Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Sex influences in neurological disorders: case studies and perspectives

Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, scientists and the public alike recognized that, for too long, women had been underrepresented in clinical trials. While much progress was made in the following decades, preclinical research still often ignores sex as a fundamental biological variable. Many neurological disorders, including multiple sclerosis and migraine, show strong sex differences in incidence and disease manifestation. In this commentary, we highlight case studies of neurological disorders affecting men and women to demonstrate the need for more such studies. Research conducted in these areas so far has shed light on the underlying mechanisms of the disease and offers the promise to help develop more personalized treatments for both men and women.
The Other January Effect

"Streetlore" has touted the market return in January as a predictor of market returns for the remainder of the year since at least 1973. We systematically examine the predictive power of January returns over the period 1940-2003 and find that January returns have predictive power for market returns over the next 11 months of the year. The effect persists after controlling for macroeconomic/business cycle variables that have been shown to predict stock returns, the Presidential Cycle in returns, and investor sentiment and persists among both large and small capitalization stocks and among both value and glamour stocks. Additionally, we find that January has predictive power for two of the three premiums in the Fama-French (1993) three-factor model of asset pricing.
European Environmental Policy by Stealth: The Dysfunctionality of Functionalism?

There are four paradoxes to be explained in respect of European Union (EU) environmental policy: how it is that a liberal policy regime makes relatively little use of economic instruments; how it is that the formally independent Commission is heavily dependent upon member states in the development of its policy proposals; how it is that a ‘weak’ European Parliament has had greater influence on environmental standard setting than have most national parliaments; and how it is that a supranational political authority regulates subnational environmental public goods so extensively. The author argues that these four features of EU environmental policy are related to one another as the effects of a common cause: the historical importance of the Monnet method of European integration. How far this method should be transcended is also discussed.
Realization of a quantum standard for AC voltage: overview of a European research project

The European Josephson arbitrary waveform synthesizer (JAWS) project addresses the lack of instrumentation and knowledge for accurate and traceable measurement and generation of alternating (AC) voltage with arbitrary waveforms. The objective is to develop a standard based on a JAWS, a precise instrument that links the generated voltage to the Josephson effect, which in turn relates voltage to fundamental constants and frequency. The standard aims at synthesized voltages up to 10 mV, frequencies up to 10 kHz and uncertainty smaller than 100 /spl mu/V/V as a first step. This paper reports on the progress in developing the key components for JAWS.
Re‐thinking TQM: toward a framework for facilitating learning and change in construction organizations

Organizations in the construction industry have eschewed implementing TQM practices because short‐term benefits are relatively minimal. As a result, re‐engineering has emerged as an alternative to change. Albeit re‐engineering seeks radical performance improvements, the path to its implementation is incremental. Therefore, organizational change should be viewed as a continuous process rather than a static or “one‐off” event. Before construction organizations consider implementing re‐engineering initiatives, they should re‐address their existing approaches to quality, so that an adaptive learning TQM culture can be cultivated. In striving for this ambition and based on a review and synthesis of the literature, a framework for facilitating organizational learning and change in construction organizations is presented.
Effects of Industrial Merger on Productivity and Profitability: A Review

It is now widely recognised that entrepreneurship is not necessarily an individual-centric response to profitable opportunities or synonymous with business start-ups. Corporations or established firms, too, can play an entrepreneurial role. Merger is one means through which two ormore firms can augment their business power, add to their product lines, expand their market reach and achieve various economies of scale. This paper critically reviews the existing literature on the effects of industrial merger and concludes that they are not easy to measure precisely.
Towards an impact study of electric vehicles on the Italian electric power system using simulation techniques

The transportation sector is greatly responsible for air pollution. Therefore, electric vehicles can play an important role in the near future in order to improve the air quality in cities and metropolitan areas. In general, we cannot assume that the electricity for charging batteries is only generated by renewable energy sources. For this reason, the aim of this work is to present the development of electric vehicle penetration and the very first steps towards an impact study of electric vehicles on the Italian electric power system. We introduce a simulation model for electric vehicles and power grid systems.
Exchange Market Pressures During the Financial Crisis: A Bayesian Model Averaging Evidence

