Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Modeling the Roles of Leadership for Inter-organizational Information Sharing and Integration Success

We expand the current understanding of leadership's influence on the success of inter-organizational information sharing and integration (IIS) by testing and proposing direct and indirect relationships using structural equation modelling (SEM). We analyzed data from a national survey of 173 professionals from IIS projects in Public Health and Criminal Justice in the US. We evaluated the direct and indirect relationships of three leadership mechanisms -- executive involvement, exercise of formal authority, and informal leaders. By testing the causal relationships between two types of leaders: bureaucratic-based executive leader and network-based informal leaders, we substantiate how embeddedness in bureaucracy influences the relationship between leadership activities and success of IIS projects. Our findings show the significant role of executive involvement to the success of IIS. We found that the influence of informal leaders is magnified by the involvement of executives. Our finding also support the importance of informal leaders both directly to the success of IIS or in curbing the potential negative impact of misuse of authority in the collaboration. Finally, we found that perceptions of participants in terms of how IIS project success is measured, influences the impact of leadership on the success of IIS projects.
Plane wave integral representation for fields in reverberation chambers

A plane wave integral representation is presented for well-stirred fields in a reverberation chamber. The representation automatically satisfies Maxwell's equations in a source-free region and the statistical properties of the fields are introduced through the angular spectrum, which is taken to be a random variable. Starting with fairly simple and physically appropriate assumptions for the angular spectrum, a number of properties of the electric and magnetic fields and the power received by an antenna or a test object are derived. Many of these properties and test object responses are in agreement with other theories or with measured results. An important result for radiated immunity testing is that the ensemble (stirring) average of received power is equal to the average over plane wave incidence and polarization.
Aesthetic and technical refinements in latissimus dorsi implant breast reconstruction: a 15-year experience.

BACKGROUND The latissimus dorsi myocutaneous flap and implant breast reconstruction procedure has undergone many refinements over its lifetime. In fact, the authors have made many aesthetic and technical refinements to their own approach to breast reconstruction. OBJECTIVES The authors review the historical progression of latissimus flap and breast reconstruction techniques and compare these to their own 15-year experience. METHODS A retrospective chart review was conducted for all latissimus and implant breast reconstructions performed by the senior author (MAC) from July 1994 to June 2009, for a total of 52 procedures in 31 patients. Surgical and oncological data, complications, and outcomes data were recorded. RESULTS The mean age of the patients at time of surgery was 47.6 years. Average mastectomy weight was 283 grams and average final implant volume was 364 cc. Average follow-up was three years, four months. Of the 52 total procedures, 34.6% were immediate breast reconstructions utilizing skin-sparing mastectomy (SSM); 13.5% of the reconstructed breasts also had preservation of the areola (areolar-sparing mastectomy [ASM]). The most common complication was donor site seroma (40.4%). Aesthetic and surgical refinements identified over the time period included the adoption of SSM and ASM techniques, immediate nipple reconstruction, the placement of an adjustable saline implant to allow for postoperative size adjustment, and implant placement in the prepectoral position. The overall latissimus dorsi implant reconstruction success rate was 94.2% (49/52). CONCLUSIONS The data demonstrated a successful outcome for latissimus dorsi and implant breast reconstruction for patients with a low or normal body mass index and a small (A to C cup) breast size. The aesthetic outcome of latissimus dorsi breast reconstruction has been improved over the past 15 years by the adoption of SSM and ASM techniques. Immediate nipple reconstruction and the placement of an adjustable saline implant potentially render this procedure a true single-stage reconstruction. Prepectoral implant position provides good aesthetics while preserving the subpectoral space for future management of capsular contracture if required.
Spatiotemporal Variability of ENSO and SST Teleconnections to Summer Drought over the United States during the Twentieth Century

Presented are investigations into the spatial structure of teleconnections between both the winter El Niño– Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and global sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and a measure of continental U.S. summer drought during the twentieth century. Potential nonlinearities and nonstationarities in the relationships are noted. During the first three decades of this century, summer drought teleconnections in response to SST patterns linked to ENSO are found to be strongest in the southern regions of Texas, with extensions into regions of the Midwest. From the 1930s through the 1950s, the drought teleconnection pattern is found to extend into southern Arizona. The most recent three decades show weak teleconnections between summer drought over southern Texas and Arizona, and winter SSTs, which is consistent with previous findings. Instead, the response to Pacific SSTs shows a clear shift to the western United States and southern regions of California. These epochal variations are consistent with epochal variations observed in ENSO and other low-frequency climate indicators. This changing teleconnection response complicates statistical forecasting of drought.
Neural Networks with Quadratic VCDimension 1

