Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Private Sector-led Urban Development Projects: Comparative Insights from Planning Practices in the Netherlands and the UK

Dutch planning practice in recent decades witnesses the emergence of private sector-led urban development projects. Such projects are ‘led’ by property developers and ‘facilitated’ by local planning authorities aimed to realize both planning and market objectives. However, remarkably little academic attention has been paid to how public and private actors decisively organize and manage these projects in practice. This paper explores the roles planners and developers perform by generating empirical lessons from Dutch and UK planning practices. The findings are of importance to planners and planning theory, as the current social-economic circumstances require them to redefine their roles in urban development.
Landscape Features and Tourism Development in Nigeria

Tourism in Nigeria is still down the ladder in policy formulation for economic growth and development. Tourism sector needs advocates and researchers that would work towards repositioning tourism on the Zenith level of budgetary allocation to enable the sector contribute maximally to the economic development of Nigeria. Based on this, this paper examined landscapes and tourism development in Nigeria. Therefore, the objectives considered are: Some specific landscape features for tourism development across Nigeria, development strategies and relevance for promoting tourism and the sustainability of landscape features that are tourism based. However, suggestions were made on the need for library and research centers for tourism development, encouraging both private and corporate organizations to invest in tourism industry, the need for Federal, State and Local Governments to give tourism priority position in their economic pursuits among others. Key words: Springs, Beaches, Relief, Waterfalls and Economy.
Enhancing multiyear guideline concordance for bipolar disorder through collaborative care.

OBJECTIVE Implementation of evidence-based care for serious mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder has been suboptimal. Improving and sustaining concordance with clinical practice guidelines has been a cornerstone of efforts to enhance evidence-based care and improve outcomes. For bipolar disorder, however, there has been only one regional controlled trial reporting guideline concordance, and no data are available for time periods longer than 1 year. In a multiregion effectiveness trial in veterans with bipolar disorder, the authors assessed the effects of a collaborative care model for this disorder on guideline concordance in care over a 3-year period. METHOD A total of 306 participants with bipolar disorder were randomly assigned at hospital discharge to 3 years of follow-up treatment with a collaborative care model or to usual care. The collaborative care model included provider support through simplified practice guidelines, patient skills management enhancement through group psychoeducation, and facilitated access and continuity via nurse care management. Concordance with guideline-recommended antimanic pharmacotherapy was assessed at baseline and prospectively over six 6-month epochs. Group differences were assessed with generalized estimating equations that controlled for relevant covariates. RESULTS The collaborative care model achieved significantly higher rates of guideline-concordant antimanic treatment than usual care over the entire follow-up period. Baseline guideline concordance, but not patient age or bipolar type, was associated with higher concordance. CONCLUSIONS Multicomponent collaborative care models, which include not only provider support for guideline implementation but also patient self-management skill enhancement and facilitated treatment access and continuity, can improve guideline concordance over the long term, even in severely impaired patients.
Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare

For much of human history, most of the population lived and worked on farms but today, information about livestock is more likely to come from children's books than hands-on experience. When romanticized notions of an agrarian lifestyle meet with the realities of the modern industrial farm, the result is often a plea for a return to antiquated production methods. The result is a brewing controversy between animal activist groups, farmers, and consumers that is currently being played out in ballot boxes, courtrooms, and in the grocery store. Where is one to turn for advice when deciding whether to pay double the price for cage-free eggs, or in determining how to vote on ballot initiates seeking to ban practices such as the use of gestation crates in pork production or battery cage egg production? At present, there is no clear answer. What is missing from the animal welfare debate is an objective approach that can integrate the writings of biologists and philosophers, while providing a sound and logical basis for determining the consequences of farm animal welfare policies. What is missing in the debate? Economics. This book journeys from the earliest days of animal domestication to modern industrial farms. Delving into questions of ethics and animal sentience, the authors use data from ingenious consumers' experiments conducted with real food, real money, and real animals to compare the costs and benefits of improving animal care. They show how the economic approach to animal welfare raises new questions and ethical conundrums, as well as providing unique and counter-intuitive results. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship. com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/9780199551163/toc.html
4D ultrasound adaptive image pre-processing

