Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Poverty and Price Transmission

A key parameter determining the welfare impact from a world market shock is the transmission elasticity which measures the average domestic response to an international price change. Many studies have estimated price transmission elasticities for a large number of countries but the variation in these estimates is so far largely unexplored. This paper proposes a model which explains a country's domestic price response to world market shocks in terms of its demand structure. The model delivers two testable predictions; price transmission is increasing in per capita food expenditure and in income inequality. The empirical analysis of price changes during the food crises confirms these predictions with a caveat. I find significant inverse U-shaped relationships between domestic food price growth in 2007-8 and 2010-11 and per capita food expenditure. Unequal countries also experienced higher price growth but the relationship is less significant. The finding that food prices in middle-income countries increased the most during the food crises is a cause for concern in light of the fact that the majority of the world's poor today live in middle-income countries.
Upconversion nanoparticle-mediated photodynamic therapy induces THP-1 macrophage apoptosis via ROS bursts and activation of the mitochondrial caspase pathway

Atherosclerosis (AS) is the most vital cardiovascular disease, which poses a great threat to human health. Macrophages play an important role in the progression of AS. Photodynamic therapy (PDT) has emerged as a useful therapeutic modality not only in the treatment of cancer but also in the treatment of AS. The purpose of this study was to determine the molecular mechanisms underlying the activity of PDT, using mesoporous-silica-coated upconversion fluorescent nanoparticles encapsulating chlorin e6 (UCNPs-Ce6) in the induction of apoptosis in THP-1 macrophages. Here, we investigated the ability of UCNPs-Ce6-mediated PDT to induce THP-1 macrophage apoptosis by facilitating the induction of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and regulation of mitochondrial permeability transition pore (MPTP) to depolarize mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP). Both Bax translocation and the release of cytochrome C were examined using immunofluorescence and Western blotting. Our results indicated that the levels of ROS were significantly increased in the PDT group, resulting in both MPTP opening and MMP depolarization, which led to apoptosis. In addition, immunofluorescence and Western blotting revealed that PDT induced both Bax translocation and the release of cytochrome C, as well as upregulation of cleaved caspase-9, cleaved caspase-3, and cleaved poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase. Therefore, we demonstrated that UCNPs-Ce6-mediated PDT induces apoptosis in THP-1 macrophages via ROS bursts. The proapoptotic factor Bax subsequently translocates from the cytosol to the mitochondria, resulting in the MPTP opening and cytochrome C release. This study demonstrated the great potential of UCNPs-Ce6-mediated PDT in the treatment of AS.
Stopping Inflations, Big and Small

Previous studies of disinflation work with models in which firms use time-dependent strategies, changing nominal prices at intervals of fixed length. These models may be criticized for failing to allow pricing behavior to adjust after a large shift in policy regime. Consequently, this paper develops a model that allows firms to adopt strategies that are partially state-dependent, changing nominal prices whenever they deviate sufficiently from their target values. The paper uses this model to examine how the welfare costs and benefits of disinflation vary with the initial inflation rate and the speed of disinflation.
Neuroanatomy and Neurochemistry of Mouse Cornea

Purpose To investigate the entire nerve architecture and content of the two main sensory neuropeptides in mouse cornea to determine if it is a good model with similarities to human corneal innervation. Methods Mice aged 1 to 24 weeks were used. The corneas were stained with neuronal-class βIII-tubulin, calcitonin gene–related peptide (CGRP), and substance P (SP) antibodies; whole-mount images were acquired to build an entire view of corneal innervation. To test the origin of CGRP and SP, trigeminal ganglia (TG) were processed for immunofluorescence. Relative corneal nerve fiber densities or neuron numbers were assessed by computer-assisted analysis. Results Between 1 and 3 weeks after birth, mouse cornea was mainly composed of a stromal nerve network. At 4 weeks, a whorl-like structure (or vortex) appeared that gradually became more defined. By 8 weeks, anatomy of corneal nerves had reached maturity. Epithelial bundles converged into the central area to form the vortex. The number and pattern of whorl-like structures were different. Subbasal nerve density and nerve terminals were greater in the center than the periphery. Nerve fibers and terminals that were CGRP-positive were more abundant than SP-positive nerves and terminals. In trigeminal ganglia, the number of CGRP-positive neurons significantly outnumbered those positive for SP. Conclusions This is the first study to show a complete map of the entire corneal nerves and CGRP and SP sensory neuropeptide distribution in the mouse cornea. This finding shows mouse corneal innervation has many similarities to human cornea and makes the mouse an appropriate model to study pathologies involving corneal nerves.
Biofouling of Water Treatment Membranes: A Review of the Underlying Causes, Monitoring Techniques and Control Measures

