Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Bone morphogenetic protein-4 interacts with activin and GnRH to modulate gonadotrophin secretion in LβT2 gonadotrophs

We have shown previously that, in sheep primary pituitary cells, bone morphogenetic proteins (BMP)-4 inhibits FSHβ mRNA expression and FSH release. In contrast, in mouse LβT2 gonadotrophs, others have shown a stimulatory effect of BMPs on basal or activin-stimulated FSHβ promoter-driven transcription. As a species comparison with our previous results, we used LβT2 cells to investigate the effects of BMP-4 on gonadotrophin mRNA and secretion modulated by activin and GnRH. BMP-4 alone had no effect on FSH production, but enhanced the activin+GnRH-induced stimulation of FSHβ mRNA and FSH secretion, without any effect on follistatin mRNA. BMP-4 reduced LHβ mRNA up-regulation in response to GnRH (±activin) and decreased GnRH receptor expression, which would favour FSH, rather than LH, synthesis and secretion. In contrast to sheep pituitary gonadotrophs, which express only BMP receptor types IA (BMPRIA) and II (BMPRII), LβT2 cells also express BMPRIB. Smad1/5 phosphorylation induced by BMP-4, indicating activation of BMP signalling, was the same whether BMP-4 was used alone or combined with activin±GnRH. We hypothesized that activin and/or GnRH pathways may be modulated by BMP-4, but neither the activin-stimulated phosphorylation of Smad2/3 nor the GnRH-induced ERK1/2 or cAMP response element-binding phosphorylation were modified. However, the GnRH-induced activation of p38 MAPK was decreased by BMP-4. This was associated with increased FSHβ mRNA levels and FSH secretion, but decreased LHβ mRNA levels. These results confirm 1. BMPs as important modulators of activin and/or GnRH-stimulated gonadotrophin synthesis and release and 2. important species differences in these effects, which could relate to differences in BMP receptor expression in gonadotrophs.
A Wide Tuning-Range CMOS VCO With a Differential Tunable Active Inductor

By utilizing a differential tunable active inductor for the LC-tank, a wide tuning-range CMOS voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is presented. In the proposed circuit topology, the coarse frequency tuning is achieved by the tunable active inductor, while the fine tuning is controlled by the varactor. Using a 0.18-mum CMOS process, a prototype VCO is implemented for demonstration. The fabricated circuit provides an output frequency from 500 MHz to 3.0 GHz, resulting in a tuning range of 143% at radio frequencies. The measured phase noise is from -101 to -118 dBc/Hz at a 1-MHz offset within the entire frequency range. Due to the absence of the spiral inductors, the fully integrated VCO occupies an active area of 150times300 mum2
Assessing the Impact of Organizational Practices on the Productivity of University Technology Transfer Offices : An Exploratory Study #

for their insightful comments and suggestions. We are also deeply indebted to the many administrators, scientists, managers, and entrepreneurs who agreed to be interviewed. ABSTRACT We present quantitative and qualitative evidence on the productivity of university technology transfer offices (TTOs). Our empirical results suggest that TTO activity is characterized by constant returns to scale and that environmental/institutional factors explain some of the variation in performance. Productivity may also depend on organizational practices. Unfortunately, there are no data on such practices, so we rely on inductive, qualitative methods to identify them. Based on 55 interviews of entrepreneurs, scientists, and administrators at five research universities, we conclude that the most critical organizational factors are faculty reward systems, TTO staffing/compensation practices, and cultural barriers between universities and firms.
Formal digital license language with OTS/CafeOBJ method

This paper discusses how to model digital licenses as observational transition systems (OTSs) with CafeOBJ, a formal algebraic specification language. To extend the concept of licensing to cover various application domains of digital rights management, we first analyze the concepts of permission and obligation with some real-world examples which are not covered by current XML-based Rights Expression Languages (RELs), and then discuss how to formally specify licenses in terms of deontic and temporal logic with OTS/CafeOBJ method. Several important deontic and temporal modeling issues of licenses are also addressed for discussion. The proposed formal license language can be used not only for the formal specifications of licenses which capture both static observations and dynamic state transitions of the licenses, but also for the formal verification of licenses thanks to the executability and theorem proving facility of CafeOBJ.
The Coordinated Radio and Infrared Survey for High-Mass Star Formation (The CORNISH Survey). I. Survey Design

