Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Testing the Efficient Market Hypothesis in The Greek Secondary Capital Market

This study uses cointegration tests and event study methodology to provide evidence on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) in the secondary (parallel) capital market of Athens Stock Exchange (ASE). It examines the existence of interdependence between primary and secondary market in order to test the autonomy of secondary market price behaviour. It also measures the effects of the announcements for issuing new stocks by the listed companies. The empirical results indicate that there is evidence of a bi-directional causality and price co-movement between the primary and secondary capital market in Greece. These findings have significant implications for the rejection of the weak form efficiency. It also provides evidence, which suggests that the announcement of issuing new stocks gives support (total or partial) to specific classes of capital structure theories. The existence of non-zero abnormal returns around the announcement periods leads to the rejection of the semi-strong EMH for the secondary market of the ASE.
Influence of age group differences on website cultural usability

Research on culture and web usability has highlighted influences of culture on web usability. However, the issue of age group differences has been neglected, as participants were mostly university students which represent only one age group. People of different age groups are different, not only in their physical attributes, but also in their cognitive and socioemotional attributes. This paper investigated the influence of age group differences on usability of culturally accommodated websites. Research participants were tested with three different web prototypes. Two of them represented two different cultures, while another one was designed to be neutral to the other two cultures. The results were evaluated both subjectively and objectively. The results indicate that there were interaction effects between age group and culture, as represented in each prototype, on web usability was significantly different. In conclusion, interpretations of interaction effects are discussed.
Post-translational Regulation of Human Indoleamine 2,3-Dioxygenase Activity by Nitric Oxide*

The heme protein indoleamine 2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) is induced by the proinflammatory cytokine interferon-γ (IFNγ) and plays an important role in the immune response by catalyzing the oxidative degradation of l-tryptophan (Trp) that contributes to immune suppression and tolerance. Here we examined the mechanism by which nitric oxide (NO) inhibits human IDO activity. Exposure of IFNγ-stimulated human monocyte-derived macrophages (MDM) to NO donors had no material impact on IDO mRNA or protein expression, yet exposure of MDM or transfected COS-7 cells expressing active human IDO to NO donors resulted in reversible inhibition of IDO activity. NO also inhibited the activity of purified recombinant human IDO (rhIDO) in a reversible manner and this correlated with NO binding to the heme of rhIDO. Optical absorption and resonance Raman spectroscopy identified NO-inactivated rhIDO as a ferrous iron (FeII)-NO-Trp adduct. Stopped-flow kinetic studies revealed that NO reacted most rapidly with FeII rhIDO in the presence of Trp. These findings demonstrate that NO inhibits rhIDO activity reversibly by binding to the active site heme to trap the enzyme as an inactive nitrosyl-FeII enzyme adduct with Trp bound and O2 displaced. Reversible inhibition by NO may represent an important mechanism in controlling the immune regulatory actions of IDO.
Year : 2008 Sensorimotor gating of schizophrenia patients depends on catechol O-methyltransferase Val 158 Met polymorphism

It has been recently shown that Catechol O-methyltransferase (COMT) Val(158)Met polymorphism strongly influences prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle response (ASR) in healthy human volunteers. Given that schizophrenia patients exhibit impairment in PPI and that COMT is a putative susceptibility gene for schizophrenia, we investigated the impact of the COMT Val(158)Met polymorphisms on PPI in schizophrenic inpatients. We analyzed COMT Val(158)Met polymorphisms and assessed startle reactivity, habituation, and PPI of ASR in 68 Caucasian schizophrenia inpatients. Clinical symptoms were measured with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Patients carrying the Val(158)Met Met/Met allele showed elevated PPI levels whereas startle reactivity and habituation did not differ from the other two genotypes. These preliminary results imply that PPI is influenced by COMT Val(158)Met genotype in schizophrenia as well. In concert with other findings, our data suggest that PPI is a polygenic trait. Sensorimotor Gating of Schizophrenia Patients Depends on Catechol O-Methyltransferase ValMet Polymorphism Boris B. Quednow, Michael Wagner, Rainald Mössner, Wolfgang Maier, and Kai-Uwe Kühn Department of Psychiatry, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Experimental Psychopathology and Brain Imaging, University Hospital of Psychiatry, University of Zurich, Switzerland It has been recently shown that Catechol O-methyltransferase (COMT) ValMet polymorphism strongly influences prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle response (ASR) in healthy human volunteers. Given that schizophrenia patients exhibit impairment in PPI and that COMT is a putative susceptibility gene for schizophrenia, we investigated the impact of the COMT ValMet polymorphisms on PPI in schizophrenic inpatients. We analyzed COMT ValMet polymorphisms and assessed startle reactivity, habituation, and PPI of ASR in 68 Caucasian schizophrenia inpatients. Clinical symptoms were measured with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). Patients carrying the ValMet Met/Met allele showed elevated PPI levels whereas startle reactivity and habituation did not differ from the other two genotypes. These preliminary results imply that PPI is influenced by COMT ValMet genotype in schizophrenia as well. In concert with other findings, our data suggest that PPI is a polygenic trait.
Inflation Uncertainty and Real Economic Activity: An Alternative Approach

