Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
THE PROPAGATION OF INDUSTRIAL BUSINESS CYCLES

This paper examines the evolution of the distribution of industry-specific business cycle linkages, which are modeled through a multivariate Markov-switching model and estimated by Gibbs sampling. Using nonparametric density estimation approaches, we find that the number and location of modes in the distribution of industrial dissimilarities change over the business cycle. There is a relatively stable trimodal pattern during expansionary and recessionary phases characterized by highly, moderately, and lowly synchronized industries. However, during phase changes, the density mass spreads from moderately synchronized industries to lowly synchronized industries. This agrees with a sequential transmission of the industrial business cycle dynamics.
Beyond Testing: Empirical Models of Insurance Markets

We describe recent advances in the empirical analysis of insurance markets. This new research proposes ways to estimate individual demand for insurance and the relationship between prices and insurer costs in the presence of adverse and advantageous selection. We discuss how these models permit the measurement of welfare distortions arising from asymmetric information and the welfare consequences of potential government policy responses. We also discuss some challenges in modeling imperfect competition between insurers and outline a series of open research questions.
The Effects of Lottery Prizes on Winners and Their Neighbors: Evidence from the Dutch Postcode Lottery

Each week, the Dutch Postcode Lottery (PCL) randomly selects a postal code, and distributes cash and a new BMW to lottery participants in that code. We study the effects of these shocks on lottery winners and their neighbors. Consistent with the life-cycle hypothesis, the effects on winners’ consumption are largely confined to cars and other durables. Consistent with the theory of in-kind transfers, the vast majority of BMW winners liquidate their BMWs. We do, however, detect substantial social effects of lottery winnings: PCL nonparticipants who live next door to winners have significantly higher levels of car consumption than other nonparticipants.
Social persuasion to develop rapport in high-stakes interviews: qualitative analyses of Asian-Pacific practices

Motivating cooperation in official police interviews is a central professional challenge across jurisdictions and cultures. Rapport-building is regarded as a critical antecedent of interviewee cooperation, but relatively little is known about how rapport is developed in practice. A total of 123 experienced intelligence and investigative interviewers from five Asian-Pacific jurisdictions (Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea and Sri Lanka) participated in in-depth interviews (mean 68 min) about rapport-building techniques used with high-value interviewees. The majority of participants had more than 10 years' experience and 63% had conducted between 100 and 500 interviews. Responses were recorded, transcribed and de-identified for systematic deductive analysis according to the principles of persuasion outlined by Cialdini, to assess the nature and extent of forms of social influence strategies applied. Reported rapport-development techniques were classifiable as one or more of these six principles of persuasion: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity. Results revealed that liking and reciprocity were the principles that encompassed the most ubiquitously and frequently reported rapport-development strategies across jurisdictions. Liking was established through similarity and humour, although at times dissimilarity was effective. Few practitioners simulated liking; the majority were sincere. Techniques encompassed by the principles of authority, commitment-consistency and social proof were culture-bound and more diverse. Results confirmed the generalisability of social influence theory to the policing context across diverse legal systems and cultures. By applying psychological theory to advance understanding of rapport-building, best practices and policies were identified in a field where few standards exist. Notwithstanding the limitations of self-reports, strong practitioner support emerged for the effectiveness of noncoercive social persuasion strategies in high-stakes police interviews.
Enteropathogenic and Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli Virulence Gene Regulation

Enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) and enterohemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) cause significant morbidity and mortality worldwide (18, 60, 63). Though these E. coli pathotypes are genetically related, many features of their epidemiology, their pathogenesis, and the niches they occupy within the human host are unique. EPEC causes profuse watery diarrhea, primarily in children under the age of 2 years, and mostly affects individuals residing in developing countries. In contrast, adults and children infected by EHEC bacteria can suffer from either bloody or nonbloody diarrhea, and in a small percentage of cases a life-threatening complication known as hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) occurs. Many patients with HUS experience long-term renal damage, and they often require dialysis or kidney transplantation. EHEC produces Shiga toxins (Stx), which can cause damage to renal endothelial cells, resulting in HUS, while EPEC bacteria do not possess stx (72). EHEC disease appears in primarily industrialized nations yet causes fewer disease outbreaks in developing countries. This observation has been anecdotally attributed to immunological cross-protection from the related EPEC bacteria prevalent in the less developed regions of the world. There are two additional important differences that distin
Wearable sensor based multimodal human activity recognition exploiting the diversity of classifier ensemble

