Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Chapter 2 . Fiscal Policy , the Variety Effect , and the Real Exchange Rate ∗

This paper explores the effects of government consumption spending in a small open economy both under flexible and fixed exchange rate regimes. Varying price elasticity and the variety effect due to firm entry, are introduced to match the empirical evidences on the small open economy. The main mechanism is that firm entry leads to a higher price elasticity (hence variable markup), and increasing returns to specialization (or the variety effect). For the flexible exchange rate regime, I adopt varying price elasticity and the variety effect to resolve the puzzling empirical evidence: consumption crowding in and a positive co-movement between private consumption and the real exchange rate in response to a government spending shock. For the fixed exchange rate regime, I develop two types of models to replicate heterogeneous country dynamics (as in Chapter 1) in response to an increase in government spending. By properly combining the rule-of-thumb consumers and the variety effect (including varying price elasticity) assumptions, I construct two distinct models. For one model, I employ the variety effect as its main dynamics, for the other, the rule-of-thumb consumers. The main result from three models is that in terms of the stimulus effect, the models under the fixed exchange rate regime represent equivalent or inferior policy effect compared to the variety effect model under the flexible exchange rate regime. This result is different from the conventional wisdom. Another featuring result is that three models display somewhat different ordering in terms of the welfare implication, when compared to the ordering in terms of the stimulus effect.
GoPubMed: ontology-based literature search applied to Gene Ontology and PubMed

The biomedical literature grows at a tremendous rate, so that finding the relevant literature is becoming more and more difficult. To address this problem we introduce ontology-based literature search, which structures search results thorugh the categories of an ontology. We develop and implement GoPubMed, which submits keywords to PubMed, extracts GeneOntology-terms from the retrieved abstracts, and presents the relevant sub-ontology for browsing. For GoPubMed we develop a novel term extraction algorithm and evaluate its performance. GoPubMed is available at www.gopubmed. org
Adaptive Task-Space Tracking Control of Robots Without Task-Space- and Joint-Space-Velocity Measurements

The task-space tracking control of robots without the exact knowledge of kinematics and dynamics has been studied before with the assumption that the joint velocities are available for controller designs. However, the velocity measurements can be contaminated by noises, thereby resulting in poor system performance, or even leading to instability problems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new tracking controller for robots in the task space without the use of both task-space and joint-space-velocity measurements, under the condition that both the robot kinematics and dynamics are unknown. To overcome these incapacities without the velocity measurements, we introduce the well-known sliding-observer-design techniques to estimate the joint velocities for the purpose of our controller design. Our main concern, i.e., the stability analysis of our controller design incorporated with the siding observer, is presented with the help of Lyapunov-analysis methodology and the sliding-patch concept. Simulation results are presented to show the performance of our controller-observer designs.
Enabling agent-based management of Web services with WS2JADE

Web services management has attracted substantial research and industry interests in recent years. Web services technology is gaining popularity because of its well defined infrastructure aiming at enabling interoperability among heterogeneous applications. However, this interoperability promise also poses a difficulty in building a Web service management framework which can work across organizational boundaries. Software agents have been recognized as a promising technology for managing Web services. However in many proposed frameworks no agent standard is assumed. In this paper, we propose an extension of our existing Web services-agent integration toolkit WS2JADE for Web services management with FIPA compliant multi-agent systems. In particular, we relate our framework to other solutions in the area and show how new emerging Web services management technologies can be used with WS2JADE for enabling Web services management with agents.
Ketamine as Adjuvant Analgesic to Opioids: A Quantitative and Qualitative Systematic Review

Animal studies on ketamine and opioid tolerance have shown promising results. Clinical trials have been contradictory. We performed a systematic review of randomized, double-blind clinical trials of ketamine added to opioid analgesia. Thirty-seven trials with 51 treatment arms and 2385 patients were included. Studies were divided into 5 subgroups: IV ketamine as single dose (n = 11), continuous infusion (n = 11), patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) (n = 6), epidural ketamine with opioids (n = 8), and studies in children (n = 4). Outcome measures included pain scores, time to first request for analgesia, supplemental analgesics, and adverse events. Efficacy was estimated by statistical significance (P <0.05) of outcome measures as reported in studies and also by calculation of weighted mean difference for pain scores during the first 24 h after surgery. As compared to morphine alone, IV PCA with ketamine and morphine did not improve analgesia. Intravenous infusion of ketamine decreased IV and epidural opioid requirements in 6 of 11 studies. A single bolus dose of ketamine decreased opioid requirements in 7 of 11 studies. Five of 8 trials with epidural ketamine showed beneficial effects. Adverse effects were not increased with small dose ketamine. We conclude that small dose ketamine is a safe and useful adjuvant to standard practice opioid-analgesia.
Theory and strategy for Pneumococcal vaccines in the elderly

