Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Welfare Cost of Business Cycles in an Economy with Nonclearing Markets

In this paper we measure the welfare cost of fluctuations in a simple representative agent economy with nonclearing markets. The market friction we consider involves price rigidities and a voluntary exchange rationing scheme. These features are incorporated into an otherwise standard neoclassical growth model. We show that the frictions we introduce make the losses from fluctuations four times bigger than in a frictionless environment.
Determinants of Anemia among Children Aged 6–59 Months Living in Kilte Awulaelo Woreda, Northern Ethiopia

Introduction. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of anemia and determinant factors among children aged 6–59 months living in Kilte Awulaelo Woreda, eastern zone. Method. A community based cross-sectional study was conducted during February 2013 among 6 tabias of Kilte Awulaelo Woreda, northern Ethiopia. A total of 568 children were selected by systematic random sampling method. Anthropometric data and blood sample were collected. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were performed to identify factors related to anemia. Result. The mean hemoglobin level was 11.48 g/dl and about 37.3% of children were anemic. Children who were aged 6–23 months [AOR = 1.89: 95% CI (1.3, 2.8)], underweight [AOR = 2.05: 95% CI (1.3, 3.3)], having MUAC less than 12 cm [AOR = 3.35: 95% CI (2.1, 5.3)], and from households with annual income below 10,000 Ethiopian birr [AOR = 4.86: 95% CI (3.2, 7.3)] were more likely to become anemic. Conclusion. The prevalence of anemia among the children is found to be high. It was associated with annual household income, age, and nutritional status of the child. So, improving family income and increasing awareness of the mother/caregiver were important intervention.
The effect of input on bilingual adolescents’ long-term language outcomes in a foreign language instruction context

The aim of the current study is twofold: to examine the effects of input on bilingual adolescents’ long-term second language (L2) outcomes in a minority/foreign language context; and to understand the interaction between input and other potential predictors of L2 outcomes, specifically environmental variables, learners’ motivation and language learning aptitude. Participants included 97 Mandarin–English bilingual adolescents in Taiwan who learned English as an L2 between the ages of two to eleven. All participants completed a listening comprehension and a story-telling task in English and two standardized language learning aptitude tests. Participants and their parents filled out a detailed questionnaire providing information about family demographics and in-class and out-of-class L2 input. Correlation and multivariate regression analyses revealed that input played an important role in long-term L2 listening comprehension outcome, but not in speech production outcomes. The results also showed that environmental variables and language learning aptitude significantly predicted long-term L2 listening comprehension and speech production outcomes. Finally, out-of-class L2 input outweighed instructional input and current input outweighed early input. Since most previous research on the role of input in long-term L2 outcomes was conducted in a majority/societal language context, the present study contributes to the topic by specifying the effect of input in L2 acquisition in a minority/foreign language context.
Large classes of infinite k‐cop‐win graphs

While finite cop‐win finite graphs possess a good structural characterization, none is known for infinite cop‐win graphs. As evidence that such a characterization might not exist, we provide as large as possible classes of infinite graphs with finite cop number. More precisely, for each infinite cardinal κ and each positive integer k, we construct 2κ non‐isomorphic k‐cop‐win graphs satisfying additional properties such as vertex‐transitivity, or having universal endomorphism monoid and automorphism group. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 65: 334–342, 2010
Flat spacetimes with compact hyperbolic Cauchy surfaces

