Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Context of State-Level Policy Formation

To identify the relative power and influence of various state education policy groups, data were collected by elite interviewing as part of a larger study by the authors. This article displays the variation among six states in the ranking of policy groups. The relative rankings show how the configurations of power differ among the states. Using the qualitative data, the article provides short analyses of the policy processes that explain these differences. History, recent political battles, and the action styles of policy actors are part of the context that explains the differences (e.g., showing how teachers’ associations may rank first in one state and twelfth in another). The research explores further the qualitative data to search for policy actors’ sense of the rules that must be followed to gain and maintain power in the cultural state policymaking. The article introduces the theory of assumptive worlds; the common action principles understood by all state policy actors and learned from their socialization in the culture of politics. It concludes by showing how assumptive worlds build cohesion, translate values, and are barometers of change.
Use of different molecular typing techniques for bacteriological follow-up in a clinical trial with AIDS patients with Mycobacterium avium bacteremia

One hundred ninety-six Mycobacterium avium isolates from blood samples recovered from 93 AIDS patients for several months were typed by serotyping, by IS1245 restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis and in some cases RFLP analysis with plasmids pVT2 and pLR7 as probes, and by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). PCR typing of single colonies was also used to detect polyclonal infections. Strains belonged mainly to serotypes 1, 4, and 8. pVT2- and pLR7-related plasmids were detected in strains from 49% of the patients. The IS1245 RFLP and PFGE analyses showed a 96.8% diversity of the M. avium strains from the 93 patients. The vast majority (95.2%) of infections were monoclonal, indicating that recent infection is unlikely, even at an advanced stage of AIDS. For one patient, sequential isolates gave divergent patterns of sensitivity and resistance to clarithromycin, but all were identified as the initial clone. RFLP analysis and PCR typing of single colonies allowed for the detection of three polyclonal infections during the bacteriological follow-up. Among strains from patients whose samples were positive by culture after treatment for 2 to 15 months, 97.4% were the same as the initial strain. In conclusion, relapses and failures were mostly due to the initial strain. These relapses and failures resulted either from the selection of resistant mutants or the reappearance of sensitive strains, suggesting the persistence of nonsterilized tissue reservoirs.
Privatism and the Limits of Local Economic Development Policy

Contemporary local economic development policies reflect an underlying commitment to privatism—to enhancing and enlarging the role of the private sector in urban regeneration. In this study we challenge conventional expectations about the benefits of local economic development policies that are based on this commitment. Our analysis supports a set of propositions that define common limitations of the local economic development policies pursued in the 1970s and 1980s. We expect such limitations whenever privatism is accepted as the framework for urban development and regeneration policies.
Does Oil Still Hinder Democracy?

Abstract The purpose of this study is to re-examine the support for the ‘oil hinders democracy’ hypothesis. Following Michael Ross' seminal article ‘Does oil hinder democracy? ’ (2001), the hypothesis has been supported by a number of cross-national empirical tests. We will proceed along two routes, one conceptual and one temporal/contextual. Using time-series cross-section data from 132 countries between 1977–2006 we find that Ross' theory does not stand the test of time, and that a broader conceptual take on the notion of democracy has left the theory more inconclusive than in previous studies. The jury appears to be out concerning the generality of the ‘oil hinders democracy’ hypothesis.
The Quadratic Core-Selecting Payment Rule for Combinatorial Auctions

We report on the use of a quadratic programming technique in recent and upcoming spectrum auctions in Europe, and proposed for use in the FAA’s landing-slot auctions in the United States. Specifically, we compute a unique point “in the core” that minimizes the sum of squared deviations from the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves payments. Analyzing the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions, we demonstrate that the resulting payments can be decomposed into a series of economically meaningful and equitable penalties, adding to the perceived “fairness” of this payment rule. Further, we discuss the many benefits of this combinatorial auction paradigm.
Public–Private Partnership Tenders

The scope of the paper is to provide a guiding methodology in the design of public–private partnership (PPP) tendering processes on the basis of the number of potential bidders in the market (existing competition) and their respective transaction cost. Analytical models, initially proposed by McAfee and McMillan, are further investigated with respect to the various tendering procedures by recalling the dynamics of transaction costs for competitors in the PPP market. The proposed methodology, in the form of a graphical instrument, potentially provides an optimum balance between existing market competition and tender transaction costs. The methodology also has the potential to protect against market concentration. The proposed graphical instrument reduces excessive transaction costs for the public and private sectors and proposes tendering procedures suitable to the existing market. The present research work, based on reported findings, takes an alternative approach and reports on how to exploit all existing competition in the market through the tendering procedure. Therefore, this work takes a rational approach endorsing the notion that for a specific level of transaction costs there is a maximum number of bidders that may tender, and competition is optimum when that number is secured.
Herpesvirus cervicitis and cervical neoplasia. A cytologic review

