Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Business Cycle Implications of Mortgage Spreads

How do aggregate quantities at the business cycle frequency respond to shocks to the spread between residential mortgage rates and government bonds? Using a structural VAR approach, we find that mortgage spread shocks impact the real economy by both economically and statistically significant magnitudes: a 100 basis point decline in the spread causes a peak increase in consumption, residential investment and GDP by 1.6 percent, 6.2 percent and 1.9 percent, respectively. Presumably, these effects are magnified when the policy rate is held fixed, as was the case in the US during the recent implementation of unconventional monetary policy.
PSICOV: precise structural contact prediction using sparse inverse covariance estimation on large multiple sequence alignments

MOTIVATION The accurate prediction of residue-residue contacts, critical for maintaining the native fold of a protein, remains an open problem in the field of structural bioinformatics. Interest in this long-standing problem has increased recently with algorithmic improvements and the rapid growth in the sizes of sequence families. Progress could have major impacts in both structure and function prediction to name but two benefits. Sequence-based contact predictions are usually made by identifying correlated mutations within multiple sequence alignments (MSAs), most commonly through the information-theoretic approach of calculating mutual information between pairs of sites in proteins. These predictions are often inaccurate because the true covariation signal in the MSA is often masked by biases from many ancillary indirect-coupling or phylogenetic effects. Here we present a novel method, PSICOV, which introduces the use of sparse inverse covariance estimation to the problem of protein contact prediction. Our method builds on work which had previously demonstrated corrections for phylogenetic and entropic correlation noise and allows accurate discrimination of direct from indirectly coupled mutation correlations in the MSA. RESULTS PSICOV displays a mean precision substantially better than the best performing normalized mutual information approach and Bayesian networks. For 118 out of 150 targets, the L/5 (i.e. top-L/5 predictions for a protein of length L) precision for long-range contacts (sequence separation >23) was ≥ 0.5, which represents an improvement sufficient to be of significant benefit in protein structure prediction or model quality assessment. AVAILABILITY The PSICOV source code can be downloaded from http://bioinf.cs. ucl.ac. uk/downloads/PSICOV.
An Enhanced Multiple-Feedback Algorithm for RFID MAC Protocols

This paper introduces two new tree-based anti-collision schemes using multiple feedback symbols for uplink tag random access of emerging radio frequency identification (RFID) networks. To this end a uplink(UL) time slot requires an extra time portion called voting field in addition to the packet payload to obtain a slot based estimate for the number of contending tags. As a function of the voting field length we examine MAC efficiency improvements in terms of UL throughput, and compare it with the conventional binary tree based RFID MAC in ISO 18000-6 Type B standard.
Shuidouchi (Fermented Soybean) Fermented in Different Vessels Attenuates HCl/Ethanol-Induced Gastric Mucosal Injury

Shuidouchi (Natto) is a fermented soy product showing in vivo gastric injury preventive effects. The treatment effects of Shuidouchi fermented in different vessels on HCl/ethanol-induced gastric mucosal injury mice through their antioxidant effect was determined. Shuidouchi contained isoflavones (daidzein and genistein), and GVFS (glass vessel fermented Shuidouchi) had the highest isoflavone levels among Shuidouchi samples fermented in different vessels. After treatment with GVFS, the gastric mucosal injury was reduced as compared to the control mice. The gastric secretion volume (0.47 mL) and pH of gastric juice (3.1) of GVFS treated gastric mucosal injury mice were close to those of ranitidine-treated mice and normal mice. Shuidouchi could decrease serum motilin (MTL), gastrin (Gas) level and increase somatostatin (SS), vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) level, and GVFS showed the strongest effects. GVFS showed lower IL-6, IL-12, TNF-α and IFN-γ cytokine levels than other vessel fermented Shuidouchi samples, and these levels were higher than those of ranitidine-treated mice and normal mice. GVFS also had higher superoxide dismutase (SOD), nitric oxide (NO) and malonaldehyde (MDA) contents in gastric tissues than other Shuidouchi samples. Shuidouchi could raise IκB-α, EGF, EGFR, nNOS, eNOS, Mn-SOD, Gu/Zn-SOD, CAT mRNA expressions and reduce NF-κB, COX-2, iNOS expressions as compared to the control mice. GVFS showed the best treatment effects for gastric mucosal injuries, suggesting that glass vessels could be used for Shuidouchi fermentation in functional food manufacturing.
Tradeoff analysis between knowledge assessment approaches