We describe the motivation, design, and implementation of the CORNISH survey, an arcsecond-resolution radio continuum survey of the inner galactic plane at 5 GHz using the Very Large Array (VLA). It is a blind survey coordinated with the northern Spitzer GLIMPSE I region covering 10° < l < 65° and |b| < 1° at similar resolution. We discuss in detail the strategy that we employed to control the shape of the synthesised beam across this survey, which covers a wide range of fairly low declinations. Two snapshots separated by 4h kept the beam elongation to less that 1.5 over 75% of the survey area and less than 2 over 98% of the survey. The prime scientific motivation is to provide an unbiased survey for ultra-compact H II regions to study this key phase in massive star formation. A sensitivity around 2 mJy will allow the automatic distinction between radio-loud and radio-quiet mid-IR sources found in the Spitzer surveys. This survey has many legacy applications beyond star formation, including evolved stars, active stars and binaries, and extragalactic sources. The CORNISH survey for compact ionized sources complements other Galactic plane surveys that target diffuse and nonthermal sources, as well as atomic and molecular phases to build up a complete picture of the interstellar medium in the Galaxy.
Thermal model at RHIC: particle ratios and pT spectra

Predictions of the single-freeze-out model for the particle spectra at RHIC are presented. The model assumes that the chemical and thermal freeze-outs occur simultaneously, and incorporates in simple terms the longitudinal and transverse flow. All resonance decays are included. The model predictions and the data are in striking agreement in the whole available range of momenta.
Three outcomes of service recovery: Customer recovery, process recovery and employee recovery

– Based on a review of the literature, this paper sets out to suggest that an organisation's service recovery procedures lead to three distinct outcomes; customer, process, and employee recoveries. The objective of the paper is to investigate the impact of service recovery procedures (i.e. the way service recovery is managed and executed) on these three outcomes and their relative impact on an organisation's financial performance. , – A model, linking recovery procedures to the outcomes of recovery and financial performance, is tested using empirical data from a detailed survey of 60 organisations in the UK. , – It would appear that many organisations and academic researchers have focused their efforts on customer recovery and have, to some extent, ignored the potentially higher impact outcomes of process and employee recovery. The main finding was that service recovery procedures have a greater impact on employees and process improvement than on customers. Furthermore, while many organisations appear to be concerned with service recovery few seem to be good at it or gaining the benefits of recovered customers, improved processes or recovered employees. , – This paper tries to encourage wider research into the impact of service recovery. The main limitations were sample size and selection. , – It challenges the way some organisations have focused their recovery procedures on satisfying or delighting customers and suggests that by doing so they are missing out on substantial benefits. It also suggests that many organisations have a long way to go to develop their recovery procedures. , – This work proposes three outcomes of service recovery and finds that the impact of process and employee recoveries may be more significant than customer recovery.
Automated trading in agents-based markets for communication bandwidth

electronic commerce, internet auctions, electronic data submissions Automated agents are increasingly being used by organisations and individuals trading in electronic markets. Agents are particularly useful in markets where trade might not have been possible otherwise, for example because a lot of information must be processed quickly, or because employing human traders in 24-hour, small transactions markets is not costeffective. Markets for communication bandwidth, where organisations trade the rights to transmit data over a network, are one such application. Because demand fluctuates considerably every few seconds agent-based spot markets provide extra liquidity.
Are the Directions of Stock Price Changes Predictable ? Statistical Theory and Evidence

We propose a model-free omnibus statistical procedure to check whether the direction of changes in an economic variable is predictable using the history of its past changes. A class of separate inference procedures are also given to gauge possible sources of directional predictability. They can reveal information about whether the direction of future changes is predictable using the direction, level, volatility, skewness, and kurtosis of past changes. An important feature of the proposed procedures is that they check many lags simultaneously, which is particularly suitable for detecting the alternatives whose directional dependence is small at each lag but it carries over a long distributional lag. At the same time, the tests naturally discount higher order lags, which is consistent with the conventional wisdom that financial markets are more influenced by the recent past events than by the remote past events. We apply the proposed procedures to four daily U.S. stock price indices. We find overwhelming evidence that the directions of excess stock returns are predictable using past excess stock returns, and the evidence is stronger for the directional predictability of large excess stock returns. In particular, the direction and level of past excess stock returns can be used to predict the direction of future excess stock returns with any threshold, and the volatility, skewness and kurtosis of past excess stock returns can be used to predict the direction of future excess stock returns with nonzero thresholds (i.e., large returns). The well-known strong volatility clustering together with weak serial dependence in mean cannot completely explain all documented directional predictability for stock returns. To exploit the economic significance of the documented directional predictability for stock returns, we consider a class of autologit models for directional forecasts and find that they have significant out-of-sample directional predictive power. Some trading strategies based on these models and their combinations can earn significant out-of-sample extra risk-adjusted returns over the buy-and-hold trading strategy.
FINANCIAL INTEGRATION AND CYCLICALITY OF MONETARY POLICY IN SMALL OPEN ECONOMIES