A review was made of cytologic data from 113 patients who had a diagnosis of herpesvirus infection on Papanicoloau stained smears from the cervix. A total of 43 from this group had additional abnormalities diagnosed from “atypical cells” to invasive cancer. However, 28 of these 43 patients demonstrated intraepithelial neoplasia before evidence of herpesvirus was noted on later smears. In addition, 81% or 24 patients in this group of 28 had primary‐type herpesvirus infection. These data would appear to be positive evidence for the greater susceptibility of atypical cervical epithelium to herpesvirus infections.
Community health care workers in South Africa are at increased risk for tuberculosis.

2have indicated that HCWs have an increased risk of TB disease compared with the general population. The risk for TB disease is even higher among HCWs co-infected with HIV. Studies from South Africa found an HIV prevalence among HCWs of 15.7% in 4 provinces in 2002 3 and of 11.5% in 2 hospitals in Gauteng in 2005. 4 Many sub-Saharan African countries face a severe shortage of qualified HCWs as a result of the dual HIV/TB epidemic, which has triggered task shifting to a range of lay community health care workers (CHWs) – for example, home-based care workers, lay counsellors and adherence supporters, for both TB and highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). CHWs may experience a considerable occupational TB risk; however, their risk of TB disease and HIV prevalence has never been documented. The TB/HIV Care Association is a non-governmental organisation that employs CHWs to provide adherence support to both TB patients and patients taking HAART. The Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation partnered with the TB/HIV Care Association to provide HIV and TB testing to their CHWs, and subsequently determined the prevalence of diagnosed and undiagnosed TB and HIV among them. Methods
IL‐1 signaling is critical for expansion but not generation of autoreactive GM‐CSF+ Th17 cells

Interleukin‐1 (IL‐1) is implicated in numerous pathologies, including multiple sclerosis and its animal model experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE). However, the exact mechanism by which IL‐1 is involved in the generation of pathogenic T cells and in disease development remains largely unknown. We found that following EAE induction, pertussis toxin administration leads to IL‐1 receptor type 1 (IL‐1R1)‐dependent IL‐1β expression by myeloid cells in the draining lymph nodes. This myeloid‐derived IL‐1β did not vitally contribute to the generation and plasticity of Th17 cells, but rather promoted the expansion of a GM‐CSF+ Th17 cell subset, thereby enhancing its encephalitogenic potential. Lack of expansion of GM‐CSF‐producing Th17 cells led to ameliorated disease in mice deficient for IL‐1R1 specifically in T cells. Importantly, pathogenicity of IL‐1R1‐deficient T cells was fully restored by IL‐23 polarization and expansion in vitro. Therefore, our data demonstrate that IL‐1 functions as a mitogenic mediator of encephalitogenic Th17 cells rather than qualitative inducer of their generation.
Circulating endothelial cells as a prognostic marker in thrombotic microangiopathy.

BACKGROUND Circulating endothelial cells (CECs) are a reliable marker of disease activity in a variety of vascular disorders. Damage to microvascular endothelial cells is a hallmark of thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA). The aim of this study is to identify and count CECs during the course of TMA and evaluate whether cell numbers may serve as a prognostic marker in patients undergoing plasma exchange. METHODS Fifteen patients (8 women, 7 men) aged 31 to 66 years with TMA of different causes were studied before and after 4 sessions of plasma exchange. CECs were isolated by using anti-CD146-driven immunomagnetic isolation and counted after staining with Ulex Europaeus lectin-1. RESULTS Numbers of CECs were markedly elevated in all patients before treatment (64 to 672 CEC/mL; mean, 320 +/- 205 CEC/mL) compared with healthy controls (0 to 16 CEC/mL; mean, 6.4 +/- 4.2 CEC/mL; P < 0.001). Patients with a favorable outcome had significantly greater initial CEC levels (mean, 426 +/- 175 CEC/mL; P < 0.001), and cell numbers decreased significantly after 4 treatments of plasma exchange (mean, 101 +/- 53 CEC/mL; P = 0.001). Patients with disease unresponsive to plasma exchange presented with lower initial CEC levels (mean, 108 +/- 36 CEC/mL), and numbers failed to decrease after plasma exchange (mean, 114 +/- 57 CEC/mL; P = 0.827). CONCLUSION Markedly elevated numbers of CECs reflect severe and widespread endothelial damage in patients with TMA. Cell numbers at presentation and their degree of decrease after 4 sessions of plasma exchange could provide important prognostic clues.
Entrepreneurial environments and growth: evidence from Malaysia GEM data