The problem of modeling and assessing an individual's ability level is central to learning environments. Numerous approaches exists to this end. Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) techniques, such as IRT and Bayesian posterior updating, are amongst the early approaches. Bayesian networks and graphs models are more recent approaches to this problem. These frameworks differ on their expressiveness and on their ability to automate model building and calibration with empirical data. We discuss the implication of expressiveness and data-driven properties of different frameworks, and analyze how it affects the applicability and accuracy of the knowledge assessment process. We conjecture that although expressive models such as Bayesian networks provide better cognitive diagnostic ability, their applicability, reliability, and accuracy is strongly affected by the knowledge engineering effort they require. We conclude with a comparative analysis of data driven approaches and provide empirical estimates of their respective performance for two data sets.
Systematics and biogeography of Orconectes, subgenus Trisellescens, in the southeastern United States, a test of morphology-based classification

Diagnosable taxonomic units are fundamental to conservation biology and management of resources and the need for sound science in both fields is more pressing for aquatic ecosystems. Within freshwater crayfishes, the North American genus Orconectes is one of the most diverse in the World. Accurate assessments of species level relationships and species boundaries within the genus have historically been hampered by a low number of variable morphological characters and inadequate sampling from across the ranges of many taxa. We examine a diverse group of southeastern United States stream dwelling Orconectes in the subgenus Trisellescens using 16S, COI mtDNA, and morphology to resolve uncertainties in species boundaries. Our results suggest that strong divergences exist between taxa found above and below the Fall Line in parts of the southeastern United States and the taxonomy for taxa found in that region should remain unchanged. However, using both molecular and morphological datasets we are unable to determine species limits for some taxa found on and below the Fall Line. Analysis of DNA data suggests that historical and ongoing genetic events such as gene introgression may contribute to these uncertainties. For taxa found on and below the Fall Line, we suggest tentative, taxonomic assignments. Finally, we argue for increased sampling of independent molecular datasets and increased sample sizes for all cambarid crayfish biogeographic studies.
Constructivism in Practice: A Comparison and Contrast of Apprenticeship and Constructionist Learning Environments

This article compares and contrasts 2 summer camps. Future Camp 97 is based on assumptions consistent with constructionism and Scientists Apprentice Camp 97 consistent with legitimate peripheral participation. These 2 learning environments create an opportunity to do an empirical, as opposed to a strictly theoretical, comparison of what has been frequently lumped under the term constructivism. The goal of this article is twofold: First, to move the discourse away from comparing constructivist learning environments solely to traditional learning environments. The 2nd goal is to move away from talking of a single constructivist learning environment, and instead to explore the nuances of learning environments based on different theoretical assumptions. Toward these ends, we analyze 2 summer camps in terms of theoretical assumptions, community and groups, participant roles, practices, and other evidence of learning. We conclude with a discussion of similarities and distinctions between these 2 learning environments, highlighting issues of ownership, authenticity, power, and task structure.
Mode of action of lactocin 160, a bacteriocin from vaginal Lactobacillus rhamnosus.

