Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A genetic algorithm based method to improve image segmentation

Segmentation of textured images is becoming more and more important in applications, as quality control or remote sensing. Segmentation of textured images is demanding. A new genetic algorithm based method to post-process segmented texture images is presented. A genetic algorithm is used to extract web-like rules from segmented texture images. These rules are checked and they are used in post-processing to improve the segmentation. An unsupervised image segmentation and definition of classes by class prototypes are assumed. Some preliminary results are presented.
MATRIX APPROACH OF STRATEGIC POSITIONING IN THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

The diversity of environmental conditions that characterize the locations of some geographical structure of global enterprises or of those with extensive territorial divisions, impose the reiteration of the strategic analysis at the level of each component structure in order to avoid inadequate investment policies and the adoption of specific strategies for each situation, individually. In this context, we propose a matrix approach of the strategic positioning of the reception structures belonging to a travel company with national distribution developed on the basis of some composite indices that aggregate the performance on two coordinates, synthesizing its own capabilities and the attractiveness of the site, generating opportunities and constraints that shall guide the decision making process.
Signaling-Screening Equilibrium in the Mortgage Market

The signaling model of Spence (1973a) and the screening model of Rothchild and Stiglitz (1976) have been separately used to explain economic phenomena when there is asymmetric information. In the real world, however, situations of asymmetric information often simultaneously involve signaling and screening. In this paper, we combine signaling and screening mechanisms and demonstrate a signaling-screening separating equilibrium. We present the analysis within the framework of mortgage markets. Borrowers signal their default risk types to lenders by acquiring different credit records. This partially separates borrowers into subsets. Lenders screen each subset by offering menus of mortgage loan contracts. Borrowers, then, self-select by choosing particular contracts from the menu. We show the conditions under which the signaling-screening equilibrium is Pareto superior to a screening-only equilibrium.
Collaborative Offloading for Distributed Mobile-Cloud Apps

Computation offloading has been widely used to improve the energy consumption and completion time for standalone apps in mobile-cloud platforms. However, existing approaches have not been designed for distributed mobile-cloud apps and, thus, they are unable to provide effective solutions for such apps that have job and device dependencies, specific to their distributed nature. This paper presents CASINO, a dynamic and collaborative computation offloading framework which employs distributed profiling, decision making, and job execution to achieve an optimized completion time of the distributed computation. CASINO’s main component is its job scheduler that works in real-time and considers the global resource conditions and job/device dependencies in order to generate an optimized job schedule for a distributed app. We validated this scheduler by using simulated albeit realistic data. We also built a prototype of CASINO and evaluated it using a proof-of-concept distributed app. The results show that CASINO can significantly improve the computation latency when compared to solutions that execute all offloadable jobs on mobile devices or in the cloud.
Race, Poverty, and Teacher Mobility

This paper provides new information about the interrelated issues of teacher turnover (both within and across school districts and inside and outside of teaching) and the importance of nonpecuniary school characteristics, such as race and poverty, using new administrative data on Georgia teachers and the elementary schools in which they teach. Simple descriptive statistics indicate that teachers are more likely to change schools if they begin their teaching careers in schools with lower student test scores, schools with lower income students, or schools that have higher proportions of minority students. A linear probability and a competing risks model of transitions out of first teaching jobs allow us to separate the importance of these highly correlated school characteristics. The estimates from the model imply that teachers are much more likely to exit schools with large proportions of minority students, and that the other univariate statistical relationships associated with student test scores and poverty rates are driven to a large extent by the correlations of these variables with the minority variable. Thus we find that, while the common notion that teachers are more likely to leave high poverty schools is correct, it occurs because teachers are more likely to leave a particular type of poor school - that which has a large proportion of minority students.
Partial sleep deprivation reduces natural killer cell activity in humans.

&NA; Sleep disturbance, measured by either subjective report or electroencephalographic (EEG) assessment of sleep, correlates with a reduction of natural killer (NK) cell activity in major depression. To test whether sleep loss independent of mood disturbance alters daytime values of cellular immune function, the effect of late‐night partial sleep deprivation on NK cell activity was studied in 23 medically and psychiatrically healthy male volunteers. After a night of sleep deprivation between 3 and 7 AM, NK cell activity was reduced in 18 of the 23 subjects with average lytic activity reduced significantly (p < .01) to a level 72% of the mean of three separate baseline values. After a night of resumed nocturnal sleep, NK cell activity had returned to baseline levels. These data implicate sleep in the modulation of natural immunity and demonstrate that even modest disturbances of sleep produce a reduction of NK cell activity.
Corporate Real Estate Strategies and Financial Performance of Companies