This paper shows that neural networks which use continuous activation functions have VC dimension at least as large as the square of the number of weights w. This result settles a long-standing open question, namely whether the well-known O(w log w) bound, known for hard-threshold nets, also held for more general sigmoidal nets. Implications for the number of samples needed for valid generalization are discussed.
The Transduction Channel TRPM5 Is Gated by Intracellular Calcium in Taste Cells

Bitter, sweet, and umami tastants are detected by G-protein-coupled receptors that signal through a common second-messenger cascade involving gustducin, phospholipase C β2, and the transient receptor potential M5 (TRPM5) ion channel. The mechanism by which phosphoinositide signaling activates TRPM5 has been studied in heterologous cell types with contradictory results. To resolve this issue and understand the role of TRPM5 in taste signaling, we took advantage of mice in which the TRPM5 promoter drives expression of green fluorescent protein and mice that carry a targeted deletion of the TRPM5 gene to unequivocally identify TRPM5-dependent currents in taste receptor cells. Our results show that brief elevation of intracellular inositol trisphosphate or Ca2+ is sufficient to gate TRPM5-dependent currents in intact taste cells, but only intracellular Ca2+ is able to activate TRPM5-dependent currents in excised patches. Detailed study in excised patches showed that TRPM5 forms a nonselective cation channel that is half-activated by 8 μm Ca2+ and that desensitizes in response to prolonged exposure to intracellular Ca2+. In addition to channels encoded by the TRPM5 gene, we found that taste cells have a second type of Ca2+-activated nonselective cation channel that is less sensitive to intracellular Ca2+. These data constrain proposed models for taste transduction and suggest a link between receptor signaling and membrane potential in taste cells.
Looking at Remedies for the Urban Stream Syndrome from a new Perspective: Novel Approaches for Restoring Preurban Hydrology and Water Quality in Human-Impacted Catchments

Author(s): Askarizadeh Bardsiri, Asal | Advisor(s): Grant, Stanley | Abstract: Urbanization adversely impacts stream water quality and ecosystem services. It also disrupts the water and sediment budgets of streams. Novel technologies and out-of-the-box approaches are required to address the impaired stream health and function in human-impacted catchments. In this thesis, I look at the degraded condition of urban streams from both hydrological and water quality perspectives, and propose methods for returning the impaired urban streams condition close to the preurban state. From the hydrological standpoint, I explore the role of low impact development technologies in restoring natural water balance over urbanized catchments. I demonstrate that over annual time scales, the volumes of stormwater that should be infiltrated and harvested can be estimated from a catchment scale water balance given local climate conditions and preurban land cover. I conclude that for all but the wettest regions of the world, a much larger volume of stormwater runoff should be harvested than infiltrated to maintain stream hydrology in a preurban state. From the water quality perspective, I investigate the negative impacts of excess in-stream nitrate concentration on human health and the ecosystem; and develop a catchment scale modeling framework for its management. This modeling framework advances the state-of-the-art by taking into account the natural ability of streams in treatment of nitrate (by biotic assimilation and denitrification). My model builds on a seminal study [Mulholland et al., 2008, Nature, 452, 202-205] that found in-stream treatment of nitrate declines non-linearly with increasing nitrate concentration in a stream. I explore the implications of this result for nitrate management in an urbanizing watershed in southeastern Australia. To this end, I couple the correlation for in-stream processing of nitrate with a stream network model of the Jacksons Creek watershed (Victoria, Australia). By exploring various scenarios for nitrate loading rate in the effluent of a recycled water plant within the catchment, stream network model predicts that as nitrate loading from a sewage treatment plant increases (or decreases), Jacksons Creek responds by reducing (or increasing) in-stream nitrate removal. Thus, the non-linear nature of in-stream treatment may reinforce socio-ecological feedback loops that drive urban streams into healthy or degraded states.
Integrating emotional competences in the Early Childhood Education curriculum

The current Spanish education legislation has started to highlight the need to work on emotional education since early childhood Education. The Spanish Education Law 2/2006 May 3(known as LOE), and all decrees and orders currently regulating the curriculum and teaching in Early Childhood Education include contents and objectives related to the Emotional Intelligence framework developed by Mayer & Salovey (1997). Because all these laws and regulations give teachers autonomy for both designing and programming the curriculum in Early Childhood Education and because important relationships have been established between social and emotional competence and school adaptation, we argue in this paper that the training of future teachers in Early Childhood Education should include the development of emotional intelligence abilities and skills. This article presents an emotional education proposal for its integration in the second cycle of Early Childhood Education (children aged 3 to 6 years old). This proposal is based on Mayer and Salovey’s model (1997) of emotional intelligence. This model is the only one in which emotional abilities are considered cognitive‐emotional capacities which can be developed and it matches the general goal of this educational stage and also the general aims and curricular contents included in the abovementioned legislation.
Modeling of the time-dependency of in vitro drug cytotoxicity and resistance.

