Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Electro-Deposition of Cu on Open Cell Aluminum Foams

This manuscript deals with the electro-deposition of Cu on aluminum foams. Metallic foams are highly porous materials which present complex structure of three-dimensional open cells. This aspect causes strong limitations in mass transport due to electro-deposition technology. Experimental tests were performed to study the influence of the operational parameters on the overall performance of the coated aluminum foams. The experimental findings revealed that the manufactured metal foams were characterized by a high thermal conductivity and low process costs, making these materials very promising in many technological fields. On the basis of the experimental results, analytical models are proposed to predict the quantity and the quality characteristics of the coating.
Is the Impact of Health Shocks Cushioned by Socioeconomic Status? the Case of Low Birthweight

This paper examines the long-term effects of low birthweight (LBW) on educational attainments, labor market outcomes, and health status using data from the National Child Development Study. The study has followed the cohort of children born in Great Britain during one week in 1958 through age 33. We pay particular attentionto possible interactions between LBS and socio-economic status (SES), asking to what extent the deleterious effects of LBW are mitigated by higher SES. We find that LBW has significant long-term effects on self-reported health status, educational attainments, and labor market outcomes. However, there is little evidence of variation in the effects of LBW by SES. An important exception is that high SES women of LBW are less likely to report that they are in poor or fair health than other LBW women.
Automatic extraction and assessment of entities from the Web

The search for information about entities, such as people or movies, plays an increasingly important role on the Web. This information is still scattered across many Web pages, making it more time consuming for a user to find all relevant information about an entity. This thesis describes techniques to extract entities and information about these entities from the Web, such as facts, opinions, questions and answers, interactive multimedia objects, and events. The findings of this thesis are that it is possible to create a large knowledge base automatically using a manually-crafted ontology. The precision of the extracted information was found to be between 75–90 % (facts and entities respectively) after using assessment algorithms. The algorithms from this thesis can be used to create such a knowledge base, which can be used in various research fields, such as question answering, named entity recognition, and information retrieval.
Cyber Victimization, Psychological Intimate Partner Violence, and Problematic Mental Health Outcomes Among First-Year College Students

Both cyber victimization and psychological intimate partner violence (IPV) have been associated with negative mental health outcomes among adolescents and young adults. The present study examined relations among cyber victimization, psychological IPV, and mental health outcomes (depressive symptoms, antisocial behavior) among first-year college students. Consistent with polyvictimization theory, we hypothesized that cyber victimization and psychological IPV would be related to each other. We also hypothesized that each would uniquely contribute to depressive symptoms and antisocial behavior, after accounting for the other. Participants (N = 342, M age = 18.33 years; 50% male) completed questionnaires during a single lab visit. Results indicated that cyber victimization and psychological IPV were related to each other, and both contributed uniquely to depressive symptoms, but only cyber victimization contributed uniquely to antisocial behavior. Exploratory analyses indicated that experiencing both cyber victimization and psychological IPV was necessary for increased depressive symptoms and antisocial behavior. This study is the first to establish a unique relation between cyber victimization and mental health problems, after accounting for psychological IPV. The findings also suggest a need to consider multiple forms of victimization when considering relations between specific types of victimization and mental health problems.
Convertible Bonds: Test of a Financial Signalling Model

This paper presents an empirical test of the Brennan Kraus (1987) hypothesis of convertible bond financing, according to which firms signal their volatility by their choice of terms of the convertible issue. With additional assumptions about the nature of investorsâ€™ prior beliefs about firm types the model predicts that the announcement period return will be positive related to the face value of the convertible, and negatively related to the fraction of the firm accruing to the convertible holders on conversion. The empirical evidence for a sample of public issues strongly supports these predictions, while that for a sample of private placements does not, which is consistent with problems of information asymmetry being important for the former but not for the latter.
Monetary integration and the French model: a case study in the eurozone

Whatever its successes and difficulties, monetary integration has caused significant changes in many, perhaps most, Eurozone societies. A review of EMU's origins and first years of EMU would thus be remiss without national case studies. France is a particularly good choice for this task. It has had complicated, passionate relationships with European integration. It has often taken the lead, worked to make the architecture of Europe conform to its desires and protested about the constraints that this new Europe placed on its national life. And nowhere have these contradictory outlooks been as clear as in European monetary integration and EMU.
[Effect of environmental factors on bacterial community in Lake Dongping sediment].

