Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Abnormalities in the export and fate of recent thymic emigrants in diabetes-prone BB/W rats.

Abnormalities in postthymic T cell development in the BB/W rat model of autoimmune insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) result in part from a lymphopenia (lyp) gene defect. To better characterize these abnormalities, the phenotypes of T cells from diabetes-prone (DP) and diabetes-resistant (DR) coisogenic rats were analyzed by multiparameter flow immunocytometry (FCM). Marked decreases in the numbers of Thy1- RT6+ T cells, most of which are CD8+, were documented in DP rats by live-gating. Conversely, an approximately 3-fold increase was observed in the percentage of Thy1+ RT6- T cells, which normally serve as the precursors of both Thy1- RT6+ and Thy1- RT6- T cell subsets in rats. These results suggested that, at a minimum, an arrest in maturation of the Thy1+ precursors of RT6+ T cells occurs postthymically in DP rats. To determine more precisely the stage(s) in T cell development at which lymphopenia occurs, the export and fate of recent thymic emigrants (RTE's) and their immediate descendants in DP rats was traced after intrathymic (i.t.) labelling with fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC). The results showed that in DP, as compared with DR, rats: 1) 5-fold fewer RTE's are exported from the thymus per 24 hr; 2) more than 80% of the RTE's are CD4+; 3) most of the immediate descendants of RTE's disappear from the peripheral lymphoid tissues within one week after export from the thymus; and 4) few of the descendants of the RTE's that do survive differentiate into RT6+ T cells. Staining with propidium iodide revealed that a significantly higher proportion of Thy1+ T cells in DP than in DR rats are in cycle (S/G2/M), thereby accounting for their disproportionately high numbers relative to RTE's. These results indicate that, in addition to defective thymic export, most of the immediate descendants of RTE's in DP rats undergo non-productive proliferation and death at the time (3-7 days postthymic) at which their counterparts in DR rats differentiate into Thy1- RT6+ T cells. The resulting deficiency of immunoregulatory T cells, acting in concert with defective intrathymic selection of effector T cell precursors, appears to conspire to markedly enhance the predisposition of DP rats to autoimmunity.
Optimal real power dispatch of centralized micro-grid control operation

A Microgrid (MG) low voltage network basically consists of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), storage devices and controllable loads which can operate in grid tied or islanded mode. Optimal power flow (OPF) is carried out for minimum operational cost based optimal scheduling in day ahead pricing market with forecasted data of DERs generation and daily hourly residential load profile. Optimal scheduling helps to maximize overall profit of Micro grid controller (MGCC) in centralized control mode operation of micro-grid where owners have common goal of profit maximization achieved with cooperation in order to meet their individual goal. Linear programming method of optimal power flow is used for the cost minimization purpose and Newton's method for power flow to estimate initial cost of dispatch.
A five-frequency bands quasi-optical multiplexer for geostationary orbit microwave radiometer

Microwave radiometer on board the FY-4 microwave satellite, which is China's second generation geostationary orbit meteorological satellite, is able to acquire temperature profiles and humidity profiles at 54, 118, 183, 380 and 425GHz. The FY-4 microwave radiometer receives the radiation emitted by the earth surface and atmospheric molecules at the five-frequency bands. A multiplexer is an important part of the radiometer, which separates the radiation beam into five-frequency bands signal and transmits the signal to respective receiver of each frequency band. In this paper, a five-frequency bands quasi-optical multiplexer is designed for the low-loss frequency band separation. Meanwhile, the quasi-optical multiplexer seen as a feed network of the radiometer has to provide the proper antenna illumination in amplitude and phase for the antenna reflector. Quasi-optical techniques are used to design the overall five-frequency bands multiplexer.
Strategic issues for the not-for-profit sector

Bringing together some of Australia’s leading and emerging researchers studying different aspects of the not-for-profit (NFP) sector, Strategic Issues in the Not-for-Profit Sector draws on original Australian and comparative research to provide a spirited exploration of strategic issues facing NFP organisations. A diverse, vital and ever-growing sector in Australia, the NFP sector provides the organisational framework through which many of the most disadvantaged in the community receive access to services and support. However, pressures such as a changing composition, an erosion of financial sustainability, the need to professionalise, and demographic trends affecting patterns of volunteering have put pressure on the NFP sector to innovate and grow in new directions. Strategic Issues in the Not-for-Profit Sector considers the local and global drivers of change, as well as the industry, policy and community imperatives impacting upon NFP sustainability, providing a unique insight into not only the strategic issues, but also strategic responses emerging within the sector.
Corporate Governance in Multinational Companies