This study analyzes the relationship between Corporate Real Estate (CRE) strategy and the financial performance of major companies in the UK for two time periods, 1998 and 2003. The identification of specific CRE strategies is based on the seminal work of Nourse and Roulac (1993). The results indicate that more than 75% of the companies examined had a CRE strategy that could be mapped to the Nourse and Roulac framework and that certain CRE strategies made a contribution in enhancing the financial performance of companies. The relationship was stronger for companies in 2003 than for 1998. This was tested for both share price and profit margin as the dependent variable. This study concludes that CRE strategy can make a limited contribution to company financial performance.
Testing Restrictions on a Model of Japanese Meat Demand

Analysis the tests for quasi-separability, net and perfect substitutability developed and implemented on a demand system model of the Japanese meat sector. Net complimentarity between chicken and dairy beef and chicken and pork; Japanese Wagyu beef as a separate commodity to both imported beef and dairy beef; Importance of fish in the Japanese meat demand system.
Regional activation of rapid onset vasodilatation in mouse skeletal muscle: regulation through α‐adrenoreceptors

Exercise onset entails motor unit recruitment and the initiation of vasodilatation. Dilatation can ascend the arteriolar network to encompass proximal feed arteries but is opposed by sympathetic nerve activity, which promotes vasoconstriction and inhibits ascending vasodilatation through activating α‐adrenoreceptors. Whereas contractile activity can antagonize sympathetic vasoconstriction, more subtle aspects of this interaction remain to be defined. We tested the hypothesis that constitutive activation of α‐adrenoreceptors governs blood flow distribution within individual muscles. The mouse gluteus maximus muscle (GM) consists of Inferior and Superior regions. Each muscle region is supplied by its own motor nerve and feed artery with an anastomotic arteriole (resting diameter ∼25 μm) that spans both muscle regions. In anaesthetized male C57BL/6J mice (3–5 months old), the GM was exposed and superfused with physiological saline solution (35°C; pH 7.4). Stimulating the inferior gluteal motor nerve (0.1 ms pulse, 100 Hz for 500 ms) evoked a brief tetanic contraction and produced rapid (<1 s) onset vasodilatation (ROV; diameter change, 10 ± 1 μm) of the anastomotic arteriole along the active (Inferior) muscle region but not along the inactive (Superior) region (n= 8). In contrast, microiontophoresis of acetylcholine (1 μm micropipette tip, 1 μA, 500 ms) initiated dilatation that travelled along the anastomotic arteriole from the Inferior into the Superior muscle region (diameter change, 5 ± 2 μm). Topical phentolamine (1 μm) had no effect on resting diameter but this inhibition of α‐adrenoreceptors enabled ROV to spread along the anastomotic arteriole into the inactive muscle region (dilatation, 7 ± 1 μm; P < 0.05), where remote dilatation to acetylcholine then doubled (P < 0.05). These findings indicate that constitutive activation of α‐adrenoreceptors in skeletal muscle can restrict the spread of dilatation within microvascular resistance networks and thereby increase blood flow to active muscle regions.
Connecting the dots: an invariant migration corridor links the Holocene to the present

Numerous species undergo impressive movements, but due to massive changes in land use, long distance migration in terrestrial vertebrates has become a highly fragile ecological phenomenon. Uncertainty about the locations of past migrations and the importance of current corridors hampers conservation planning. Using archeological data from historic kill sites and modern methods to track migration, we document an invariant, 150 km (one-way) migration corridor used for at least 6000 years by North America's sole extant endemic ungulate. Pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) from the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, like other long distant migrants including Serengeti wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) and Arctic caribou (Rangifer tarandus), move nearly 50 km d−1, but in contrast to these other species, rely on an invariant corridor averaging only 2 km wide. Because an entire population accesses a national park (Grand Teton) by passage through bottlenecks as narrow as 121 m, any blockage to movement will result in extirpation. Based on animation of real data coupled with the loss of six historic routes, alternative pathways throughout the 60 000 km2 Yellowstone ecosystem are no longer available. Our findings have implications for developing strategies to protect long distance land migrations in Africa, Asia and North America and to prevent the disappearance of ecological phenomena that have operated for millennia.
Business Cycle Dynamics and its drivers in Lithuania

