Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Perceiving Human Locomotion: Priming Effects in Direction Discrimination

During the perception of biological motion, the available stimulus information is confined to a small number of lights attached to the major joints of a moving actor. Despite this drastic impoverishment of the stimulus, the human visual apparatus organizes the swarm of moving dots in a vivid percept of a human figure. In addition, observers effortlessly identify the action the figure is involved in. After a historical introduction and a short walk through the literature, data from a priming experiment are presented. In a serial two-choice reaction-time task, participants were presented with a point-light walker, facing either to the right or to the left and walking either forward or backward on a treadmill. Subjects had to identify the direction of articulatory movements. Reliable priming effects were established in consecutive trials, but these effects were tempered by the relation between priming and primed walker. The reaction time to a walker was shorter when the walker in the preceding trial moved in the same direction and was facing in the same direction. The findings are discussed in relation to recent data from neuropsychological case studies, neuroimaging, and single-cell recording.
Environmental Aspects of Resource Extraction Contracts

This paper analyzes resource partnerships and their influence on the environmental quality in a resource-rich country by introducing incomplete contracts, imperfect property rights protection, and a lack of valuation for the environment by the government in the South. Employing numerical simulations, I determine the equilibrium extraction rate, the applied extraction technology, and the environmental quality in dependence of the state of democracy in the resource-rich country. In contrast to what one might expect, under certain circumstances it can be environmentally beneficial to have incomplete contracts that induce the utilization of a suboptimal technology for resource extraction. Further, reducing the holdup problem by shifting bargaining power to the North, is only desirable if the environmental quality in- creases with a better extraction technology.
The Quiet Revolution in Staple Food Value Chains: Enter the Dragon, the Elephant, and the Tiger

Feeding nine billion people by 2050 is a top priority on the global agenda for sustainable and inclusive development. This task is especially formidable in Asia, where more than two-thirds of the worldâ€™s poor and malnourished people live. Food prices in Asia are projected to remain high and volatile, and food production is likely to be challenged by the combined effects of resource degradation and increasing climate variability and change. Ensuring food security in this region requires urgent actions to improve the productivity and climate resilience of agriculture and to upgrade the food value chains to ensure adequate and affordable food supplies.
Suppression of Cotton Bollworm in Multiple Crops in China in Areas with Bt Toxin–Containing Cotton

Transgenic cotton that has been engineered to produce insecticidal toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and so to resist the pest cotton bollworm (Helicoverpa armigera) has been widely planted in Asia. Analysis of the population dynamics of H. armigera from 1992 to 2007 in China indicated that a marked decrease in regional outbreaks of this pest in multiple crops was associated with the planting of Bt cotton. The study area included six provinces in northern China with an annual total of 3 million hectares of cotton and 22 million hectares of other crops (corn, peanuts, soybeans, and vegetables) grown by more than 10 million resource-poor farmers. Our data suggest that Bt cotton not only controls H. armigera on transgenic cotton designed to resist this pest but also may reduce its presence on other host crops and may decrease the need for insecticide sprays in general.
Latvia's Internal Devaluation: A Success Story?

Advocates of an economic strategy of “internal devaluation” have recently pointed to Latvia as an example of successful macroeconomic policy. The Latvian economy is projected to grow by four percent in 2011. They argue that the Latvian government, along with the European authorities (including the International Monetary Fund ­ IMF), pursued the correct macroeconomic policies by maintaining Latvia’s fixed exchange rate and implementing pro-cyclical fiscal policies (that shrunk the economy further) and sometimes pro-cyclical monetary policies. They argue that these were the best policies ­as opposed to counter-cyclical, expansionary fiscal and monetary policies, accompanied by devaluation­ designed to promote a rapid economic recovery. The data, however, contradict the notion that Latvia’s experience provides an example of successful internal devaluation. This paper looks at the Latvian case and provides further evidence that this can be a very costly strategy and one that does not work. The social and economic costs in Latvia were enormous, and the loss of income much greater than most countries that had crisis-driven devaluations. Countries with crisis-driven devaluations also recovered vastly faster, on average, than did Latvia. Furthermore, net exports contributed little or nothing to Latvia's recovery, which seems to have been facilitated instead by the abandonment of pro-cyclical macroeconomic policies.
Evaluation of Various Turbulence Models in Predicting Airflow and Turbulence in Enclosed Environments by CFD: Part 1—Summary of Prevalent Turbulence Models