OBJECTIVE In order to investigate the effect of environmental factors on the bacterial composition of Lake Dongping sediment. METHODS We set six sampling points in Lake Dongping and sampled once in July and once October. Terminal Restriction Fragment Length Polymorphism (T-RFLP) method was used to analyze the bacterial diversity. Ammonium nitrogen (NH4(+)-N) , nitrate nitrogen (NO3(-)-N) , total nitrogen (TN), total phosphorus (TP), total organic carbon (TOC) and water depth were measured. RESULTS T-RFLP profiles showed high similarity among samples. However, bacterial diversity indices were significant difference in various samples. The richness, diversity, and evenness in samples which were collected in dry season (October) were generally higher than those in wet season (July), and the bacterial species dominance was higher in wet season than that in dry season. Principal Component Analysis showed that the structure of bacterial communities in sample 2B was marked different from the other samples. The results of Canonical Correspondence Analysis suggested that the abundance of 558 bp T-RF was negatively correlated with NH4(+)-N, NO3(-)-N, TN, TP and TOC, but positively correlated with TOC/TN and the water depth; the abundance of 64.5, 164, 509, and 543 bp T-RFs were positively correlated with NH4(+)-N, NO3(-)-N, TN, TOC, TOC/TN and the water depth. The dominant bacteria in Lake Dongping sediments were Firmicutes and Proteobacteria. CONCLUSION Environmental factors affect bacterial diversity of Lake Dongping sediments, although affect less on indigenous bacteria.
Contributing factors to long‐term citation count in marine and freshwater biology articles

Researchers have investigated factors thought to affect the total number of citations in various academic disciplines, and some general trends have emerged. However, there are still limited data for many fields, including aquatic sciences. Using papers published in 2003–2005 (n = 785), we investigated marine and freshwater biology articles to identify factors that may contribute to the probability of citation and for cumulative citation counts over 10 years. We found no relationships with probability of citation; however, we found evidence that for those that were cited at least once, cumulative citations were related to several factors. Articles cited by books received more citations than those never cited by books, which we hypothesized to be indicative of the impact an article may have in the field. We also found that articles first cited within 2 years of publication received more cumulative citations than those first cited after 2 years. We found no evidence that self‐citation (as the first citation) had a significant effect on total citations. Our findings were compared with previous studies in other disciplines, and it was found that aquatic science citation patterns are comparable to fields in science and technology but less so to humanities and social sciences.
Fewer thymic changes in MuSK antibody‐positive than in MuSK antibody‐negative MG

In generalized myasthenia gravis (MG) patients without detectable acetylcholine receptor (AChR) antibodies (SNMG), the thymus is often reported as “normally involuted. ” We analyzed thymic compartments in 67 patients with generalized MG, with AChR antibodies (AChR+, n = 23), with muscle‐specific kinase (MuSK) antibodies (MuSK+, n = 14) or with neither (MuSK−, n = 30), and in 11 non‐MG controls. Four of 14 MuSK+ thymi had rare small germinal centers, but overall they were not different from age‐matched controls. However, approximately 75% MuSK− samples showed lymph node–type infiltrates similar to those in AChR+ patients, but with fewer germinal centers. These variations may explain some apparent differences in responses to thymectomy in SNMG. Ann Neurol 2005;57:444–448
Compound Design by Fragment‐Linking

The linking together of two fragment compounds that bind to distinct protein sub‐sites can lead to a superadditivity of binding affinities, in which the binding free energy of the linked fragments exceeds the simple sum of the binding energies of individual fragments (linking coefficient E<1). However, a review of the literature shows that such events are relatively rare and, in the majority of the cases, linking coefficients are far from optimal being much greater than 1. It is critical to design a linker that does not disturb the original binding poses of each fragment in order to achieve successful linking. However, such an ideal linker is often difficult to design and even more difficult to actually synthesize. We suggest that the chance of achieving successful fragment linking can be significantly improved by choosing a fragment pair that consists of one fragment that binds by strong H‐bonds (or non‐classical equivalents) and a second fragment that is more tolerant of changes in binding mode (hydrophobic or vdW binders). We also propose that the fragment molecular orbital (FMO) calculations can be used to analyse the nature of the binding interactions of the fragment hits for the selection of fragments for evolution, merging and linking in order to optimize the chance of success.
Heterogeneity in a Monetary Union and its Impact on Welfare

