Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Social Cost of Road Congestion in Ile-de-France Region (and France): Empirical Evidences from the Paris Ring-Road

The aim of this article was to assess specific problems concerning traffic congestion access to the city of Paris. First, we attempted to evaluate the evolution of the congestion cost for the Paris Ring-Road (PRR), the major urban highway surrounding the French capital, during the period from 2000-2007. A speed-density methodology was implemented which enabled us to differentiate the external costs of road congestion between speed-classes of 5 km/h. These results were useful to subsequently propose the order of magnitude of time losses at national and regional scales, as well as marginal pricing schemes which could potentially be used in order to correct road congestion externality on the PRR. Our empirical investigation concluded that, in 2007, the PRR was more costly for central Paris area (130 M€) compared to that of seven years earlier (117 M€). The deterioration of traffic conditions, symbolized by the mean speed fall (- 5.2 %), dominates the infrastructure least used (- 2.2 %). Based on these figures, the social cost of road congestion is thought to reach about 0.2 % of the French GDP. This ratio becomes three times higher once reported on a regional scale and underlines that road congestion is an important issue for Ile-de-France. Finally, despite their analytical limitations, the proposed taxes clearly illustrate the challenges related to road-pricing strategies.
The moving object detection experiment on RADARSAT-2

Under contract to the Canadian Space Agency and in cooperation with the Canadian Department of National Defence, MacDonald Dettwiler and Associates Ltd. will include an experimental ground moving target detection function in RADARSAT-2. The RADARSAT-2 design allows two portions of the full antenna aperture to be used independently with two separate receivers. This configuration provides a temporal (along-track) interferometer (ATI) capability. By appropriate processing of the received echo data from the two apertures, it is possible to detect targets that have a radial motion component and to measure their radial velocities. This element of the RADARSAT-2 spacecraft and ground system design is known as the moving object detection experiment (MODEX). Ongoing research into the properties of unscanned synthetic aperture radar (SAR) ground moving target indication (SAR GMTI) sensors of the RADARSAT-2 class has identified a number of features that are unique to SAR GMTI processing requirements. This paper describes the capabilities of RADARSAT-2 that are relevant to moving target detection and defines moving target detection modes of operation. Potential signal processing algorithms and issues that must be considered in the design of MODEX data processing facilities are introduced. A preliminary conceptual design for a MODEX processor is outlined.
Individual specialists in a generalist population: results from a long-term stable isotope series

Individual variation in resource use has often been ignored in ecological studies, but closer examination of individual patterns through time may reveal significant intrapopulation differences. Adult loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) are generalist carnivores with a wide geographical range, resulting in a broad isotopic niche. We microsampled scute, a persistent and continuously growing tissue, to examine long-term variation in resource use (up to 12 years) in 15 nesting loggerhead turtles. Using stable isotopes of nitrogen and carbon, we examined the resource use patterns (integration of diet, habitat and geographical location) and demonstrate that individual loggerheads are long-term specialists within a generalist population. We present our results in the context of a conceptual model comparing isotopic niches in specialist and generalist populations. Individual consistency may have important ecological, evolutionary and conservation consequences, such as the reduction of intraspecific competition.
The Struggle for Canadian Sport

