Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Seminar Paper No. 717 IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE OF THE EUROPEAN SOCIAL MODEL – THE WELFARE STATE OVER THE LIFE CYCLE by Assar Lindbeck INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC STUDIES

The achievements of social-welfare arrangements in Western Europe are well known: considerable income security, relatively little poverty and, in some countries, ample supply of social services. But there are also well-known weaknesses and hence considerable scope for improvement. Three types of weaknesses are considered in this paper: social-welfare arrangements are often not financially robust to shocks; individuals make undesirable behavioural adjustments in response to welfare-state arrangements and their financing; and social-welfare arrangements are often poorly adapted to recent changes in socio-economic conditions and preferences of individuals. I discuss these weaknesses, and alternative methods to mitigate them, in the context of various types of welfare-state arrangements that the individual may encounter over the life cycle. JEL Classification codes: H00, H4, H5
Activation of a critical attitude in prospective teachers: From research investigations to guidelines for teacher education

This paper is inspired by the widely accepted need to develop critical thinking in physics students and teachers. More specifically, it is focused on the development of a critical attitude in prospective physics teachers. The question of a possible interplay between the development of conceptual comprehension and that of a critical attitude prompted us to conduct a series of investigations with teachers at the end of their preparation. The goal of this paper is to provide a synthesis of five previously published papers on this topic in order to inform discussion about teacher preparation. Each investigation is centered on a particular aspect of physics, and all are based on in-depth interviews with different participants. We focus on prospective teachers’ “intellectual dynamics,” that is, the way their comprehension of nonobvious topics and their critical attitudes evolve during these interviews, taking into account metacognitive and affective aspects such as intellectual satisfaction and self-esteem. We characterize several types of intellectual dynamics: “early critique,” “delayed critique,” “unstable critique,” and “expert anesthesia” and provide information on their frequency. An overall conclusion is that in this type of context, that is, a guided intellectual pathway of about an hour, the development of conceptual comprehension and critical attitude are most often deeply entangled. We discuss the implications of these results for future research and we advocate new objectives and strategies for physics teachers’ preparation.
Establishing an Interest-Free Lending Platform Applying Optimum Premium, 'Mesbah Point,' in Amortization and Time Value of Money

The concept of Interest has been viewed as a forbidden instrument in Islamic investments. This study has focused on establishing an interest-free platform, and introducing a new method of direct-to-consumer financing using the amortization and the time value of money. Based on this method, the borrower makes a pre-determined amount of upfront payment in order to receive zero percent interest rate financing and only makes monthly principal payments during the term of the loan. Using the same interest rate and the same term period as in amortization, the total amount of interest occurring during the amortized loan is replaced as future value and the discounted value is calculated as the amount of upfront payment. The relationship between the amount of upfront payment in each range of 30,20,15,10 and 5 year terms and the interest rates 1%-30% shows a parabolic pattern in each term, in which the amount of upfront payment will increase to a pivotal level in each term and will decrease as the interest rate increases. The vertex point of the parabola is named Mesbah Point in order to distinguish this conceptual point. Therefore, Mesbah Point is the optimum amount of upfront payment collected, irrespective of the interest rate, to receive an interest free, zero percent loan. In other words, Mesbah Point is as an interest rate-proof value in which the borrower, regardless of interest rates in the market, can contribute a pre-determined amount of upfront payment to receive an interest free, zero percent interest rate loan.
Evaluation des contenus de forums d’entraide en ligne d’usagers de cannabis

Objectif: investiguer en terme d’analyse de contenus les forums d’entraide en ligne d’usagers de cannabis. Methode : analyse des contenus (mecanismes d’entraide et champs d’interet) de 717 messages postes par 328 usagers sur des forums libres d’acces de langue anglaise. Resultats : les forums d’usagers de cannabis partagent des similitudes avec d’autres types de forums d’usagers en soins mentaux, mais different entre eux de maniere significative. Les usagers postent des messages a thematiques differentes selon leur genre et leur implication quantitative sur les forums. Il existe une dissociation partielle entre le soutien emotionnel et le soutien de type provision d’information. Conclusion : ce travail met en lumiere la multiplicite des themes et des mecanismes d’entraide que l’on retrouve sur les forums d’usagers de cannabis ainsi que leur variabilite, et ouvre ainsi des perspectives nouvelles de soins collaboratifs entre praticiens de sante mentale et usagers.
Job Sequencing in a Miniload System