We study the flat (n+1)-spacetimes Y admitting a Cauchy surface diffeomorphic to a compact hyperbolic n-manifold M . Roughly speaking, we show how to construct a canonical future complete one, Yρ, among all such spacetimes sharing a same holonomy ρ. We study the geometry of Yρ in terms of its canonical cosmological time (CT). In particular we study the asymptotic behaviour of the level surfaces of the cosmological time. The present work generalizes the case n = 2 treated in [11] taking from [4] the emphasis on the fundamental role played by the canonical cosmological time. In particular Mess showed that if F is a closed surface of genus g ≥ 2 then the linear holonomies of the Lorentzian flat structures on R × F such that {0} × F is a spacelike surface are faithful and discrete representations of π1(F ) in SO (2, 1). Moreover he proved that every representation φ : π1(F ) → Iso(M3) whose linear part is faithful and discrete is a holonomy for some Lorentzian structure on R×F such that {0}×F is a spacelike surface. In particular he showed that there exists a unique maximal future complete convex domain of M3, called domain of dependence, which is φ(π1(F ))-invariant such that the quotient is a globally hyperbolic manifold homeomorphic to R × F with regular cosmological time. If we fix the linear holonomy f : π1(F ) → SO(2, 1) these domains (and so the affine deformations of the representation f) are parametrized by the measured geodesic laminations on H/f(π1(F )). The link between domains of dependence and measured geodesic laminations is the Gauss map of the CT-level surfaces. On the other hand Benedetti and Guadagnini noticed in [4] the singularity in the past of a domain of dependence is a real tree which is dual to the lamination. Moreover they argued that the action of π1(F ) on the CT-level surface Sa = T −1(a) converges in the Gromov sense to the action of π1(F ) on the singularity for a → 0 and to the action of π1(F ) on the hyperbolic plane
The Ciliary Rootlet Maintains Long-Term Stability of Sensory Cilia

ABSTRACT The striated ciliary rootlet is a prominent cytoskeleton originating from basal bodies of ciliated cells. Although a familiar structure in cell biology, its function has remained unresolved. In this study, we carried out targeted disruption in mice of the gene for rootletin, a component of the rootlet. In the mutant, ciliated cells are devoid of rootlets. Phototransduction and ciliary beating in sensory and motile cilia initially exhibit no apparent functional deficits. However, photoreceptors degenerate over time, and mutant lungs appear prone to pathological changes consistent with insufficient mucociliary clearance. Further analyses revealed a striking fragility at the ciliary base in photoreceptors lacking rootlets. In vitro assays suggest that the rootlet is among the least dynamic of all cytoskeletons and interacts with actin filaments. Thus, a primary function of the rootlet is to provide structural support for the cilium. Inasmuch as photoreceptors elaborate an exceptionally enlarged sensory cilium, they are especially dependent on the rootlet for structural integrity and long-term survival.
Score One for Jazz: Working Memory in Jazz and Classical Musicians

Jazz musicians rely on different skills than do classical musicians for successful performances. We investigated the working memory span of classical and jazz student musicians on musical and nonmusical working memory tasks. College-aged musicians completed the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale, followed by verbal working memory tests and musical working memory tests that included visual and auditory presentation modes and written or played recall. Participants were asked to recall the last word (or pitch) from each task after a distraction task, by writing, speaking, or playing the pitch on the piano. Jazz musicians recalled more pitches that were presented in auditory versions and recalled on the piano compared with classical musicians. Scores were positively correlated to years of jazz-playing experience. We conclude that type of training should be considered in studies of musical expertise, and that tests of musicians’ cognitive skills should include domain-specific components.
Differential Privacy: An Estimation Theory-Based Method for Choosing Epsilon

Differential privacy is achieved by the introduction of Laplacian noise in the response to a query, establishing a precise trade-off between the level of differential privacy and the accuracy of the database response (via the amount of noise introduced). However, the amount of noise to add is typically defined through the scale parameter of the Laplace distribution, whose use may not be so intuitive. In this paper we propose to use two parameters instead, related to the notion of interval estimation, which provide a more intuitive picture of how precisely the true output of a counting query may be gauged from the noise-polluted one (hence, how much the individual's privacy is protected).
Measuring Web-based Service Quality: The Online Customer Point of View

