Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
What Drives International Bank Flows? Politics, Institutions and Other Determinants

This paper uses a large panel of bilateral bank flow data to assess how institutions and politics affect international capital -bank in particular- flows. The following key findings emerge: 1) The empirical "gravity" model is the benchmark in explaining the volume of international banking activities. 2) Conditioned on standard gravity factors (distance, GDP, population), well-functioning institutions are a key driving force for international bank flows. Specifically, foreign banks invest substantially more in countries with i) uncorrupt bureaucracies, ii) high-quality legal system, and iii) a non-government controlled banking system. 3) Beyond institutions, politics exert also a firstorder impact. 4) The European Integration process has spurred cross-border banking activities between member states. These results are robust to various econometric methodologies, samples and the potential endogeneity of institutional characteristics. The strong institutions/politics-bank flows nexus has strong implications for asset trade and international macro theories, which have not modelled these relationships explicitly. JEL Classification: F34, F21, G21, K00
Welfare and Equity Impacts of Gasoline Price Changes under Different Public Transportation Service Levels

The impacts on public transit ridership of changes in gasoline prices and service levels have been studied, while the combined effects of gasoline price changes under different levels of transit service have not. This paper discusses a consumer welfare calculation based on a binary mode choice model for commuters in idealized corridors with varying public transportation levels of service. Welfare losses are seen to be greatest for commuters in corridors with poor public transit options, and losses increase with rising gas prices. Low-income commuters are seen to suffer more welfare loss in corridors with low-performing transit options than in corridors with well-performing public transit systems. This simple model points to the need for more research regarding the impact of high gas prices on low-income households’ commute behavior and access to jobs.
The Gulf Arab states and Israel since 1967: from ‘no negotiation’ to tacit cooperation

Abstract This article analyses the Gulf Arab states’ changing posture toward Israel since the June 1967 War. Fifty years on, the ‘three no’s’ of Khartoum have been replaced by the Saudi-coordinated Arab Peace Initiative, which offers Israel normalization in return for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Furthermore, the meaning of ‘normalization’ has been re-defined over the years in accordance with the changing geopolitical circumstances. Mutually beneficial ties between Israel and the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) have grown up in proportion to their shared interests and shared threat perceptions. In the period from the 1967 War to the 1979 Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty, the Gulf Arab states, for the most part, boycotted Israel in line with pan-Arab requirements. While Iranian propaganda during the Khomeini era (1979–1989) depicted Gulf Arab rulers as lackeys of Zionism and imperialism, GCC–Israel ties were anathema. In the 1990s, the GCC lent cautious support to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, and two of its members, Oman and Qatar, expanded trade relations with Israel in defiance of Arab and Gulf norms. The emergence of the Saudi–Iranian regional cold war after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 gave rise to unprecedented levels of tacit security and intelligence cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Three-dimensional extinction mapping and selection effects

Selection effects can bedevil the inference of the properties of a population of astronomical catalogues, unavoidably biasing the observed catalogue. This is particularly true when mapping interstellar extinction in three dimensions: more extinguished stars are fainter and so generally less likely to appear in any magnitude limited catalogue of observations. This paper demonstrates how to account for this selection effect when mapping extinction, so that accurate and unbiased estimates of the true extinction are obtained. We advocate couching the description of the problem explicitly as a Poisson point process, which allows the likelihoods employed to be easily and correctly normalised in such a way that accounts for the selection functions applied to construct the catalogue of observations.
Both Cerebral and Hematopoietic Deficiencies in CCR2 Result in Uncontrolled Herpes Simplex Virus Infection of the Central Nervous System in Mice

CCR2 is a chemokine receptor expressed on the surface of blood leukocytes, particularly «Ly6Chi» inflammatory monocytes and microglia. Signaling through this receptor is thought to influence the immune activity of microglia as well as monocytes egress from the bone marrow (BM) and their trafficking into the central nervous system (CNS) in several neurological diseases. During experimental herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) encephalitis (HSE), CCR2 deficiency has been reported to exacerbate the outcome of the disease. However, the precise contribution of CCR2 expressed in cells of the CNS or peripheral monocytes in the protection against HSE remains unclear. To dissect the differential role of CCR2 during HSE, chimeric mice with receptor deficiency in the brain or blood cells were generated by transplanting wild-type (WT) C57BL/6 or CCR2-/- BM-derived cells in CCR2-/- (WT→CCR2-/-) and WT (CCR2-/-→WT) mice, respectively. Our results indicate that following intranasal infection with 1.2x106 plaque forming units of HSV-1, CCR2 deficiency in hematopoietic cells and, to a lesser extent, in CNS exacerbates the outcome of HSE. Mortality rates of CCR2-/- (71.4%) and CCR2-/-→WT (57.1%) mice were significantly higher than that of WT (15.3%; P<0.01 and P<0.05, respectively) but the difference did not reach statistical significance for WT→CCR2-/- animals (42.8%; P = 0.16). Both peripheral and CNS deficiencies in CCR2 resulted in increased infectious viral titers and wider dissemination of HSV antigens in the brain as well as an overproduction of inflammatory cytokines and chemokines including IL-1β, IL-6, CCL2, CCL3 and CCL5. Furthermore, CCR2 deficiency in the hematopoietic system altered monocytes egress from the BM and their recruitment to the CNS, which may contribute to the failure in HSV-1 containment. Collectively, these data suggest that CCR2 expressed on cells of CNS and especially on peripheral monocytes is important for the control of HSV-1 replication and inflammatory environment during experimental HSE.
Executive function deficits in preschool children with ADHD and DBD.