More and more warehouses shift towards the use of automated systems. One such system is a miniload system. In this system, a crane retrieves bins from their storage locations and brings the bins to the picking station, where a worker takes the requested products from the retrieved bins. After a product has been picked, the bin is put back by the crane in its original location. A buffer is present at the picking station to absorb fluctuations in speed between the picker and the crane. The problem of scheduling jobs in this system has received little attention in the literature. We describe system properties and give insight in the performance of a number of heuristics.
Distributed Stochastic Optimization via Matrix Exponential Learning

In this paper, we investigate a distributed learning scheme for a broad class of stochastic optimization problems and games that arise in signal processing and wireless communications. The proposed algorithm relies on the method of matrix exponential learning (MXL) and only requires locally computable gradient observations that are possibly imperfect. To analyze it, we introduce the notion of a stable Nash equilibrium and we show that the algorithm is globally convergent to such equilibria—or locally convergent when an equilibrium is only locally stable. To complement our convergence analysis, we also derive explicit bounds for the algorithm's convergence speed and we test it in realistic multicarrier/multiple-antenna wireless scenarios where several users seek to maximize their energy efficiency. Our results show that learning allows users to attain a net increase between <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$100\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$500\%$ </tex-math></inline-formula> in energy efficiency, even under very high uncertainty.
ADABOOK & MULTIBOOK: Adaptive Boosting with Chance Correction

There has been considerable interest in boosting and bagging, including the combination of the adaptive techniques of AdaBoost with the random selection with replacement techniques of Bagging. At the same time there has been a revisiting of the way we evaluate, with chance-corrected measures like Kappa, Informedness, Correlation or ROC AUC being advocated. This leads to the question of whether learning algorithms can do better by optimizing an appropriate chance corrected measure. Indeed, it is possible for a weak learner to optimize Accuracy to the detriment of the more reaslistic chance-corrected measures, and when this happens the booster can give up too early. This phenomenon is known to occur with conventional Accuracy-based AdaBoost, and the MultiBoost algorithm has been developed to overcome such problems using restart techniques based on bagging. This paper thus complements the theoretical work showing the necessity of using chance-corrected measures for evaluation, with empirical work showing how use of a chance-corrected measure can improve boosting. We show that the early surrender problem occurs in MultiBoost too, in multiclass situations, so that chance-corrected AdaBook and Multibook can beat standard Multiboost or AdaBoost, and we further identify which chance-corrected measures to use when.
Alternative Continuous Quilting Suture Technique for Preventing Hematoma in Axillary Osmidrosis

which circumvent factorVIII inactivating the coagulant pathway, and immunosuppressant medications. The bypassing agents include both recombinant activated factor VII and the activated prothrombin complex concentrate anti-inhibitor coagulant complex. These drugs are the treatment of choice for active, potentially fatal bleeding, but may be associated with an increased risk of thrombosis. Immunosuppressants are used to lower factor VIII inhibitor titers. These medications thereby have the ability to both treat active bleeding that is mild and to prevent recurrent bleeding episodes from occurring. First-line immunosuppressants include systemic corticosteroids alone or with the addition of cyclophosphamide. Resistant cases occasionally require concomitant rituximab, azathioprine, calcineurin inhibitors, or other agents. Although immunosuppression is commonly withdrawn after normalization of factor VIII function, approximately 10% to 20% of patients relapse and may require longterm therapy. Surgical interventions for disorders that are not life-threatening should be postponed until the coagulopathy is resolved.
Limbic and Motor Circuitry Underlying Footshock-Induced Reinstatement of Cocaine-Seeking Behavior

