Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Economic Growth and Convergence Across the United States

A key economic issue is whether poor countries or regions tend to grow faster than rich ones: are there automatic forces that lead to convergence over time in levels of per capita income and product? After considering predictions of closed- and open-economy neoclassical growth theories, we examine data since 1840 from the U.S. states. We find clear evidence of convergence, but the findings can be reconciled quantitatively with neoclassical models only if diminishing returns to capital set in very slowly. The results from a broad sample of countries are similar if we hold constant a set of variables that proxy for differences in steady-state characteristics. Two types of existing theories seem to fit the facts: the neoclassical growth model with broadly-defined capital and a limited role for diminishing returns, and endogenous growth models with constant returns and gradual diffusion of technology across economies.
Gender-Based Differences in Life Insurance Ownership

This article estimates the influence of income and the value of household production on the amount of life insurance purchases for both husbands and wives, and investigates whether the response of life insurance purchases to these two key motives differs by gender. The results indicate that there are meaningful differences between husbands and wives in their demand for life insurance functions. Although money income is the most significant determinant of life insurance holdings for both husbands and wives, there is evidence that contributions to household production also influence the purchase of life insurance.
Maternal embryokines that regulate development of the bovine preimplantation embryo

Proper embryonic development depends upon regulatory signals from the reproductive tract called embryokines. This review uses the cow as a model to understand the developmental processes controlled by embryokines. The focus is on 3 embryokines that have been shown to increase competence of embryos to survive after transfer to recipients: CSF2, IGF1, and DKK1. Together, these molecules regulate key events required for development of the embryo to the blastocyst stage including proliferation (enhanced by IGF1), development of the inner cell mass (regulated by CSF2), control of differentiation (modified by DKK1), and inhibition of apoptosis and stress-mediated developmental arrest (IGF1 and CSF2).
Classroom Applications of Mnemonic Instruction: Acquisition, Maintenance, and Generalization

This investigation evaluated the effectiveness of classroom mnemonic instruction of science content, for 19 students with mild disabilities. Students were given either mnemonic instruction or more traditional instruction in a within-subjects design, in which treatment order was counterbalanced across classrooms, for each of two weekly units in life science. Following a third week of mnemonic instruction, students were taught to generate and draw their own mnemonic pictures. Results suggested that mnemonic instruction resulted in substantial increases in initial content acquisition, and substantially higher delayed-recall scores, over more traditional instructional procedures. Further, it was found that trained students were able to successfully generate and apply their own mnemonic strategies to novel content. Students overwhelmingly preferred mnemonic instruction over traditional instructional methods.
Towards reliable and valid measurement of individualized student parameters

Research in Educational Data Mining could benefit from greater efforts to ensure that models yield reliable, valid, and interpretable parameter estimates. These efforts have especially been lacking for individualized student-parameter models. We collected two datasets from a sizable student population with excellent “depth” – that is, many observations for each skill for each student. We fit two models, the Individualized-slope Additive Factors Model (iAFM) and Individualized Bayesian Knowledge Tracing (iBKT), both of which individualize for student ability and student learning rate. Estimates of student ability were reliable and valid: they were consistent across both models and across both datasets, and they significantly predicted out-of-tutor pretest data. In one of the datasets, estimates of student learning rate were reliable and valid: consistent across models and significantly predictive of pretest-posttest gains. This is the first demonstration that statistical models of data resulting from students’ use of learning technology can produce reliable and valid estimates of individual student learning rates. Further, we sought to interpret and understand what differentiates a student with a high estimated learning rate from a student with a low one. We found that learning rate is significantly related to estimates of student ability (prior knowledge) and self-reported measures of diligence. Finally, we suggest a variety of possible applications of models with reliable estimates of individualized student parameters, including a more novel, straightforward way of identifying wheel spinning.
Severe infantile epilepsies: molecular genetics challenge clinical classification.