This book provides rigorous analysis of the wide range of questions surrounding the role of international institutions in governing global business, especially multinational enterprises (MNEs). The analysis, both theoretical and empirical, focuses on the corporate governance of MNEs and to what extent their management takes into account the negative effects of their activities. Also discussed are: how nation states and international institutions control the activities of MNEs, and how the role and strategies of international institutions can be changed to minimise any negative effects without hampering the positive aspects and effects of MNEs.
Data acquisition and representation of leaves using digital close range photogrammetry for species identification

The surveying technique of close-range Photogrammetry is based on an approach of representation of the image forming mechanism of photography and extract spatial information through computation on photos. This research used the fundamentals of close-range Photogrammetry and is applied to model leaves, measure the geometric model of leaf length and width and compare with the conventional measurement method. Ringed Automated Detection (RAD) coded target are applied in this research. RAD coded target offers automatic detection and matching of points across multiple photographs. The process has a better opportunity to execute with less error even in complex conditions. The process is much faster without worrying about the residual error. The research took two species of leaves, Jelutong leaf, dyera constulata species and Kulim leaf, scorodocarpus borneensis species. Three specimens are taken from each species to identify the shape size and range. These leaves are then taken in photographs and process the images using PhotoModeler software to extract the data.
Diagnostic Utility of the PTSD Checklist in Detecting PTSD in Chinese Earthquake Victims

By using the posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) module of the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (MINI) as the gold standard to identify PTSD, the current study investigated the diagnostic efficiency of the PTSD Checklist (PCL) as a screening questionnaire in a sample of 152 Chinese victims of the Wenchuan earthquake. The results showed that the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was . 96 (SE = .02), and the optimally efficient cut-off score was 44. The findings provide preliminary support of the PCL as a screening questionnaire among Chinese earthquake victims. The present study may contribute to further PTSD-related research and practices in Chinese disaster settings.
Crisis Management in Social Media and Digital Age: Recall Problem and Challenges to Toyota

Social media, such as Facebook and Twitter have added new meaning to spreading news and information. While the traditional information channels such as newspapers, radios, and TV, are one-way mediums, the dawn of the Internet and social media have made communication a two-way extravaganza. The lack of any official control, supervision, or regulation has fueled a social media frenzy, which has proved to be a very effective method of rallying around a mass on any significant or even not so significant issue. The recent banning of Facebook, and others alike, by certain governments is proof that social media cannot be ignored. Though authoritarian governments can resort to such drastic methods, public corporations cannot afford to do so. Corporations have no other way than to live with social media phenomenon -- either countering effectively, when a crisis starts brewing or suffering the consequences when it grows out of proportions.Under this light, it is interesting to explore how the recall-troubled Toyota has handled the social media and what options are available for Toyota in order to prevent the situation go out of control and harming the worldwide reputation it has strenuously built over the decades as a top quality auto maker.Toyota’s recall has exposed a bit of “digitization in automobile” industry as well. The digital technology in music and video industry, along with its exploitation by Apple using Internet and social media, basically pushed the old industry heavyweight Sony to the sideline. Could the same thing happen to Toyota? Can a new comer exploit the digitization in automobile, in conjunction with Internet and social media, to dethrone an established giant such as Toyota?
Loneliness and depression in middle and old age: are the childless more vulnerable?

OBJECTIVES This study tests whether childlessness is significantly related to greater loneliness or depression among older adults, both alone and in conjunction with marital status. METHODS Using data from the 1988 National Survey of Families and Households, the relative circumstances of community-dwelling, permanently childless adults and biological parents (with at least one surviving child), 50-84 years old, are compared. Multivariate models are used to test the effects of parental status and combined marital-parental statuses on loneliness and depression, controlling for sociodemographic characteristics. RESULTS Results of multivariate analyses show no significant, direct effect of childlessness, though a marginally significant effect appears for women. However, small but significant differences are observed within a typology combining marital and parental statuses. Widowed men and women report higher levels of loneliness and depression than married parents regardless of parental status. Divorced parents are also significantly more vulnerable. The subjective well-being of never married, childless men and women is indistinguishable from that of their married peers. DISCUSSION The results confirm earlier studies, indicating that childlessness is not necessarily linked with diminished subjective well-being among older adults. However, marital status represents an important context within which to understand and evaluate the experience of parental status.
Investor Expectations and Systematic Risk

This study refines the estimation of beta risk within the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) framework. Evidence is provided that the link between ex-ante risk and ex-post returns is strengthened by more accurately reflecting the formation of investor expectations. An adaptive expectations approach is employed as an estimation technique consistent with the behavioural patterns of investors. Finally, the study compares the capability of risk estimates from both the standard CAPM and adaptive expectation methods to account for future asset returns in Australia.
Assembly scaffolding with PE-contaminated mate-pair libraries