OBJECTIVES: To determine the mechanism of antimicrobial action of lactocin 160, a bacteriocin produced by the healthy vaginal strain of Lactobacillus rhamnosus, using an established model, with Micrococcus luteus ATCC 10420 as a test organism. METHODS: Sensitivity of M. luteus to lactocin 160 was determined by the diffusion assay. Loss of cellular ATP in the lactocin-treated cells was elucidated using a commercially available ATP determination kit (luciferin-luciferase bioluminescence assay). Luminescence intensity as a reflection of ATP quantity was determined using a luminometer. Dissipation of membrane potential (Deltapsi) was studied using fluorophore DiSC3(5) with the fluorescence spectrum sensitive to changes in Deltapsi. RESULTS: Lactocin 160 inhibited growth of M. luteus ATCC 10420 at a concentration of 5 microg/ml. There were no significant changes in the intracellular ATP level of M. luteus upon the addition of 20 microg/ml of lactocin 160. However, the extracellular ATP level increased significantly. This means that the treatment of cells with lactocin 160 resulted in an efflux of ATP from inside the cells. Therefore, a partially purified lactocin 160 preparation (16 microg /ml of the bacteriocin in the sample) killed sensitive cells and dissipated 3.12 +/- 0.36% of Deltapsi. CONCLUSION: Lactocin 160 has a mode of action typical for bacteriocins. It disturbs the cellular membrane (Deltapsi dissipation) and induces ATP efflux, most likely because of the pore formation, which is a common mechanism of action for many bacteriocins.
Role of social support on physical activity in adolescent girls

ii Lay summary . iii Declaration . iv Acknowledgements . v Knowledge Exchange. vii List of Tables. xii List of Figures . xiii List of Appendices . xiv Chapter 1: Introduction . 1 Overview of the research area . 1 Physical activity interventions for adolescent girls . 7 Social support for physical activity in adolescent girls . 8 Epistemological stance of the research. 9 Format of the thesis . 10 Chapter 2: Literature Review . 12 Overview.12 Correlates of physical activity in adolescent girls . 12 Social influences on behaviour . 19 How social support influences physical activity.35 Social support interventions . 47 Gaps in the evidence and thesis aims . 49 Research questions and thesis structure.50 Chapter 3: The role of social support on physical activity behaviour in adolescent girls: A systematic review and meta-analysis . 52 Introduction . 52 Method.55 Results . 60 Discussion . 72 Conclusion . 78 Chapter 4: The effectiveness of Health 4 U on increasing phyiscal activity in adolescent girls: An analysis of social support as a mediator of physical activity behaviour change. 79 Introduction . 79 Method.88 Results . 100 Discussion . 112 Conclusion . 116
Are We Teaching Critical Thinking in the Classroom

The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) requires social work programs to integrate critical thinking into their curriculum (CSWE, 1992). This article reports results from a pilot study designed to assess how well students integrate critical thinking skills after a one-semester generalist practice course. Forty-six students completed a pre- and posttest assessing critical-thinking skills and their attitudes about critical thinking. The results show some minimal changes in critical thinking. It is concluded that critical thinking is a difficult set of skills to develop and it requires more than a single, one-semester course to develop those skills. We suggest changes in teaching methodology. The article concludes with a discussion of issues regarding measurement of critical thinking for future research.
Safety and Multi-employer Worksites in High-risk Industries: An Overview

This paper focuses on safety on multi-employer worksites in high-risk industries. Relevant industries are those that utilize flexible labour arrangements and specialization, such as construction, mining and petroleum production, and that traditionally have been high-risk due to hazards in the physical work environment and the occurrence of unsafe work processes and practices. These industries also share common characteristics in matters of overall work environments, multi-employer worksites (including subcontracting chains), as well as tasks performed by contractors, making it relevant to explore and clarify the situation regarding the safety of the affected groups. A comprehensive review is performed of 43 peer-reviewed research articles published up until early 2015, with a main focus on international studies covering safety issues on multi-employer worksites in construction and industrial work settings such as mining, petroleum production and manufacturing.The results show that previous research has focused on a number of key issues that may be divided into three broad categories: 1- contract work characteristics; 2- structural/organizational factors and conditions; 3- cultural conditions. Much of the focus is on structure and organization, for example, how multi-employer arrangements can lead to breakdowns in communication and overall disorganization effects in relation to safety. There is, however, a need for further studies on the nature of these structural and organizational factors and conditions, such as focused studies on the consequences of power asymmetry for the ability of contractors to adhere to safety laws and regulations. Furthermore, we argue that the development towards blurred organizational boundaries in these networks due to extensive outsourcing and long-term contracts may be a worthwhile avenue for future research into safety on multi-employer worksites.
On the non‐negative garrotte estimator

