Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Matching with Conflicts : An Application to the Advertising Industry ú Job Market Paper : Preliminary

In professional service markets, clients who are product market competitors are often reluctant to work with the same service agency. This can e ectively restrict the choice set of clients seeking matches, and it may cause agency mergers to reduce e ciency even when static pricing ine ciencies are absent. To understand the importance of conflict, I construct a new data set on matches between pharmaceutical advertisers and advertising agencies from 2002 to 2010 in which competitors are defined by therapeutic classes, and estimate a two-sided matching model using a maximum score estimator. The results show that conflict does indeed reduce the match surplus, and the reduction is greater for a pair of agents who have matched with each other in the previous period. Also, preserving previously formed matches yields much higher surplus than forming new matches. Based on these estimates, I conduct a counterfactual exercise to illustrate the e ect of conflict on allocation of matches. I find that 14% of all matches that would have formed in a non-conflict environment are unable to form when conflict is present. Another counterfactual exercise shows that mergers between advertising agencies that previously contracted with competing advertisers decrease surplus by bringing their clients into conflict. Mergers involving agencies that have not previously contracted reduce the number of matching opportunities for new clients and tend to lower the total number of matches made in equilibrium. úI am grateful to my advisors Ginger Jin and Andrew Sweeting for their invaluable support and guidance throughout this project. I thank Larry Ausubel, Roger Betancourt, Peter Cramton, Jingting Fan, Jeremy Fox, Avi Goldfarb, John Hatfield, Soohyung (Soo) Lee, Ben Zou and seminar participants at the and department of economics and Robert Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland for helpful discussions, suggestions and comments. I would also like to thank George Chressanthis for suggesting data sources, and Robert Girondi from the Fox School of Business, Drew Guiteras from McKinney, Prasun Subedi from Pfizer for providing institutional detail on advertising agencies and pharmaceutical marketing. †Department of Economics, University of Maryland. Email: dai@econ.umd. edu ‡For the latest version, please check, http://econweb.umd. edu/~dai/dai_jmp. pdf
Exploring patterns in website content structure

A pilot study was conducted for the dissertation research on the indications of conventionalization in the observable structure of website content, i.e. in the way information is displayed to and perceived by users. The pilot applied qualitative content analysis methods, guided by the genre theory, to the sample of the top three structural levels of fifteen websites of three types (universities, governmental, and business). Because of the small sample, the pilot results should be treated as preliminary, but they do point to certain type-dependent patterns in organization of information on websites. In addition, analysis of page titles and link labels identified some naming conventions for particular content categories. The analysis of content structure also appears potentially informative about major “lines of business” of an actual entity, or entity type, behind the website.
Neurochemical control of cricket stridulation revealed by pharmacological microinjections into the brain.

Neuroactive substances were administered into the frontal protocerebrum of tethered male Gryllus bimaculatus by pressure injections from microcapillaries. All three types of species-specific song pattern (calling song, rivalry song and courtship song) could be elicited by injection of acetylcholine and cholinergic agonists. Injection of nicotine led to short bouts of calling song that occurred after a short latency. In contrast, muscarine elicited long-lasting stridulation that took longer to develop. The pharmacologically induced song patterns showed transitions from rivalry song to calling song and from calling song to courtship song, which also occur during natural behaviour. Stridulation induced by a cholinergic agonist could be immediately blocked by microinjection of (&ggr;)-aminobutyric acid (GABA) into the same neuropile sites. Administration of picrotoxin in resting crickets led to enhanced motor activity that incorporated the three different song patterns. We propose that, in the brain of the cricket, acetylcholine and GABA are putative transmitters involved in the control of stridulation. Histological analysis located the stimulation sites to an area between the pedunculus and the (&agr;)-lobe of the mushroom body in which the command neurons for calling song have dendritic arborizations.
People Favour Imperfect Catching by Assuming a Stable World

The visual angle that is projected by an object (e.g. a ball) on the retina depends on the object's size and distance. Without further information, however, the visual angle is ambiguous with respect to size and distance, because equal visual angles can be obtained from a big ball at a longer distance and a smaller one at a correspondingly shorter distance. Failure to recover the true 3D structure of the object (e.g. a ball's physical size) causing the ambiguous retinal image can lead to a timing error when catching the ball. Two opposing views are currently prevailing on how people resolve this ambiguity when estimating time to contact. One explanation challenges any inference about what causes the retinal image (i.e. the necessity to recover this 3D structure), and instead favors a direct analysis of optic flow. In contrast, the second view suggests that action timing could be rather based on obtaining an estimate of the 3D structure of the scene. With the latter, systematic errors will be predicted if our inference of the 3D structure fails to reveal the underlying cause of the retinal image. Here we show that hand closure in catching virtual balls is triggered by visual angle, using an assumption of a constant ball size. As a consequence of this assumption, hand closure starts when the ball is at similar distance across trials. From that distance on, the remaining arrival time, therefore, depends on ball's speed. In order to time the catch successfully, closing time was coupled with ball's speed during the motor phase. This strategy led to an increased precision in catching but at the cost of committing systematic errors.
Causes of Grade Nine Students’ Grade Retention in General Secondary Schools of Dabat Woreda in North Gondar, Ethiopia

