pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Effects of Payment for Performance on Accountability Mechanisms: Evidence from Pwani, Tanzania.

Payment for Performance (P4P) aims to improve provider motivation to perform better, but little is known about the effects of P4P on accountability mechanisms. We examined the effect of P4P in Tanzania on internal and external accountability mechanisms. We carried out 93 individual in-depth interviews, 9 group interviews and 19 Focus Group Discussions in five intervention districts in three rounds of data collection between 2011 and 2013. We carried out surveys in 150 health facilities across Pwani region and four control districts, and interviewed 200 health workers, before the scheme was introduced and 13 months later. We examined the effects of P4P on internal accountability mechanisms including management changes, supervision, and priority setting, and external accountability mechanisms including provider responsiveness to patients, and engagement with Health Facility Governing Committees. P4P had some positive effects on internal accountability, with increased timeliness of supervision and the provision of feedback during supervision, but a lack of effect on supervision intensity. P4P reduced the interruption of service delivery due to broken equipment as well as drug stock-outs due to increased financial autonomy and responsiveness from managers. Management practices became less hierarchical, with less emphasis on bureaucratic procedures. Effects on external accountability were mixed, health workers treated pregnant women more kindly, but outreach activities did not increase. Facilities were more likely to have committees but their role was largely limited. P4P resulted in improvements in internal accountability measures through improved relations and communication between stakeholders that were incentivised at different levels of the system and enhanced provider autonomy over funds. P4P had more limited effects on external accountability, though attitudes towards patients appeared to improve, community engagement through health facility governing committees remained limited. Implementers should examine the lines of accountability when setting incentives and deciding who to incentivise in P4P schemes
Post-postbiological evolution?

It has already become a commonplace to discuss postbiological evolution in various contexts of futures studies, bioethics, cognitive sciences, philosophical anthropology, or even economics and SETI studies. The assumption is that technological/cultural evolution will soon entirely substitute for the biological processes which underlie human existence – and, by analogy, the existence of other independently evolved intelligent beings, if any. Various modes of postbiological evolution of humans have been envisioned in both ﬁctional and discursive contexts (uploading, cyborgization, technological singularity, etc.). Little thought has been devoted so far to the question whether these postbiological modes are truly ﬁnal in both logical and conceptual terms. What lies beyond the postbiological realm? Clearly, only a few radical speculations on the topic can be oﬀered. In this paper, it is argued that in a suﬃciently broad subset of scenarios for postbiological evolution there will be a kind of reverse trend: the one of reintegration with the (astro)biological universe, by that point understood in a much wider and more inclusive sense. The argument for such reintegration could be understood through the metaphor of expanding Klein bottle as a symbolic image of the post-postbiological evolutionary trajectories. This kind of trajectory will lead to the state in which products of culture are indistinguishable from the natural environment, suggesting practical consequences for our SETI eﬀorts
Optimal Control Problem for a Conveyor-Type Production Line

A method for constructing optimal control of the conveyor-type flow line parameters is developed. The model of the conveyor line is represented by the partial differential equation, which allows to take into account the distribution of products along the technological route as a function of time. Various variants of stepped speed control of the conveyor belt are investigated. The features of step control are determined. The divergence the rate of output by the flow line from the given demand for different parameters of step control is shown
Analysis of PM10 and PM2.5 Concentrations in an Urban Atmosphere in Northern Spain

