Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Business cycle dynamics in the CEE countries: a political economy approach

This paper uses a simple VAR analysis to examine 5 CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) in order to understand whether their business cycles are synchronized with each other and/or with the major economies that they are supposed to be linked with, namely the US, Germany and Russia. We find that there are differences across the CEE countries themselves and that there is no common CEE business cycle. Comparing the individual CEE business cycles with those of the dominant economies, we find that Hungary and Poland are related to the US business cycle, reflecting the fact that they are more integrated with the global economy, whereas Slovakia is closer to the Russian cycle. Finally, splitting the sample into the late 1990s and 2000s due to the transition nature of these economies in the former period shows that the influence of Russia on the CEE economies has declined over time. However, in contrast to the expectations that CEE countries are likely to be affected by Germany in the second half of the sample due to EU negotiations followed by full membership, among the CEE countries only the business cycle of Slovakia is synchronized with that of Germany. On the other hand the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland are synchronized with the US business cycle, showing that globalization has decreased the importance of distance.
FogFlow: Easy Programming of IoT Services Over Cloud and Edges for Smart Cities

Smart city infrastructure is forming a large scale Internet of Things (IoT) system with widely deployed IoT devices, such as sensors and actuators that generate a huge volume of data. Given this large scale and geo-distributed nature of such IoT systems, fog computing has been considered as an affordable and sustainable computing paradigm to enable smart city IoT services. However, it is still a major challenge for developers to program their services to leverage benefits of fog computing. Developers have to figure out many details, such as how to dynamically configure and manage data processing tasks over cloud and edges and how to optimize task allocation for minimal latency and bandwidth consumption. In addition, most of the existing fog computing frameworks either lack service programming models or define a programming model only based on their own private data model and interfaces; therefore, as a smart city platform, they are quite limited in terms of openness and interoperability. To tackle these problems, we propose a standard-based approach to design and implement a new fog computing-based framework, namely FogFlow, for IoT smart city platforms. FogFlow’s programming model allows IoT service developers to program elastic IoT services easily over cloud and edges. Moreover, it supports standard interfaces to share and reuse contextual data across services. To showcase how smart city use cases can be realized with FogFlow, we describe three use cases and implement an example application for anomaly detection of energy consumption in smart cities. We also analyze FogFlow’s performance based on microbenchmarking results for message propagation latency, throughput, and scalability.
Harnessing the power of regulatory T‐cells to control autoimmune diabetes: overview and perspective

Type 1 diabetes (T1D) is a T‐cell‐mediated autoimmune disease resulting in islet β‐cell destruction, hypoinsulinaemia and severely altered glucose homeostasis. Although the mechanisms that initiate T1D still remain elusive, a breakdown of immune tolerance between effector T‐cells (Teff) and regulatory T‐cells (Treg) is considered to be the crucial component leading to autoimmunity. As such, strategies have been developed to boost the number and/or function of Treg in the hope of specifically hampering the pathogenic Teff activity. In this review, we will summarize the current understanding of biomarkers and functions of both forkhead box protein 3 (FoxP3)+ Treg and type 1 regulatory T (Tr1) cells in health and in T1D, examine the outcome of experimental therapies in both animal models and humans via manipulation of Treg responses and also provide an outlook on the potential of Treg‐based immunotherapies in the prevention and treatment of this disease. Discussed immunotherapies include adoptive transfer of ex‐vivo expanded FoxP3+ Treg, manipulation of Treg cells via the interleukin (IL)‐2/IL‐2R pathway and induction of Treg by tolerogenic peptides, tolerogenic dendritic cells or altered gut microbiota.
Formal Analysis of Security Models for Mobile Devices, Virtualization Platforms, and Domain Name Systems

In this work we investigate the security of security-critical applications, i.e. applications in which a failure may produce consequences that are unacceptable. We consider three areas: mobile devices, virtualization platforms, and domain name systems. The Java Micro Edition platform denes the Mobile Information Device Prole (MIDP) to facilitate the development of applications for mobile devices, like cell phones and PDAs. We rst study and compare formally several variants of the security model specied by MIDP to access sensitive resources of a mobile device. Hypervisors allow multiple guest operating systems to run on shared hardware, and oer a compelling means of improving the security and the exibility of software systems. In this work we present a formalization of an idealized model of a hypervisor. We establish (formally) that the hypervisor ensures strong isolation properties between the dierent operating systems, and guarantees that requests from guest operating systems are eventually attended. We show also that virtualized platforms are transparent, i.e. a guest operating system cannot distinguish whether it executes alone or together with other guest operating systems on the platform. The Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is a suite of specications that provides origin authentication and integrity assurance services for DNS data. We nally introduce a minimalistic specication of a DNSSEC model which provides the grounds needed to formally state and verify security properties concerning the chain of trust of the DNSSEC tree. We develop all our formalizations in the Calculus of Inductive Constructions |formal language that combines a higher-order logic and a richly-typed functional programming language| using the Coq proof assistant.
The association between burning mouth syndrome and sleep disturbance: A case-control multicentre study.