In recognition of the expanding role of the web as a channel of conducting business, vast investments in web technologies have been witnessed. Using web technologies and their applications enables firms reaching more customers, trading with customers and offering them a smooth purchase transaction. However, firms cannot realize returns on their investments, unless they are offering superior web-based service quality to their customers. It is therefore, important to develop the appropriate instrument to measure web-based service quality. The current study proposes and tests a conceptual framework of web-based service quality by using the SERVQUAL measure as its starting point. In addition, the study examines the influence of identified dimensions of web-based service quality on overall service quality and loyalty intentions. Reformulating the generic dimensions of the SERVQUAL resulted in measuring web-based service quality on six dimensions: website usability, information quality, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and personalization. The analytical work of the study suggests that assurance and reliability are the most important factors that influence both overall service quality and loyalty intentions. The study ends providing implications for research as well as for practice. Limitations are also addressed.
Why do PE and VC Firms Retain Ownership after the Initial Public Offering ?

The purpose of the paper is to assess the determinants of PE and VC investors’ decision to continue holding shares in the post-IPO period. We distinguish between compulsory ownership which arise as a result of the lockup commitments and voluntary holdings which occur when there is no lockup or ownership in the post-lockup expiry dates. We find support that voluntary ownership is driven by signalling and commitment hypotheses. PE/VC investors’ compulsory holdings are driven only by the signalling hypothesis in the US, while in the UK, the compulsory ownership is consistent the commitment hypotheses. We find significant differences across US and UK PE/VC firms in terms of their investment, divestment dynamics, ownership retention three years post-flotation, and the terms of lock-up agreements. We also report statistically significant relationships between PE/VC fund’s ownership and fund’s characteristics such as age, location and bank affiliation. JEL classification: G11, G14, G24, G32, M13
Questing with Grandma: Building Closer Families Through Intergenerational Video Gaming

ix CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION . 1 Purpose of the Study . 5 CHAPTER 2: BACKGROUND AND THEORETHICAL FRAMEWORK . 7 Family and Shared Activities . 8 Games and Play . 12 Understanding Video Games . 15 Social Side of Video Games . 17 Sociability of Video Games . 19 Older Adults and Video Games . 30 Theoretical Framework . 36 Family Communication Patterns Theory . 37 Self-Other Overlap . 39 Social Penetration Theory . 41 Summary . 45 CHAPTER 3: METHODS . 48 Research Design . 48 Sample and sampling procedure . 49 Instruments and Data Collection . 49 Data analysis . 53 CHAPTER 4: GROUP 1 – GAMING TREATMENT GROUP . 54 Information about the Sample . 54 Findings of Hypotheses Testing . 56 Summary Statistics . 56 Hypotheses Testing: Inclusion of Other in the Self (H1-H4) . 58 Hypotheses Testing: Self-Disclosure (H5-H8) . 61 Findings Addressing the Research Questions . 65 Findings Addressing the Narrative Data . 66 Summary of Findings . 73 vi CHAPTER 5: GROUP 2 – CONVERSATION TREATMENT GROUP . 76 Information about the Sample . 76 Findings of Pretest-Posttest Analyses . 77 Summary Statistics . 77 Inclusion of Other in the Self . 79 Comparison to Gaming Treatment Group . 81 Self-Disclosure. 82 Comparison to Gaming Treatment Group . 85 Findings Addressing the Research Questions . 87 Summary of Findings . 93 CHAPTER 6: DISCUSSION . 96 Inclusion of Other in the Self . 96 Self-Disclosure. 99 Limitations. 103 Conclusion . 104 REFERENCES . 106 APPENDIX A . 119 APPENDIX B . 124 APPENDIX C . 127 APPENDIX D . 128 APPENDIX E . 129 APPENDIX F . 130 APPENDIX G . 131 APPENDIX H . 132 VITA . 134
Effect of the Fine Fraction of Particulate Matter versus the Coarse Mass and Other Pollutants on Daily Mortality in Santiago, Chile