The role of limbic, cortical, and striatal circuitry in a footshock reinstatement model of relapse to cocaine seeking was evaluated. Transient inhibition of the central extended amygdala [CEA; including the central nucleus of the amygdala (CN), ventral bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNSTv), and nucleus accumbens shell (NAshell)], ventral tegmental area (VTA), and motor circuitry [including the dorsal prefrontal cortex (PFCd), nucleus accumbens core (NAcore), and ventral pallidum (VP)] blocked the ability of footshock stress to reinstate lever pressing previously associated with cocaine delivery. However, inhibition of the basolateral amygdala, mediodorsal nucleus of the thalamus, or the ventral prefrontal cortex had no effect on drug-seeking behavior. These data suggest that footshock stress activates limbic circuitry of the CEA that, via the VTA, activates motor output circuitry responsible for producing lever press responding. Consistent with this notion, the D1/D2 dopamine receptor antagonist fluphenazine blocked footshock-induced reinstatement when infused into the PFCd. Further, inhibition of the NAshell blocked a footshock-induced increase in dopamine within the PFC and concomitantly blocked reinstatement responding. Also supporting the idea of a CEA-VTA-motor circuit in stress-induced reinstatement of cocaine seeking, inactivation of the PFCd was shown to block stress-induced glutamate release within the NAcore while concurrently inhibiting reinstatement responding. Taken together, these data suggest that footshock activates limbic circuitry in the CEA, which in turn activates a VTA dopamine projection to the PFCd. The rise in dopamine within the PFCd initiates reinstatement via a glutamatergic projection to the NAcore.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Former Prisoners of War: Incidence and Correlates.

Although Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is known to be common among those who have experienced life-threatening trauma, there have been few attempts to determine the incidence of PTSD among such groups. One hundred seventy-two former prisoners of war (POWs) from World War II and Korea, representing a well-defined group with a clearly identifiable severe stressor, responded to a questionnaire requesting demographic data and information about the occurrence of PTSD symptoms. Time in captivity ranged from one month to 46 months, with a mean of 17.5 months. These veterans showed remarkable stability in their marriages, with 88% currently married and with a mean duration of current marriables being 35 years. Fully 64.5% of this sample met DSM-III criteria for diagnosis of current PTSD. There was a variable time course of symptomatology, with four percent indicating having never been troubled since their release, while one quarter indicated always being troubled by PTSD symptoms. The remaining 61% reported intermittent patterns of symptomatology. Contrary to expectations, neither location nor duration of POW experiences predicted current symptomatology. However, both rank and age were significantly related to PTSD symptomatology, with lower ranked and younger veterans reporting greater current difficulty. Multiple regression analysis showed that of these four variables, only rank contributed significantly to the degree of current symptomatology. The fact that duration and location of captivity do not predict degree of symptoms raises questions of the nature of the stress-PTSD relationship, with some suggestion that PTSD-producing stress may be better conceptualized as a "critical moment variable" rather than one where duration of the traumatic event is crucial. Possible explanations for the predictive ability of the rank and age variables are also discussed.
Micro-Expression Recognition with Expression-State Constrained Spatio-Temporal Feature Representations

Recognizing spontaneous micro-expression in video sequences is a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a new method of small scale spatio-temporal feature learning. The proposed learning method consists of two parts. First, the spatial features of micro-expressions at different expression-states (i.e., onset, onset to apex transition, apex, apex to offset transition and offset) are encoded using convolutional neural networks (CNN). The expression-states are taken into account in the objective functions, to improve the expression class separability of the learned feature representation. Next, the learned spatial features with expression-state constraints are transferred to learn temporal features of micro-expression. The temporal feature learning encodes the temporal characteristics of the different states of the micro-expression using long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks. Extensive and comprehensive experiments have been conducted on the publically available CASME II micro-expression dataset. The experimental results showed that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art micro-expression recognition methods in terms of recognition accuracy.
Supplementary Digital Content to manuscript : Ageing with HIV in South Africa

We used STDSIM, a stochastic microsimulation model of the transmission and control of HIV and other STIs [1-3]. The model simulates the life course of individuals in a dynamic network of sexual contacts. Events like partnership formation or the acquisition of infections are the result of random processes, determined by probability distributions. Therefore, the results of the model are subject to stochastic variation. It is necessary to perform multiple runs and average the results to diminish the stochasticity in predictions.
Much ado about morphemes