A bstracct-Increased uncertainty about inflation is shown to encourage inflation hedging which, in turn, reduces the macroeconomic costs of that uncertainty. Portfolio theory and empirical evidence support the contention that only the portion of inflation volatility that cannot be hedged has real economic effects. Additional empinrcal results suggest that: (i) increased inflation volatility in the early seventies was eventually followed by portfolio reallocations that allowed for greatly improved inflation hedging, and (ii) the deletenrous effect of inflation uncertainty on real economic activity shown in previouis studies is significantly smaller after 1975.
The Reaction of Investors and Stock Prices to Insider Trading

Trading by corporate insiders and their tippees is analyzed in Anheuser-Busch's 1982 tender offer for Campbell Taggart. Court records that identify insider transactions are used to disentangle the individual insider trades from liquidity trades. Consistent with previous studies, insider trading was found to have had a significant impact on the price of Campbell Taggart. However, the impact of informed trading on the market is complicated. Trading volume net of insider purchases rose. Contrary to the broad implications of adverse selection models, Campbell Taggart's liquidity improved when the insiders were active in the market and all the insiders received superior execution for their orders. Copyright 1992 by American Finance Association.
A General Formulation for Safely Exploiting Weakly Supervised Data

Weakly supervised data helps improve learning performance, which is an important machine learning data. However, recent results indicate that machine learning techniques with the usage of weakly supervised data may sometimes lead to performance degradation. How to safely leverage weakly supervised data has become an important issue, whereas there is only very limited effort, especially on a general formulation to help provide insight to understand safe weakly supervised learning. In this paper we present a scheme, which builds the final prediction results by integrating several weakly supervised learners. Our resultant formulation brings two implications. i) It has safeness guarantees for the commonly used convex loss functions in both regression and classification tasks of weakly supervised learning; ii) It can embed uncertain prior knowledge about the importance of base learners flexibly. Moreover, our formulation can be addressed globally by simple convex quadratic program or linear program in an efficient manner. Experiments on multiple weakly supervised learning tasks such as label noise learning, domain adaptation and semi-supervised learning validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms.
Legislative Leviathan: Party Government in the House

This book provides an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era. Reevaluating the role of parties and committees, Gary Cox and Mathew McCubbins view parties in the House - especially majority parties - as a species of 'legislative cartel. ' These cartels usurp the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure and process of legislation. Possession of this rule-making power leads to two main consequences. First, the legislative process in general, and the committee system in particular, is stacked in favor of majority party interests. Second, because the majority party has all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of that party and the majority party's central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel's leadership. Debunking prevailing arguments about the weakening of congressional parties, Cox and McCubbins powerfully illuminate the ways in which parties exercise considerable discretion in organizing the House to carry out its work. This work will have an important impact on the study of American politics, and will greatly interest students of Congress, the presidency, and the political party system.
Impact of Diabetes Mellitus on Head and Neck Cancer Patients Undergoing Surgery

Objective The impact of diabetes mellitus (DM) on surgical outcomes and cost of care for patients undergoing surgery for head and neck cancer (HNCA) is not well established. We used the Nationwide Inpatient Sample to analyze the postoperative impact of DM on HNCA patients. Study Design Population-based inpatient registry analysis. Setting Academic medical center. Subjects and Methods Discharge data from the Nationwide Inpatient Sample were analyzed for patients undergoing HNCA surgery from 2002 to 2010. Patient demographics, comorbidities, length of stay, hospital charges, and postoperative complications were compared between HNCA patients with and without DM. Results Of 31,075 patients, 4029 patients (13.0%) had a DM diagnosis. DM patients were older (65.7 ± 10.8 vs 61.1 ± 14.1 years old; P < .001), had more preexisting comorbidities, had longer hospitalizations, and incurred greater hospital charges. Compared with the non-DM cohort, DM patients experienced significantly higher rates of postoperative infections (2.6% vs 2.1%, P = .025), cardiac events (9.0% vs 4.3%, P < .001), pulmonary edema/failure (6.6% vs 5.7%, P = .023), acute renal failure (3.3% vs 1.5%, P < .001), and urinary tract infections (2.8 % vs 2.1%, P = .005). No differences in surgical wound healing rates were observed (0.1 vs 0.1, P = .794). On multivariate logistic regression corrected for age and race, DM patients had greater odds of postoperative infections (1.382, P = .007), cardiac events (1.893, P < .001), and acute renal failure (2.023, P < .001). Conclusions DM is associated with greater length of stay and hospital charges among HNCA patients. DM patients have significantly greater rates of postoperative complications, including postoperative infections, cardiac events, and acute renal failure.
Key Issues in Information Systems Management: A Comparative Study of Academics and Practitioners in Thailand