4D ultrasound is one of the most advancing visualization techniques of the ultrasound dataset. it is subdivided into main five visualization modes volume render, maximum, minimum, mean, and the surface render. The surface render visualization mode is the most realistic mode among the five modes of visualizing the ultrasound 3D dataset. We enhance the rendered image quality of the surface render mode by enhancing the pre-processing of the 2D ultrasound image. Surface render is subdivided into four major stages, 2D image pre-processing, volume render with surface detection, surface shading and finally post-processing. Surface render mode gives a low rendered image quality because of the speckle noise nature of the ultrasound, which is the reason for the coherent nature of the ultrasound imaging. And so, pre-processing of the 2D image is needed to remove the speckle noise keeping and enhancing the surface edges. Our processing meets the Three major challenges which must be concerned when designing the pre-processing of the 2D ultrasound image. Firstly, robustly smooth the speckle noise. Secondly, preserves and enhances the organs edges. and finally, the time constrains must be met that is because of this processing is part of many intensive processing stages. in addition, the processing implemented on the current GPUs platform, which shows a very high processing power with significant low coast value. A recent review of the literature, on this topic found that, a vast publication in the area of the 4D rendering pipeline [1] and 2D image enhancement each separately, despite this interest, no one to the best of our knowledge has studied the suitable 2D image pre-processing to get the best 4D data visualization [2], considering the nature of the ultrasound image [3] and the time constrains of the ultrasound physics. Our processing is a merge between local statistics and non-linear filters. It guarantees the required suitable quality of the 2D ultrasound image and performance constrains.
The Sin3p PAH Domains Provide Separate Functions Repressing Meiotic Gene Transcription in Saccharomyces cerevisiae

ABSTRACT Meiotic genes in budding yeast are repressed during vegetative growth but are transiently induced during specific stages of meiosis. Sin3p represses the early meiotic gene (EMG) by bridging the DNA binding protein Ume6p to the histone deacetylase Rpd3p. Sin3p contains four paired amphipathic helix (PAH) domains, one of which (PAH3) is required for repressing several genes expressed during mitotic cell division. This report examines the roles of the PAH domains in mediating EMG repression during mitotic cell division and following meiotic induction. PAH2 and PAH3 are required for mitotic EMG repression, while electrophoretic mobility shift assays indicate that only PAH2 is required for stable Ume6p-promoter interaction. Unlike mitotic repression, reestablishing EMG repression following transient meiotic induction requires PAH3 and PAH4. In addition, the role of Sin3p in reestablishing repression is expanded to include additional loci that it does not control during vegetative growth. These findings indicate that mitotic and postinduction EMG repressions are mediated by two separate systems that utilize different Sin3p domains.
The environmental cost of protein food choices

Abstract Objective To investigate the resource efficiency and environmental impacts of producing one kilogram of edible protein from two plant- and three animal-protein sources. Design Primary source data were collected and applied to commodity production statistics to calculate the indices required to compare the environmental impact of producing 1 kg of edible protein from kidney beans, almonds, eggs, chicken and beef. Inputs included land and water for raising animals and growing animal feed, total fuel, and total fertilizer and pesticide for growing the plant commodities and animal feed. Animal waste generated was computed for the animal commodities. Setting Desk-based study at the Department of Nutrition and Department of Occupational and Environmental Health, Loma Linda University. Subjects None. Results To produce 1 kg of protein from kidney beans required approximately eighteen times less land, ten times less water, nine times less fuel, twelve times less fertilizer and ten times less pesticide in comparison to producing 1 kg of protein from beef. Compared with producing 1 kg of protein from chicken and eggs, beef generated five to six times more waste (manure) to produce 1 kg of protein. Conclusions The substitution of beef with beans in meal patterns will significantly reduce the environmental footprint worldwide and should also be encouraged to reduce the prevalence of non-communicable chronic diseases. Societies must work together to change the perception that red meat (e.g. beef) is the mainstay of an affluent and healthy diet.
Joint resource allocation and admission control for energy harvesting based cooperative overlay cognitive radio networks

We propose the joint resource allocation and admission control schemes for energy-harvesting (EH) based cooperative overlay cognitive radio networks under imperfect channel state information (CSI) condition, where the primary-user (PU) pair and several secondary-users (SUs) cooperate in terms of both information transmission and energy harvesting. Specifically, each SU transmitter applies the power splitting technique to scavenge energy from signals radiated by the PU transmitter, and uses the harvested energy to serve the data transmission to its own receiver and forward the information for the PU transmitter. Also, we apply the OFDMA technique over the SUs to mitigate the interference caused by multiple co-existing cooperative SUs. To tackle the challenge of imperfect CSI, the effective data rate on each subcarrier of OFDMA and the effective energy that can be used by each SU transmitter are first derived and analyzed. Then, we develop the resource allocation schemes to efficiently allocate the OFDMA subcarriers and the PU's and co-existing SUs' transmission powers so that both the PU communication-pair's and all SU pairs' quality-of-service (QoS) requirements can be guaranteed. Moreover, we employ the fuzzy-logic technique for the admission control to determine the network access for SU pairs, when the QoS requirements for some parts of the PU and SU pairs cannot be guaranteed. Finally, we validate and evaluate the performance of our proposed joint resource allocation and admission control schemes through the numerical analyses.
Marginal railway infrastructure cost estimates in the presence of unobserved effects

