Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chromosome Transfer from F-lac+ Strains of Escherichia coli K-12 Mutant at recA, recB, or recC

The frequency of chromosome transfer from various recombination-deficient F-lac+ donor strains was estimated by standardizing the yield of conjugants receiving a male chromosomal marker against the level of episome transfer in the mating mixture. The efficiency of chromosome transfer from newly formed F-lac+ cells carrying recB21 or recC22 was more than 50% of the wild-type value, although it was about 10 and 20%, respectively, if the male cell lines had become established. In contrast, recA13 donors transmitted the chromosome with less than 10−4 of the normal frequency. If chromosome transfer from F-lac+ strains reflects the cutting and subsequent joining of homologous single strands of episomal and chromosomal deoxyribonucleic acid by recombination, these results imply that the completed unions are not made in recA cells, but can be effected with more than 50% of normal efficiency in newly formed partial diploids mutant at either recB or recC. Thus, the defective stage in recA mutants may precede strand joining, whereas the deficiency in recB or recC cells may involve a later step in recombinant formation.
How Do Performance Indicators Add Up? An Examination of Composite Indicators in Public Services

Composite indicators are an aggregation of underlying performance indicators into a single index and have been used widely in the public sector to create league tables. This article investigates the degree to which composite measures are an appropriate metric for measuring performance. The authors illustrate the degree of uncertainty in the construction of composites and how rankings are sensitive to the way in which the performance indicators are aggregated. The article highlights the issues which need to be considered in the development and use of composite indicators for performance management purposes.
The Early Years of the MIT PhD Program in Industrial Economics

The immediate postwar period witnessed not only a considerable expansion of economics graduate education in the United States but also its reformulation. Graduate education at MIT became more technical, with shorter theses on narrowly defined problems. This occurred as economics was going through important changes, informed by its mathematization, by the stabilization of a neoclassical way of doing economics, by the advancement of econometrics and the “Keynesian revolution,” and by the Americanization of economics. The MIT PhD program in economics was created only in 1941 but very quickly became a major producer of PhDs. The new training offered by MIT to economists not only followed larger changes in US academe but also contributed to them, and this makes it an important case study of the transformation of American economics more generally. My aim here is to scrutinize the formative years of this graduate program, mostly the 1940s and 1950s.
Frequency and Type of Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Mutations in African Americans with Non-small Cell Lung Cancer

Background: Epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutations in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) predict response to tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Mutations occur more commonly in never smokers and East Asians, but there are conflicting reports on the frequency of EGFR mutations in tumors from African Americans. Methods: Tumors from 67 African American and 77 white participants in previous case-control studies of lung cancer were selected to determine EGFR mutational status. Mutation analysis was performed using the Sequenom mass array analyzer (Sequenom, San Diego, CA). Results: Overall, 13.9% of the study population carried an EGFR mutation. EGFR mutations occurred in 11.9% of tumors from African Americans compared with 15.6% in whites (p = 0.53). All mutations found in African Americans were deletions in exon 19. The majority of mutations were found in nonsmokers among both African Americans (7/8) and whites (8/12). Conclusion: These results indicate that African Americans with NSCLC harbor somatic EGFR mutations at a frequency similar to whites with NSCLC. Thus, clinicians should not use race as a clinical decision parameter for the use of EGFR-tyrosine kinase inhibitors.
The Aging Voice

Objectives To evaluate the impact on voice quality of 2 pathogenic factors involved in age-related dysphonia: glottal gap and decline in respiratory function. Study Design Cross-sectional prospective. Settings Tertiary referral center. Subjects and Methods A total of 105 healthy patients ≥65 years old were included, with a maximum phonation time ≤15 seconds for men and ≤12 seconds for women. Laryngostroboscopy and spirometry were conducted to assess the glottal gap and respiratory function, and 4 profiles were defined according to their combination: glottal deficit, respiratory deficit, combined deficit, and no deficit. Differences across profiles in phonation times, acoustic parameters, and GRBAS scale and Voice Handicap Index–10 scores were analyzed according to Kruskal-Wallis and Mann-Whitney nonparametric tests. Multiple regression was performed to estimate the influence of each pathogenic factor. Results Respiratory deficit was the most frequent profile (37%). When compared to the other groups, patients with combined deficit had shorter phonation times for men (8.5 seconds; Kruskal-Wallis, P = .009) and women (7.8 seconds; P = .003), worse jitter (8.3%; P = .001), GRBAS scale (5.8; P < .001), and Voice Handicap Index–10 (7.7; P = .002). Conclusion Age-related respiratory and laryngeal changes have a negative impact on vocal quality, especially when both deficits are present.
The interaction between tourism and FDI in real estate in OECD countries

The purpose of this article is to investigate the empirical link between foreign direct investment (FDI) in real estate sector (FDIRE) and international tourism (TOUR). Panel co-integration and panel Granger causality techniques are applied to analyse both long- and short-run relationships for the case study of selected OECD countries. Our empirical results show the existence of the long-run and a bi-directional causal relationship between FDIRE and TOUR. The results provide some implications for policy-makers.
Patterns of care for the treatment of bladder cancer.

