Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Assessment of Behavioral Distress and Depression in a Pediatric Population

Using a multitrait—multimethod approach, measures designed to assess emotional distress in medical populations were compared with depression measures standardized on healthy children. In a hospitalized sample of children ages 4 to 12 years old, parent ratings of child distress were compared to nurse ratings and children's responses to a pictorial measure. An assessment battery was administered to 70 mothers and children; 32 nurse ratings were also obtained. Results indicated overlap between information obtained from measures of depression and pediatric-specific measures of distress. However, the findings provide some evidence that measures that incorporate the pediatric context in assessment may be more suitable for medically ill children. Children's reactions to medical intervention vary considerably, but emotional distress during hospitalization is typical. In a pediatric context, emotional distress may be manifest as affective symptoms of depression (e.g., dysphoria, irritability) and behavioral signs of distress (e.g., social withdrawal, agitation, anxiety). Such distress can interfere with medical procedures, and research has historically demonstrated that without intervention during their stay, children display more long-term emotional and behavioral problems following hospitalization (e.g., Douglas, 1975; Melamed & Siegel, 1975).
Les effets du dispositif d'intéressement sur l'insertion au marché du travail des bénéficiaires de l'allocation chômage

Since 1986, the French unemployment insurance system allows recipients to partially cumulate unemployment benefits with labor income derived from temporary jobs. The consequences of this compensation scheme for access to regular jobs are still partly unstudied. The objective of this paper is to provide a theoretical and empirical assessment of this specific feature of labor market policy. We first recall (section 2) the conditions for access to subsidized temporary jobs. The incentives created by this compensation scheme for access to temporary job and the longer term consequences for exit out of unemployment are then examined from a theoretical perspective (section 3). Section 4 addresses the issues raised by the empirical assessment of this labor market programm. Section 5 surveys available empirical evidence. Finally, section 6 summarizes the main results and discusses the scope for future research.
Adsorption of Blood Proteins onto Polysaccharide Surfaces

In this study, surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) were combined to investigate the adsorption behavior of two platelet adhesion-related blood proteins, human serum albumin (HSA) and human serum fibrinogen (HSF), on two polysaccharide materials used for hemodialysis membrane applications: regenerated cellulose and cellulose acetate. The study aims to provide insight into the design of novel hemocompatible polysaccharide materials. Information such as real-time adsorption curves, adsorbed amounts, and water contents of the protein layers were obtained and analyzed. The results suggested 1) monolayer adsorption of HSA on both cellulose and cellulose acetate, possibly with different HSA conformations; 2) a multilayer of HSF or some degree of end-on adsorption on both surfaces. The study of HSA adsorption onto cellulose acetate surfaces with different degrees of substitution indicated that the change in content of acetyl groups may not be the main factor governing the adsorbed HSA amount but may affect the conformation of adsorbed HSA molecules.
Overexpression of Csk-binding protein/phosphoprotein associated with glycosphingolipid-enriched microdomains induces cluster of differentiation 59-mediated apoptosis in Jurkat cells

Csk-binding protein/phosphoprotein associated with glycosphingolipid-enriched microdomains (CBP/PAG) is a membrane-bound adaptor protein that downregulates the activation of Src family kinases present in lipid rafts. To elucidate the role of CBP/PAG in human T cell activation, a cell line overexpressing CBP/PAG was constructed and the function of CBP/PAG in Jurkat cells was examined. The present study revealed that increased CBP/PAG expression in T cells significantly enhanced their apoptosis and reduced cellular activation and proliferation. Overexpression of CBP/PAG suppressed the growth of Jurkat cells by recruiting c-Src and its negative regulator, C-terminal Src kinase (CSK), to lipid rafts. The negative regulation of CBP/PAG was enhanced in the presence of anti-cluster of differentiation (CD)59 monoclonal antibodies. In addition, a significant association was revealed between the location of CBP/PAG and CD59, which were co-expressed in the same region of the cell membrane, implicating a potential overlap of the elicited signaling pathways. These results indicate that CBP/PAG functions as a negative regulator of cell signal transduction and suggest that CD59 may strengthen the role of negative feedback regulation.
An Economic Evaluation of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) Biofuel Program: An Industrial Policy Approach

The American public realizes the growing scarcity of petroleum and the desirability of the development of alternative fuels. In 2005 and 2007, the U.S. Congress passed laws that aim to promote the consumption of renewable biofuels. The Environmental Protection Agency then designed the Renewable Fuel Standard Program (RFS) that mandates a certain volume of renewable biofuel consumption over the period of 2006-2022. The current policy discussions and analyses regarding the RFS have focused heavily on environmental issues, but we know very little about the U.S. ethanol industry itself. In this study, we examine the potential impact of the RFS on the development process of the U.S. ethanol industry from the viewpoint of industrial policy using ethanol plant-level data. Our analysis suggests that the RFS program contributes to increasing economies of scale and improving competition level among existing firms. The successful development of the U.S. ethanol industry hinges on this factor. The ethanol market is expanding through new plant construction, and the increased competition will let ethanol emerge as a viable fuel alternative to conventional fossil fuel.
Will You Buy My Peg?: The Credibility of a Fixed Exchange Rate Regime as a Determinant of Bilateral Trade

