra very accurately. This allows us to determine the charge densities and the potentials of the π-band electrons on all graphene layers separately and to extract the interlayer permittivity due to higher-energy bands.
Gravitational wave sources from inspiralling globular clusters in the Galactic Centre and similar environments

We model the inspiral of globular clusters (GCs) towards a galactic nucleus harboring a supermassive black hole (SMBH), a leading scenario for the formation of nuclear star clusters.We consider the case of GCs containing either an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) or a population of stellar mass black holes (BHs), and study the formation of gravitational wave (GW) sources. We perform direct summation N-body simulations of the infall of GCs with different orbital eccentricities in the live background of a galaxy with either a shallow or steep density profile. We find that the GC acts as an efficient carrier for the IMBH, facilitating the formation of a bound pair. The hardening and evolution of the binary depends sensitively on the galaxy’s density profile. If the host galaxy has a shallow profile the hardening is too slow to allow for coalescence within a Hubble time, unless the initial cluster orbit is highly eccentric. If the galaxy hosts a nuclear star cluster, the hardening leads to coalescence by emission of GWs within 3−4 Gyr. In this case, we find a IMBH-SMBH merger rate of IIMBH−SMBH = 2.8×10−3 yr−1 Gpc−3. If the GC hosts a population of stellar BHs, these are deposited close enough to the SMBH to form extreme-mass-ratio-inspirals with a merger rate of IEMRI = 0.25 yr−1 Gpc−3. Finally, the SMBH tidal field can boost the coalescence of stellar black hole binaries delivered from the infalling GCs. The merger rate for this merging channel is IBHB = 0.4 − 4 yr−1 Gpc−3.
The Effect of Macroeconomic Factors on Stock Prices of Swiss Real Estate Companies

Stock values of companies listed on stock exchanges could be influenced by many factors. The aim of this article is to examine existence and character of relationship between stock prices of selected Swiss real estate companies and macroeconomic fundamentals (GDP, interest rate, price level). The existence of long-run equilibrium relationship between stock prices and macroeconomic fundamentals is tested with the Johansen cointegration. The short run dynamics between the variables is examined by Vector Error Correction modelling and the Granger causality test. During the period 2005 – 2014 we revealed a long‑run equilibrium for five of the six analyzed stocks. We also confirmed that macroeconomic variables and the interest rate in particular, can explain a long-run behavior of stock prices. By contrast, macroeconomic variables are usually short in explanation of short‑run dynamics of stock prices. However, the results differ substantially among the stocks and, hence, they prevent us from drawing any general conclusion for the entire real estate sector in Switzerland.
Functionality of Two Origins of Replication in Vibrio cholerae Strains With a Single Chromosome

Chromosomal inheritance in bacteria usually entails bidirectional replication of a single chromosome from a single origin into two copies and subsequent partitioning of one copy each into daughter cells upon cell division. However, the human pathogen Vibrio cholerae and other Vibrionaceae harbor two chromosomes, a large Chr1 and a small Chr2. Chr1 and Chr2 have different origins, an oriC-type origin and a P1 plasmid-type origin, respectively, driving the replication of respective chromosomes. Recently, we described naturally occurring exceptions to the two-chromosome rule of Vibrionaceae: i.e., Chr1 and Chr2 fused single chromosome V. cholerae strains, NSCV1 and NSCV2, in which both origins of replication are present. Using NSCV1 and NSCV2, here we tested whether two types of origins of replication can function simultaneously on the same chromosome or one or the other origin is silenced. We found that in NSCV1, both origins are active whereas in NSCV2 ori2 is silenced despite the fact that it is functional in an isolated context. The ori2 activity appears to be primarily determined by the copy number of the triggering site, crtS, which in turn is determined by its location with respect to ori1 and ori2 on the fused chromosome.
HOXC6 promotes migration, invasion and proliferation of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma cells via modulating expression of genes involved in malignant phenotypes