Air distribution in enclosed environments is crucial to thermal comfort and air quality. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has played an important role in evaluating and designing various air distribution. Many factors can influence the applications of CFD for studying air distribution. The most critical factors are the selection of an appropriate CFD approach and a turbulence model. Recent advances in CFD approaches and turbulence models provide great potential for improving prediction accuracy of air distribution in enclosed environments. This paper summarizes recent progress in CFD turbulence modeling and its application to some practical indoor environment studies. Also described are turbulence models that either are commonly used or have been proposed and used recently for indoor environment modeling. Finally, this study further identifies a few turbulence models that show great potential for modeling airflows in enclosed environments. A companion paper presents the evaluation of the selected models by using experimental data from the literature.
Dynamic Nature of Noncoding RNA Regulation of Adaptive Immune Response

Immune response plays a fundamental role in protecting the organism from infections; however, dysregulation often occurs and can be detrimental for the organism, leading to a variety of immune-mediated diseases. Recently our understanding of the molecular and cellular networks regulating the immune response, and, in particular, adaptive immunity, has improved dramatically. For many years, much of the focus has been on the study of protein regulators; nevertheless, recent evidence points to a fundamental role for specific classes of noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) in regulating development, activation and homeostasis of the immune system. Although microRNAs (miRNAs) are the most comprehensive and well-studied, a number of reports suggest the exciting possibility that long ncRNAs (lncRNAs) could mediate host response and immune function. Finally, evidence is also accumulating that suggests a role for miRNAs and other small ncRNAs in autocrine, paracrine and exocrine signaling events, thus highlighting an elaborate network of regulatory interactions mediated by different classes of ncRNAs during immune response. This review will explore the multifaceted roles of ncRNAs in the adaptive immune response. In particular, we will focus on the well-established role of miRNAs and on the emerging role of lncRNAs and circulating ncRNAs, which all make indispensable contributions to the understanding of the multilayered modulation of the adaptive immune response.
Immune camouflage: Relevance to vaccines and human immunology

High strain sequence variability, interference with innate immune mechanisms, and epitope deletion are all examples of strategies that pathogens have evolved to subvert host defenses. To this list we would add another strategy: immune camouflage. Pathogens whose epitope sequences are cross-conserved with multiple human proteins at the TCR-facing residues may be exploiting “ignorance and tolerance," which are mechanisms by which mature T cells avoid immune responses to self-antigens. By adopting amino acid configurations that may be recognized by autologous regulatory T cells, pathogens may be actively suppressing protective immunity. Using the new JanusMatrix TCR-homology-mapping tool, we have identified several such ‘camouflaged’ tolerizing epitopes that are present in the viral genomes of pathogens such as emerging H7N9 influenza. Thus in addition to the overall low number of T helper epitopes that is present in H7 hemaglutinin (as described previously, see http://dx.doi.org/10.4161/hv.24939), the presence of such tolerizing epitopes in H7N9 could explain why, in recent vaccine trials, whole H7N9-HA was poorly immunogenic and associated with low seroconversion rates (see http://dx.doi.org/10.4161/hv.28135). In this commentary, we provide an overview of the immunoinformatics process leading to the discovery of tolerizing epitopes in pathogen genomic sequences, provide a brief summary of laboratory data that validates the discovery, and point the way forward. Removal of viral, bacterial and parasite tolerizing epitopes may permit researchers to develop more effective vaccines and immunotherapeutics in the future.
Advances in Quantitative Analysis of Finance and Accounting

Advances in Quantitative Analysis of Finance and Accounting is an annual publication designed to disseminate developments in the quantitative analysis of finance and accounting. The publication is a forum for statistical and quantitative analyses of issues in finance and accounting, as well as applications of quantitative methods to problems in financial management, financial accounting, and business management. The objective is to promote interaction between academic research in finance and accounting and applied research in the financial community and accounting profession. The chapters in this volume cover a wide range of important topics, including corporate finance and debt management, earnings management, options and futures, equity market, and portfolio diversification. These topics are very useful for both academicians and practitioners in the area of finance.
The impact of peer victimization on later maladjustment: mediating and moderating effects of hostile and self-blaming attributions.

