Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Politics of Gender in the NHS: Impression Management and ‘Getting Things Done’

This article is concerned with gendered differences in managerial repertoires in the National Health Service. Interviews carried out with senior NHS managers across several geographical areas suggest that, from an impression management perspective, where they are able to occupy senior management positions, a different management style begins to emerge amongst women, with a separation between their ‘front-stage, ‘backstage’ and ‘outside’ stage activities. Women managers appeared to acknowledge that they could not behave front stage in the same way with doctors as they often did in their outside stage encounters with them, but that the additional strategies they utilized whilst outside stage were key elements to their repertoire for getting things done. This view of management is contrasted with a very different one exhibited by male managers. The implications of the analysis are explored in the article's conclusion.
Characterization of RNA sequence determinants and antideterminants of processing reactivity for a minimal substrate of Escherichia coli ribonuclease III

Members of the ribonuclease III family are the primary agents of double-stranded (ds) RNA processing in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Bacterial RNase III orthologs cleave their substrates in a highly site-specific manner, which is necessary for optimal RNA function or proper decay rates. The processing reactivities of Escherichia coli RNase III substrates are determined in part by the sequence content of two discrete double-helical elements, termed the distal box (db) and proximal box (pb). A minimal substrate of E.coli RNase III, μR1. 1 RNA, was characterized and used to define the db and pb sequence requirements for reactivity and their involvement in cleavage site selection. The reactivities of μR1. 1 RNA sequence variants were examined in assays of cleavage and binding in vitro. The ability of all examined substitutions in the db to inhibit cleavage by weakening RNase III binding indicates that the db is a positive determinant of RNase III recognition, with the canonical UA/UG sequence conferring optimal recognition. A similar analysis showed that the pb also functions as a positive recognition determinant. It also was shown that the ability of the GC or CG bp substitution at a specific position in the pb to inhibit RNase III binding is due to the purine 2-amino group, which acts as a minor groove recognition antideterminant. In contrast, a GC or CG bp at the pb position adjacent to the scissile bond can suppress cleavage without inhibiting binding, and thus act as a catalytic antideterminant. It is shown that a single pb+db ‘set’ is sufficient to specify a cleavage site, supporting the primary function of the two boxes as positive recognition determinants. The base pair sequence control of reactivity is discussed within the context of new structural information on a post-catalytic complex of a bacterial RNase III bound to the cleaved minimal substrate.
Initial testing (stage 1) by the pediatric preclinical testing program of RO4929097, a γ‐secretase inhibitor targeting notch signaling

RO4929097 is a potent and selective inhibitor of γ‐secretase and as a result is able to inhibit Notch pathway signaling. The activity of RO4929097 was evaluated against the in vivo panels of the Pediatric Preclinical Testing Program (PPTP). RO4929097 induced significant differences in event‐free survival (EFS) distribution compared to control in 6 of 26 (23%) of the evaluable solid tumor xenografts and in 0 of 8 (0%) of the evaluable ALL xenografts. The most consistent tumor growth delay effects were noted in the osteosarcoma panel. RO4929097 at the dose and schedule evaluated demonstrated little antitumor activity against childhood cancer xenografts. Pediatr Blood Cancer 2012; 58: 815–818. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Tough-mindedness and fair play

One of the most potentially important factors in determining public and potential jury members’ attitudes toward the death penalty may be personality traits. There have been few recent studies conducted on the relationship between personality traits and attitudes toward the death penalty and these have produced conflicting results. Earlier research has suggested that extroverted people are tough-minded while introverts are more likely to consider mitigating circumstances. This study examines the effects of the five-factor model of personality traits on attitudes toward the death penalty and includes gendered analyses. Results from the study indicated that both extroversion and neuroticism could predict pro-death penalty attitudes, and this effect held across gender groups. Conscientiousness was also associated with pro-death penalty attitudes. Openness to experience and agreeableness were both able to predict less favorable attitudes toward the death penalty. Gendered analyses revealed that among males, openness was a significant predictor of anti-death penalty attitudes, but it was not for females, and the opposite was true of conscientiousness. Suggestions for further research and a discussion of implications of the research are included in the study.
Playing with maps Explore, discover, learn, categorize, model, analyse, explain, present geographic and non-geographic data