PURPOSE We examined bladder cancer patterns of care and differences in treatments administered to patients by age, race/ethnicity and gender using a population based sample. MATERIAL AND METHODS A random sample of bladder cancer patients diagnosed in 1995 without upper urinary tract involvement in 8 Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results registries were included. Tumor stage and grade were used to assign patients to risk groups and patterns of care were investigated. Descriptive analyses and logistic regression models examined differences in care based on patient age, race/ethnicity and gender. RESULTS Of the 669 patients 485 patients had superficial disease, including 222 at low, 151 at intermediate and 112 at high risk, while 154 had muscle invasive disease. Of the patients with superficial bladder cancer 73.4% underwent transurethral bladder resection only. Those with muscle invasive disease were most commonly treated with transurethral bladder resection only (49.1%) or cystectomy only (31%). Intravesical chemotherapy in patients with superficial tumors and aggressive treatment with cystectomy and/or systemic chemotherapy in those with muscle invasive disease increased in relation to risk classification, as may have been expected. However, multivariate analyses suggested an influence of co-morbidities on intravesical therapy in patients with superficial tumors and an influence of patient age and geographic region on aggressive treatment for muscle invasive disease. CONCLUSIONS No differences in treatment were identified based on patient race/ethnicity or gender. Treatment for superficial disease is primarily influenced by risk category and co-morbidities, while treatment for muscle invasive disease is influenced by patient age and geographic region.
Public sector personnel management in three African countries: Current problems and possibilities

Following visits to three less developed countries (LDCs) in Sub-Saharan Africa (Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe) to study public sector personnel systems, the author offers a review of personnel practice in Civil Service and parastatal organizations. In the main, despite a recognition that personnel issues were crucial to organizational success and thereby, ultimately, to economic development, the personnel function was found to be a largely reactive administrative operation, often combined with non-personnel ‘housekeeping’ roles and lacking a strategic role within the organization. Reasons for this restricted role are suggested and include a lack of alternative models of best personnel practice, the historical legacy of colonial administration, and the continuing need for administrative controls in the face of favouritism and corruption. Prospects for reform are considered in the light of current conditions and the view is advanced that changes in the personnel practices and policy are most desirable and urgent in the parastatal sector, and that a reformed parastatal sector might serve as a model for selective improvements to personnel management in the Civil Service.
Economic Framework for Melbourne Traffic Planning

elbourne has the size, population density and car ownership levels of many North American cities but the levels of public transport infrastructure seen in European cities. Although possessing aboveaverage public transport infrastructure it still faces problems of dealing with high car use and socially-costly traffic congestion that amount to losses of billions of dollars annually. The costs include wasted travel time, increased stress and fatigue, excessive fuel and maintenance costs, lower worker productivity, increased transport capital requirements, reduced business competitiveness and deterioration of an otherwise aesthetically pleasing environment. Although these costs can be reduced with demand-side policies, roads are the only public utility in Victoria not targeted for efficient pricing. In this paper, economics-based policies are proposed for ameliorating Melbourne’s traffic congestion. A suite of demand-side strategies is suggested including a cordon pricing scheme for the central city, parking policies which address boundary problems on the cordon perimeter and pricing of major arterials and ring-roads. These policies should be accompanied by ‘traffic calming’ measures on smaller urban roads. Auxiliary public transport pricing reforms are advocated promoting competition. Current policies of concentrating urban expansion on city boundaries are criticised. The proposed policy mix is a stop-gap bringing congestion closer to efficient levels thereby facilitating transfer to comprehensive electronic pricing. Comprehensive ‘first-best’ pricing of Melbourne’s roads by satellite monitoring is impractical due to high start-up costs relative to congestion. However, inexpensive demand-side policies can reduce congestion costs. This paper exposits such policies. Section 2 overviews Melbourne’s transport system. Section 3 analyses congestion policies emphasising demand-side tactics and costeffective cordon pricing of the city centre. Supply-side strategies, information policies, indirect demand-side strategies and other policies are discussed. Section 4 outlines a plan to relieve radial and central traffic congestion by curb-side pricing, cordon pricing and ‘traffic calming’. Section 5 explains why direct demand-side strategies are generally unsuited to reduce cross-town congestion. Section 6 offers conclusions and final remarks.
An Assessment of Visitor Expenditure Methods and Models