Background HOXC6 is a member of the HOX gene family. The elevated expression of this gene occurs in prostate and breast cancers. However, the role of HOXC6 in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) remains largely uninvestigated. Methods The expression of HOXC6 was examined by immunohistochemistry, quantitative real-time PCR and immunoblotting assays. The lentivirus-mediated expression of HOXC6 was verified at mRNA and protein levels. Wound healing and Matrigel assays were performed to assess the effect of HOXC6 on the migration and invasion of cancer cells. The growth curving, CCK8, and colony formation assays were utilized to access the proliferation capacities. RNA-seq was performed to evaluate the downstream targets of HOXC6. Bioinformatic tool was used to analyze the gene expression. Results HOXC6 was highly expressed in ESCC tissues. HOXC6 overexpression promoted the migration, invasion, and proliferation of both Eca109 and TE10 cells. There were 2,155 up-regulated and 759 down-regulated genes in Eca109-HOXC6 cells and 95 up-regulated and 47 down-regulated genes in TE10-HOXC6 cells compared with the results of control. Interestingly, there were only 20 common genes, including 17 up-regulated and three down-regulated genes with similar changes upon HOXC6 transfection in both cell lines. HOXC6 activated several crucial genes implicated in the malignant phenotype of cancer cells. Discussion HOXC6 is highly expressed in ESCC and promotes malignant phenotype of ESCC cells. HOXC6 can be used as a new therapeutic target of ESCC.
New robust stability and performance conditions based on parameter dependent multipliers

This paper introduces a new robust stability and performance characterization for parameter dependent systems. The main idea is to jointly use parameter dependent Lyapunov functions and parameter dependent multipliers. It is shown that the novel tests can be easily specialized to the results that have been recently proposed in the literature and that have been derived in an independent fashion for discrete- and continuous-time systems. It is revealed that these characterization apply to system descriptions with rational parameter dependence, and we discuss in how far they extend to robust state-feedback controller synthesis. Various examples demonstrate the benefit of the proposed algorithms over previous approaches.
Measuring and Explaining Political Sophistication through Textual Complexity

Abstract Political scientists lack domain‐specific measures for the purpose of measuring the sophistication of political communication. We systematically review the shortcomings of existing approaches, before developing a new and better method along with software tools to apply it. We use crowdsourcing to perform thousands of pairwise comparisons of text snippets and incorporate these results into a statistical model of sophistication. This includes previously excluded features such as parts of speech and a measure of word rarity derived from dynamic term frequencies in the Google Books data set. Our technique not only shows which features are appropriate to the political domain and how, but also provides a measure easily applied and rescaled to political texts in a way that facilitates probabilistic comparisons. We reanalyze the State of the Union corpus to demonstrate how conclusions differ when using our improved approach, including the ability to compare complexity as a function of covariates.
Understanding Codecs : Complexity , Hardware Support , MOS , and Negotiation Contents

This document provides an overview to the different coder-decoders (codecs) used with Cisco IOS® Voice over IP (VoIP) gateways. Prior to Cisco IOS Software Release 12.0(5)T, VoIP gateways only supported the G.729 and G.711 codecs and only one voice/fax-relay call per digital signal processor (DSP). With the introduction of Cisco IOS 12.0(5)T, Cisco VoIP gateways support a larger number of codecs and DSP modules. They can also support up to four voice/fax-relay calls per DSP.
A Methanol Sensor Incorporating Nanostructured ZnO and Integrated Micro-heater on Thermally Isolated Planar MEMS Platform

A sensor incorporating nanostructured zinc oxide film on planar and thermally isolated MEMS platform is reported for detecting methanol vapours. An innovative technique for fabricating sensor having integrated microheater with improved mechanical strength is presented. The proposed innovation facilitates the sensor to achieve desired temperature on the chip at lower power. The sensors are capable of detecting methanol vapours at 50 °C and at room temperature (30 °C) with slightly reduced sensitivity. To achieve the operating temperature of 50 °C and 30 °C, the sensor requires only 40 and 20 mW of power respectively. The lower operating temperature has been achieved due to the use of nanostructured material as sensing layer. The sensor is capable of giving detectable response for concentrations of methanol vapor as low as 5 ppm. KeywordsNanostructured ZnO; Thermal evaporation; MEMS Platforms; Methanol sensor.
Active Appearance Model Algorithm with K-Nearest Neighbor Classifier for Face Pose Estimation