Maps are especially known for their capability to provide insight in geographic patterns and trends. Maps do this well because they only present a selection of the complex reality and visualize it in an abstract way. But today they have many more roles to play. They should also be seen as flexible interface to geospatial data, since they offer interaction with the data behind the visual representation and additionally maps are instruments that encourage exploration. As such they are used to stimulate (visual) thinking about geospatial patterns, relationships, and trends. The context where maps like this operate is the world of geovisualization which can be described as a loosely bounded domain that addresses the visual exploration, analysis, synthesis and presentation of geospatial data by integrating approaches from disciplines including cartography with those from scientific visualization, image analysis, information visualization, exploratory data analysis, visual analytics, and GIScience. Contact with all those disciplines has enriched the world of maps but have also stimulated others to use the map (metaphor) to visualize non-geographic data. The discussion illustrated the new and exiting role maps can play to visualize geographic and non-geographic data in combination with other visual means
Special Issue on ‘Behavioral Ethics, Organizational Justice, and Social Responsibility across Contexts’

The management literature is witnessing an intersection of research on organizational justice, behavioral ethics, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Organizational justice deals with how fairly employees feel they are treated by the various stakeholders with whom they interact. This includes perception formation, the cognitive and emotional processing of events, attitudinal and behavioral reactions to perceived mistreatment, and the formation of justice climates within workgroups and organizations. Behavioral ethics considers those interactions between individual behavior and social contexts that involve morality-based social prescriptions and moral norms. CSR refers to firm activities that serve the social good and are beyond both the interest of the firm and what the law requires. Whereas these topics differ in terms of perspective and level of analysis (i.e., justice often deals with the self, behavioral ethics often deals with the context for justice and the behavior of potential transgressors, and CSR involves the actions of firms), what brings these topics together is a focus on fairness, individual rights, and morality-based (as opposed to profit-based) decisions. Research that integrates these themes has involved collaborations between micro and macro OB, psychology, sociology, political science, law, behavioral economics, business ethics, and philosophy. As such, we see topics such as morality, social norms, decision-making, social influence, motivation, whistle-blowing, deviance, governance, and business ethics being studied in new ways and through new lenses.
Modeling and estimating yield and efficiency of photovoltaic solar parks

Subsidy reduction and the increased importance of photovoltaic energy generation have triggered the need to develop accurate approaches to measure, estimate and possibly forecast energy production with the goal of enabling early detection and diagnosis of parametric faults before they become catastrophic and lead to partial or full shut down of the plant. Moreover the ability of accurately predicting the energy output of a photovoltaic plant is becoming increasingly important to operate efficiently the existing power grid infrastructure that has difficulties with intermittent, unpredictable power sources. In this paper a new model of photovoltaic solar parks designed to estimate efficiency, predict energy production and enable early fault detection is presented. The proposed model is based on an equivalent electro-thermal model of the PhotoVoltaic (PV) cell, which takes as input the irradiance, ambient temperature and wind speed measured by existing sensors and data-logging equipment used in most solar PV parks. The proposed model is demonstrated to accurately predict the performance of real-life MW scale plants. By directly comparing predicted vs. actual energy production, it also allows easy and early identification and diagnose of malfunctions and efficiency drops of PV systems.
Abstraction and Refinement in Configuration Structures

An abstraction operator for configuration structures is defined and it is proven that it is left inverse to the traditional refinement operator. The abstraction operator describes how concrete behaviour looks when observed from a more abstract level, where the difference between concrete and abstract is given by a transformation mapping. This generates a notion of implementation: L is said to implement H iff L is mapped to H by the abstraction operator. The implementation relation generated by the abstraction operator is strictly more general than the implementation function defined by a refinement operator, thus allowing a more flexible design process for distributed systems.
Follistatin and Activin: A Potential Intrinsic Regulatory System within Diverse Tissues

Until the 1920s, it was assumed that the sole gonadal hormones modulating anterior pituitary glandular secretions were lipid-soluble entities called steroids. Experimental evidence then surfaced during the ensuing decade that demonstrated that the testis also contained a hydrophilic material that might also influence pituitary secretory activity (1, 2). The name “inhibin” was given to this novel substance in view of its ability to inhibit hypertrophy of pituitary cells in castrated rats (2). Work in later years evoked the concept that inhibin could be an important regulator of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) secretion (3, 4). Thus, as a consequence of these landmark studies, investigators began a search to elucidate the chemical nature of the inhibins. Although inhibin was discovered as a potential secretory product of the testis, it was almost 45 years later that a nonsteroidal FSH suppressor was demonstrated in the ovarian follicular fluid of cows (5). Ironically, it was the ovarian follicular fluid from which chemists eventually isolated what was most likely the putative inhibin molecule described in the 1920s and 30s (6–9). Chemical characterization of the purified FSH-suppressing material revealed that inhibin is a 31-to 32-kDa heterodimer consisting of two distinct polypeptide chains, α and β. In pig follicular fluid, two inhibin heterodimers, A and B, were isolated and found to consist of a common α-subunit chain linked by disulphide bridges to a βA- or βB-subunit chain, respectively. Both inhibins were essentially equipotent in suppressing FSH secretion in the dispersed anterior pituitary cell bioassay system (6). At long last, the elusive inhibin had been proven a true chemical entity—a major breakthrough in reproductive endocrinology. However, little did anyone know that the gonads produced other FSH-regulatory polypeptide factors besides inhibin, and that the ability of these other factors to modulate FSH secretion could be only the tip of the iceberg with regard to the multi-functional properties of these factors, thereby extending their importance to other areas of biology.
Effect of apelin on the cardiac hemodynamics in hypertensive rats with heart failure