Canadian sports were turned on their head during the years between the world wars. The middle-class amateur men's organizations which dominated Canadian sports since the mid-nineteenth century steadily lost ground, swamped by the rise of consumer culture and badly battered and split by the depression. In The Struggle for Canadian Sport Bruce Kidd illuminates the complex and fractious process that produced the familiar contours of Canadian sport today -- the hegemony of continental cartels like the NHL, the enormous ideological power of the media, the shadowed participation of women in sports, and the strong nationalism of the amateur Olympic sports bodies. Kidd focuses on four major Canadian organizations of the interwar period: the Amateur Athletic Union, the Women's Amateur Athletic Federation, the Workers' Sport Association, and the National Hockey League. Each of these organizations became focal points of debate and political activity, and they often struggled with each other - each had a radically different agenda: The AAU sought 'the making of men' and the strengthening of English-Canadian nationalism; the WAAF promoted the health and well-being of sportswomen; the WSA was a vehicle for socialism; and the NHL was concerned with lucrative spectacles. These national organizations stimulated and steered many of the resources available for sport and contributed significantly to the expansion of opportunities. They enjoyed far more power than other Canadian cultural organizations of the period, and they attempted to manipulate both the direction and philosophy of Canadian athletics. Through their control of the rules and prestigious events and their countless interventions in the mass media, they shaped the dominant practices and coined the very language with which Canadians discussed what sports should mean. The success and outcome of each group, as well as their confrontations with one another were crucial in shaping modern Canadian sports. The Struggle for Canadian Sport adds to our understanding of the material and social conditions under which people created and elaborated sports and the contested ideological terrain on which sports were played and interpreted. Winner of the North American Society for Sports History (NASSH) 1997 book award
Kinematic Modeling of Bird Locomotion from Experimental Data

We present the design of a bird-like kinematics model for a biped robot as an alternative to the human model. The starting point of the research consists of analyzing the walking motion of quail birds using biological data obtained by X-ray radiography. The 3-D-motion analysis allows identification of the number of degrees of freedom (DOF) and the rotation mechanism for each leg, especially the main rotation axis. Leg joints are located at the hip, knee, ankle, and foot. The ankle is off the ground. Using this analysis, we have designed a biped kinematics model with a minimum of actuated joints and with the original orientation of hip and ankle main rotary joints, which are not horizontally and vertically oriented as in classical biped robotics. Given a reference-foot trajectory, we carry out simulations to compare internal-joint trajectories with the ones obtained from biological measurements. We show that the proposed model can be used to reproduce the kinematics of bird locomotion with a minimum of four actuated joints per leg, i.e., two at the hip and one at the knee, and one at the ankle, which is less than the usual six joints per leg that drive anthropomorphic legs.
Multi-criteria Web Services Selection: Balancing the Quality of Design and Quality of Service

Web service composition allows developers to create applications via reusing available services that are interoperable to each other. The process of selecting relevant Web services for a composite service satisfying the developer requirements is commonly acknowledged to be hard and challenging, especially with the exponentially increasing number of available Web services on the Internet. The majority of existing approaches on Web Services Selection are merely based on the Quality of Service (QoS) as a basic criterion to guide the selection process. However, existing approaches tend to ignore the service design quality, which plays a crucial role in discovering, understanding, and reusing service functionalities. Indeed, poorly designed Web service interfaces result in service anti-patterns, which are symptoms of bad design and implementation practices. The existence of anti-pattern instances in Web service interfaces typically complicates their reuse in real-world service-based systems and may lead to several maintenance and evolution problems. To address this issue, we introduce a new approach based on the Multi-Objective and Optimization on the basis of Ratio Analysis method (MOORA) as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method to select Web services based on a combination of their (1) QoS attributes and (2) QoS design. The proposed approach aims to help developers to maintain the soundness and quality of their service composite development processes. We conduct a quantitative and qualitative empirical study to evaluate our approach on a Quality of Web Service dataset. We compare our MOORA-based approach against four commonly used MCDM methods as well as a recent state-of-the-art Web service selection approach. The obtained results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by significantly improving the service selection quality of top-k selected services while providing the best trade-off between both service design quality and desired QoS values. Furthermore, we conducted a qualitative evaluation with developers. The obtained results provide evidence that our approach generates a good trade-off for what developers need regarding both QoS and quality of design. Our selection approach was evaluated as “relevant” from developers point of view, in improving the service selection task with an average score of 3.93, compared to an average of 2.62 for the traditional QoS-based approach.
Essentials of Negotiation