The dissertation‘s main objective is to analyse Lithuanian business cycle and to answer the question about the main drivers of the business cycle in Lithuania. For that purpose two quantitative models of partial and general equilibrium are constructed. The models explore structural shock effects on Lithuanian output, consumption, investment, trade-balance-to-output ratio, labour supply and labour productivity over the period 1995-2011. Model results are compared to the findings of other small open emerging economies. The results of augmented real business cycle model for Lithuania show that non-stationary productivity shocks to trend is the main source of variation in output; investment is mostly driven by country premium shocks while the dynamics of consumption and trade-balance-to-output ratio is mostly affected by stochastic preference shocks in the long term and domestic spending shocks in the short run. Due to the estimated low persistence of domestic spending shocks, it has a limited impact on macroeconomic aggregates in the long term. Structural vector autoregression model reveals that technology shocks do not have strong negative impact on labour supply in the country contrary to patterns explored in the developed countries. %%%%Disertacijoje analizuojami Lietuvos ekonominiai ciklai bei juos lemiancios struktūrinės priežastys. Siekiant pagrindinio darbo tikslo, sudaromi du empiriniai verslo ciklų modeliai: dalinės bei bendrosios pusiausvyros, kuriais kiekybiskai vertinama struktūrinių sokų įtaka Lietuvos bendrajam vidaus produktui (BVP), darbo produktyvumui, darbo pasiūlai bei visuminės paklausos komponentams. Darbe pristatomi abiejų modelių rezultatai Lietuvai, jie lyginami su kitų mažų atvirų augancių ekonomikų rezultatais. Tyrimas rodo, kad Lietuvos ekonomikos realiojo BVP dinamiką analizuojamu istoriniu laikotarpiu (1995-2011 m.) labiausiai įtakojo ilgalaikiai produktyvumo sokai, antrasis pagal svarbą buvo pereinamasis produktyvumo sokas. Namų ūkių vartojimo pokycius labiausiai lėmė preferencijų sokai ir jų paveikti tarplaikiniai vartojimo pasirinkimai. Didžiausias investicijų dinamikos veiksnys - palūkanų normų sokas. Nors valstybės islaidų sokai neturėjo didelio ilgalaikio poveikio visuminės paklausos komponentų dinamikai, taciau trumpuoju laikotarpiu sių sokų įtaka prekybos balanso dalies bendrajame vidaus produkte dinamikai yra stipri. Prekybos balanso dalis BVP ilguoju laikotarpiu labiausiai priklausė nuo preferencijų sokų. Taip pat įvertinta, kad technologiniai sokai neturi stipraus neigiamo poveikio darbo pasiūlai Lietuvoje.
A novel bispidinone analog induces S‑phase cell cycle arrest and apoptosis in HeLa human cervical carcinoma cells.

2,4,6,8-(3)-Tetranitrophenyl-3,7-diazabicyclo[3.3. 1]nonan-9-one (B16), a bispidinone analog, was synthesized to investigate its effects on cell viability, the cell cycle, and apoptotic pathways in HeLa human cervical cancer cells. B16 decreased the percentage of viable cells in WST-8 assays, and morphological changes associated with apoptotic cell death were observed, including cell shrinkage and disruption. Annexin V-FITC/PI dual staining assays showed that B16 significantly increased the early apoptosis of HeLa cells after 24 h of treatment. Moreover, DNA content analysis and [3H]-thymidine incorporation assays showed that B16 induced S-phase cell cycle arrest and inhibited DNA replication after 24 h of treatment. Following treatment with 25 µM of B16, an increase in reactive oxygen species and a decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential were observed by flow cytometry. In addition, the expression levels of caspase cascade and Bcl-2 family proteins determined by western blotting suggested that the induction of apoptosis by B16 was associated with a caspase- and mitochondrial-dependent pathway in HeLa cells. In conclusion, B16 induced early apoptosis and S-phase cell cycle arrest in HeLa cells via a caspase- and mitochondrial‑dependent pathway.
Five Facts You Need to Know About Technology Diffusion

This paper presents a new data set on the diffusion of about 115 technologies in over 150 countries over the last 200 years. We use this comprehensive data set to uncover general patterns of technology diffusion. Our main 5 findings are as follows: (i) Once the intensive margin is measured, technologies do not diffuse in a logistic way. (ii) Within a typical technology, the dispersion in the adoption levels across countries is about 5 times larger than the cross-country dispersion in income per capita. (iii) The rankings of countries by level of technology adoption are very highly correlated across technologies. (iv) Within a typical technology, there has been convergence at an average rate of 4 percent per year. (v) The speed of convergence for technologies developed since 1925 has been three times higher than the speed of convergence for technologies developed before 1925.
School-based Interventions Improve Heart Health in Children With Multiple Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors

Objective. To determine the immediate effects of two types of elementary school-based interventions on children with multiple cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors. Design. Randomized, controlled field trial. Setting. Conducted in 18 randomly selected elementary schools across North Carolina. Study Participants. Four hundred twenty-two children age 9 ± 0.8 years with at least two risk factors at baseline: low aerobic power and either high serum cholesterol or obesity. Intervention. Both 8-week interventions consisted of a knowledge and attitude program and an adaptation of physical education. The classroom-based intervention was given by regular teachers to all children in the 3rd and 4th grades. The risk-based intervention was given in small groups only to children with identified risk factors. Children in the control group received usual teaching and physical education. Outcome Measures. The primary outcome measure was cholesterol; additional measures were blood pressure, body mass index, body fat, eating and activity habits, and health knowledge. Results. Both interventions produced large reductions in cholesterol (−10.1 mg/dL and −11.7 mg/dL) compared with a small drop (−2.3 mg/dL) in the controls. There was a trend for systolic blood pressure to increase less in both intervention groups than in the controls. Both intervention groups had a small reduction in body fat and higher health knowledge than the control group. Conclusions. Both brief interventions can improve the CVD risk profile of children with multiple risk factors. The classroom-based approach was easier to implement and used fewer resources. This population approach should be considered as one means of early primary prevention of CVD.
Economic efficiency of Embrapa's research centers and the influence of contextual variables

