Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Student Responses to Merit Scholarship Retention Rules

A common justification for state-sponsored merit scholarships like Georgia’s HOPE program is to promote academic achievement. However, grade-based retention rules encourage other behavioral responses. Using longitudinal records of enrolled undergraduates at the University of Georgia between 1989 and 1997, we estimate the effects of HOPE on course-taking, treating nonresidents as a control group. First, we find that HOPE decreased full-load enrollments and increased course withdrawals among resident freshmen. Second, the scholarship’s influence on course-taking behavior is concentrated on students whose predicted freshmen GPAs place them on or below the scholarship-retention margin. Third, HOPE substantially increased summer school credits.
An Extension of the Core solution Concept

A solution concept for cooperative games, the extended core, is introduced. This concept is always nonempty yet coincides with the core whenever it is nonempty. Moreover, a non-cooperative framework can generate the extended core. Every transferable utility game is associated with a two-player zero-sum non-cooperative game. The min-max values of the associated zerosum games characterize when cooperative games have nonempty cores. If the core is empty, the min-max value determines how an exogenous regulator can impose costs on proper coalition formation so that there are no incentives to deviate from extended core imputations, which are necessarily feasible in the original game. In order to choose among the imputations belonging to the extended core, a proportional version of the nucleolus is proposed as a selection device.
Equity and Development

This year, the workshop examined the conceptual foundation of the workshop sessions by discussing the definition of equity itself. What do we mean by equity, and how does equity differ from equality? Whereas equity is commonly associated positively with impartiality and justice, economists understand equality as an idealistic and unattainable goal often linked to socialism and communism. The terminological twins equity/equality, however, can be conceptualized in highly diverging ways with different consequences for development strategy. The discussions throughout the workshop mirror the controversial positions of international discourse on the topic. Through the varying dimensions of these terms, discussions focused on the different responsibilities for political action such terms entail. For example, whereas equality in outcome implies an egalitarian perspective, economic studies on inequality in outcome mostly take into account the results of actions and conditions such as unequal incomes. Session I, on what is equity, and, what is the role for governments in the promotion of equity, further discussed how does this role differ between developed and developing countries. Nonetheless, it was suggested that before operationalizing and measuring inequity, the concept itself has to be clarified, and, further arguments indicated that one future challenge for development policy is precisely to combine growth-promoting policies with policies that assure that the poor can fully participate in the opportunities that growth offers. Session II, on equity-enhancing social transformation and historical evidence from European and Transition Countries, focus on policies that impact equity. Session III, on building efficient welfare states and lessons learnt, discussed the task of formulating policies that foster both efficiency and equitable social welfare, while Session IV, on international inequalities and what can be done to reduce them, focuses on the global level, contrary to Session III which concentrated on equity issues at the national level. Finally, Session V, on what will greater integration mean for inequalities between and within the richer and poorer countries of the New Europe, draws a very differentiated picture. Conclusions outlined key issues that need to be addressed, noting the importance of carefully analyzing different redistributive instruments with respect to their effects on growth and efficiency, and vice versa.
Psychometric Comparison of the PROMIS Physical Function CAT With the FAAM and FFI for Measuring Patient-Reported Outcomes

