Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Cessation of rapid late endosomal tubulovesicular trafficking in Niemann–Pick type C1 disease

Niemann–Pick type C1 (NPC1) disease results from a defect in the NPC1 protein and is characterized by a pathological accumulation of cholesterol and glycolipids in endocytic organelles. We followed the biosynthesis and trafficking of NPC1 with the use of a functional green fluorescent protein-fused NPC1. Newly synthesized NPC1 is exported from the endoplasmic reticulum and requires transit through the Golgi before it is targeted to late endosomes. NPC1-containing late endosomes then move by a dynamic process involving tubulation and fission, followed by rapid retrograde and anterograde migration along microtubules. Cell fusion studies with normal and mutant NPC1 cells show that exchange of contents between late endosomes and lysosomes depends upon ongoing tubulovesicular late endocytic trafficking. In turn, rapid endosomal tubular movement requires an intact NPC1 sterol-sensing domain and is retarded by an elevated endosomal cholesterol content. We conclude that the neuropathology and cellular lysosomal lipid accumulation in NPC1 disease results, at least in part, from striking defects in late endosomal tubulovesicular trafficking.
Cloud computing as a facilitator of SME entrepreneurship

The rapid adoption of Cloud-based information and communication technology (ICT) services reflects a Schumpeterian creative destruction scenario [Schumpeter, J. A. 1942. Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row], as they increasingly supplant traditional in-house ICT capital investment models [Ross, P. K. , and M. Blumenstein. 2012. Leveraging the Opportunities of the Cloud: The Impact of Cloud Computing Strategies on Organisational Structures, Management Practices and ICT Worker Skill Sets in Queensland Private and Public Sector Organisations. Brisbane: Griffith University and the Department of Science, Information, Technology, Innovation and the Arts (SITIA)]. This research examines how Cloud technologies facilitate the development of internationally orientated small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) entrepreneurship by providing greater access to global markets, lowering opportunity costs and supporting collaboration and innovation in an increasingly connected world. The Cloud computing paradigm also brings associated threats for SMEs, including potential challenges in adapting to Cloud-based and supported business models and increased competition from globally based competitors. Therefore, while Cloud technologies offer a potential boon to SME entrepreneurship, they may also usher in a period of rationalisation, as some firms will inevitably fail to successfully adapt to a globally competitive Cloud environment.
The Role and Impact of Private Schools in Developing Countries: A response to the DFID-commissioned "Rigorous Literature Review"

We are grateful to the “Private Schools Rigorous Review Team” (henceforth “Team”) for their reply to Tooley and Longfield, (2015), itself a response to the Team’s DFID-commissioned “Rigorous Review” (Day Ashley et al., 2014). In our Rejoinder we have confined our remark to three areas. First, we are pleased that the Team acknowledges it made eight of the errors and misrepresentations we highlighted in our Response (section 1). However we are disappointed they did not address more of the errors/misrepresentations we had pointed out. Second, we are also disappointed that the Team forbids our reformulation of two (out of 17) of their assumptions (section 2), even though it turns out that others had been allowed to make changes earlier. Third, we also question the way in which the Team has tried to reduce the impact of some of the studies included in the research sample, now that they seem to point in favour of private schools (section 3).
Child Mortality in Developing Countries: Challenges and Policy Options

The objective of this study is to understand determinants of mortality rates of children under the age of five years in developing countries. The study uses secondary data to investigate the relationship between underfive mortality rates and such socioeconomic variables as fertility, literacy, immunization, access to clean drinking water, HIV/AIDS prevalence, and human and material resources using linear regression analysis. Results show that while most of these variables have a significant relationship with under-five mortality rate, the proportion of doctors for every 100,000 population, and health expenditure per capita have an insignificant predictive value. Conclusion: Reducing child mortality rates requires multiple intervention strategies, such as access to safe drinking water, improvement in education opportunities, family planning, and tackling HIV/AIDS.
Basic concepts in the use of thoracic and lung ultrasound

Purpose of review Recent advances were made in the field of point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS). Thoracic and lung ultrasound have become a rapid and accurate method of diagnosis of hypoxic diseases. The purpose of this article is to review the recent literature on POCUS, emphasizing on its use in the operating room. Recent findings Many international critical care societies published guidelines on the use of ultrasound in the installation of central venous access. More recently, evidenced-based guidelines on the use of POC lung ultrasound were published. Lung ultrasound has shown its superiority over conventional chest radiography in the diagnosis of many disorders of significant importance in anesthesiology, particularly the pneumothorax. Summary POC thoracic and lung ultrasound is used in many critical medicine fields. The aim of this review is to describe the basic lung ultrasound technique and the knowledge required in order to diagnose and treat the hypoxic patient. Emphasis is on disorder such as pleural effusion, alveolar interstitial disease, as well as pneumothorax, which is of particular importance in the field of anesthesiology.
Price Dynamics and Consumer Learning

