Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
MicroRNA as modulators of neuronal responses

Neuronal activity controls the correct establishment and refinement of neuronal circuits by regulating key aspects such as dendritogenesis and spine development. Both transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene expression programs induced by neuronal activity have to be coordinated in a tight spatio-temporal manner in order for proper functioning of the neuron. In this context microRNAs (miRNAs), which are implicated in post-transcriptional gene regulation, are good candidates to control dendritic and spine development. In a recent study we have demonstrated that neuronal activity induces myocyte enhancing factor 2 (Mef2) dependent transcription of a large cluster of brain-specific miRNAs (miR379-410). Expression of at least three microRNAs (miR-329,-134 and -381) from this cluster is essential for activity-dependent dendritic outgrowth of hippocampal neurons. One of these three miRNAs, miR-134, promotes dendritic outgrowth by inhibiting translation of the mRNA encoding for the translational repressor (or activator) Pumilio2 (Pum2). In brief, our results suggest a novel role for Mef2 in promoting activity-dependent dendritogenesis by inducing the transcription of miR379-410 cluster.
Social capital, internationalization and absorptive capacity: The electronics and ICT cluster of the Basque Country

This article analyses the case of a successful young high technology cluster in an old industrialized European region, the electronics and information and communications technology cluster in the Basque Country (Spain). Based on the findings of this case study, we propose that social capital and internationalization play an important role in increasing the absorptive capacity of clusters (thus, the capacity of a cluster to absorb, diffuse and creatively exploit extra-cluster knowledge), and hence, in sustaining their growth and dynamism. Absorptive capacity depends on the capacity of firms to establish intra- and extra-cluster knowledge linkages. We put forward in this article the fact that social capital fosters intra-cluster knowledge linkages, and cluster's internationalization the extra-cluster knowledge ones. Therefore, social capital and internationalization are key elements to increase the absorptive capacity of a cluster and its growth. Given the accumulative, path- and place-dependent nature of social capital and knowledge creation and accumulation, we employed a largely qualitative and historical analysis, combining statistical and qualitative cluster data and interviews with key actors.
Bank financing and credit rationing of Australian SMEs

This paper investigates two aspects of bank financing using a sample of 1,973 Australian small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). We compare the variables that explain why Australian small to medium sized enterprises seek bank finance with those that underpin bank credit rationing of loan applications. Our analysis highlights that little overlap exists between the two sets of variables. Larger small to medium sized enterprises with growth intentions, business plans, and those in the agriculture industry are significantly more likely to seek finance. In contrast, firms in agriculture that are older, and that have incremental product innovation, 40% or more of export sales, and a male Chief Executive Officer, are less likely to be credit rationed. Importantly, having business plans, whether in large or small firms, does not relate significantly to credit rationing.
Confocal microscopy comparison of intralase femtosecond laser and Moria M2 microkeratome in LASIK.

PURPOSE To analyze the quality of LASIK flaps created using a femtosecond laser or a mechanical microkeratome. METHODS A prospective study of consecutive bilateral LASIK flaps (100 patients) created with a 15 kHz femtosecond laser (IntraLase) or with a mechanical microkeratome (Moria M2) was performed. Outcome measures included visual and refractive outcomes, flap dimensions, and intraoperative complications. The first consecutive ten patients (20 eyes) were examined using confocal microscopy 1 and 3 months following surgery. RESULTS No significant differences were noted in the visual outcomes between groups (t test, P > .05 for all comparisons). Analysis of superficial measurements revealed more round flaps and greater predictability in surface dimensions for the femtosecond laser group (t test, P = .016). Mean deviation of flap thickness from target was the same for both instruments, 10 microm, with greater variability for the mechanical microkeratome. The incidence of diffuse lamellar keratitis was significantly greater in the femtosecond laser group (17%) than in the mechanical group (0%) (chi-square test, P < .001). Confocal microscopy revealed a higher wound healing opacity index in the femtosecond laser group. CONCLUSIONS Although the clinical results are similar, the femtosecond laser produces LASIK flaps with more accurate dimensions compared to the mechanical microkeratome.
Histopathological Study of Healing After Allogenic Mesenchymal Stem Cell Delivery in Myocardial Infarction in Dogs