This work analyses levels of particles PM10 and PM2.5 recorded at four air-quality monitoring stations located in the urban area of Valladolid (Spain) during 2015–2016. To achieve this, the evolution of particle concentrations at different time scales was determined. Average concentrations ranged from 15.3 to 17.6 μg m−3 for PM10 and between 8.9 and 14.8 μg m−3 for PM2.5. The highest monthly means were recorded in autumn and winter. The difference between mean concentrations at weekends and on weekdays for PM10 was around 3 μg m−3 at most of the measuring stations and was 1 μg m−3 for PM2.5. Two concentration peaks were found during the day, one in the morning and the other in the evening, which evidenced the
influence of traffic and other anthropogenic activities on PM concentrations. Their mean values were approximately 21 and 17–21 μg m−3, respectively, for PM10. Mean maximum values for PM2.5 were 12 μg m−3, except at one of the measuring sites, with 17 μg m−3 for the morning maximum and 1 μg m−3 more for the nocturnal peak. In addition, the impact of longdistance
transport of air masses in the study area was analysed by applying a HYSPLIT trajectory model, taking into account backward trajectories of European, African, and Atlantic origins as well as local conditions. In particular, high concentration events due to Saharan dust intrusions are presented. Finally, background levels of particle concentrations estimated at most
sampling areas were around 15 and 7.7 μg m−3 for the PM10 and PM2.5 particle fractions, respectively.Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and ERDF funds (projects CGL2009-11979 and CGL2014-53948-P
BCS-BEC crossover of neutron pairs in symmetric and asymmetric nuclear
  matter

We propose new types of density dependent contact pairing interaction which
reproduce the pairing gaps in symmetric and neutron matter obtained by a
microscopic treatment based on the nucleon-nucleon interaction. These
interactions are able to simulate the pairing gaps of either the bare
interaction or the interaction screened by the medium polarization effects. It
is shown that the medium polarization effects cannot be cast into the density
power law function usually introduced together with the contact interaction and
require the introduction of another isoscalar term. The BCS-BEC crossover of
neutrons pairs in symmetric and symmetric nuclear matter is studied by using
these contact interactions. It is shown that the bare and screened pairing
interactions lead to different features of the BCS-BEC crossover in symmetric
nuclear matter. For the screened pairing interaction, a two-neutron BEC state
is formed in symmetric matter at $k_{Fn}\sim 0.2$ fm$^{-1}$ (neutron density
$\rho_n/\rho_0\sim 10^{-3}$). Contrary the bare interaction does not form the
BEC state at any neutron density
Composition of Biochemical Networks using Domain Knowledge

Graph composition has applications in a variety of practical applications. In drug development, for instance, in order to understand possible drug interactions, one has to merge known networks and examine topological variants arising from such composition. Similarly, the design of sensor nets may use existing network infrastructures, and the superposition of one network on another can help with network design and optimisation. The problem of network composition has not received much attention in algorithm and database research. Here, we work with biological networks encoded in Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML), based on XML syntax. We focus on XML merging and examine the algorithmic and performance challenges we encountered in our work and the possible solutions to the graph merge problem. We show that our XML graph merge solution performs well in practice and improves on the existing toolsets. This leads us into future work directions and the plan of research which will aim to implement graph merging primitives using domain knowledge to perform composition and decomposition on specific graphs in the biological domain
A bio-economic analysis of harvest control rules for the Northeast Arctic cod fishery

Harvest control rules (HCRs) have been implemented for many fisheries worldwide. However, in most instances, those HCRs are not based on the explicit feedbacks between stock properties and economic considerations. This paper develops a bio-economic model that evaluates the HCR adopted in 2004 by the Joint Norwegian–Russian Fishery Commission to manage the world's largest cod stock, Northeast Arctic cod (NEA). The model considered here is biologically and economically detailed, and is the first to compare the performance of the stock's current HCR with that of alternative HCRs derived with optimality criteria. In particular, HCRs are optimized for economic objectives including fleet profits, economic welfare, and total yield and the emerging properties are analyzed. The performance of these optimal HCRs was compared with the currently used HCR. This paper show that the current HCR does in fact comes very close to maximizing profits. Furthermore, the results reveal that the HCR that maximizes profits is the most precautionary one among the considered HCRs. Finally, the HCR that maximizes yield leads to un-precautionary low levels of biomass. In these ways, the implementation of the HCR for NEA cod can be viewed as a success story that may provide valuable lessons for other fisheries
Automated verification of the FreeRTOS scheduler in Hip/Sleek