Background: Selecting optimal patient-reported outcome (PRO) instruments is critical to improving the quality of health care. The purpose of this study was to compare the reliability, responsiveness, and efficiency of three PRO measures: the Foot and Ankle Ability Measure–Activity of Daily Living subscale (FAAM_ADL), the Foot Function Index 5-point verbal rating scale (FFI-5pt), and the PROMIS Physical Function computerized adaptive test (PF CAT). Methods: Data were aggregated from 10 clinical sites in the AOFAS’s National Orthopaedic Foot and Ankle Research (OFAR) Network from 311 patients who underwent elective surgery for a disorder of the foot or ankle. Patients were administered the FAAM_ADL, FFI-5pt, and PF CAT at their preoperative visit and at 6 months after surgery. Reliabilities were evaluated using a Rasch model. Responsiveness was calculated using paired samples t test and efficiency was recorded as number of seconds to complete the instrument. Results: Similar reliabilities were found for the three instruments. Item reliabilities for FAAM_ADL, FFI-5pt, and PF CAT were all . 99. Pearson reliabilities for FAAM_ADL, FFI-5pt, and PF CAT were . 95, . 93, and . 96, respectively. On average, patients completed the FAAM_ADL in 179 seconds, the FFI-5pt in 194 seconds, and the PF CAT in 44 seconds, (P < .001). The PF CAT and FAAM_ADL showed significant improvement (P = .01 and P = .001, respectively) in patients’ physical function after treatment; the FFI-5pt did not show improvement. Conclusions: Overall, the PF CAT performed best in terms of reliability, responsiveness, and efficiency in this broad sample of foot and ankle patients. It can be a potential replacement for the conventional PRO measures, but further validation is needed in conjunction with the PROMIS Pain instruments. Level of Evidence: Level I, prospective comparative outcome study.
Feature Enhancement Network: A Refined Scene Text Detector

In this paper, we propose a refined scene text detector with a novel Feature Enhancement Network (FEN)for Region Proposal and Text Detection Refinement. Retrospectively, both region proposal with only 3 x 3 sliding-window feature and text detection refinement with single scale high level feature are insufficient, especially for smaller scene text. Therefore, we design a new FEN network with task-specific, low and high level semantic features fusion to improve the performance of text detection. Besides, since unitary position-sensitive RoI pooling in general object detection is unreasonable for variable text regions, an adaptively weighted position-sensitive RoI pooling layer is devised for further enhancing the detecting accuracy. To tackle the sample-imbalance problem during the refinement stage,we also propose an effective positives mining strategy for efficiently training our network. Experiments on ICDAR2011 and 2013 robust text detection benchmarks demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results, outperforming all reported methods in terms of F-measure.
The identification of mental disorders in the criminal justice system : report to the Criminology Research Council

Incontrovertible evidence now exists to show that the prevalence of mental disorder among those in the criminal justice system (prisoners, offenders on community orders and accused on remand) is significantly greater than is found in the general population. Despite the prevalence of mentally disordered people in the criminal justice system, and the potential consequences of failing to adequately address the issues, few services exist either in prisons or in the community to help identify and prevent these people from entering or remaining in the criminal justice system. This consultancy paper provides an overview of the mechanisms by which persons with mental illnesses are identified across the criminal justice system in Australia. The paper comprises several components. First, a literature review is provided regarding the prevalence of mental disorders across the criminal justice system as well as the various screening measures described in the international literature. Based upon detailed interviews and correspondence with key contact people in the Australian criminal justice system, the authors then provide an overview of current practice identifying mental disorder across police, correctional services, and the courts in all jurisdictions. Finally, a fiscal analysis is provided of the most promising approaches and recommendations made for further development in this area.
OUTCOME FOLLOWING STANDARDIZED 185 MBq DOSE 131I THERAPY FOR GRAVES' DISEASE

The clinical outcome of 199 patients with Graves' disease treated with standardized 185MBq 131I therapy doses has been analysed. Most patients were controlled with antithyroid drugs prior to the 131I therapy, and also received antithyroid drugs for several months following 131I. The median follow‐up period was 5.5 years. The single 185MBq 131I dose successfully treated 72.4% of patients. The 1,2 and 5 year hypothyroid figures were 15.5%, 19.3% and 27.3%, respectively. Previous thyroidectomy was associated with an increased hypothyroid rate. Retreatment was required by 25.6%, with 3.5% requiring more than two 131I doses. Discriminant analysis of pretreatment variables suggests that patients with large goitres or severe disease (serum T3 > 10nmol/l) should be treated with higher doses of 131I.
Mainstream Macroeconomics: A ‘Keynesian’ Revival?