Biofouling is a critical issue in membrane water and wastewater treatment as it greatly compromises the efficiency of the treatment processes. It is difficult to control, and significant economic resources have been dedicated to the development of effective biofouling monitoring and control strategies. This paper highlights the underlying causes of membrane biofouling and provides a review on recent developments of potential monitoring and control methods in water and wastewater treatment with the aim of identifying the remaining issues and challenges in this area.
How Can Korea be a Role Model for Catch-up Development?: A.Capability-based View

There is some scepticism about Korea as role model of development as the Korean model involved a considerable degree of state activism, unacceptable in today.s global environment. This paper propose a . capability-based view. of the country.s catch-up development, arguing that the real lesson from Korea is not the role of government but the fact that it was able to strengthen the capability of firms, thus inducing sustained growth for several decades. This paper points to the mid 1980s as the critical juncture in this process of capability-building, as the Korea emphasized in-house R&D in private sectors, pushing the aggregate R&D/GDP ratio to the threshold level of 1 per cent or more. This led to another core aspect of the Korean model.continuous upgrading within the same industries as well as advancing successive entries into new promising industries. The paper argues that without capability-building, devaluation or standard trade liberalization alone cannot bring sustained catch-up as these often result in short-run, albeit temporary, export booms. The study analyses how Korea utilized various access modes to learning and knowledge to enhance its technological capabilities, and concludes with a discussion of the transferability of the Korean
WORKING PAPER SERIES

In this paper, we propose a multivariate model for financial assets which incorporates jumps, skewness, kurtosis and stochastic volatility, and discuss its applications in the context of equity and credit risk. In the former case we describe the stochastic behavior of a series of stocks or indexes, in the latter we apply the model in a multi-firm, value-based default model. Starting from a independent Brownian world, we will introduce jumps and other deviations from normality, as well as non-Gaussian dependence, by the simple but very strong technique of stochastic time-changing. We work out the details in the case of a Gamma time-change, thus obtaining a multivariate Variance Gamma (VG) setting. We are able to characterize the model from an analytical point of view, by writing down the joint distribution function of the assets at any point in time and by studying their association via the copula technique. The model is also computationally friendly, since numerical results require a modest amount of time and the number of parameters grows linearly with the number of assets. The main feature of the model however is the fact that opposite to other, non jointly Gaussian settings its risk neutral dependence can be calibrated from univariate derivative prices. Examples from the equity and credit market show the goodness of fit attained.
Determination of Factors Affecting Physical Activity Status of University Students on a Health Sciences Campus

Background Upon graduation, students studying in departments related to health will work in the health sector and will guide and enlighten people with their knowledge and behavior. The purpose of this study was to determine the factors affecting the physical activity (PA) conditions of university students on a health sciences campus. Material/Methods A cross-sectional study was carried out on 706 students in a Turkish university. The data was obtained from a survey prepared by the researchers. The 26-question survey aimed to discover the students’ socio-demographic characteristics and their awareness and practices concerning PA. Results We found that 30% of the students engage in some type of PA during their university education. A relationship was observed concerning their current PA and their family inactivity levels, as well as between inactivity before entering the university and inactivity during their education. The presence of a chronic disease in family members does not affect student PA. A majority of the students believe PA is beneficial (98.7%), 93.9% believe it relieves stress, and 94.5% believe it helps control body weight. Conclusions Although students of medicine and related disciplines are aware of the importance of proper diet and adequate levels of PA in health, they did not implement theory into practice. Thus, it is questionable how young health professionals will promote the positive effects and necessity of regular physical activity if they do not apply these activities to their own lifestyle.
Institutional inertia and climate change: a review of the new institutionalist literature

Climate scientists and policy analysts alike have repeatedly called for urgent mitigating action to avoid the most adverse effects of climate change. However, within the political arena this action is largely lacking. To understand this discrepancy, we consider the institutions in climate change policy to be of central importance. Renewed interest in institutions has been generated to a great extent by ‘new institutionalism’, a field of research combining economics, political science, and sociology, and which has become increasingly popular since the 1980s. The tendency of institutions to resist change and thereby stabilize policy can be understood by using the concept of institutional inertia. Our review of the new institutionalist literature on climate change identifies five main mechanisms that generate institutional inertia: costs, uncertainty, path dependence, power, and legitimacy. Means of addressing these mechanisms are proposed by referring to the literature on institutional entrepreneurship and institutional work. A focus on the mechanisms that generate and regenerate institutional inertia is beneficial for future research on institutions and climate change, as it can be used to study bottlenecks for action and address more clearly the urgency of necessary policy interventions. WIREs Clim Change 2014, 5:639–648. doi: 10.1002/wcc.292
Trading on stock split announcements and the ability to earn long-run abnormal returns