In this paper, a face pose estimation (FPE) algorithm using active appearance model (AAM) with a k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classifier is presented. AAM is a model-based image representation method used to describe non-rigid visual objects, with both shape and texture variations, using a mean vector and linear combinations of a set of variation modes. Since AAM is a deformable model, it has several variations. Owing to the variations, the model is adjusted to the input test face image using iterative searching and fitting. The error, which measures the difference between the model and a test image, is minimized with the proposed searching algorithm. The face pose is then estimated using the distances between the landmark points in the AAM model with a kNN classifier. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed FPE algorithm can fit the face location with different face poses, with or without a hat, even wearing glasses, and identify the face pose accurately.
A Multi-Events Mixture Feedback Model for Event Retrieval

In this paper, we proposed a multi-event mixture feedback model under the background of event retrieval, in which we assumed there should be a target event hidden behind the initial query and considered the pseudo feedback documents as a mixture of multiple events, so the hidden event could be identified through fitting the term distribution pre-built language models of known events into feedback documents. And then we could obtain improved query expression by integrating hidden event information with the initial query. As the experimental results on TREC-TS 2015 demonstrated, in contrast to mainstream non-feedback retrieval method, and state-of-the-art pseudo feedback methods, the new method can achieve significantly better performance with respect to the MAP value of the retrieval results, and furthermore, the new model still showed surprising stability when feedback parameters changed.
Social entrepreneurship in the UAE: challenges and recommendations

The purpose of this study is to explore current challenges facing social entrepreneurs in the UAE, and provide recommendations that can contribute to the development of the growing and vibrant community of social entrepreneurs in the UAE. The UAE is a recognised regional and global leader in supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. Recognising this, this study seeks to contribute thoughtful insights that can help the UAE embrace social entrepreneurship and further act as a catalyst to push social entrepreneurship forward within the wider region. Based on primary interviews with key informants, several key challenges were identified related to a lack of institutional support a lack of social and cultural awareness regarding social entrepreneurship within the UAE. Further challenges include a lack of clear benchmarks related to monitoring and measuring social impact. Overall, the challenges identified highlighting the need for more government and institutional support, as well as a stronger link between the corporate sector, academia, and the social enterprise sector.
Simplified Mobile AR Platform Design for Augmented Tourism

 Abstract — This study outlines iterations of designing mobile augmented reality (MAR) applications for tourism specific contexts. Using a design based research model, several cycles of development to implementation were analyzed and refined upon with the goal of building a MAR platform that would facilitate the creation of augmented tours and environments by non-technical users. The project took on several stages, and through the process, a simple framework was begun to be established that can inform the design and use of MAR applications for tourism contexts. As a result of these iterations of development, a platform was developed that can allow novice computer users to create augmented tourism environments. This system was able to connect existing tools in widespread use such as Google Forms and connect them to computer vision algorithms needed for more advanced augmented tourism environments. The study concludes with a discussion of this MAR platform and reveals design elements that have implications for tourism contexts. The study also points to future case uses and design approaches for augmented tourism.
Classical swine fever virus and p 7 protein induce secretion of IL-1 b in macrophages

Classical swine fever virus (CSFV) has a tropism for vascular endothelial cells and immune system cells. The process and release of pro-inflammatory cytokines, including IL-1b and IL-18, is one of the fundamental reactions of the innate immune response to viral infection. In this study, we investigated the production of IL-1b from macrophages following CSFV infection. Our results showed that IL-1b was upregulated after CSFV infection through activating caspase-1. Subsequent studies demonstrated that reactive oxygen species may not be involved in CSFVmediated IL-1b release. Recently, research has indicated a novel mechanism by which inflammasomes are triggered through detection of activity of viroporin. We further demonstrated that CSFV viroporin p7 protein induced IL-1b secretion which could be inhibited by the ion channel blocker amantadine and also discovered that p7 protein was a short-lived protein degraded by the proteasome. Together, our observations provided an insight into the mechanism of CSFV-induced inflammatory responses.
Open issues in extracting nuclear-structure information from the breakup of exotic nuclei

