Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Consumer Surveys and Reality

This paper investigates the usefulness of Italian consumer surveys as estimation and forecasting tool over the period 1982-2003. To this end, standard consumption equations are estimated and then compared, in terms of in-sample and out-of-sample predictive ability, with corresponding models which differ from them only because of the presence of the confidence indicator. Unlike mainstream literature, the present work focuses on the relationships between subjective and objective information at a less aggregate level. In particular, the overall sentiment index is divided into four sub-indices related to the opinion about the i) current, ii) future, iii) general, and iv) personal situation. In turn, the total private consumption is divided in five items. The idea behind is to check if one attitudinal measure is more or less informative than another, and if some outlay is more or less “sentiment sensitive” than another. It is shown that the qualitative information obtained from household surveys improves both the goodness- of-fit of consumption equations and their forecasting performances. It is noteworthy that these improvements are all the more evident when working on disaggregated data, i.e., linking a particular kind of consumption to a particular sub index. For instance, perceptions about the future help to explain consumption for services more than disbursement for non durable goods.
Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition for English and Chinese with Multiview Modeling and Effective Representation Learning

Discourse relations between two text segments play an important role in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The connectives strongly indicate the sense of discourse relations, while in fact, there are no connectives in a large proportion of discourse relations, that is, implicit discourse relations. Compared with explicit relations, implicit relations are much harder to detect and have drawn significant attention. Until now, there have been many studies focusing on English implicit discourse relations, and few studies address implicit relation recognition in Chinese even though the implicit discourse relations in Chinese are more common than those in English. In our work, both the English and Chinese languages are our focus. The key to implicit relation prediction is to properly model the semantics of the two discourse arguments, as well as the contextual interaction between them. To achieve this goal, we propose a neural network based framework that consists of two hierarchies. The first one is the model hierarchy, in which we propose a max-margin learning method to explore the implicit discourse relation from multiple views. The second one is the feature hierarchy, in which we learn multilevel distributed representations from words, arguments, and syntactic structures to sentences. We have conducted experiments on the standard benchmarks of English and Chinese, and the results show that compared with several methods our proposed method can achieve the best performance in most cases.
A Simon effect for stimulus-response duration

A non-spatial variant of the Simon effect for the stimulus-response (S-R) feature of duration is reported. In Experiment 1 subjects were required to press a single response key either briefly or longer in response to the colour of a visual stimulus that varied in its presentation duration. Short keypresses were initiated faster with short than with long stimulus duration whereas the inverse was observed with long keypresses. In Experiment 2 subjects were required to press a left or right key (according to stimulus form) either briefly or longer (according to stimulus colour). The stimuli concurrently varied in their location (left or right) and duration (short or long), which were both task irrelevant. Approximately additive correspondence effects for S-R location and S-R duration were observed. To summarize, the results suggest that the irrelevant stimulus features of location and duration are processed automatically and prime corresponding responses in an independent manner.
Primary spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid leaks located at the clivus

Transclival meningoceles and primary spontaneous cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) leaks at the clivus are extremely rare lesions and only few of them have been reported in the literature. We report here six cases of transclival primary spontaneous CSF leaks through the clivus. A retrospective case study was performed. We reviewed six cases involving sinonasal CSF leaks located at the clivus treated between 1997 and 2009. Presenting symptoms, duration of symptoms, defect size, site of defect, surgical approach and technique of defect closure, intraoperative complications, postoperative complications, and recurrences are discussed. All CSF leaks were located in the upper central part of the clivus. two of six patients showed signs of increased intracranial pressure (ICP) including arachnoid pits and/or empty sella. For three patients a purely transnasal approach was used with multilayer reconstruction using a nonvascularized graft, and three patients underwent a transnasal transseptal approach with a multilayer reconstruction, with nasoseptal flap. No recurrences of CSF leaks at clivus or other sites were observed to date with a mean follow-up of 10.3 years (range, 3–15 years). Spontaneous CSF rhinorrhea located at the clivus is an extremely rare condition. To date, only eight cases have been described. Here, we report the largest group of six consecutive cases. Irrespective of the used reconstruction technique in all cases a 100% closure rate was achieved. However, identification of increased ICP is an essential aspect and this condition should be treated either medically or surgically.
Dynamic magnetic circuit modelling of permanent magnet linear motor

Usage of a magnetic circuit model as part of a dynamic simulation model of a non-salient permanent-magnet linear synchronous motor drive is investigated. The complete dynamic system model includes position control, motor magnetic circuit and mechanical models. A dynamic motion profile is simulated to demonstrate the dynamical capability of the simulation method proposed. To validate the simulation results measurements have been done with a linear drive, including a commercial permanent magnet linear motor. The same motion profile as in the simulation has been used. The experimental results show a good correlation with the simulation results. The correlation is high both in the system model level and in the motor model level showing e.g. the saturation effects during operation points with high force demand.
Stochastic Nash Equilibrium Seeking for Games with General Nonlinear Payoffs

