Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The corporate social responsibility of Canadian mining companies in Latin America: A systems perspective

Canada’s Mining Presence in Latin America The economic histories of Canada and many Latin American countries bear some striking similarities, not least of which is their respective reliance on natural resource extraction to fuel economic growth and stability. It is not surprising, therefore, that Canada’s renewed diplomatic interest in Latin America in recent decades can be traced at least in part to recordhigh commodity prices and an accompanying worldwide mining boom. Latin America’s share of global resources, its relatively attractive investment climate and lower risks when compared to conflict regions such as Africa and the Middle East, combined with its geographic proximity, have made it an attractive destination for Canadian investment in mining and exploration. Canada is Latin America’s third largest source of foreign investment after the United States and Spain (Lemieux, 2005). In 2005, Canadian mining companies owned over 1,300 mineral properties in Latin America and spent over CA$400 million on exploration in the region, which accounted for over 37 percent of the total exploration budget in Latin America. On an individual country basis, Canadian companies accounted for the dominant share of exploration in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname (ibid.). Canada’s Sherritt International has become Cuba’s single largest foreign investor with holdings not only in nickel, but in oil exploration, tourism, energy, and food. Moreover, Canada is one of the major financing centres for the mining industry, and Canadian junior exploration companies are quite active in Latin America. Due to the high level of investment in the region and the visible impact of mining on the region, the sector has become one that Latin Americans closely associate with Canadian interests. Mining is also a sector rife with conflict and contention. Even with technological advances improving safety and minimizing adverse environmental impacts, mining operations literally consume large tracts of land as they remove topsoil, vegetation, and any living occupants to access sub-surface mineral deposits, often reaching to great depths. Mineral extraction processes require the transport and use of corrosive and toxic chemicals which, if spilled or leaked, can have devastating effects on living organisms, including humans. Mining necessarily involves the alteration of natural landscapes, and despite recent gains in reclamation and restoration processes, mining operations have significant direct impact on local residents. For those not experiencing tangible positive benefits, such as employment or direct community development, perceived negative impacts are highly visible and frequently 103
Immigrant over- and under-education: the role of home country labour market experience

Literature on the immigrant labour market mismatch has not explored the signal provided by the quality of home country work experience, particularly that of education-occupation mismatch prior to migration. We show that type of work experience in the home country plays a significant role in explaining immigrant mismatch in the destination country’s labour market. We use the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Australia and find that having been over-educated in the last job held in the home country increases the likelihood of being over-educated in Australia by about 45 percent. Whereas having been under-educated in the home country has an even stronger impact, as it increases the probability to be similarly mismatched in Australia by 62 percent.
Chromatin regulation in drug addiction and depression

Alterations in gene expression are implicated in the pathogenesis of several neuropsychiatrie disorders, including drug addiction and depression, increasing evidence indicates that changes in gene expression in neurons, in the context of animal models of addiction and depression, are mediated in part by epigenetic mechanisms that alter chromatin structure on specific gene promoters. This review discusses recent findings from behavioral, molecular, and bioinformatic approaches that are being used to understand the complex epigenetic regulation of gene expression in brain by drugs of abuse and by stress. These advances promise to open up new avenues for improved treatments of these disorders.
On vehicle state tracking for long-term carpark video surveillance

Car park video surveillance systems present a huge volume of data that can be beneficial for video analytics and data analysis. We present a vehicle state tracking method for long term video surveillance with the goal of obtaining trajectories and vehicle states of various car park users. However, this is a challenging task in outdoor scenarios due to non-optimal camera viewing angle compounded by ever-changing illumination & weather conditions. To address these challenges, we propose a parking state machine that tracks the vehicle state in a large outdoor car park area. The proposed method was tested on 10 hours of continuous video data with various illumination and environmental conditions. Owing to the imbalanced distribution of parking states, we report the precision, recall and F1 scores to determine the overall performance of the system. Our approach proves to be fairly accurate, fast and robust against severe scene variations.
The impact of the tax and benefit system on second earners

This article analyses the theoretical and applied aspects of employment disincentives for second earners that exist in the British tax benefit system. The shortcomings of existing tax-benefit income profiles are examined, together with the underlying role of tax credits in disincentives compared with other factors. The potential of such disincentives to worsen employment of second earners in a recession is addressed. Conclusions suggest that a more sophisticated applied approach is required by social policy analysts, together with improved ways to profile incentives in the tax benefit system.
Repair Tree: Fast Repair for Single Failure in Erasure-Coded Distributed Storage Systems