Pneumonia is the fourth-leading cause of death globally, and Streptococcus pneumoniae is the most important causative pathogen. Because the incidence of pneumococcal diseases is likely to increase with the aging society, we should determine an optimal strategy for pneumococcal vaccination. While consensus indicates that 23-valent pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccine prevents invasive pneumococcal diseases (IPD), its effects on community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) remain controversial. Recently, a 13-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV13) was released. The latest clinical study (CAPiTA study) showed that PCV13 reduced vaccine-type CAP and IPD. Based on these results, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommended initial vaccination with PCV13 for the elderly. Scientific evidence regarding immunosenescence is needed to determine a more ideal vaccination strategy for the elderly with impaired innate and adaptive immunity. Continuing research on the cost effectiveness of new vaccine strategies considering constantly changing epidemiology is also warranted.
A note on ‘The limitations of school league tables to inform school choice’

Summary. In earlier work, we showed that, for any given year, England's secondary school league tables poorly predict schools’ future performances. We generalize our prediction formula to calculate predictions based on multiple years of school league table data and show that this does very little to improve precision. This reinforces the conclusion of our earlier work: school league tables are unreliable and misleading guides for school choice and that this is still the case even if several years of school league table data are considered.
Analytics for Product Planning: In-Depth Interview Study with SaaS Product Managers

SaaS cloud computing, in contrast to packaged products, enables permanent contact between users of a software product and the product-owning company. When planning the development and evolution of a software product, a product manager depends on reliable information about feature attractiveness. So far, planning decisions were based on stakeholder opinion and the customer's willingness to buy. Whether or not a feature actually is used was out of consideration. Analytics that measure the interaction between users and the SaaS gives product managers unprecedented access to information about product usage. To understand whether and how SaaS analytics can be used for product planning decision, we performed 17 in-depth interviews with experienced managers of SaaS products and analyzed the results analyzed with a mixed-method strategy. The empirical results characterize the relevance of a broad range of analytics for product planning decisions, and the strengths and limitations of an analytics-based product planning approach.
Combinatorial Auctions

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor Tony Bagnall for his help and advice throughout the duration of the project. I am grateful to Kevin Leyton-Brown for making freely available the source code to the Combinatorial Auction Test Suite (CATS), and to Ian Whittley for supplying me with the source code to his optimisation toolkit, HTL Lite. Abstract Auctions are a popular way of allocating goods when the price bidders are willing to pay is unknown or variable. Increases in computing power and the increasing use and popularity of electronic commerce have facilitated the development of increasingly complex auction mechanisms. Combinatorial auctions, in which bidders submit bids on bundles of items, can lead to more economical allocations of the items for auction as bids can express complementarity and substitutability relationships. Determining the winning bidders of a general combinatorial auction has been proven to be NP-complete and inapproximable. To overcome this researchers have developed heuristic search algorithms for solving combinatorial auctions. In this project we use the Combinatorial Auction Test Suite (CATS) to generate realistic combinatorial auction test problems. We successfully recreate previously published results using the CATS distributions. Building on those results we generate further problems in order to discover the boundaries of the problem for the general purpose optimisation software CPLEX. The final experimentation involves using the heuristic techniques Simulated Annealing and Tabu Search with the CATS problems.
Carry a big stick, or no stick at all An experimental analysis of trust and capacity of punishment

We investigate the effect of punishment in a trust game with endowment heterogeneity in which the investor may punish the allocator at a cost. Our results indicate that the effect of the punishment crucially depends on the investor’s capacity of punishment, that is measured in our experiment by the proportion of the allocator’s payoffs that the investor can destroy. We find that punishment fosters trust when the capacity of punishment is high (i.e., when the cost of punishing is relatively low). Otherwise, punishment fails to promote trusting behavior, crowding out intrinsic motivation to trust. Trustworthiness is higher with punishment than without punishment, except if investors have a high capacity of punishment
A Tully-Fisher Relation for S0 Galaxies

