Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Comparative Ex Vivo Activity of Novel Endoperoxides in Multidrug-Resistant Plasmodium falciparum and P. vivax

ABSTRACT The declining efficacy of artemisinin derivatives against Plasmodium falciparum highlights the urgent need to identify alternative highly potent compounds for the treatment of malaria. In Papua Indonesia, where multidrug resistance has been documented against both P. falciparum and P. vivax malaria, comparative ex vivo antimalarial activity against Plasmodium isolates was assessed for the artemisinin derivatives artesunate (AS) and dihydroartemisinin (DHA), the synthetic peroxides OZ277 and OZ439, the semisynthetic 10-alkylaminoartemisinin derivatives artemisone and artemiside, and the conventional antimalarial drugs chloroquine (CQ), amodiaquine (AQ), and piperaquine (PIP). Ex vivo drug susceptibility was assessed in 46 field isolates (25 P. falciparum and 21 P. vivax). The novel endoperoxide compounds exhibited potent ex vivo activity against both species, but significant differences in intrinsic activity were observed. Compared to AS and its active metabolite DHA, all the novel compounds showed lower or equal 50% inhibitory concentrations (IC50s) in both species (median IC50s between 1.9 and 3.6 nM in P. falciparum and 0.7 and 4.6 nM in P. vivax). The antiplasmodial activity of novel endoperoxides showed different cross-susceptibility patterns in the two Plasmodium species: whereas their ex vivo activity correlated positively with CQ, PIP, AS, and DHA in P. falciparum, the same was not apparent in P. vivax. The current study demonstrates for the first time potent activity of novel endoperoxides against drug-resistant P. vivax. The high activity against drug-resistant strains of both Plasmodium species confirms these compounds to be promising candidates for future artemisinin-based combination therapy (ACT) regimens in regions of coendemicity.
Third world multinationals: Rhetoric or reality?

Third World Multinationals: The Rise of Foreign Investment from Developing Countries. By Louis T. Wells, Jr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. Pp. viii + 206. £22.50. ISBN 0 262 23113 1. The New Multinationals: The Spread of Third World Enterprises. By Sanjaya Lall in collaboration with Edward Chen, Jorge Katz, Bernado Kosacoff and Annibal Villela. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1984. Pp. xv + 268. £13.50. ISBN 0 471 9041 1.
Knowledge integration in the management of coastal conflicts in urban areas: two cases from Sweden

High anthropogenic pressure on coastal ecosystems, competition for natural resources and climate change are major challenges to the sustainable management of coastal areas. Two cases of resource use conflicts in coastal urban areas in the south and west of Sweden analysed here illustrate these challenges. The social practices of using and integrating knowledge and joint learning in conflict resolution show that dominant actors and their knowledge practices have a strong influence on conflict resolution and its outcomes. Improved conflict resolution requires more efforts to achieve knowledge integration and joint learning of stakeholders in open, dialogue-based strategies in all phases of the resolution process.
Control of chaotic responses of a laminated composite beam subjected to external excitation

With the employment of a fuzzy sliding mode control (FSMC) approach, the chaotic responses of a laminated composite cantilever beam subjected to an external sinusoidal excitation are suppressed into periodic responses. The third-order shearing effect on the responses of the beam is considered in the model establishment. The FSMC approach has shown significant advantages on effectively suppressing the chaotic responses of the investigated system.
Error analysis of differentially modulated cooperative systems under generalized fading

This paper analyzes the average bit error rate performance of dual-hop cooperative systems over generalized multipath fading conditions. The considered system is differentially modulated and is assumed to operate based on the amplify-and-forward relaying protocol. Therefore, its main advantage is that it does not require any channel state information neither at the relay nor at the destination nodes. Novel closed-form expressions are derived for the end-to-end statistics for the case of generalized multipath fading conditions that follow the η-μ, distribution, which includes as special cases the well-known Nakagami-m, Rayleigh and Nakagami-g (Hoyt) fading models. Capitalizing on this, a closed-form expression is subsequently derived for the corresponding average bit-error-rate, which is given in terms of known elementary and special functions. The derived analytic expressions are then employed in evaluating the performance and behavior of the considered system and thus quantify the corresponding effects of generalized fading conditions on the achieved bit error rate performance. It is shown that the effect of multipath fading is detrimental at both high and low signal-to-noise ratio regimes as the corresponding deviations are often close to an order of magnitude. This indicates that accurate channel characterization is essential in effective design of cooperative communications as well as that differential modulation can be a suitable modulation scheme for relay systems since it can provide adequate performance at a reduced implementation complexity.
Next generation millimeter wave backhaul radio: Overall system design for GbE 60GHz PtP wireless radio of high CMOS integration