In this histological study, we assessed the role of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) in the healing process that takes place during the subacute phase of myocardial infarction in dogs. Seven days after occlusion of the left anterior descending coronary artery, adult mongrel dogs received 100 × 106 4′-6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI)-labeled allogenic bone marrow-derived MSCs by the transendocardial (TE, n = 6) and intracoronary (IC, n = 4) routes; control dogs (n = 6) received no infusion. The dogs were euthanized at 21 days after occlusion. Hearts were excised and sliced from apex to base into four transverse sections, which were divided into nine segments. Paraffin sections from each segment were stained with hematoxylin and eosin, trichrome, picrosirius red, and antibodies against several extracellular matrix components. Frozen sections were immunostained for host cardiac phenotypical markers and analyzed by epifluorescence and deconvolution fluorescence microscopy (DFM). We found less unresolved necrotic myocardium and more extracellular matrix deposition in MSC-treated dogs than in controls 2 weeks after cell delivery. By DFM, no DAPI+ MSC nuclei were observed within native cardiac cells. MSCs delivered during the subacute phase of acute myocardial infarction positively affect healing, apparently by mechanisms other than differentiation into mature native cardiac cells.
iRFP is a sensitive marker for cell number and tumor growth in high-throughput systems

GFP and luciferase are used extensively as markers both in vitro and in vivo although both have limitations. The utility of GFP fluorescence is restricted by high background signal and poor tissue penetrance. Luciferase throughput is limited in vitro by the requirement for cell lysis, while in vivo, luciferase readout is complicated by the need for substrate injection and the dependence on endogenous ATP. Here we show that near-infrared fluorescent protein in combination with widely available near-infrared scanners overcomes these obstacles and allows for the accurate determination of cell number in vitro and tumor growth in vivo in a high-throughput manner and at negligible per-well costs. This system represents a significant advance in tracking cell proliferation in tissue culture as well as in animals, with widespread applications in cell biology.
Morphological abnormalities in the lymphocytes of patients with the Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome.

Lymphocytes from 18 patients with the Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome (WAS) were examined by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Most peripheral blood lymphocytes from normal individuals are covered with slender microvillus projections, but a large proportion of lymphocytes from WAS patients were found to be relatively devoid of microvilli. A lymphocyte morphology scoring system was developed to quantify the density of microvilli: Grade 4 classified those lymphocytes with greater than 75% of the surface covered with microvilli with progressive decrements to grade 1, which were those without microvilli. The mean lymphocyte morphology score of eight normal individuals was 3.62 +/- . 22. The mean lymphocyte score of WAS patients was substantially lower (2.89 +/- .27, P less than .001). In addition, WAS lymphocytes often were qualitatively abnormal, with short, blunted microvilli. These morphological criteria were used to diagnose WAS from the cord blood lymphocytes of one "at-risk" patient. Thus, WAS is the first primary immunodeficiency in which morphological abnormalities have been identified that can aid in diagnosis.
Abductive Equivalence in First-order Logic

In Artificial Intelligence, abduction is often formalized in first-order logic. In this article, we focus on the problem of identifying equivalence of two abductive theories represented in first-order logic. To this end, two definitions of equivalence are given for abduction. Explainable equivalence requires that two abductive theories have the same explainability for any observation. On the other hand, explanatory equivalence guarantees that any observation has exactly the same explanations in each abductive theory. Explanatory equivalence is a stronger notion than explainable equivalence. In first-order logic, explainable equivalence can be verified by the notion of extensional equivalence in default theories, while explanatory equivalence reduces to logical equivalence between background theories. We also show the complexity results for abductive equivalence.
A Cultural Model of Online Banking Adoption: Long-Term Orientation Perspective

Because the technology acceptance model TAM may not be applicable to all cultures, conducting studies from a cultural perspective to support research on the adoption of online banking can contribute to the TAM literature. A research framework based on the extended TAM is developed to examine the effects of efficacy computer self-efficacy, social status subjective norms and belief variables perceived usefulness and ease of use on customers' adoption intentions. The effect of the interaction between the cultural value of long-term orientation and the TAM is examined. A voluntary survey involving a total of 376 potential adopters was conducted in an online banking setting in Taiwan. The results confirm previous TAM findings that both efficacy and belief variables have significantly positive direct and indirect effects on adoption, but under the cultural influence of long-term orientation, customers remain hesitant to use online banking because they are more concerned with face-to-face long-term bank relationships to ensure future gratification than with current social status.
Ethical Positioning Index (EPI): an innovative tool for differential brand positioning

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the Ethical Positioning Index (EPI), an innovative ranking scale based on the ethical issues in brand positioning. This paper is based on the core idea that ethics can be used as a product differentiator and can create a strategic advantage.Design/methodology/approach – Five basic elements of brand positioning, brand identity, brand image, brand personality, brand awareness, and brand communication, are blended with the three basic elements of ethics; beliefs, values, and symbols and customs. The EPI emerges from the established ethical brand positioning framework and the analysis from the conducted survey which was composed of brand positioning and ethics questions.Findings – Consumer driven weights have been obtained and a mathematical model has been proposed to evaluate the total score and finally the ranking of the brands.Research limitations/implications – The EPI parameters' weight will vary owing to the non‐existence of universal ethics and hence .
Social democracy and full employment