This paper examines the relationship between fixed exchange rate arrangements and trade using a gravity model of international trade together with bilateral trade data from 24 countries from the Caribbean and Latin America for the period 1960-2001. The analysis indicates that a credible fixed peg has a positive impact on the value of bilateral trade. Moreover, the positive impact on trade is more pronounced with a stricter definition of the fixed peg or a longer duration of the peg. This supports the argument that the credibility of an exchange rate peg is an important element to determine bilateral trade. There is, however, no evidence to suggest that a currency union provides additional benefits.
The Effect of a Fuel Adjustment Clause on a Regulated Firm's Selection of Inputs

When input prices are changing rapidly, the delays inherent in rate-of-return regulation can result in rate decisions that are outdated before they can be implemented. Many regulatory commissions have adopted fuel adjustment clauses to remedy this problem. Fuel clauses adjust output price for changes in fuel costs so that the utility's profit remains relatively unaffected. Fuel adjustment clauses are now used in almost all the 50 states and the District of Columbia; a survey by the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) (1978, p. 6) revealed that only 7 states did not permit fuel clauses.
Politics from below? Small-, mid- and large-scale land dispossession in Teso, Uganda, and the relevance of scale

While processes of land dispossession – or ‘land grabbing' – have garnered significant attention from researchers in recent years, local reactions to instances of land alienation have received insufficient scrutiny. This paper focuses on small-, mid- and large-scale land dispossession in the post-conflict Teso region in Uganda, and considers how people assert their agency when their tenure rights are infringed upon. I argue that those who lose tenure rights through small-scale land dispossession are primarily focused on reacquiring tenure rights and meeting the demands of their basic social reproduction. In these cases, there is little resistance that is definitively ‘political'. In contrast, a ‘politics from below’ more clearly emerges in the cases of mid- and large-scale land alienation, which I attribute to particular structural conditions.
MODELING COURT DELAY

Quantitative modeling using operations research and related techniques has much less promise for mitigating court delay than proponents anticipate. Results to date have been discouraging, largely because trial court process is exceptionally difficult to model. There is no consistent sequence or path, and critical discretionary decisions are made by professionals based on individualized criteria that are hard to code. Also, participants (litigants and lawyers) are not part of the organization in any normal sense: Their very purpose is conflict, and they are as likely to try to subvert the court operation as support it. Manipulating court incentive structures is a more promising management approach.
The new Charter System in Ghana: the ‘holy grail’ of public service delivery?

Public services delivery has been at the forefront of public sector reforms in many countries throughout the past three decades. Invariably, the desire is to do more with less, empower citizens, enhance transparency, and hold public servants accountable. Many countries have therefore developed a number of service delivery mechanisms over the years to achieve this objective. A good example is the Citizen’s Charter System. First developed in the United Kingdom, the idea quickly spread to other developed countries and, more recently, to some developing countries as well. Ghana has followed the lead taken by these countries by developing its own Citizen’s Charter, which is believed to be the ‘holy grail’ of service delivery in the public sector. The article attempts to examine the Citizen’s Charter, evaluate its rationale, and any challenges that may be faced in its implementation. It argues that there are a number of constraints, which the government should have addressed before establishing the Charter. The government’s failure to address these challenges, it is argued, will significantly affect the success of the program. Points for practitioners In the last few decades, governments in both developed and developing countries have been searching for better delivery mechanisms for public services. One such mechanism is the Citizen’s Charter, which has become popular in the developed world as a means of achieving efficient, effective, and accountable service delivery. More recently, it has also become popular in some developing countries. The implementation of a Citizen’s Charter requires a solid understanding of the capacity of a state’s public sector; however, in many developing countries, this sector is characteristically weak. It is important, therefore, for practitioners to understand the limits of the public sector in any given state, and the barrier it may pose to the successful implementation of service delivery mechanisms.
A Soft-Switching Bridgeless AC–DC Power Factor Correction Converter