ABSTRACT Daily counts of non-accidental deaths in Santiago, Chile, from 1988 to 1996 were regressed on six air pollutants— fine particles (PM2.5), coarse particles (PM10–2.5), CO, SO2, NO2, and O3. Controlling for seasonal and meteorological conditions was done using three different models— a generalized linear model, a generalized additive model, and a generalized additive model on previously filtered data. Single- and two-pollutant models were tested for lags of 1-5 days and the average of the previous 2-5 days. The increase in mortality associated with the mean levels of air pollution varied from 4 to 11%, depending on the pollutants and the way season of the year was considered. The results were not sensitive to the modeling approaches, but different effects for warmer and colder months were found. Fine particles were more important than coarse particles in the whole year and in winter, but not in summer. NO2 and CO were also significantly associated with daily mortality, as was O3 in the warmer months. No consistent effect was observed for SO2. Given particle composition in Santiago, these results suggest that combustion-generated pollutants, especially from motor vehicles, may be associated with increased mortality. Temperature was closely associated with mortality. High temperatures led to deaths on the same day, while low temperatures lead to deaths from 1 to 4 days later.
When memory leads the brain to take scenes at face value: face areas are reactivated at test by scenes that were paired with faces at study

In the first use of the event-related optical signal as a brain imaging tool for the study of long-term memory, we examined relational or associative aspects of memory, widely presumed to involve the interplay among multiple brain regions in representing and reactivating different elements of a given event. Here, we found that a brain region known to be involved in face processing (the posterior superior temporal sulcus) was active not only when viewing faces during the study phase but also when viewing scenes at test that, through prior learning, were associated with specific faces. These findings, demonstrating the activation of stimulus-specific cortical regions in the absence of stimuli of that type, based on learned relations, reveal cortical substrates of the reactivation of relational memories.
Implementation Of Supervision On Office Of Community Empowerment And Makassar City Village

This study aims to determine the Implementation of Supervision at the Office of Village and Community Empowerment in Makassar. Type This research is descriptive research using Quantitative method and approach which describes Implementation of Supervision at Office of Community Empowerment and Village. The population of this research is the employees of Office of Community Empowerment and Village amounted to 84 people. Data collection techniques used are observation, questionnaires, and documentation. Data analysis technique used is percentage analysis. The results showed that the percentage achieved by 84.30% was confirmed with a pre-defined category that is at intervals of 81% - 100% percent means that the Implementation of Supervision at the Office of Community Empowerment and Village Village of Makassar is very good.
Adapting a Sentence Intervention with Spelling and Handwriting Support for Elementary Students with Writing Difficulties: A Preliminary Investigation.

Difficulties with two critical transcription skills, handwriting and spelling, can hinder acquisition and use of simple sentences during writing for elementary students. This preliminary investigation used a framework of data-based individualization to adapt and study effects of a multi-component intervention designed to teach simple sentence construction. Two adaptations to the intervention included a modified form of cover-copycompare procedures for spelling difficulties and extended time for handwriting difficulties. Intervention was delivered across two small groups of elementary students at-risk for or with identified learning disabilities. All students showed gains in simple sentence construction; however, results must be viewed with caution given high variability for some students in performance and several design limitations.
A Multilingual Approach to Building Slovene Wordnet

The paper presents an experiment in which synsets for Slovene wordnet were induced automatically from several multilingual resources. Our research is based on the assumption that translations are a plausible source of semantically relevant information. More specifically, we argue that the translational relation on the one hand reduces ambiguity of a source word and on the other conveys semantic relatedness of a set of target words. We tried to identify sense distinctions of polysemous words and obtain sets of synonyms by first extracting multilingual lexicons from a word-aligned JRC-Acquis parallel corpus and then comparing them with the already existing wordnets in various languages. At this stage, lexicon entries were disambiguated and appropriate synset ids were assigned to their Slovene translation equivalents. Finally, the Slovene lexicon entries sharing the same assigned synset id were organized into a synset.
Isomaltitol Exacerbates Neutrophilia but Reduces Eosinophilia: New Insights into the Sephadex Model of Lung Inflammation

