Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Market Impacts of Pharmaceutical Product Patents in Developing Countries: Evidence from India

In 2005, as the result of a World Trade Organization mandate, India began to implement product patents for pharmaceuticals that were compliant with the 1995 Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). We combine pharmaceutical product sales data for India with a newly gathered dataset of molecule-linked patents issued by the Indian patent office. Exploiting variation in the timing of patent decisions, we estimate that a molecule receiving a patent experienced an average price increase of just 3-6 percent with larger increases for more recently developed molecules and for those produced by just one firm when the patent system began. Our results also show little impact on quantities sold or on the number of pharmaceutical firms operating in the market.
On Effective Quality of Service Negotiation

This paper addresses the problem of flexible procuring of multiple services with multiple non-functional characteristics, i.e., quality of service attributes. We investigate the one-to-many negotiation approach as a flexible method for procuring multiple services by a buyer agent. We address the problem of coordinating multiple concurrent negotiations and propose a novel dynamic negotiation strategy that considers the behaviors of the opponents in managing the local reservation values for the common negotiation issues. Most previous works consider the problem of negotiation over a single issue. We investigate a more complex scenario where a buyer agent negotiates with multiple seller agents over multiple services characterized by multiple issues. The initial experimental results show the effectiveness of our dynamic negotiation strategy when compared to a static strategy.
Availability Analysis of Cloud Deployed Applications

High availability (HA) is a main key performance indicator for cloud deployed services. Cloud providers offer different availability zones possibly located in different geographical regions. To protect cloud services against failures and natural disasters, it is recommended to deploy the applications on redundant resources across multiple zones and distribute the workload through a load-balancer. Different cloud infrastructure, located in different geographical zones with different energy source powering, hardware quality, etc., may have different reliability levels. Scheduling a cloud service on different zones while meeting the service level agreement availability requirements necessitate a solution to assess the expected availability of a given deployment. To quantify the expected availability offered by an application deployment, a formal stochastic model is required to capture the stochastic behavior of failures. This paper proposes a stochastic Petri Net model that captures the stochastic characteristics of cloud services and translates them into elements of an availability model. The model evaluates the availability of cloud services and their deployments in geographically distributed data centers (DCs). The results are useful to generate guidelines for an HA-aware scheduling.
Pain disorder leads to a frequency shift in the anterior default mode and the salience network

a Klinik und Poliklinik fuer Psychosomatische Medizin und Psychotherapie, University of Ulm, Am Hochstraess 8, D-89081 Ulm, Germany; e-mail: minohu@gmx.net b Abteilung fuer Neuroradiologie, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Ismaningerstrasse 22, D-81675 Muenchen, Germany c Klinik und Poliklinik fuer Psychosomatische Medizin und Psychotherapie, Klinikum rechts der Isar, Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Langerstrasse 3, D-81675 Muenchen, Germany
Temporal Resolution of Uncertainty and Dynamic Choice Theory

We consider dynamic choice behavior under conditions of uncertainty, with emphasis on the timing of the resolution of uncertainty. Choice behavior in which an individual distinguishes between lotteries based on the times at which their uncertainty resolves is axiomatized and represented, thus the result is choice behavior which cannot be represented by a single cardinal utility function on the vector of payoffs. Both descriptive and normative treatments of the problem are given and are shown to be equivalent. Various specializations are provided, including an extension of "separable" utility and representation by a single cardinal utility function. CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING idealization of a dynamic choice problem with uncertainty. At each in a finite, discrete sequence of times t = 0, 1, . , T, an individual must choose an action d,. His choice is constrained by what we temporarily call the state at time t, xt. Then some random event takes place, determining an immediate payoff zt to the individual and the next state xt+l. The probability distribution of the pair (zt, xt+l) is determined by the action dt. The standard approach in analyzing this problem, which we will call the payoff vector approach, assumes that the individual's choice behavior is representable as follows: He has a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function U defined on the vector of payoffs (z0, z1, . . ., ZT). Each strategy (which is a contingent plan for choosing actions given states) induces a probability distribution on the vector of payoffs. So the individual's choice of action is that specified by any optimal strategy, any strategy which maximizes the expectation of utility among all strategies (assuming sufficient conditions so that an optimal strategy exists). This paper presents an axiomatic treatment of the dynamic choice problem which is more general than the payoff vector approach, but which still permits tractable analysis. The fundamental difference between our treatment and the payoff vector approach lies in our treatment of the temporal resolution of uncertainty: In our models, uncertainty is "dated" by the time of its resolution, and the individual regards uncertainties resolving at different times as being different. For example, consider a situation in which a fair coin is to be flipped. If it comes up heads, the payoff vector will be (zo, z1) = (5, 10); if it is tails, the vector will be (5, 0). Because z0 = 5 in either case, the coin flip can take place at either time 0 or time 1. It will not matter when the flip occurs to someone who has cardinal utility on the vector of payoffs. But an individual can obey our axioms and prefer either one to the other. One justification for our approach is the well known "timeless-temporal" or "joint time-risk" feature of some models (usually models which are not "complete"). For example, preferences on income streams which are induced from primitive preferences on consumption streams in general depend upon when the
The reduction of CSF tumor necrosis factor alpha levels in schizophrenia: no correlations with psychopathology and coincident metabolic characteristics