Extremum seeking is extended from standard multi-input optimization problems to multi-player non-cooperative games. The players do not have knowledge of the payoff functions and only measure their own payoff values. The players are also unaware of the other players’ actions. Extremum seeking is shown to achieve convergence to the Nash equilibrium of the underlying static game.
Relative Spectral Lag: a New Redshift Indicator of Gamma-ray Bursts

Using 64 ms count data of long gamma-ray bursts (T-90 > 2.6 s), we analyze the quantity named relative spectral lag (RSL), tau(31)/FWHM(1). We investigated in detail all the correlations between the RSL and other parameters for a sample of nine long bursts, using the general cross-correlation technique that includes the lag between two different energy bands. We conclude that, the distribution of RSLs is normal and has a mean value of 0.1; that the RSLs are weakly correlated with the FWHM, the asymmetry, peak flux (F-p), peak energy (E-p) and spectral indexes (alpha and beta), while they are uncorrelated with tau(31), the hardness-ratio (HR31) and the peak time (t(m)). Our important discovery is that redshift (z) and peak luminosity (L-p) are strongly correlated with the RSL, which can be measured easily and directly, making the RSL a good redshift and peak luminosity indicator.
Impact of the Ebola outbreak on health systems and population health in Sierra Leone.

BACKGROUND The current Ebola outbreak has proved devastating to vulnerable populations in West Africa. Health needs assessments were conducted in two districts of Sierra Leone to identify and quantify the impact of the outbreak on population health and health systems. METHODS Mixed qualitative and quantitative methods were employed including interviews, focus groups, and interrogation and analysis of data from health facilities, district health records and burial teams. T-tests were performed to compare periods before and during the outbreak. RESULTS A breakdown in relations between the health system and communities was demonstrated leading to marked and significant reductions in utilization of health facilities including: paediatric all-cause and malaria admissions, maternity admissions and attendance in the community. High avoidable all-cause mortality was identified (3.4 times higher than normally registered for the period, 42% deaths in children <5 years, 2% attributed to Ebola). Negative impacts on the health workforce, health system leadership and governance, and disruption of health programmes and systems were demonstrated. Reductions in vaccination coverage and a rise in teenage pregnancy were noted. CONCLUSIONS The findings indicate a public health emergency as a legacy of the Ebola outbreak. Sustained commitment of the international community is required to support health system re-building.
AntElements: An Extensible and Scalable Ant Colony Optimization Middleware

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has become a popular metaheuristic approach for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. However, most existing ACO software systems are domain-specific, dedicated to concrete problems or non-extensible, non-portable and non-scalable solutions that have been evaluated for problem spaces of limited size. In this context, we present AntElements (AntE), a portable Java-based ACO middleware, designed and implemented with the highest consideration for versatility. The extensibility of the proposed middleware allows its use in virtually any ACO deployment, ranging from experimental to commercial. In this work, the overall object-oriented architecture and the software design patterns of AntE are explained, alongside the main concepts behind them. Furthermore, AntE is analyzed with respect to the computational efficiency, parallelization capacities and memory consumption, which allows to establish its usability and scalability range. In its current implementation, on an average to mid-high workstation, our middleware is capable of processing upwards of 105 agents per second, in graphs of the order of 105 nodes and sustain a stable, fully logged experiment for over 12 hours. The proposed middleware has already been deployed in several research projects that are outlined in this paper, illustrating the range of possibilities it offers.
Human Brands: Investigating Antecedents to Consumers’ Strong Attachments to Celebrities

This article explores recent advances in self-determination research to address why consumers develop strong attachments to “human brands,” a term that refers to any well-known persona who is the subject of marketing communications efforts. Study 1 uses a survey that is analyzed with structural equation modeling. Study 2 is qualitative and offers corroborating evidence for the proposed theoretical model. Study 3 extends the model with a more naturalistic sample and tests several alternative hypotheses using hierarchical regression. The results suggest that when a human brand enhances a person's feelings of autonomy and relatedness and does not suppress feelings of competence, the person is likely to become more strongly attached to it. This article documents that strong attachments are predictive of satisfied, trusting, and committed relationships and proposes that attachment strength may be a parsimonious proxy for consumer–brand relationship strength. The results imply that benefits would accrue to organizations such as entertainment firms and political parties that establish direct and routine interaction between human brands and consumers, that human brands to which consumers are attached offer significant potential as endorsers, and that organizations should address how to make the human brands they manage more authentic.
Prolonged Culture of Diploid Human Cells*