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the entrepreneurial activities in Malaysia through determining some demographic characteristics, expert and individual perceptions of Malaysian entrepreneurs, in addition to the environment for entrepreneurship, and to highlight Malaysia's entrepreneurial position internationally.Design/methodology/approach – The study was drawn from country‐level data provided by the National Malaysia GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) to evaluate the current status of entrepreneurial environments in the country.Findings – The findings show that the early stages of entrepreneurship development in Malaysia are very dynamic and volatile. The number of early‐stage entrepreneurial activities in Malaysia is still lower than in other parts of developing countries. Inadequate financial support, bureaucracy and inconsistency of government policies, lack of entrepreneurial education at tertiary level and inadequacy of entrepreneurial training are some of the important obstacles.
Planners as catalysts and initiators of change. The new structure plan for flanders

Abstract Through an intimate view of a very unique planning experiment this article illustrates that planning and planners are important. The committed mediation of planners proved to be effective in this case. The structure planning process for Flanders was used as a vehicle for change. New planning concepts were introduced; the former very negative attitude toward planning changed considerably. Spatial planning came back on the political agenda, and a new elan and a new spirit in the planning community emerged. The article focuses on how the basis of public support vital for the adoption of the plan has been secured.
Issues and challenges facing population ageing in Korea: productivity, economic growth, and old-age income security

This article critically reviews issues and challenges facing population ageing in Korea, focusing on productivity change, economic growth, and old-age income security. To that end, trends and prospects of population ageing in Korea are first presented and, then, their impacts on economic growth, employment of the old-aged, and old-age income security are discussed. Policy measures and initiatives need to cope with the challenges are discussed to conclude the paper.
Tolerance, protest and democratic transition: Survey evidence from 13 post‐communist countries

Based on survey evidence in 13 post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, we show that citizens who engage in protest activities are more tolerant than those who do not take part in such activities. We argue that these ‘protesters’ have the potential to play a pivotal role in the democratic consolidation process currently under way in post-communist countries. Our findings are compatible with earlier results that suggest that the remaking of political culture, in societies where radical social and political changes have been taking place, might be accomplished through concrete experience with the democratic process rather than through adherence to abstract democratic norms.
Asymmetric effects of monetary policy on an emerging stock market

This paper examines the relationship between monetary policy and the stock market based on data from two stock indices in China - the Shanghai Composite Index and Shenzhen Composite Index. The result shows only unanticipated monetary policy can affect the stock return significantly. Based on anticipated effects, we examine whether monetary policy has asymmetric effects on the stock market by using a linear model with a dummy variable and a modified Markov-switching model respectively. Our empirical results support existing evidence for developed markets, suggesting that monetary policy has a significant impact on stock returns in bear-market periods, whereas the impact is weak and insignificant in bull-market periods. Given this, we surmise that investor sentiments and borrowing constraints are the main causes of the asymmetric effects found.
Coverage of Femicide in Chile and the US By © 2013

The present study explored the portrayal and frames that the U.S. online news media and Chilean online news media use when covering femicide/IPV fatalities news. Associations among a Femicide Law enactment and changes in the use of labels to portray the cases were examined. Content analysis was conducted, comparing data from 46 U.S. online news articles and 138 Chilean news articles. Results suggest that the enactment of a law that recognizes femicide as a crime has an effect on how the cases are labeled in the news. Results also support previous findings, showing stereotyped news coverage that isolates cases of violence against women and indirectly excuses the perpetrator.
Egg size and the adaptive capacity of early life history traits in Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha)

Offspring traits are greatly influenced by maternal effects, and these maternal effects may provide an important pathway through which populations can adapt to changing thermal environments. We investigated the effect of egg size on the among‐ and within‐population variation in early life history traits among introduced Great Lakes Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) populations under varying thermal conditions. We reared Chinook salmon from three populations in a common‐garden hatchery study at 6.5, 9.4, and 15.2°C and measured a variety of fitness‐related traits during development. We found that most of the among‐population variation in early life history traits was explained by egg size. However, the contribution of egg size to the among‐population variation decreased with an increase in temperature suggesting that other effects, such as genetic, contribute at high temperature. Within populations, egg size explained much of the dam variance and maternal effect for traits in every temperature, whereas egg size generally had little to no influence on the sire variance and heritability. Overall, our results demonstrate the significant contribution egg size makes to shaping early life history phenotypes among and within populations, and suggest that egg size is an important pathway through which offspring phenotypes can evolve on contemporary timescales.
Sexual risk behavior and mental health of young gay men

• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.
European Inflation and the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

