Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Small Colony Variant of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus pseudintermedius ST71 Presenting as a Sticky Phenotype

ABSTRACT We first observed the phenomenon of small colony variants (SCVs) in a Staphylococcus pseudintermedius sequence type 71 (ST71) strain, isolated from a non-pet owner. Although we found that small-sized colonies share main features with Staphylococcus aureus SCVs, they nevertheless show a novel, particular, and sticky phenotype, whose expression was extremely stable, even after subcultivation.
Sum capacity of binary signatures that minimize the total squared correlation

We evaluate the sum capacity of the binary signatures of [G. N. Karystinos etal. , (2001)(2003)] that achieve the lower bound on total squared correlation for binary signatures. Analytical expressions are derived for this sum capacity, and it is found that the restriction to binary-valued signatures can have a small but nonnegligible impact on the sum capacity.
Fine regulation of Saccharomyces cerevisiae MAPK pathways by post‐translational modifications

Saccharomyces cerevisiae has been widely used as a model eukaryotic organism to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that operate upon activation of signalling pathways. For over two decades, many clues to the regulation of mitogen‐activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathways have derived from basic research in yeast. Here we review aspects of MAPK pathway fine‐tuning, such as the functional implication of feedback loops or regulatory inputs from other pathways, mediated by post‐transcriptional modifications on their components. The impact of recent phosphoproteomic approaches in this particular field is also discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The role of the state in the Turkish earthquake of 1999

This paper seeks to contextualise the 1999 Turkish earthquake within the institutional structure of Turkey's development. Particularly focussed upon the role-and culpability-of the state in the disaster, it outlines a number of key continuities within Turkey's political tradition. In all, it argues that Ankara's inadequate response can be understood both in terms of the persistence of these older social structures and in a more recent weakening of the public sector. Despite a pronounced sense of instrumental activism which emerged in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, the result, it is concluded, is a perpetuation of both state insularity and a fragmented pattern of civil organisation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Analysis of grocery buying and selling practices among manufacturers and distributors: Implications for industry structure and performance

Current buying and selling practices among grocery manufacturers and distributors reduce the efficiency of the food distribution system. This article applies the concept of positive feedback to explain the evolution of the system to its current situation. The study also uses concepts from game theory and transaction-cost economics to explain the persistence of inefficient practices in spite of the potential benefits from alternative forms of transacting. Based on these theoretical concepts, current grocery industry initiatives, such as every day low pricing and efficient consumer response, aimed at creating a lower cost food distribution system, are analyzed. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Forecasting Gathering Events through Continuous Destination Prediction on Big Trajectory Data

Urban gathering events such as social protests, sport games, and traffic congestions bring significant challenges to urban management. Identifying gathering events timely is thus an important problem for city administrators and stakeholders. Previous techniques on gathering event detection are mostly descriptive, i.e., using realtime on-site observations (e.g., taxi drop-offs, traffic volume) to detect the gathering events that have already emerged. In this paper we propose a predictive approach to identify future gathering events through destination prediction of incomplete trajectories. Our approach consists of two parts, i.e., destination prediction and event forecasting. For destination prediction, we relax the Markov property assumed in most of the related work and address the consequent high-memory-cost challenge by proposing a novel Via Location Grouping (VIGO) approach for destination prediction. For event forecasting, we design an online prediction mechanism that learns from both historical and recent trajectories to address the non-stationarity of urban trip patterns. Gathering events are forecast based on projected arrivals in each location and time. A case study on real taxi data in Shenzhen, China shows that our proposed approach can correctly and timely predict gathering events. Extensive experiments show that the proposed VIGO approach achieves higher accuracy than related work for destination prediction and saves more than 82% memory cost over a baseline approach. The event forecasting based on VIGO is effective and fast enough for continuous event forecasting at one-minute frequency.
Alcohol consumption and cardiovascular mortality accounting for possible misclassification of intake: 11-year follow-up of the Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study.