Aim The aim of this study was to assess whether tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-α) levels are correlated with the behavioral syndrome of schizophrenia and/or metabolic abnormalities. Methods Sixty patients with first-onset schizophrenia were recruited. The concentrations of TNF-α in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) were determined in 22 schizophrenia patients and ten patients with nonsuppurative appendicitis using a radioimmunoassay. Physiological characteristics such as fasting blood glucose, fasting insulin, triglycerides, corrected QT interval, waist circumference, and body mass index were measured prior to CSF collection. Subjects were screened for insulin resistance using the homeostasis model assessment. The extent of positive and negative behavioral symptoms was scored using the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. Results The CSF TNF-α levels in schizophrenic patients were significantly lower than those in the control group. The age of disease onset was positively correlated with the CSF TNF-α level using Pearson correlation analysis (r=0.37, P<0.05). There were no significant differences in CSF TNF-α levels in terms of age, duration of schizophrenia, or systolic and diastolic blood pressure. Furthermore, the CSF TNF-α levels were not significantly correlated with fasting blood glucose, fasting insulin, insulin resistance index, triglycerides, corrected QT interval, waist circumference, or body mass index. No significant correlation was found between CSF TNF-α levels and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale total scores or other factors scores. There were also no significant differences in CSF TNF-α levels between patients with schizophrenia types I and II. Conclusion CSF TNF-α levels are decreased in schizophrenia, although this reduction does not correlate with the psychopathology or coincident metabolic characteristics of this disease.
Enabling technology for multilingual natural language generation: the KPML development environment

Natural language generation is now moving away from research prototypes into more practical applications. Generation functionality is also being asked to play a more significant role in established applications such as machine translation. In both cases, multilingual generation techniques have much to offer. However, the take-up of multilingual generation is being restricted by a critical lack both of large-scale linguistic resources suited to the generation task and of appropriate development environments. This paper describes KPML, a multilingual development environment that offers one possible solution to these problems. KPML aims to provide generation projects with standardized, broad-coverage, reusable resources and a basic engine for using such resources for generation. A variety of focused debugging aids ensure efficient maintenance, while supporting multilingual work such as contrastive language development and automatic merging of independently developed resources. KPML is based on a new, generic approach to multilinguality in resource description that extends significantly beyond previous approaches. The system has already been used in a number of large generation projects and is freely available to the generation community.
Working Paper Series Automated Liquidity Provision

NOTE: Staff working papers in the DERA Working Paper Series are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment. References in publications to the DERA Working Paper Series (other than acknowledgement) should be cleared with the author(s) in light of the tentative character of these papers. The Securities and Exchange Commission, as a matter of policy, disclaims responsibility for any private publication or statement by any of its employees. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission or of the author's colleagues on the staff of the Commission. Traditional market makers are losing their importance as automated systems have largely assumed the role of liquidity provision in markets. We update the model of Glosten and Milgrom (1985) to analyze this new world: we add multiple securities and introduce an automated market maker who prices order flow for all securities contemporaneously. This automated participant transacts the majority of orders, sets prices that are more efficient, increases informed and decreases uninformed traders' transaction costs, and has no effect on volatility. The model's predictions match very well with recent empirical findings and are difficult to replicate with alternative models. † The Securities and Exchange Commission, as a matter of policy, disclaims responsibility for any private publication or statement by any of its employees. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission or of the author's colleagues on the staff of the Commission. Traditionally, financial markets have appointed specialists or market makers to keep orderly markets and continually supply liquidity in traded securities. For many years, these individuals played a key role in determining prices and participated in a large fraction of trading. Today, this is no longer the case. Over the past decade, the task of liquidity provision has largely shifted from traditional market makers to proprietary automated systems that trade at high-frequency and across different exchanges and securities. Why have automated systems replaced traditional market makers? What are the effects of automation: are prices more efficient, do transaction costs increase or decrease, who benefits and who is harmed? In this paper, we present a straightforward model that helps answer these ques­ tions. In the model, we assume that automation alleviates a market friction due to the limited attention and processing power of traditional market makers. Specifically, we assume that …
First signatures of strong differential rotation in A-type stars