In 1978, Charlotte Dravet described the ‘cryptogenic’ epilepsy syndrome severe myoclonic epilepsy of infancy (SMEI) (Dravet, 1978). This severe generalized epileptic encephalopathy begins at around 6 months of age with febrile hemiclonic or generalized status epilepticus. Hemiclonic status typically recurs involving each side independently. After 1 year of age, other seizure types appear including absence, partial, atonic and often myoclonic seizures. Early development is normal, with slowing and regression after 1 to 2 years; pyramidal features and ataxia may also evolve. The prognosis is poor. The recent draft proposal of the ILAE classification suggests the eponymous name Dravet syndrome instead of SMEI in recognition that not all cases experience myoclonic seizures (Engel, 2001). SMEI is associated with a family history of seizures in 50% of patients. Affected relatives of SMEI probands have epilepsy subsyndromes such as febrile seizures and mild generalized epilepsies. These phenotypes are consistent with the generalized epilepsy with febrile seizures plus (GEFS+) spectrum (Singh et al ., 2001). GEFS+ is a familial epilepsy syndrome characterized by heterogeneous phenotypes with most individuals having benign childhood seizure disorders ranging from classical ‘febrile seizures’ to ‘febrile seizures plus’ where febrile seizures continue past early childhood or afebrile convulsions occur (Scheffer and Berkovic, 1997). Within the …
Firms, International Money and Prices: A Survey of the Literature

Sluggish price adjustments with respect to exchange rate shocks take essentially two forms. Firstly, prices do not adjust completely to neutralize the effects of nominal exchange rate shocks. Secondly, price adjustments after exchange rate shocks only take place in discrete time intervals, in other words they are discontinuous. These two features of price adjustments form our definition of international price rigidities. In this paper we shall present a survey of the empirical and theoretical literature on international price rigidities. We provide the underlying intuition of the theoretical research and present a brief summary of the empirical findings.
Factors Related with Induced Abortion among Primigravid Women in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

A case-control study was conducted between July and August 2001 in Ho Chi Minh City to investigate factors associated with having induced abortions among primigravid women aged 16 to 38 years. Interviews were conducted with 87 women undergoing abortion (cases) and 81 pregnant women coming for antenatal care (controls). Multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that older age (odds ratio [OR]=0.84) and being married (OR=0.05) decreased the risk of getting unintended pregnancy leading to abortion. Risk factors of obtaining an abortion were not being exposed to family planning promotion on television (OR=2.28) and not knowing the adverse effects of abortion (OR=10.26). Descriptive analysis of contraceptive behavior showed that 41% of cases had never used contraceptives and the reason for non-usage was lack of knowledge of any type of contraceptives in 43% of the cases. Additionally, only 24% of cases had discussed about family planning with their partners. Effective contraceptive methods should be promoted among young population, both females and males, and they need to be informed of the consequences of abortion. Television programs might be an effective mode of providing the information.
Dictionary Learning Inspired Deep Network for Scene Recognition

Scene recognition remains one of the most challenging problems in image understanding. With the help of fully connected layers (FCL) and rectified linear units (ReLu), deep networks can extract the moderately sparse and discriminative feature representation required for scene recognition. However, few methods consider exploiting a sparsity model for learning the feature representation in order to provide enhanced discriminative capability. In this paper, we replace the conventional FCL and ReLu with a new dictionary learning layer, that is composed of a finite number of recurrent units to simultaneously enhance the sparse representation and discriminative abilities of features via the determination of optimal dictionaries. In addition, with the help of the structure of the dictionary, we propose a new label discriminative regressor to boost the discrimination ability. We also propose new constraints to prevent overfitting by incorporating the advantage of the Mahalanobis and Euclidean distances to balance the recognition accuracy and generalization performance. Our proposed approach is evaluated using various scene datasets and shows superior performance to many state-of-the-art approaches.
Authoritarian Electoral Engineering and its Limits: A Curious Case of the Imperiali Highest Averages Method in Russia

This study examines the limits of electoral engineering in a consolidating authoritarian regime by focusing on the case of the Imperiali highest averages method of proportional seat allocation in Russia's regional legislative elections. The Imperiali method strongly disadvantages the opposition. But, in the absence of political constraint or trends towards liberalisation, most of the regional decision makers still chose a more permissive formula. The trade-off among the incentives to solidify the power monopoly, to maintain the democratic façade of the regime and to co-opt the opposition was achieved by rejecting the least permissive electoral formula and choosing a middle-of-the-road solution instead.
Social capital, firm embeddedness and regional development

