Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
American Acts of Force: Results and Misperceptions

This article examines and evaluates the apparent results of 12 prominent examples of American acts of force ranging from its entry into World War I to North American Treaty Organization's (NATO) massive air strike that ended the war in Bosnia. The values in terms of which I judge them are military success (to the extent that it promotes other values), low cost (in loss of life, physical suffering, and economic deprivation), peace (ending or avoiding a war), international good will, democracy, and freedom from alien rule. With 6, I judge to have had mainly "good" results: World War II in Europe, World War II in Asia, the defense of South Korea, the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Bosnian War. This study rates 4 to have had mainly "bad" results: the invasion of North Korea, the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, and the SAC Alert in 1973. Two were ambiguous in this respect: World War I and the Persian Gulf War. Separately, this article judges negatively the results of many lesser interventions a.
Reduced order modelling in searches for continuous gravitational waves - I. Barycentring time delays

The frequencies and phases of emission from extra-solar sources measured by Earth-bound observers are modulated by the motions of the observer with respect to the source, and through relativistic effects. These modulations depend critically on the source’s sky-location. Precise knowledge of the modulations are required to coherently track the source’s phase over long observations, for example, in pulsar timing, or searches for continuous gravitational waves. The modulations can be modelled as sky-location and time dependent time delays that convert arrival times at the observer to the inertial frame of the source, which can often be the solar system barycentre (SSB). We study the use of Reduced Order Modelling for speeding up the calculation of this time delay for any sky-location. We find that the time delay model can be decomposed into just four basis vectors, and with these the delay for any sky-location can be reconstructed to sub-nanosecond accuracy. When compared to standard routines for time delay calculation in gravitational wave searches, using the reduced basis can lead to speed-ups of 30 times. We have also studied components of time delays for sources in binary systems. Assuming eccentricities <0.25 we can reconstruct the delays to within 100s of nanoseconds, with best case speed-ups of a factor of 10, or factors of two when interpolating the basis for different orbital periods or time stamps. In long-duration phase-coherent searches for sources with sky-position uncertainties, or binary parameter uncertainties, these speed-ups could allow enhancements in their scopes without large additional computational burdens.
Increased number of B-cells in bronchial biopsies in COPD

Recently, it has been shown that the accumulated volume of B-cells in small airways is increased in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) Global Initiative for Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (GOLD) stages 3 and 4. Little is known about the number of B-cells in central airways in COPD. The present authors hypothesised that the number of B-cells in bronchial biopsies of large airways is higher in patients with COPD than in controls without airflow limitation and higher in more severe COPD. Therefore, bronchial biopsies were collected from 114 COPD patients (postbronchodilator forced expiratory volume in one second (FEV1) 63±9 % predicted value, FEV1/inspiratory vital capacity (IVC) 48±9%) and 28 controls (postbronchodilator FEV1 108±12 % predicted value, FEV1/IVC 78±4%). Paraffin sections were stained for B-cells (CD20+) and their number was determined in the subepithelial area (excluding muscle, glands and vessels). B-cell numbers were higher in patients with COPD versus controls (8.5 versus 3.9 cells·mm−2, respectively) and higher in patients with GOLD severity stage 3 (n = 11) than stage 2 (n = 103; 22.3 versus 7.8 cells·mm−2). No relationship was found between the number of B-cells and clinical characteristics within the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease group. The authors suggest that these increased B-cell numbers may have an important contribution to the pathogenesis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Synchronous Activation of ERK and Phosphatidylinositol 3-Kinase Pathways Is Required for Collagen and Extracellular Matrix Production in Keloids*

Keloid fibroproliferation appears to be influenced by epithelial-mesenchymal interactions between keloid keratinocytes (KKs) and keloid fibroblasts (KFs). Keloid and normal fibroblasts exhibit accelerated proliferation and collagen I and III production in co-culture with KKs compared with single cell culture or co-culture with normal keratinocytes. ERK and phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway activation has been observed in excessively proliferating KFs in co-culture with KKs. We hypothesized that ERK and PI3K pathways might be involved in collagen and extracellular matrix production in KFs. To test our hypothesis, four samples of KFs were co-cultured in defined serum-free medium with KKs for 2–5 days. KF cell lysate was subjected to Western blot analysis. Compared with KF single cell culture, phospho-ERK1/2 and downstream phospho-Elk-1 showed up-regulation in the co-culture groups, as did phospho-PI3K and phospho-Akt-1, indicating ERK and PI3K pathway activation. Western blotting of the conditioned medium demonstrated increased collagen I–III, laminin β2, and fibronectin levels. Addition of the MEK1/2-specific inhibitor U0126 or the PI3K-specific inhibitor LY294002 (but not p38 kinase and JNK inhibitors) completely nullified collagen I–III production and significantly decreased laminin β2 and fibronectin secretion. In the presence of the MEK1/2 or PI3K inhibitor, fibronectin demonstrated changes in molecular mass reflected by faster in-gel migration. These data strongly suggest that synchronous activation of both the ERK and PI3K pathways is essential for collagen I–III and laminin β2 production. These pathways additionally appear to affect the side chain attachments of fibronectin. Modulation of these pathways may suggest a direction for keloid therapy.
Global Governance and Legitimacy Problems