We reanalyzed high quality spectra of 158 stars of spectral types A0–F1 and $v\,\sin{i}$ values between 60 and 150 km s$^{-1}$. Using a least squares deconvolution technique we extracted high $S/N$ broadening profiles and determined the loci of the Fourier transform zeros $q_{1}$ and $q_{2}$ where the $S/N$-ratio was high enough. For 78 stars $q_{2}$ could be determined and the ratio $q_{2}/q_{1}$ was used as a shape parameter sensitive to solar-like differential rotation (the equatorial velocity is faster than the near polar velocities). Seventy-four of the 78 stars have values of $q_{2}/q_{1}$ consistent with solid body rotation; in four of the 78 cases, values of $q_{2}/q_{1}$ are not consistent with rigid rotation. Although these stars may be binaries, none of their profiles shows any signatures of a companion. The Fourier transforms do not indicate any distortions and the broadening profiles can be considered due to single objects. One of these candidates may be an extremely rapid rotator seen pole-on, but for the other three stars of spectral types as early as A6, differential rotation seems to be the most plausible explanation for the peculiar profiles.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard. edu/abstract_service. html
Local variation and parallel evolution: morphological and genetic diversity across a species complex of neotropical crater lake cichlid fishes

The polychromatic and trophically polymorphic Midas cichlid fish species complex (Amphilophus cf. citrinellus) is an excellent model system for studying the mechanisms of speciation and patterns of phenotypic diversification in allopatry and in sympatry. Here, we first review research to date on the species complex and the geological history of its habitat. We analyse body shape variation from all currently described species in the complex, sampled from six crater lakes (maximally 1.2–23.9 kyr old) and both great lakes in Nicaragua. We find that Midas cichlid populations in each lake have their own characteristic body shape. In lakes with multiple sympatric species of Midas cichlid, each species has a distinct body shape. Across the species complex, most body shape change relates to body depth, head, snout and mouth shape and caudal peduncle length. There is independent parallel evolution of an elongate limnetic species in at least two crater lakes. Mitochondrial genetic diversity is higher in crater lakes with multiple species. Midas cichlid species richness increases with the size and age of the crater lakes, though no such relationship exists for the other syntopic fishes. We suggest that crater lake Midas cichlids follow the predicted pattern of an adaptive radiation, with early divergence of each crater lake colonization, followed by intralacustrine diversification and speciation by ecological adaptation and sexual selection.
Structural and Functional Modeling of Artificial Bioactive Proteins

A total of 32 synthetic proteins designed by Michael Hecht and co-workers was investigated using standard bioinformatics tools for the structure and function modeling. The dataset consisted of 15 artificial α-proteins (Hecht_α) designed to fold into 102-residue four-helix bundles and 17 artificial six-stranded β-sheet proteins (Hecht_β). We compared the experimentally-determined properties of the sequences investigated with the results of computational methods for protein structure and bioactivity prediction. The conclusion reached is that the dataset of Michael Hecht and co-workers could be successfully used both to test current methods and to develop new ones for the characterization of artificially-designed molecules based on the specific binary patterns of amino acid polarity. The comparative investigations of the bioinformatics methods on the datasets of both de novo proteins and natural ones may lead to: (1) improvement of the existing tools for protein structure and function analysis; (2) new algorithms for the construction of de novo protein subsets; and (3) additional information on the complex natural sequence space and its relation to the individual subspaces of de novo sequences. Additional investigations on different and varied datasets are needed to confirm the general applicability of this concept.
Is the common teasel (Dipsacus fullonum) carnivorous or was Francis Darwin wrong?

Francis Darwin first suggested that the common teasel (Dipsacus fullonum L.), a biennial species, might be a carnivorous plant. He suggested that this species acquires nutrients from insects that drown in water-holding cups formed at the base of leaves that surround the stems. Since then, other biologists have made the same claim. To test this we addressed the question: does adding invertebrates as supplemental nutrients to water-filled cups of D. fullonum influence reproduction or are nutrients only obtained from the soil? We performed two factorial designed experiments (high-nutrient soil vs. low-nutrient soil) × (fed vs. control) to test this. Fed treatments involved either crickets or liquefied animal solution. We performed a third experiment where teasel plants were grown in nutrient deficient standard carnivorous plant soil mix to determine whether prey supplement influenced growth and reproduction. These experiments revealed that soil nutrients alone influence growth and reproduction. More seeds were produced by plants grown in high-nutrient soil; while curiously, a higher percentage of seeds germinated from plants grown in low-nutrient soil. When teasel rosettes were grown in carnivorous plant soil, plants did not grow, produce stems, or flower, even with animal solution. Thus we found no evidence suggesting common teasel is carnivorous.
Multiphoton Radiation in Leptonic W-Boson Decays ?

