Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Normative power Europe reconsidered: beyond the crossroads1

Abstract The idea of being civilian, military, and civilizing at the same time is undoubtedly very seductive to the armies of academics now writing on EU military force. It is tempting to think that the EU can have-its-cake-and-eat-it-too in militarizing its normative power. In contrast, in my reconsideration of normative power Europe I suggest that militarization of the EU need not necessarily lead to the diminution of the EU's normative power, if the process is characterized by critical reflection rather than the pursuit of ‘great power’. However, I will further argue that militarizing processes beyond the crossroads provided by the European Security Strategy are already weakening the normative claims of the EU in a post-11 September world characterized by the drive towards ‘martial potency’ and the growth of a Brussels-based ‘military-industrial simplex’.
METHODS AND AN OVERVIEW OF THE CANADIAN RECOMMENDATIONS

Objective: To provide updated, evidence-based recommendations for health care professionals on lifestyle changes to prevent and control hypertension in otherwise healthy adults (except pregnant women). Options: For people at risk for hypertension, there are a number of lifestyle options that may avert the condition — maintaining a healthy body weight, moderating consumption of alcohol, exercising, reducing sodium intake, altering intake of calcium, magnesium and potassium, and reducing stress. Following these options will maintain or reduce the risk of hypertension. For people who already have hypertension, the options for controlling the condition are lifestyle modification, antihypertensive medications or a combination of these options; with no treatment, these people remain at risk for the complications of hypertension. Outcomes: The health outcomes considered were changes in blood pressure and in morbidity and mortality rates. Because of insufficient evidence, no economic outcomes were considered. Evidence: A MEDLINE search was conducted for the period January 1966 to September 1996 for each of the interventions studied. Reference lists were scanned, experts were polled, and the personal files of the authors were used to identify other studies. All relevant articles were reviewed, classified according to study design and graded according to level of evidence. Values: A high value was placed on the avoidance of cardiovascular morbidity and prema-ture death caused by untreated hypertension. costs: Lifestyle modification by means of weight loss (or maintenance of healthy body exercise and low alcohol consumption will the blood pressure of appropriately selected normotensive and hypertensive people. Sodium and stress the blood pressure of appropriately selected hypertensive patients. The side effects of these therapies are the
OF FINANCIAL AND QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS June 1973 MORE ON MULTIDIMENSIONAL PORTFOLIO ANALYSIS

I. In response to the suggestions of the editorial and reviewing staff of this journal, some additional explanation and extensions of the model presented in an earlier paper [4] seem desirable at this time. In that paper the investor in securities was assumed to have a utility function that depended on the first n moments of the statistical distribution of returns rather than just on the mean and variance. When the borrowing-lending possibility was introduced as in the Sharpe-Lintner model, the investor's perceived risk premium could be expressed in the higher moments' dimensions as well as in terms of the variance. In the original article it was not made clear that the model presented was a normative model for an individual investor, and that different investors would have different perceived risk premiums. The lack of agreement by investors about the equilibrium combination of risky securities is shown by graphical methods later in this paper. , In the higher dimensions such results of the Capital Market Line model as the separation theorem do not hold, and empirical judgments on the efficacy of investment program managers such as mutual funds must be approached with more caution than in the usual two-parameter case. In exploring the statistical characteristics of the interaction of cross-moment term in the third moment around the mean (E(v.v ) in the earlier i m notations), it was found that the third moment around the mean may lack convexity. In constructing a portfolio mix of risky securities, a unique optimum could not be generally assured. Therefore at the conclusion of this paper the model is reconstructed in terms of moments around zero, where convexity is assured with relatively minor assumptions.
Universal Banks and Stock Market Reaction: Some Evidence from Major Announcements

