Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Diatom growth responses to photoperiod and light are predictable from diel reductant generation

Light drives phytoplankton productivity, so phytoplankton must exploit variable intensities and durations of light exposure, depending upon season, latitude, and depth. We analyzed the growth, photophysiology and composition of small, Thalassiosira pseudonana, and large, Thalassiosira punctigera, centric diatoms from temperate, coastal marine habitats, responding to a matrix of photoperiods and growth light intensities. T. pseudonana showed fastest growth rates under long photoperiods and low to moderate light intensities, while the larger T. punctigera showed fastest growth rates under short photoperiods and higher light intensities. Photosystem II function and content responded primarily to instantaneous growth light intensities during the photoperiod, while diel carbon fixation and RUBISCO content responded more to photoperiod duration than to instantaneous light intensity. Changing photoperiods caused species‐specific changes in the responses of photochemical yield (e−/photon) to growth light intensity. These photophysiological variables showed complex responses to photoperiod and to growth light intensity. Growth rate also showed complex responses to photoperiod and growth light intensity. But these complex responses resolved into a close relation between growth rate and the cumulative daily generation of reductant, across the matrix of photoperiods and light intensities.
An investigation of quality culture development in UK industry

Describes results of research at the University of Liverpool into the level of quality culture development in UK manufacturing industries. The study identified the important factors that influence the development of a culture that complements total quality implementation. These factors are the basis for the development of a framework to assist in culture change. The research approach consisted of a questionnaire survey and structured interviews in industrial organisations to examine development in the identified areas of quality culture – senior management leadership, employee involvement and empowerment, customer focus, supplier partnership, teamwork, effect of CEO and open corporate culture. The research results provide an understanding of the vital relationships between quality culture and the activities undertaken by organisations, and serve as a guide for the development of a much desired but often elusive organisational culture.
Capitalism and Freedom: Manumissions and the Slave Market in Louisiana, 1725–1820

I use a rich new dataset of Louisiana slave records to answer long-standing questions about manumission. I examine who was manumitted, by whom, and whether manumittees paid prices above market for their freedom, shedding some light on the debate of the efficiency of slavery. Legal changes after the Louisiana Purchase allow us to conclude that manumission laws were quite important in determining the terms at which manumission agreements were struck: when slaves lost the right to sue for self-purchase at market price, there was a precipitous drop in the number of manumissions, while prices paid increased.
Global financial crisis and the puzzling exchange rate path in CEE countries

In the present paper we examine whether financial markets could have helped predict exchange rates in three selected Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies of the EU, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, during the current financial crisis. To this end, we derive risk-neutral densities from the implied volatilities of FX options, which approximate market expectations about exchange rate developments. Based on these risk-neutral density estimates, we then assess the out-of-sample predictive power of indicators. The forecasting results suggest that models based on FX options are inferior to the random walk in terms of the forecasting error, confirming a stylized fact about the short-term forecasting of exchange rates. Yet, we also find that, for the Czech Republic and Poland, risk-neutral densities contain useful information on the direction of change of the exchange rate.
Mild traumatic brain injury and fatigue: A prospective longitudinal study

Primary objective: To examine fatigue prevalence, severity, predictors and co-variates over 6 months post-mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI). Research design: Longitudinal prospective study including 263 adults with MTBI. Procedures: Participants completed the Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS), Rivermead Post-concussion Symptoms Questionnaire (RPSQ), Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) and the Short Form 36 Health Survey-Version 2 (SF-36v2). Complete data were available for 159 participants. Key measures; prevalence—RPSQ Item 6: severity—FSS. The effect of time on fatigue prevalence and severity was examined using ANOVA. Multiple regression analysis identified statistically significant covariates. Main outcomes and results: Post-MTBI fatigue prevalence was 68%, 38% and 34% at 1 week, 3 and 6 months, respectively. There was a strong effect for time over the first 3 months and moderate-to-high correlations between fatigue prevalence and severity. Early fatigue strongly predicted later fatigue; depression, but not anxiety was a predictor. Fatigue was seen as laziness by family or friends in 30% of cases. Conclusions: Post-MTBI fatigue is a persistent post-concussion symptom, exacerbated by depression but not anxiety. It diminishes in the first 3 months and then becomes relatively stable, suggesting the optimum intervention placement is at 3 months or more post-MTBI.
Why Households Don’t Have Checking Accounts

Using the Surveys of Consumer Finances from 1992 to 1998, this article explores the reasons for not having a checking account, including product design, human capital, motivation for having a checking account, and institutional factors. Focusing primarily on reasons related to product design, we found that smaller family units, unemployed people, those with shorter planning horizons, older people, families with higher levels of education, those who have some other bank account, and those with better credit histories were more likely to give reasons related to product design than were their counterparts. Reasons for not having an account have changed over time, shifting away from product design factors toward other reasons. We suggest potential responses for firms, community educators, and policy makers.
Congenic Mapping and Candidate Sequencing of Susceptibility Genes for Type 1 Diabetes in the NOD Mouse