Cooke P., Clifton N. and Oleaga M. (2005) Social capital, firm embeddedness and regional development, Regional Studies 39 , 1065–1077. This paper presents the results of a research project examining the effects of social capital on the performance of small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in 12 UK regions. It first investigates the association between performance and social capital use at the firm level, then it seeks to move beyond the confines of the individual firm in order to relate these ‘firm capabilities’ findings to the meso‐level to assess regional economic performance in relation to social capital. The research on the conscious use by firms of ‘relational embeddedness’ in markets shows this to be an important indicator of SME performance, but not conclusively of regional economic performance measured in terms of regional competitiveness.
Series Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs Federal Reserve Board , Washington , D . C . The Effect of Satellite Entry on Product Quality for Cable Television

In vertically differentiated markets, the effects of firm entry are contingent upon whether incumbent firms can respond to entry by adjusting product quality in addition to simply lowering prices. Using market-level data, I estimate a structural model of supply and demand for subscription television that takes into account the endogeneity of quality choice. Using counterfactual analysis, I decompose the effect of satellite entry on existing cable into two components: the conventional price response and the effect of endogenous quality adjustments (measured by changes in programming content). Consistent with the empirical observation that cable prices rose during the 1990s and early 2000s “in spite of” increasing competition, I find that raising both price and quality for the most comprehensive subscription package—i.e., competing “headto-head”—is the rational response to entry by cable systems in markets with relatively homogeneous consumer types. Elsewhere, incumbents respond less aggressively and relegate themselves to being the low-end provider. When an entrant credibly commits to serving consumers with the highest preferences for quality, competition over both price and quality lowers the welfare gains due to entry, relative to pure price competition. In particular, head-to-head competition results in “crowding” of quality choices toward the high end of the market and inefficiently low product differentiation. In such cases, consumers with weak quality preferences may actually become worse off following entry. The evidence also suggests that the observed degradation of the lowest-quality cable tier in many markets during this time period—while commonly seen as an attempt to evade price regulation—may actually have been welfare-enhancing. ∗email: sean.chu@frb.gov. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Governors or the staff of the Federal Reserve System. The author would like to thank DirecTV, Echostar, Warren Publishing, and Media Business Corp. for providing the data used in this study.
Competing Pre-marital Investments

Pre-marital investments by spouses are largely viewed as public goods within the marriage. So individuals may underinvest. But individuals also use their investments to compete for spouses with higher investments. In a large marriage market, the higher equilibrium match quality obtained by increasing pre-marital investment exactly internalizes the external benefit of the investment so the competitive equilibrium is effcient. This model of competing investments in local public goods is a special case of Rosen's hedonic market model. In small marriage markets, the competition for spouses will raise incentives to invest in pre-marital investments as well as making these investments less predictable.
Engaging with the Ecological Footprint as a Decision-Making Tool: Process and Responses

Abstract Since the initial development of the Ecological Footprint in the early 1990s, the concept has gained increased interest amongst academics and practitioners internationally. In the UK, it is estimated that some 60 to 70 Ecological Footprint studies were undertaken between 1999 and 2004. Although the majority of interest in Ecological Footprinting has come from local government, a recent study has found that government officers involved in the formulation of council policy have not been able to engage with the Ecological Footprint as a process or use the results to inform policy decisions. This paper analyses how an Ecological Footprint has been developed for Cardiff, the capital city of Wales. The approach used to construct an Ecological Footprint for Cardiff has been significantly different to that which had been used previously in the UK, as it has involved a unique consortium of researchers at Cardiff University and policy development officers at Cardiff Council checking the quality of data used in the Footprint calculation, and developing a range of policy scenarios.
Health implications of new age technologies for adolescents: a review of the research

Purpose of review Within the past 20 years, there have been profound advances in personal technology. Although adolescents have embraced the Internet, video games and smart phones, with their extraordinary potential for education, entertainment and connecting with peers, respectively, there is a ‘dark side’ to these new age technologies. This article identifies many of the adverse physical, psychological, developmental and emotional consequences of our new age technologies. Recent findings As Internet access has become easier, faster and more ubiquitous, there is increased evidence of its potential for direct and indirect harm to teens. Sexually explicit material is now indiscriminately available to youth, and studies have linked pornography with a number of negative health effects. Internet addiction is a problem even among teenagers who do not view pornography online. The rise of the Internet and social media sites now makes it easier for a student to bully a peer, and adolescents represent the majority of cyberbullying victims These technologies not only carry increased morbidity but also mortality, with increased suicides due to cyberbullying and motor vehicle deaths due to texting while driving. Summary Paediatricians play a critical role in educating adolescents and their parents about the risks associated with new age technologies.
Mapping the neural systems that mediate the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Task (PASAT)