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interface between the banking and insurance sectors. Using capital market data, the paper aims to discover any significant equity returns around the announcement date of these bank-insurance interfaces. Design/methodology/approach - The analysis employs an event study methodology to evaluate the equity performance of these institutions. The empirical findings are based on well-known financial intermediaries taken from an international sample. Findings - The magnitude and sign of equity returns appear to differ among the cases examined. Some firms exhibit considerable abnormal returns, while others remain passive to any corporate restructuring revelation, or even undrape stock market losses. In many cases, the latter is associated with the overall economic environment, and/or with investments that are not compatible with the general banking philosophy of “fast growth within short-term horizons. ” Based on equity returns, the bank-insurance interface seems to be the most preferable business restructuring; while insurance divestments and horizontal mergers, among financial intermediaries, do not perform as profitably as expected. Originality/value - The paper will be of value to those interested in capital markets with emphasis on universal banking and insurance. It is suitable for academics as well as practitioners.
Examining the Chinese Approach to Crisis Management: Cover-Ups, Saving Face, and Taking the “Upper Level Line”

In 2008, the Sanlu Group, a former giant in the Chinese dairy industry and a quintessential Chinese organization, was confronted with the melamine-contaminated milk crisis. Its products were blamed for causing at least six babies' deaths and damaging the kidneys of about 294,000 babies. Sanlu was criticized for its crisis handling, which resulted in its collapse several months later. Using the contingency theory of strategic conflict management and Coombs' typology of crisis communication strategies, this study explored Sanlu's crisis management as a mirror to understanding the Chinese approach to crisis management. Findings showed that influenced by political, social, and cultural factors, Sanlu adopted an accommodative stance toward its local government while maintaining an advocacy stance toward the media and consumers. Government relationships, cover-up, and denial were used. Findings also suggested that the Chinese approach to crisis management remains mired in values that differ from best practices of effective crisis management.
Intrapreneurship in Large Firms and SMEs: A Comparative Study

Intrapreneurship research has moved to focusing on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), looking at the differences between large companies and SMEs, considering factors such as the emergence and development of intrapreneurship, the structural and relationship-related contexts, managerial relationships, co-workers, incentives and rewards, job satisfaction, and strategic processes. This analysis is drawn from the author's 1992 French doctoral dissertation. A major challenge of large firms is the detection of potential intrapreneurs, in SMEs they are easily identified; managerial inhibition or cooperation is the issue. In big firms, the intrapreneur-manager dyad may create problems, though the level of anonymity can be an advantage; the success of the intrapreneur-entrepreneur dyad in SMEs depends on a shared confidence and business philosophy. The friendlier and personal environment of the SME tends to preclude anonymity and creates a process concerned with matching and convergence. In both firm types, attractive rewards for intrapreneurs are symbolic or financial recognition, freedom to explore new projects, and availability of capital. In large firms, offering a promotion may be a mistake; a promotion is more appreciated in SMEs, where defining rewards is easier. Large firms draw up strategies to develop intrapreneurs; in SMEs, the intrapreneurs often take the lead and the strategy is reactive. Many current entrepreneurs were once dissatisfied intrapreneurs; the loss of frustrated or misunderstood intrapreneurs is more serious for SMEs, who may start their own firms or join a competitor. Further differences between intrapreneurs in SMEs and large firms are summarized. (TNM)
EU policy on GMOs : a quick scan of the economic consequences

The cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops has seen a rapid growth since 1996, especially in North and South America. In the European Union (EU) the cultivation of GM crops is still rather limited. In contrast, the use of GM crops in the EU is rapidly increasing. Over the last years there have been increasing difficulties with the EU import of (GM) food and feedstuffs from major exporting countries. This is caused by the asynchronous EU approval of GM crops, coupled with the operation of a zero tolerance threshold for the presence of GMOs not yet approved in the EU. This policy of the EU has already led to difficulties with the import of raw materials from exporting countries where more GMOs have already been approved or are under development. This report argues that it is likely that in the near future problems will become more urgent. This could negatively affect the EU supply of raw materials and economic position of the European agricultural and food sector.
Electoral Cycles And Local Government Debt Management

Abstract The literature provides both theories and empirical assessments that link national electoral cycles and opportunistic incumbents' behaviour. However, at the subnational level the literature is scarce. Using a panel of 238 Spanish municipalities over the period 1992–2005, this paper investigates for the first time in Spain whether electoral events contribute to shape municipal debt policies. We show that the electoral cycle influences the municipal debt per capita. Furthermore, both weak (no-majority) and wealthier municipal governments have higher levels of debt per capita. Finally, our data show that the 2001 Spanish Budgetary Stability Law (stemming from the European Stability and Growth Pact) appears to have reduced the electoral effect on municipal debt per capita.
The influence of organizational respect on emotional exhaustion in the human services