In this paper we present the implementation of an experimental FDD, QPSK, millimeter-wave radio modem (57–64 GHz) for Point to Point (PtP) wireless backhaul applications. The transceiver supports GbE targeting a two-chip solution plus the antenna subsystem, aiming at highly integrated functions in 90nm CMOS technology, for a range of more than 1km. Achieving these levels of overall integration and silicon implementation requires many technological challenges and innovative design approaches. Furthermore, it allows for drastic changes of relevant cost factors enabling the wireless backhaul deployment for broadband services. The present paper is an outcome of the NexGenMiliwave project aiming to prove that it is possible to provide integrated solutions in silicon, based on demanding high frequency PtP requirements and significantly reduce the cost of the relevant backhaul network deployment.
Employer Matters in 2005

By any reckoning, the year 2005 will long be remembered as a watershed year for Australian industrial relations. While there were the usual types of industrial disputes, on-going enterprise bargaining and another round of arguments over the Australian Industrial Relations Commission’s (AIRC’s) annual safety-net review, the year was dominated by the looming re-writing of Australia’s industrial relations regulatory regime, made possible by the Government’s surprise majority in the Senate, granted to them in late 2004. Viewed as a looming dark cloud by some or a shining light by others, most of 2005 was spent in anxious anticipation of the Howard government’s impending ‘WorkChoices’ legislation. Employer groups spent much of the year lobbying the Howard government for the types of reforms long cherished, but only dreamed of by employers, for arguably 100 years. A once in a lifetime opportunity had presented itself and employer groups were determined to take full advantage of the situation, by ensuring that the government did not lose its nerve. Perhaps more importantly, however, in addition to lobbying the government, major employer organizations devoted significant resources to building the case for industrial relations reform and attempting to sell that message to the electorate. By year’s end, employers had succeeded in the first objective, but had seemingly failed in the second.
Vaccination in the Context of Al-Maqasid Al-Shari`ah : Objectives of Divine Law and Islamic Medical Jurisprudence

The goal of public health is to prevent disease and vaccination fulfils that role by protecting people from contracting serious diseases as well as curtailing the spread of such diseases to others. However, the implementation of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) polio vaccination drive is being hampered in some Muslims countries. For example, polio workers are being killed in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Somalia. This article addresses the concerns that Muslims have vis-a-vis to vaccination and attempts to dispel them on the basis of
On the outside looking in? Transitions out of non-employment in the United Kingdom and Germany

This article investigates differences in the likelihood of becoming an insider in Germany and the United Kingdom. Consistent with recent literature on dualization it contends that insider protection is more pronounced in the corporatist system and conservative welfare state of Germany. In conjunction with micro-level labour market sociology, the study argues that this affects the job matching process of the labour market. Using individual level panel data in event history models, it contrasts leaving non-employment for an insider position, that is, permanent full-time employment, with staying on the outside of the core labour market, that is, remaining without employment or taking up an atypical job. Results demonstrate that insider positions are harder to attain in the German labour market as a consequence of the institutional context that makes the said posts so appealing in the first place. At the same time, the German labour market regime strengthens the mechanisms of selection in terms of gender, age and education. The insider/outsider divide thus works in two ways. First, it increases inequality between insiders and outsiders in terms of economic and positional stability. Second, a stronger divide interacts with micro-level matching processes on the labour market. By reinforcing social differences in the chance to obtain an insider position, inequality is thus even further pronounced.
Genome Sequence of Citromicrobium Strain JLT1363, Isolated from the South China Sea

ABSTRACT Citromicrobium is a member of the alpha-4 subcluster in the Alphaproteobacteria and is identified as a typical aerobic anoxygenic phototrophic bacterium (AAPB). Here we report the draft genome sequence of a non-AAPB strain, Citromicrobium sp. JLT1363. The genome sequence reveals a multimechanism of horizontal gene transfer, as well.
Evaluating high-level design strategies on FPGAs for high-performance computing

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are gaining considerable momentum in mainstream high-performance systems in recent years due to their flexibility and low power consumption. Still, FPGAs remain largely unavailable to software programmers due to programming and debugging difficulties that are inherent to standard Hardware Description Languages. The performance that hardware-oblivious software engineers can expect from migrating legacy code to FPGAs remains shrouded in mystery. To gain insight on how to use FPGAs in high-performance computing, we created four different systems and evaluated them using benchmarks from the Rodinia benchmark suite. The systems we evaluated were diverse with respect to both programming model and generality, and range from a custom-built 30-core manycore system to FSM-based accelerators using LegUP and deep data-flow pipelines using Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL. We found that the original version of LegUp does not achieve very good performance out of the box; still, with some non-trivial modification in the architecture, we improved its performance by up to 10 times. Despite this, we found Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL to perform up to two orders of magnitude faster than LegUp. We also found our general-purpose manycore system to have comparable performance with LegUp.
Forecasting Errors in Capital Budgeting: A Multi-Firm Post-Audit Study