Abstract: Inheritance of type 1 diabetes is polygenic with a major susceptibility gene located in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). In addition to MHC‐linked susceptibility, a number of susceptibility genes have been mapped outside the MHC in both humans and animal models. In order to localize and identify susceptibility genes for type 1 diabetes, we have developed a series of congenic strains in which either susceptibility intervals from the NOD mouse, a mouse model of type 1 diabetes, were introgressed onto control background genes or protective intervals from control strains were introgressed onto NOD background genes. NOD. CTS‐H‐2 congenic mice, which possess recombinant MHC with NOD alleles at class II A and E genes, which are candidates for Idd1, revealed that Idd1 consists of multiple components, one in class II (Idd1) and the other adjacent to, but distinct from, Idd1 (Idd16). Phenotypes of NOD. IIS‐Idd3 congenic mice, which share the same alleles at both Il2 and Il21 as the NOD mouse, were indistinguishable from the NOD parental strain, indicating that both Il2 and Il21 are candidates for Idd3. In contrast, NOD. IIS‐Idd10 congenic mice, which share the same alleles at Fcgr1, a previous candidate for Idd10, as the NOD mouse, were protected from type 1 diabetes, suggesting that Fcgr1 may not be responsible for the Idd10 effect. These data suggest that the use of strain colony closely related to a disease model to find the same candidate mutation on different haplotypes and make congenic strains with this recombinant chromosome, termed ancestral haplotype congenic mapping, is an effective strategy for fine mapping and identification of genes responsible for complex traits.
Role of the diadic cleft in myocardial contractile control.

The diadic cleft space is the region of the cell, in mammalian heart, between the JSR membrane and the inner leaflet of the T-tubular SL membrane. As results accumulate from various laboratories, the role of the cleft region in regulation of the calcium movements of the cell seems to be of considerable significance. Much remains to be learned about the region, but enough is currently known to warrant a brief perspective at this time. In terms of calcium control of contraction, it is useful initially to compare this control in skeletal and cardiac muscle, because both demonstrate cleft structure: diadic in the heart, triadic in skeletal muscle. A simple experiment, which attracted little attention at the time, clearly showed that the process of excitation-contraction coupling is very different in skeletal and heart muscle. Armstrong et al1 showed that single fibers from frog semitendinosus muscle continued to contract for 20 minutes or longer when perfused with zero calcium plus EGTA ([Ca]<10−8 mol/L). By contrast, removal of calcium from the perfusate bathing ventricular cells completely eliminates contraction within the period between two beats.2 Just before the Armstrong study, Endo et al3 demonstrated the process of CICR in skinned skeletal muscle fibers. Ironically, he later found4 that the process occurred only in heavily calcium-loaded or caffeine-treated skeletal SR and was not physiological for this tissue. Fabiato,5 6 however, in a series of seminal studies, later established that CICR played a physiologically crucial role in heart muscle. It then became obvious that excitation-contraction coupling was, indeed, very different in the two tissues and that events in the cleft space were dissimilar. In skeletal muscle, the L-type calcium channel, also known as the DHPR,7 acts as a voltage sensor that provides the signal for calcium release …
The responsibility of respecting justice: an open challenge to Tony Blair's successors

This chapter examines the profound deficiencies in the bequest of the ‘Respect’ Agenda by responding to Tony Blair’s (2006) own challenge in his speech to accompany the launch of the Respect Action Plan for a “genuine intellectual debate about the nature of liberty” to which few had responded. By examining the progressive erosion of young people’s rights under Tony Blair’s leadership this chapter concludes by arguing that it is only by addressing the social injustices facing young people will the possibility of respect be actualised, responsibility be enabled, and liberty be secured.
Evidence-Based Prenatal Management in Cases of Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia

Congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) is the most common defect of the diaphragmatic muscle that separates the thoracic cavity from the abdominal cavity. This malformation allows part of the abdominal structures (intestinal loops, stomach and liver) to herniate into the thoracic cavity, hampering the normal development of the lung and resulting in abnormalities in cardiac function (Santos et al., 2008; Johnson, 2005).
The Operations Dashboard: a Collaborative Environment for Monitoring Virtual Organization-specific Compute Element Operational Status