This paper examines the nature of the ‘convergence of vision’ that is said to have existed within mainstream macroeconomics prior to the ‘global economic recession’, and which has been the subject of strong criticism in recent times from Nobel Laureates such as Krugman, Akerlof and Solow. The nature of a proposed ‘Keynesian revival’ is also examined, and it is concluded that while the required changes in theoretical content and methodological perspective are substantial, the most significant obstacle to be overcome is to be found in what Keynes had referred to as the ‘metaphysical principles' upon which laissez faire has been founded.
Disclosing intellectual capital in company annual reports: Evidence from Malaysia

Companies around the world are recognizing the importance of intellectual capital (IC) and its significant contribution towards adding higher value to its products or services. The objective of the study is to examine the IC disclosure practices of the top 20 profit‐making public listed companies in Malaysia in their annual reports, both qualitatively and quantitatively. This paper adopts the definition of Karl Erik Sveiby which classified IC as internal capital, external capital and employee competence. A content analysis of 20 copies of 2001 annual reports was carried out. The study indicates that the incidences of voluntary disclosure of IC in company report are high qualitatively, but not quantitatively. This study will assist future researchers, the national accounting setting board and regulators to develop an appropriate accounting framework for those ICs which do not have accounting standards yet.
SC2Net: Sparse LSTMs for Sparse Coding

The iterative hard-thresholding algorithm (ISTA) is one of the most popular optimization solvers to achieve sparse codes. However, ISTA suffers from following problems: 1) ISTA employs non-adaptive updating strategy to learn the parameters on each dimension with a fixed learning rate. Such a strategy may lead to inferior performance due to the scarcity of diversity; 2) ISTA does not incorporate the historical information into the updating rules, and the historical information has been proven helpful to speed up the convergence. To address these challenging issues, we propose a novel formulation of ISTA (named as adaptive ISTA) by introducing a novel \textit{adaptive momentum vector}. To efficiently solve the proposed adaptive ISTA, we recast it as a recurrent neural network unit and show its connection with the well-known long short term memory (LSTM) model. With a new proposed unit, we present a neural network (termed SC2Net) to achieve sparse codes in an end-to-end manner. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first works to bridge the $\ell_1$-solver and LSTM, and may provide novel insights in understanding model-based optimization and LSTM. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method on both unsupervised and supervised tasks.
Role of the PAR1 Receptor 8th Helix in Signaling

The protease-activated receptors are tethered ligand G protein-coupled receptors that are activated by proteolytic cleavage of the extracellular domain of the receptor. The archetypic protease-activated receptor PAR1 strongly activates Gq signaling pathways, but very little is known regarding the mechanism of signal transference between receptor and internally located G protein. The recent x-ray structure of rhodopsin revealed the presence of a highly conserved amphipathic 8th helix that is likely to be physically interposed between receptor and G protein. We found that the analogous 8th helix region of PAR1 was critical for activation of Gq-dependent signaling. Engineering an 8th helix α-aneurysm with a downwards-directed alanine residue markedly interfered with signal transference to Gq. The 8th helix-anchoring cysteine palmitoylation sites were important for the affinity of ligand-dependent G protein coupling but did not affect the maximal signal. A network of H-bond and ionic interactions was found to connect the N-terminal portion of the 8th helix to the nearby NPXXY motif on transmembrane helix 7 and also to the adjacent intracellular loop-1. Disruption of these pairwise interactions caused additive defects in coupling to G protein, indicating that the transmembrane 7–8th helix-i1 loop may move in a coordinated manner to transfer the signal from PAR1 to G protein. This “7-8-1” interaction network was found to be prevalent in G protein-coupled receptors involved in endothelial signaling and angiogenesis.
Functional Diversity, Absorptive Capability and Product Success: The Moderating Role of Project Complexity in New Product Development Teams

Absorptive capability appears to be an appealing concept in the technology and innovation management literature. Though absorptive capability attracts researchers from a variety of disciplines, team‐level empirical research on it is scant. In this study, we operationalized team absorptive capability as a multidimensional construct involving knowledge acquisition, assimilation and exploitation. This study also explores the moderating effect of project complexity between team absorptive capability and new product success. In studying the data from 239 new product development projects using partial least squares structural equation modelling, we found that team functional diversity is a significant determinant of team absorptive capability. Moreover, regarding the relationships between team absorptive capability and new product success, we uncovered that (i) new product success is dependent on the ability to understand the acquired knowledge, and (ii) the teams appear to be more cautious in putting the assimilated knowledge into practice to the extent that project complexity increases.
Diffusion-weighted MR microimaging of the lacrimal glands in patients with Sjogren's syndrome.