This is a post-audit study concerning the accuracy of capital budgeting procedures. It is based on the statistical analysis of the deviations occurring between effective and forecasted performance of companies after implementing their projected investments. The forecasts were collected from a large database of applications for investment incentives submitted for consideration to the Portuguese Governmental Agency IAPMEI during the 2nd European Union Framework Programme. The first conclusion of the study is the significance of negative forecasting errors of post-investment sales and their implication in terms of the expected profitability. In contrast, forecasts on future operating costs were quite accurate and errors on investment expenses revealed high volatility. Also interesting is the finding that there seems to be no relationship between the size, industry, region, or investment incentives and the pattern of the errors found.
Managing global talent: solving the spousal adjustment problem

Spousal adjustment issues, increasingly career related, are a major reason for expatriate assignment failure. Employer-provided spousal assistance programs have been proposed to address this situation. This field study of 238 expatriate spouses found that those who experience a severe disruption or cessation of employment have significantly lower interaction adjustment to the expatriate experience than others. For spouses with a career orientation to work, females had higher cultural and interactional adjustment than males. Only 18% of the spouses received employer-provided career assistance, and there was no significant difference in adjustment between spouses who received assistance and those who did not. Interviews with 100 spouses indicated that their greatest needs are for networking information to assist with their job search and for a ‘go to’ person for practical settling-in assistance.
Government and Pressure Groups in Britain

What is the role of pressure groups in political systems? How are these groups formed, and why have they multiplied so dramatically in the 20th century? This book is concerned with the historical background to the relationship between government and pressure groups, as well as with the operation of pressure politics in Britain today. The authors begin by examining the pluralist and corporatist traditions, and move on to an assessment of how pressure groups function. They argue that consultation with pressure groups is important in British policy-making, and that political decisions are made not only in the world of voters, political parties, and Parliament, but also in the "second channel of democracy" - ministers, pressure groups, and government departments. Finally, the authors focus on potential channels of influence open to interest groups, and the relationship between these groups and Parliament, especially the New Select Committees. Althought they provide thorough coverage of the principal theories of groups, the authors' emphasis is on how decisions are taken, and they illustrate their discussion with numerous examples.
Alternative climate policy pathways in the US

Although it is likely that the political–economic coalition required for implementing a federal cap-and-trade programme for GHGs in the US is now sufficiently strong, the structural impediments that have prevented its legislative passage remain impressively durable and can be expected to continue to lay waste to congressional proposals for the foreseeable future. Indeed, given the complex history of environmental policy gridlock in Washington since the early 1980s, any expectations that a cap-and-trade programme could have been realistically achieved through the traditional legislative passage in Congress are fundamentally misplaced. Building on previous research, it is argued that – as with most other forms of environmental policy in the US over the past three decades – a national carbon market is more plausible given alternative policy pathways, which if taken are capable of circumventing the Federal Congress altogether. In particular, the interaction between litigation against the federal government and the ‘rulemaking’ authority possessed by the Executive Branch provides the potential space for the current administration to unilaterally establish a model rule for a national carbon-trading programme. Policy relevance This article aims to contribute to American climate policy debates by re-thinking the policy mechanisms most capable of establishing a national carbon market in the US. By taking into account the array of structural factors that have prevented the legislative passage of such a programme in federal Congress, a range of alternative policy ‘pathways’ is considered that have historically allowed progressive environmental policies to endure in Washington (despite increased Congressional gridlock over the past few decades). Two specific alternative strategies and the relationship between them are assessed: the use of litigation to impose legal obligations on federal agencies to regulate effluents, and the use of executive authority to define the nature and scope of environmental regulation. The administration's current potential to unilaterally develop a model-rule for a cap-and-trade programme under the Clean Air Act is emphasized, and the political implications of such a strategy are considered.
130/30

Long-only portfolio managers and investors have acknowledged that the long-only constraint is a potentially costly drag on performance, and loosening this constraint can add value, but the extent of the performance drag is difficult to measure without a proper benchmark for a 130/30 portfolio. A passive but dynamic benchmark can be developed, consisting of a plain-vanilla 130/30 strategy using simple factors to rank stocks and standard methods for construction of portfolios based on these rankings. Two types of indexes are produced—investable and look-ahead indexes; the former uses only prior information, and the latter uses realized returns to set an upper bound on performance. Historical simulations of these 130/30 benchmarks illustrate their advantages and disadvantages under various market conditions.
Returns-Based Style Analysis of High-Yield Bonds