Effectively utilizing multimodal information (e.g., heart rate and acceleration) is a promising way to achieve wearable sensor based human activity recognition (HAR). In this paper, an activity recognition approach MARCEL (Multimodal Activity Recognition with Classifier Ensemble) is proposed, which exploits the diversity of base classifiers to construct a good ensemble for multimodal HAR, and the diversity measure is obtained from both labeled and unlabeled data. MARCEL uses neural network (NN) as base classifiers to construct the HAR model, and the diversity of classifier ensemble is embedded in the error function of the model. In each iteration, the error of the model is decomposed and back-propagated to base classifiers. To ensure the overall accuracy of the model, the weights of base classifiers are learnt in the classifier fusion process with sparse group lasso. Extensive experiments show that MARCEL is able to yield a competitive HAR performance, and has its superiority on exploiting multimodal signals.
Sporting knowledge and the problem of knowing how

In the Concept of Mind from 1949 Gilbert Ryle (1949/1963) distinguished between knowing how and knowing that. What was Ryle’s basic idea and how is the discussion going on in philosophy today? How can sport philosophy use the idea of knowing how? My goal in this paper is first to bring Ryle and the post-Rylean discussion to light and then show how phenomenology can give some input to the discussion. The article focuses especially on the two main interpretations of knowing how, intellectualism and anti-intellectualism. In the second part of the article I discuss how views from phenomenology and philosophy of mind can enrich and widen our understanding of what knowing how means in relation to sport practices. It is argued that knowing how is not limited to athletic abilities but includes knowledge of how the environing world operates in relation to athletic action.
Conservative Protestant Congregations and Racial Residential Segregation: Evaluating the Closed Community Thesis in Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Counties

Structural explanations of residential segregation usually focus on the role of discrimination in the real estate and mortgage lending industries in generating blackwhite residential segregation in metropolitan areas. However, these explanations overlook the role of social institutions in integrating or isolating groups in a community. To address this issue, I develop the closed community thesis and argue that the theological and value orientation of white Conservative Protestant congregations undermines the creation of bridging group ties. Drawing on county-level data from the 2000 Census of Population and Housing and the 2000 Churches and Church Congregations data, I test the hypothesis that the number of Conservative Protestant congregations per 1,000 non-Hispanic whites is directly associated with levels of residential segregation between non-Hispanic blacks and whites. I find that counties with a large number of Conservative Protestant congregations exhibit higher levels of residential segregation along multiple dimensions. Separate models estimated by metropolitan status and region indicate that the effect of Conservative Protestant congregations is consistent across a variety of localities. I conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of the role of religion in explanations of residential segregation and the analysis of segregation outside of metropolitan areas.
Socio-cognitive conflict and structure of individual and collective performances

A previous experiment (Doise, Mugny and Perret-Clermont, 1975) has shown that pairs of subjects perform better on a spatial representation task than subjects alone. As a conclusion the hypothesis was put forward that conflicts of cognitive centrations, embedded in a social situation, lead children to coordinate their centrations. The present research was planned to verify several predictions following from this general hypothesis. Results show that indeed more progress takes place when children with different cognitive strategies work together than when children with the same strategies do so, and that not only the less advanced but also the more advanced child progresses when they interact with each other.
Predictors of final specialty choice by internal medicine residents

BACKGROUND: Sociodemographic factors and personality attributes predict career decisions in medical students. Determinants of internal medicine residents’ specialty choices have received little attention.OBJECTIVE: To identify factors that predict the clinical practice of residents following their training.DESIGN: Prospective cohort study.PARTICIPANTS: Two hundred and four categorical residents from 2 university-based residency programs.MEASUREMENTS: Sociodemographic and personality inventories performed during residency, and actual careers 4 to 9 years later.RESULTS: International medical school graduates (IMGs) were less likely to practice general medicine than U.S. graduates (33.3% vs 70.6%,P<.001). Residents with higher loan indebtedness more often became generalists (P=.001). A corresponding trend favoring general internal medicine was observed among those who perceived General Internists to have lower potential incomes (69.0% vs 53.3%,P=.08). There was a trend for generalists to have lower scores on scales measuring authoritarianism, negative orientation to psychological problems, and Machiavellianism (0.05<P<.10). In a logistic regression, graduation from a U.S. medical school (odds ratio [OR] 3.02; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.00 to 9.10,P=.049] and perception of low future income (OR 1.65; 95% CI, 1.06 to 2.56,P=.03) predicted entry into general medicine, with trends apparent for higher debt (P=.05) and greater comfort caring for patients with psychological problems (P=.07). CONCLUSION: Recruitment of IMGs may not increase the supply of General Internists. Prospects of lower income, even in the face of large debt, may not discourage residents from becoming generalists. If increasing generalist manpower is a goal, residencies should consider weighing applicants’ personal attributes during the selection process.
Accelerated Hypothesis Generation for Multistructure Data via Preference Analysis