Abstract Whereas traditional institutions used to be seen as an international complement to a dominantly national paradigm, today's international institutions are an expression of political denationalization. The new international institutions are much more intrusive into national societies than the traditional ones. They increasingly contain supranational and transnational features and thus undermine the consensus principle of international cooperation. When society and political actors begin to comprehend this change, they begin to reflect on the features of a legitimate and effective political order beyond national borders. As a result, denationalization becomes reflexive and thus politicized. At the same time, the politicization of international politics harbours the potential for resistance to political denationalization, which increases the need – both from a normative and descriptive perspective – for the legitimation of such international institutions.
Hereditary pseudo vitamin D deficiency rickets in a Pakistani infant.

our case. Gross et al. (quoted by Walker et al., 1960) noted the decreasing number of elastic fibres in the skin as the lesion is approached from the periphery, and suggested that during development an elastic-free skin area m-ight be overstretched, resulting in disturbed circulation in that area and consequent maldevelopment. Duhamel (1963) has given a plausible explanation; he regards aplasia of the skin in cases such as that here described as anexample of defective development of the outer layer of the body wall. Agenesis of the sternum or ribs, or of the abdominal muscles are other examples. Most of these skin defects heal well with conservative management, and the infant does well provided there are no other congenital abnormalities.
Existence and Nonexistence of Global Solutions of a Fully Nonlinear Parabolic Equation

In the paper, we study the global existence of weak solution of the fully nonlinear parabolic problem (1.1)-(1.3) with nonlinear boundary conditions for the situation without strong absorption terms. Also, we consider the blow up of global solution of the problem (1.1)-(1.3) by using the convexity method.
How We Learn to Talk About Events: Linguistic and Conceptual Constraints on Verb Learning

To learn the meaning of a word, a language learner must map a linguistic unit onto a representation of the world provided by her conceptual system. A classic puzzle in the study of language acquisition concerns what constraints determine the set of hypotheses that a learner generates for the meaning of a novel word and what kinds of information help her to narrow down that set. My dissertation investigated the range of meanings that learners are willing to encode in single verbs associated with causative events and how those options are guided by the mapping between conceptual and linguistic event representations. To accomplish this, I asked three specific questions: first, which combinations of the subparts of a causative event learners are willing to encode in a single verb; second, how specific they are about the event features being encoded; and third, how they deal with conflicts between hypothesized verb meanings and new information from the extralinguistic context. My results demonstrate that the meanings that adult and 2-year-old word learners postulate for novel verbs are influenced both by cues to meaning provided by verb syntax and by more general constraints on the way that verb meanings can be related to event representations. From infancy, we represent causative events as being composed of a set of subevents associated in a hierarchical structure that reflects their partonomic relationships to one another (Leslie (1984), Zacks and Tversky (2001)). So, for example, a causative event in which a girl makes a ball bounce by hitting it with her hand would be represented as in (1), in which the first subpart [girl hits
The political systems of Italian regions between state-wide logics and increasing differentiation1

The aim of this article is to describe the evolution of the Italian regional party systems 25 years after the establishment of 15 Ordinary Statute regions and five years after the implementation of a major Constitutional reform increasing the powers of the regions and the visibility of regional political actors. The theoretical point of departure of the article is the second order election model originally applied to European elections to highlight their dependence on the national political level. The article begins by showing that this model has been applicable for regional elections only since the mid-1990s, a finding that goes against the conventional wisdom. The article then explains the structure of regional political competition through the analysis of two phenomena, fragmentation and differentiation, and the way they are correlated, stressing the changing pattern of competition before and after the breakdown of the First Republic.
Dinner of Luciérnaga: an interactive play with iPhone app in theater

