Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Book Reviews

Innovations, particularly technical ones, have a prominent place in today’s discussions on future growth. Technical innovation is not only relevant for a company and its potential networks, but also for the regional and national economy. This book by Meine Pieter van Dijk and Henry Sandee (editors) provides a background for the discussion related to the conditions for innovation processes in developing countries. But it is not self evident how the concept of innovation should be understood, especially if one focuses on the economic concerns of developing countries. The authors think that innovation in this case is almost synonymous with technical change and development. In developing countries, rather than introducing/implementing new technologies, existing technologies are in most cases used in a new context and new environments. To be an entrepreneur and innovator in developing countries is very much a question of imitating and adapting existing technologies to new local conditions. Focusing on technology development, the book explores the process of innovation, how it spreads in developing nations, and how this process influences the individual small company. Van Dijk and Sandee also take a closer look at the impacts of organized clusters and networks on the innovation process and how conditions for a functional innovative environment might be created within a broad regional or national context through the orchestration of various supporting resources. To create, to spread and to adopt innovations does not occur spontaneously, just out of the blue, but is something that can be seen as a process with different actors. The authors have identified four steps in this innovation process. The first step requires the availability of a new technology. In the second step the technology is introduced within the company, either from their own initiative (internal research and development) or through customer/client demand or contract research. In the third step the technology is adapted to local conditions and needs, and is further developed in the fourth step. This process perspective is the basis for understanding the arguments in the book. The authors emphasize the importance of clusters or networks. They suggest that collaboration between small companies in clusters or networks makes the small companies stronger and more eager to be developed technically. When a pioneer begins to work with a new technology, the new-found strengths of that technology impact the improvement of the whole cluster. Consequently, it is not self-evident that the pioneer him or herself actually benefits by the technology brought to the cluster. The pioneer by definition goes through a trial-and-error phase, which the others in the cluster can avoid. These other companies can adopt the technology. If the technology does not benefit the pioneer, the conditions for the cluster have improved nonetheless and thereby so has the basis for future innovations in the cluster. Consequently, different companies within a cluster create a foundation for each other’s processes. But it is not only the new International Small Business Journal 21(3)
A Fitts Law comparison of eye tracking and manual input in the selection of visual targets

We present a Fitts' Law evaluation of a number of eye tracking and manual input devices in the selection of large visual targets. We compared performance of two eye tracking techniques, manual click and dwell time click, with that of mouse and stylus. Results show eye tracking with manual click outperformed the mouse by 16%, with dwell time click 46% faster. However, eye tracking conditions suffered a high error rate of 11.7% for manual click and 43% for dwell time click conditions. After Welford correction eye tracking still appears to outperform manual input, with IPs of 13.8 bits/s for dwell time click, and 10.9 bits/s for manual click. Eye tracking with manual click provides the best tradeoff between speed and accuracy, and was preferred by 50% of participants. Mouse and stylus had IPs of 4.7 and 4.2 respectively. However, their low error rate of 5% makes these techniques more suitable for refined target selection.
Unique transposon landscapes are pervasive across Drosophila melanogaster genomes

To understand how transposon landscapes (TLs) vary across animal genomes, we describe a new method called the Transposon Insertion and Depletion AnaLyzer (TIDAL) and a database of >300 TLs in Drosophila melanogaster (TIDAL-Fly). Our analysis reveals pervasive TL diversity across cell lines and fly strains, even for identically named sub-strains from different laboratories such as the ISO1 strain used for the reference genome sequence. On average, >500 novel insertions exist in every lab strain, inbred strains of the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel (DGRP), and fly isolates in the Drosophila Genome Nexus (DGN). A minority (<25%) of transposon families comprise the majority (>70%) of TL diversity across fly strains. A sharp contrast between insertion and depletion patterns indicates that many transposons are unique to the ISO1 reference genome sequence. Although TL diversity from fly strains reaches asymptotic limits with increasing sequencing depth, rampant TL diversity causes unsaturated detection of TLs in pools of flies. Finally, we show novel transposon insertions negatively correlate with Piwi-interacting RNA (piRNA) levels for most transposon families, except for the highly-abundant roo retrotransposon. Our study provides a useful resource for Drosophila geneticists to understand how transposons create extensive genomic diversity in fly cell lines and strains.
El acceso a la jubilación o pensión en Uruguay: ¿cuántos y quiénes lo lograrían?