A new soft-switching, bridgeless power factor correction (PFC) boost converter is proposed for power supply and battery charging applications. The converter operates in both pulse width modulation (PWM) mode and resonant mode each switching cycle, and utilizes standard average current mode control. The converter is bridgeless, therefore eliminating the need for a front-end diode bridge rectifier. It operates in continuous conduction mode and achieves zero voltage switching (ZVS) for all switches. The proposed converter also reduces the turn-off losses of the PWM switches, therefore nearly eliminating switching losses. The output diodes operate with controlled di/dt turn-off, which reduces reverse–recovery losses. The PWM switches of the proposed converter can be driven with the same PWM signal, enabling simplified control. The detailed operation of the proposed converter is presented, including the conditions for ZVS operation and a stress analysis for the circuit components. Experimental results are presented for a 650-W prototype at 150-kHz switching frequency, universal ac input, and 400-V dc output. The proposed converter shows about 1% better efficiency and lower device temperatures at full load and 100-V ac input (maximum loss operating point) compared with the conventional hard switched PFC boost converter.
Buckling transitions and clock order of two-dimensional Coulomb crystals

Crystals of repulsively interacting ions in planar traps form hexagonal lattices, which undergo a buckling instability towards a multi-layer structure as the transverse trap frequency is reduced. Numerical and experimental results indicate that the new structure is composed of three planes, whose separation increases continuously from zero. We study the effects of thermal and quantum fluctuations by mapping this structural instability to the six-state clock model. A prominent implication of this mapping is that at finite temperature, fluctuations split the buckling instability into two thermal transitions, accompanied by the appearance of an intermediate critical phase. This phase is characterized by quasi-long-range order in the spatial tripartite pattern. It is manifested by broadened Bragg peaks at new wave vectors, whose line-shape provides a direct measurement of the temperature dependent exponent $\eta(T)$ characteristic of the power-law correlations in the critical phase. A quantum phase transition is found at the largest value of the critical transverse frequency: here the critical intermediate phase shrinks to zero. Moreover, within the ordered phase, we predict a crossover from classical to quantum behavior, signifying the emergence of an additional characteristic scale for clock order. We discuss experimental realizations with trapped ions and polarized dipolar gases, and propose that within accessible technology, such experiments can provide a direct probe of the rich phase diagram of the quantum clock model, not easily observable in condensed matter analogues. Therefore, this works highlights the potential for ionic and dipolar systems to serve as simulators for complex models in statistical mechanics and condensed matter physics.
( 4 S )-4 , 8-dihydroxy-1-tetralone and other chemical constituents from Pestalotiopsis sp . EJC 07 , endophytic from Bauhinia guianensis

The present work reports the isolation of eight compounds from Pestalotiopsis sp. EJC07 isolated as endophytic from Bauhinia guianensis, a tipical plant of the Amazon. The compounds (4S)-4,8-dihydroxy1-tetralone (1), uracil (2), uridin (3), p-hydroxybenzoic acid (4), ergosterol (5), ergosterol peroxide (6), cerevisterol (7) and ducitol (8) were isolated by chromatographic procedures and identifi ed by spectral methods of 1D and 2D NMR and MS. The compound 1 is being reported for the fi rst time in the genus Pestalotiopsis.
Differences That ‘Matter’? A Framework for Comparing Environmental Certification Standards and Government Policies

Abstract Competition among environmental certification systems has created considerable demand for transparent comparison. Drawing on the case of forest certification, this article presents an analytical framework for comparing certification standards and government policies according to their policy approach and environmental threshold requirements. A detailed analysis of existing policies is applied to one key indicator, i.e. riparian buffer zones, where it reveals clear differences among the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) regional standards and among the FSC, the Canadian Standards Association (CSA), and Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) certification systems. The FSC regional standards of British Columbia and the Pacific Coast contain quantitative riparian buffer zone thresholds, with the FSC British Columbia standards being the most restrictive. The FSC Southeast standards are comparable with the SFI standards in deferring to state buffer zone guidelines but making those guidelines mandatory. The systems-based CSA standards contain no substantive prescriptions. Most certification standards appear to closely mimic government policy approaches. Standards that cover multiple jurisdictions resemble an averaging of the prescriptiveness and performance thresholds of government policies, resulting in an increase in some state requirements and no additional requirements in others. These findings lay the groundwork for further explanatory research on the interaction of state and non-state policies as well as the systematic comparison of policy effectiveness.
Reduced Susceptibility to Vancomycin in Staphylococcus aureus