The aim of this study is to examine why underreaction following stock split announcements persists over the long-term. To do so, we analyze long-run abnormal returns after split announcements over the period 1975-2006. A significant abnormal return of 5% p.a. is observed over the entire dataset but this finding is not robust across sub-periods or segregations based on market cap. It is also documented that abnormal returns can be enhanced by focusing on splitting firms that have not split previously within the last three years. The key result of this study, which dominates all other findings, is that abnormal returns are conditional on whether firms split again in the next three years. Unsurprisingly, firms that split again perform very well in the year after the current split. However, for the roughly two-thirds of the sample that do not split again, the abnormal return is -11%. This suggests that the average long-term underreaction following stock split announcements is difficult to exploit.
Putting Semantic Information Extraction on the Map : Noisy Label Models for Fact Extraction

Geographic indexing is a powerful and effective way to organize information on the web, but the use of standardized location tags is not widespread. Therefore, there is considerable interest in using machine learning approaches to automatically obtain semantic associations involving geographic locations from processing unstructured natural language text. While it is often impractical or expensive to obtain training labels, there are often ways to obtain noisy labels. We present a novel discriminative approach using a hidden variable model suitable for learning with noisy labels and apply it to extracting location relationships from natural language. We examine the problem of associating events with locations, where simple keyword matching produces a small number of positive examples within many false positives. Compared to a state-of-the-art baseline, our method doubles the precision of extracting semantic information while maintaining the same recall.
Complexity and Volume: An Inquiry into Factors that Drive Principals’ Work

Background: The work of contemporary school principals is intensifying in terms of its complexity and volume. Many factors moderate and drive such work intensification. This study aims to understand what and how factors interact to complicate principals’ work. Methods: Focus groups and an online survey were used for data collection. Three focus group sessions with eight principals were conducted to help develop and refine the online survey. The survey covers 12 key areas in principals’ work and was distributed among the members of Ontario Principals’ Council. Descriptive statistics, correlation and factor analysis were conducted on survey results. Results: The study shows that there are many key areas that moderate principals’ work, such as administrative duties and responsibilities, jurisdictional policies, external influences, partnerships, and challenges and possibilities. School principals are experiencing increased expectations at work in terms of the number of tasks they are expected to undertake, the duration of time they are required to complete those tasks, and the many challenges they face at their work. Conclusions: Principals’ choice of leadership approaches and practices is subject to factors that exist within and beyond schools. Such factors moderate the way that principals carry out their work and limit their choices in exercising their professional autonomy.
Fractal and Chaos Properties of Explosion Earthquakes Followed by Harmonic Tremor at Semeru Volcano, East Java, Indonesia

Fractal and chaos analyses of successive event of explosion earthquake and harmonic tremor recorded at Semeru volcano were applied to investigate the dynamical system regarding to their eruptive mechanism. The eruptive activity at Semeru volcano East Java, Indonesia is intermittent emission of ash and bombs with Strombolian style which occurred at interval of 15 to 45 minutes. The explosive eruptions accompanied by explosion earthquakes and followed by harmonic tremor which generated by continuous emission of volcanic ash. Spectral, fractal and Lyapunov exponent of successive event of explosion and harmonic tremor were analyzed. Peak frequencies of explosion earthquakes range 1.2 to 1.9 Hz and those of the harmonic tremor have peak frequency range 1.5 – 2.2 Hz. Temporal change of fractal dimension shows a higher fractal dimension of explosion earthquakes and gradually decrease during the occurrence of harmonic tremors. The phase space is reconstructed and evaluated based on the Lyapunov exponents. Harmonic tremors have smaller Lyapunov exponent than explosion earthquakes. It can be considerably as correlated complexity of the mechanism from the variance of spectral and fractal dimension and can be concluded that the successive event of harmonic tremor and explosions are chaotic.
Structure and Evolution of Nearby Stars with Planets. II. Physical Properties of ~1000 Cool Stars from the SPOCS Catalog