Should countries follow counter-cyclical or pro-cyclical monetary policies? This paper documents that in contrast to developed economies, developing countries tend to follow pro-cyclical monetary policies. The paper then constructs a New-Keynesian small open economy model with wage rigidity and solves for the optimal monetary policy under di? erent levels of integration in the international financial markets. The model suggests that as economies gain access to the international financial markets the optimal monetary policy shifts from pro-cyclical to counter-cyclical. Also, when economies are denied access to financial markets the optimal policy partially o? set exchange rate movements which may be perceived as “fear of floating”. Results are robust to a wide range of parameter values and utility specifications.
Vanishing Point Attracts Eye Movements in Scene Free-viewing

Eye movements are crucial in understanding complex scenes. By predicting where humans look in natural scenes, we can understand how they percieve scenes and priotriaze information for further high-level processing. Here, we study the effect of a particular type of scene structural information known as vanishing point and show that human gaze is attracted to vanishing point regions. We then build a combined model of traditional saliency and vanishing point channel that outperforms state of the art saliency models.
Context for the ESA ExoMars rover: the Panoramic Camera (PanCam) instrument

The recently approved ExoMars rover is the first element of the ESA Aurora programme and is scheduled to deliver the Pasteur exobiology payload to Mars by 2015. The 0.7 kg Panoramic Camera will provide multi-spectral stereo images with 65 ° field-of-view (1.1 mrad/pixel) and high-resolution (85 μrad/pixel) monoscopic ‘zoom’ images with 5 ° field-of-view. The stereo wide-angle cameras (WAC) are based on the Beagle 2 Stereo Camera System heritage (Griffiths et al. (2005). Planet. Space Sci. 53, 1466–1488). The Panoramic Camera instrument is designed to fulfil the digital terrain mapping requirements of the mission as well as to provide multi-spectral geological imaging, colour and stereo panoramic images, water vapour abundance and dust optical depth measurements. It can also be used for high-resolution imaging of inaccessible locations on crater walls and to observe retrieved subsurface samples before ingestion into the rest of the Pasteur payload.
Gender Quota Spill-Over in Sweden: From Politics to Business?

Ever since the 1990s, legislated gender quotas have been adopted across the world as a means to increase the number of women in elected bodies. In recent years, legislated gender quotas have also been adopted to rectify the under-representation of women on company boards. Sweden diverges from this trend. Despite the fact that Sweden has been recognized as a model of gender equality, being ranked among the most gender equal countries in the world and having achieved gender balanced political assemblies, legal gender quotas have not been enacted, neither in the political sphere nor in the economic sphere. This paper analyses women’s path to power in Sweden. It studies the adoption of special measures and provides an assessment of the factors that facilitate or hinder increases in the proportion of women decision-makers in the political and economic sectors. By applying feminist institutional theory, the dynamics of institutional configurations facilitating or hindering change is investigated. It is argued that the interplay of institutions in the political sector operated in a mutually reinforcing way, thereby constituting a good fit, while the interaction of institutions in the economic sector functioned in a conflicting way. It is also claimed that women’s movement organisations (working both within and outside of the political parties) represented critical actors in implementing party quotas in Sweden. Such coordinated efforts did not exist in the corporate sector. There, the forces of resistance were much stronger than the forces for change, thereby hindering the introduction of a legal corporate gender quota.
METAPHORS WE TEACH AND LEARN BY : A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO THE USAGE OF METAPHORS IN TEACHING ENGLISH

Applying the key ideas of the famous book Metaphors We Live By co-authored by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) [2] and findings of numerous investigations into metaphor that have followed the book to the practice of teaching English, this study aims at revealing the importance of metaphors in teaching-learning English and aspires to outline a number of propositions for working with metaphors in teaching English. In order to achieve this aim the following tasks were set: to provide a brief overview of the theory of conceptual metaphor, to summarize the findings of what metaphors are used in the teaching-learning context, to discuss the observations of how metaphors function in the educational environment, and to give a number of suggestions for employing metaphors while teaching English. Methodologically the study is based on the principle of application and integration of the achievements of the theory of the language to the practice of teaching a particular language. The theory of conceptual metaphor has suggested and proved that metaphor is more than a stylistic device functioning of the level of language – it is a mental phenomenon, a way people think conceptualizing one thing in terms of another. A great number of metaphors – those ones that are conventionalized in the everyday language – are routinely used by people to comprehend that which needs understanding but is as a rule quite abstract in the light of that which is more concrete and more tangible. For example, the title of this Conference – English Learning in the
A 3-Level Cache Miss Model for a Nonvolatile Extension to Transcendent Memory