For potential clinical extrapolation of in vitro findings, it is of interest to relate the measured effect of an anticancer agent to concentration and exposure time. The Hill model (A. V. Hill, J. Physiol., 40: iv-vii, 1910) is commonly used to describe pharmacodynamic (PD) effects, including drug-induced growth inhibition of cancer cells in vitro. The IC(X)n x T = k relationship, in which IC(X) is the concentration of agent required to reduce cell growth by X%, T is the exposure time, and n and k are estimable parameters, was first applied to bacterial disinfectant action and then was successfully used to model anticancer drug potency as a function of exposure time (D. J. Adams, Cancer Res., 49: 6615-6620, 1989). Our goal was to create a new global PD modeling paradigm to facilitate the quantitative assessment of the growth-inhibitory effect of anticancer agents as a function of concentration and exposure time. Wild-type human ovarian A2780 and ileocecal HCT-8 carcinoma cells and sublines that were resistant to cisplatin (A2780/CP3), doxorubicin (A2780/DX5B), and raltitrexed (RTX) (HCT-8/DW2) were exposed to various anticancer agents, cisplatin, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, trimetrexate, RTX, methotrexate, and AG2034, for periods ranging from 1 to 96 h. Cell growth inhibition was measured with the sulforhodamine B protein dye assay. Patterns of time-dependency of drug potency, slope of the concentration-effect curves, and relative degree of resistance were characterized. Empirical mathematical expressions were built into a global concentration-time-effect model. The global PD model was then fit to the concentration-time-effect data with iteratively reweighted nonlinear regression. Under specific treatment conditions, the examination of the slope and the shape of the concentration-effect curves revealed a large heterogeneity in drug response, e.g., shallow concentration-effect curve or double or triple Hill "roller coaster" concentration-effect curve. These patterns, which were observed at intermediate exposure times in parental and resistant cells for paclitaxel and trimetrexate or only in resistant HCT-8/DW2 cells for RTX, methotrexate, and AG2034, revealed mechanistic insights for the former cases but possible methodological artifacts for the latter cases. The comprehensive PD modeling of the cytotoxic effect of anticancer agents showed that it was possible to modulate drug effect, response heterogeneity, and drug resistance by altering the time of exposure to the agents. This approach will be useful for: (a) describing complex concentration-time-effect surfaces; (b) refining biological interpretations of data; (c) providing insights on mechanisms of drug action and resistance; and (d) generating leads for clinical use of anticancer drugs.
Aligning Metabolic Pathways Exploiting Binary Relation of Reactions

Metabolic pathway alignment has been widely used to find one-to-one and/or one-to-many reaction mappings to identify the alternative pathways that have similar functions through different sets of reactions, which has important applications in reconstructing phylogeny and understanding metabolic functions. The existing alignment methods exhaustively search reaction sets, which may become infeasible for large pathways. To address this problem, we present an effective alignment method for accurately extracting reaction mappings between two metabolic pathways. We show that connected relation between reactions can be formalized as binary relation of reactions in metabolic pathways, and the multiplications of zero-one matrices for binary relations of reactions can be accomplished in finite steps. By utilizing the multiplications of zero-one matrices for binary relation of reactions, we efficiently obtain reaction sets in a small number of steps without exhaustive search, and accurately uncover biologically relevant reaction mappings. Furthermore, we introduce a measure of topological similarity of nodes (reactions) by comparing the structural similarity of the k-neighborhood subgraphs of the nodes in aligning metabolic pathways. We employ this similarity metric to improve the accuracy of the alignments. The experimental results on the KEGG database show that when compared with other state-of-the-art methods, in most cases, our method obtains better performance in the node correctness and edge correctness, and the number of the edges of the largest common connected subgraph for one-to-one reaction mappings, and the number of correct one-to-many reaction mappings. Our method is scalable in finding more reaction mappings with better biological relevance in large metabolic pathways.
Using the COM-B model of behaviour to understand sitting behaviour in UK office workers