Grid computing integrates heterogeneous, geographically distributed, Internet-ready resources that are administered under multiple domains. A key challenge in grid computing is to provide a high quality of service to users in a transparent fashion, hiding issues that include ownership, administration, and geographic location of a wide variety of resources that provide compute cycles, data storage, rendering cycles, imaging devices, and sensors, to name a few. Ensuring the functionality of a wide variety of resources under multiple administrative policies requires tools for discovering, repairing, and publishing information on the services offered by individual sites within a given grid. In this paper, we present the ACDC Operations Dashboard, an interactive, collaborative environment for collecting, addressing, and publishing operational service information for resources across a computational grid.
Valuation of Permanent, Transitory, and Price-Irrelevant Components of Reported Earnings

Both the economic nature of events and extant accounting rules cause reported earnings to have different components, each with different valuation implications. The price-earnings link is described better by separating components of unexpected earnings and multiplying each by a different response coefficient, rather than applying a single earnings response coefficient (ERC) to aggregate unexpected earnings. Using a simple model that assumes three types of innovations to reported earnings (permanent, transitory, and price-irrelevant), we develop systematic links among current earnings components, future earnings, and stock prices. Empirical tests of the model's predictions confirm the validity of our characterization of the price-earnings link. Attempts to understand better the effects of growth and (beta) risk result in little improvement.
Understanding Research on Values in Business

Researchers in all management specialties have discussed and investigated the important role values play in personal and organizational phenomena. However, because research on values has been performed in a wide range of social science disciplines and at different levels of analysis, much of thiswork has been uninformed by other work and is neither well integrated nor systematized, resulting in a great deal of confusion concerning the topic. This article attempts to add order and clarity to this area of research by proposing a framework of values research based on level of analysis and by cataloguing and reviewing the vast theoretical and empirical research in light of this framework. It concludes with a critique of the extant literature and recommendations for further research.
Foreign Policy Implications of Chinese Nationalism Revisited: the strident turn

This paper revisits the debate about foreign policy implications of Chinese nationalism in the context of China's increasingly confrontational and assertive behavior in recent years. It argues that while the Chinese government made effective efforts to control popular nationalism and Chinese foreign policy was therefore not dictated by emotional nationalistic rhetoric before 2008, it has become more willing to follow the popular nationalist calls to take a confrontational position against the Western powers and to adopt tougher measures in maritime territorial disputes with its neighbors. This strident turn is partially because the government is increasingly responsive to public opinion, but more importantly because of the convergence of Chinese state nationalism and popular nationalism calling for a more muscular Chinese foreign policy. Enjoying an inflated sense of empowerment supported by its new quotient of wealth and military capacities, and terrified of an uncertain future due to increasing social, economic and political tensions at home, the communist state has become more willing to play to the popular nationalist gallery in pursuing the so-called core national interests. These developments have complicated China's diplomacy, creating a heated political environment to harden China's foreign policy.
Reducing the Risk of Investing in Stocks

Although financial literature presents ambiguous evidence about the predicting value of fundamental and technical variables in stock markets, we find that evolving trading models based on fundamental variables substantially reduce the risk of investing in stocks. This reduction is so generous that the risk-adjusted return obtained following these fundamental variables to trade individual stocks is superior to that obtained by the passive investing in the same individual stocks. However the technical indicators we analyze do not show any predicting value neither in terms of return or risk. We observe the dynamics of individual stock prices’ return and risk in a new framework, the Adaptive Market Hypothesis (AMH) proposed recently by Lo (2004). Using this framework, we examine if there is room to improve investment strategies when adapting them to the potential changing conditions of financial markets or to the investors’ learning process. This adaptation is carried out by quantitative adaptive models driven by evolutionary algorithms (genetic algorithms) that update, over time, the threshold values for fundamental and technical indicators. We find that adaptation improves the risk-adjusted return of investment strategies. We test our trading models using a large sample of companies: non-financial firms with data available in Compustat database which have been listed in the S&P 500 for at least two quarters during the period 1976 - 2006. Our sample consists of 332,700 firm-quarterly observations for fundamental trading systems and 7,157,320 firm-daily observations for technical trading systems. Our models are run using parallel computation executed on 81 computers with a global capacity of 225 GFLOPS or (225x109) FLOPS (floating point operations per second) at the Computational Laboratory of the IT School of Madrid’s Complutense University.
Fyn Regulates the Duration of TCR Engagement Needed for Commitment to Effector Function1

In naive T cells, engagement of the TCR with agonist peptide:MHC molecules leads to phosphorylation of key intracellular signaling intermediates within seconds and this peaks within minutes. However, the cell does not commit to proliferation and IL-2 cytokine production unless receptor contact is sustained for several hours. The biochemical basis for this transition to full activation may underlie how T cells receive survival signals while maintaining tolerance, and is currently not well understood. We show here that for CD8 T cells commitment to proliferation and cytokine production requires sustained activation of the Src family kinase Lck and is opposed by the action of Fyn. Thus, in the absence of Fyn, commitment to activation occurs more rapidly, the cells produce more IL-2, and undergo more rounds of division. Our data demonstrate a role for Fyn in modulating the response to Ag in primary T cells.
An essential transcription factor, SciP, enhances robustness of Caulobacter cell cycle regulation