MOTIVATION Scaffolding is often an essential step in a genome assembly process, in which contigs are ordered and oriented using read pairs from a combination of paired-end libraries and longer-range mate-pair libraries. Although a simple idea, scaffolding is unfortunately hard to get right in practice. One source of problems is so-called PE-contamination in mate-pair libraries, in which a non-negligible fraction of the read pairs get the wrong orientation and a much smaller insert size than what is expected. This contamination has been discussed before, in relation to integrated scaffolders, but solutions rely on the orientation being observable, e.g. by finding the junction adapter sequence in the reads. This is not always possible, making orientation and insert size of a read pair stochastic. To our knowledge, there is neither previous work on modeling PE-contamination, nor a study on the effect PE-contamination has on scaffolding quality. RESULTS We have addressed PE-contamination in an update to our scaffolder BESST. We formulate the problem as an integer linear program which is solved using an efficient heuristic. The new method shows significant improvement over both integrated and stand-alone scaffolders in our experiments. The impact of modeling PE-contamination is quantified by comparing with the previous BESST model. We also show how other scaffolders are vulnerable to PE-contaminated libraries, resulting in an increased number of misassemblies, more conservative scaffolding and inflated assembly sizes. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The model is implemented in BESST. Source code and usage instructions are found at https://github.com/ksahlin/BESST BESST can also be downloaded using PyPI. CONTACT ksahlin@kth.se SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
ERP implementation choices: a supply/use space based analysis

In this research we describe the institutionalization process of an organizational field: that of ERP customization choices. We will ground our analysis on the case of a public sector organization in the course of 10 years. Implementation choices evolved according to a process where pressures towards cross-unit homogeneization were followed by a period of internal differentiation. A subsequent time period of inter-organizational and inter-regional homogeneization gave rise to a time period of particularization based on local organizational contexts. The processual analysis of implementation choices let us conclude that the evolution of the organizational field of customization choices can be described as a framing/overflowing dynamics where actors and relations and the âsituationâ in which the issue of similarity can be addressed vary according to a discountinuous and recursive pattern and that actors consciously use space and time as resources in their search for niches of autonomy.
Design of C-shaped meander line inverted-L antenna for embeded in land mines

This letter proposed a 150 MHz C-shaped meander line inverted-L antenna, which can be embedded in land mines. First, a radiation element of monopole antenna has been transformed to an inverted-L form by turning it to be parallel with the ground. Then, it was designed to a size allowing insertion in a land mine by designing the radiating element being parallel with the ground into C-form by using a meander line. Thus-produced antenna return loss has -12.66 dB at the center frequency of 150 MHz, bandwidth of 2.6 MHz (1.73%), and the radiation pattern has a conical form of -15.4 dBi in maximum gain.
Aalborg Universitet Dual connectivity for LTE-advanced heterogeneous networks

Dual connectivity (DC) allows user equipments (UEs) to receive data simultaneously from different eNodeBs (eNBs) in order to boost the performance in a heterogeneous network with dedicated carrier deployment. Yet, how to efficiently operate with DC opens a number of research questions. In this paper we focus on the case where a macro and a small cell eNBs are inter-connected with traditional backhaul links characterized by certain latency, assuming independent radio resource management (RRM) functionalities residing in each eNB. In order to fully harvest the gain provided by DC, an efficient flow control of data between the involved macro and small cell eNBs is proposed. Moreover, guidelines for the main performance determining RRM algorithms such as UE cell association and packet scheduling are also presented. It is demonstrated how proper configuration of the proposed flow control algorithm offers efficient trade-offs between reducing the probability that one of the eNBs involved in the DC runs out of data and limiting the buffering time. Simulation results show that the performance of DC over traditional backhaul connections is close to that achievable with inter-site carrier aggregation (CA) and virtually zerolatency fronthaul connections, and in any case it is significantly higher compared to the case without DC.
Competitive Intelligence and Information Technology Adoption of SMEs in Turkey: Diagnosing Current Performance and Identifying Barriers

The need for SMEs to behave in a more concise and coherent competitive fashion is well recognised. This study reports on an empirical study of SMEs in Turkey. Their responses were applied to a behavioural and information technology adoption framework which enabled the identification of areas where changes would be required for these firms to begin operating at a higher level of competence. The findings revealed significant scope for improvements on all strands of the diagnostic framework: attitude, gathering, location, technology support, IT systems support and finally, use of intelligence-based output by decision-makers. Through free form responses, it was also possible to identify barrier to higher level adoption and performance inhibiters, which were subsequently, categorised and assessed for significance.
Frequency domain constant modulus algorithm for broadband wireless systems