AIMS To investigate the relationship between usual daily alcohol intake, beverage type and drinking frequency on cardiovascular (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality, accounting for systematic misclassification of intake. DESIGN Prospective cohort study with mean follow-up of 11.4 years. Setting The Melbourne Collaborative Cohort Study, Australia. PARTICIPANTS A total of 38 200 volunteers (23 044 women) aged 40-69 years at baseline (1990-1994). MEASUREMENTS Self-reported alcohol intake using beverage-specific quantity-frequency questions (usual intake) and drinking diary for previous week. FINDINGS Compared with life-time abstention, usual daily alcohol intake was associated with lower CVD and CHD mortality risk for women but not men. For women, the hazard ratio [HR (95% CI)] for CVD for those drinking > 20 g/day alcohol was 0.43 (0.19-0.95; P trend = 0.18), and for CHD, 0.19 (0.05-0.82; P trend = 0.24). Male former drinkers had over twice the mortality risk for CVD [HR = 2.58 (1.51-4.41)] and CHD [HR = 2.91 (1.59-5.33)]. Wine was the only beverage associated inversely with mortality for women. Compared with drinkers who consumed no alcohol in the week before baseline, drinking frequency was associated inversely with CVD and CHD mortality risk for men but not women. HR for men drinking 6-7 days/week was 0.49 (0.29-0.81; P trend = 0.02) for CVD, and 0.49 (0.26-0.92: P trend = 0.23) for CHD. CONCLUSIONS Usual daily alcohol intake was associated with reduced CVD and CHD mortality for women but not men. This benefit appeared to be mainly from wine, although comparison of beverages was not possible. Drinking frequency was associated inversely with CVD and CHD death for men but not women.
Portfolios for Investors Who Want to Reach TheirGoals While Staying on the Mean–Variance Efficient Frontier

How can investors construct portfolios that help them reach their goals, such as a comfortable retirement for themselves, a bequest for their children, and college education for their grandchildren? Are such portfolios on the mean–variance efficient frontier? How can advisors discuss investment risk with clients whose risk tolerance varies by goal—low for retirement and higher for bequests? These are the questions answered in this article. The authors show that advisors can help clients construct portfolios that take clients to their goals while also leaving them on the mean–variance efficient frontier.
Quality costing: A study of manufacturing organizations. Part 2: Main survey

This paper continues the reporting of a four-stage investigation into the use of quality costing in manufacturing industry. The focus here is a large-scale survey conducted using a stratified sample of 1000 manufacturing organizations in the North East of England. The aim of the study was to identify what was actually happening in industry with respect to the use of quality costing within quality management. This was in order to provide an alternative view to the many case study-based investigations that predominate in the literature. To this end a large representative sample of industry was compiled. The methodology used in the survey is described and the key results obtained are detailed, including the relationship between the sophistication of quality management and company characteristics and a model for the best practice of quality costing.
The Politics of Aid: African Strategies for Dealing with Donors

Thus opens the 2009 book The Politics of Aid, edited by Lindsay Whitfield and published by Oxford University Press, and it is an apt quote. It captures the essence of the question, who should bring about development and how? Given the barrage of books being published on the issue in recent years, we seem to be in the midst of a new surge in the aid efficiency debate. The titles of books such as The End of Poverty, The White Man’s Burden and Dead Aid alternately present aid as a boon or scourge. There are those that believe aid works, but that there should be more of it, and that it needs to be given in the right way. Readers may be swayed by high-flying rhetoric such as that of Jeffrey Sachs (2005) who in The End of Poverty: How We Can Make It Happen In Our Lifetime advocates simple quick-fix solutions to deal with developing country challenges. Sachs acknowledges the historical and political causes of poverty are intricate and complex, but insists that there are practical solutions to most problems. He points to malaria as a pernicious problem for African development, which could be easily relieved through the distribution of low-cost bed nets. Then there are those who are decidedly sceptical of the virtues of aid. William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and so Little Good (2006) belongs to this camp. He is not convinced by Sachs’ big plans. On the contrary, he believes such grandstanding is part of the problem. To illustrate his point, he distinguishes between what he calls ‘planners’ and ‘searchers’. The planners are those that engage in top-down planning, think that external solutions to local problems will work, raise expectations but take
Testing the hypothesis of market efficiency in the Taiwan-US forward exchange market since 1990

This article examines the applicability of the hypothesis of market efficiency in Taiwan's foreign exchange market using daily data. Instead of linear regression-based models, we consider the possibility that the true data generating process may come from two different distributions, and we employ the Markov Switching approach to analyse this. From the results of the two-state Markov Switching model, we define State 1 as the efficient state and State 2 as the inefficient one. Only the 30-day forward rate is able to differentiate between the two states. Based on the unconditional probabilities from the Markov switching model, we also find that the 30-day forward rate has a 70% probability in the efficient state, which indicates that 70% of all speculators fully extract information when predicting future spot rates, while 30% of all investors do not.
Developing a child-focused and multidimensional model of child poverty for South Africa

This paper presents a new method of measuring child poverty in South Africa, based on a theoretically sound distinction between the conceptualization, definition, measurement, and enumeration of poverty. Conceptual frameworks, definitions, and measurements of poverty are briefly reviewed in the international and South African contexts. This paper presents a child-centered, multidimensional model of child poverty with both absolute and relative poverty components. The absolute core of this model follows the Copenhagen Declaration and includes basic needs such as food and shelter. This is complemented by a relative component, using a multidimensional conceptualization of poverty, and based on a child's ability to participate fully in South African society. The dimensions, or domains of deprivation, for both absolute core and relative aspects can be the same; eight exemplar domains are presented here. Located between the model's relative and absolute components and equally relevant to both components is found a ring of indicators relating to access to good-quality services. We argue that relative poverty can be defined both by consensually agreed upon necessities for societal inclusion and by research-delineated child needs. This approach, while presenting challenges for measurement, will provide policy makers with a better evidence base for combating child poverty.
Lifespan Differences in Cortico-Striatal Resting State Connectivity