There has been a great deal of research devoted to estimating visitor expenditures in countries, regions, cities, and other areas as related to specific events. Such estimates are essential for producing comprehensive estimates of tourism’s economic benefits in an area. This review of methods used to estimate visitor expenditures applies definitions of relevant concepts developed by the World Tourism Organization (WTO) to promote standardization and quality in tourism statistics. Three contexts are identified for visitor-expenditure studies: occasion, venue, and time frame. Occasion recognizes the visitor-expenditure studies that have focused on annual visitor expenditures in a study area in contrast to those focusing on visitor expenditures associated with a given event. The latter occasion raises a number of issues regarding what constituted qualified visitors and qualified expenditures. Relevance, coverage, and accuracy principles are applied from the literature to assess 11 methods and models. Guidance is provided for selecting valid approaches by occasion.
The conservative revolution: a roundtable discussion

My interpretation of conservative economic policy-especially in the US where I am entitled to an opinion, but also in Europe, where I am not is rather different from that implicit in the papers. The difference has to do with goals in the first instance; but that has implications for policies. Olivier Blanchard says: 'Freeing the forces of the supply side was the ultimate goal of the Reagan program. ' It was certainly the stated ultimate goal of the program as it was in Britain but to accept it as the real goal is to make the Reagan people and other conservatives appear to be foolish when they are not. Charlie Schultze said that there was nothing wrong with supply-side economics that dividing by ten would not cure. It is hardly credible that serious people believed those things, and I don't think that they did. I think they said and say things like that in the same spirit that manufacturers make wildly vague claims for their products. It was PR from the word Go and remains PR. To tell you the truth, I'm inclined to think that the Reagan and Thatcher people do not really care much about macroeconomic performance. There was never much intensive talk by the Reagan Administration about its macroeconomic intentions. In the case of the UK and the
Relative importance of foreign and domestic shocks in the Venezuelan economy

This paper uses a Cholesky Factorization in a var analysis to investigate the relative importance of foreign and domestic shocks in the Venezuelan economy during the 1960:i- 2004:ii period. The economy is assumed to be driven by foreign (U. S. gdp and oil prices) and domestic (exchange rate, fiscal, monetary, inflation, and output) orthogonal shocks. As shown by the empirical evidence foreign shocks tend to be relatively more important than domestic shocks. Precisely, oil price and U. S. gdp shocks tend to have permanent effects on the main macroeconomic aggregates. Monetary policy only has temporary effects on output and the nominal exchange rate.
‘Breaking the ICE’: workplace democracy in a modernized social Europe

The EU seeks to improve its labour market performance through implementing the Lisbon and European Employment Strategies which encourage the modernization of work organization through the development of partnership with the assistance of an ‘appropriate’ regulatory framework. Key aspects of this latter framework concern workers' rights regarding information, consultation and participation in corporate governance. European labour laws, introduced in the 1970s, sought to strengthen employers' consultation with their workforce and, more recently, the changing economic, technological and organizational environment has returned issues related to workplace democracy to the top of the social policy agenda. Here we evaluate the significance of the new Directive on Information and Consultation with Employees (ICE) within the context of this planned modernization of European social policy. In doing so, we re-examine the historical development of workers' consultation laws in Europe and assess the economic rationale for regulating workplace social dialogue in an enlarged Social Europe.
Effect of Host Tree Species on Cellulase Activity and Bacterial Community Composition in the Gut of Larval Asian Longhorned Beetle

ABSTRACT Anoplophora glabripennis, the Asian longhorned beetle, is a wood-boring insect that can develop in a wide range of healthy deciduous hosts and requires gut microbes to aid in wood degradation and digestion. Here we show that larval A. glabripennis harbor a diverse gut bacterial community, and this community can be extremely variable when reared in different host trees. A. glabripennis reared in a preferred host (Acer saccharum) had the highest gut bacterial diversity compared with larvae reared either in a secondary host (Quercus palustris), a resistant host (Pyrus calleryana), or on artificial diet. The gut microbial community of larval A. glabripennis collected from field populations on Brooklyn, NY, showed the highest degree of complexity among all samples in this study. Overall, when larvae fed on a preferred host, they harbored a broad diversity of gut bacteria spanning the &agr;-, &bgr;-, &ggr;-Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes. Cellulase activities (&bgr;-1,4-endoglucanase, &bgr;-1,4-exoglucanase, and &bgr;-1,4-glucosidase) in the guts of larvae fed in a preferred host (A. saccharum) or a secondary host (Q. palustris) were significantly higher than that of artificial diet fed larvae. Larvae that fed on wood from a resistant host (P. calleryana) showed suppressed total gut cellulase activity. Results show that the host tree can impact both gut microbial community complexity and cellulase activity in A. glabripennis.
Labour mobility in the enlarged European Union