We present the calculation of multiphoton radiation effects in leptonic W -boson decays in the framework of the Yennie–Frautschi–Suura exclusive exponentiation. This calculation is implemented in the Monte Carlo event generator WINHAC for single W -boson production in hadronic collisions at the parton level. Some numerical results obtained with the help of this program are also presented. To be submitted to European Physical Journal C ? Work partly supported by the Polish Government grants KBN 2P03B00122 and KBN 5P03B09320, the EC FP5 contract HPRN-CT-2000-00149, the EC FP5 Centre of Excellence “COPIRA” under the contract No. IST-2001-37259. CERN-TH/2003-018 January 2003
A Text Relatedness and Dependency Computational Model: Using Latent Semantic Analysis and Coh-Metrix to Predict Self-explanation QualityRunning head: Relatedness and Text Dependency Model

The Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking (iSTART) is an intelligent tutoring system that provides students with automated training on reading strategies. In particular, iSTART helps students integrate textual information into a coherent mental representation through self-explanation. The goal of the present study was to examine how text cohesion influences qualitatively different types of self-explanation, namely, bridging and elaborative inferences. To do so, we developed a computational model that characterizes cohesion in terms of the textbase indices word stem and Latent Semantic Analysis relatedness, as well as the situation model index causal dependency between sentences. This model successfully predicted the different types of self-explanations as a function of cohesion. We also found that students’ prior knowledge interacted particularly with causal dependency. RÉSUMÉ. ISTART (Interactive Strategy Trainer for Active Reading and Thinking) est un tuteur électronique qui entraine des étudiants à utiliser certaines stratégies de lecture dans le but de comprendre un texte difficile. Les utilisateurs d’iSTART sont amenés à intégrer les Studia Informatica Universalis. informations, contenues dans un texte, à une représentation mentale cohérente, par la technique de l’auto-explication. Le but de notre étude était d’examiner comment la cohésion textuelle influençait qualitativement la production de différents types d’auto-explications, particulièrement les stratégies consistant à expliciter des liens entre phrases ou à élaborer le contenu d’un texte. Dans cette optique, nous avons développé un modèle qui calcule deux genres de cohésion textuelle à partir d’indices linguistiques différents contribuant, d’une part, à la construction de la base de texte, à savoir, la répétition de racines de mots et la similarité sémantique entre phrases (Analyse Sémantique Latente), et d’autre part, à la construction d’un modèle de situation, comme la dépendance causale. Ce modèle permet de prédire différents types d’auto-explications en fonction du degré de cohésion textuelle calculée. Nous montrons en outre que les connaissances initiales interagissent particulièrement avec la cohésion situationnelle, calculée à partir de la dépendance causale entre phrases.
Working Paper No . 62 Work motivation , institutions , and performance

In this paper we study experimentally four remedies to overcome inefficiencies that arise from the incompleteness of contracts. These remedies are reciprocity, repeated game effects, social embeddedness, and incentive contracts. In our baseline treatment we find that reciprocity is a powerful contract enforcement device. A second experiment establishes that repeated game effects interact with reciprocity in a complementary way, i.e., efficiency is increased compared to our baseline. Adding social approval incentives does not contribute significantly to efficiency. Finally, we show that explicit incentive contracts may have perverse effects in the sense that they “crowd out” reciprocity and therefore reduce efficiency compared to the baseline. In our concluding section we discuss the relation of our findings to the recent literature on “intrinsic motivation”. JEL-Classification: D64, J30, J50, J64, C92 * This paper is part of the EU-TMR Research Network ENDEAR (FMRX-CT98-0238). We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (No. 1214-051000.97) and from the MacArthur Foundation, Network on Economic Environments and the Evolution of Individual Preferences and Social Norms. For helpful comments we are grateful to Werner Güth, Amnon Rapoport and the participants of the First Asian Conference on Experimental Business Research at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. + University of St. Gallen, Dufourstrasse 50b, CH-9000 St. Gallen. E-mail: simon.gaechter@unisg.ch ++ University of Zürich, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, Blümlisalpstrasse 10, CH-8006 Zürich. E-mail: falk@iew.unizh. ch