Background: We have previously examined isomaltitol in an in vitro static adhesion assay and were interested in investigating whether the potentially anti-inflammatory effects observed there could be relevant in vivo. The Sephadex-induced lung inflammation model was considered a suitablemodel due to the significant changes in global inflammatory endpoints seen upon provocation with Sephadex. Methods: Male Sprague-Dawley rats were instilled intratracheally with Sephadex (5 mg/ml), vehicle (0.9% NaCl), isomaltitol (50 mg/ml) or a combination of isomaltitol and Sephadex. After 24 h, the lungs were weighed to measure edema and preserved for histology. Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid was used for analysis of tumor necrosis factor, cysteinyl leukotrienes, and differential and total leukocyte counts. Results: Differential counts showed that isomaltitol increased the neutrophil component while decreasing the eosinophilia, thus asserting a modulatory role on the usually eosinophil-dominated Sephadex-induced cell profile. Isomaltitol alone also increased edema and cysteinyl leukotrienes, and generally aggravated total inflammation in combination with Sephadex. The mechanisms were not investigated in this study, but effects could relate to a combination of isomaltitol’s osmotic and structure-specific properties. Conclusion: Our results show that isomaltitol can modulate the inflammatory response induced by Sephadex instillation in addition to having proinflammatory effects on its own, and may therefore provide new insights into the mechanisms of this widely used animal model. Sugar alcohols similar to isomaltitol have already been used to aid mucus clearance in cystic fibrosis patients, and it is possible that isomaltitol could also be used for this purpose.
Savoring as a Moderator of the Daily Demands and Psychological Capital Relationship: A Daily Diary Study

ABSTRACT The present study examined daily savoring as a moderator of the relationship between daily demands and daily psychological capital (PsyCap), a collective term referring to the positive psychological states of hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy. A sample of university students (N = 109) responded to nightly online surveys over the course of eight days. Results showed that daily uplifts and savoring were positively related to overall daily PsyCap, as well as each individual dimension of the PsyCap. Daily demands were negatively related to PsyCap and each dimension of PsyCap. Additionally, daily savoring significantly interacted with daily demands to predict overall PsyCap, as well as the individual dimensions of optimism and resilience. Specifically, the negative relationship between daily demands and PsyCap was reduced when individuals engaged in greater savoring. The discussion focuses on the role of savoring in responding to demands and the mechanisms linking higher savoring to greater PsyCap on demanding days.
TaskMan : Simple Task-Parallel Programming

Programmers need better, more reliable techniques to build parallel programs. In the task-parallel programming paradigm, the programmer defines independent pieces of work, called tasks, that may run in parallel. The runtime library then takes responsibility for dynamically scheduling these tasks with whatever processor resources are available, keeping low-level synchronization and threading details out of view. For certain classes of programs, this paradigm can be extremely effective. We present TaskMan, a C++ library for task-parallel programming designed with emphasis on programmability and simplicity. We discuss the TaskMan programming model and describe the Taskman runtime. This runtime is rather simple, but by exploiting fast communication between cores on a CMP, it can perform comparably to mature, heavily optimized task systems.
Identifying Interestingness in Fashion E-commerce using Pinterest Data

Fashion is the fastest growing category in online shopping. However, research in finding “interestingness” in online fashion has been restricted to the domain of computer vision. This paper aims to address the effectiveness of using a product’s textual description for showcasing fashion in terms of its attractiveness, i.e. the ability to draw consumer’s attention, interest, and in turn their engagement. Pinterest is an online social media platform that allows users to pin products on their boards. Past research on Pinterest users shows that majority of these are things that the user “wants” or “needs”. Thus it is reasonable to assume that all pins related to fashion on Pinterest are “interesting”. Our system uses this assumption to discover interesting fashion items on a popular e-commerce website, eBay. We propose a data driven approach for extracting interestingness based on textual data from pins and applying it to eBay items. We evaluate our results using crowdsourcing by comparing them to Pinterest. We obtain an inter annotator agreement of κ = 0.43 for evaluating our classifier’s performance on women’s shoes. Evaluating the results using topic model analysis shows that heels, wedges, converse, leather shoes, platform, pump and nike running shoes are ranked highly positive for interestingness by our classifier.