benefited by the development of cell lines which largely retain an unaltered diploid karyotype. Although such cell lines as HeLa have proved of great value, they have the disadvantage of being markedly aneuploid ; and although strains derived from single cells exhibit much more sharply modal chromosome counts (1, 25), they continue to un dergo shifts and to acquire new chromosomal variants (25). The possibility of maintaining diploidy (â€œdiploidâ€• being used here to imply â€œclassically diploidâ€• as opposed to â€œquasi-diploidâ€• wherein the number of chromosomes is 2n but abnormal chromosomes have replaced normal ho mologues) in rapidly growing cell strains has usually been discounted in the past. A majority of reports have stressed that the fate of benign human cells explanted in vitro is either death after brief growth or a striking change in growth rate and cell morphology often leading to the development of permanent lines. The latter event has been referred to as â€œtransformationâ€• or â€œalteration. â€• When cytologic studies have been done on such cell lines they have been found invariably to have greatly altered chromosome constitutions (1, 10, 11) and, in the case of lines of female origin, to have lost the sex chromatin char acteristic (18). Such findings contrast sharply with cy tologic studies of early in vitro passages of benign human cells from normal subjects. These cells are invariably diploid and, where appropriate, sex chromatin-positive (6). There can be little doubt that transformation is a real occurrence (even allowing for the possibility that some re ports may simply indicate contamination by other cell lines), but there is a marked difference in the experience of
Emotional and Social Loneliness in Individuals With and Without Substance Dependence Disorder

Background: Loneliness is one of the psychological variables related to high risk behaviors that should be investigated more. Objectives: The current study aimed to assess emotional, social, romantic, and familial dimensions of loneliness in drug abuser and nondrug abuser individuals. Patients and Methods: Two hundred and twenty eight individuals were enrolled in this cross sectional study. Hundred and eighteen drug abusers were recruited through random sampling among the clients referred to Baharan Psychiatric Hospital, and 110 non-substance dependent individuals were selected from their companions, students, and staffs. In addition to clinical interview, the Iranian short version of the social and emotional loneliness scale for adults (SELSA-S) was used to evaluate the participants. Results: There were statistically significant difference between the scores of all four emotional, social, familial, and romantic dimensions of loneliness in substance dependent individuals. Although there was no difference between the scores of men and women, the mean scores of romantic and emotional dimensions were higher in non-substance dependent women. Conclusions: The feeling of loneliness is stronger in drug abusers rather than non-drug abusers that could develop the sense of being different from community and increase the probability of taking high risk behaviors and abusing drugs. Thus, it is suggested to consider the feeling of loneliness in all programs designed to prevent or treat addiction.
Automatic Exudate Detection with a Naive Bayes Classifier

� Abstract—Diabetic retinopathy is a major cause of vision loss for diabetic patients, but early detection of its symptoms and treatment can prevent blindness. Exudate is a key indicator of diabetic retinopathy that can potentially be automatically quantified. In this paper, which focuses on automatic exudate detection in images acquired through non-dilated pupils, we present a series of experiments on feature selection and exudate pixel classification using a naive Bayes classifier. We find that the best feature set is a combination of 6 features: the pixel intensity after preprocessing, the standard deviation of the preprocessed intensities in a window around the pixel, the pixel hue, the number of edge pixels in a window around the pixel, the ratio between the size of the pixel's intensity cluster and the optic disc, and the response at the pixel to a derivative of Gaussian filter. The overall sensitivity, specificity, precision, and accuracy are 93.38%, 98.14%, 47.51%, and 98.05%, respectively.
Vanilloid-Mediated Heterosynaptic Facilitation of Inhibitory Synaptic Input to Neurons of the Rat Dorsal Motor Nucleus of the Vagus

Vanilloid type-1 receptors (VR1) are abundant in the dorsal vagal complex, where their function is mostly unknown. We examined the role of VR1 in regulating synaptic inputs to neurons of the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus (DMV). Using patch-clamp recordings from DMV neurons in brainstem slices, capsaicin was found to increase action potential-independent inhibitory input onto DMV neurons. This rapid effect was mimicked by application of the endogenous cannabinoid, anandamide and blocked by VR1 antagonists. The VR1-mediated facilitation of synaptic inhibition was reduced by ionotropic and metabotropic glutamate receptor antagonists, suggesting an indirect, heterosynaptic enhancement of GABA release caused by a VR1-mediated increase in glutamate release from presynaptic terminals of excitatory neurons. Application of l-glutamate also increased GABA release. The paired-pulse ratio was increased for IPSCs evoked after electrical stimulation of the nucleus tractus solitarius, but the effect was slower than for the enhancement of spontaneous and miniature IPSCs. Capsaicin also increased the frequency of glutamatergic postsynaptic currents in a VR1-mediated manner. Results of these studies suggest that VR1-containing glutamatergic terminals contact DMV neurons. Activation of VR1 potently enhances glutamate release onto GABAergic terminals, facilitating GABA release. Endogenous cannabinoids can thereby rapidly enhance inhibitory input to DMV neurons via VR1-mediated presynaptic mechanisms.
Biopharmaceutical Classification System : An Account