One of the great problems of Ethiopia for the educational arena is retention. Averagely 8.07% of each year of the secondary education students is repeated due to lack of achievement in this country. The percentage of retention in a country shows what proportion of students is regularly repeated in the same grade and who are, therefore, committing different crimes and misbehaved behaviors. Grade retention predicts many negative student outcomes: the frustration and humiliation associated with repeating the curriculum, combined with one’s physical size, may result in an increase in aggression and oppositional behavior. The main purpose of this study was to investigate some of the causes that contribute to grade nine students’ grade retention in general secondary schools of Dabat district. It has attempted to identify the major factors under two headings: in-school and out-of-school factors to present separate area of intervention. In order to attain the objectives, the study was carried out in two general secondary schools which were selected using comprehensive sampling techniques. The study involved 264(M=106 & F=158) grade repeaters and 44 teachers and 2 principals. The data gathered were analyzed using percentage, mean, Spearmen rank order correlation coefficient and t-test. Based on the result of the analysis, among the in-school factors, the highest percentages were observed for difficulty of language of instruction, students’ failure to study hard, poor quality of teaching, lack of guidance and counseling and frequent absenteeism of students were in-school related. On the other hand, low level of family income, parent (pupils) health problem, lack of parents support and child labor were identified as the major out-of-school causes for grade retention in grade nine secondary schools. It was also found out that the combined effect of both in-school and out-of-school factors was important in explaining students’ grade retentions in the secondary schools of the district. The incidence of the problem is relatively higher among girls than among boys.
Anabolic steroids in part reverse glucocorticoid-induced alterations in rat diaphragm.

Animal and clinical studies have shown respiratory muscle dysfunction caused by treatment with glucocorticoids. The present study was designed to investigate whether anabolic steroids are able to antagonize the loss of diaphragm force induced by long-term low-dose methylprednisolone (MP) administration. Male adult rats were randomized to receive saline or MP (0.2 mg . kg-1 .day-1 sc) during 9 mo, with or without nandrolone decanoate (ND; 1 mg . kg-1 . wm -1 im) during the last 3 mo. The approximately 10% reduction in force generation of isolated diaphragm bundles induced by MP was completely abolished by addition of ND. The MP-induced decrease in number of fibers expressing type IIb myosin heavy chains was not reversed by ND. MP slightly reduced type I, IIa, and IIx fiber cross-sectional areas (CSA), but not type IIb fiber CSA. Addition of ND abolished the reduction in IIa and IIx fiber CSA. The MP-induced alterations in glycogenolytic activity and fatty acid oxidation capacity were not reversed by ND. In conclusion, the marked reduction in diaphragm force caused by long-term low-dose MP was completely abolished by addition of ND. ND in part also antagonized the effects of MP on diaphragm morphology but showed no beneficial effects on biochemical changes.
The Fecal Microbiome in Dogs with Acute Diarrhea and Idiopathic Inflammatory Bowel Disease

Background Recent molecular studies have revealed a highly complex bacterial assembly in the canine intestinal tract. There is mounting evidence that microbes play an important role in the pathogenesis of acute and chronic enteropathies of dogs, including idiopathic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The aim of this study was to characterize the bacterial microbiota in dogs with various gastrointestinal disorders. Methodology/Principal Findings Fecal samples from healthy dogs (n = 32), dogs with acute non-hemorrhagic diarrhea (NHD; n = 12), dogs with acute hemorrhagic diarrhea (AHD; n = 13), and dogs with active (n = 9) and therapeutically controlled idiopathic IBD (n = 10) were analyzed by 454-pyrosequencing of the 16S rRNA gene and qPCR assays. Dogs with acute diarrhea, especially those with AHD, had the most profound alterations in their microbiome, as significant separations were observed on PCoA plots of unweighted Unifrac distances. Dogs with AHD had significant decreases in Blautia, Ruminococcaceae including Faecalibacterium, and Turicibacter spp. , and significant increases in genus Sutterella and Clostridium perfringens when compared to healthy dogs. No significant separation on PCoA plots was observed for the dogs with IBD. Faecalibacterium spp. and Fusobacteria were, however, decreased in the dogs with clinically active IBD, but increased during time periods of clinically insignificant IBD, as defined by a clinical IBD activity index (CIBDAI). Conclusions Results of this study revealed a bacterial dysbiosis in fecal samples of dogs with various GI disorders. The observed changes in the microbiome differed between acute and chronic disease states. The bacterial groups that were commonly decreased during diarrhea are considered to be important short-chain fatty acid producers and may be important for canine intestinal health. Future studies should correlate these observed phylogenetic differences with functional changes in the intestinal microbiome of dogs with defined disease phenotypes.
A longitudinal study of job stress in the nursing profession: causes and consequences.