Full employment was the centrepiece of the economic policy of social democracy in the post-war period. Whilst the role of Keynesianism in policy making may be exaggerated, it offered the prospect of maintaining full employment without any section of society having to pay. Problems with the foreign balance and with the budget deficits, however, may require that some part of society has to pay with reduced consumption for full employment. This will tend to sharpen the distributive conflicts which, as Kalecki argued, are endemic to full employment capitalism and which eventually rendered it unsustainable by undermining profitability and the dynamism of private investment. The demand necessary to sustain full employment can be maintained by a balanced budget expansion provided the political support can be secured for the higher taxation and provided the institutions for containing distributional conflict can be developed.
Highly Skilled Indian Migrants in Ireland

Migration is a key aspect of globalistion and the regulation of international migration and migrant rights are among the most contested public policy issues around the world. This paper is a contribution to the debate on the global governance of migration, migrant rights and development. The paper is aimed at forming part of a constructive dialogue between the EU and India on all migration-related aspects. The paper consists of a high-level overview of expertise in major disciplines that deal with migration (demography, economics, law, sociology and politics) with a view to informing future migration studies regarding highly skilled Indian migrants in Ireland. This paper uses standardized concepts and instruments that allow for aggregation and comparison, thereby providing the Government of India as well as the European Union, its Member States, the academia and civil society, with reliable, updated and comparative information on migration from India to Ireland, as well as more in-depth analysis on highly-skilled and circular migration. This research adds value by connecting experts with both policy-makers and the wider public.
The endogenous scholar: porous boundaries and travelling ideas in development

The title of this symposium begs many questions: what is development? What is ‘critical? What constitutes policy and its implementation? And, finally, what is the justification for the implied separation of something called ‘policy and implementation’ and the domain of scholarship and critical thinking? I pose these questions not as part of a ritual nod towards deconstruction but to highlight the extent to which we can become prisoners of our own terms and our own ways of framing problems. In this instance I suggest that the separation of scholarship from policy and implementation is more imagined than actual, as also is the presumption that ‘critical thinking’ is almost always by definition done on and from the outside of ‘orthodox’ organisations. As always seems to be the case for me, I make these observations in great debt to my Latin American colleagues and friends. I have long been struck in Latin America by the absence of any clear separation between scholarship, policy and public service. Ideas, people and resources flow across these presumed boundaries with relative ease. Friends, colleagues and acquaintances from the worlds of research and civil society organisation have cycled in and out of central and subnational government positions as well as in and out of donor agencies. One friend, un intelectual nato (a born intellectual), has done research, turned down a tenure track job in the USA in order to work with peasant organisations, worked for the World Bank, led a regional initiative closely associated with a prominent global foundation, continued his political activism and is one of the sharpest thinkers I have known. His ‘critical perspectives’ are there for all to see and have accompanied him in his travels across the worlds of research, activism and policy. Friends who have done important research making visible the obstacles to indigenous peoples’ access to territory, land and services, or research on the political ecologies of forest resurgence, have become ministers and vice-ministers (and this is before we get to the ostensible governments of 21st century socialism, where you find a vice-president, such as Alvaro García Linera of Bolivia, steeped in critical social theory and social movement writings and coming from backgrounds at once academic and militant). To be sure, the
Service quality in Brazilian mobile telephony: an efficiency frontier analysis

The mobile telephony sector is characterized by the dynamic interplay of rapid changes in technology and an apparently growing competition, as indicated by the fierce nonprice competition, and is yet associated with the entry of new operating companies in some cases. In this context, a relevant and neglected issue is the assessment of how service quality responded to an increasingly competitive environment. This study utilizes data envelopment analysis to assess the quality efficiency of mobile telephony companies in Brazil during the 2000–2003 period. Window analysis was conducted for the entire period, taking as reference different quality indicators pertaining to different forms of complaints and calls completed and interrupted. The efficiency measurement was made feasible by interpreting the indicators reflecting a positive dimension of quality as outputs and those reflecting negative aspects of quality as inputs. Given potential heterogeneities across firms that relate to the frequency band and to the technology (time division multiple access technology and code division multiple access technology among others), this article considered adjusted efficiency scores. The Tobit model for censored data was estimated to control for the aforementioned aspects. Rescaled residuals from the econometric estimation produced efficiency scores for service quality. The evidence indicated an overall improvement in efficiency over time. Nonparametric tests were consistent with a positive evolution of quality over time even for shorter subperiods.
Differential in vitro activities of ionophore compounds against Plasmodium falciparum and mammalian cells