Distinctive cortico-striatal circuits that serve motor and cognitive functions have been recently mapped based on resting state connectivity. It has been reported that age differences in cortico-striatal connectivity relate to cognitive declines in aging. Moreover, children in their early teens (i.e., youth) already show mature motor network patterns while their cognitive networks are still developing. In the current study, we examined age differences in the frontal-striatal "cognitive" and "motor" circuits in children and adolescence, young adults (YAs), and older adults (OAs). We predicted that the strength of the "cognitive" frontal-striatal circuits would follow an inverted "U" pattern across age; children and OAs would have weaker connectivity than YAs. However, we predicted that the "motor" circuits would show less variation in connectivity strength across the lifespan. We found that most areas in both the "cognitive" and "motor" circuits showed higher connectivity in YAs than children and OAs, suggesting general inverted "U"-shaped changes across the lifespan for both the cognitive and motor frontal-striatal networks.
Valuing psychiatric patients’ stories: Belief in and use of the supernatural in the Jamaican psychiatric setting

The aim of this study was to examine illness presentation and understand how psychiatric patients make meaning of the causes of their mental illnesses. Six Jamaican psychiatric patients were interviewed using the McGill Illness Narrative Interview Schedule. Of the 6, 3 representative case studies were chosen. The hermeneutic phenomenological approach and the common sense model were used in the formulation of patients’ explanatory models. Results indicate that psychiatric patients actively conceptualized the causes and resultant treatment of their mental illnesses. Patients’ satisfaction and compliance with treatment were dependent on the extent to which practitioners’ conceptualization matched their own, as well as practitioners’ acknowledgement of patients’ concerns about causation, prognosis, and treatment.
Reciprocal regulation of the autophosphorylation of enzyme INtr by glutamine and α‐ketoglutarate in Escherichia coli

In addition to the phosphoenolpyruvate:sugar phosphotransferase system (sugar PTS), most proteobacteria possess a paralogous system (nitrogen phosphotransferase system, PTSNtr). The first proteins in both pathways are enzymes (enzyme Isugar and enzyme INtr) that can be autophosphorylated by phosphoenolpyruvate. The most striking difference between enzyme Isugar and enzyme INtr is the presence of a GAF domain at the N‐terminus of enzyme INtr. Since the PTSNtr was identified in 1995, it has been implicated in a variety of cellular processes in many proteobacteria and many of these regulations have been shown to be dependent on the phosphorylation state of PTSNtr components. However, there has been little evidence that any component of this so‐called PTSNtr is directly involved in nitrogen metabolism. Moreover, a signal regulating the phosphorylation state of the PTSNtr had not been uncovered. Here, we demonstrate that glutamine and α‐ketoglutarate, the canonical signals of nitrogen availability, reciprocally regulate the phosphorylation state of the PTSNtr by direct effects on enzyme INtr autophosphorylation and the GAF signal transduction domain is necessary for the regulation of enzyme INtr activity by the two signal molecules. Taken together, our results suggest that the PTSNtr senses nitrogen availability.
Shear Stress‐Mediated Chromatin Remodeling Provides Molecular Basis for Flow‐Dependent Regulation of Gene Expression

&NA; Shear stress (SS), the tangential component of hemodynamic forces, modulates the expression of several genes in endothelial cells. However, no information is available about its effect on chromatin structure, which plays a key role in gene transcription. In this study, a link between SS and chromatin remodeling was established in human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs). HUVECs were exposed to SS of 10 dyne/cm2 per second, in the presence or absence of the histone deacetylase inhibitor trichostatin A, and assayed for histone H3 and histone H4 modifications. SS induced histone H3 serine phosphorylation at position 10 (S10) and lysine acetylation at position 14 (K14) but required trichostatin A to induce H3 phosphoacetylation and H4 acetylation. The phosphatidylinositol 3‐kinase inhibitor wortmannin and the mitogen‐activated protein kinase inhibitor PD98059 decreased SS‐dependent histone H3 phosphorylation, without affecting its acetylation; the p38 inhibitor SB203580 reduced both H3 phosphorylation and acetylation, whereas the protein kinase A inhibitor PKI‐tide reduced histone H3 acetylation. Remarkably, the abrogation of histone acetylation inhibited SS‐dependent c‐fos expression. SS also activated ribosomal S6 kinase‐2 and mitogenand stress‐activated kinase‐1 protein kinases and promoted the formation of a cAMP‐responsive element‐binding protein (CREB)/CREB‐binding protein complex, providing the molecular basis for the increase in histone acetyltransferase activity observed in HUVECs exposed to SS. Finally, the effect of SS on chromatin remodeling was examined. In HUVECs exposed to SS, chromatin within c‐fos and c‐jun promoters was specifically immunoprecipitated by an antibody against acetylated histone H3 on K14. These results indicate that SS induces posttransduction modifications of histones; this is an early step toward the flow‐dependent regulation of gene expression. (Circ Res. 2003;93:155‐161.)
The Usefulness of MD&A Disclosures in the Retail Industry

