Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Constraints on Plasticity in a Connectionist Model of the English Past Tense

This paper investigates constraints on dissociation and plasticity in a connectionist model undergoing random lesions both prior to and during training. When networks were trained only on phonological encodings of stem-suhed pairs similar to English regular verbs (e.g., walk walked), long-term deficits (i.e., critical period effects) were not observed, yet there were substantive short-term effects of injury. When training vocabulary reflected the English-like competition between regular (suffixed) and irregular verbs (e.g., go went, hit hit), the acquisition of regular verbs became increasingly susceptible to injury, while the irregulars were learned quickly and were relatively impervious to damage. Patterns of generalization to novel forms conflicts with the assumption that this behavioral dissociation is indicative of selective impairment of the learning and generalization of the past tense rule, while the associative lexical-based mechanism is left intact. Instead, we propose a view of network performance in which the regular-irregular dissociation derives from a general reduction in the ability to find a single-mechanism solution when resolving the competition between two classes of mappings. In light of other models in which regular and irregular forms compete (e.g., Patterson, Seidenberg, & McClelland, 1989), as well as patterns of performance in normal and disordered English speakers (e.g., Pinker, 1991), two general implications are discussed: (1) critical period effects need not derive from endog-enously determined maturational change, but instead may in part result from learning history in relation to characteristics of the language to be learned (i.e., entrenchment), and (2) selective dissociations can result from general damage in systems that are not modularized in terms of rule-based vs. associative mechanisms.
Reptile Infection with Anaplasma phagocytophilum, the Causative Agent of Granulocytic Anaplasmosis

Abstract Granulocytic anaplasmosis (GA) is a potentially fatal tick-borne rickettsial disease that occurs sporadically in the far western United States. We evaluated the prevalence of Anaplasma phagocytophilum in multiple species of lizards and snakes from enzootic sites in northern California, described the infestation prevalence of its tick vector Ixodes pacificus on reptiles, and conducted an experimental challenge of western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis) and Pacific gopher snakes (Pituophis catenifer) with A. phagocytophilum delivered via needle inoculation or tick bite. Both serologically and polymerase-chain reaction (PCR)–positive lizards (seroprevalence = 10.8%, PCR prevalence = 10.2%) and snakes (seroprevalence = 5.8%, PCR prevalence = 11.7%) were detected among wild-caught animals. A DNA sequence of the A. phagocytophilum groESL gene from a PCR-positive snake was 100% homologous to that of the human-derived A. phagocytophilum. Experimental attempts to infect naïve animals were unsuccessful for snakes (n = 2), but 1 of 12 lizards became infected for 1 wk only by tick bite. Xenodiagnostic I. pacificus larvae that fed on a PCR-positive lizard did not acquire or transmit rickettsiae. Our findings suggest that lizards and snakes are exposed to A. phagocytophilum by infected ticks, but that they do not serve as primary reservoir hosts of this rickettsia.
Beta‐blocker, angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitor/angiotensin receptor blocker, nitrate‐hydralazine, diuretics, aldosterone antagonist, ivabradine, devices and digoxin (BANDAID2): an evidence‐based mnemonic for the treatment of systolic heart failure

Heart failure causes significant morbidity and mortality, with recognised underutilisation rates of guideline‐based therapies. Our aim was to review current evidence for heart failure treatments and derive a mnemonic summarising best practice, which might assist physicians in patient care. Treatments were identified for review from multinational society guidelines and recent randomised trials, with a primary aim of examining their effects in systolic heart failure patients on mortality, hospitalisation rates and symptoms. Secondary aims were to consider other clinical benefits. MEDLINE and EMBASE were searched using a structured keyword strategy and the retrieved articles were evaluated methodically to produce an optimised reference list for each treatment. We devised the mnemonic BANDAID 2, standing for beta‐blocker, angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitor/angiotensin receptor blocker, nitrate‐hydralazine (or potentially neprilysin inhibitor), diuretics, aldosterone antagonist, ivabradine, devices (automatic implantable cardioverter defibrillator, cardiac resynchronisation therapy or both) and digoxin as a representation of treatments with strong evidence for their use in systolic heart failure. Treatment with omega‐3 fatty acids, statins or anti‐thrombotic therapies has limited benefits in a general heart failure population. Adoption of this mnemonic for current evidence‐based treatments for heart failure may help improve prescribing rates and patient outcomes in this debilitating, high mortality condition.
High-grade MRI bone oedema is common within the surgical field in rheumatoid arthritis patients undergoing joint replacement and is associated with osteitis in subchondral bone