Interactive digital art in the field of performance is emerging as an increasingly important form of artistic expression in Taiwan. Dinner of Luciérnaga is an interdisciplinary project produced by more than ten talented members which include the director, dancer, choreographer, artist, interactive designer, sound designer, iPhone app engineer, image processing designer, stage designer and light designer. The goal of this project is to create new modes of interactive participation between the performers and audience through the use of an innovative iPhone application that links dancer to audience and audience to dancer. The application not only plays a key role in connecting the audience and dancer, but also uses an interesting sound generation application that enhances the spectators' experience. It creates and shares special interactive experiences. Dinner of Luciérnaga is a story about the relationship of light and human in the digital era. It is a stunning performance in visuals and interactive process with focus on new interface that are put into use in authentic environments for validation by audience. In this paper, we will discuss our artistic motivation, the development of the digitally interactive performances, and our process for creating the digitally interactive performance entitled Dinner of Luciérnaga.
Scoring Points: Politicians, Activists, and the Lower Federal Court Appointment Process

Scoring Points: Politicians, Activists, and the Lower Federal Court Appointment Process. By Nancy Scherer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 288p. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. The last several decades have witnessed increasing politicization of the selection and confirmation process for judges of the lower federal courts. Nancy Scherer argues that this phenomenon results from politicians engaging in “elite mobilization strategies” designed to placate, and motivate, elite party activists. Republican presidents tend to make ideologically driven appointments. Democratic presidents embrace affirmative action in selecting judicial nominees, both to signal powerful groups and also—insofar as Scherer's empirical analysis confirms that female and minority Democratic judicial appointees tend to be more liberal than other Democratic appointees—on ideological grounds. Senators on both sides of the aisle employ obstructionist tactics, and both parties have made judicial selection and confirmation a campaign issue.
Optical interconnection networks for high-performance computing systems

Enabled by silicon photonic technology, optical interconnection networks have the potential to be a key disruptive technology in computing and communication industries. The enduring pursuit of performance gains in computing, combined with stringent power constraints, has fostered the ever-growing computational parallelism associated with chip multiprocessors, memory systems, high-performance computing systems and data centers. Sustaining these parallelism growths introduces unique challenges for on- and off-chip communications, shifting the focus toward novel and fundamentally different communication approaches. Chip-scale photonic interconnection networks, enabled by high-performance silicon photonic devices, offer unprecedented bandwidth scalability with reduced power consumption. We demonstrate that the silicon photonic platforms have already produced all the high-performance photonic devices required to realize these types of networks. Through extensive empirical characterization in much of our work, we demonstrate such feasibility of waveguides, modulators, switches and photodetectors. We also demonstrate systems that simultaneously combine many functionalities to achieve more complex building blocks. We propose novel silicon photonic devices, subsystems, network topologies and architectures to enable unprecedented performance of these photonic interconnection networks. Furthermore, the advantages of photonic interconnection networks extend far beyond the chip, offering advanced communication environments for memory systems, high-performance computing systems, and data centers.
Entrepreneurial Orientation: Reviewing Three Papers and Implications for Further Theoretical and Methodological Development

We evaluate the contributions to entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in three articles: Wales, Monsen, and McKelvie; Wiklund and Shepherd; and Morris, Webb, and Franklin, commenting on key findings and their implications for further development of EO. We outline the potential for a multiplicative construct of EO and future directions for research in the field of international entrepreneurship: cross–border internationalizing firms and comparative studies.
Perception of Contingency in Conditioning: Scalar Timing, Response Bias, and Erasure of Memory by Reinforcement

Pigeons' key pecks turned off a key light, which also went off independently of their pecks. The pigeons were able to correctly discriminate the cause of the stimulus change, although their attributions were strongly affected by the amount and the delay of reward given for correct responses. Their discrimination was based on the asynchrony between a response and the change in the key light. A simple detection model that combined detectability and motivational factors provided a good description of the data. It was shown that the discriminative criteria did not change with changes in distribution of noise events in an optimal fashion and that the pigeons therefore were not "ideal detectors. " In the final experiment, the pigeons were asked to discriminate the cause of a key light change, of a hopper illumination, and of a feeding. Performance decreased with each condition and with the duration of the last two events. It was noted that the memory trace for a stimulus change decays at the same rate as the primary reinforcement gradient but that it decays faster when the delay is filled with an event such as reinforcement. The possibility that the effects of reinforcement may be blocked by reinforcement is briefly discussed. Discriminative stimuli are denned in terms of their impact on current behavior, but they also affect subsequent behavior. Analysis of memory in animals has been stimulated by theories of learning that posit an important role for it and other "cognitive" processes (e.g., Grant, Brewster, & StierhofF, 1983; Shimp, 1976a; Wagner, Rudy, & Whitlow, 1973). The stimuli to be remembered may be not only lights and tones but also reinforcement schedules (Lattal, 1975; Rilling & McDiarmid, 1965), the animal's own behavior (Reynolds, 1966; Shimp, 1983), and even the animal's characterization of a particular behavior-reinforcement contingency (see e.g., Commons & Nevin, 1981). The techniques used in these studies permit evaluation of sensitivity to events in a motivational context different from the ones in which they occurred and thus allow the measurement of detectability separate from motivational biases. An instance of this approach that provides the prototype for the research to be reported
Visual summaries of popular landmarks from community photo collections