Summary. We study the non‐negative garrotte estimator from three different aspects: consistency, computation and flexibility. We argue that the non‐negative garrotte is a general procedure that can be used in combination with estimators other than the original least squares estimator as in its original form. In particular, we consider using the lasso, the elastic net and ridge regression along with ordinary least squares as the initial estimate in the non‐negative garrotte. We prove that the non‐negative garrotte has the nice property that, with probability tending to 1, the solution path contains an estimate that correctly identifies the set of important variables and is consistent for the coefficients of the important variables, whereas such a property may not be valid for the initial estimators. In general, we show that the non‐negative garrotte can turn a consistent estimate into an estimate that is not only consistent in terms of estimation but also in terms of variable selection. We also show that the non‐negative garrotte has a piecewise linear solution path. Using this fact, we propose an efficient algorithm for computing the whole solution path for the non‐negative garrotte. Simulations and a real example demonstrate that the non‐negative garrotte is very effective in improving on the initial estimator in terms of variable selection and estimation accuracy.
Adaptive k-coverage contour evaluation and deployment in wireless sensor networks

The problem of coverage is a fundamental issue in wireless sensor networks. In this article, we consider two subproblems: k-coverage contour evaluation and k-coverage rate deployment. The former aims to evaluate, up to k, the coverage level of any location inside a monitored area, while the latter aims to determine the locations of a given set of sensors to guarantee the maximum increment of k-coverage rate when they are deployed into the area. For the k-coverage contour evaluation problem, a nonuniform-grid-based approach is proposed. We prove that the computation cost of our approach is at most the square root of existing solutions. Based on our k-coverage contour evaluation scheme, a greedy k-coverage rate deployment scheme (k-CRD) is proposed, which is shown to be an order faster than existing studies for k-coverage rate deployment. The k-CRD can incorporate two different heuristics to further reduce its running time. Simulation results show that k-CRD with these heuristics can be significantly more time efficient without causing much degradation in the coverage rate of final deployment.
Validity of retrospective time-use reports in old age

In a sample of N=83 participants aged between 72 and 97, we assessed the accuracy of time budgets originating from the Yesterday Interview (YI; Moss and Lawton, 1982) by means of comparison with in-situ assessments based on the Experience-Sampling Method (ESM; e.g. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson, 1987). We examined convergent and discriminant correlation patterns from indices of activity participation, location, company, and mood collected via both methods. The correspondence between the two methods appeared acceptable. Furthermore, we explored whether (a) length of the retention interval, (b) congruence with pre-existing knowledge, and (c) congruence of the locations of encoding and retrieval accounted for (in)accuracy of recall. We also analysed the degree to which age and cognitive functioning explained performance differences. While we found discrepancies between YI and ESM to be hardly attributable to context effects or differences in cognitive functioning, there was an age effect. Finally, the sensitivity of the two methods to detect differences between groups was found to be largely equivalent but hardly sufficiently convergent. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Automated detection of apnea and hypopnea events