The 2004 enlargement has been one of the most challenging tasks undertaken by the European Union (EU) since its creation in 1958. The enlargement is going to change the character of the entire union. While before 2004 the EU was a more or less homogeneous club of rich economies, after the enlargement has taken place the income gap between its "old" and "new" members greatly endangers this homogeneity. Given the magnitude of the income gap, there are serious concerns in the "old" member-countries that their labour markets and social safety nets may be swamped with huge inflow of cheap, low-skilled labour from the newly acceding countries (AC), especially from the former East European Soviet satellite states. Unfortunately international macroeconomic theory does little to dismiss those concerns. The neoclassical Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson model predicts overall gains from economic integration for all countries involved but it also foresees the equalisation of goods and factor prices among the final outcomes of the integration (i. e. falling prices of scarce production factors such as labour). This happens regardless whether the restrictions on trade or production factor movements are lifted or not because trade and production factors movement are substitutes in the model. If factor prices (i. e. wages) do not adjust quickly due to rigidities that prevail on
Exogenous melatonin in periodic limb movement disorder: an open clinical trial and a hypothesis.

STUDY OBJECTIVES The etiology of Periodic Limb Movement Disorder (PLMD) as well as the precise role of melatonin in human physiology remains poorly understood. Inspired by a single case observation we performed the presented study in order to obtain first evidence for the hypothesis that exogenous melatonin would decrease PLM's and thereby improves symptoms of PLMD patients. DESIGN N/A. SETTING N/A. PATIENTS/PARTICIPANTS Nine patients with first time diagnosis of PLMD without RLS were treated over a six-week period with 3 mg melatonin, taken between 10 and 11 p.m. INTERVENTIONS N/A. RESULTS Melatonin improved well-being in 7 of the 9 patients. Polysomnography, performed prior and at the end of melatonin treatment, demonstrated a significant reduction of investigated movement parameters, such as PLMs, PLM index, PLMs with arousals and PLM-arousal index. Actigraphy, measured over 14 nights prior and during the last 14 days of melatonin treatment, showed a significant reduction in movement rate and minutes with movements during Time in Bed. CONCLUSIONS The temporal distribution of PLMs, as well as the coupling of PLMs with the phase position of circadian temperature curve, suggest an involvement of the circadian timing system in the pathophysiology of PLMD. Locomotor activity in animals clearly exhibits a circadian pattern and can be strongly influenced by exogenous melatonin. Results suggest a chronobiotic effect of exogenous melatonin in PLMD. More specifically, we hypothesize that the mode of action of melatonin in the presented PLMD patients might have been an increase of output-amplitude of the circadian timing system, thereby enhancing the circadian rhythmicity of locomotor activity with a reduction of sleep motor activity.
HVDC/HVAC system and damping the oscillation by a linear controller based on genetic algorithm

Stabilizing power angle oscillation and torsional oscillation on the turbine-generator shaft using a linear feedback controller is investigated in this paper. In order to analysis the effect of this controller, a single machine connected through two transmission lines (HVAC and HVDC), to an infinite bus is used. To damp and control the oscillations in this system, after any change, a linear feedback controller was employed which is based on the combination of linear quadratic regulator (LQR) control and the genetic algorithm (GA). Genetic algorithm is employed to find the best values for gains of the controller in a very short time with an effective performance. The simulation results show the improvement in the dynamic performance of the test AC/DC system.
Optimal Node Allocation in Multiservice WSNs Based on Correlated Strategy

A distributed game theoretic framework based on correlated strategies is proposed to maximize the lifetime of dense homogeneous multiservice wireless sensor networks (MS-WSNs), that support multiple services continually and ubiquitously over the WSN deployment. The MS-WSN operation is dealt with as a game played by the multimode nodes. A correlated strategies approach is proposed to lead the MS-WSN close to its theoretical optimal state with respect to the network lifetime. The computationally efficient correlated strategy proposed to implement service selection by the multimode WSN nodes is distributed, based solely on local information exchange. Indicative simulation results concerning the application of the proposed scheme on top of k-hop clustering reveal that the proposed correlated strategies based framework leads the MS-WSN operation close to its theoretical optimal at no significant exchange of overhead messages.
A I-V 36-pW low-noise adaptive interface IC for portable biomedical applications

This paper presents an adaptive interface ASIC consisting of a low-noise analog front-end and a successive- approximation ADC. The entire analog signal processing chain is fully-differential for better immunity to common-mode noise and interferences. To make the interface adaptive to different biopotential signals, the bandwidth and gain of the analog front-end are configurable. The ADC is designed for rail-to- rail operation and the input full-scale is adjustable so that the resolution requirement can be relaxed. Fabricated in 0.18-mum CMOS, 95-nV/radicHz input-referred noise density and more than 100-dB CMRR are obtained. Operating in 10-bit mode, the ADC exhibits -1/+0.3-LSB DNL and -1.3/+0.8-LSB INL for 1-V rail-to-rail input. The whole interface IC consumes 36 muW from a single 1-V supply, making it suitable for a wide range of low-voltage and low-power biomedical applications.