In order to guarantee data reliability, erasure codes have been used in distributed storage systems. Nevertheless, this mechanism suffers from the repair problem that excess data are needed to repair a single failure, causing both high bandwidth consuming for the network and heavy computing load on the replacement node. To reduce repair traffic, researchers pointed out the tradeoff between storage and repair traffic and proposed regenerating codes by combining network coding. However, the combination only focuses on the storage terminal and the construction of the codes is quite complicated. Therefore, this paper further combines network coding with network structure and proposes a repair tree model based on general erasure codes to simplify the repair procedure. By decomposing repair computing and distributing it among the tree nodes, our model can mitigate the computing tension. The performance of repair tree is analyzed and evaluated by preliminary emulation. The result shows it can make about three times faster computing than conventional measure and the repair throughput is doubled if there are network bottlenecks. For proper topology, it can significantly reduce the repair traffic. We present algorithms to generate trees across the network topology. At last, we present the idea of extending repair tree to repair multiple failures.
Managing impressions during institutional change – The role of organisational accounts in legitimation

Public relations literature has only recently drawn on institutional theory to provide insights into legitimacy that go beyond strategic organisational level processes. Many of the existing crisis management studies are approached from a strategic perspective, which have limitations in terms of how organizations manage their legitimacy in relation to broader and often changing social agendas. This study focuses on how impression management is used to deal with legitimacy gaps between organizations and public expectations that draw on an institutional theory perspective. This qualitative study examines the use of organizational accounts through a lens that marries institutional theory and impression management in order to understand how organizations manage their legitimacy. This study of accounts around legitimacy concerns of corporate social responsibility matters shows that organizations relied on their own tangible technical attributes rather than shared norms of what is considered responsible when there are no hard or institutionalised laws and regulations in place around corporate social responsibility concerns. This study offers insights into public relations concerns around impression management during institutional change and in doing so extends existing public relations approaches to crisis management.
Preclinical Studies of Apogossypolone, a Novel Pan Inhibitor of Bcl-2 and Mcl-1, Synergistically Potentiates Cytotoxic Effect of Gemcitabine in Pancreatic Cancer Cells

Objective: Overexpression of antiapoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins confers resistance to conventional therapy in pancreatic cancer patients. Apogossypolone (ApoG2) is an analogue of (−)−gossypol, exhibiting binding activity with Ki values of 35 nmol/L for Bcl-2 and 25 nmol/L for Mcl-1. The present study was designed to test our hypothesis whether inactivation of Bcl-2 family of proteins using ApoG2 could sensitize pancreatic cancer cells to the cytotoxic effect of gemcitabine. Methods: Two pancreatic cancer cell lines were treated with ApoG2, gemcitabine, and their combination; cytotoxicity and apoptosis was confirmed by MTT and histone/DNA enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. Coimmunoprecipitation experiments were performed to elucidate the mechanism of action of ApoG2. In vivo efficacy of ApoG2 was evaluated in a xenograft model to confirm its therapeutic benefit with gemcitabine. Results: When ApoG2 was combined with gemcitabine, increased cytotoxicity and apoptosis was evident. Coimmunoprecipitation experiment revealed that ApoG2 blocks the heterodimerization of Mcl-1/Bax and Bcl-2/Bim in cells. Furthermore, administration of ApoG2 with gemcitabine resulted in a statistically higher antitumor activity compared with either ApoG2 or gemcitabine alone in a severe combined immunodeficiency mouse xenograft model. Conclusions: Apogossypolone, which functions as a potent pan-Bcl-2 family inhibitor, seems therapeutically promising for future translational studies including the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Adaptation of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 to cells expressing a binding-deficient CD4 mutant (lysine 46 to aspartic acid)

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1) was adapted to replicate efficiently in cells expressing an altered form of the CD4 viral receptor. The mutant CD4 (46 K/D) contained a single amino acid change (lysine 46 to aspartic acid) in the CDR2 loop of domain 1, which results in a 15-fold reduction in affinity for the viral gp120 glycoprotein. The ability of the adapted virus to replicate in CD4 46 K/D-expressing cells was independently enhanced by single amino acid changes in the V2 variable loop, the V3 variable loop, and the fourth conserved (C4) region of the gp120 glycoprotein. Combinations of these amino acids in the same envelope glycoprotein resulted in additive enhancement of virus replication in cells expressing the CD4 46 K/D molecule. In cells expressing the wild-type CD4 glycoproteins, the same V2 and V3 residue changes also increased the efficiency of replication of a virus exhibiting decreased receptor-binding ability due to an amino acid change (aspartic acid 368 to glutamic acid) in the gp120 glycoprotein. In neither instance did the adaptive changes restore the binding ability of the monomeric gp120 glycoprotein or the oligomeric envelope glycoprotein complex for the mutant or wild-type CD4 glycoproteins, respectively. Thus, particular conformations of the gp120 V2 and V3 variable loops and of the C4 region allow postreceptor binding events in the membrane fusion process to occur in the context of less than optimal receptor binding. These results suggest that the fusion-related functions of the V2, V3, and C4 regions of gp120 are modulated by CD4 binding.
On the estimation of cost of capital and its reliability