BACKGROUND Evidence indicates that being a victim of bullying or peer aggression has negative short- and long-term consequences. In this study, we investigated the mediating and moderating role of two types of attributional mechanisms (hostile and self-blaming attributions) on children's maladjustment (externalizing and internalizing problems). METHODS In total, 478 children participated in this longitudinal study from grade 5 to grade 7. Children, parents, and teachers repeatedly completed questionnaires. Peer victimization was assessed through peer reports (T1). Attributions were assessed through self-reports using hypothetical scenarios (T2). Parents and teachers reported on children's maladjustment (T1 and T3). RESULTS Peer victimization predicted increases in externalizing and internalizing problems. Hostile attributions partially mediated the impact of victimization on increases in externalizing problems. Self-blame was not associated with peer victimization. However, for children with higher levels of self-blaming attributions, peer victimization was linked more strongly with increases in internalizing problems. CONCLUSIONS Results imply that hostile attributions may operate as a potential mechanism through which negative experiences with peers lead to increases in children's aggressive and delinquent behavior, whereas self-blame exacerbates victimization's effects on internalizing problems.
Cosmic background of gravitational waves from rotating neutron stars

The extragalactic background of gravitational waves produced by tri-axial rotating neutron stars was calculated, under the assumption that the properties of the underlying pulsar population are the same of those of the galactic population, recently derived by Regimbau & de Freitas Pacheco (2000). For an equatorial ellipticity of $\epsilon$ = 10$^{-6}$, the equivalent density parameter due to gravitational waves has a maximum amplitude in the range 2$\times10^{-11}-3\times10^{-9}$, around 0.9-1.5 kHz. The main reasons affecting the theoretical predictions are discussed. This background is comparable to that produced by the ''ring-down'' emission from distorted black holes. The detection possibility of this background by a future generation of gravitational antennas is also examined.
Croatian Dependency Treebank 2.0: New Annotation Guidelines for Improved Parsing

We present a new version of the Croatian Dependency Treebank. It constitutes a slight departure from the previously closely observed Prague Dependency Treebank syntactic layer annotation guidelines as we introduce a new subset of syntactic tags on top of the existing tagset. These new tags are used in explicit annotation of subordinate clauses via subordinate conjunctions. Introducing the new annotation to Croatian Dependency Treebank, we also modify head attachment rules addressing subordinate conjunctions and subordinate clause predicates. In an experiment with data-driven dependency parsing, we show that implementing these new annotation guidelines leeds to a statistically significant improvement in parsing accuracy. We also observe a substantial improvement in inter-annotator agreement, facilitating more consistent annotation in further treebank development.
Profitability, Investment and Employment: A Survey of Recent Developments in Medium- Term Growth Theory

This paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on the relationship between profitability, investment and employment in an attempt to clarify the roles of demand-management, supply-management and incomes policies in stimulating employment and growth. conomic theorists, working within the confines of the traditional distinc­ tion between short-run and long-run analyses, have until recently paid little attention to the impact of real wage developments on capital accumulation and growth. Macroeconomists have regarded investment primarily as a com­ ponent of aggregate demand rather than as the process through which the stock of productive capital is changed over time, while growth theorists have for the most part been concerned with flexible price full employment situations within which the relationship between conflict over income shares or levels and the capital accumulation process cannot be studied. The supply shocks of the 1970s have convinced many economists of the desirability of relaxing this traditional dichotomy. The attempts by all groups in society to maintain their income levels hindered the structural adjustments required by the massive relative price changes of this period and drew attention to the need for an analysis of the determinants of capital accumulation in dis­ equilibrium situations.
Adaptive process management with ADEPT2