OBJECTIVES To investigate the quality of sleep and the psychological profiles of a large cohort of Italian patients with burning mouth syndrome (BMS) and to clarify the relationships between these variables and pain. METHODS In this case-control study, 200 patients with BMS vs an equal number of age- and sex-matched healthy controls, recruited in 10 universities, were enrolled. The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS), Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D), Hamilton Rating Scale for Anxiety (HAM-A), Numeric Pain Intensity Scale (NRS) and Total Pain Rating Index (T-PRI) were administered. Descriptive statistics, including the Mann-Whitney U test and hierarchical multiple linear regression analysis, were used. RESULTS Poor sleep quality (PSQI ≥ 5) was present in 78.8% (160) patients with BMS. BMS patients had statistically higher scores in all items of the PSQI and ESS than the healthy controls (p < .001). A depressed mood and anxiety correlated positively with sleep disturbance. The Pearson correlations were 0.570 for the PSQI vs HAM-D (p < .001) and 0.549 for the PSQI vs HAM-A (p < .001). Pain intensity (NRS) poorly correlated to sleep quality; the Pearson correlation was 0.162 for the PSQI vs NRS (p = .021). CONCLUSIONS The BMS patients showed a poor sleep quality, anxiety and depression, as compared with the controls, highlighting the relationships between oral burning, sleep and mood.
Identifying dispersed epigenomic domains from ChIP-Seq data

Motivation: Post-translational modifications to histones have several well known associations with regulation of gene expression. While some modifications appear concentrated narrowly, covering promoters or enhancers, others are dispersed as epigenomic domains. These domains mark contiguous regions sharing an epigenomic property, such as actively transcribed or poised genes, or heterochromatically silenced regions. While high-throughput methods like ChIP-Seq have led to a flood of high-quality data about these epigenomic domains, there remain important analysis problems that are not adequately solved by current analysis tools. Results: We present the RSEG method for identifying epigenomic domains from ChIP-Seq data for histone modifications. In contrast with other methods emphasizing the locations of ‘peaks’ in read density profiles, our method identifies the boundaries of domains. RSEG is also able to incorporate a control sample and find genomic regions with differential histone modifications between two samples. Availability: RSEG, including source code and documentation, is freely available at http://smithlab.cmb. usc.edu/histone/rseg/. Contact: anrewds@usc.edu Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Urban park soil microbiomes are a rich reservoir of natural product biosynthetic diversity

Significance Bacterial natural products (NPs) have served as inspiration for many therapeutics. The hunt for new bioactive NPs has led to a global search for natural ecosystems from which bacteria can be cultured. Here, we used NP-focused metagenome sequencing to explore biosynthetic diversity in urban park soil of New York City. Our analyses reveal rich biosynthetic diversity in these microbiomes and predict that gene clusters encoding many clinically approved NPs families discovered using bacteria cultured from around the world are actually present in the soil microbiomes of a single city. Contrary to traditional NP discovery efforts that involve shallow explorations of diverse environments, our data suggest that a deeper exploration of local microbiomes may prove equally, if not, more productive. Numerous therapeutically relevant small molecules have been identified from the screening of natural products (NPs) produced by environmental bacteria. These discovery efforts have principally focused on culturing bacteria from natural environments rich in biodiversity. We sought to assess the biosynthetic capacity of urban soil environments using a phylogenetic analysis of conserved NP biosynthetic genes amplified directly from DNA isolated from New York City park soils. By sequencing genes involved in the biosynthesis of nonribosomal peptides and polyketides, we found that urban park soil microbiomes are both rich in biosynthetic diversity and distinct from nonurban samples in their biosynthetic gene composition. A comparison of sequences derived from New York City parks to genes involved in the biosynthesis of biomedically important NPs produced by bacteria originally collected from natural environments around the world suggests that bacteria producing these same families of clinically important antibiotics, antifungals, and anticancer agents are actually present in the soils of New York City. The identification of new bacterial NPs often centers on the systematic exploration of bacteria present in natural environments. Here, we find that the soil microbiomes found in large cities likely hold similar promise as rich unexplored sources of clinically relevant NPs.
Commitment, Forgiveness, and Relationship Self-Regulation: An Actor-Partner Interdependence Model