In this paper we measure, with a DEA BCC model, the economic efficiency of Embrapas (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation) research centers. We model the DEA economic efficiency as a linear function of the contextual variables revenue generation capacity, partnership intensity, improvement of administrative processes, cost rationalization, size and type of research centers. The model used is of the type dynamic panel and assumes a structured correlation matrix intra times and unstructured inter times. In order to better discriminate the efficient units we used a heuristic efficiency score that aggregates the efficiencies in relation to the original and inverted DEA frontiers. Partnerships positive effect in the efficiency scores does not confirm the thoughts that Embrapas performance evaluation process discourages the integration and cooperation of its research centers. From the point of view of statistical significance, the improvement of administrative processes is the most important indicator among the contextual variables.
Revisiting University Spinoffs: Conceptual Advancements and Theoretical Underpinnings

University spinoffs (USOs) have remarkably strengthened the linkage between universities and the industry. Number of technology patents and spinoffs coming out of university research has a significant impact on regional economic and social development. To further highlight the importance of university spinoffs the aim of this paper is to review the scholarly literature on university spinoff and present a comprehensive overview of what is a university spinoff, why is it important, what makes it significant and how university spinoffs are created/can be created. Besides reviewing the existing models of university spinoff creation, authors have also attempted to develop a stage model of university spinoff creation.
Polymerase Slippage at Vesicular Stomatitis Virus Gene Junctions To Generate Poly(A) Is Regulated by the Upstream 3′-AUAC-5′ Tetranucleotide: Implications for the Mechanism of Transcription Termination

ABSTRACT Termination of mRNA synthesis in vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), the prototypic rhabdovirus, is controlled by a 13-nucleotide gene end sequence which comprises the conserved tetranucleotide 3′-AUAC-5′, the U7 tract and the intergenic dinucleotide. mRNAs terminated at this sequence possess 100- to 300-nucleotide-long 3′ poly(A) tails which are thought to result from polymerase slippage (reiterative transcription) by the VSV polymerase on the U7tract. Previously we determined that in addition to the AUAC tetranucleotide, the U7 tract was an essential signal in the termination process. Shortening or interrupting the U7tract abolished termination. These altered U tracts also prevented the polymerase from performing reiterative transcription necessary for generation of the mRNA poly(A) tail and thus established seven residues as the minimum length of U tract that allowed reiterative transcription to occur. In this study we investigated whether sequences other than the essential U7 tract are involved in controlling polymerase slippage. We investigated whether the AUAC tetranucleotide affected the process of reiterative transcription by analyzing the nucleotide sequence of RNAs transcribed from altered subgenomic templates and infectious VSV variants. The tetranucleotide was found to regulate reiterative transcription on the U7 tract. The extent of polymerase slippage was governed not by specific tetranucleotide sequences but rather by nucleotide composition such that slippage occurred when the tetranucleotide was composed of A or U residues but not when it was composed of G or C residues. This suggested that polymerase slippage was controlled, at least in part, by the strength of base pairing between the template and nascent strands. Further data presented here indicate that the tetranucleotide contains both a signal that directs the VSV polymerase to slip on the downstream U7 tract and also a signal that directs a slipping polymerase to terminate mRNA synthesis.
Competition in securities markets: the impact on liquidity

Competition for order flow is widely documented for U.S. markets, but is a relatively new phenomenon in European equities trading. Only with the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, which went into effect in November 2007, did new trading venues emerge in Europe that for the first time ever seriously threatened established exchanges. Chi-X, one of the new competitors, has gained a considerable market share, eroding the traditional exchanges’ share of equities trading volumes. As the proliferation of new trading venues in Europe increases the danger of market fragmentation, this paper analyzes the potentially positive liquidity implications of a new trading venue. To this end, we examine the impact of the Chi-X market entry in French blue-chip equities on the liquidity of their home market. Our findings suggest that in consequence of the new competitor’s market entry, liquidity in the most actively traded stocks was enhanced on the home market during the observation period. This improvement exceeds the general European liquidity trend measured by a matching firm approach, which implies that despite fragmentation of order flow, market quality may even be enhanced.