The paced auditory serial addition task (PASAT), in which subjects hear a number-string and add the two most-recently heard numbers, is a neuropsychological test sensitive to cerebral dysfunction. We mapped the brain regions activated by the PASAT using positron emission tomography (PET) and 15O-water to measure cerebral blood flow. We parsed the PASAT by mapping sites activated by immediate repetition of numbers and by repetition of the prior number after the presentation of the next number in the series. The PASAT activated dispersed non-contiguous foci in the superior temporal gyri, bifrontal and biparietal sites, the anterior cingulate and bilateral cerebellar sites. These sites are consistent with the elements of the task that include auditory perception and processing, speech production, working memory, and attention. Sites mediating addition were not identified. The extent of the sites activated during the performance of the PASAT accounts for the sensitivity of this test and justifies its use in a variety of seemingly disparate conditions. (JINS, 2004, 10, 26–34.)
Multi-Lagged Specification of the Ohlson Model

This paper extends the study by Bar-Yosef, Callen, and Livnat (BCL) (1996), in which they test the single lagged formulation of the Ohlson (1995) linear valuation model by assuming that book values, earnings, and dividends are the underlying primitives in a multi-lagged Garman-Ohlson (1980) framework. Unlike BCL who focus solely on the information dynamic, this paper estimates both the information dynamic and the valuation equation. Also, since Akaike's (1969a, 1969b) final prediction error (FPE) and Akaike's (1973, 1974) information criterion (AIC) are known to overfit in small samples, the lag structure specification in this study is estimated by the AICe criterion suggested by Hurvich and Tsai (1989, 1991, 1994) rather than by the FPE criterion of BCL. Furthermore, to bias the case against a multi-lagged structure, the maximum lag structure is limited to three lags per variable rather than the five lags of BCL. Utilizing the result that the lag structure of the information dynamic determines the lag structure of the valuation equation, the internal consistency of the model is evaluated from the estimated lag structures. The median lag structure for the valuation equation implied by the lag structure of the estimated information dynamic is found to be somewhat inconsistent with the median lag structure estimated directly from the valuation equation. Further testing on a stationary subsample suggests that the inconsistency may be induced by nonstationarities. Overall, the results indicate strongly that the modeling of earnings and book values in a linear valuation framework necessarily requires a multi-lagged formulation rather than the single lag formulation common to the empirical accounting literature.
Interleukin‐8 is involved in cervical dilatation but not in prelabour cervical ripening

Our aim was to determine the amount and source of interleukin (IL)‐8 and to study IL‐8 receptor expression in the human cervix during pregnancy and after labour. Cervical biopsies were obtained from six non‐pregnant women, eight women undergoing pregnancy termination, 17 women undergoing elective caesarean section and 11 women after vaginal delivery. IL‐8 levels were compared in women with and without a ripe cervix, as determined by cervical Bishop score and cervicovaginal fetal fibronectin levels. Levels of IL‐8 and IL‐1β, a regulator of IL‐8 expression, were determined by enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). IL‐8, IL‐1β and IL‐8 receptor proteins were localized by immunohistochemistry. Compared with late pregnancy, IL‐8 levels increased after labour and vaginal delivery (P < 0·01) but there was no correlation with cervical ripening. IL‐8 was localized to stromal cells, macrophages and granulocytes. There were no significant differences in IL‐1β levels between groups. IL‐8 receptors were expressed primarily on granulocytes and macrophages after vaginal delivery. We conclude that IL‐8 is involved in cervical dilatation but not in cervical ripening.
A new lease charging system for Busan container terminals: a historical case study

This paper aims to examine the inherent problems in the old lease charging system at Busan container terminals, to explore the factors and rationale, both theoretically and practically, for developing a reasonable lease calculation model, and to articulate the design of an efficient lease charging system to enhance throughputs. On the basis of the above achievements, implications for the newly introduced lease charging system of the Port of Busan based on the flat rate method are drawn.
Tardive dyskinesia is caused by maladaptive synaptic plasticity: A hypothesis

It has been 50 years since the first patients with tardive dyskinesia (TD) were described, but the pathophysiology is only partially understood and effective treatments have remained elusive. Newer atypical antipsychotics with less nonspecific activity at dopamine receptors have not heralded the end of tardive dyskinesia and merely highlight the incomplete understanding of the disorder.