Commitment, Forgiveness, and Relationship Self-Regulation: An Actor-Partner Interdependence Model Heather M. Smith School of Family Life, BYU Master of Science Relationship self-regulation (RSR) refers to the “work”, or effort and strategies, that partners exert over time to maintain the health of their romantic relationships. Most research focuses on self-reports of RSR, however, several studies suggest that partner perceptions are more influential in relationship appraisal. In addition, most RSR research has focused not on partners’ attitudes and virtues like commitment, but instead on personality traits, emotional health, and communication skills. In this study, we examine the relationship between partners’ levels of commitment and forgiveness within their relationships, and how they perceive their partner’s use of RSR behaviors. Using paired data from 679 cohabiting and married couples who took the RELATE questionnaire, we found that males’ and females’ self-reports of commitment and forgiveness were both positively associated with higher perceptions of partner RSR. Likewise, we found that, for females, higher self-reports of commitment and forgiveness were positively correlated with higher male perceptions of her RSR, and male forgiveness was positively correlated with female perceptions of his RSR. The variables of commitment and forgiveness explained an average of 44% of the variance in perceptions of partner RSR for both genders. Implications for future research and clinicians are discussed.
Allocating dissipation across a molecular machine cycle to maximize flux

Significance Cells use molecular machines to complete many tasks. These machines consume free energy to operate, typically by converting a high-concentration chemical into a low-concentration one. Each step of a machine’s operating cycle consumes some free energy, and different allocations of the available free energy among the machine steps lead to different machine speeds. We show that the speed-maximizing allocation is not even, instead depending on the timescales of the various steps. Models fit to experimental molecular machine dynamics often find similarly uneven free energy use. Deviations from the optimal allocation can drastically slow machine operation, suggesting a significant functional advantage to machines with dissipation allocation that is tuned to improve speed. Biomolecular machines consume free energy to break symmetry and make directed progress. Nonequilibrium ATP concentrations are the typical free energy source, with one cycle of a molecular machine consuming a certain number of ATP, providing a fixed free energy budget. Since evolution is expected to favor rapid-turnover machines that operate efficiently, we investigate how this free energy budget can be allocated to maximize flux. Unconstrained optimization eliminates intermediate metastable states, indicating that flux is enhanced in molecular machines with fewer states. When maintaining a set number of states, we show that—in contrast to previous findings—the flux-maximizing allocation of dissipation is not even. This result is consistent with the coexistence of both “irreversible” and reversible transitions in molecular machine models that successfully describe experimental data, which suggests that, in evolved machines, different transitions differ significantly in their dissipation.
Web-Based Interventions Alone or Supplemented with Peer-Led Support or Professional Email Counseling for Weight Loss and Weight Maintenance in Women from Rural Communities: Results of a Clinical Trial

Objective. This trial compared the effectiveness of a web-based only (WO) intervention with web-based supplemented by peer-led discussion (WD) or professional email counseling (WE) across 3 phases to achieve weight loss and weight maintenance in women from underserved rural communities. Methods. 301 women (BMI of 28–45 kg/m2) randomly assigned to groups participated in guided weight loss (baseline to 6 months), guided weight loss and maintenance (6 to 18 months), and self-managed weight maintenance (18 to 30 months). Results. Retention was 88.7%, 76.5%, and 71.8% at 6, 18, and 30 months, respectively. Intent-to-treat analyses demonstrated no group differences in change in weight within any phases. At 6 months, observed mean (SD) weight loss was 5.1 (6.0) kg in WO, 4.1 (5.6) kg in WD, and 6.0 (6.3) kg in WE, with 42%, 38%, and 51%, respectively, meeting ≥ 5% weight loss. These proportions dropped by a third after phase 2 with no further change during phase 3. Conclusion. Web-based interventions assisted women from rural communities in achieving 6-month weight loss, with weight regain by half at 30 months. No group differences were potentially due to the robust nature of the web-based intervention. Trial Registration. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01307644.
HIV with Hepatitis B Co-Infection: Optimizing Treatment in Resource-Limited Settings

Hepatitis B infection is a major cause of morbidity and mortality in HIV-infected patients. While the majority of persons infected with hepatitis B are found in the developing world and were infected at birth or in early childhood, most studies in HIV and HBV co-infection have been conducted in developed countries, where the main modes of transmission are either intravenous drug use or sexual transmission. The few studies that have been conducted in resource-limited settings have very few patients, and the laboratory parameters for proper evaluation of these studies are frequently incomplete. The applicability of United States and European guidelines for HBV-co-infected HIV patients in resource-limited settings (RLS) is therefore uncertain, and may be constrained by financial issues especially with regard to appropriate initiation of antiretroviral treatment. This review discusses the few studies conducted in RLS, and proposes guidelines for treatment based on the best available evidence from these studies. In addition, the effect of co-infection on disease progression, including the role of HBV genotypes and HIV subtypes and the use of hepatitis B vaccination in HIV infection is reviewed.
CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT OF A MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISE : A CASE STUDY OF THAILAND AND VIETNAM