Abstract This study was designed to examine the information systems (IS) key issues in Thailand by comparing IS academics and practitioners within the country, and by comparing Thailand as a whole with other developed and developing countries. The economic development based on GDP per capita was used to classlfj, the developed and developing countries. The Q-Sort method, a ranking technique, was used to rank the IS key issues. The data were collected through an Internet survey website. The findings show that the issue of building information technology (Ig infrastructure was projected to be the top issue over the next three to five years in Thailand. The importance ranking of IS key issues in Thailand was similar to the studies from developed countries but dlflerent than the studies from developing countries. There was a signljkant dlflerence in the importance rankings of IS key issues between academics and practitioners in Thailand. However, they were in agreement on the first and second ranking IS key issues, which were building IT infrastructure and IS strategic planning, respectively.
Social Choice from an n-Dimensional Euclidean Space: A Short Impossibility Proof

Most presentations of social choice theory are difficult for a non-specialist to follow. This paper attempts to provide some feel for what is going on by providing a short proof of an impossibility theorem in terms of the techniques that are familiar to political economists. We illustrate the advantages of this approach with a short proof of an impossibility theorem.
Conformational equilibria of terminally blocked single amino acids at the water-hexane interface. A molecular dynamics study.

The conformational equilibria of the acetyl and methyl amide terminally blocked L-alanine, L-leucine and L-glutamine amino acids are examined in vacuum, in bulk water, and at the water-hexane interface, using multi-nanosecond molecular dynamics simulations. The two-dimensional probability distribution functions of finding the peptides at different dihedral angles of the backbone, phi and psi, are calculated, and free energy differences between different conformational states are determined. All three peptides are interfacially active, i.e. tend to accumulate at the interface even though they are not amphiphilic. Conformational states stable in both gas phase and water are also stable in the interfacial environment. Their populations, however, cannot be simply predicted from the knowledge of conformational equilibria in the bulk phases, indicating that the interface exerts a unique effect on the peptides. Conformational preferences in the interfacial environment arise from the interplay between electrostatic and hydrophobic effects. As in an aqueous solution, electrostatic solute-solvent interactions lead to the stabilization of more polar peptide conformations. The hydrophobic effect is manifested at the interface by a tendency to segregate polar and nonpolar moieties of the solute into the aqueous and the hexane phases, respectively. For the terminally blocked glutamine, this favors conformations for which such a segregation is compatible with the formation of strong, backbone-side chain intramolecular hydrogen bonds on the hexane side of the interface. The influence of the hydrophobic effect can be also noted in the orientational preferences of the peptides at the interface. The terminally blocked leucine is oriented such that its nonpolar side chain is buried in hexane, whereas the polar side chain of glutamine is immersed in water. The free energies of rotating the peptides along the axis parallel to the interface by more than 90 degrees are substantial. This indicates that peptide folding at interfaces is strong by driven by the tendency to adopt amphiphilic structures.
Assessing the Role of Ecotourism Training in Changing Participants' Pro-Environmental Knowledge, Attitude and Behaviour

Ecotourism training is usually considered to be undertaken only by tourism practitioners for professional development. However, ecotourism training has a more important role to play, as it could be adopted as a long-term strategy for environmental conservation by altering people's attitudes and behaviours towards greater environmental responsibility. In this study, the role of ecotourism training with respect to pro-environmental knowledge enhancement as well as attitude and behavioural changes is investigated. A questionnaire survey was conducted on participants of an ecotourism training programme. Participants' environmental knowledge, attitudes and behaviours were evaluated using a pre- and post-test method. The results indicated that participants demonstrated a significant increase in environmental knowledge after the training. Moreover, participants' demographic characteristics such as age group, occupation and salary are significantly associated with the improvement in knowledge, change in pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. Participants tend to adopt environmentally responsible attitudes and behaviours after completion of ecotourism training.
Disproportionality analysis of buprenorphine transdermal system and cardiac arrhythmia using FDA and WHO postmarketing reporting system data