Broadband wireless systems require powerful equalizers which can cope with long channel impulse responses and severe intersymbol interference (ISI). In this paper, a frequency domain modified constant modulus algorithm (PD-MCMA) is presented. The employed modified CMA (MCMA) is chosen to confine the phase ambiguity of the conventional CMA to a 90/spl deg/ phase shift solution. On this foundation, a block MCMA algorithm which updates the equalizer coefficients on a block-by-block basis is proposed. The advantage of this block MCMA is that it can be equivalently implemented in the frequency domain. This approach offers a large reduction in computational complexity compared to time domain algorithms. For an equalizer with 256 coefficients, the number of real multiplications required by the FD-MCMA is only 9.5% of that required by the MCMA. Furthermore, convergence of the proposed FD-MCMA is significantly improved by properly normalizing the update equations. Simulations show that the normalized FD-MCMA converges much faster than the MCMA and the FD-MCMA while maintaining approximately the same bit error rate (BER) performance.
Timing of Entry and Foreign Subsidiary Survival

We adopt a two-stage, contingency approach to analyze the relationship between timing of entry and subsidiary survival. We develop and test hypotheses concerning determinants of the timing of entry, and hypotheses about asset-based competitive advantage moderators of timing of entry's influence on subsidiary survival. Our results show that subsidiary survival was positively related to late entry, but the magnitude of this effect was dependent on the assets possessed by the investing firm.
Diabetes Mellitus is a chronic metabolic disorder , where the improper management of the blood glucose level in the diabetic patients will lead to the risk of heart attack , kidney disease and renal failure

Diabetes Mellitus is a chronic metabolic disorder, where the improper management of the blood glucose level in the diabetic patients will lead to the risk of heart attack, kidney disease and renal failure. This paper attempts to enhance the diagnostic accuracy of the advancing blood glucose levels of the diabetic patients, by combining principal component analysis and wavelet neural network. The proposed system makes separate blood glucose prediction in the morning, afternoon, evening and night intervals, using dataset from one patient covering a period of 77 days. Comparisons of the diagnostic accuracy with other neural network models, which use the same dataset are made. The comparison results showed overall improved accuracy, which indicates the effectiveness of this proposed system. Keywords—Diabetes Mellitus, principal component analysis, time-series, wavelet neural network.
Challenges for Less Developed Countries: Agricultural Policies in the EU and the US

Agricultural policies adopted by developed countries are considered distortional and detrimental to less developed countries (LDCs). This paper discusses the adverse impacts on less developed countries of the agricultural support regimes of the European Union (EU) and the United States (US). Despite the fact that the budget for agriculture in these constituencies has the same order of magnitude, we find that the EU relies much more heavily on agricultural support than does the US. Specifically, the EU provides agricultural producers with an amount of support that is about two-and-a-half times that of the US, and for most commodities a larger share of farmers’ income stems from support measures as well. While the composition of producer support differs between the EU and US, the per-dollar negative impact of the policies on farmers in LDCs is about equal. Finally, we analyse the medium-term impact of the 2003 reform of common agricultural policy in the EU. We estimate the reform will lead to a reduction of EU producer support of 20 percent by 2013 and will reduce the per-dollar negative impact on LDCs of the policy as well.
The last barrier: on-chip antennas

This paper has presented a comprehensive overview of on-chip antennas, which remain the last bottleneck for achieving true SoC RF solutions. CMOS remains the mainstream IC technology choice but is not well suited for on-chip antennas, requiring the use of innovative design techniques to overcome its shortcomings. Codesign of circuits and antennas provide leverage to the designer to achieve optimum performance. The layout of on-chip antennas is dictated by foundry specific rules whereas characterization of on-chip antennas requires special text fixtures. For future highly integrated SoC solutions, foundries will have to provide special layers for efficient on-chip antenna implementations, as they currently do for on-chip inductors. In many of the emerging applications such as THz communication, implantable systems and energy harvesting, on-chip antennas have shown immense potential and are likely to play a major role in shaping up future communication systems.
A knowledge-based decision support system for managing logistics operations under risk considerations

This thesis is protected by copyright, with all rights reserved. By reading and using the thesis, the reader understands and agrees to the following terms: 1. The reader will abide by the rules and legal ordinances governing copyright regarding the use of the thesis. 2. The reader will use the thesis for the purpose of research or private study only and not for distribution or further reproduction or any other purpose. 3. The reader agrees to indemnify and hold the University harmless from and against any loss, damage, cost, liability or expenses arising from copyright infringement or unauthorized usage.