In this paper, we examine whether pre-crisis leading indicators help explain pressures on the exchange rate (and its volatility) during the global financial crisis. We use a unique data set that covers 149 countries and 58 indicators, and estimation techniques that are robust to model uncertainty. Our results are threefold: First and foremost, we find that price stability plays a pivotal role as a determinant of exchange rate pressures. More specifically, the currencies of countries that experienced higher inflation prior to the crisis tend to be more affected in times of stress. Second, we investigate potential effects that vary with the level of pre-crisis inflation. In this vein, our results reveal that domestic savings reduce the severity of pressures in countries that experienced a low-infation environment prior to the crisis. Finally, we find evidence of the mitigating effects of international reserves on the volatility of exchange rate pressures.
What Makes Community Forest Management Successful: A Meta-Study From Community Forests Throughout the World

ABSTRACT Thirty-one articles on community forestry, encompassing 69 case studies worldwide, were reviewed for systematic data synthesis and hypothesis testing. The meta-study identifies 43 independent variables ranging from internal attributes of the community and resources to external factors. Variables with significant influence on the success of community forestry are tenure security, clear ownership, congruence between biophysical and socioeconomic boundaries of the resources, effective enforcement of rules and regulations, monitoring, sanctioning, strong leadership with capable local organization, expectation of benefits, common interests among community members, and local authority. These variables illustrate community–forest relationships, community ability to organize and continue collective activities, and protection of benefits, rights, and responsibilities in common resource management.
Conflicts of interest chief compliance officers face in implementing compliance programs for investment funds and investment advisers

Purpose – This paper aims to discuss some of the more significant conflicts that a chief compliance officer (“CCO”) may face in implementing a compliance program and to offer suggestions intended to reduce the conflicts and strengthen the advisory firm's compliance program.Design/methodology/approach – Discusses the CCO's degree of independence from the financial adviser, identifies the areas where conflicts of interest most frequently arise, and provides advice on managing potential conflicts.Findings – Potential conflict‐of‐interest problem areas include security valuation, trade allocations, affiliated transactions between the firm and its clients or among the firm's clients, soft dollar transactions, investment performance reporting, and personal trading activities of investment personnel. The CCO should work with the advisory firm's senior management to identify potential violations of the firm's compliance program and establish disciplinary actions as well as escalation procedures for compliance vio.
Current role of chimneys and sandwich grafts in complex aneurysm repair

Parallel grafts are an emerging alternative to open surgery in complex aneurysm repair. In most cases up until now custom-made devices can be used in many instances yet are associated with considerable manufacturing times and costs. Chimney techniques can offer an off-the-shelf solution. We distinguish between plain chimney grafts to maintain perfusion of side branches like the renal arteries and more complex repair techniques to treat thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms with sandwich grafts. Indications and different deployment techniques of various configurations, such as periscope grafts, are described. Chimney grafts can either be used as a bailout after accidental covering of a renal artery, or as a side branch running in parallel to an aortic graft. Midterm results and multicenter studies are discussed in the manuscript. Sandwich grafts offer a readily available solution in thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms. Here the branches and the gutters are between two aortic stent grafts rather than between the .
Job Search and Determinants of Job Search Intensity in Turkey

There are a few numbers of studies on job search behavior of unemployed individuals in the developing countries. The aim of this paper is to examine those factors which have an effect on the job-search intensity of Turkish unemployed job seekers. For this purpose we use the data on individual job seekers obtained from the Household Labor Force Surveys of 2000 and 2001. We examine the effects of personal, household and labor market characteristics on the job search intensity. The analyses are carried out for the full data as well as by considering gender and residence dimension. According to our general results, urban residents are more likely to search more intensively than rural residents. It is also observed that females search less intensively than males. Increases in education level seem to increase the job search intensity. There is an inverse-U shaped relation between age and job search intensity. While living in the most developed regions of Turkey, i.e. Marmara and Aegean increase the intensity of job search, living in the least developed regions of East and South-East Anatolia decline the job search intensity. Increases in unemployment rate increase the job search intensity, but increases in the level of GDP declines the job search intensity. Further, there is an inverse-U shaped relation between population density and job-search intensity.
Efficient Utilization of Resources in Manufacturing Firms

This study describes the optimality in resource utilization of the manufacturing firms in the south-west region of Bangladesh. A translog production function has been estimated to describe the input-output relationship. The large scale firms have the opportunity to substitute capital for labour for producing the same level of output. On the other hand, scarcity in capital leads to lower productivity of labour in medium and small firms. Therefore, an increase in capital may lead to an increase in labour productivity as well as output for these small and medium firms. The productive labour force may ensure proper utilization of the capital resources as well as the long run growth.
Character Education in Portugal