Objectives: MRI bone oedema has been observed in early and advanced RA and may represent a cellular infiltrate (osteitis) in subchondral bone. We studied MRI scans from RA patients undergoing surgery, seeking to identify regions of bone oedema and examine its histopathological equivalent in resected bone. Methods: Preoperative contrast-enhanced MRI scans were obtained in 11 RA patients scheduled for orthopaedic surgery to the hands/wrists or feet. In 9, MRI scans were scored by 2 readers for bone oedema (RAMRIS system). Its distribution with respect to surgical site was investigated. In 4 patients, 7 bone samples were examined for a cellular infiltrate, and this was compared with MRI bone oedema, scored for spatial extent and intensity. Results: Inter-reader intraclass correlation coefficients for bone oedema were 0.51 (all sites) and 0.98 (bone samples for histology). Bone oedema was observed at 60% of surgical sites vs 38% of non-surgical sites. High-grade bone oedema (score ⩾50% maximum) was strongly associated with the surgical field (OR 9.3 (3.5 to 24.2), p<0.0001). Bone oedema scores correlated with pain (r = 0.67, p = 0.048) and CRP (r = 0.86, p = 0.01). In 4 of the 7 bone samples, there was concordance between bone oedema and subchondral osteitis. In 3, there was no MRI bone oedema, and osteitis was “slight”. Conclusion: High-grade MRI bone oedema was common within the field of intended surgery and associated with pain. There was concordance between the presence and severity of MRI bone oedema and osteitis on histology, with an MRI threshold effect due to differences in image resolution.
Prognostic significance of anatomical resection and des‐γ‐carboxy prothrombin in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma

Portal venous tumour extension and intrahepatic metastasis result in a poor prognosis following hepatectomy for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Anatomical resection is, in theory, preferable for eradicating these types of invasion. Des‐γ‐carboxy prothrombin (DCP) has been reported to be associated with adverse pathological variables. This study investigated the significance of anatomical resection and DCP as predictive factors for postoperative recurrence of HCC.
Combining Open and Endovascular Approaches to Complex Aneurysms

Abstract: Patients with aortic aneurysms commonly present with anatomic issues that preclude them from receiving purely endovascular repairs. In these situations, open surgical procedures can be used to manage anatomic problems and facilitate endovascular aneurysm repair. This report focuses on combined approaches that enable repair of abdominal or thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms that involve the mesenteric and/or renal circulation. Current experience with combined open/endovascular repairs is essentially anecdotal. The common feature among the open procedures is establishment of extra‐anatomic perfusion of the visceral arteries to enable ligation and subsequent coverage of their ostia during endograft placement. The existing reports are notable for the marked variability in many factors including extent of aneurysm repair, surgical approach, mode of visceral revascularization, conduit for bypass, and type of endovascular device used. Overall, current reports demonstrate that patients with limited physiologic reserve and complex aortic anatomy can be treated successfully by combining open and endovascular repairs. As endograft design and endovascular techniques continue to improve, combined approaches are likely to play an increasingly important role in the treatment of extensive aortic disease.
Incorporating Fisheries Interests in National Oceans Policymaking