This paper studies the price dynamics induced by strategic firm behaviour in the presence of consumer learning about the uncertain quality differential of the products offered by a duopoly. It is found that consumers learn slowly and also that prices converge slowly to full-information levels. A consequence is that the incentives of firms to manipulate consumers’ beliefs are relatively persistent. Although pricing tends to be aggressive at the early stages, and average prices eventually increase over time, price wars may occur at intermediate stages of the product life-cycle.
Do Environmental Regulations Cost Jobs? An Industry-Level Analysis of the UK

Abstract This paper revisits the 'jobs versus the environment' debate and provides the first analysis for a country other than the US. We firstly examine the impact of environmental regulations on employment assuming such regulations are exogenous. However, for the first time in a study of this nature, we then allow environmental regulation costs and employment to be endogenously determined. Environmental regulation costs are not found to have a statistically significant effect on employment whether such costs are treated as being exogenous or endogenous. We therefore find no evidence of a trade-off between jobs and the environment.
Clinical application of 201Tl SPECT imaging of brain tumors.

UNLABELLED This study investigated the clinical usefulness of evaluating the histologic grade of brain tumors by 201Tl SPECT brain imaging. METHODS Early and delayed SPECT brain images were obtained about 10 min and 3 h, respectively, after intravenous injection of 111MBq (3 mCi) 201Tl in 9 healthy subjects (control subjects), 3 patients with brain hematomas, and 41 patients with brain tumors. Semiquantitative data were obtained for early and delayed 201Tl uptake indices and 201Tl retained index in all patients and healthy subjects. RESULTS In 9 healthy subjects, there was little radioactivity in brain substance. In all patients with brain hematomas or tumors, a high tracer uptake was visible in lesions on early images, but the radioactivity in lesions varied with the histologic nature of the lesion on delayed images. The radioactivity decreased remarkably in brain hematomas (average retained index, 0.61 +/- 0.04). The radioactivity was stable or decreased slightly in benign or low-grade tumors (average retained index, 0.96 +/- 0.24). The radioactivity was increased in high-grade or metastatic tumors (average retained index, 1.26 +/- 0.28). CONCLUSION This study indicates that 201Tl brain SPECT early and delayed imaging is very useful in brain tumor localization, in distinguishing low-grade from high-grade brain tumors, in predicting histologic grades of brain tumors, and in detecting residual or recurrence of brain tumors postoperatively. 201Tl brain SPECT may also offer the most accurate assessment of response to therapy.
Swimming Skill and Stroking Characteristics of Front Crawl Swimmers

The performance over a 368-meter swim, VO2max, stroke pulling pattern and anthropometric data of nine male competitive freestylers were studied to identify aspects of swimming techniques which allow a swimmer to be "more skilled" than another. Performance was mainly related to VOmax, r = 0.80, the incorporation of the hydrostatic lift increased the correlation coefficient to 0.87 at the second stepwise regression. The real performance was compared to the theoretical performance obtained from the results of the stepwise regression. The group of four swimmers whose real performance was higher than that calculated by the regression equation was considered "skilled", when compared to the other group ("less skilled"). "Skilled" swimmers were characterized by a higher stroke frequency and superposition of both arm actions, a shorter stroke length, downsweep phase and longer upsweep phase. Those two phases were linked together, r = -0.88, p less than 0.01, but not related to stroke rate. Entry phase and depth of stroke pattern were related to hydrostatic lift, r = -0.80 and 0.77, respectively, p less than 0.01. However, there was no relationship between stroke length and anthropometric data.
Skill Gaps, Skill Shortages and Skill Mismatches: Evidence for the Us

Concerns that there are problems with the supply of skills, especially education-related skills, in the US labor force have exploded in recent years with a series of reports from employer-associated organizations but also from independent and even government sources making similar claims. These complaints about skills are driving much of the debate around labor force and education policy, yet they have not been examined carefully. The discussion below examines the range of these charges as well as other evidence about skills in the labor force. There is very little evidence consistent with the complaints about skills and a wide range of evidence suggesting that they are not true. Indeed, a reasonable conclusion is that over-education remains the persistent and even growing situation of the US labor force with respect to skills. I consider three possible explanations for the employer complaints as well as the implications associated with those changes.
LoGA: low-overhead GPU accounting using events