BACKGROUND Impairments in executive functions (EF) are consistently associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and to a lesser extent, with disruptive behavior disorder (DBD), that is, oppositional defiant disorder or conduct disorder, in school-aged children. Recently, larger numbers of children with these disorders are diagnosed earlier in development, yet knowledge about impairments in clinically diagnosed preschool children and the role of comorbidity is limited. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to examine EF in clinically referred preschool children with a clinical diagnosis of ADHD, DBD and ADHD + DBD. METHOD Participants were 202 children aged 3.5-5.5 years, 61 with ADHD only, 33 with DBD only, 52 with comorbid ADHD + DBD and 56 typically developing children. Five EF tasks were administered. RESULTS Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the two-factor model (inhibition and working memory) fit the data better than a one-factor model in this clinical sample. Preschoolers with ADHD displayed inhibition deficits, also after controlling for IQ. Likewise, preschoolers with DBD displayed impaired inhibition, but when IQ was controlled differences were carried mostly by the effect on the task where motivational demands were high (i.e. when tangible rewards were used). This pattern was also found in the interaction between ADHD and DBD; impaired inhibition in the comorbid group, however, was more severe than in the DBD group. Regarding working memory, few group differences were found. CONCLUSIONS Clinically diagnosed preschool children with ADHD showed robust inhibition deficits, whereas preschool children with DBD showed impaired inhibition especially where motivational incentives were prominent. Severity of inhibition impairment in the comorbid group was similar to the ADHD group.
The changing nature of death and mourning – an analysis of Hungarian obituaries (1961–2000)

Abstract The paper examines obituaries appearing in the Hungarian daily Népszabadság during the second half of the twentieth century. It argues from a social constructivist stance that the reading of these texts gives us insights about the prevailing norms and values related to death. It posits that the issue of death brings to the surface general cultural values as well. Its aim is to see how these norms and values have changed as the political and social structure changed in Hungary. First, the paper looks at general statistical data regarding obituaries which show a decline in their numbers. Using a topic framework, the elements and the structure of the texts are identified. In a detailed analysis of these elements, the paper examines the questions of authorship, informing, traits, identity, the announcement of death, achievements and the funeral, respectively. The findings put existing theories on the ‘death taboo’ in an empirical context in a number of ways. Instead of signifying a death taboo, metaphorical expressions of death show a secular, demystified but not tabooed relationship towards death in Hungary in the second half of the twentieth century.
Resolving Tumor Heterogeneity: Genes Involved in Chordoma Cell Development Identified by Low-Template Analysis of Morphologically Distinct Cells

The classical sacrococcygeal chordoma tumor presents with a typical morphology of lobulated myxoid tumor tissue with cords, strands and nests of tumor cells. The population of cells consists of small non-vacuolated cells, intermediate cells with a wide range of vacuolization and large heavily vacuolated (physaliferous) cells. To date analysis was only performed on bulk tumor mass because of its rare incidence, lack of suited model systems and technical limitations thereby neglecting its heterogeneous composition. We intended to clarify whether the observed cell types are derived from genetically distinct clones or represent different phenotypes. Furthermore, we aimed at elucidating the differences between small non-vacuolated and large physaliferous cells on the genomic and transcriptomic level. Phenotype-specific analyses of small non-vacuolated and large physaliferous cells in two independent chordoma cell lines yielded four candidate genes involved in chordoma cell development. UCHL3, coding for an ubiquitin hydrolase, was found to be over-expressed in the large physaliferous cell phenotype of MUG-Chor1 (18.7-fold) and U-CH1 (3.7-fold) cells. The mannosyltransferase ALG11 (695-fold) and the phosphatase subunit PPP2CB (18.6-fold) were found to be up-regulated in large physaliferous MUG-Chor1 cells showing a similar trend in U-CH1 cells. TMEM144, an orphan 10-transmembrane family receptor, yielded contradictory data as cDNA microarray analysis showed up- but RT-qPCR data down-regulation in large physaliferous MUG-Chor1 cells. Isolation of few but morphologically identical cells allowed us to overcome the limitations of bulk analysis in chordoma research. We identified the different chordoma cell phenotypes to be part of a developmental process and discovered new genes linked to chordoma cell development representing potential targets for further research in chordoma tumor biology.
The importance of career goal in relation to academic performance: a case study of hospitality management students