The principal aim of national oceans policymaking is to identify and assess all current and future uses of ocean spaces and resources in order to facilitate the making of effective management arrangements for them. There are a myriad of actual and potential uses of the oceans. They can lead to a range of potentially conflicting interests across different sectors. This means that it is a daunting and politically fraught task to integrate management of all ocean uses. Fisheries is a key sector that must feature in any effective national oceans policy. This is because fishing is the most intensive use of marine space and resources and the fishing industry is a key contributor to many national economies. A challenge for the incorporation of fisheries interests in national oceans policymaking is that fisheries is a diverse sector. In addition to commercial fishing, it includes recreational fishing and, in some countries, indigenous and subsistence fishing. Fishing also has an international and regional dimension and it overlaps with aquaculture. This article identifies the range of fisheries interests and considers how they are incorporated into national oceans policymaking, focusing on Australia and Canada.
Socioeconomic Background, Schooling, Experience and Monetary Rewards in the United States

Using a selective sample from the 1977 Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the authors investigate the relations among schooling, job experience, socioeconomic status (SES), IQ, and earnings in the United States. In contrast to the results for the United Kingdom reported by John Papanicolaou and George Psacharopoulos, we find no interaction effect on earnings between schooling and SES. A positive interaction effect on earnings , however, is found between experience and SES. Introducing IQ in the analysis leaves the above-mentioned results unchanged. It is argued that differences between the U.S. and the U.K. might be due to cultural and labor- market factors. Copyright 1986 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
Entrepreneurship education in sub‐Saharan African universities

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate entrepreneurship course offerings in business administration/management curricula in sub‐Saharan higher education institutions.Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a survey of online course catalogs to analyze entrepreneurship course offerings.Findings – The results of the study demonstrate that most higher education institutions in the sample offer courses in entrepreneurship and/or small business management but few offer specialization in the area. Newly created institutions are more likely to offer entrepreneurship courses and specializations than traditional ones while a few operate university‐based entrepreneurship centers. The study findings are consistent with the environmental school of entrepreneurial thought.Research limitations/implications – The study depended exclusively on online data. Several institutions were excluded from the sample because their web sites were unavailable. Future research should use a larger sample.Practical implica.
Brazilian Retail Banking and the 2008 Financial Crisis: Were the Government-Controlled Banks that Important?

We revisit the interest rate pass-through effect using weekly retail banking data from May 2006 to March 2010. Our choice of data avoids caveats of previous studies concerning excessive data aggregation and the estimation of how fast changes in benchmark interest rates impact those charged on short-term loans in Brazil. Our analysis focuses on four large retail banks – two of them privately owned and run, two of them government-controlled – before and after September 2008. They account for 60% of the total credit supplied by retail banks. Results indicate that government control over two of the largest banks, supposedly an asset for crisis management, may have had higher welfare costs than assumed. We find no evidence of asymmetry in adjustments of retail rates charged by private and government-controlled banks.
Is consumption insufficiently sensitive to innovations in income

Deaton (1986) has noted that if income is a first-order autoregressive process in first differences, then a simple version of Friedman’s permanent income hypothesis (SPIH) implies that measured U.S. consumption is insufficiently sensitive to innovations in income. This paper argues that this implication of the SPIH is a consequence of the fact that it ignores the role of the substitution effect in the consumption decision. Using a parametric version of the standard model of economic growth, the paper shows that very small movements in interest rates are sufficient to induce an empirically plausible amount of consumption smoothing. Since an overall evaluation of the model’s explanation for the observed smoothness of consumption requires examining its implications for other aspects of the data, the paper also explores some of these.
Factors Affecting Adoption of e‐Government in Zambia