Most of the psycholinguists working on morphological processing nowadays admit that morphemes are represented in long-term memory and the predominant hypothesis of lexical access is morpheme-based as it supposes a systematic morphological decomposition mechanism taking place during the very early stages of word recognition. Consequently, morphemes would stand as access units for any item (i.e., word or nonword) that can be split into two morphemes. One major criticism of this prelexical hypothesis is that the mechanism can only be applied to regular and perfectly segmentable words and, more problematic, it reduces the role of morphology to surface/formal effects. Recently, Giraudo & Dal Maso (2016) discussed the issue of morphological processing through the notion of morphological salience – as defined as the relative role of the word and its parts – and its implications for theories and models of morphological processing. The issue of the relative prominence of the whole word and its morphological components has indeed been overshadowed by the fact that psycholinguistic research has progressively focused on purely formal and superficial features of words, drawing researchers’ attention away from what morphology really is: systematic mappings between form and meaning. While I do not deny that formal features can play a role in word processing, an account of the general mechanisms of lexical access also needs to consider the perceptual and functional salience of lexical and morphological items. Consequently, if the sensitivity to the morphological structure is recognized, I claim that it corresponds to secondary and derivative units of description/analysis. Focusing on salience from a mere formal point of view, I consider in the present contribution how a decompositional hypothesis could deal with some phonological endings whose graphemic transcriptions are various. To this end, a distributional study of the final sound [o] in French is presented. The richness and the diversity of the distributions of this ending (in terms of type of forms, size and frequency) reveal that paradigmatic relationships are more suitable to guide morphological processing than morphological parsing as suggested by the lexeme-based approach of morphology (see Fradin 2003).
The Dynamics of Transposable Elements in Structured Populations

We analyzed the dynamics of transposable elements (TEs) according to Wright's island and continent-island models, assuming that selection tends to counter the deleterious effects of TEs. We showed that migration between host populations has no impact on either the existence or the stability of the TE copy number equilibrium points obtained in the absence of migration. However, if the migration rate is slower than the transposition rate or if selection is weak, then the TE copy numbers in all the populations can be expected to slowly become homogeneous, whereas a heterogeneous TE copy number distribution between populations is maintained if TEs are mobilized in some populations. The mean TE copy number is highly sensitive to the population size, but as a result of migration between populations, it decreases as the sum of the population sizes increases and tends to reach the same value in these populations. We have demonstrated the existence of repulsion between TE insertion sites, which is established by selection and amplified by drift. This repulsion is reduced as much as the migration rate is higher than the recombination rate between the TE insertion sites. Migration and demographic history are therefore strong forces in determining the dynamics of TEs within the genomes and the populations of a species.
Referring strategies in American Sign Language and English (with co-speech gesture): The role of modality in referring to non-nameable objects

ABSTRACT American Sign Language (ASL) and English differ in linguistic resources available to express visual–spatial information. In a referential communication task, we examined the effect of language modality on the creation and mutual acceptance of reference to non-nameable figures. In both languages, description times reduced over iterations and references to the figures’ geometric properties (“shape-based reference”) declined over time in favor of expressions describing the figures’ resemblance to nameable objects (“analogy-based reference”). ASL signers maintained a preference for shape-based reference until the final (sixth) round, while English speakers transitioned toward analogy-based reference by Round 3. Analogy-based references were more time efficient (associated with shorter round description times). Round completion times were longer for ASL than for English, possibly due to gaze demands of the task and/or to more shape-based descriptions. Signers’ referring expressions remained unaffected by figure complexity while speakers preferred analogy-based expressions for complex figures and shape-based expressions for simple figures. Like speech, co-speech gestures decreased over iterations. Gestures primarily accompanied shape-based references, but listeners rarely looked at these gestures, suggesting that they were recruited to aid the speaker rather than the addressee. Overall, different linguistic resources (classifier constructions vs. geometric vocabulary) imposed distinct demands on referring strategies in ASL and English.
Relationships between self-rated health, functional disability and psychological well-being in rheumatoid arthritis

Objective: The objective of this study is to specify relationships between self-perceived health, functional disability, psychological well-being and disease duration in patients with early rheumatoid arthritis (RA). This issue is interesting since recent studies reveal that subjective evaluations of health appear to be the most powerful predictor of a number of important outcomes such as mortality, morbidity or utilisation of health care services. However, in spite of a growing number of studies on self-perceived health and the above-mentioned variables, the interpretation of these relationships remains unclear. On the other hand, a closer understanding of mechanisms underlying the process of evaluation of health could be useful in clarifying these associations. Methods: In this study relationships between self-perceived health, disability, psychological well-being and disease duration are evaluated by means of correlation, linear multiple regression and LISREL analyses. Results: In general the outcomes of the analyses support our expectation that functional disability and psychological well-being are important determinants of self-perceived health. The results of LISREL suggest that the level of psychological well-being significantly influences the impact of disability on self-perceived health. In addition, the outcomes imply interesting associations between self-perceived health and psychological well-being, and support the concept of ‘feedback loops’ in the disease process. Conclusion: More insight into the process of evaluation of subjective health may provide us with relevant information about those treatment possibilities that may contribute to the improvement of the patient’s quality of life.