Around the world, children who can exercise their right to attend school spend a significant part of their lives within the education environment. Therefore, schools have a great deal of influence on children's development beyond the academic realm. Given this accessibility to children, schools have opportunities to help children develop positive character traits. Each community must determine what role schools will play in providing character education and what content would be delivered through character education programs. This article explores these issues associated with character education within Portugal, including who should be responsible for providing character education and how it can best be transmitted.
Reshaping Druze Particularism in Israel

In order to suppress Arab and Palestinian national sentiments among the Druzes, Israeli policymakers have systematically tried to reshape Druze traditional particularism since 1948 into a Druze identity that is part reconstruction, part invention. In so doing, Israeli government officials, with the help of a coopted Druze elite, are practicing a policy seeking to politicize Druze communal and sectarian dimensions while depoliticizing their noncommunal and national dimensions. This paper, based largely on Israeli archival material, documents some of the political, social, and economic factors that have led to the "success" of these policies.
The Net Benefits to Leverage

I estimate the market's valuation of the net benefits to leverage using panel data from 1994 to 2004, identified from market values and betas of a company's debt and equity. The median firm captures net benefits of up to 5.5% of firm value. Small and profitable firms have high optimal leverage ratios, as predicted by theory, but in contrast to existing empirical evidence. Companies are on average slightly underlevered relative to the optimal leverage ratio at refinancing. This result is mainly due to zero leverage firms. I also look at implications for financial policy.
Getting to Know You: Trust Formation in New Interfirm Relationships and the Consequences for Investments in Management Control and the Collaboration

Trust is often posited to substitute for management control in interfirm transactions. However, this raises questions of how trust arises in new relationships, and whether trust that is not based on prior experience transacting together is sufficient to persuade managers to forego investments in management controls. We use experimental methods to test whether two features of the early stage of an interfirm relationship influence a buyer’s initial trust in a supplier and have consequences for subsequent investments in management controls and in the collaboration. These two features are the autonomy of the buyer’s manager to choose a supplier (i.e., delegation of decision-making authority) and the supplier’s willingness to share information with the buyer. We find that the buyer manager’s initial trust in the supplier is associated positively with both the autonomy to choose the supplier and the supplier’s willingness to share information. Information content and supplier characteristics are held constant, so these results are novel and distinct from prior studies of the antecedents of trust. We find that higher initial trust is associated with reduced expenditures for management controls and increased investments in the collaboration. Thus, we conclude that delegation of decision-making authority and supplier information-sharing behavior in the early stages of a relationship influence the formation of initial trust, which has real consequences for investments in management control and in the collaboration.
Commentary: A Framework for Managing the Familiness and Agency Advantages in Family Firms

This article uses a family–influenced, international, new venture creation case as a platform for addressing the importance of context when exploring entrepreneurship in start–up and growth companies. I raise crucial issues about how agency relationships and costs are evaluated in family firms, arguing that the competitiveness implications of agency can only be fully assessed in light of the larger context considerations. I suggest that agency is best evaluated as inputs and outputs in a contextual ecosystem. I utilize a family business ecosystems model to show that family is a distinct context for entrepreneurship and that it generates an idiosyncratic bundle of resources and capabilities that provide a potential agency advantage in new venture creation. Since the case findings indicate that the agency inputs and outputs change over time, I conclude by placing the potential agency advantages and constraints into an organizational life cycle framework. The goal of the article is to further the discussion on how families find their advantage in the entrepreneurial process.
Public Sector Reforms in Fiji: Examining Policy Implementation Setting and Administrative Culture

For many years, public management reform has been an evolving concept. New Public Management (NPM) and Good Governance have been the two ground–breaking ideas, generating colossal discourse over the past three decades. Inspired by NPM-led policy changes in the developed world, many developing countries have lately joined the reform bandwagon but achieved limited success. Policy analysts observe that the policy planners in the developing world seem to have spent more resources in policymaking than addressing the policy implementation challenges. Also, the policy transfer effort ignored the issue of administrative culture. Focusing on Fiji, this article examines how the country's recent public sector reform initiatives have largely failed to bring about expected results. Based on the case studies of two organizations, it explains that the success and failure of policy change occurs in several ways, manifesting multiple challenges including a lack of well-prepared implementation framework and culture change.
Changing job roles in the Norwegian and UK fitness industry: in search of national institutional effects