The influence of organizational respect on emotional exhaustion was examined in a longitudinal field study in the human services industry. Of a sample of 108 Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) working in a long-term health care facility for the elderly, those CNAs who reported greater organizational respect at Time 1 experienced less emotional exhaustion 16 months later (Time 2). Through a longitudinal field experiment, we also examined the outcomes of an organizational change intended to increase organizational respect for the facility's employees. As predicted, CNAs on units undergoing organizational change experienced a decrease in emotional exhaustion from Time 1 to Time 2 compared to CNAs on the control units, and this effect was partially mediated by the degree of organizational respect reported by the employees. CNA's satisfaction with the change was also related to a decrease in emotional exhaustion, and this effect was completely mediated by the degree of reported organizational respect.
LEARNING OUTCOMES AND INSTRUCTIONAL DELIVERY METHOD IN PROFESSIONAL AND BUSINESS RELATED COURSES: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY CONTROLLING FOR COURSE AND INSTRUCTOR DIFFERENCES

In this study we compare the student performance associated with instructional delivery methods, including pure on-line, VOIP, hybrid, and traditional classroom environments using a large sample of 2,077 students enrolled in business, criminal justice, and public administration courses. We also address the criticisms of prior empirical studies by using an explicit measure of course learning outcomes and controlling for both course and instructor differences. The results indicate that with the possible exception of hybrid classes there are generally no significant differences in student attainment of course learning outcomes associated with the different delivery methods, even when controlling for course and instructor. In addition, we examine the correlation between course grades, student perceptions of learning, and our objective measure of course learning outcome attainment.
The Economic Impact of Agricultural Extension: A Review

The history of economic development shows that few countries have achieved sustained economic growth without first, or simultaneously, developing their agricultural sector. ' In most developing countries, agriculture is the most important economic activity providing income, employment, and foreign exchange. Without an efficient agricultural sector, a country is severely constrained in its ability to feed itself or import foreign products for domestic consumption and development. Rapid technological advances in agriculture have occurred since World War II. These advances have induced great changes in agricultural production and also highlighted the importance of a rapid and efficient transfer of advanced knowledge to the farmer. When farmers become aware of the availability of new technology, they may have inaccurate perceptions of the related costs and benefits, as information availability may be limited. As farmers' decisions are based on their perceptions, their resource allocation and technology choice will deviate from the social optimum if perceptions do not coincide with the correct attributes of the technology. Both society and the farmers as individuals would gain from improved information, and theoretically there should exist a market for information. However, information on improved agricultural technology is often a public good because the provider of the information cannot exclude other potential users from free access to information provided to one user, and the value of the information is not directly affected by the number of users. While many instances of market activities in various aspects of agricultural information are observed (e.g., specialized information on pest man
Face liveness detection based on enhanced local binary patterns

For face recognition systems, impostors can obtain legal identity authentication by presenting the printed images, the downloaded images or candid videos to the sensor. In this paper, an enhanced face local binary feature (ELBP) of a face map is extracted as a classification feature to identify whether the face map is a real face or a fake face. Compared with the dynamic or static methods proposed in the previous literature, the proposed method is convenient and effective. We achieved over 95% correct recognition rate on NUAA datasets. Through comprehensive analysis and comparison with other static-based algorithms such as M-LBP or LTP, the proposed algorithm can achieve better performances.
Military Spending and Democratisation

Abstract There is considerable evidence that authoritarian regimes have tended to spend more on the military than democracies. However, the direction of causality of this relationship has not been seriously investigated. The literature tends to assume that causality runs from regime type to military expenditure, but one might also expect military expenditure to influence regime type: history yields numerous examples of countries whose democratisation process was reversed by a powerful military unwilling to give up its privileged position in society. Successful democratisation, amongst other things, requires the reform of civil-military relations. In this paper, I build on the empirical literature on democratic transitions and examine whether lowering military expenditure in a democratising country increases the chances of successful democracy consolidation. I use a number of techniques, including two-way fixed effects model and a panel VAR to examine the linkages and pattern of Granger causality between measures of regime type, GDP and military expenditures.
The dental office visit as a potential opportunity for diabetes screening: an analysis using NHANES 2003-2004 data.