Automated verification of operating system kernels is a challenging problem, partly due to the use of shared mutable data structures. In this paper, we show how we can automatically verify memory safety and functional correctness properties of the task scheduler component of the FreeRTOS kernel using the verification system Hip/Sleek. We show how some of Hip/Sleek features such as user-defined predicates and lemmas make the specifications highly expressive and the verification process viable. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first code-level verification of memory safety and functional correctness properties of the FreeRTOS scheduler. The outcome of our experiment confirms that Hip/Sleek can indeed be used to verify code that is used in production. Moreover, since the properties that we verify are quite general, we envisage that the same approach can be adopted to verify components of other operating systems
Weighting schemes in global VAR modelling: a forecasting exercise

We provide a comprehensive analysis of the out-of-sample predictive\ud
accuracy of different global vector autoregressive (GVAR) specifications based on\ud
alternative weighting schemes to address global spillovers across countries. In addition\ud
to weights based on bilateral trade, we entertain schemes based on different\ud
financial variables and geodesic distance. Our results indicate that models based on\ud
trade weights, which are standard in the literature, are systematically outperformed in\ud
terms of predictive accuracy by other specifications. We find that, while information\ud
on financial linkages helps improve the forecasting accuracy of GVAR models, averaging\ud
predictions by means of simple predictive likelihood weighting does not appear\ud
to systematically lead to lower forecast errors
Global Solutions of the Boltzmann Equation over R D near Global Maxwellians with Small Mass

30 pagesWe study the dynamics defined by the Boltzmann equation set in the Euclidean space RD in the vicinity of global Maxwellians with finite mass. A global Maxwellian is a special solution of the Boltzmann equation for which the collision integral vanishes identically. In this setting, the dispersion due to the advection operator quenches the dissipative effect of the Boltzmann collision integral. As a result, the large time limit of solutions of the Boltzmann equation in this regime is given by noninteracting, freely transported states and can be described with the tools of scattering theory
Pulmonary autoimmunity as a feature of autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 1 and identification of KCNRG as a bronchial autoantigen.

International audiencePatients with autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 1 (APS-1) suffer from multiple organ-specific autoimmunity with autoantibodies against target tissue-specific autoantigens. Endocrine and nonendocrine organs such as skin, hair follicles, and liver are targeted by the immune system. Despite sporadic observations of pulmonary symptoms among APS-1 patients, an autoimmune mechanism for pulmonary involvement has not been elucidated. We report here on a subset of APS-1 patients with respiratory symptoms. Eight patients with pulmonary involvement were identified. Severe airway obstruction was found in 4 patients, leading to death in 2. Immunoscreening of a cDNA library using serum samples from a patient with APS-1 and obstructive respiratory symptoms identified a putative potassium channel regulator (KCNRG) as a pulmonary autoantigen. Reactivity to recombinant KCNRG was assessed in 110 APS-1 patients by using immunoprecipitation. Autoantibodies to KCNRG were present in 7 of the 8 patients with respiratory symptoms, but in only 1 of 102 APS-1 patients without respiratory symptoms. Expression of KCNRG messenger RNA and protein was found to be predominantly restricted to the epithelial cells of terminal bronchioles. Autoantibodies to KCNRG, a protein mainly expressed in bronchial epithelium, are strongly associated with pulmonary involvement in APS-1. These findings may facilitate the recognition, diagnosis, characterization, and understanding of the pulmonary manifestations of APS-1
Impact reduction during running: efficiency of simple acute interventions in recreational runners

International audienceRunning-related stress fractures have been associated with the overall impact intensity, which has recently been described through the loading rate (LR). Our purpose was to evaluate the effects of four acute interventions with specific focus on LR: wearing racing shoes (RACE), increasing step frequency by 10 % (FREQ), adopting a midfoot strike pattern (MIDFOOT) and combining these three interventions (COMBI). Nine rearfoot-strike subjects performed five 5-min trials during which running kinetics, kinematics and spring-mass behavior were measured for ten consecutive steps on an instrumented treadmill. Electromyographic activity of gastrocnemius lateralis, tibialis anterior, biceps femoris and vastus lateralis muscles was quantified over different phases of the stride cycle. LR was significantly and similarly reduced in MIDFOOT (37.4 ± 7.20 BW s(-1), -56.9 ± 50.0 %) and COMBI (36.8 ± 7.15 BW s(-1), -55.6 ± 29.2 %) conditions compared to NORM (56.3 ± 11.5 BW s(-1), both P<0.001). RACE (51.1 ± 9.81 BW s(-1)) and FREQ (52.7 ± 11.0 BW s(-1)) conditions had no significant effects on LR. Running with a midfoot strike pattern resulted in a significant increase in gastrocnemius lateralis pre-activation (208 ± 97.4 %, P<0.05) and in a significant decrease in tibialis anterior EMG activity (56.2 ± 15.5 %, P<0.05) averaged over the entire stride cycle. The acute attenuation of foot-ground impact seems to be mostly related to the use of a midfoot strike pattern and to a higher pre-activation of the gastrocnemius lateralis. Further studies are needed to test these results in prolonged running exercises and in the long term
Regulation of hepatic cardiolipin metabolism by TNFα: Implication in cancer cachexia