Chapter 1 - The Nature of Negotiation Chapter 2 - Strategy and Tactics of Distributive Bargaining Chapter 3 - Strategy and Tactics of Integrative Negotiation Chapter 4 - Negotiation: Strategy and Planning Chapter 5 - Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Chapter 6 - Communication Chapter 7 - Finding and Using Negotiation Power Chapter 8 - Ethics in Negotiation Chapter 9 - Relationships in Negotiation Chapter 10 - Multiple Parties and Teams Chapter 11 - International and Cross-Cultural Negotiation Chapter 12 - Best Practices in Negotiations
Experimental studies on cooperation and coordination in politics, firms and society

Mein Dank geht auch an alle, die das Graduiertenkolleg " Quantitative Economics and Finance " ermöglicht haben, die Stiftung des Landes Baden-Württemberg, die Deutsch-Französische Hochschule und das Thurgauer Wirtschaftsinstitut für die finanzielle Unterstützung meiner Arbeit. Ich möchte mich auch bedanken bei denjenigen Menschen, die nicht (unbedingt) aus meinem Arbeitsumfeld stammen: An letzter Stelle, aber an wichtigster, sage ich " Danke " für all die Unterstützung, die mir meine Eltern Inge und Dieter gegeben haben. Ich bin froh, dass Ihr an mich glaubt und mir in all' den Jahren zu Seite gestanden seid.
Effects of "Voice" and Peer Opinions on Responses to Inequity

Southern Methodist UniversityTwo experiments investigated the effects of "voice" (participating in allocationdecision making by expressing one's own opinion about the preferred alloca-tion) on responses to an inequitable allocation. In addition to subjects' (femalecollege students) either having or not having voice, Experiment 1 manipulated(a) whether the allocation made by a "decision maker" (supposedly anothersubject but actually the experimenter) was or was not biased (due to self-interest) and (b) whether the subject did or did not learn that a "co-worker"believed the allocation to be inequitable. Experiment 2 (with female high schoolstudents) manipulated the presence or absence of voice and involved only aself-interested decision maker; also, a note from a co-worker either supportedthe decision maker's allocation or confirmed the subject's opinion that the allo-cation was inequitable. In both experiments, the impact of voice was mediatedby knowledge about the co-worker's opinion. When subjects had no knowledgeof the co-worker's opinion (Experiment 1) or knew that the co-worker's opinioncoincided with the decision maker's allocation (Experiment 2), there was evi-dence for a "fair process effect": Voice subjects expressed greater satisfactionthan those with no voice.How do people know that they have beentreated fairly? According to equity theory(Adams, 1965; Walster, Berscheid, & Wal-ster, 1973), a distribution of outcomes is con-sidered fair (equitable) if the ratio of out-comes to inputs is constant across people.Apart from considerations of equity, however,fairness judgments may also be affected bywhether a distribution is the result of an ac-ceptable decision-making procedure (see thedistinction between distributive and proce-dural justice in Folger, 1977; Leventhal,1976; and Thibaut & Walker, 1975). Deutsch(1975), in discussing how "injustice of deci-sion-making procedures" affects the percep-tion of justice, makes the following argument:"There is much social psychological research
Men of Color: Ensuring the Academic Success of Latino Males in Higher Education.