The estimations in this paper show that there is a high risk that a very significant share of the workers registered in the work history of the main social security institution of Uruguay (the BPS) will not be able to comply with the condition of contributing 35 years to access the pension when they reach the usual ages for retirement, if the frequencies of contributions observed between 1996 and 2004 remain unchanged in the future. As expected, the problem is more serious in the private sector and among low-wage workers than in the public sector and among better paid workers. The differences found between males and females are significant, but of a lower magnitude than the above mentioned ones. Also the sign of the differences between genders change across estimations.
Essays on labor economics and public finance

Public policies are an important determinant of the welfare of individuals and the society at large. Careful evaluation of the impact of public policies on welfare is therefore imperative for our understanding of the positive and normative implications for these institutions. The three chapters of this thesis examine the welfare consequences of specific economic and political institutions. Chapters 1 and 2 study two distinct channels through which social housing, a common feature of developed countries, may impact the neighborhoods in which they are built and the labor market outcomes of their low income tenants. Chapter 1 is concerned with the effect of the provision of social housing on neighboring private ats. It assesses the spillovers of low-income tenants and the change in the composition of the housing stock that are to be expected from the provision of new social housing units. In particular, it uses the direct conversion of private rental flats into social units without any accompanying rehabilitation to identify the impact of the inflow into the neighborhood of low income tenants, separately from the effects of social housing on the quality of the existing housing stock. Chapter 2 shows that social housing influences the location of low income tenants, and that the neighborhood of social housing units may improve the labor market outcomes of the poorest tenants. I observe the relocation of welfare recipients through the selection process of social housing applicants in the city of Paris from 2001 to 2007. The institutional process acts as a conditional randomization device across residential areas in Paris. The empirical estimates outline that neighborhoods have weak short- and medium-run effects on the economic self-sufficiency of poor households. Chapter 3, by contrast, focuses on how regional migrations of unemployed workers may affect their job search prospect in Europe. Using a longitudinal sample of French unemployment spells, the empirical estimates outline positive migration effects on transitions from unemployment to employment that depends on the previous duration of the unemployment spells.
Resistance to Chemotherapy and Poor Outcome Death Domain in Acute Myeloid Leukemia Cells Predicts Absence or Low Expression of Fas-Associated Protein with Updated

In acute myeloid leukemia (AML), coexpression of death receptors and ligands of the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) receptor/TNFsuperfamily on leukemic cells after chemotherapy is not always accompanied by apoptosis, suggesting that the apoptotic death receptor signaling pathway is disrupted. Because Fas-associated protein with death domain (FADD) is the main adaptor for transmitting the Fas, TNF-related apoptosis-inducing ligand receptors, and TNF receptor 1 death signal, expression of FADD was analyzed by Western blot and immunocytochemistry in leukemic cells of 70 de novo AML patients treated with the European Organization of Research and Treatment of Cancer AML-10 randomized trial before initiation of induction chemotherapy. Thirty seven percent of patients (17 of 46) with FADD negative/low (FADD ) leukemic cells had a primary refractory disease compared with 12% of FADD patients (3 of 24; P 0.05). FADD /low expression was significantly associated with a worse event-free survival [EFS (P 0.04)] and overall survival (P 0.04). In multivariate analysis, FADD /low protein expression was independently associated with a poor EFS and overall survival (P 0.002 and P 0.026, respectively). Importantly, FADD /low protein expression predicted poor EFS even in patients with standardor good-risk AML (P 0.009). Thus, we identified low or absent expression of the FADD protein in leukemic cells at diagnosis as a poor independent prognostic factor that can predict worse clinical outcome even for patients with standardor good-risk AML.
Education and Home Production

Valuable insights into the labor supply of married women have recently been gained by analyzing the problem in the household production context. Pioneered by Jacob Mincer, this approach sees women as choosing not simply between work and leisure, but between work in the home, work in the market, and leisure. While income affects the total amount of work, its division between home and market depends on wage rates, productivity in the home, and the price and availability of substitutes for the wife's labor in the home. Participation of married women in the market has, of course, increased dramatically in the past thirty years; this increase in labor force participation has been accompanied by various changes in inputs and outputs of household work which have only recently come under detailed scrutiny. It appears that over a fifty-year period the total time devoted to work in the home by urban nonemployed women has remained virtually constant at fiftythree hours per week (Joann Vanek). But since employed women have always devoted less time to household production than nonemployed women, and since the proportion of women in the labor force has been rising, the average time devoted to household tasks by all women has been falling over the past fifty years. One of the factors drawing women into the labor market has been their rising educational attainment. But what is the effect of the considerable rise in schooling levels on production within the home? First, it is important to understand how home production varies with schooling. Michael Grossman has recently found that a married man's health is positively related to his wife's schooling level. Lee Benham finds evidence to support his hypothesis that the earnings of married men are positively related to their wives' schooling. Robert T. Michael finds that education affects the efficiency with which contraception is carried on. In contrast to these papers, which relate a woman's education to various household production outputs, the present paper will try to determine how schooling affects one of the inputs of household production, namely, time. Time budget data will be used to determine how time allocation to various activities varies with schooling level.
Optimization Beyond Prediction: Prescriptive Price Optimization