The SEC believes that MD&A disclosures provide investors with useful information that clarifies and supplements the financial statements. In this study, we use data from retail firms to examine the predictive ability and value relevance of MD&A discussion of the results of operations and capital resources. In particular, we examine the usefulness of information on the sources of revenue changes (comparable store sales growth, store openings, and store closings) and of two measures of future capital resource plans (planned store openings and capital expenditures). We find that these variables contribute incremental explanatory power in future revenues, future earnings, and contemporaneous stock return regressions that include financial statement variables.
Two Active Fault-Tolerant Control Schemes of Induction-Motor Drive in EV or HEV

In this paper, two active fault-tolerant control (AFTC) schemes dedicated to induction-motor drives in electric or hybrid vehicle powertrains are presented and compared. Fault detection and mitigation are merged to propose a robust algorithm against speed-sensor faults (fault is modeled as significant additional noise or an exponential type emulating a bias) leading to uncertainties in the measurement. The first architecture is a hybrid fault tolerant-control (FTC) with proportional-integral and H∞ controllers; the second architecture is the generalized internal model control (GIMC) with a natural reconfiguration. Both are built to ensure resilience while keeping good dynamic performances. For each architecture, the speed-sensor fault detection is based on an extended Kalman filter (EKF) that generates a residual vector. The correction method is calculated differently for the two schemes specifically in the switching transition phase between the nominal and robust controllers. A comparative study is carried out between the two FTC schemes.
Innovation activity and corporate financing: evidence from a developing economy

The present study investigates the extent to which technology-related asymmetric information between corporate managers and outside investors has an adverse effect on the external financing activities of innovation-intensive firms. The results indicate that innovation-intensive firms are more likely to engage in equity financing when their valuation multiples are higher than those of their industry peers. This finding is more pronounced among firms with low institutional shareholdings and fewer brokers following them. The empirical evidence supports the misvaluation explanation, as well as the timing and type of security issuance if the agency problem is severe. The findings provide insights into the timing of company financing choices in a highly innovative developing economy.
Bird tracking and flapping motion recognition for monitoring system

Recently, the increasing bird injury is one of the social problems. To solve this problem, we set our goal to develop the monitoring system. As the first step, we focus the bird tracking and flapping motion recognition both techniques are core technologies of our goal. It is found that Mean Shift tracking based on both the color model and flow model is the most effective to track the target object compared with other well known tracking methods, such as, optical flow, color model based Mean Shift, and Particle Filter. We defined three features the flow gradient and two flow features based on the frequency analysis, and proposed the method for recognizing the flapping motion. We collected 70 scenes including the bird's flying, bird's walking, and person's walking. As the result, the flow gradient feature is the effective for recognizing the flapping motion.
Optimization and Application of a Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction to Determine the Bacterial Viability in Infectious Endophthalmitis

Purpose: To develop RNA based assay – reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to detect viable bacteria in intraocular specimens obtained from patients with infectious endophthalmitis. Materials and methods: Thirty-five intraocular specimens (19 vitreous fluid and 16 aqueous humor) collected from patients with typical infectious endophthalmitis were subjected to conventional and molecular microbiological investigations. Culture negative, eubacterial genome PCR positive intraocular specimens were subjected to denaturing high performance liquid chromatography (dHPLC) for separation of mixed genomes and subsequently identified by PCR based DNA sequencing. In parallel, RT-PCR was performed to detect the presence of viable bacteria in intraocular specimens. Results: Among 35 intraocular specimens, single bacterial genome was detected in 9 (25.7%) and two or more genomes in 26 (74.28%) intraocular specimens. Eubacterial genome was detected by RT-PCR in 29 (82.85%) specimens. PCR based dHPLC followed by PCR based DNA sequencing revealed the presence of 65 bacterial genomes in 35 intraocular specimens. Five novel genera namely Terrabacter species, Facklamia species, Xylella fastidiosa, Duganella species and Synechococcus species were detected. Conclusion: RT-PCR serves as a rapid and reliable tool to detect viable bacteria causing endophthalmitis.