Over the last few years, GPUs have become common in computing. However, current GPUs are not designed for a shared environment like a cloud, creating a number of challenges whenever a GPU must be multiplexed between multiple users. In particular, the round-robin scheduling used by today's GPUs does not distribute the available GPU computation time fairly among applications. Most of the previous work addressing this problem resorted to scheduling all GPU computation in software, which induces high overhead. While there is a GPU scheduler called NEON which reduces the scheduling overhead compared to previous work, NEON's accounting mechanism frequently disables GPU access for all but one application, resulting in considerable overhead if that application does not saturate the GPU by itself. In this paper, we present LoGA, a novel accounting mechanism for GPU computation time. LoGA monitors the GPU's state to detect GPU-internal context switches, and infers the amount of GPU computation time consumed by each process from the time between these context switches. This method allows LoGA to measure GPU computation time consumed by applications while keeping all applications running concurrently. As a result, LoGA achieves a lower accounting overhead than previous work, especially for applications that do not saturate the GPU by themselves. We have developed a prototype which combines LoGA with the pre-existing NEON scheduler. Experiments with that prototype have shown that LoGA induces no accounting overhead while still delivering accurate measurements of applications' consumed GPU computation time.
eAssessment: Trends in content reuse and standardization

eAssessment saves human work by automating presentation and marking, but also enables new forms of testing of interest for engineering education. Authoring reliable, high quality assessment content is a difficult and costly task. Public content repositories populated with stand-alone items of assessment content enable authors and teachers to set up an exam by selection and ordering, with little additional effort. Reusable, shareable assessment objects require conformance to standards of packaging and transportability. After revising eAssessment tools and content creation standards, this article identifies some popular learning platforms, authoring tools and public repositories, and verifies their standards compliance. Most popular learning platforms support packaging standards, but not assessment content transportability. Though some outstanding examples exist, there is a need for more public objects repositories and a deeper engagement in standards compliance. Government agencies and educational organizations have a role to play as the most powerful driving forces towards standards adoption for reusable content creation and sharing. Research in tools to aid education practitioners will be always valued, and can be carried on with rough consensus and small funding.
Galanin in the normal human pituitary and brain and in pituitary adenomas.

Galanin-like immunoreactivity (IR) was measured by radioimmunoassay in extracts of non-tumorous and tumorous human pituitaries and in multiple sites in the human brain. Galanin-IR was present in considerable quantities in the non-tumorous pituitaries (21.4 +/- 1.2 pmol/g wet weight; mean +/- S.E.M., n = 30). In 25 pituitary tumours, galanin-IR was detectable in extracts of only nine, with a mean concentration of 11.5 +/- 4.4 pmol/g. Galanin-IR was undetectable in the remaining 16. Of ten brain sites, galanin-IR was detected only in the hypothalamus, where the concentration was 9.1 +/- 1.8 pmol/g (n = 5). On fast protein liquid chromatography of the non-tumorous pituitary extracts, galanin-IR mostly eluted in a peak with a retention time similar to that of synthetic porcine galanin. On gel permeation chromatography, galanin-IR eluted as a peak with an elution coefficient (Kav) of 0.72, also similar to that of porcine galanin, with additional preceding (Kav 0.62) and following (Kav 0.77) peaks of galanin-IR. These results show that healthy human pituitary and hypothalamus contain substantial amounts of galanin, whereas it is present in variable amounts or not at all in pituitary tumours. Chromatographic analysis suggests that pituitary galanin is present in three molecular forms, with the majority corresponding to synthetic porcine galanin.
Environmental changes and violent conflict

This letter reviews the scientific literature on whether and how environmental changes affect the risk of violent conflict. The available evidence from qualitative case studies indicates that environmental stress can contribute to violent conflict in some specific cases. Results from quantitative large-N studies, however, strongly suggest that we should be careful in drawing general conclusions. Those large-N studies that we regard as the most sophisticated ones obtain results that are not robust to alternative model specifications and, thus, have been debated. This suggests that environmental changes may, under specific circumstances, increase the risk of violent conflict, but not necessarily in a systematic way and unconditionally. Hence there is, to date, no scientific consensus on the impact of environmental changes on violent conflict. This letter also highlights the most important challenges for further research on the subject. One of the key issues is that the effects of environmental changes on violent conflict are likely to be contingent on a set of economic and political conditions that determine adaptation capacity. In the authors’ view, the most important indirect effects are likely to lead from environmental changes via economic performance and migration to violent conflict.
Effects of inter- and intra-observer variability on echocardiographic measurements in awake cats.