02 Acknowledgments the authors would like to thank the staff of the institute for higher Education Policy who contributed to this brief—Lorelle Espinosa, Ph.d., director of policy and strategic initiatives and Anne Bowles, m.A., policy and outreach associate. We greatly appreciate their feedback, guidance, and support. in addition, we extend our thanks to the center for mexican American studies and the division of diversity and community Engagement—both at the university of texas (ut) at Austin—for their continued support of our work on this important issue. We are especially grateful to our colleagues and partners at south texas college (stc)—Vice President William serrata and Associate dean Luzelma canales—who have been instrumental in helping us launch Project mALEs (mentoring to Achieve Latino Educational success), a joint effort between ut-Austin and stc that focuses on mentoring Latino males in higher education. finally, we are grateful for the grant support from tg for our ongoing research study on Latino males called " Boys in Peril. " About the Authors victor b. sáenz, Ph.d., is an assistant professor of higher education administration in the department of Educational Administration, college of Education, at the university of texas at Austin. he is also a faculty affiliate with the ut center for mexican American studies, a faculty fellow with the ut division of diversity and community Engagement, and a faculty associate with the ucLA higher Education research institute. is an assistant professor of higher education administration in the college of Education at the university of florida. he is a faculty affiliate with the center for Latin American studies. 03 Executive summary 04 introduction 05 the condition of Latino males in Education 06 Latino male Pre-college Pathways, college Access, and college success 11 Alternative career and Life Pathways for Latino males 12 Blueprint for Action: creating and maintaining successful initiatives for Latino males 14 Promising Programs and Practices for Latino male Educational success 15 implications for Policy and Practice: Addressing the Educational crisis facing Latino males 17 conclusion 18 references men of color: Ensuring thE AcAdEmic succEss of LAtino mALEs in highEr EducAtion 03 exeCuTive summary The U.S. Census data are clear: In the coming years, America's Latina/o community will continue to drive population and labor force growth. Therefore, federal and state policymakers, higher education leaders, and communities small and large across the pre-K to college continuum would be wise to seize this sizeable demographic shift to help propel …
Does Product Differentiation Soften Price Reactions to Entry? Evidence from the Airline Industry

We examine the effects of entry on the pricing of legacy airlines facing a rapidly expanding low-cost newcomer. We estimate the timing and the determinants of responses allowing for asymmetry and product differentiation. We propose a decomposition procedure of time fixed-effects to control for unobserved heterogeneity, accounting for time-varying route-, city-, and carrier-specific unobservables. We find that incumbents do price-respond to actual but not to potential entry. The lack of preemption is due to financial distress, which precluded costly deterrence against a deep-pocketed newcomer. Our model also uncovers product differentiation stemming from more convenient flights. © 2012 LSE and the University of Bath
Robust Visual-Textual Sentiment Analysis: When Attention meets Tree-structured Recursive Neural Networks

Sentiment analysis is crucial for extracting social signals from social media content. Due to huge variation in social media, the performance of sentiment classifiers using single modality (visual or textual) still lags behind satisfaction. In this paper, we propose a new framework that integrates textual and visual information for robust sentiment analysis. Different from previous work, we believe visual and textual information should be treated jointly in a structural fashion. Our system first builds a semantic tree structure based on sentence parsing, aimed at aligning textual words and image regions for accurate analysis. Next, our system learns a robust joint visual-textual semantic representation by incorporating 1) an attention mechanism with LSTM (long short term memory) and 2) an auxiliary semantic learning task. Extensive experimental results on several known data sets show that our method outperforms existing the state-of-the-art joint models in sentiment analysis. We also investigate different tree-structured LSTM (T-LSTM) variants and analyze the effect of the attention mechanism in order to provide deeper insight on how the attention mechanism helps the learning of the joint visual-textual sentiment classifier.
Influenza: the virus and prophylaxis with inactivated influenza vaccine in “at risk” groups, including COPD patients

Influenza is a major respiratory pathogen, which exerts a huge human and economic toll on society. Influenza is a vaccine preventable disease, however, the vaccine strains must be annually updated due to the continuous antigenic changes in the virus. Inactivated influenza vaccines have been used for over 50 years and have an excellent safety record. Annual vaccination is therefore recommended for all individuals with serious medical conditions, like COPD, and protects the vaccinee against influenza illness and also against hospitalization and death. In COPD patients, influenza infection can lead to exacerbations resulting in reduced quality of life, hospitalization and death in the most severe cases. Although there is only limited literature on the use of influenza vaccination solely in COPD patients, there is clearly enough evidence to recommend annual vaccination in this group. This review will focus on influenza virus and prophylaxis with inactivated influenza vaccines in COPD patients and other “at risk” groups to reduce morbidity, save lives, and reduce health care costs.
Aktivierende Sozialhilfe 2006: Das Kombilohn-Modell des ifo Instituts