A cyclical control circuit composed of four master regulators drives the Caulobacter cell cycle. We report that SciP, a helix-turn-helix transcription factor, is an essential component of this circuit. SciP is cell cycle-controlled and co-conserved with the global cell cycle regulator CtrA in the α-proteobacteria. SciP is expressed late in the cell cycle and accumulates preferentially in the daughter swarmer cell. At least 58 genes, including many flagellar and chemotaxis genes, are regulated by a type 1 incoherent feedforward motif in which CtrA activates sciP, followed by SciP repression of ctrA and CtrA target genes. We demonstrate that SciP binds to DNA at a motif distinct from the CtrA binding motif that is present in the promoters of genes co-regulated by SciP and CtrA. SciP overexpression disrupts the balance between activation and repression of the CtrA-SciP coregulated genes yielding filamentous cells and loss of viability. The type 1 incoherent feedforward circuit motif enhances the pulse-like expression of the downstream genes, and the negative feedback to ctrA expression reduces peak CtrA accumulation. The presence of SciP in the control network enhances the robustness of the cell cycle to varying growth rates.
Urban solid waste collection system using mathematical modelling and tools of geographic information systems

A poorly designed urban solid waste collection system has an enormous impact on labour, operational and transport costs, and on society in general due to road contamination and negative effects on public health and the environment. This study proposes a methodology for designing an urban solid waste collection system. This methodology uses combinatorial optimisation and integer programing, and GIS tools to minimise collection time, and operational and transport costs while enhancing the current solid waste collection system. This methodology establishes feasible collection routes, determines an adequate vehicle fleet size and presents a comparative cost and sensitivity analysis of the results. The implementation of this methodology in a study case of a zone in Santiago yields significant cost savings in the total collection system.
Design and Analysis of Low-Power High-Frequency Robust Sub-Harmonic Injection-Locked Clock Multipliers

A low-jitter, low-power LC-based injection-locked clock multiplier (ILCM) with a digital frequency-tracking loop (FTL) is presented. Based on a pulse gating technique, the proposed FTL continuously tunes the oscillator's free-running frequency to ensure robust operation across PVT variations. The FTL resolves the race condition existing in injection-locked PLLs by decoupling frequency tuning from the injection path, such that the phase-locking condition is only determined by the injection path. This paper also introduces an accurate theoretical large-signal analysis for phase domain response (PDR) of injection-locked oscillators (ILOs). The proposed PDR analysis captures the asymmetric nature of ILO's lock-in range, and the impact of frequency error on injection strength and phase noise performance. The proposed architecture and analysis are demonstrated by a prototype fabricated in 65 nm CMOS process with active area of 0.25 mm2. The prototype ILCM generates output clock in the range of 6.75-8.25 GHz by multiplying the reference clock by 64. It achieves superior integrated jitter performance of 190 fsrms, while consuming 2.25 mW power. This translates to an excellent figure-of-merit (FoM) of -251 dB, which is the best reported high-frequency clock multiplier.
Frequency and predictability effects in the Dundee Corpus: An eye movement analysis

Analyses carried out on a large corpus of eye movement data were used to comment on four contentious theoretical issues. The results provide no evidence that word frequency and word predictability have early interactive effects on inspection time. Contrary to some earlier studies, in these data there is little evidence that properties of a prior word generally spill over and influence current processing. In contrast, there is evidence that both the frequency and the predictability of a word in parafoveal vision influence foveal processing. In the case of predictability, the direction of the effect suggests that more predictable parafoveal words produce longer foveal fixations. Finally, there is evidence that information about word class modulates processing over a span greater than a single word. The results support the notion of distributed parallel processing.
Pathogen‐induced apoptosis of macrophages: a common end for different pathogenic strategies

Microbe–macrophage interactions play a central role in the pathogenesis of many infections. Several bacterial pathogens induce apoptosis specifically in macrophages, but the mechanisms by which it occurs differ, and the resulting pathology can take different courses. Macrophage death caused by Shigella flexneri and Salmonella spp. has been shown to result in the release of pro‐inflammatory cytokines. Conversely, Yersinia spp. induce apoptosis by suppressing the signalling pathways that lead to the production of tumour necrosis factor (TNF)‐α, a cytokine essential for the control of this infection. It is likely that there are a variety of reasons why macrophages are particularly susceptible to pathogen‐induced apoptosis. One reason may be the expression of surface receptors that recognize highly conserved bacterial components, such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and bacterial lipoproteins (BLPs). These receptors have recently been shown to activate pro‐apoptotic signalling pathways. The roles of macrophage apoptosis in different disease processes are discussed.