We present returns-based style analysis of four high-yield (HY) bond indexes and 60 HY bond funds. It is widely accepted that HY bonds are hybrid assets, with returns sensitive to both high-grade bond returns and stock returns. Our findings show they should be viewed as part high-grade bonds, part stocks, and sometimes part cash. Consistent with theory, as the credit rating decreases from BB to B to CCC, the bond component of returns decreases from about 73% to 48%, while the stock component increases from about 22% to 52%. Furthermore, there is a strong small-cap tilt in HY bond index returns. Our results reveal substantial differences among HY bond funds. Differences across funds in style weights are consistent with differences in the funds' holdings and investment styles. Returns of funds that invest more heavily in low-quality debt are more sensitive to stocks than funds that focus on BB or better bonds. There are notable differences in the strength of the small-cap tilts. Separately, some HY bond funds are more sensitive to growth stocks, while others show a value tilt. These findings should help investors better understand their true asset allocations and better manage their portfolios.
Conformai microwave lens for focusing across inhomogenous tissue

We describe a thin, conformai device for focusing microwave radiation across a curved interface between air and tissue. To design the lens, the matched filter for a multiport system consisting of annuiar metai strips and a point source placed at the focal spot is solved and then implemented by reactively loading the strips. We numerically show that the focal spot produced deep in tissue is much smaller than the wavelength in air and is robust to changes in the surface properties as well as inhomogeneity in the tissue volume.
Growth‐associated protein‐43 is degraded via the ubiquitin‐proteasome system

Growth‐associated protein‐43 (GAP‐43) is a phosphoprotein whose expression in neurons is related to the initial establishment and remodeling of neural connections. GAP‐43 gene expression is known to be regulated at both the transcriptional and the postranscriptional levels. However, very little is known about the cellular mechanism involved in the degradation of this protein. Ubiquitin (Ub) is well known for its role in targeting cytoplasmic proteins for degradation by the 26S proteasome. The ubiquitin‐proteasome system (UPS) consists of a conserved cascade of three enzymatic components that attach Ub covalently to various substrates and control the degradation of protein involved in several important cellular processes. In this study, we investigated the degradation of GAP‐43 in transfected NIH 3T3 cells and neuronal cultures. We found that the proteasome inhibitors, lactacystin and MG132 increased the cellular GAP‐43 level, leading to the accumulation of polyubiquitinated forms of this protein in transfected cells and that the Ub‐proteasome pathway is also involved in the turnover of this protein in neurons. We conclude based on our findings that GAP‐43 is a substrate of the UPS. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Correlation between Increased Serum sFas Levels and Microalbuminuria in Type 1 Diabetic Patients

Objective: The aim of this study was to elucidate if apoptosis dysregulation is present in type 1 diabetic patients with microalbuminuria. Subjects and Methods: The following variables were determined in 29 type 1 diabetic patients: the duration of diabetes, soluble Fas (sFas), Bcl-2, hemoglobin A1c levels, glomerular filtration rate (GFR) and microalbuminuria, using the urine albumin to urine creatinine ratio (ACR). Age and gender were assessed and patients were categorized into two groups, according to their ACR: the microalbuminuric (MA) group with an ACR ≧30 mg/g, and the normoalbuminuric (NA) group with an ACR <30 mg/g. Results: The differences between the two groups regarding sFas, Bcl-2 and GFR were not statistically significant. However, in the MA group, a significant positive relationship between sFas and ACR was observed (r = 0.736, p = 0.015). Dividing patients into two subgroups – mild versus severe (ACR ≧150 mg/g) microalbuminuric patients – significant differences in sFas (60.4 vs. 87.2 pg/ml; p = 0.047) and GFR (113 vs. 69.5 ml min–1 1.73 m–2; p = 0.021) were observed, whereas in Bcl-2, the difference was not significant (77.96 vs. 71.13 ng/ml). Conclusions: At the early stages of diabetic nephropathy in type 1 diabetic patients, there seems to be a dysregulation of apoptosis, as expressed by enhanced sFas levels, leading to the speculation that the prevalence of antiapoptotic mechanisms (sFas) may promote mesangial proliferation.
Old age support in kind

It has been argued whether a transfer policy for elderly people should be in kind or in cash. This paper presents a rationale to answer the question in an endogenous growth model with a two-way intrafamily transfer in middle age, education for the child as an inter-vivos transfer, and informal parental care in exchange for a bequest. We have two analytical results. First, a transfer in cash, such as a public pension, prevents economic growth because a strategic behavior concerning caregiving generates a disincentive effect on education. Second, a transfer in kind, such as public formal care, promotes economic growth because the valuation of the service generates an additional benefit of education, which dominates the disincentive effect. Our results show that old age support should be in kind rather than in cash in the context of economic growth and also welfare if bequests are strategic.