AIM AND BACKGROUND This study examines the influence of changes in work conditions on stress outcomes as well as influence of changes in stress outcomes on work conditions. As such, it answers questions still open in the literature regarding causality of work environmental characteristics and the health of nurses. METHOD A complete, two wave panel design was used with a time interval of 3 years. The sample consisted of 381 hospital nurses in different functions, working in different wards. RESULTS Changes in work conditions are predictive of the outcomes, especially of job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. The strongest predictors of job satisfaction were social support from supervisor, reward and control over work. The strongest predictors of emotional exhaustion were work and time pressure and physical demands. Reversed relationships were also found for these outcomes. CONCLUSION The results of this study are consistent with transactional models of stress that indicate that stressors and stress outcomes mutually influence each other. To prevent nurses from a negative spiral, it seems of importance to intervene early in the process.
Storytelling of Photo Stream with Bidirectional Multi-thread Recurrent Neural Network

Visual storytelling aims to generate human-level narrative language (i.e., a natural paragraph with multiple sentences) from a photo streams. A typical photo story consists of a global timeline with multi-thread local storylines, where each storyline occurs in one different scene. Such complex structure leads to large content gaps at scene transitions between consecutive photos. Most existing image/video captioning methods can only achieve limited performance, because the units in traditional recurrent neural networks (RNN) tend to "forget" the previous state when the visual sequence is inconsistent. In this paper, we propose a novel visual storytelling approach with Bidirectional Multi-thread Recurrent Neural Network (BMRNN). First, based on the mined local storylines, a skip gated recurrent unit (sGRU) with delay control is proposed to maintain longer range visual information. Second, by using sGRU as basic units, the BMRNN is trained to align the local storylines into the global sequential timeline. Third, a new training scheme with a storyline-constrained objective function is proposed by jointly considering both global and local matches. Experiments on three standard storytelling datasets show that the BMRNN model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.
Alpino: Wide-coverage Computational Analysis of Dutch

Alpino is a wide-coverage computational analyzer of Dutch which aims at accurate, full, parsing of unrestricted text. We describe the head-driven lexicalized grammar and the lexical component, which has been derived from existing resources. The grammar produces dependency structures, thus providing a reasonably abstract and theory-neutral level of linguistic representation. An important aspect of wide-coverage parsing is robustness and disambiguation. The dependency relations encoded in the dependency structures have been used to develop and evaluate both hand-coded and statistical disambiguation methods.
Alterations in Red Blood Cells and Plasma Properties after Acute Single Bout of Exercise

The aim of this study was to investigate alterations in haemoglobin conformation and parameters related to oxidative stress in whole erythrocytes, membranes, and plasma after a single bout of exercise in a group of young untrained men. Venous blood samples from eleven healthy young untrained males (age = 22 ± 2 years, BMI = 23 ± 2.5 kg/m2) were taken from the antecubital vein before an incremental cycling exercise test, immediately after exercise, and 1 hour after exercise. Individual heart rate response to this exercise was 195 ± 12 beats/min and the maximum wattage was 292 ± 27 W. Immediately after exercise, significant increase in standard parameters (haemoglobin, haematocrit, lactate levels, and plasma volume) of blood was observed as well as plasma antioxidant capacity one hour after exercise. Reversible conformational changes in haemoglobin, measured using a maleimide spin label, were found immediately following exercise. The concentration of ascorbic acid inside erythrocytes significantly decreased after exercise. A significant decline in membrane thiols was observed one hour after exercise, but simultaneously an increase in plasma thiols immediately after and 1 h after exercise was also observed. This study shows that a single bout of exercise can lead to mobilization of defensive antioxidant systems in blood against oxidative stress in young untrained men.
Introducing ν-CLEAR: a latent variable approach to measuring nuclear proficiency