International audienceCardiolipin (CL) content accumulation leads to an increase in energy wasting in liver mitochondria in a rat model of cancer cachexia in which tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) is highly expressed. In this study we investigated the mechanisms involved in liver mitochondria CL accumulation in cancer cachexia and examined if TNFα was involved in this process leading to mitochondrial bioenergetics alterations. We studied gene, protein expression and activity of the main enzymes involved in CL metabolism in liver mitochondria from a rat model of cancer cachexia and in HepaRG hepatocyte-like cells exposed to 20 ng/ml of TNFα for 12 h. Phosphatidylglycerolphosphate synthase (PGPS) gene expression was increased 2.3-fold (p < 0.02) and cardiolipin synthase (CLS) activity decreased 44% (p < 0.03) in cachectic rat livers compared to controls. CL remodeling enzymes monolysocardiolipin acyltransferase (MLCL AT-1) activity and tafazzin (TAZ) gene expression were increased 30% (p < 0.01) and 50% (p < 0.02), respectively, in cachectic rat livers compared to controls. Incubation of hepatocytes with TNFα increased CL content 15% (p < 0.05), mitochondrial oxygen consumption 33% (p < 0.05), PGPS gene expression 44% (p < 0.05) and MLCL AT-1 activity 20% (p < 0.05) compared to controls. These above findings strongly suggest that in cancer cachexia, TNFα induces a higher energy wasting in liver mitochondria by increasing CL content via upregulation of PGPS expression
Regular expression constrained sequence alignment revisited

International audienceImposing constraints in the form of a finite automaton or a regular expression is an effective way to incorporate additional a priori knowledge into sequence alignment procedures. With this motivation, the Regular Expression Constrained Sequence Alignment Problem was introduced, which proposed an O(n^2t^4) time and O(n^2t^2) space algorithm for solving it, where n is the length of the input strings and t is the number of states in the input non-deterministic automaton. A faster O(n^2t^3) time algorithm for the same problem was subsequently proposed. In this article, we further speed up the algorithms for Regular Language Constrained Sequence Alignment by reducing their worst case time complexity bound to O(n^2t^3/log t). This is done by establishing an optimal bound on the size of Straight-Line Programs solving the maxima computation subproblem of the basic dynamic programming algorithm. We also study another solution based on a Steiner Tree computation. While it does not improve worst case, our simulations show that both approaches are efficient in practice, especially when the input automata are dense
Optimization of Divergences Within the Exponential Family for Image Segmentation

International audienceIn this work, we propose novel results for the optimization of divergences within the framework of region-based active contours. We focus on parametric statistical models where the region descriptor is chosen as the probability density function (pdf) of an image feature (e.g. intensity) inside the region and the pdf belongs to the exponential family. The optimization of divergences appears as a flexible tool for segmentation with and without intensity prior. As far as segmentation without reference is concerned, we aim at maximizing the discrepancy between the pdf of the inside region and the pdf of the outside region. Moreover, since the optimization framework is performed within the exponential family, we can cope with difficult segmentation problems including various noise models (Gaussian, Rayleigh, Poisson, Bernoulli ...). We also experimentally show that the maximisation of the KL divergence offers interesting properties compare to some other data terms (e.g. minimization of the anti-log-likelihood). Experimental results on medical images (brain MRI, contrast echocardiography) confirm the applicability of this general setting
Human regulator of telomere elongation helicase 1 (RTEL1) is required for the nuclear and cytoplasmic trafficking of pre-U2 RNA