Since 1999, 15 European countries have abandoned their national currency and autonomous monetary policy, and have joined the euro area. According to the Optimal Currency Areas (OCA) theory, it is more advantageous for regions to share the same currency area when there is a minimum level of synchronisation of economic cycles and integration of trade and labour markets. Despite the increased economic integration among euro area countries, these have shown persistent differentials. Benalal et al. (2006) show that since the beginning of the euro area the dispersion of economic growth across countries has not changed significantly, and remains at relatively low levels. Given that the level of synchronisation of economic cycles has also increased, these differences suggest the existence of structural differences among countries. A paper by the European Central Bank (ECB, 2003) on inflation differentials has concluded that these are partly caused by convergence processes, but also by other structural factors. Other papers point out of the existence of differences across countries in priceand wage-setting mechanisms (Dhyne et al., 2005; Dickens et al., 2006). Even in the case of common shocks, these structural differences across countries may have implications on monetary policy transmission mechanisms. Since monetary policy in the euro area is defined for the union as a whole, irrespective of country specificities or idiosyncratic shocks, what is the importance of heterogeneity at union level? In particular, what is the impact on welfare of individual economies and of the union as a whole?
Measuring Similarity and Ordering Based on Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Numbers

This paper extends a preference degree to rank interval type-2 fuzzy numbers. A general method to measure the similarity between interval type-2 fuzzy numbers is also introduced. Using some theorems and lemmas, it is proven that the extended similarity measures satisfy many common and desired properties based on the common axiomatic definitions introduced for similarity measures. The main properties of the extended preference degree are studied. In addition, several possible applications of the proposed methods are illustrated by some application examples in pattern recognition and multicriteria group decision making. Moreover, the proposed methods are examined in order to compare them with other existing methods, and the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methods are cleared via some lemmas and numerical comparisons.
Deficient cytokine expression and neutrophil oxidative burst contribute to impaired cutaneous wound healing in diabetic, biofilm‐containing chronic wounds

Diabetic patients exhibit dysregulated inflammatory and immune responses that predispose them to chronic wound infections and the threat of limb loss. The molecular underpinnings responsible for this have not been well elucidated, particularly in the setting of wound biofilms. This study evaluates host responses in biofilm‐impaired wounds using the TallyHo mouse, a clinically relevant polygenic model of type 2 diabetes. No differences in cytokine or Toll‐like receptor (TLR) expression were noted in unwounded skin or noninoculated wounds of diabetic and wild‐type mice. However, diabetic biofilm‐containing wounds had significantly less TLR 2, TLR 4, interleukin‐1β, and tumor necrosis factor‐α expression than wild‐type wounds with biofilm (all p < 0.001). Both groups had similar bacterial burden and neutrophil infiltration after development of biofilms at 3 days postwounding, but diabetic wounds had significantly less neutrophil oxidative burst activity. This translated into a log‐fold greater bacterial burden and significant delay of wound epithelization for biofilm‐impaired diabetic wounds at 10 days postwounding. These results suggest that impaired recognition of bacterial infection via the TLR pathway leading to inadequate cytokine stimulation of antimicrobial host responses may represent a potential mechanism underlying diabetic susceptibility to wound infection and ulceration.
Relational time series forecasting

Abstract Networks encode dependencies between entities (people, computers, proteins) and allow us to study phenomena across social, technological, and biological domains. These networks naturally evolve over time by the addition, deletion, and changing of links, nodes, and attributes. Despite the importance of modeling these dynamics, existing work in relational machine learning has ignored relational time series data. Relational time series learning lies at the intersection of traditional time series analysis and statistical relational learning, and bridges the gap between these two fundamentally important problems. This paper formulates the relational time series learning problem, and a general framework and taxonomy for representation discovery tasks of both nodes and links including predicting their existence, label, and weight (importance), as well as systematically constructing features. We also reinterpret the prediction task leading to the proposal of two important relational time series forecasting tasks consisting of (i) relational time series classification (predicts a future class or label of an entity), and (ii) relational time series regression (predicts a future real-valued attribute or weight). Relational time series models are designed to leverage both relational and temporal dependencies to minimize forecasting error for both relational time series classification and regression. Finally, we discuss challenges and open problems that remain to be addressed.
A Knowledge Perspective on Big Data by Joining Enterprise Modeling and Data Analyses

In this paper we discuss how knowledge management can contribute to the analysis of big data by joining enterprise modeling methods with data analyses. The goal of this approach is to enable the seamless interaction and exchange of information between knowledge-oriented representations as provided by enterprise modeling on the one hand and methods for analyzing data on the other hand. For the realization of the approach we revert to techniques of metamodeling. These permit to describe the necessary extensions of enterprise modeling methods and implement them as IT-based tools using metamodeling platforms. For evaluating the feasibility of our approach we describe a generic implementation using the ADOxx metamodeling platform and the R toolkit. In addition, we discuss the application to a use case from the area of business process improvement and the according implementation within the ADOxx-based RUPERT tool.
The Effectiveness of a Training Program for the Self-Evaluated Job Performance of Cultural Tourism Interpreters