The majority of macroeconomists who have studied inflation dynamics in Europe argue that the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) provides a good way to describe changes in the price level from the 1970s on. However the vast majority of these articles estimate the NKPC using the labor income share as the proxy for real marginal cost. This article argues that the labor share cannot serve as a proxy for real marginal cost because of its countercyclicality and the lack of labor adjustment costs. Once we account for labor adjustment costs, we are able to derive a new marginal cost proxy that is indeed procyclical; however, we find that the NKPC fails to produce coefficients consistent with its underlying structural parameters when a procyclical marginal cost proxy is used. This casts serious doubt whether the NKPC is empirically applicable to Europe or, for that matter, any other country.
Lattice Long Short-Term Memory for Human Action Recognition

Human actions captured in video sequences are threedimensional signals characterizing visual appearance and motion dynamics. To learn action patterns, existing methods adopt Convolutional and/or Recurrent Neural Networks (CNNs and RNNs). CNN based methods are effective in learning spatial appearances, but are limited in modeling long-term motion dynamics. RNNs, especially Long Short- Term Memory (LSTM), are able to learn temporal motion dynamics. However, naively applying RNNs to video sequences in a convolutional manner implicitly assumes that motions in videos are stationary across different spatial locations. This assumption is valid for short-term motions but invalid when the duration of the motion is long. ,,In this work, we propose Lattice-LSTM (L2STM), which extends LSTM by learning independent hidden state transitions of memory cells for individual spatial locations. This method effectively enhances the ability to model dynamics across time and addresses the non-stationary issue of long-term motion dynamics without significantly increasing the model complexity. Additionally, we introduce a novel multi-modal training procedure for training our network. Unlike traditional two-stream architectures which use RGB and optical flow information as input, our two-stream model leverages both modalities to jointly train both input gates and both forget gates in the network rather than treating the two streams as separate entities with no information about the other. We apply this end-to-end system to benchmark datasets (UCF-101 and HMDB-51) of human action recognition. Experiments show that on both datasets, our proposed method outperforms all existing ones that are based on LSTM and/or CNNs of similar model complexities.
Employment relations in small- and medium-sized enterprises: insights from Ghana

This study examines employment relations in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Ghana. This is done through in-depth case studies of three private firms in the service sector. A review of the extant literature on SMEs revealed a dearth of knowledge on employment relations in SMEs in Africa. Previous research into SMEs in developing countries – and Africa in particular – has focused on economic policy initiatives, problems in raising capital and obstacles to the development of SMEs. In an attempt to fill the gap in the literature, this study uses recruitment, selection and retention, remuneration, discipline and welfare practices to explore the nature of employment relations, the factors that influence and shape them, and the extent of informality involved. The findings cast doubt on the stereotype: small implies/equals informal employment relations in SMEs in Ghana. The study also identifies the factors that influence employment relations and, in addition, reveals that under competitive pressures, SMEs have developed employment relations systems that enable them to have a competitive advantage in their product market/service delivery.
Endothelial Cell-T Lymphocyte Interactions: iP-10 Stimulates Rapid Transendothelial Migration of Human Effector but not Central Memory CD4+ T Cells. Requirements for Shear Stress and Adhesion Molecules

The chemokine interferon (IFN)-&ggr;-inducible protein of 10 kDa (IP-10; CXCL10) has been implicated in recruitment of T cells into rejecting allografts yet appears ineffective at stimulating human peripheral blood CD4+ T cells to transmigrate across tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-treated human endothelial cell (EC) monolayers in vitro. The same cells rapidly (within 15 min) transmigrate across TNF-treated EC monolayers overlaid with stromal cell-derived factor-1&agr; (SDF-1&agr;) and subjected to shear stress. The effector memory subset within the CD4+ T cell population, defined as CD45RO+, CD62Llo and CCR7lo, which constitutes less than 10% of total CD4+ T cells, does respond to IP-10 but requires enrichment to be observed in this model. Central memory T cells do not respond to IP-10. Transendothelial migration of effector memory CD4+ T cells requires TNF-pretreatment of the EC monolayer and application of venular shear force during the assay. TNF treatment of ECs may be effectively replaced by transduction of vascular cell adhesion molecule-1 or intercellular adhesion molecule-1 but not E-selectin.
Misadjustment and tracking analysis of the constant modulus array

The constant modulus (CM) array is a blind adaptive beamformer that can separate cochannel signals. A follow-on adaptive signal canceler may be used to perform direction finding of the source captured by the array. In this paper, we analyze the convergence and tracking properties of the CM array using a least-mean-square approximation. Expressions are derived for the misadjustment of the adaptive algorithms, and a tracking model is developed that accurately predicts the behavior of the system during fades. It is demonstrated that the adaptive canceler contributes more to the overall misadjustment than does the adaptive CM beamformer. Computer simulations are presented to illustrate the transient properties of the system and to verify the analytical results.