Gordon and Shapiro (1956 Management Sci. 10 102-10) first equated the price of a share with the present value of future dividends and derived the well known relationship. Since then, there have been many improvements on the theory. For example, Thompson (1985 Managerial Decis. Economics 6 132-40, 1987 Managerial Decis. Economics 8 321-32) combined the 'dividend yield plus growth' method with Box-Jenkins time series analysis of past dividend experience to estimate the cost of capital and its 'reliability' for individual firms. Thompson and Wong (1991 Managerial Decis. Economics 12 27-42, 1996 Eng. Economist 41 123-47) proved the existence and uniqueness of the cost of capital and provided a formula to estimate both the cost of capital and its reliability. However, their approaches cannot be used if the 'reliability' does not exist or if there are multiple solutions for the 'reliability'. In this paper, we extend their theory by proving the existence and uniqueness of this reliability. In addition, we propose estimators for the reliability and prove that the estimators converge to a true parameter. The estimation approach is further simplified, hence rendering computation easier. In addition, the properties of the cost of capital and its reliability will be analysed with illustrations of several commonly used Box-Jenkins models.
Wideband Circularly Polarized Dielectric Resonator Antenna

A circularly polarized quadruple strip feed cylindrical dielectric resonator antenna utilizing a pair of 90deg hybrid couplers is investigated experimentally. The antenna is shown to deliver an impedance bandwidth (S11 < -10 dB) of 34.5%, from 1.75 to 2.48 GHz, and an axial-ratio bandwidth (AR < 3 dB) of 25.9%, from 1.65 to 2.14 GHz. The gain and radiation patterns are found to be stable within the passband.
Apoptosis induced by cryo‐injury in human colorectal cancer cells is associated with mitochondrial dysfunction

Cryotherapy, a method of in situ ablation, is used in the treatment of colorectal liver metastases with variable results. During the treatment, the central area of treated tumor undergoes necrotic destruction by lethal cryo‐injury; however, the cellular response of tumor exposed to sublethal cryo‐injury at the peripheral zone is unclear. In our study, we have identified the induction of apoptosis by cryo‐injury at −10°C in 4 colorectal cancer cell lines (HT29, HCT116, KM12C and KM12SM). The apoptosis was characterized by chromatin condensation, transferase‐mediated dUTP nick end‐labeling (TUNEL) staining, proteolytic cleavage of poly(ADP‐ribose) polymerase (PARP) and cytokeratin 18, and activation of caspase‐3. The occurrence and intensity of cryo‐induced apoptosis did not correlate with the functional status of p53 in the cell lines studied. The expression of anti‐apoptotic proteins (Bcl‐2, Bcl‐XL) and pro‐apoptotic proteins (Bax, Bcl‐XS, Bad, and Bak) in response to cryo‐injury varied in this cell line panel. The basal level of Bcl‐2/Bax protein ratio correlated inversely to the apoptotic rate. We further demonstrated that Bax level decreased in cytosol and increased in mitochondria, followed by a loss of mitochondrial membrane potential after cryo‐injury in HT29 cells. These findings indicate that cryo‐injury induces apoptosis in colorectal cancer cells via disruption of mitochondrial integrity. The cryo‐induced apoptosis was also identified in a nude mouse tumor xenograft model. Our elucidation of the apoptosis pathway induced by cryo‐injury implies that synergistic combination of cryosurgery with pharmacological agents that augment of apoptosis induction may have clinical relevance in treating colorectal liver metastasis. © 2002 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
The impact of the post-1972 floating exchange-rate regime on US exports

By employing the techniques of cointegration and error-correction models, this article empirically investigates the impact of the post-1972 floating exchange-rate regime on the volume of US bilateral exports to Canada, Germany, Japan and the UK. The econometric models specified in the analysis were estimated using quarterly data for the sample period 1959:1–1997:4. The empirical results provide evidence that the post-1972 exchange-rate regime is less conducive to trade than the Bretton-Woods fixed exchange rate regime.
The Effect of Social Networks on Resource Access and Business Start-ups

In previous research, entrepreneurs' social networks are expected to influence entrepreneurial success because they give access to resources. This is confirmed in this study. In most research it is also believed that network features such as strength of ties determine to a great extent what kind of resources the entrepreneur receives. Although this last assumption has important implications for entrepreneurship research and for practice, the validity of the assumption has not been put to the test in previous research. The analysis of data from an empirical study of entrepreneurs in Norway gives at best partial support for the assumption. Contrary to what should be expected, the results indicate that strong ties are important channels for information and that weak ties give access to finance.
Evolution or revolution? The impact of unions on workplace performance in Britain and France