ABSTRACT Hospitality management programs have commonly offered exclusive learning opportunities to talented students in order to keep “brains” in the industry. While academic performance indices are often used to identify “brains” in the education sector, scant research has empirically examined whether “brains” are intended to stay in the industry. This study surveyed 304 hospitality management students and examined the relationships between their career-goal related factors and academic performance. Findings indicate that career goal and positive job valence toward the hospitality industry are significantly related to academic performance. The results of this study contribute to the limited literature on the relationship between career goal and academic performance.
The Enduring Impact of Childhood Experience on Mental Health: Evidence Using Instrumented Co-Twin Data

The question of whether there is a lasting effect of childhood experience on mental health has eluded causal measurement. We draw upon identical twin data and econometric instrumentation to provide an unbiased answer. We find that 55% of a one standard deviation change in mental health due to idiosyncratic experience at age 9 will still be present three years later. Extending the analysis, we find such persistence to vary with age at impact, gender, and mental health sub-categories. This investigation allows us to get a grasp on the degree to which childhood events influence health and socio-economic outcomes by way of their lagged effect on subsequent mental health. A better understanding of the evolution of mental health also helps identifying when mental health issues can be most effectively treated.
Predicting Children's Emotional And Behavioral Functioning: An Examination Of Coparenting And Parental Satisfaction

To examine the interplay among shared parenting, coparent support, parental satisfaction, and child behavior problems, the current study examines the responses of mothers and fathers who have children between the ages of 3and 6-years. As part of this study, 107 parents (i.e., 80 mothers and 27 fathers) completed a questionnaire packet including measures of coparenting, parental satisfaction, and child behavior problems. Results are examined using correlational and hierarchical regression analyses. Correlational analyses suggest that coparent support and parental satisfaction are related positively and that coparent support and parental satisfaction are related negatively with children’s behavior problems. Unique relationships are found in this study when examining overt supportive behaviors versus perceptions of coparent support, suggesting the importance of examining these constructs separately in relation to parental satisfaction and children’s behavior. Hierarchical regression analyses reveal that, when coparent support measures are examined as different constructs, coparent support and parental satisfaction contribute uniquely to the prediction of children’s emotional and behavioral functioning. These findings highlight the connection between coparent support and parental satisfaction as well as the importance of each in predicting outcomes for children, regardless of how evenly two parents divide childcare responsibilities. These findings also contribute to the literature by suggesting the importance of examining perceptions of support and overt supportive behavior separately. It is hoped that the findings of this study will provide valuable information for potential targets of parenting interventions provided to mothers and fathers in mental health facilities.
Comparison of Model-Based Tests and Selection Strategies to Detect Genetic Polymorphisms Influencing Pharmacokinetic Parameters

We evaluate by simulation three model-based methods to test the influence of a single nucleotide polymorphism on a pharmacokinetic parameter of a drug: analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the empirical Bayes estimates of the individual parameters, likelihood ratio test between models with and without genetic covariate, and Wald tests on the parameters of the model with covariate. Analyses are performed using the FO and FOCE method implemented in the NONMEM software. We compare several approaches for model selection based on tests and global criteria. We illustrate the results with pharmacokinetic data on indinavir from HIV-positive patients included in COPHAR 2-ANRS 111 to study the gene effect prospectively. Only the tests based on the EBE obtain an empirical type I error close to the expected 5%. The approximation made with the FO algorithm results in a significant inflation of the type I error of the LRT and Wald tests.
A new approach to model the stationary behavior of TCP connections

In this paper, we outline a methodology that can be applied to model the behavior of TCP flows. The proposed methodology stems from a Markovian model of a single TCP source, and eventually considers the superposition and interaction of several such sources using standard queueing analysis techniques. Our approach allows the evaluation of such performance indices as throughput, queueing delay and packet loss of TCP flows. The results obtained through our model are validated by means of simulation, under several topology and traffic settings.
Protecting Software through Obfuscation