New railway legislation in Sweden has increased the need for transparent access charges on the Swedish railway network. The purpose of this paper is to estimate cost functions for infrastructure operation, maintenance and renewal in the Swedish national railway network, using unobserved effects models. The estimated cost functions are used to calculate the marginal cost for railway infrastructure wear and tear and give the Swedish National Rail Administration (Banverket) support in designing a marginal cost based pricing scheme in line with Swedish transport policy. A panel of 185 track sections is observed during 1999-2002. Collected data covers infrastructure, traffic and cost data. Despite having a rich set of information, unobserved effects are assumed to exist, which will bias estimates by ordinary least squares (OLS) due to omitted variables. We therefore use random effects specifications to estimate our models. We find evidence of unobserved effects at a track district level for infrastructure operation, maintenance and renewal costs. We estimate the marginal infrastructure operation cost to SEK 0.50 per train kilometre and the marginal maintenance cost to SEK 0.0029 per gross tonne kilometre. Combining maintenance and renewal cost increases the estimate to SEK 0.0065 per gross tonne kilometre. For all models, elasticities and marginal cost estimates are in line with previous work using pooled ordinary least squares (Andersson, In press).
Birth weight and type 2 diabetes: A meta-analysis

The prevalence of T2DM is increasing around the world on a yearly basis. A meta-analysis was conducted to analyze the association between birth weight and incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). A literature search was performed from January 1990 to June 2016 in PubMed, ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, China National Knowledge Infrastructure and Chinese Biomedical Literature Database. After reviewing characteristics of all the included studies systematically, a meta-analytical method was employed to calculate the pooled odds ratios (ORs) and associated 95% confidence intervals (CI) from random-effects models. Heterogeneity was assessed by Q-statistic test. Funnel plot, Begg's and Egger's linear regression tests were applied to evaluate publication bias. A sensitivity analysis was also performed to assess the robustness of results. According to inclusion and exclusion criteria, 8 studies were selected to be included in the meta-analysis. Compared with normal birth weight (2,500–4,000 g), low birth weight (<2,500 g) was associated with an increased risk of T2DM (OR, 1.55; 95% CI, 1.39–1.73; P<0.001). No significant difference was observed between high birth weight (>4,000 g) and normal birth weight in terms of the risk of T2DM (OR, 0.98; 95% CI, 0.79–1.22). Compared with high birth weight, low birth weight was associated with an increased risk of diabetes mellitus (OR, 1.58; 95% CI, 1.30–1.93; P<0.001). These findings indicated that there may be an inverse linear association between birth weight and T2DM.
Administrative support for institutional effectiveness activities: responses to the ‘new accountability’

This study examines administrative perspectives on the importance of institutional effectiveness activities in higher education and measures the impact of four predictor variables. The findings suggest that higher education administrators are more supportive of institutional effectiveness activities when (1) the primary motivation for undertaking them is internal improvement, not external reporting, (2) the results lead to initiatives that are implemented by the institution, and (3) the administrators are directly involved in the activity itself. The data suggest some strategies institutions may adopt to cultivate administrative support for institutional effectiveness initiatives.
Epidermal Growth Factor Induces Oxidative Neuronal Injury in Cortical Culture

Abstract : Recently, we have demonstrated that certain neurotrophic factors can induce oxidative neuronal necrosis by acting at the cognate tyrosine kinase‐linked receptors. Epidermal growth factor (EGF) has neurotrophic effects via the tyrosine kinase‐linked EGF receptor (EGFR), but its neurotoxic potential has not been studied. Here, we examined this possibility in mouse cortical culture. Exposure of cortical cultures to 1‐100 ng/ml EGF induced gradually developing neuronal death, which was complete in 48‐72 h ; no injury to astrocytes was noted. Electron microscopic findings of EGF‐induced neuronal death were consistent with necrosis ; severe mitochondrial swelling and disruption of cytoplasmic membrane occurred, whereas nuclei appeared relatively intact. The EGF‐induced neuronal death was accompanied by increased free radical generation and blocked by the anti‐oxidant Trolox. Suggesting mediation by the EGFR, an EGFR tyrosine kinase‐specific inhibitor, C56, attenuated EGF‐induced neuronal death. In addition, inhibitors of extracellular signal‐regulated protein kinase 1/2 (Erk‐1/2) (PD98056), protein kinase A (H89), and protein kinase C (GF109203X) blocked EGF‐induced neuronal death. A p38 mitogen‐activated protein kinase inhibitor (SB203580) or glutamate antagonists (MK‐801 and 6‐cyano‐7‐nitroquinoxaline‐2,3‐dione) showed no protective effect. The present results suggest that prolonged activation of the EGFR may trigger oxidative neuronal injury in central neurons.
New Product Development (Npd) Service Suppliers In Open Innovation Practices: Processes And Organization For Knowledge Exchange And Integration