Random hypothesis generation is integral to many robust geometric model fitting techniques. Unfortunately, it is also computationally expensive, especially for higher order geometric models and heavily contaminated data. We propose a fundamentally new approach to accelerate hypothesis sampling by guiding it with information derived from residual sorting. We show that residual sorting innately encodes the probability of two points having arisen from the same model, and is obtained without recourse to domain knowledge (e.g., keypoint matching scores) typically used in previous sampling enhancement methods. More crucially, our approach encourages sampling within coherent structures and thus can very rapidly generate all-inlier minimal subsets that maximize the robust criterion. Sampling within coherent structures also affords a natural ability to handle multistructure data, a condition that is usually detrimental to other methods. The result is a sampling scheme that offers substantial speed-ups on common computer vision tasks such as homography and fundamental matrix estimation. We show on many computer vision data, especially those with multiple structures, that ours is the only method capable of retrieving satisfactory results within realistic time budgets.
Asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA) is tightly correlated with growth in juveniles without correlations to obesity related disorders.

BACKGROUND Asymmetrical dimethylarginine (ADMA) was found to be increased in conditions associated with atherosclerosis and metabolic disorders. We investigated ADMA in obese juveniles with pre-atherosclerotic symptoms and in normal weight juveniles. DESIGN To elucidate correlations of ADMA in juveniles with obesity related disorders such as insulin resistance, low grade inflammation, hypertension and pre-atherosclerosis, we analysed ADMA by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) in 68 obese and 68 healthy, age and gender matched juveniles. RESULTS ADMA levels are slightly, but significantly increased (p=0.04) in obese (0.78+/-0.01 micromol/l), compared to normal weight juveniles (0.74+/-0.01 micromol/l). There are no robust correlations of ADMA with obesity related disorders, like dyslipidemia, hypertension, low-grade inflammation and pre-atherosclerosis. Age, body length and alkaline phosphatase, as markers of growth are correlated with ADMA. Multiple testing revealed that, alkaline phosphatase turned out as highly significant positively correlated with ADMA in normal weight (r=0.45/p<0.0001) and obese (r=0.59/p<0.0001) children. CONCLUSIONS We show here, that ADMA is slightly increased in obese juveniles without any robust correlations to obesity related disorders. ADMA is tightly correlated with alkaline phosphatase as a marker of growth in obese and normal weight, healthy juveniles.
Next-Generation Sequencing of the Chrysanthemum nankingense (Asteraceae) Transcriptome Permits Large-Scale Unigene Assembly and SSR Marker Discovery

Background Simple sequence repeats (SSRs) are ubiquitous in eukaryotic genomes. Chrysanthemum is one of the largest genera in the Asteraceae family. Only few Chrysanthemum expressed sequence tag (EST) sequences have been acquired to date, so the number of available EST-SSR markers is very low. Methodology/Principal Findings Illumina paired-end sequencing technology produced over 53 million sequencing reads from C. nankingense mRNA. The subsequent de novo assembly yielded 70,895 unigenes, of which 45,789 (64.59%) unigenes showed similarity to the sequences in NCBI database. Out of 45,789 sequences, 107 have hits to the Chrysanthemum Nr protein database; 679 and 277 sequences have hits to the database of Helianthus and Lactuca species, respectively. MISA software identified a large number of putative EST-SSRs, allowing 1,788 primer pairs to be designed from the de novo transcriptome sequence and a further 363 from archival EST sequence. Among 100 primer pairs randomly chosen, 81 markers have amplicons and 20 are polymorphic for genotypes analysis in Chrysanthemum. The results showed that most (but not all) of the assays were transferable across species and that they exposed a significant amount of allelic diversity. Conclusions/Significance SSR markers acquired by transcriptome sequencing are potentially useful for marker-assisted breeding and genetic analysis in the genus Chrysanthemum and its related genera.
Assessing Demand for Special Education Faculty in Higher Education: A Pilot Study and a Prototype for a National Registry