We present an I-band Tully-Fisher relation (TFR) for 18 nearby S0 galaxies using kinematics derived from long-slit spectroscopy of stellar absorption lines. Our estimates of the circular velocity, Vc, at 2–3 exponential disk scale lengths account for line-of-sight projection and for the stellar random motions through an asymmetric drift correction. Uniform and accurate distance calibration is available from recent surface brightness fluctuation measurements. Despite the care taken in estimating both Vc and MI, the TFR shows an intrinsic scatter of about 0.7 mag in MI or 0.15 in log Vc. This result is surprising, because S0 galaxies appear to have both the simple kinematics of disk galaxies and the simple stellar populations of early-type galaxies. Remarkably, in this sample of overall rotation-dominated galaxies, the central stellar velocity dispersion is a better predictor of the total I-band luminosity (through the fundamental plane relations) than the circular speed at several exponential scale lengths. Furthermore, the TFR zero point, or the mean stellar I-band luminosity at a given Vc, differs by only about 0.5 mag between our sample of S0s and a comparison sample of late-type spirals, once both data sets are brought onto a consistent distance scale. This offset is less than expected if S0s are former spiral galaxies with prematurely truncated star formation (≳4 Gyrs ago).
Understanding differences in ethical beliefs and behaviors toward software copying: the effects of organization culture

Unauthorized software copying is believed to be widespread in many organizations today. The annual losses to the software vendors from software piracy are estimated in the billions of dollars. From the perspective of managers in organizations, unauthorized software copying means the threat of costly litigation on the one hand, balanced against the reduced expense for additional software if unauthorized copies are used. The individual computer user, however, ultimately makes the decision whether or not to attempt to copy protected software. It may be possible to exercise more informed control over software copying if there were a more complete understanding of the factors that lead to the decision to copy software. The goal of this study is to identify those organizational factors that are associated with a variety of attitudes and behaviors regarding unauthorized software copying. In particular, we focus on the impact of organizational culture in promoting or discouraging unauthorized software copying. We examine the culture and software copying behaviors in two very different organizations: a private university with a technical/engineering focus (TechU) and a public university with a business focus in information systems (BusU). We developed survey instruments that measure dimensions of organization culture and attitudes and behaviors toward software copying, and issued the surveys to students enrolled in the required introductory undergraduate information systems courses at the two universities. Our results reveal notable differences in the attitudes and behaviors towards software copying at the two universities. Students at TechU are significantly more likely to consider unauthorized copying of software to be acceptable and admit to making more unauthorized copies than students at BusU. There are a number of important differences in the organization culture at the two universities that underlie these variations in attitudes and behaviors. We discuss the implications of our results for academicians and managers who are trying to reduce illegal software copying. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part ofthis work for peIWnal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are no1 made or distributed for prolit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. ho copy otherwise. to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. SIGCPR ‘93 New Orleans LA USA Copyright ACM 1999 l-581 13-063-5/99/04. $5.00 Sandra A. Slaughter Carnegie Mellon University 314A GSIA Tech & Frew Streets Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (412)268-2308 Sandras+@andrew.cmu. edu
Bending the Employment, Income, and Cost Curves for People with Disabilities. Washington, DC: Center for Studying Disability Policy

This issue brief proposes a two-pronged approach for increasing the employment rate for people with disabilities, reducing their reliance on federal support, and increasing their household incomes, while preserving benefits for those who are unable to work. This approach includes introducing an experience-rating system for the disability portion of the payÂ­roll tax and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit for workers in all low-income households, funded by higher taxes on high-income houseÂ­holds.
Ipilimumab-Induced Hypophysitis: MR Imaging Findings

SUMMARY: Ipilimumab is a promising new immunotherapeutic antineoplastic agent with clinical activity in the treatment of metastatic melanoma and renal cell carcinoma. With advances in immunotherapy, however, a host of new side effects related to the mechanism of action of these drugs has appeared. At our institution, 3 patients presented with hypophysitis, which was attributed to an autoimmune process based on the documented relationship of the drug to other autoimmune phenomena and significant and rapid improvement with discontinuation of the drug and addition of steroids. We present the imaging findings in 3 patients with presumed ipilimumab-induced hypophysitis.
A note on the Green function estimates for symmetric stable processes