This paper addresses a novel data science problem, prescriptive price optimization, which derives the optimal price strategy to maximize future profit/revenue on the basis of massive predictive formulas produced by machine learning. The prescriptive price optimization first builds sales forecast formulas of multiple products, on the basis of historical data, which reveal complex relationships between sales and prices, such as price elasticity of demand and cannibalization. Then, it constructs a mathematical optimization problem on the basis of those predictive formulas. We present that the optimization problem can be formulated as an instance of binary quadratic programming (BQP). Although BQP problems are NP-hard in general and computationally intractable, we propose a fast approximation algorithm using a semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxation. Our experiments on simulation and real retail datasets show that our prescriptive price optimization simultaneously derives the optimal prices of tens/hundreds products with practical computational time, that potentially improve approximately 30% of gross profit of those products.
Wild plant species growing closely connected in a subalpine meadow host distinct root-associated bacterial communities

Plant roots are known to harbor large and diverse communities of bacteria. It has been suggested that plant identity can structure these root-associated communities, but few studies have specifically assessed how the composition of root microbiota varies within and between plant species growing under natural conditions. We assessed the community composition of endophytic and epiphytic bacteria through high throughput sequencing using 16S rDNA derived from root tissues collected from a population of a wild, clonal plant (Orange hawkweed–Pilosella aurantiaca) as well as two neighboring plant species (Oxeye daisy–Leucanthemum vulgare and Alsike clover–Trifolium hybridum). Our first goal was to determine if plant species growing in close proximity, under similar environmental conditions, still hosted unique root microbiota. Our results showed that plants of different species host distinct bacterial communities in their roots. In terms of community composition, Betaproteobacteria (especially the family Oxalobacteraceae) were found to dominate in the root microbiota of L. vulgare and T. hybridum samples, whereas the root microbiota of P. aurantiaca had a more heterogeneous distribution of bacterial abundances where Gammaproteobacteria and Acidobacteria occupied a larger portion of the community. We also explored the extent of individual variance within each plant species investigated, and found that in the plant species thought to have the least genetic variance among individuals (P. aurantiaca) still hosted just as diverse microbial communities. Whether all plant species host their own distinct root microbiota and plants more closely related to each other share more similar bacterial communities still remains to be fully explored, but among the plants examined in this experiment there was no trend that the two species belonging to the same family shared more similarities in terms of bacterial community composition.
"Cloud" health-care workers.

Certain bacteria dispersed by health-care workers can cause hospital infections. Asymptomatic health-care workers colonized rectally, vaginally, or on the skin with group A streptococci have caused outbreaks of surgical site infection by airborne dispersal. Outbreaks have been associated with skin colonization or viral upper respiratory tract infection in a phenomenon of airborne dispersal of Staphylococcus aureus called the "cloud" phenomenon. This review summarizes the data supporting the existence of cloud health-care workers.
A supervised learning Multiple-F0 estimation algorithms for computer-synthesized music

Multiple fundamental frequency estimation, or Multiple-FO estimation, is one of the most important problem on automatic music transcription, but it has not been well resolved up to now. This paper presents a supervised pattern recognition and machine learning methods for computer-synthesized music specifically to Multiple-F0 estimation. Computer-synthesized music is almost free from similar instruments of the differences between different individuals, so it is a good research object. It can be shown in this paper that the experimental results indicate that this method has very good recognition results.
Networked Narratives: Understanding Word-of-Mouth Marketing in Online Communities

Word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing—firms’ intentional influencing of consumer-to-consumer communications—is an increasingly important technique. Reviewing and synthesizing extant WOM theory, this article shows how marketers employing social media marketing methods face a situation of networked coproduction of narratives. It then presents a study of a marketing campaign in which mobile phones were seeded with prominent bloggers. Eighty-three blogs were followed for six months. The findings indicate that this network of communications offers four social media communication strategies—evaluation, embracing, endorsement, and explanation. Each is influenced by character narrative, communications forum, communal norms, and the nature of the marketing promotion. This new narrative model shows that communal WOM does not simply increase or amplify marketing messages; rather, marketing messages and meanings are systematically altered in the process of embedding them. The theory has definite, pragmatic implications for how marketers should plan, target, and leverage WOM and how scholars should understand WOM in a networked world.
Credit and Liquidity in Interbank Rates: A Quadratic Approach