International audienceHoyeraal-Hreidarsson syndrome (HHS) is a severe form of Dyskeratosis congenita characterized by developmental defects, bone marrow failure and im-munodeficiency and has been associated with telom-ere dysfunction. Recently, mutations in Regulator of Telomere ELongation helicase 1 (RTEL1), a helicase first identified in Mus musculus as being responsible for the maintenance of long telomeres, have been identified in several HHS patients. Here we show that RTEL1 is required for the export and the correct cyto-plasmic trafficking of the small nuclear (sn) RNA pre-U2, a component of the major spliceosome complex. RTEL1-HHS cells show abnormal subcellular partitioning of pre-U2, defects in the recycling of ribonu-cleotide proteins (RNP) in the cytoplasm and splicing defects. While most of these phenotypes can be suppressed by re-expressing the wild-type protein in RTEL1-HHS cells, expression of RTEL1 mutated variants in immortalized cells provokes cytoplasmic mislocalizations of pre-U2 and other RNP components , as well as splicing defects, thus phenocopying RTEL1-HHS cellular defects. Strikingly, expression of a cytoplasmic form of RTEL1 is sufficient to correct RNP mislocalizations both in RTEL1–HHS cells and in cells expressing nuclear mutated forms of RTEL1. This work unravels completely unanticipated roles for RTEL1 in RNP trafficking and strongly suggests that defects in RNP biogenesis pathways contribute to the pathology of HHS
Magnetohydrodynamics measurements in the von Karman sodium experiment

International audienceWe study the magnetic induction in a confined swirling flow of liquid sodium, at integral magnetic Reynolds numbers up to 50. More precisely, we measure in situ the magnetic field induced by the flow motion in the presence of a weak external field. Because of the very small value of the magnetic Prandtl number of all liquid metals, flows with even modest R-m are strongly turbulent. Large mean induction effects are observed over a fluctuating background. As expected from the von Karman flow geometry, the induction is strongly anisotropic. The main contributions are the generation of an azimuthal induced field when the applied field is in the axial direction (an Omega effect) and the generation of axial induced field when the applied field is the transverse direction (as in a large scale alpha effect). Strong fluctuations of the induced field, due to the flow nonstationarity, occur over time scales slower than the flow forcing frequency. In the spectral domain, they display a f(-1) spectral slope. At smaller scales (and larger frequencies) the turbulent fluctuations are in agreement with a Kolmogorov modeling of passive vector dynamics
Experimental investigation of nitrile formation from VUV photochemistry of interstellar ices analogs: acetonitrile and amino acetonitrile

International audienceContext. The study of the chemical reactivity in interstellar ices in astrophysical environments is an important tool for understanding the origin of the organic matter in molecular clouds, in protoplanetary disks, and possibly, as a final destination, in our solar system. The laboratory simulations of the reactivity in ice analogs provide important information for understanding the reactivity in these environments. Here, we used these experimental simulations to trace some formation pathways of two nitriles, acetonitrile and amino acetonitrile, which are two potential precursors of amino acids in astrophysical environments. Aims. The purpose of this work is to present the first experimental approach for the formation of acetonitrile and amino acetonitrile in interstellar-like conditions. Methods. We use Fourier Transform InfraRed (FTIR) spectroscopy and mass spectrometry to study the formation at 20 K of ace-tonitrile CH 3 CN from VUV irradiation of ethylamine and of amino acetonitrile NH 2 CH 2 CN from VUV irradiation of ammonia: acetonitrile mixture. Isotopic substitutions are used to confirm identifications. Results. We demonstrate that acetonitrile can be formed at 20 K from the VUV irradiation of ethylamine with a yield of 4%. Furthermore, in presence of ammonia, at 20 K and under VUV irradiation, the acetonitrile can lead to the amino acetonitrile for-mation. These results suggest that acetonitrile and amino acetonitrile can be formed in astrophysical environments that are submitted to VUV irradiations