ABSTRACT Objective: Positive-controlled clinical studies have shown a dose dependent effect of buprenorphine transdermal system on QTc interval prolongation. This study provides assessment of the buprenorphine transdermal system and cardiac arrhythmia using US FDA and WHO postmarketing reporting databases. Methods: Disproportionality analysis of spontaneously reported adverse events to assess whether the reporting rate of cardiac arrhythmia events was disproportionately elevated relative to expected rates of reporting in both FDA and WHO databases. Cardiac arrhythmia events were identified using the standardized Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities query for torsade de pointes and/or QT prolongation (TdP/QTP). The threshold for a signal of disproportionate adverse event reporting was defined as the lower 90% confidence limit ≥ 2 of the Empiric Bayes geometric mean in FDA database and as the lower 95% confidence limit of the Informational Component >0 in WHO database. Results: There were 124 (<1%) and 77 (2%) cardiac arrhythmia event cases associated with buprenorphine transdermal as compared to 3206 (12%) and 2913 (14%) involving methadone in the FDA and WHO databases, respectively. In the FDA database methadone was associated with a signal of disproportionate reporting for TdP/QTP (EB05 3.26); however, buprenorphine transdermal was not (EB05 0.33). In the WHO database methadone was associated with a signal of disproportionate reporting for TdP/QTP (IC025 2.66); however, buprenorphine transdermal was not (IC025 −0.88). Similar trends were observed in sensitivity analyses by age, gender, and specific terms related to ventricular arrhythmia. Conclusions: The signal identified in the transdermal buprenorphine thorough QTc study, which led to a dose limitation in its US label, does not translate into a signal of increased risk for cardiac arrhythmia in real world use, as assessed by this method of analyzing post-market surveillance data.
Ozone, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides time series at four alpine GAW mountain stations in central Europe

Abstract. Long-term, ground based in-situ observations of ozone (O3) and its precursor gases nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and carbon monoxide (CO) from the four sites Hohenpeissenberg and Zugspitze (D), Sonnblick (A) and Jungfraujoch (CH) are presented for the period 1995–2007. These Central European alpine mountain observatories cover an altitude range of roughly 1000 to 3500 m. Comparable analytical methods and common quality assurance (QA) procedures are used at all sites. For O3 and CO, calibration is linked to primary calibrations (O3) or CO standards provided by the Central Calibration Laboratory (CCL) at NOAA/ESRL. All stations have been audited by the World Calibration Centre (WCC) for CO and O3 (WCC-Empa; CH). Data from long-term measurements of NO2 and CO are only available from Hohenpeissenberg and Jungfraujoch. Both sites show slightly decreasing mixing ratios of the primarily emitted NO2 and the partly anthropogenically emitted CO between 1995 and 2007. The findings are generally consistent with shorter observation periods at Zugspitze and Sonnblick and thus are considered to represent regional changes in Central European atmospheric composition at this altitude range. Over the same period, 1995–2007, the O3 mixing ratios have slightly increased at three of the four sites independent of wind sector. Trends are often more pronounced in winter and less in summer; highest declines of NO2 and CO are observed in winter and the lowest in summer, whereas the strongest O3 increase was detected in winter and lowest or even decline in summer, respectively. Weekly cycles demonstrate anthropogenic impact at all elevations with enhanced NO2 on working days compared to weekends. Enhanced O3 values on working days indicating photochemical production from anthropogenic precursors are only observed in summer, whereas in all other seasons anti-correlation with NO2 was found due to reduced O3 values on working days. Trends are discussed with respect to anthropogenic impacts and vertical mixing. The observed trends for NO2 at the alpine mountain sites are less pronounced than trends estimated based on emission inventories.
Cocaine effects on NMDAR expression Nucleus accumbens and the ventral tegmental area

Addictive states are often thought to rely on lasting modification of signaling at relevant synapses. A long-standing theory posits that activity at N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) is a critical component of long-term synaptic plasticity in many brain areas. Indeed, NMDAR signaling has been found to play a role in the etiology of addictive states, in particular following cocaine exposure. However, no consensus is apparent with respect to the specific effects of cocaine exposure on NMDARs. Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that NMDARs interact extensively with multiple membrane proteins and intracellular signaling cascades. This allows for highly heterogeneous patterns of NMDAR regulation by cocaine in distinct brain regions and at distinct synapses. The picture is further complicated by findings that cocaine effects on NMDARs are sensitive to the behavioral history of cocaine exposure, such as the mode of cocaine administration. This review provides a summary of evidence for cocaine-induced changes in NMDAR expression, cocaine-induced alterations in NMDAR function and cocaine effects on NMDAR control of intracellular signaling cascades.
Do Rising Top Incomes Lift All Boats?

Abstract Pooling data for 1905 to 2000, we find no systematic relationship between top income shares and economic growth in a panel of 12 developed nations observed between 22 and 85 years. After 1960, however, a one percentage point rise in the top decile’s income share is associated with a statistically significant 0.12 point rise in GDP growth during the following year. This relationship is not driven by changes in either educational attainment or top tax rates. If the increase in inequality is permanent, the increase in growth appears to be permanent. However, our estimates imply that it would take 13 years for the cumulative positive effect of faster growth on the mean income of the bottom nine deciles to offset the negative effect of reducing their share of total income.