To the Editor: I read with interest the article by Aguado et al. (1). I congratulate the authors for their high-quality research and would like to make 2 brief comments. My first point regards the mechanism by which methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) with reduced susceptibility to vancomycin would also acquire decreased susceptibility to β-lactams. The authors “hypothesize that certain structural modifications might also occur in the cell wall of strains with high vancomycin MIC, including a thicker cell wall as it has been described in MRSA [methicillin-resistant S. aureus]. ” In addition to cell wall thickening, possible mechanisms could include reduction in autolysis (2,3) and in the cell wall content of penicillin binding protein 4 (PBP4) (3). A study of MSSA isolates has shown a reduction in autolysis and in the bactericidal activity of oxacillin after development of intermediate vancomycin susceptibility (2). Lower content of PBP4 and decreased autolysis were reported in MRSA isolates after reduced susceptibility to vancomycin developed after exposure to this antimicrobial drug (3). Decreased PBP4 has been associated with reduced methicillin susceptibility in S. aureus (4). Second, knowing whether the authors had the exact vancomycin MIC of the isolates by broth microdilution to compare with the Etest results would be interesting. In the article, they only state that “all 99 MSSA strains were susceptible to vancomycin (MIC <2 μg/mL) by the broth microdilution method. ” Although difficult to compare (because Etest dilution progression is arithmetic and broth microdilution is performed with a geometric dilution), some authors have found substantial differences between the vancomycin MIC results given by these 2 methods (5). These differences could have major laboratory and clinical implications.
Stable R&D Cooperation with Spillovers

The literature on the incentives for R&D cooperation with spillovers typically deals only with the factors affecting cooperative profits. This paper focuses on the incentives to cheat and the stability of such cooperative agreements in a repeated game framework. It is shown that the stability of cooperation is influenced by the nature and magnitude of spillovers, relative to the nature and degree of product market competition. While cooperative profits are higher with large positive (exogenous, unintended) know-how spillovers, such as in fundamental research, our analysis shows that it may be easier to sustain cooperation in areas with lower spillovers, such as applied research, because of the smaller incentives to cheat on the initial agreement, at least when firms produce substitutes. Alternatively, the possibility of technology sharing i.e., intended or endogenous spillovers), besides R&D coordination, not only increases cooperative profits but also reduces the incentives to defect from a cooperative equilibrium. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.
Design and verification for dual issue digital signal processor

Digital Signal Processor (DSP) has been widely used in processing video and audio streaming data. Due to the huge amount of streaming data, increasing throughput is the key issue in designing DSP architecture. One way to increase the throughput of a DSP is to increase the instruction level parallelism. To increase the instruction level parallelism, many architectures have been proposed and can be classified into two main approaches, the superscaler and the VLIW architectures. Among the hardware architectures, the VLIW attracts a lot of attention due to its simple hardware complexity. However, the VLIW architecture suffers from the explosion of instruction memories due to the overhead of instruction grouping. In this paper, we propose a novel DSP architecture which contains three pipelines and performs dynamic instruction grouping by hardware. The experimental results show that our architecture can reduce 13% of memory requiremnt on average while maintaining the same performance.
Kinetics of hyperpolarized 13C1-pyruvate transport and metabolism in living human breast cancer cells

Metabolic fluxes can serve as specific biomarkers for detecting malignant transformations, tumor progression, and response to microenvironmental changes and treatment procedures. We present noninvasive hyperpolarized 13C NMR investigations on the metabolic flux of pyruvate to lactate, in a well-controlled injection/perfusion system using T47D human breast cancer cells. Initial rates of pyruvate-to-lactate conversion were obtained by fitting the hyperpolarized 13C and ancillary 31P NMR data to a model, yielding both kinetic parameters and mechanistic insight into this conversion. Transport was found to be the rate-limiting process for the conversion of extracellular pyruvate to lactate with Km = 2.14 ± 0.03 mM, typical of the monocarboxylate transporter 1 (MCT1), and a Vmax = 27.6 ± 1.1 fmol·min−1·cell−1, in agreement with the high expression level of this transporter. Modulation of the environment to hypoxic conditions as well as suppression of cells' perfusion enhanced the rate of pyruvate-to-lactate conversion, presumably by up-regulation of the MCT1. Conversely, the addition of quercetin, a flavonoidal MCT1 inhibitor, markedly reduces the apparent rate of pyruvate-to-lactate conversion. These results suggest that hyperpolarized 13C1-pyruvate may be a useful magnetic resonance biomarker of MCT regulation and malignant transformations in breast cancer.
The Bacillus subtilis nucleoid-associated protein HPB12 strongly compacts DNA

The HPB12 protein from the nucleoid of Bacillus subtilis was previously described, and its DNA binding properties have been reported previously (V. Salti, F. Le Hégarat, and L. Hirschbein, Biochim. Biophys. Acta 1009:161-167, 1989). The DNA-HPB12 complexes were examined by electron microscopy. They appeared as short, slightly curved rods whereas naked DNA showed no compaction. Since only a small number of complexes with an intermediate degree of folding were observed, it appears that the nucleoid-associated protein HPB12 binds cooperatively to DNA, confirming Salti et al. (V. Salti, F. Le Hégarat, and L. Hirschbein, Biochim. Biophys. Acta 1009:161-167, 1989), and gives rise to a tightly compacted DNA-protein complex. N-terminal sequencing of purified HPB12 showed that all but one of the first 26 amino acids were identical to those of the L24 ribosomal protein.