Kombilohn ist nicht gleich Kombilohn. Teilweise wurden Kombilöhne in Deutschland bereits erprobt, in begrenztem Umfang und mit bestenfalls mäßigem Erfolg, wie etwa beim »Mainzer Modell«, das weitgehend schon wieder in Vergessenheit geraten ist. Auch das »Arbeitslosengeld II«, das als vorerst letzter Schritt der »HartzReformen« Anfang 2005 eingeführt wurde und die alte Arbeitslosenund Sozialhilfe für erwerbsfähige Leistungsempfänger vollständig ersetzt hat, enthält Kombilohn-Elemente. Für eine abschließende Beurteilung der damit erzielbaren Erfolge ist es gegenwärtig noch zu früh. Auf dem Tisch liegen seit geraumer Zeit weitere Kombilohn-Modelle wie die »Aktivierende Sozialhilfe« des ifo Instituts (vgl. Sinn et al. 2002) oder die ähnlich angelegten Modelle des Sachverständigenrates (2002, Tz. 432–482) und des wissenschaftlichen Beirats beim Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft (2002), die auf einen noch weiter gehenden Umbau des Systems der Unterstützung Arbeitsloser hinauslaufen. Zu erwähnen ist ferner die »Magdeburger Alternative« von Schöb und Weimann (2003; 2004), auf die weiter unten noch genauer eingegangen wird. In einer Rede vom 15. März 2005 hatte Bundespräsident Horst Köhler der Politik empfohlen, die Aktivierende Sozialhilfe und die Magdeburger Alternative auszuprobieren.
Spatial variation of chemical composition and sources of submicron aerosol in Zurich during wintertime using mobile aerosol mass spectrometer data

Abstract. Mobile measurements of PM 1 (particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter 1 yielded 3 factors: Hydrocarbon-like organic aerosol (HOA) related to traffic emissions; organic aerosol from wood burning for domestic heating purposes (WBOA); and oxygenated organic aerosol (OOA), assigned to secondary organic aerosol formed by oxidation of volatile precursors. The chemical composition of PM 1 was assessed for an urban background site and various sites throughout the city. The background site is dominated by secondary inorganic and organic species (57 %), BC, HOA, and WBOA account for 15 %, 6 %, and 12 %, respectively. As for the other sites, HOA is important along major roads (varying between 7 and 14 % of PM 1 for different sites within the city, average all sites 8 %), domestic wood burning makes up between 8–15 % of PM 1 for different sites within the city (average all sites 10.5 %). OOA makes up the largest fraction of organic aerosol (44 % on average). A new method allows for the separation and quantification of the local fraction of PM 1 emitted or rapidly formed in the city, and the fraction of PM 1 originating from the urban background. The method is based on simultaneous on-road mobile and stationary background measurements and the correction of small-scale meteorological effects using the ratio of on-road sulfate to stationary sulfate. Especially during thermal inversions over the Swiss plateau, urban background concentrations contribute substantially to particulate number concentrations (between 40 and 80 % depending on meteorological conditions and emissions, 60 % on average) as well as to the mass concentrations of PM 1 components measured on road in downtown Zurich (between 30 and 90 %, on average 60 % for black carbon and HOA, and between 90 and 100 % for WBOA, OOA, and the measured inorganic components). The results emphasize, on a scientific level, the advantage of mobile measurements for distinguishing local from regional air pollution research, and on a political level, the importance of regional collaboration for mitigating air pollution issues.
Zero Lower Bound: Is it a Problem in the Euro Area?

This paper presents the results of a quantitative study of the implications of the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates which was undertaken in the context of the review of the ECB's monetary policy strategy in Spring 2003. Focusing on the euro area, the paper provides an assessment of the likelihood that the short-term nominal interest rate may be constrained at zero and quantifies how the zero-bound constraint may affect the dynamic behaviour of key macroeconomic variables such as the shortterm nominal interest rate, annual inflation and output. Keywords: zero-interest-rate bound, price stability, nominal rigidities, interest rate rules, euro area