A bank that lends on the unsecured market requires compensations for facing the default risk of the borrowing bank (credit risk) and the risk associated to its own future funding needs (liquidity risk). In this paper, we propose a quadratic term-structure model of the spreads between unsecured and risk-free interbank rates. Our no-arbitrage econometric framework allows us to decompose the term structure of spreads into credit and liquidity components and to identify risk premia associated with each of these two risks. Our results suggest that, over the period 2012–2013, most of the reduction in interbank spreads comes from a decrease in liquidity-related risk components.
Spatio-temporal video copy detection

Video copy detection algorithms are used to find copies of original video content even if the content has been altered. Given the prevalence of video recording and copying devices as well as the availability of many Internet sites for hosting videos, detecting video copies has become an important problem especially for companies interested in managing and controlling copyrights of their content. We propose a new content-based video copy detection algorithm. The proposed algorithm creates signatures that capture the spatial and temporal features of videos. These spatio-temporal signatures enable the algorithm to provide both high precision and recall. In addition, these signatures require small storage and are easy to compute and compare. Our extensive experimental analysis with a large video dataset shows that the proposed algorithm achieves high precision and recall values while remaining robust to many video transformations that commonly occur in practice. The algorithm is simple to implement and is more computationally efficient than previous algorithms in literature.
The ciliary pocket: an endocytic membrane domain at the base of primary and motile cilia

Cilia and flagella are eukaryotic organelles involved in multiple cellular functions. The primary cilium is generally non motile and found in numerous vertebrate cell types where it controls key signalling pathways. Despite a common architecture, ultrastructural data suggest some differences in their organisation. Here, we report the first detailed characterisation of the ciliary pocket, a depression of the plasma membrane in which the primary cilium is rooted. This structure is found at low frequency in kidney epithelial cells (IMCD3) but is associated with virtually all primary cilia in retinal pigment epithelial cells (RPE1). Transmission and scanning electron microscopy, immunofluorescence analysis and videomicroscopy revealed that the ciliary pocket establishes closed links with the actin-based cytoskeleton and that it is enriched in active and dynamic clathrin-coated pits. The existence of the ciliary pocket was confirmed in mouse tissues bearing primary cilia (cumulus), as well as motile cilia and flagella (ependymal cells and spermatids). The ciliary pocket shares striking morphological and functional similarities with the flagellar pocket of Trypanosomatids, a trafficking-specialised membrane domain at the base of the flagellum. Our data therefore highlight the conserved role of membrane trafficking in the vicinity of cilia.
Representation of the non-dominated set in biobjective combinatorial optimization

This article introduces several algorithms for nding a representative subset of the non-dominated point set of a biobjective combinatorial optimization problem with respect to uniformity, coverage and the -indicator. These representation problems are formulated as particular facility location problems with a special location structure, which allows for polynomial-time algorithms in the biobjective case based on the principles of dynamic programming and threshold approaches. In addition, we show that several multiobjective variants of these representation problems are also solvable in polynomial time. Computational results obtained by these approaches on a wide range of randomly generated point sets are presented and discussed.
Romania and the European Union: How the weak vanquished the strong

Introduction 1. The EU discovers Romania 2. Crafty natives lead the Eurocrats astray 3. The futility of EU funding 4. Labour of Sisyphus: administrative reform in Romania 5. Justice clings to its chains: 1989-2004 6. NATO, the EU and Romania's strategy of duplicity 7. The EU at its most incoherent: April-December 2004 8. The EU regains and loses the initiative: 2005-7 9. Corruption and anti-corruption 10. The expiry of reform after 2007 Conclusion
Congruence properties of the Ω-function on sumsets

Throughout this paper, we shall use the following notation: c1,c2,. denote positive absolute constants. Z, N and N0 denote the set of integers, positive integers and non-negative integers respectively. The cardinality of a set S is denoted by |S|. bxc and {x} denote the integer part and the fractional part of x and ‖x‖ denotes the distance from x to the nearest integer: ‖x‖ = min({x}, 1 − {x}). We write e = e(α). If f(n) = O(g(n)), then we write f(n) g(n); if the implied constant depends on a certain parameter c, then we write f(n) c g(n). A,B, . denote subsets of N0 and A+ B denotes the set of the non-negative integers n that can be represented in the form n = a + b with a ∈ A, b ∈ B. ω(n) denotes the number of distinct prime factors of n and Ω(n) denotes the number of prime factors of n counted with multiplicity. λ(n) is the Liouville function: λ(n) = (−1). The divisor function is denoted by τ(n).