Software obfuscation has always been a controversially discussed research area. While theoretical results indicate that provably secure obfuscation in general is impossible, its widespread application in malware and commercial software shows that it is nevertheless popular in practice. Still, it remains largely unexplored to what extent today’s software obfuscations keep up with state-of-the-art code analysis and where we stand in the arms race between software developers and code analysts. The main goal of this survey is to analyze the effectiveness of different classes of software obfuscation against the continuously improving deobfuscation techniques and off-the-shelf code analysis tools. The answer very much depends on the goals of the analyst and the available resources. On the one hand, many forms of lightweight static analysis have difficulties with even basic obfuscation schemes, which explains the unbroken popularity of obfuscation among malware writers. On the other hand, more expensive analysis techniques, in particular when used interactively by a human analyst, can easily defeat many obfuscations. As a result, software obfuscation for the purpose of intellectual property protection remains highly challenging.
Simultaneous Object Detection and Ranking with Weak Supervision

A standard approach to learning object category detectors is to provide strong supervision in the form of a region of interest (ROI) specifying each instance of the object in the training images [17]. In this work are goal is to learn from heterogeneous labels, in which some images are only weakly supervised, specifying only the presence or absence of the object or a weak indication of object location, whilst others are fully annotated. To this end we develop a discriminative learning approach and make two contributions: (i) we propose a structured output formulation for weakly annotated images where full annotations are treated as latent variables; and (ii) we propose to optimize a ranking objective function, allowing our method to more effectively use negatively labeled images to improve detection average precision performance. The method is demonstrated on the benchmark INRIA pedestrian detection dataset of Dalal and Triggs [14] and the PASCAL VOC dataset [17], and it is shown that for a significant proportion of weakly supervised images the performance achieved is very similar to the fully supervised (state of the art) results.
Study of Time Series Data Mining for the Real Time Hydrological Forecasting: A Review

paper presents a review of runoff forecasting method based on hydrological time series data mining. Researchers are developed models for runoff forecasting using the data mining tools and techniques like regression analysis, clustering, artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector machine (SVM), Genetic Algorithms (GA), fuzzy logic and rough set theories. The scientific community has been trying to find out a better approach to solve the issues of flood problems. Time Series Data mining is paying crucial role for the achieving a real time hydrological forecast. Hydrological Time series is an important class of temporal data objects and it can be find out from water resource management and metrological department. A hydrological time series is a collection of observations of hydro and hydrometeorological parameters chronologically. The wide use of hydrological time series data has initiated a great deal of research and development attempts in the field of data mining. Trend, pattern, simulation, similarity measures indexing, segmentation, visualization and prediction carried out by the researchers with the implicit mining from the historical observed data. The critical reviews of the existing hydrological parameter prediction research are briefly explored to identify the present circumstances in hydrological fields and its concerned issues.
Antihypertensive treatment and development of heart failure in hypertension: a Bayesian network meta-analysis of studies in patients with hypertension and high cardiovascular risk.

BACKGROUND It is still debated whether there are differences among the various antihypertensive strategies in heart failure prevention. We performed a network meta-analysis of recent trials in hypertension aimed at investigating this issue. METHODS Randomized, controlled trials published from 1997 through 2009 in peer-reviewed journals indexed in the PubMed and EMBASE databases were selected. Selected trials included patients with hypertension or a high-risk population with a predominance of patients with hypertension. RESULTS A total of 223,313 patients were enrolled in the selected studies. Network meta-analysis showed that diuretics (odds ratio [OR], 0.59; 95% credibility interval [CrI], 0.47-0.73), angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors (OR, 0.71; 95% CrI, 0.59-0.85) and angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs) (OR, 0.76; 95% CrI, 0.62-0.90) represented the most efficient classes of drugs to reduce the heart failure onset compared with placebo. On the one hand, a diuretic-based therapy represented the best treatment because it was significantly more efficient than that based on ACE inhibitors (OR, 0.83; 95% CrI, 0.69-0.99) and ARBs (OR, 0.78; 95% CrI, 0.63-0.97). On the other hand, diuretics (OR, 0.71; 95% CrI, 0.60-0.86), ARBs (OR, 0.91; 95% CrI, 0.78-1.07), and ACE inhibitors (OR, 0.86; 95% CrI, 0.75-1.00) were superior to calcium channel blockers, which were among the least effective first-line agents in heart failure prevention, together with β-blockers and α-blockers. CONCLUSIONS Diuretics represented the most effective class of drugs in preventing heart failure, followed by renin-angiotensin system inhibitors. Thus, our findings support the use of these agents as first-line antihypertensive strategy to prevent heart failure in patients with hypertension at risk to develop heart failure. Calcium channel blockers and β-blockers were found to be less effective in heart failure prevention.