Zambia has been implementing e‐government model of government for close to 3 years now. This is because e‐government has been identified and adopted as one of the most efficient vehicles for appropriate, transparent and inclusive / participatory decision making. Zambia has shown a higher propensity to indigenous knowledge systems which are full of inefficiencies, a lot of red tape in public service delivery, and prone to corrupt and inefficient practices. The adoption of e‐Governance promises a sharp paradigm shift where public institutions will be more responsive and transparent, promote efficient Public Private Partnerships (PPP), and empower citizens by making knowledge and other resources more directly accessible. This paper has examined two cases from Zambia where ICT has been utilized in support of e‐government initiatives. It has also assessed the challenges, opportunities, and issues together with e‐government adoption criteria regarding successful encapsulation of e‐government into the Zambian contextual environment. It has been found that lack of adequate ICT infrastructure and political will, provision of content in English other than local languages, lack of proper change management procedures, non‐contextualization of e‐government practices, etc., contribute much to the delay in appropriate e‐government adoption in Zambia. Out of these challenges identified, the paper proposes a conceptual model which offers balanced e‐government adoption criteria involving a combination of electronic and participatory services. The proposed conceptual model is a start‐point for a model which can later be replicated to include the whole lot of Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries given the similarity in the contextual environment.
Planning After Hurricane Katrina

Abstract Hurricane Katrina was the greatest urban and regional disaster in U.S. history. The rebuilding of New Orleans and surrounding areas of Louisiana and Mississippi will require the largest and most complex planning effort in my lifetime. To succeed, we must learn from disasters of the past, while also applying the planning knowledge of the present. From past disasters, we know that successful reconstruction requires both outside funding and local citizen involvement. As planners, we know that the processes should be rich in data, imagination, communication, and participation. Optimistically, a new New Orleans will involve improved flood safety, revitalized neighborhoods, housing opportunities for all, and equitable treatment of all residents. Planners have an obligation to take an active role and advocate for the funding and full participation necessary to achieve these goals. The alternative would be a city that is poor, unsafe, and unequal. This is the greatest planning problem most of us have ever seen, and it warrants a correspondingly large response.
Low-Resistance Titanium Contacts and Thermally Unstable Nickel Germanide Contacts on p-Type Germanium

Ti/p-Ge and NiGe/p-Ge contacts are compared on both planar and fin-based devices. Ti/p-Ge contacts show low contact resistance, while NiGe/p-Ge devices show short circuit problems due to thermally driven Ni diffusion. Considering the thermal budget in the standard backend of line processing for CMOS, Ti is more suitable for p-Ge devices. A low Ti/p-Ge contact resistivity of 1.1 × 10-8 Ω · cm2 is achieved by using a multi-pulse laser annealing technique for B activation.
Interleukin-8 production by CD16-CD56bright natural killer cells in the human early pregnancy decidua.

Decidual CD16-CD56bright natural killer (NK) cells were sorted from the decidual mononuclear cells (MNC) at the early pregnancy using a fluorescence activated cell sortor. The CD16-CD56bright NK cell population occupies a major population in the decidual MNC, in contrast to a very small population (< 1%) in the peripheral blood MNC. These decidual CD16-CD56bright NK cells produced a large amount of IL-8, i. e. , mean of 96.7 +/- 19.8 ng/ml in the 24 hr-cultured supernatants without any stimulant, which was comparable to the IL-8 production by LPS-stimulated peripheral blood MNC. Most of the IL-8 was ascribable to the production from decidual CD16-CD56bright NK cells. Intracytoplasmic IL-8 in the decidual CD56bright NK cells was also detected by flow cytometry. RT-PCR methods confirmed IL-8 mRNA expression in this population, while no or very scarce expression of IL-1 alpha and IL-1 beta mRNA was observed. The present study is a first observation revealing that decidual CD16-CD56bright NK cells express IL-8 mRNA and produce IL-8.
Stakeholder Management and Nonparticipation in Controversial Business