Suppose D is a bounded C domain in R and GD is the Green function of the killed symmetric α-stable process in D. In this note we establish a sharp upper bound estimate for GD in such a way that the explicit dependence of the constant in the estimate on α is also given. This sharp estimate allows us to recover the sharp upper bound estimate for the Green function of killed Brownian motion in D by letting α ↑ 2. One of the most important family of Markov processes is the family of symmetric stable processes. A symmetric α-stable process X on Rn is a Lévy process such that for any ξ ∈ Rn and t ≥ 0, E [ eiξ·(Xt−X0) ] = e−t|ξ| α . Here α must be in the interval (0, 2]. When α = 2, we get a Brownian motion running with a time clock twice as fast as the standard one. In this note, symmetric stable processes refer to the case when α ∈ (0, 2). We always assume that n ≥ 2 in this note. For any Borel measurable set A ⊂ Rn, we define τA = inf{t > 0 : Xt 6∈ A}. The killed symmetric stable process XD in D is defined by X t = { Xt, if t < τD, ∂, if t ≥ τD where ∂ is the cemetery point. The Green function GD(x, y) of X D is a function that is continuous on D ×D except along the diagonal such that for every Borel measurable function f ≥ 0 on D, Ex [∫ τD
Limited Pass-Through from Policy to Retail Interest Rates: Empirical Evidence and Macroeconomic Implications

In this paper we survey empirical evidence on the limited pass-through from policy to retail interest rates and summarize some recent research on potential implications for monetary policy and macroeconomic fluctuations. Empirical evidence suggests that while the pass-through is incomplete in the euro area as well as in the U.S.A. , it appears to be higher in the U.S.A. This is especially true for the long-run pass-through. Research in this field suggests that a limited pass-through alters the Taylor Principle. In the case of a perfect pass-through, the Taylor Principle requires that policy rates increase by more than one-to-one with an increase in (expected) inflation. If the pass-through is incomplete, policy rates have to respond by even more to compensate for the smoothing of retail rates. However, the monetary policies currently implemented in the euro area and the U.S.A. seem to satisfy the conditions for a unique and stable equilibrium and thus avoid sunspot shocks. Furthermore, findings in the literature also show that a limited passthrough has implications for the stabilizing role of monetary policy and therefore, fluctuations arising from fundamental shocks.
Sound-Symbol Learning in Children with Dyslexia

This study evaluated the effect of sound-symbol association training on visual and phonological memory in children with a history of dyslexia. Pretests of phonological and visual memory, a sound-symbol training procedure, and phonological and visual memory posttests were administered to children with dyslexia, to children whose dyslexia had been compensated through remedial training, and to age- and reading level-matched comparison groups. Deficits in visual and phonological memory and memory for sound-symbol associations were demonstrated in the dyslexia group. For children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been remediated, the sound-symbol training scores were significantly associated with word and pseudoword reading scores and were significantly lower than those of the comparison groups. Children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been compensated showed significantly less facilitation of phonological memory following the training than did typical readers. Skilled readers showed some reduction in accuracy of visual memory following the training, which may be the result of interference of verbalization with a predominantly visual task. A parallel decrease was not observed in the children with dyslexia, possibly because these children did not use the verbal cues. Children with dyslexia and children whose dyslexia had been compensated seemed to have difficulty encoding the novel sounds in memory. As a result, they derived less phonological memory advantage and less visual memory interference from the training than did typical readers. Children in the compensated dyslexia group scored lower on sound-symbol training than their age peers. In other respects, the scores of these children were equivalent to those of the typically reading comparison groups. Children in the compensated dyslexia group exhibited higher phonological rehearsal, iconic memory, and associative memory scores than children in the dyslexia group. Implications for the remediation of dyslexia are discussed.
Study of multitasking, cognitive coordination and cognitive shifts in Web search: Preliminary findings

This paper discusses users' cognitive coordination processes and their shifts in cognition when multi-tasking across different information searching problems on the Web. Preliminary results are presented for an exploratory study investigating the nature and roles of multitasking and cognitive behaviors during 42 Web searches. The purpose of this study is two-fold: (1) to understand the nature of each process of multitasking, cognitive coordination and cognitive shifts within user–Web interaction; (2) to identify the relationship between multitasking, cognitive coordination and cognitive shifts during Web search. Multitasking as a prevalent behavior during Web search was achieved through task coordination. The task level coordination behavior was supported by cognitive coordination mechanisms including feedback, self-learning and regulating, and strategy coordination. Humans' mental process of cognitive shifts occurred due to coordination behaviors during multitasking Web search. User–Web interaction appears more complicated than previously understood.