Supply and demand for special education faculty in institutions of higher education has been an issue of national concern for more than a decade, following efforts to terminate support programs for doctoral study. One organization, the Higher Education Consortium for Special Education (HECSE), and a limited number of investigators have reached reasonable conclusions: there is a critical need to train additional doctoral-level personnel; the existing problem is, in part, a reflection of the greying of the American professoriate, and, a host of other possible factors such as salary, career choice, and instability in American higher education. This study was initiated to accomplish two objectives. First, we tested the feasibility of our approach as the basis for a national study. Knowing that the universe of special education teacher certification programs is small and the universe of programs that train doctoral level personnel is even smaller, it was believed that such a national effort was feasible. Second, an attempt was made to gather basic demographic information on the universe of faculty in Pennsylvania colleges and universities that offer teacher certification in special education. Knowing that a significant number of those special education faculty might be approaching retirement age, we attempted to learn the retirement plans of those who were age 55 and older. The outcomes of the study are described and the magnitude of the problem in one state, Pennsylvania, is emphasized. Strategies for obtaining more information are suggested, including the establishment of a national registry of doctoral-level special education personnel. Broader issues such as the values, economics, and rewards of careers in higher education are discussed. We conclude with a request for serious consideration of novel solutions to the imminent problem of a potential national shortage of special education faculty.
Is There a "Race" Effect on Concern for Environmental Quality?

Efforts to examine racial differences in environmental attitudes and to explain what may account for them are relatively recent. A conventional wisdom has been that African Americans are not as concerned as are whites about environmental quality issues. Although this view has been challenged by recent studies and by the rising visibility of a grassroots environmental justice movement, much of the recent research has failed to distinguish among the many various types of environmental issues about which African Americans and white Americans may be concerned. The review of the literature suggests that there are sound theoretical reasons to expect that African Americans are less concerned than are whites about some issues (such as nature preservation issues) but that they are more concerned about others (such as pollution). In particular, three theoretical explanations have a bearing on understanding racial differences in environmental concern: (1) hierarchy of needs, (2) cultural differences, and (3) environmental deprivation. The first two predict that African Americans are less concerned about the environment than are whites. The third predicts that African Americans are more concerned than are whites. The authors tested hypotheses about these explanations from a comprehensive survey of residents in the Detroit metropolitan area. They found little evidence to support the theoretical explanations that predict African Americans are less concerned about the environment than are whites. To the contrary, they found few differences between African Americans and whites, even over the nature preservation issues about which African Americans long have been thought to be unconcerned. Where significant differences existed, they were over local environmental problems, with African Americans expressing substantially greater concern than did whites. That racial differences in concern about such issues is a function of the disproportionate burden of environmental disamenities in
Preference Handling in Combinatorial Domains: From AI to Social Choice

In both individual and collective decision making, the space of alternatives from which the agent (or the group of agents) has to choose often has a combinatorial (or multi-attribute ) structure. We give an introduction to preference handling in combinatorial domains in the context of collective decision making, and show that the considerable body of work on preference representation and elicitation that AI researc hers have been working on for several years is particularly relevant. After giving an overview of languages for compact representation of preferences, we discuss problems in voting in combinatorial domains, and then focus on multiagent resource allocation and fair division. These issues belong to a larger field, known as computational social choice, that bri ngs together ideas from AI and social choice theory, to investigate mechanisms for collective decision making from a computational point of view. We conclude by briefly describing some of the other research topics studied in computational social choice.
Using Bourdieu’s concept of doxa to illuminate classed practices in an English fee-paying school

Especially in research on the ‘classed practice’ of educational decision-making, it is striking how the Bourdieuian concepts of habitus and capital have dominated. With a tendency to focus on the middle-classes’ ability to accumulate and deploy cultural capital, less attention has been given to the role of the educational institution and its place in the field. This article draws from interviews and field notes taken from time spent within a fee-paying school in the south of England. I argue that the school and parents are engaged in the production, display and consumption of cultural capital. Through Bourdieu’s notion of ‘doxa’ we gain an understanding of how the school and parents negotiate a very particular classed practice.