New Product Development (NPD) service providers have assumed a prominent role in enabling a more widespread use of Open Innovation strategies, thanks to their ability to acquire, recombine and sell specialized knowledge and technologies. This paper adopts the point of view of the NPD service provider to investigate the approaches it can employ in order to favor knowledge exchange with its clients, throughout the service delivery process. The research relies on a multiple case study, which focuses on three collaborative projects undertaken by a worldwide leading provider of NPD services with some of its most important clients. The analysis reveals some important findings. First, the NPD service provider uses standard approaches, both as regards process and organizational variables, to address two critical barriers toward a successful completion of the inter-organizational relationship: the tacit nature of the knowledge to be exchanged and the difficulties in predicting the content of collaboration activities. Second, in implementing these approaches, the NPD service provider takes into account the distinctive characteristics of each client and the peculiarities of the specific collaborative project. Besides providing several managerial insights that will be useful for managers working in NPD service providers, the paper contributes to the academic debate, e.g., investigating the importance of trust in successful inter-organizational knowledge exchange processes.
A 13.56 MHz Wireless Power Transfer System With Reconfigurable Resonant Regulating Rectifier and Wireless Power Control for Implantable Medical Devices

A 13.56 MHz wireless power transfer system with a 1X/2X reconfigurable resonant regulating (R 3) rectifier and wireless power control for biomedical implants is presented. Output voltage regulation is achieved through two mechanisms: (1) a local PWM loop at the secondary side controls the duty cycle of mode-switching of the rectifier between the 1X and 2X modes; and (2) a global control loop obtains the mode-switching information from the secondary side and send it back to the primary side through the wireless channel and adjusts the transmitter power of the primary coil to adapt to load and coupling variations. Two novel backscattering uplink techniques are proposed for fast and energy-efficient data feedback. The first is for general data transmission using Manchester code; and the second is for fast duty cycle feedback to cater for fast load-transient responses. Stability analysis of the entire system with the two control loops is also presented. The primary transmitter and the secondary R 3 rectifier are fabricated in 0.35 μm CMOS process with the digital control circuits implemented using FPGA. The measured maximum received power and receiver efficiency are 102 mW and 92.6%, respectively. For load transients, the overshoot and the undershoot are approximately 110 mV and the settling times are less than 130 μs.
Legal Environment of Managerial Decision Making

The scope of this undertaking is to categorize that sector of the environment affecting managerial decision making that makes up the “legal environment. ” The term legal environment encompasses the federal and state legislative and regulatory powers, plus the common law or court‐developed law that impacts an organization's domain. I have set out to divide the project into three chapters with each chapter emphasizing a major regulatory impact on corporate direction; some predictable, some unpredictable. Moreover, predictability will be dealt with as to controlling the legal environment. Historically, the legal environment crosses over two of the sectors: the government sector, city, state, federal laws and regulations, the court system, and political processes; the sociocultural sector, affirmative action, Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, values, beliefs, etc. Certain regulatory powers were anticipated by the frames of the Constitution in order to maintain a system of prosperity and strength. However, many of our regulatory agencies have come into being at the behest of the very industries that are regulated, such as antitrust. Furthermore, many of the regulatory laws came about due to the negligence of the business community in not self‐regulating and thereby permitting intolerable conditions for the sociocultural sector.
Copper metallization technology on bare Glass substrate

Fabrication of metal circuits on the Glass substrate is one of the key technologies to enhance the performance of next generation electronic devices. Metal circuits were created without roughening the surface of glass substrate by wet plating process with subtractive process. Surface cleaning is critical to obtain good adhesion. In this experiment, glass surface was cleaned by the irradiation of UV light and alkaline degreasing with complex agent. UV light and alkaline degreasing make the clean surface of the glass. Consequently, the enhanced and uniform metal deposition enabled good adhesion between the glass and the deposited copper. This new glass plating process has an intrinsic advantage for the formation of fine patterned glass substrate.