The main objective of this research is to provide knowledge on the impact that nonparticipation in controversial business can have on corporate financial performance. Accordingly, the stakeholder theory perspective was adopted and the effect of nonparticipation in controversial business on corporatefinancial performance was tested by using market-based and accounting-based economic measures. In addition, the effect of primary stakeholders’ management activities on corporate financial performance was tested, whereby it can be seen whether this nonparticipation in controversial business reveals a different causal relationship with certain aspects of economic performance.
Gap junctional communication and pharmacological heterogeneity in astrocytes cultured from the rat striatum

1 Indo‐1 and fluo‐3 imaging techniques were used to investigate the role of gap junctions in the changes in cytosolic calcium concentrations ([Ca2+]i) induced by several receptor agonists. Subpopulations of confluent cultured astrocytes from the rat striatum were superfused with submaximal concentrations of endothelin‐1 (Et1) and the α1‐adrenergic and muscarinic receptor agonists, methoxamine and carbachol, respectively. 2 Combined binding and autoradiographic studies indicated that all striatal astrocytes possess binding sites for Et1. In contrast, α1‐adrenergic and muscarinic binding sites were found to be heterogeneously distributed. In agreement with these findings, Et1 induced fast calcium responses in all cells while only subsets of striatal astrocytes responded to the application of either methoxamine or carbachol. 3 Halothane, heptanol and octanol, which are commonly used as gap junction inhibitors, drastically reduced the amplitude of Et1‐induced calcium responses. In contrast, 18‐α‐glycyrrhetinic acid (αGA) used at a concentration known to block gap junction permeability in astrocytes had no significant effect on the amplitude of these calcium responses. 4 As demonstrated by quantitative and topological analysis, Et1 application similarly increased [Ca2+]i levels in all astrocytes in both the absence and presence of αGA. 5 In control conditions, subpopulations of cells responding to methoxamine or carbachol exhibited two main types of calcium responses which differed in their shape and kinetic characteristics. In the presence of αGA the number of cells responding to these receptor agonists was significantly reduced. Indeed, responses characterized by their long latency, slow rise time and weak amplitude disappeared in the presence of αGA while responses with short latency and fast rise time were preserved. 6 These results indicate that permeable gap junction channels tend to attenuate the pharmacological and functional heterogeneity of populations of astrocytes, while their inhibition restricts calcium responses in astrocytes expressing high densities of transmitter receptors coupled to phospholipase C.
On Enforcement, Management and Persuasion: Different Logics of Implementation Policy in the EU and the ILO

This article helps to understand the effectiveness of EU legislation through analysing implementation policies and how they contribute to ensure Member State compliance. Comparing the EU and the ILO it provides new empirical data on instruments used to change Member State behaviour and presents conceptual tools to assess them along the lines of enforcement, management and persuasion.
Frequency dependence of scattering by dense media of small particles based on Monte Carlo simulation of Maxwell equations

The frequency dependence of extinction and scattering by geophysical medium at microwave frequencies is an important scattering topic because multifrequency measurements are used in remote sensing applications. Classical independent scattering theory states that if the particles are small, scattering is proportional to the fourth power in three-dimensional (3D) scattering and the third power in two-dimensional (2D) scattering. In this paper, the authors present Monte Carlo simulation results of dense media scattering. The dense media consists of densely packed small particles. Solutions are based on rigorous methods of generating dense media and subsequent numerical solutions of Maxwell's equation. Numerical simulations indicate that the frequency dependence of densely packed sticky particles is weaker than independent scattering.
Accuracy versus Falsification Costs: The Optimal Amount of Evidence under Different Procedures

An arbiter can decide a case on the basis of his priors or he can ask for further evidence from the two parties to the conflict. The parties may misrepresent evidence in their favour at a cost. The arbiter is concerned about accuracy and low procedural costs. When both parties testify, each of them distorts the evidence less than when they testify alone. When the fixed cost of testifying is low, the arbiter hears both, for intermediate values one, and for high values no party at all. The arbiter's ability to remain uninformed as well as sequential testifying makes it more likely that the arbiter requires evidence.