The open issues in the development of models for the breakup of exotic nuclei and the link with the extraction of structure information from experimental data are reviewed. The question of the improvement of the description of exotic nuclei within reaction models is approached in the perspective of previous analyses of the sensitivity of these models to that description. Future developments of reaction models are suggested, such as the inclusion of various channels within one model. The search for new reaction observables that can emphasize more details of exotic nuclear structure is also proposed.
IMPLEMENTATION & COMPARISON OF DIFFERENT SEGMENTATION ALGORITHMS FOR MEDICAL IMAGING

-Medical image segmentation refers to the segmentation of known anatomic structures from medical images. Structures include organs or parts such as cardiac ventricles or kidneys, abnormalities such as tumours and cysts, as well as other structures such as vessels, brain structures etc. The complete objective of this segmentation is referred to as computer-aided diagnosis that are used for assisting doctors in evaluating medical imagery or in recognizing abnormal findings in a medical image. Segmentation is done using clustering, region growing, otsu method which separates the cell core structure from background and here input image is a myocardial images obtained with biopsies of a Transplanted heart patient. The above three methods to diagnose the similarity of cell core or tissue of a transplanted heart patient and they identify clearly cell core, fibrous tissue, muscles and tissue rejection in myocardial images of biopsies from heart transplant patients. In this paper, we compared the above three methods using the nonlinear objective assessments like energy and entropy and concluded the best among them is OTSU method. KEYWORDS--Segmentation, Clustering, Region growing, Otsu method, Energy and Entropy.
Oxidative stress potential of Lead-Zinc mining on selected plants growing in Ishiagu, Nigeria

The study evaluated some biochemical and physiological properties of selected plants growing in the Ishiagu lead-Zinc mining area, Nigeria, in order to assess oxidative stress. Using sampling without replacement, twelve plants were randomly selected from the thirty five identified. Control samples were collected from a non-mining area about twenty five km away from the study area. Results showed that statistically significant differences were not found between sites with respect to biochemical parameters (ascorbic acid content, pH, total chlorophyll content and relative water content) at p>0.05. Physiological parameters (abaxial and adaxial stomata pore size) showed significant difference between site at p>0.05. With respect to plants, values for all parameters were statistically significant at p>0.05 except for relative water content, possibly due to stomatal occlusion from particulate contamination at the mining area. The lower mean values for pH, total chlorophyll content, and stomata pore size, and the higher mean ascorbic acid values of plants at the mining area is suggestive of oxidative stress from heavy metal accumulation. Stress is very likely to have less potential of mitigating air pollution and providing other environmental services. Such plants also suffer from compromised nutritive and phytotherapeutic values, as well as being potential sources of pollutant intoxication of man and animals through dietary origin. Key Words: Heavy metals, Plants, Physiochemical status, Oxidative stress, Health risks
Early Stopping for Nonparametric Testing

Early stopping of iterative algorithms is an algorithmic regularization method to avoid over-fitting in estimation and classification. In this paper, we show that early stopping can also be applied to obtain the minimax optimal testing in a general non-parametric setup. Specifically, a Wald-type test statistic is obtained based on an iterated estimate produced by functional gradient descent algorithms in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. A notable contribution is to establish a "sharp" stopping rule: when the number of iterations achieves an optimal order, testing optimality is achievable; otherwise, testing optimality becomes impossible. As a by-product, a similar sharpness result is also derived for minimax optimal estimation under early stopping studied in [11] and [19]. All obtained results hold for various kernel classes, including Sobolev smoothness classes and Gaussian kernel classes.