It is known that apelin has definite protective effects on various cardiovascular diseases; however, the mechanism through which hypertension with heart failure (H-HF) is affected by pyroglutamylated apelin-13 (Pyr-AP13) remain unclear. Thus, in the present study, we investigated the effects of apelin on the cardiac hemodynamics in rats with hypertension and heart failure. In our study, cardiac function, dimensions and histological determination of the fibrosis of rats with two-kidney, one-clip induced hypertension and sham-operated rats were assessed using an echocardiography system and Masson’s trichrome. The infusion of either 5% glucose injection (GS) alone or 5% GS containing Pyr-AP13 as a dose, time-matched design on the cardiac hemodynamics in H-HF rats and sham-operated rats was recorded. For the determination of the effects of potential related proteins on cardiac hemodynamics in the H-HF rats, the animals were divided into 5 groups: i) the sham-operated group (n=8); ii) H-HF (n=8); iii) H-HF with infusion of 0.1 μg dose of Pyr-AP13 (n=8) or 5% glucose (GS) (n=8); iv) H-HF with infusion of 1 μg dose of Pyr-AP13 (n=8) or 5% GS (n=8); and v) H-HF with infusion of 10 μg dose of Pyr-AP13 (n=8) or 5% GS (n=8). The concentration of cyclic adenosine 3′,5′-monophosphate (cAMP) was determined by ELISA. The expression of membrane and cytosolic proteins was evaluated by western blot analysis. Significant cardiac and perivascular fibrosis was observed in the H-HF rats. Following the infusion of Pyr-AP13, the systolic and diastolic function was significantly improved in the cardiac hemodynamic parameters in the H-HF rats treated with Pyr-AP13. The apelin receptor (APJ), which was activated by the exogenous infusion of Pyr-AP13, was partially recycled from the cytoplasm back to the plasma membrane; however, membrane APJ was eventually downregulated in the H-HF rats treated with Pyr-AP13 compared with the sham-operated group rats. Our findings suggested that a complex was formed after Pyr-AP13 combined with cellular membrane APJ receptor. However, the endogenous downregulation of the APJ receptor results in benefits from the exogenous administration of apelin.
How does Casimir energy fall? II. Gravitational acceleration of quantum vacuum energy

It has been demonstrated that quantum vacuum energy gravitates according to the equivalence principle, at least for the finite Casimir energies associated with perfectly conducting parallel plates. We here add further support to this conclusion by considering parallel semitransparent plates, that is, δ-function potentials, acting on a massless scalar field, in a spacetime defined by Rindler coordinates (τ, x, y, ξ). Fixed ξ in such a spacetime represents uniform acceleration. We calculate the force on systems consisting of one or two such plates at fixed values of ξ. In the limit of a large Rindler coordinate ξ (small acceleration), we recover (via the equivalence principle) the situation of weak gravity, and find that the gravitational force on the system is just Mg, where g is the gravitational acceleration and M is the total mass of the system, consisting of the mass of the plates renormalized by the Casimir energy of each plate separately, plus the energy of the Casimir interaction between the plates. This reproduces the previous result in the limit as the coupling to the δ-function potential approaches infinity.
Enhanced Transmission at a Spinal Synapse Triggered In Vivo by an Injury Signal Independent of Altered Synaptic Activity