The objective of this study was to determine intra- and inter-observer variability of echocardiographic measurements in awake cats. Four observers with different levels of experience in echocardiography performed 96 echocardiographic examinations in four cats on four different days over a 3-week period. The examinations were randomized and blinded. The maximum within-day and between-day CV values were 17.4 and 18.5% for inter-ventricular septal thickness in diastole, 18.7 and 22.6% for left ventricular free-wall thickness in diastole, 9.8 and 14.9% for left ventricular end-diastolic diameter, 20.8 and 15.2% for left ventricular end-systolic diameter, and 21.2 and 18.4% for left ventricular shortening fraction. The maximum within-day CV values were most often associated with the least competent observer (i.e. the graduate student) and, the minimum CV values with the most competent observer (i.e. the associate professor in cardiology). A significant interaction between cat and observer was also evidenced. Thus, the most competent observer could not be replaced by any of the other observers.
Processing Technology, Market Power and Price Transmission

This paper focuses on the extent to which price changes occurring at the farm‐level are transmitted to the retail sector. A price transmission elasticity is derived which is shown to depend on the degree of market power in the food industry and the nature of the food industry's processing technology. The offsetting role of the processing technology and market power in determining the extent of price transmission are highlighted. A case‐study reports values for the price transmission elasticity for the US beef and pork sectors.
Strategic Responses to Global Climate Change: Conflicting Pressures on Multinationals in the Oil Industry

MNCs are increasingly facing global environmental issues demanding coordinated market and non-market strategic responses. The home country institutional context and individual company histories can create divergent pressures on strategy for MNCs based in different countries; however, the location of MNCs in global industries and their participation in ‘global issues arenas’ create issue-level fields within which strategic convergence might also be expected. This paper analyzes the responses of oil MNCs to climate change and finds that local context influenced initial corporate reactions, but that convergent pressures predominate as the issue matures.
Private Interhousehold Transfers of Money and Time: New Empirical Evidence

There is a growing awareness that it is important to understand patterns of family assistance; however, there is still a great deal of information about private transfers that is not known. This study begins to fill this void by presenting results from a new survey and integrating these findings with evidence from recent studies that use other new data sets. It is found that: (1) a large share of households participate in private transfer networks, (2) a greater amount of financial assistance is provided to lower income family members, (3) altruism does not fully explain transfer behavior, and (4) people in their 20s and 30s receive more assistance than people of other ages, even the very old. Copyright 1997 by The International Association for Research in Income and Wealth.
Does Experience Teach? Professionals and Minimax Play in the Lab

Does expertise in strategic behavior obtained in the field transfer to the abstract setting of the laboratory? Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2008) argued that the behavior of professional soccer players in mixed-strategy games conforms closely to minimax play, while the behavior of students (who are presumably novices in strategic situations requiring unpredictability) does not. We reexamine their data, showing that the play of professionals is inconsistent with the minimax hypothesis in several respects: (i) professionals follow nonstationary mixtures, with action frequencies that are negatively correlated between the first and the second half of the experiment, (ii) professionals tend to switch between under- and overplaying an action relative to its equilibrium frequency, and (iii) the distribution of action frequencies across professionals is far from the distribution implied by minimax. In each respect, the behavior of students conforms more closely to the minimax hypothesis. Copyright 2010 The Econometric Society.
Spatial and non-spatial attention deficits in neurodegenerative diseases: assessment based on Bundesen's theory of visual attention (TVA).

PURPOSE The aim was to present evidence that, similarly as in neglect, a combined pattern of spatial and non-spatial deficits of visual attention can also be typically observed in patients suffering from neurodegenerative disorders. METHOD Whole and partial report of brief letter arrays, based on Bundesen's 'theory of visual attention' (TVA), was applied in patients suffering from Huntington's disease (HD), mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or Alzheimer's disease (AD). TVA-based parameter estimates were derived reflecting (a) perceptual processing speed and visual working memory storage capacity as non-spatial aspects of visual attention (determined by whole report performance), and (b) spatial attentional weighting (determined by partial report performance). RESULTS Processing speed was severely slowed in HD, and also reduced, although to a lesser degree, in MCI and AD patients. In HD and AD patients, but not in MCI patients, a strong leftward bias of spatial attention was observed. CONCLUSION Neglect and neurodegenerative diseases both involve a similar constellation of non-spatial and spatial deficits of visual attention. Therefore, by using TVA-based measurement, results from both fields of research may fruitfully inform each other in future studies, thus improving our understanding of the interaction of spatial and non-spatial attention deficits and its behavioral consequences.