There has been considerable debate about the impact of different national institutional environments on work organization. The Nordic countries, with their strong trade unions and well developed systems of social partnership around collective bargaining and vocational education and training, are found to be particularly advanced when it comes to developing more autonomous job roles. While institutions are said to play a key role, some commentators point to the existence of national employment ‘logics’ which may have a more far-reaching influence. Drawing upon qualitative research, the article compares the job of fitness instructor in Norway and the UK. The study finds little evidence of a clear country-level difference in job design, suggesting that if there is a national employment ‘logic’ it has been overwhelmed by specific industry dynamics.
EXPIRATION DATES AND STIGMA: WHY DON’T WE OBSERVE HEDONIC MARKETS FOR PERISHABLE PRODUCTS?

Consumers indicate on surveys that price and freshness are important to their purchase decisions. If this is true, then why don’t retailers sell milk differentiated by the date it was pasteurized or why are meats not displayed with several different prices based on time since butchering? Our experimental results suggest that the addition of an expiration date led consumers to consider milk to have a consistent level of freshness until the expiration date in contrast to them assuming a more linear decline. Our findings indicate that expiration dating substantially alters consumers’ beliefs on milks’ freshness and potentially enhances firms’ profits.
E-Governance: An Emerging Paradigm

The information age has opened powerful new business and social development opportunities throughout the world. The core requirement to realize these opportunities is to provide an environment that allows for the free access of information. Information Technology is changing the way the society functions. Internet is the biggest revolution in human society. The impact of IT can be felt in all economic and social activities in every conceivable manner. The convergence of all forms of communications on the digital play field is opening immense new possibilities of achieving speed, versatility and space-time independence. This paper discusses the paradigm shift in the governance of the citizen. This shift has been possible with the IT revolution and Internet. The e-governance has become citizen-centric. Various issues are being explored to provide the best possible services to citizens. As per the need of the citizens, there is a requirement to identify the issues related to deal with the problems of high level of illiteracy, social diversity and unequal distribution of wealth and low level of woman empowerment so as to conceptualize, design and implement a e-governance model. A brief review of the existing models of e-governance has also been made to crystallize the issues involved.
Estimating the Hungarian New-Keynesian Phillips curve

This paper estimates the hybrid New-Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) for Hungary with different techniques. Because of weak instruments, single-equation GMM estimations yield very unreliable results. More robust methods show that basically no statistical inference is possible as to the true specification of the inflation dynamics. However, a more efficient simultaneous-equations method, the full information maximum likelihood (FIML) estimator provides identified parameters. Furthermore, coefficient estimates on the driving variable are positive and significant for the first time, lending much-needed empirical support in favour of the New-Keynesian model. Inflation appears to be determined to an equal extent by past inflation and forward-looking expectations. Structural analysis yields realistic estimates for the frequency of price adjustments and suggests that the dominant price setting behaviour is backward-looking.
Heparin interacts with the adhesion GPCR GPR56, reduces receptor shedding, and promotes cell adhesion and motility

ABSTRACT GPR56 is an adhesion-class G-protein-coupled receptor responsible for bilateral frontoparietal polymicrogyria (BFPP), a severe disorder of cortical formation. Additionally, GPR56 is involved in biological processes as diverse as hematopoietic stem cell generation and maintenance, myoblast fusion, muscle hypertrophy, immunoregulation and tumorigenesis. Collagen III and tissue transglutaminase 2 (TG2) have been revealed as the matricellular ligands of GPR56 involved in BFPP and melanoma development, respectively. In this study, we identify heparin as a glycosaminoglycan interacting partner of GPR56. Analyses of truncated and mutant GPR56 proteins reveal two basic-residue-rich clusters, R26GHREDFRFC35 and L190KHPQKASRRP200, as the major heparin-interacting motifs that overlap partially with the collagen III- and TG2-binding sites. Interestingly, the GPR56–heparin interaction is modulated by collagen III but not TG2, even though both ligands are also heparin-binding proteins. Finally, we show that the interaction with heparin reduces GPR56 receptor shedding, and enhances cell adhesion and motility. These results provide novel insights into the interaction of GPR56 with its multiple endogenous ligands and have functional implications in diseases such as BFPP and cancer. Summary: GPR56 is an adhesion GPCR that we show interacts with heparin through heparin-interacting motifs. This interaction regulates cell adhesion, which has possible implications for diseases such as cancer.