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to detect quantitative diffusion-weighted abnormalities in the lacrimal glands of patients with Sjogren's syndrome. MATERIALS AND METHODS Diffusion-weighted MRI was performed on 31 healthy volunteers and 11 Sjogren's syndrome patients with impaired lacrimal function. The volunteers and patients underwent MRI with a single-shot spin-echo echo-planar technique using a 47-mm microscopy coil. The apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) of the lacrimal and parotid glands was obtained with b factors of 500 and 1,000 sec/mm(2). T1-weighted and fat-suppressed T2-weighted MR microscopic images were also obtained to evaluate the gland morphology and signals. RESULTS MR microscopy provided high-resolution images of the lacrimal glands that enabled ADC measurements. The ADCs of the normal lacrimal glands showed no significant sex- or age-related changes. The ADCs for the lacrimal glands were significantly higher than those of the parotid glands in the same subjects (mean +/- SD, 891 +/- 103 vs 703 +/- 84 x 10(-6) mm(2)/sec, respectively; p < 0.0001, Mann-Whitney U test). We found that ADCs of the lacrimal glands in Sjogren's syndrome patients were significantly lower than those from the normal glands of age-matched healthy volunteers (736 +/- 34 vs 923 +/- 84 x 10(-6) mm(2)/sec; p < 0.0001, Mann-Whitney U test). CONCLUSION These findings suggest that the measurement of ADCs may be a useful tool to assess abnormalities of the lacrimal glands in patients with Sjogren's syndrome.
A Profile of Female Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence: Implications for Treatment

Ce rapport est egalement disponible en francais. This report is also available in French. Pour obtenir des exemplaires supplementaires, veuillez vous adresser a la Direction de la recherche, Service correctionnel du Canada, 340, avenue Laurier ouest, Ottawa (Ontario) K1A 0P9. Should additional copies be required, they can be obtained from the Research Branch, Correctional Service of Canada, 340 Laurier Ave., West, Ottawa, Ontario, K1A 0P9.
Molecular pathology and clinical characteristics of oligodendroglial neoplasms

To evaluate the role of molecular genetics in the routine clinic, we investigated allelic imbalance at 1p36, 19q13, 17p13, 10p12‐15, and 10q22‐26 and p53 mutation in 100 oligodendroglial neoplasms diagnosed at a single treatment center between 2000 and 2003. The ‐1p/‐19q genotype, seen in 64, 34, 77, and 30% of OII, OAII, OIII, and OAIII respectively, was inversely related to p53 mutation and 17p13 loss. Genotype was unrelated to tumor location and could not distinguish high‐grade tumors that presented de novo from those that progressed from a previous lower grade malignancy. Presentation with seizures was more common in cases with the ‐1p/‐19q genotype, and these remained stable for longer before treatment. In longitudinal samples, 74% retained their initial histological differentiation, whereas 29% showed new genetic alterations, the ‐1p/‐19q genotype being acquired in three cases. Loss of 1p36 and 19q13, 17p13, chromosome 10, and p53 mutation were significantly associated with survival from presentation in Kaplan–Meier analysis (p < 0.01), and loss of 1p36 and 19q13 and loss of 17p13 retained significance in multivariate analysis. In this recently diagnosed unselected series, clinical differences in tumors with and without the ‐1p/‐19q genotype support a genetic approach to aid diagnosis and prognostication for oligodendroglial neoplasms. Ann Neurol 2005;57:855–865
The Contribution of ICT to Freedom and Democracy: An Empirical Analysis of Archival Data on the Middle East