Resource allocation is fundamental to cloud computing, where the memory hierarchy is deep. Space allocation in this hierarchy calls for a model to determine how provisioning at one level affects performance at a lower level. This paper presents a 3-level model that relates the Miss Ratio Curves for two caches at adjacent levels. The model is tested with NEXTmem, which is a transcendent memory used by a Xen hypervisor to cache pages for virtual machines. NEXTmem has a DRAM level and a nonvolatile memory level. The test runs DaCapo benchmarks and shows that the model can be used to enforce fairness at one level, and latency bounds at another level.
Graph-Matched LDPC Codes for Partial-Response Channels

In this paper, we propose an LDPC coding scheme based on repeat-accumulate (RA) codes for partial-response (PR) channels. We modify the original RA encoder in such a way that there exists a one-to-one relationship between a sequence called the D-codeword (which is not the transmitted codeword but contains the information bits) and the noiseless received sequence at the output of the PR channel. A consequence of this is that the graph used for decoding the D-codeword, which is different from the encoder graph, is of low complexity. Moreover, with the appropriate modification of the RA encoder, the graph used for decoding is the same of any PR channel, which makes sense calling these codes graph-matched. The simplicity of the decoder, resulting from the "binary" interference removal (precoding) and the linear, as opposed to quadratic, complexity of the encoder make the proposed scheme attractive. For a code rate R = 3641/4096 = 0.89 and for the PR4 channel, an LDPC code has been designed and a simulated coding gain of about 5 dB for a bit error rate less than 10-5 was obtained.
A Critique of Mobility Models for Wireless Network Simulation

Simulation is universally considered the most effective method of designing and evaluating new network protocols. When developing protocols for mobile networking, the chosen mobility model is one of the key determinants in the success of an accurate simulation. The main role of a mobility model is to mimic the movement behaviors of actual users. Several mobility models, with widely differing characteristics, are employed in contemporary simulation-supported research. Some are simple but far from representative of real user movement patterns, while others provide more complex and realistic modeling. Given the critical role of the mobility model in supporting realistic and accurate protocol simulations, its correct design and selection is essential. In this paper we critique a number of recent mobility models.
Finding dimensions for text based on heterogeneous information network

We propose an approach applicable in the problem of multi dimensions text mining that finds out several sets of phrases which were referred to as the text dimension. Based on the dimensions of text found by the proposed approach, a network could be built by similarities between documents. A method is proposed to transform the network from a coarse-grained one to a fine-grained one. By repeatedly mining phrases sets from the networks of different granularities, we could get a refined text dimensions set. We provide experimental results on text mining showing the computational feasibility and effectiveness for finding text dimensions which combines text mining with network mining and can be used for learning interesting knowledge.
Presence and the Victims of Crime in Online Virtual Worlds

Several crimes are reported to have occurred in online virtual worlds. If the victim of these offences experiences a strong sense of presence within the virtual world, it is possible that they may experience many of the after-effects that victims of offline crimes experience, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, self-blame, need for retribution and victim blaming. This paper describes what is currently known about the victims of crime in online virtual worlds, and investigates the influence of presence on the potential effects of online victimization. It also identifies the measures which could be instigated in order to aid those who have experienced such victimization. The problems of policing virtual worlds, and the implementation of suitable punishments for offenders are also addressed.
Thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension of unusual cause in a teenager.

remained above the range to be expected with his blood sugar values. A possible explanation is that some islet cell tumours produce abnormal insulins which are biologically inactive but not immunologically distinct (Samols, 1965). The principal aim of streptozotocin therapy for malignant insulinoma is the restoration of normoglycaemia. This has been achieved in all reported cases. More radical therapy with streptozotocin may be limited by toxicity, but infusion into the coeliac axis may reduce the risk to tissues other than the liver. Complete destruction of neoplastic tissue seems unlikely in this patient, as high plasma insulin levels have persisted.
CHAOTIC COMMUNICATIONS USING NONLINEAR FILTERING

w x C y a x f x , 1 ABSTRACT In this paper, we consider chaotic communication schemes using nonlinear filtering techniques. Two different previously proposed Extended Kalman Filter based chaotic schemes are revisited and implemented using the Unscented Kalman Filter. Also, a recently proposed antipodal chaotic communication scheme is implemented with both the Extended Kalman Filter and the Unscented Kalman Filter. Comparative theoretical and simulation studies are provided to show the performance improvement of the antipodal chaotic communication scheme over the others.