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of participation in a training program for cultural tourism interpreters. Results from this study revealed that there are significant differences of three of the interpreters’ job-related variables between before and after participation in the cultural tourism interpreters’ training program. However, there is not a significant difference of job involvement between before and after the program. Some program content significantly impacted on three of the interpreters’ job-related variables. Future studies are necessary to explain the relationships between the interpreters’ training program content and interpreters’ job-related variables from longitudinal perspectives. Additionally, the relationships should be examined by other samples to show the diverse experiences of the participants to the planners of cultural tourism interpreters’ training programs.
Diversification benefits in trading?

This study argues that there may exist benefits in active portfolio management and trading other than the possibility of obtaining excess returns. The objective is not to attack the hypothesis that trading cannot produce (risk-adjusted) returns that are superior to passive investment strategies. What is suggested is that the combination of active and passive strategies can help considerably in diversifying investment positions. An empirical application using large samples of daily data on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) and the Financial Times Institute of Actuaries 30 (FT30) indexes shows that simple market timing techniques, such as those used by Brock et al. (Journal of Finance, 47, 1731–64, 1992), Mills (International Journal of Finance and Economics, 2, 319–31, 1997) and Markellos (Applied Economics Letters, 6, 177–79, 1999), can be combined with buy-and-hold strategies to match the market return at a fraction of market risk. In accordance with the studies by Mills and Markellos, it is found that the behaviour of the data appears to have changed in recent years.
Characterization of the NifA-RpoN Regulon in Rhizobium etli in Free Life and in Symbiosis with Phaseolus vulgaris

ABSTRACT The NifA-RpoN complex is a master regulator of the nitrogen fixation genes in alphaproteobacteria. Based on the complete Rhizobium etli genome sequence, we constructed an R. etli CFN42 oligonucleotide (70-mer) microarray and utilized this tool, reverse transcription (RT)-PCR analysis (transcriptomics), proteomics, and bioinformatics to decipher the NifA-RpoN regulon under microaerobic conditions (free life) and in symbiosis with bean plants. The R. etli NifA-RpoN regulon was determined to contain 78 genes, including the genes involved in nitrogen fixation, and the analyses revealed 42 new NifA-RpoN-dependent genes. More importantly, this study demonstrated that the NifA-RpoN regulon is composed of genes and proteins that have very diverse functions, that play fundamental and previously less appreciated roles in regulating the normal physiology of the cell, and that have important functions in providing adequate conditions for efficient nitrogen fixation in symbiosis. The R. etli NifA-RpoN regulon defined here has some components in common with other NifA-RpoN regulons described previously, but the vast majority of the components have been found only in the R. etli regulon, suggesting that they have a specific role in this bacterium and particular requirements during nitrogen fixation compared with other symbiotic bacterial models.
Cdk and the anillin homolog Bud4 define a new pathway regulating septin organization in yeast

In budding yeast, the cortical structure formed by the septins is remodeled at the onset of mitotic exit and delineates a specialized compartment dedicated to cytokinesis. How this septin function is spatially and timely regulated remains poorly understood. In this study, we report a role of the anillin-like protein Bud4 in the formation and the disassembly of the double ring structure formed by the septins at the time of cytokinesis. Bud4 acts with Bud3 in this pathway and in parallel with septin phosphorylation by the p21-activated kinase Cla4 and the septin-dependent kinase Gin4. In addition, we show that the function of Bud4 is regulated by the cyclin-dependent protein kinase Cdk1, the master regulator of cell cycle progression. This result suggests that the Cdks, or a locally specific pool of the kinase, may have a role past mitotic exit.
A note on productivity change in French and Italian seaports

This paper proposes a framework for benchmarking French and Italian seaports and the rationalisation of their operational activities. The analysis is based on the Luenberger productivity indicator. The main benefit of our method is to allow for both input contraction and output expansion, in determining relative efficiencies and productivity changes. Benchmarks are provided for improving the operations of those seaports, which perform worse than others. Several interesting and useful managerial insights and implications arise from the study. Following this approach, the benchmarking of multi-country seaports gives a different picture than the one which is obtained from a single country.