This study is based on an empirical analysis of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) archival data for ten Middle Eastern countries: Bahrain, Iran, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and United Arab Emirates for the period of 1995–2003. Some previous studies consider the impact of ICT on socio‐economic development in the region. Using a set of regression analyses, this paper shows that ICT expansion in the Middle East has not only resulted in the reduction of the Digital Divide between this region and developed countries, it has also had a positive impact on promoting democracy and freedom of expression in a region that suffers most from political, social and global conflicts (Freedom House, 2006; Reporters Without Borders, 2005).
Mergers as a Means of Restructuring Distressed Firms: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract We examine 38 takeovers of distressed firms and find that these takeovers are more likely to involve firms in the same industry and less likely to be hostile takeovers than are acquisitions in general. We use five different measures to evaluate post-merger performance of the combined bidder and target firms. All performance measures suggest that bidders are unable to successfully restructure targets. The market demonstrates an ability to forecast the success of restructuring. Restructuring success is negatively related to the size of premium paid by the bidder for the target and positively related to the financial distress of the target.
The psycho-social dimension of pain and health-related quality of life in the oldest old.

BACKGROUND Chronic pain has an impact on the physical and social functioning of older people which in turn may worsen their health-related quality of life. Research with focus on prolonged extensive pain in the most elderly and how pain may interfere with their life situation is scarce. AIMS The aims were to describe and investigate pain from a multidimensional point of view (duration, location, psycho-social) and health-related quality of life as well as to compare sex and age groups in people aged 80 years and over. METHODS In this cross-sectional study, a total of 225 of 282 people responded to a questionnaire consisting of two instruments and background questions. The psycho-social dimension of pain was measured using the Multidimensional Pain Inventory-Swedish language version (MPI-S) with five scales: Pain Severity, Interference, Life Control, Affective Distress and Social Support. Health-related quality of life was measured using the Short Form Health Survey-12 (SF-12). RESULTS Median duration of pain was 9.0 years, and the mean number of pain locations was 2.04. The MPI-S scale Interference with a negative orientation had the highest mean score, while the mean score for Social Support was the highest for the scales with a positive orientation. The duration of pain was significantly greater for women, and those aged 80-85 years had higher pain severity than those aged≥86. Participants with a lower health-related quality of life experienced significantly more severe pain, were more troubled with pain and had less control of their life. CONCLUSIONS Older people with prolonged pain suffered from a low health-related quality of life. Pain interfered with their lives and contributed to diminished control in their daily lives. Nurses are essential for the identification and prevention of pain and should be aware of how pain affects older people's physical, mental and social health.
Momentum trading, disposition effects and prediction of future share prices: an experimental study of multiple reference points in responses to short- and long-run return trends

Returns of equities tend to exhibit momentum in the short to medium term and reversals in the longer term. While presenting results partly supporting such findings, we demonstrate that investors rely on multiple reference points in their trading behaviour. In particular it is shown that the interaction between long- and short-run returns may have important explanatory value for investment decisions. Predictions of future stock prices furthermore tend to be positively biased when evaluated against trading patterns, while loss aversion may drive investors to sometimes act against their beliefs about market sentiments. Implications for market responses to price movements are discussed.
Modeling Dielectric Constant of Semiconductor Nanocrystals

A simple and unified model has been established for size- and composition-dependent dielectric constant ε(<i>x</i>,<i>D</i>) based on a size-dependent melting-temperature model, where x is the fraction of composition, <i>D</i> denotes the diameter of nanoparticles and nanowires, and the thickness of thin films. It demonstrates that depending on the dimension of nanocrystals, ε(<i>x</i>,<i>D</i>) decreases with different trend as <i>D</i> drops, while ε(<i>x</i>,<i>D</i>) is a nonlinear function of <i>x</i>. The theoretical prediction agrees approximately with experimental and computer simulation results of semiconductor nanocrystals in single phase or multiphases.