Prolonged sedentary behaviour has established health risks; however many individuals spend long periods of time sitting at work. Qualitative researchers suggest that inconsistent effectiveness of interventions may be linked to an incomplete understanding of the nature of and factors influencing sedentary behaviour in the workplace. Therefore, this study’s aim was to use the COM-B model of behaviour, complimented by the Theoretical Domains Framework, to examine how Capability, Opportunity and Motivation influences sitting behaviour at work in office workers. The study was a qualitative phenomenological analysis in which office workers (n=10) who had predominantly desk-based jobs were interviewed about their sitting behaviour at work. Interview analysis using the Nvivo 10 programme and the Framework Method identified themes and quantified the prevalence of each theme across participants. The analysis incorporated a number of procedures to enhance the trustworthiness including researcher reflexive journal and coding triangulation. Physical capability had minimal influence on behaviour, but psychological capability was influential. Physical and social opportunities were influential in terms of the physical environment, nature of the job, social acceptability and norms related to sitting. Both automatic and reflective motivation emerged as being influential on sitting behaviour. To conclude, the COM-B model, complimented by the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF), facilitated understanding of factors influencing office workers’ sitting behaviour and highlighted a number of potential areas for future intervention foci.
Protract Lifetime by Exploiting Heterogeneity in Wireless Sensor Network

sensor networks (WSN) are emerging in various fields like disaster management, battle field surveillance, agriculture etc. A large number of sensors in these applications are unattended and work autonomously. For a case we can also use set of single sensor in order to cover the whole area of our region but it is much costly and risky as well and it gives sometimes single point of failure. So providing heterogeneous sensors clearly shorts down many problems in wireless sensor network mainly as lifetime of network. Clustering is a key technique to improve the network lifetime, reduce the energy consumption and increase the scalability of the sensor network. In this paper, a novel technique is evolved to measure the impact of heterogeneity of the nodes over lifetime of the network and compare the performance by comparing with homogeneous sensor network. KeywordsHead, Heterogeneous, Energy Efficiency.
Split-Sample Tests of “No Opinion” Responses in an Attribute-Based Choice Model

Researchers using questionnaires to elicit preferences must decide whether to include response options that allow respondents to express “no opinion. ” Using a split-sample design, we explore the implications of alternative answer formats including and not including no-opinion responses in an attribute-based choice experiment. The results indicate that using multiple no-opinion responses may enable researchers to differentiate between respondents who choose no-opinion options due to satisficing and those expressing utility indifference. Existing literature suggests no-opinion responses may be treated as “no,” but our results show treating no-opinion responses as “no” can yield substantially disparate preference estimates. (JEL C25, Q24, Q25, Q51)
Multi-Armed Bandit Mechanisms for Multi-Slot Sponsored Search Auctions

In pay-per click sponsored search auctions which are currently extensively used by search engines, the auction for a keyword involves a certain number of advertisers (say k) competing for available slots (say m) to display their ads. This auction is typically conducted for a number of rounds (say T). There are click probabilities mu_ij associated with agent-slot pairs. The search engine's goal is to maximize social welfare, for example, the sum of values of the advertisers. The search engine does not know the true value of an advertiser for a click to her ad and also does not know the click probabilities mu_ij s. A key problem for the search engine therefore is to learn these during the T rounds of the auction and also to ensure that the auction mechanism is truthful. Mechanisms for addressing such learning and incentives issues have recently been introduced and would be referred to as multi-armed-bandit (MAB) mechanisms. When m = 1,characterizations for truthful MAB mechanisms are available in the literature and it has been shown that the regret for such mechanisms will be O(T^{2/3}). In this paper, we seek to derive a characterization in the realistic but nontrivial general case when m > 1 and obtain several interesting results.
Free fatty acids and the metabolic syndrome in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea

Obesity and metabolic syndrome (MS) occur frequently in patients with obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome (OSAS). We hypothesised that circulating free fatty acids (FFAs) are elevated in OSAS patients independently of obesity. This elevation may contribute to the development of MS in these patients. We studied 119 OSAS patients and 119 controls. Participants were recruited and studied at sleep unit of our institution (Hospital Universitari Son Dureta, Palma de Mallorca, Spain) and were matched for sex, age and body mass index (BMI). The occurrence of MS was analysed by clinical criteria. Serum levels of FFAs, glucose, triglycerides, cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein–cholesterol, aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase, &ggr;-glutamyltransferase, C-reactive protein and 8-isoprostanes were determined. Prevalence of MS was higher in OSAS than in the control group (38 versus 21%; p = 0.006). OSAS patients had higher FFAs levels than controls (mean±sd 12.2±4.9 versus 10.5±5.0 mg·dL−1; p = 0.015). Among subjects without MS, OSAS patients (OSAS+ MS-) showed higher levels of FFAs than controls (OSAS- MS-) (11.6±4.7 versus 10.0±4.4 mg·dL−1; p = 0.04). In a multiple regression model, after adjustment for age, sex, BMI and the presence of MS, FFAs were significantly associated with apnoea/hypopnoea index (p = 0.04). This study shows that FFAs are elevated in OSAS and could be one of the mechanisms involved in the metabolic complications of OSAS.