Twenty-two ionophore compounds were screened for their antimalarial activities. They consisted of true ionophores (mobile carriers) and channel-forming quasi-ionophores with different ionic specificities. Eleven of the compounds were found to be extremely efficient inhibitors of Plasmodium falciparum growth in vitro, with 50% inhibitory concentrations of less than 10 ng/ml. Gramicidin D was the most active compound tested, with 50% inhibitory concentration of 0.035 ng/ml. Compounds with identical ionic specificities generally had similar levels of antimalarial activity, and ionophores specific to monovalent cations were the most active. Compounds were further tested to determine their in vitro toxicities against mammalian lymphoblast and macrophage cell lines. Nine of the 22 compounds, i.e., alborixin, lonomycin, nigericin, narasin, monensin and its methylated derivative, lasalocid and its bromo derivative, and gramicidin D, most specific to monovalent cations, were at least 35-fold more active in vitro against P. falciparum than against the two other mammalian cell lines. The enhanced ability to penetrate the erythrocyte membrane after infection could be a factor that determines ionophore selectivity for infected erythrocytes.
Approaches for Estimating Noncompliance: Examples from Federal Taxation in the United States

Crime and underground economic activity are a fact of life around the world. Most societies attempt to control these activities through the expenditure of resources on monitoring, prosecution, punishment, and educational programmes. Gathering statistics about who is engaging in illegal or underground activity, the frequencies with which various crimes or underground transactions are occurring, and the severity or magnitude of these acts, is crucial for making good decisions regarding our allocation of resources in this area. Unfortunately, in general it is very difficult to obtain accurate information about these issues. This is partly because the individuals engaged in such activities wish not to be identified and often take actions to avoid detection, and partly because by their very nature the activities tend not to generate economic, accounting, legal, demographic or other cultural records. The fact that it is difficult to obtain accurate information about the activities, however, does not in any way imply that we should not make a concerted effort to try to obtain the best information we can. I believe the cost associated with attempting to determine the extent and nature of these activities is in most circumstances well below the expected benefit, which includes the likelihood of improved decisionmaking by relevant government personnel and the general public. As a result, I also believe the debate about developing estimates of illegal or underground economic activity should primarily focus on practical issues related to how best to go about developing estimates that are as reliable as possible. In this short article I shall discuss the measurement of noncompliance with laws and regulations, my particular area of expertise, and shall not discuss the measurement of other kinds of 'hidden' economic behaviours, such as informal contracting, unmeasured home production, and 'grey-market' activities. In particular, I shall discuss three approaches for estimating the aggregate amount of noncompliance with respect to a specific law or regulation, (i) intensive data collection for a focused subsample of the population, (ii) detection controlled estimation, and (iii) the comparision of estimates generated by distinct datasets and models. For each, I shall describe in general terms what the approach is and how it is implemented, review limitations of the approach, and present an example of the application of the approach to the measurement of tax noncompliance in the United States. My discussion shall necessarily be short and I refer the interested reader to a variety of original research publications for more details, especially about the specific examples.
Review on discrete cosine transform based watermarking for compressed digital video

Digital media production and editing technologies have led to widespread forgeries and unauthorized sharing of digital video. This paper presents a method to detect video tampering and differ it from video processing operations, such as recompression, noise, and brightness increase, using a practical watermarking scheme for real-time authentication of digital video. It can be configured to adjust transparency, robustness, and capacity of the system. The watermark signals represent the macroblock's and frame's indices, and are embedded into the nonzero quantized discrete cosine transform value of blocks, mostly the last nonzero values, enabling our method to detect spatial, temporal, and spatiotemporal tampering. Our method causes smaller video distortion, leading to a PSNR degradation of about 0.88 dB and structural similarity index decrease of 0.0090 with only 0.05% increase in bitrate, and with the bit correct rate of 0.71 to 0.88 after H.264/AVC recompression.
Crystal Structure of a Neutralizing Human IgG Against HIV-1: A Template for Vaccine Design

We present the crystal structure at 2.7 angstrom resolution of the human antibody IgG1 b12. Antibody b12 recognizes the CD4-binding site of human immunodeficiency virus–1 (HIV-1) gp120 and is one of only two known antibodies against gp120 capable of broad and potent neutralization of primary HIV-1 isolates. A key feature of the antibody-combining site is the protruding, finger-like long CDR H3 that can penetrate the recessed CD4-binding site of gp120. A docking model of b12 and gp120 reveals severe structural constraints that explain the extraordinary challenge in eliciting effective neutralizing antibodies similar to b12. The structure, together with mutagenesis studies, provides a rationale for the extensive cross-reactivity of b12 and a valuable framework for the design of HIV-1 vaccines capable of eliciting b12-like activity.