This paper presents an automatic method for detection of apnea and hypopnea events occurred during sleep from the single channel recording of oronasal airflow signal. For the identification of events, three time domain measures were extracted from each of the overlapping short segment windows of respiration signal. The feature set includes area, upper 90th percentile and variance, which were used to characterize changes in the airflow signal during normal and abnormal breathing events (i.e., apnea, hypopnea). An ensemble of three binary Support Vector Machine (SVM) based classifiers arranged in one-against-all strategy, were used to classify the feature vector among three categories, according to its origin from some breathing events like normal, apnea and hypopnea. The consecutive decisions of classifier model on time sequenced consecutive overlapped windows were combined by some heuristic rules to identify abnormal breathing events from normal breathings. In this study, 14 polysomnography (PSG) recordings diagnosed as obstructive sleep apnea syndrome were analyzed. Independent test was performed on 6 recordings. The cross-validation and independent test accuracies of apneic event detection were found to be 93.3% and 92.8%, respectively. For hypopnea event these two accuracies were 90.1% and 89.6%. The proposed system can be used for home based monitoring of suspected apneic subject, and can count total number of apnea and hypopnea events occurred during sleep.
Accelerated Nearest Neighbor Search with Quick ADC

Efficient Nearest Neighbor (NN) search in high-dimensional spaces is a foundation of many multimedia retrieval systems. Because it offers low responses times, Product Quantization (PQ) is a popular solution. PQ compresses high-dimensional vectors into short codes using several sub-quantizers, which enables in-RAM storage of large databases. This allows fast answers to NN queries, without accessing the SSD or HDD. The key feature of PQ is that it can compute distances between short codes and high-dimensional vectors using cache-resident lookup tables. The efficiency of this technique, named Asymmetric Distance Computation (ADC), remains limited because it performs many cache accesses. In this paper, we introduce Quick ADC, a novel technique that achieves a 3 to 6 times speedup over ADC by exploiting Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) units available in current CPUs. Efficiently exploiting SIMD requires algorithmic changes to the ADC procedure. Namely, Quick ADC relies on two key modifications of ADC: (i) the use 4-bit sub-quantizers instead of the standard 8-bit sub-quantizers and (ii) the quantization of floating-point distances. This allows Quick ADC to exceed the performance of state-of-the-art systems, e.g., it achieves a Recall@100 of 0.94 in 3.4 ms on 1 billion SIFT descriptors (128-bit codes).
Pix Proteins and the Evolution of Centrioles

We have made a wide phylogenetic survey of Pix proteins, which are constituents of vertebrate centrioles in most eukaryotes. We have also surveyed the presence and structure of flagella or cilia and centrioles in these organisms, as far as is possible from published information. We find that Pix proteins are present in a vast range of eukaryotes, but not all. Where centrioles are absent so are Pix proteins. If one considers the maintenance of Pix proteins over evolutionary time scales, our analysis would suggest that their key function is to make cilia and flagella, and the same is true of centrioles. Moreover, this survey raises the possibility that Pix proteins are only maintained to make cilia and flagella that undulate, and even then only when they are constructed by transporting ciliary constituents up the cilium using the intraflagellar transport (IFT) system. We also find that Pix proteins have become generally divergent within Ecdysozoa and between this group and other taxa. This correlates with a simplification of centrioles within Ecdysozoa and a loss or divergence of cilia/flagella. Thus Pix proteins act as a weathervane to indicate changes in centriole function, whose core activity is to make cilia and flagella.
Evolution of operations management: past, present and future

Purpose – This paper seeks to analyze the evolution of shift in the area of operations management (OM) and attempts to anticipate potential developments in the relevant areas of OM.Design/methodology/approach – A hybrid approach is adopted to understand how the field of OM has evolved over time relying on the perspectives of both academics and business practitioners. This evolution of shift in the area of OM is examined based on a thorough literature review and the authors’ industrial experience.Findings – From the days of functional point solutions relying on concepts like reorder point to finite capacity planning, OM research at present deals with a set of important problems facing both private and public sectors at the organizational level. Most prominent of these include e‐business, supply chain management, production planning and scheduling, product development, decision support systems, information‐based strategy, systems development and implementation, risk and environmental management. OM has also.