OBJECTIVES The bidirectional relationship between periodontitis and diabetes suggests that the dental visit may offer a largely untapped opportunity to screen for undiagnosed diabetes. To better examine this potential opportunity, data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2003-2004 were used to determine if a larger proportion of patients with periodontal disease as compared with those without periodontitis would be recommended for screening according to American Diabetes Association (ADA) guidelines. The data were also used to determine whether at-risk individuals with periodontitis visited a dental professional recently, so that they could avail themselves of this opportunity for screening, if offered. METHODS Data to perform these analyses were collected from 2,923 subjects aged 20 and older who reported that they were never told that they had diabetes, had a periodontal examination, and had sufficient data to compute body mass index. Descriptive statistics, t-tests, and chi-square analyses that compared those with and without periodontitis were extrapolated to the US population. RESULTS A total of 62.9 percent of those without periodontitis and 93.4 percent of those with periodontal disease met ADA guidelines for diabetes screening. Of those at-risk with periodontal disease, 33.9 percent had seen a dentist in the past 6 months, 50 percent in the past year, and 60.4 percent in the past 2 years. CONCLUSIONS As almost all individuals with periodontitis would have been recommended for diabetes screening, and many at-risk persons with periodontal disease recently visited a dentist, our data suggest that the dental visit provides an important potential venue for this screening.
Deep Recurrent Neural Networks for Emotion Recognition in Speech

Emotion recognition in speech (ERS) is a hot research topic in the ﬁeld of aﬀective computing. Giving computers the ability to know the emotions from a subject is an important aspect in naturalistic human-computer interaction or user proﬁling. Recent methods to tackle the complex task of ERS employ deep neural networks. As human emotion is an aﬀective state, which changes over time, the neural network has the task of sequence-to-sequence modelling. This is usually implemented as a recurrent neural network (RNN), such as a long short-term memory RNN. Even though in recent work, the audio signal is directly fed into the network, the most common approach is to feed the RNN with acoustic low-level features, describing prosodic, spectral, or cepstral characteristics of the speech. Instead of using the raw low-level features, they can also be encoded in terms of the bag-of-audio-words approach, where the feature vectors are quantised using a previously learnt codebook of templates and the occurrence of each template is encoded in a sparse histogram vector. In this contribution, we propose a deep learning framework for ERS and compare diﬀerent feature representations. Results are presented using a state-of-the-art benchmark database from the domain of aﬀective computing.
Vegetation response to extreme climate events on the Mongolian Plateau from 2000 to 2010

Climate change has led to more frequent extreme winters (aka, dzud) and summer droughts on the Mongolian Plateau during the last decade. Among these events, the 2000–2002 combined summer drought–dzud and 2010 dzud were the most severe on vegetation. We examined the vegetation response to these extremes through the past decade across the Mongolian Plateau as compared to decadal means. We first assessed the severity and extent of drought using the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) precipitation data and the Palmer drought severity index (PDSI). We then examined the effects of drought by mapping anomalies in vegetation indices (EVI, EVI2) and land surface temperature derived from MODIS and AVHRR for the period of 2000–2010. We found that the standardized anomalies of vegetation indices exhibited positively skewed frequency distributions in dry years, which were more common for the desert biome than for grasslands. For the desert biome, the dry years (2000–2001, 2005 and 2009) were characterized by negative anomalies with peak values between −1.5 and −0.5 and were statistically different (P < 0.001) from relatively wet years (2003, 2004 and 2007). Conversely, the frequency distributions of the dry years were not statistically different (p < 0.001) from those of the relatively wet years for the grassland biome, showing that they were less responsive to drought and more resilient than the desert biome. We found that the desert biome is more vulnerable to drought than the grassland biome. Spatially averaged EVI was strongly correlated with the proportion of land area affected by drought (PDSI <− 1) in Inner Mongolia (IM) and Outer Mongolia (OM), showing that droughts substantially reduced vegetation activity. The correlation was stronger for the desert biome (R2 = 65 and 60, p < 0.05) than for the IM grassland biome (R2 = 53, p < 0.05). Our results showed significant differences in the responses to extreme climatic events (summer drought and dzud) between the desert and grassland biomes on the Plateau.