In 1995, Amidon and coworkers introduced the biopharmaceutical classification system (BCS) to reduce the need for in vivo bioequivalency studies, utilization of in vitro dissolution tests as a surrogate for in vivo bioequivalence studies. The principles of the BCS classification system can be applied to NDA and ANDA approvals as well as to scaleup and post approval changes in drug manufacturing. Therefore, can save significant amount of product development time of pharmaceutical companies and reduces it costs. BCS is a drug development tool that allows estimation of the contributions of three major factors, dissolution, solubility, and intestinal permeability, which affect oral drug absorption from immediate release (IR) solid oral products. Knowledge of BCS helps to the formulation scientist to develop a suitable dosage forms based on mechanistic rather than empirical approaches. This review article represents principle, goal & guidance of BCS, characteristics of various BCS class drugs, Various type of dissolution media for various BCS class drugs, their importance & methodology of dissolution, and various applications of BCS have been highlighted.
Efficient Indexation: An Alternative to Cap-Weighted Indices

This paper introduces a novel method for the construction of equity indices that, unlike their cap-weighted counterparts, offer an efficient risk/return trade-off. The index construction method goes back to the roots of modern portfolio theory and focuses on the tangency portfolio, the portfolio that weights index constituents so as to obtain the highest possible Sharpe ratio. The major challenge is to generate the required input parameters in a robust manner. The expected excess return of each stock is estimated from portfolio sorts according to the stock’s total downside risk. This estimate uses the economic insight that stocks with higher risk should compensate their holders with higher expected returns. To estimate the covariance matrix, we use principal component analysis to extract the common factors driving stock returns. Moreover, we introduce a procedure to control turnover in order to implement the method with low transaction costs. Our empirical results show that portfolio optimization with our robust parameter estimates generates out-of-sample Sharpe ratios significantly higher than those of the corresponding capweighted indices. In addition, the higher risk-return efficiency is achieved consistently and across varying economic and market conditions
Review: Disillusionment with Radical Social Groups

Disengagement from radical social groups is a complex process initiated by the experience of a crisis, or disillusionment causing a re-evaluation of involvement. This paper provides a review of the experiences that hinder group involvement and increases the likelihood of disengagement. Utilising the categorisation by Klandersman (2005) and Demant et al. (2008a), the factors are discussed under the themes of normative, affective, and continuance. Normative factors rely on the ideological premise to ensure membership is viewed as a moral obligation, while the affective factors incorporate the social and organisational aspects facilitating emotional attachment to the group, and continuance factors are those influencing the cost and benefits of group involvement. Commitment to radical social groups becomes vulnerable when the material, psychological and communal benefits of membership are outweighed by the resources required for association and the inability to achieve desirable outcomes.
Nitric Oxide-Induced Autophagy in MC3T3-E1 Cells is Associated with Cytoprotection via AMPK Activation

Nitric oxide (NO) is important in the regulation of bone remodeling, whereas high concentration of NO promotes cell death of osteoblast. However, it is not clear yet whether NO-induced autophagy is implicated in cell death or survival of osteoblast. The present study is aimed to examine the role of NO-induced autophagy in the MC3T3-E1 cells and their underlying molecular mechanism. The effect of sodium nitroprusside (SNP), an NO donor, on the cytotoxicity of the MC3T3-E1 cells was determined by MTT assay and expression of apoptosis or autophagy associated molecules was evaluated by western blot analysis. The morphological observation of autophagy and apoptosis by acridine orange stain and TUNEL assay were performed, respectively. Treatment of SNP decreased the cell viability of the MC3T3-E1 cells in dose- and time-dependent manner. SNP increased expression levels of p62, ATG7, Beclin-1 and LC3-II, as typical autophagic markers and augmented acidic autophagolysosomal vacuoles, detected by acridine orange staining. However, pretreatment with 3-methyladenine (3MA), the specific inhibitor for autophagy, decreased cell viability, whereas increased the cleavage of PARP and caspase-3 in the SNP-treated MC3T3-E1 cells. AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), a major autophagy regulatory kinase, was activated in SNP-treated MC3T3-E1 cells. In addition, pretreatment with compound C, an inhibitor of AMPK, decreased cell viability, whereas increased the number of apoptotic cells, cleaved PARP and caspase-3 levels compared to those of SNP-treated MC3T3-E1 cells. Taken together, it is speculated that NO-induced autophagy functions as a survival mechanism via AMPK activation against apoptosis in the MC3T3-E1 cells.