Managing effectively across national and cultural boundaries is a key success factor in international business in the context of globalization. The purpose of this empirical research is to compare the outcomes of the cross-cultural management of a renowned multinational organization from a Western region that has succeeded in its operations both in Thailand and Vietnam, as well as to examine the relationship between organizational antecedent factors and the outcomes of cross-cultural management. Survey questionnaire data were collected from April to September 2011 from the company’s employees, who were voluntary full-time staff members across divisions in each country. The survey included measures of job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employee engagement and their antecedents. The results indicated that the level of employee engagement of employees in Vietnam was statistically higher than that of employees in Thailand, whereas there was a similar level of job satisfaction and organizational commitment of the company’s employees in both subsidiaries. Furthermore, the regression analysis revealed that training and development, employee participation, job security, and collectivist culture predicted employee engagement. As a result, this study addresses managers that have to pay attention to build employee engagement in foreign operations. When employees are actively engaged in their organizations, they will be dedicated to their jobs and enjoy working in a team environment, and this will eventually reward good business performance.
Potential deaths averted in USA by replacing cigarettes with e-cigarettes

Introduction US tobacco control policies to reduce cigarette use have been effective, but their impact has been relatively slow. This study considers a strategy of switching cigarette smokers to e-cigarette use (‘vaping’) in the USA to accelerate tobacco control progress. Methods A Status Quo Scenario, developed to project smoking rates and health outcomes in the absence of vaping, is compared with Substitution models, whereby cigarette use is largely replaced by vaping over a 10-year period. We test an Optimistic and a Pessimistic Scenario, differing in terms of the relative harms of e-cigarettes compared with cigarettes and the impact on overall initiation, cessation and switching. Projected mortality outcomes by age and sex under the Status Quo and E-Cigarette Substitution Scenarios are compared from 2016 to 2100 to determine public health impacts. Findings Compared with the Status Quo, replacement of cigarette by e-cigarette use over a 10-year period yields 6.6 million fewer premature deaths with 86.7 million fewer life years lost in the Optimistic Scenario. Under the Pessimistic Scenario, 1.6 million premature deaths are averted with 20.8 million fewer life years lost. The largest gains are among younger cohorts, with a 0.5 gain in average life expectancy projected for the age 15 years cohort in 2016. Conclusions The tobacco control community has been divided regarding the role of e-cigarettes in tobacco control. Our projections show that a strategy of replacing cigarette smoking with vaping would yield substantial life year gains, even under pessimistic assumptions regarding cessation, initiation and relative harm.
Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Techniques for the Physics Based Simulation of Fluids and Solids

Graphics research on Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) has produced fantastic visual results that are unique across the board of research communities concerned with SPH simulations. Generally, the SPH formalism serves as a spatial discretization technique, commonly used for the numerical simulation of continuum mechanical problems such as the simulation of fluids, highly viscous materials, and deformable solids. Recent advances in the field have made it possible to efficiently simulate massive scenes with highly complex boundary geometries on a single PC [Com16b, Com16a]. Moreover, novel techniques allow to robustly handle interactions among various materials [Com18,Com17]. As of today, graphics-inspired pressure solvers, neighborhood search algorithms, boundary formulations, and other contributions often serve as core components in commercial software for animation purposes [Nex17] as well as in computer-aided engineering software [FIF16]. This tutorial covers various aspects of SPH simulations. Governing equations for mechanical phenomena and their SPH discretizations are discussed. Concepts and implementations of core components such as neighborhood search algorithms, pressure solvers, and boundary handling techniques are presented. Implementation hints for the realization of SPH solvers for fluids, elastic solids, and rigid bodies are given. The tutorial combines the introduction of theoretical concepts with the presentation of actual implementations.
A Measurement Theory of Locality

Locality is a fundamental principle used extensively in program and system optimization. It can be measured in many ways. This paper formalizes the metrics of locality into a measurement theory. The new theory includes the precise definition of locality metrics based on access frequency, reuse time, reuse distance, working set, footprint, and the cache miss ratio. It gives the formal relation between these definitions and the proofs of equivalence or non-equivalence. It provides the theoretical justification for four successful locality models in operating systems, programming languages, and computer architectures which were developed empirically.