The causes and consequences of nuclear proficiency are central to important questions in international relations. At present, researchers tend to use observable characteristics as a proxy. However, aggregation is a problem: existing measures implicitly assume that each indicator is equally informative and that measurement error is not a concern. We overcome these issues by applying a statistical measurement model to directly estimate nuclear proficiency from observed indicators. The resulting estimates form a new dataset on nuclear proficiency which we call ν-CLEAR. We demonstrate that these estimates are consistent with known patterns of nuclear proficiency while also uncovering more nuance than existing measures. Additionally, we demonstrate how scholars can use these estimates to account for measurement error by revisiting existing results with our measure.
Development of neural mechanisms of conflict and error processing during childhood: implications for self-regulation

Regulation of thoughts and behavior requires attention, particularly when there is conflict between alternative responses or when errors are to be prevented or corrected. Conflict monitoring and error processing are functions of the executive attention network, a neurocognitive system that greatly matures during childhood. In this study, we examined the development of brain mechanisms underlying conflict and error processing with event-related potentials (ERPs), and explored the relationship between brain function and individual differences in the ability to self-regulate behavior. Three groups of children aged 4–6, 7–9, and 10–13 years, and a group of adults performed a child-friendly version of the flanker task while ERPs were registered. Marked developmental changes were observed in both conflict processing and brain reactions to errors. After controlling by age, higher self-regulation skills are associated with smaller amplitude of the conflict effect but greater amplitude of the error-related negativity. Additionally, we found that electrophysiological measures of conflict and error monitoring predict individual differences in impulsivity and the capacity to delay gratification. These findings inform of brain mechanisms underlying the development of cognitive control and self-regulation.
A UNIFIED THEORY OF LINEARLY SOLVABLE OPTIMAL CONTROL

We present a unified theory of Linearly Solvable Optimal Control, that is, a class of optimal control problems whose solution reduces to solving a linear equation (for finite state spaces) or a linear integral equation (for continuous state spaces). The framework presented includes all previous work on linearly solvable optimal control as special cases. It includes both standard control problems and risk-sensitive control problems. The degree of risk sensitivity is a parameter of the optimal control problem and can be tuned to achieve the desired trade-off between performance and robustness (to noise/modeling errors). Linearly Solvable Optimal Control problems also possess a number of attractive properties that we explore in this paper. We show that it is possible to construct optimal control laws for new problems by combining the control laws of previously solved optimal control problems. This leads to analytical solutions for a class of non-LQG control problems. Another property is the existence of a path integral representation of the solution to the optimal control problem, which allows us to leverage approximate probabilistic inference techniques to compute optimal control laws. Further, we show that the Inverse Optimal Control problem, that is, the problem of inferring the cost function given trajectories sampled from the optimal control law, can be posed as a convex optimization problem and solved efficiently for problems in this class. We show that the risk sensitive problems can also be viewed as zero sum stochastic games, where the degree of risk averseness grows as the adversary becomes stronger. Under this interpretation, we derive a stochastic maximum principle that characterizes the most likely trajectory of the optimally controlled closed-loop system (that includes both the controller and the adversary).
Social Media, Permanence, and Tattooed Students: The Case for Personal, Personal Branding

ABSTRACT This article explores the perspectives of students regarding tattoos as a form of branding themselves. Various cohort groups of students at a South African university participated by completing a questionnaire (with both quantitative and qualitative components) on their behaviour and perspectives related to tattoos and personal branding. Most participants revealed reasons of a highly personal nature for getting tattoos, and the majority of the participants chose not to share their tattoos via social media platforms. The results are evaluated in terms of current notions of branding, permanence, and social media. It is argued that the social media branding perspectives of this study population strengthen the case for the proposed category “personal, personal branding”—especially in relation to tattooing. This study contributes to understanding the role tattoos play in expressing the identities of individuals in communities.
Turned on, tuned in, but not dropped out: enhancing the student experience with popular social media platforms

A paper which contends that social media platforms should be embraced by Universities, as opposed to being regarded with fear or suspicion, as they offer an invaluable resource to not only enhance educational communications, but also to embed into day-to-day practice the reality that students are active co-producers of content, rather than passive information consumers which the majority of University-based Managed Learning Environments (MLEs) have, to date, been seen to promote. Social media platforms are an inherent part of any modern student's life, and their associated apps, which provide the link between parent sites and a student's mobile phone, tablet or laptop, create an unprecedented immediacy in the way that messages are communicated between users. The greater use of social media by university Schools and Departments provides them with an opportunity to mitigate many of the negative consequences that have arisen due to increasing reliance on MLEs. The associated information overload which students face in higher education threatens to create a disengaged, 'switched off' student body rather than a community that remains turned on and tuned in'.