Peripheral nerve crush initiates a robust increase in transmission strength at spinal synapses made by axotomized group IA primary sensory neurons. To study the injury signal that initiates synaptic enhancement in vivo, we designed experiments to manipulate the enlargement of EPSPs produced in spinal motoneurons (MNs) by IA afferents 3 d after nerve crush in anesthetized adult rats. If nerve crush initiates IA EPSP enlargement as proposed by reducing impulse-evoked transmission in crushed IA afferents, then restoring synaptic activity should eliminate enlargement. Daily electrical stimulation of the nerve proximal to the crush site did, in fact, eliminate enlargement but was, surprisingly, just as effective when the action potentials evoked in crushed afferents were prevented from propagating into the spinal cord. Consistent with its independence from altered synaptic activity, we found that IA EPSP enlargement was also eliminated by colchicine blockade of axon transport in the crushed nerve. Together with the observation that colchicine treatment of intact nerves had no short-term effect on IA EPSPs, we conclude that enhancement of IA-MN transmission is initiated by some yet to be identified positive injury signal generated independent of altered synaptic activity. The results establish a new set of criteria that constrain candidate signaling molecules in vivo to ones that develop quickly at the peripheral injury site, move centrally by axon transport, and initiate enhanced transmission at the central synapses of crushed primary sensory afferents through a mechanism that can be modulated by action potential activity restricted to the axons of crushed afferents.
Microprocessor implementation of a large vocabulary speech recognizer and phonetic typewriter for Finnish and Japanese

A flexible and inexpensive real-time speech recognitlon system is described. It operates in the following modes: recognitlon of isolated words from a large vocabulary, and orthographic transcription of (eventually continuous) speech. The main parts are the acoustic processor module that transcribes speech into phonemes, a large-vocabulary lexical-access module that recognizes isolated words on the basis of these transcriptions, and a character-string processor module that produces orthographically edited text for Finnish and romanized Japanese from the erroneus transcriptions within unlimited vocabulary.
Combination of syllable based N-gram search and word search for spoken term detection through spoken queries and IV/OOV classification

This paper presents a Japanese spoken term detection method for spoken queries using a combination of word-based search and syllable-based N-gram search with in-vocabulary/out-of-vocabulary (IV/OOV) term classification. The N-gram index in a recognized syllable-based lattice for OOV terms, which assumes recognition errors such as substitution, insertion and deletion errors, incorporates a distance metric as a confidence score. To address spoken queries, we propose an automatic method for discriminating IV and OOV terms by using the confidence scores of spoken queries through large-vocabulary/syllable continuous speech recognition. Evaluation on an academic lecture presentation database with 44 hours of data shows that the combination of word search and syllable-based N-gram search yields significant improvement and outperforms the baseline syllable-based DTW approach.
How the presentation of electronic gateway pages affects research behavior

Purpose – The paper aims to provide details of a study conducted at Hunter College Libraries in fall 2005, the focus of which was how presentation of initial digital resource pages (or gateway pages) on the library's web site impacted students' subsequent steps in the research process.Design/methodology/approach – A group of 16 students from English and History classes at Hunter College were recruited to participate after having had basic library instruction. They were given computer‐based key tasks to perform in a proctored classroom setting, using the library's homepage. A second group of students was recruited to participate in two small focus groups. The methodology and exercises were developed in part using guidelines from a taxonomy of user behavior developed by librarians at Hunter College, and recommendations from usability literature by Krug, Neilsen and Rubin.Findings – Results from the computer‐based key tasks exercises were bifurcated. Completion rates for computer‐based key tasks using the in.
Using ECG as a measure in biometric identification systems

Over the last few years, there has been a number of publications suggesting the use of Electrocardiogram (ECG) as a biometric measure. Motivated by the level of sustainability to attacks the ECG provides, it can be combined in a multi-modal biometric identification system or, when the permanence and collectability issues are not an issue and the false positive margin problem is controlled and not critical, used alone for authentication of subjects. Its primary application can be in health care systems where the ECG is used for health measurements. It does furthermore, better than any other biometrics measures, deliver the proof of subject's being alive as extra information which other biometrics cannot deliver as easily. Nevertheless, the proposed feature extraction methods and experiments have not been published with a corresponding theoretical analysis of the maximum possibility of collision in an infinite domain of subjects and thus, as its current status it is best suited for complementing other metrics for a higher level of accuracy and proof of liveliness.
A Novel Set Level Technique for Image Segmentation Using Fuzzy Clustering and Self Organizing Map Network

: Image segmentation plays an important role in computer vision or in image processing such as segmentation in video and tracing object of interest, remote sensing, medical treatment and diagnose, for critical disease analysis. In segmentation process all the traditional methods like FCM and K-means are not performed well results in terms of global consistency error and elapse time. The process of image segmentation method also suffered from noise content in image, noise part of image decrease the performance of image segmentation process. For the improvement of image segmentation technique we use fuzzy based clustering technique with some objective function SOM. The motivation is to segment the image with fuzzy based clustering technique with some objective function SOM can enhance the performance.