We use nationally representative workplace surveys to examine the relationship between unionization and workplace financial performance in Britain and France. We find that union bargaining is detrimental to workplace performance in both countries. However, in Britain the effect is confined to the declining proportion of unionized workplaces where there is active collective bargaining. In the French case, the effect is confined to the minority of cases where unions have high density and to unions with a reputation for militancy.
Dimethlyglycine provides salt and temperature stress protection to Bacillus subtilis 3 4

1 2 Dimethlyglycine provides salt and temperature stress protection to Bacillus subtilis 3 4 Abdallah Bashir, Tamara Hoffmann, Sander H.J. Smits 5 and Erhard Bremer* 6 Laboratory for Microbiology, Department of Biology, Philipps-University Marburg, Karl-von-Frisch 7 Str. 8, D-35043 Marburg, Germany 8 Al-Azhar University-Gaza, Faculty of Science, Biology Department, P.O. Box 1277 Gaza, Palestine 9 Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, Emeritus Group of R.K. Thauer, Karl-von-Frisch 10 Str. 10, D-35043 Marburg, Germany 11 LOEWE-Center for Synthetic Microbiology, Philipps-University Marburg, Hans-Meerwein Str. 12 D-35043 Marburg, Germany 13 Institute of Biochemistry, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Universitätsstr. 1, 14 D-40225 Düsseldorf, Germany 15 16 Suggested section: Physiology 17 18 Running title: DMG-mediated stress protection 19 20 21 ________________________________ 22 *Corresponding author. Mailing address: Philipps-University Marburg, Dept. of 23 Biology, Laboratory for Microbiology, Karl-von-Frisch-Str. 8, D-35032 Marburg, Germany. 24 Phone: (+49)-6421-2821529. Fax: (+49)-6421-2828979. E-Mail: bremer@biologie.uni25 marburg.de 26 27 AEM Accepts, published online ahead of print on 21 February 2014 Appl. Environ. Microbiol. doi:10.1128/AEM.00078-14 Copyright © 2014, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Scraps of Paper? Agreements and the Durability of Peace

In the aftermath of war, what determines whether peace lasts or fighting resumes, and what can be done to foster durable peace? Drawing on theories of cooperation, I argue that belligerents can overcome the obstacles to peace by implementing measures that alter incentives, reduce uncertainty about intentions, and manage accidents. A counterargument suggests that agreements are epiphenomenal, merely reflecting the underlying probability of war resumption. I test hypotheses about the durability of peace using hazard analysis. Controlling for factors (including the decisiveness of victory, the cost of war, relative capabilities, and others) that affect the baseline prospects for peace, I find that stronger agreements enhance the durability of peace. In particular, measures such as the creation of demilitarized zones, explicit third-party guarantees, peacekeeping, and joint commissions for dispute resolution affect the duration of peace. Agreements are not merely scraps of paper; rather, their content matters in the construction of peace that lasts.
Cognitive and Affective Mechanisms Linking Trait Mindfulness to Craving Among Individuals in Addiction Recovery

The present study aimed to identify affective, cognitive, and conative mediators of the relation between trait mindfulness and craving in data culled from an urban sample of 165 persons (in abstinence verified by urinalysis) entering into residential treatment for substance use disorders between 2010 and 2012. Multivariate path analysis adjusting for age, gender, education level, employment status, and substance use frequency indicated that the association between the total trait mindfulness score on the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire and alcohol/drug craving was statistically mediated by negative affect (measured by the PANAS, beta = −.13) and cognitive reappraisal (measured by the CERQ, beta = −.08), but not by readiness to change (measured by the URICA, beta = −.001). Implications for mindfulness-oriented treatment of persons with substance use disorders are discussed. The study's limitations are noted.
Owners' strategizing in the family firm : Dialogue as an influential practice

By combining literature on dialogues and strategy as practice, the purpose of this paper is to explore the role of family business owners’ strategic dialogues. Relying on a case study approach we follow the strategic dialogue in two family firms over a period of four years. Our results lead to a set of statements about the characteristics and outcomes of the strategic dialogue where the ownership dimension is prominent. The strategic dialogue entails formal and unconscious power struggles where the institutionalization of arenas for the strategic dialogue excludes important stakeholders but also lead to the absence of potentially important dialogues.
Efficient Tax Exporting

In a multijurisdiction economy with free mobility of households between communities, some portion of any community's tax is incident upon nonresident landowners. It is shown that when the objective of a community is taken to be the level of satisfaction of its residents, a fully efficient allocation is a (Nash) equilibrium of the decentralized game. In general, no local tax structure that restricts a community's tax base to residents can attain the optimum; thus, tax exporting is necessary for independent local government behavior to be consistent with efficiency.