We derive detailed theoretical models for 1074 nearby stars from the SPOCS (Spectroscopic Properties of Cool Stars) Catalog. The California and Carnegie Planet Search has obtained high-quality (R ≃ 70,000-90,000, S/N ≃ 300-500) echelle spectra of over 1000 nearby stars taken with the Hamilton spectrograph at Lick Observatory, the HIRES spectrograph at Keck, and UCLES at the Anglo Australian Observatory. A uniform analysis of the high-resolution spectra has yielded precise stellar parameters (Teff, log g, v sin i, [M/H], and individual elemental abundances for Fe, Ni, Si, Na, and Ti), enabling systematic error analyses and accurate theoretical stellar modeling. We have created a large database of theoretical stellar evolution tracks using the Yale Stellar Evolution Code (YREC) to match the observed parameters of the SPOCS stars. Our very dense grids of evolutionary tracks eliminate the need for interpolation between stellar evolutionary tracks and allow precise determinations of physical stellar parameters (mass, age, radius, size and mass of the convective zone, surface gravity, etc.). Combining our stellar models with the observed stellar atmospheric parameters and uncertainties, we compute the likelihood for each set of stellar model parameters separated by uniform time steps along the stellar evolutionary tracks. The computed likelihoods are used for a Bayesian analysis to derive posterior probability distribution functions for the physical stellar parameters of interest. We provide a catalog of physical parameters for 1074 stars that are based on a uniform set of high-quality spectral observations, a uniform spectral reduction procedure, and a uniform set of stellar evolutionary models. We explore this catalog for various possible correlations between stellar and planetary properties, which may help constrain the formation and dynamical histories of other planetary systems.
Exploring Vector Space Models to Predict the Compositionality of German Noun-Noun Compounds

This paper explores two hypotheses regarding vector space models that predict the compositionality of German noun-noun compounds: (1) Against our intuition, we demonstrate that window-based rather than syntax-based distributional features perform better predictions, and that not adjectives or verbs but nouns represent the most salient part-of-speech. Our overall best result is state-of-the-art, reaching Spearman’s = 0.65 with a wordspace model of nominal features from a 20word window of a 1.5 billion word web corpus. (2) While there are no significant differences in predicting compound‐modifier vs. compound‐head ratings on compositionality, we show that the modifier (rather than the head) properties predominantly influence the degree of compositionality of the compound.
Winning Alone: The Electoral Fate of Independent Candidates Worldwide

Independent candidates are widely believed to influence the quality of representation through issues as fundamental to democracy as government accountability, responsiveness, and electoral turnout. Their impact, however, hinges on their electoral strength, which varies widely within and across countries. In order to explain this variation, this study examines which aspects of electoral systems affect independents the most and why. Based on a statistical analysis of 34 countries around the world between 1945 and 2003, this study finds that electoral systems influence the electoral strength of independent candidates by defining the opportunities for independents to compete for office (i.e., ballot access requirements), the degree to which politics is candidate centered versus partisan driven (i.e., majority/plurality rule, district magnitude, open-list PR, and democratic transitions), and the extent to which small vote getters win seats (i.e., district size and electoral thresholds). Accordingly, not only d.
Hardware extensions to make lazy subscription safe

Transactional Lock Elision (TLE) uses Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) to execute unmodified critical sections concurrently, even if they are protected by the same lock. To ensure correctness, the transactions used to execute these critical sections “subscribe” to the lock by reading it and checking that it is available. A recent paper proposed using the tempting “lazy subscription” optimization for a similar technique in a different context, namely transactional systems that use a single global lock (SGL) to protect all transactional data. We identify several pitfalls that show that lazy subscription is not safe for TLE because unmodified critical sections executing before subscribing to the lock may behave incorrectly in a number of subtle ways. We also show that recently proposed compiler support for modifying transaction code to ensure subscription occurs before any incorrect behavior could manifest is not sufficient to avoid all of the pitfalls we identify. We further argue that extending such compiler support to avoid all pitfalls would add substantial complexity and would usually limit the extent to which subscription can be deferred, undermining the effectiveness of the optimization. Hardware extensions suggested in the recent proposal also do not address all of the pitfalls we identify. In this extended version of our WTTM 2014 paper, we describe hardware extensions that make lazy subscription safe, both for SGL-based transactional systems and for TLE, without the need for special compiler support. We also explain how nontransactional loads can be exploited, if available, to further enhance the effectiveness of lazy subscription.
Surgical management of fibrotic encapsulation of the fluocinolone acetonide implant in CAPN5-associated proliferative vitreoretinopathy

Objective To review fibrosis of fluocinolone acetonide (FA) implants in subjects with CAPN5 autosomal dominant neovascular inflammatory vitreoretinopathy (ADNIV). Methods A retrospective case series was assembled from ADNIV patients in which there was fibrotic encapsulation of a fluocinolone acetonide implant. CAPN5 genotypes and surgical repair techniques were reviewed. Results Two eyes of two ADNIV patients developed a fibrotic capsule over the fluocinolone acetonide implant. Both patients had Stage IV disease. Patient A had a c.731T > C mutation in the CAPN5 gene and patient B had a c.728G > T mutation. The fibrotic membrane was surgically excised and the implant function was restored. Conclusion The exuberant fibrotic response in later stages of ADNIV may be resistant to local immunosuppression with steroids. Surgical excision of fibrotic membranes over FA implants can reestablish local steroid delivery in cases of severe proliferative vitreoretinopathy.