We present a novel data-driven algorithm that leverages online image repositories such as Flickr for automatically generating tourist maps. Our hypothesis is that, given a large enough dataset of images with geo-based metadata, clusters of matching images from that dataset tend to provide reliable cues as to what the popular tourist spots for that location may be. Our algorithm takes the geographical area of interest as input and retrieves geotagged photos from online photo collections. By clustering the photos based on their locations and identifying the popular tags for each cluster, our algorithm generates a set of points of interest (POIs) for the area. After retrieving additional photos based on these discovered POI tags, we use image matching to find the most representative landmark view for each POI. Finally, we remove clutter from the representative image and apply non-photorealistic rendering techniques to generate a map icon for each landmark. We use our system to automatically generate maps showing popular tourist locations for several large cities.
Effects of head restriction on drivers' eye movements and errors in simulated dangerous situations.

In an effort to investigate the effects of restrictive head movement upon eye movements, two groups of fifteen undergraduate student volunteers, one group with head restricted, the other with no head restriction, tracked a segment of the Aetna Training film. Tracking was done by manipulating the controls of an Aetna Drivo-Trainer Station. Eye movements were recorded simultaneously. The results indicated that restricting the head resulted in more driving errors and fewer long eye movements. Also, it was found that the number of eye movements which adjust for movements of the head (i.e., compensatory) were lower under conditions of head restraint. This was especially true for those compensatory movements characterized by swinging the eyes beyond the desired point of fixation (i.e., overshoots). In general, more eye movements correlated with more driving adjustments and lower numbers of driving errors. /Author/
Activation of the C4 and C2 components of complement by a proteinase in serum bactericidal factor, Ra reactive factor.

Ra-reactive factor (RaRF) is a C-dependent bactericidal factor that binds specifically to LPS of Ra chemotype strains of Salmonella and kills the bacteria by triggering the C cascade. In the present study, we investigated the components of mouse RaRF that activate C4 and C2. The RaRF bound to LPS-coated E, and activated the C4 on the surface of E, causing the C4 to bind to the cells. Diisopropyl fluorophosphate (DFP) bound to RaRF and inhibited its ability to activate C4 and C2. Cleavage of the alpha-chain of C4 by RaRF generated a polypeptide with a size similar to that of the alpha'-chain of C4b, which is known to be a product of the cleavage of C4 by C1s subcomponent of C1. A fraction with the ability to activate C4 and C2 was separated from RaRF by gel-permeation chromatography in the presence of EDTA and acetonitrile. This fraction contained a DFP-binding polypeptide with an apparent m.w. of 100,000. This polypeptide is not the C1s in mouse C1 because the sizes of this polypeptide and of the fragments produced by its reduction were different from those of DFP-binding proteinases in mouse C1. These results indicate that mouse RaRF contains a C1s-like serine proteinase that is capable of activating C4 and, probably, C2.
Effective marker alleles associated with type 2 resistance to Fusarium head blight infection in fields

Molecular markers associated with known quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for type 2 resistance to Fusarium head blight (FHB) in bi-parental mapping population usually have more than two alleles in breeding populations. Therefore, understanding the association of each allele with FHB response is particularly important to marker-assisted enhancement of FHB resistance. In this paper, we evaluated FHB severities of 192 wheat accessions including landraces and commercial varieties in three field growing seasons, and genotyped this panel with 364 genome-wide informative molecular markers. Among them, 11 markers showed reproducible marker-trait association (p < 0.05) in at least two experiments using a mixed model. More than two alleles were identified per significant marker locus. These alleles were classified into favorable, unfavorable and neutral alleles according to the normalized genotypic values. The distributions of effective alleles at these loci in each wheat accession were characterized. Mean FHB severities increased with decreased number of favorable alleles at the reproducible loci. Chinese wheat landraces and Japanese accessions have more favorable alleles at the majority of the reproducible marker loci. FHB resistance levels of varieties can be greatly improved by introduction of these favorable alleles and removal of unfavorable alleles simultaneously at these QTL-linked marker loci.