In the ADEPT project we have been working on the design and implementation of next generation process management software. Based on a conceptual framework for dynamic process changes, on novel process support functions, and on advanced implementation concepts, the developed system enables the realization of adaptive, process-aware information systems (PAIS). Basically, process changes can take place at the type as well as the instance level: changes of single process instances may have to be carried out in an ad-hoc manner and must not affect system robustness and consistency. Process type changes, in turn, must be quickly accomplished in order to adapt the PAIS to business process changes. ADEPT2 offers powerful concepts for modeling, analyzing, and verifying process schemes. Particularly, it ensures schema correctness, like the absence of deadlock-causing cycles or erroneous data flows. This, in turn, constitutes an important prerequisite for dynamic process changes as well. ADEPT2 supports both ad-hoc changes of single process instances and the propagation of process type changes to running instances.
Temporal and Spatial Changes of the Agroclimate in Alberta, Canada, from 1901 to 2002

Abstract This paper analyzes the long-term (1901–2002) temporal trends in the agroclimate of Alberta, Canada, and explores the spatial variations of the agroclimatic resources and the potential crop-growing area in Alberta. Nine agroclimatic parameters are investigated: May–August precipitation (PCPN), the start of growing season (SGS), the end of the growing season (EGS), the length of the growing season (LGS), the date of the last spring frost (LSF), the date of the first fall frost (FFF), the length of the frost-free period (FFP), growing degree-days (GDDs), and corn heat units (CHUs). The temporal trends in the agroclimatic parameters are analyzed by using linear regression. The significance tests of the trends are made by using Kendall’s tau method. The results support the following conclusions. 1) The Alberta PCPN has increased 14% from 1901 to 2002, and the increment is the largest in the north and the northwest of Alberta, then diminishes (or even becomes negative over two small areas) in central .
Elemental abundance survey of the Galactic thick disc

We have performed an abundance analysis for F- and G- dwarfs of the Galactic thick-disc component. A sample of 176 nearby (d≤ 150 pc) thick-disc candidate stars was chosen from the Hipparcos catalogue and subjected to a high-resolution spectroscopic analysis. Using accurate radial velocities combined with the Hipparcos astrometry, kinematics (U, V and W) and Galactic orbital parameters were computed. We estimate the probability for a star to belong to the thin disc, the thick disc or the halo. With a probability P≥ 70 per cent taken as certain membership, we assigned 95 stars to the thick disc, 13 to the thin disc, and 20 to the halo. The remaining 48 stars in the sample cannot be assigned with reasonable certainty to one of the three components. Abundances of C, O, Na, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Y, Ba, Ce, Nd and Eu have been obtained. The abundances for the thick-disc stars are compared with those for the thin-disc members from Reddy et al. The ratios of α-elements (O, Mg, Si, Ca and Ti) to iron for thick-disc stars show a clear enhancement compared to thin-disc members in the range −0.3 < [Fe/H] < −1.2. There are also other elements – Al, Sc, V, Co, and possibly Zn – which show enhanced ratios to iron in the thick disc relative to the thin disc. The abundances of Na, Cr, Mn, Ni and Cu (relative to Fe) are very similar for thin- and thick-disc stars. The dispersion in abundance ratios [X/Fe] at given [Fe/H] for thick-disc stars is consistent with the expected scatter due to measurement errors, suggesting a lack of ‘cosmic’ scatter. A few stars classified as members of the thick disc by our kinematic criteria show thin-disc abundances. These stars, which appear older than most thin-disc stars, are also, on average, younger than the thick-disc population. They may have originated early in the thin-disc history, and been subsequently scattered to hotter orbits by collisions. The thick disc may not include stars with [Fe/H] > −0.3. The observed compositions of the thin and thick discs seem to be consistent with the models of galaxy formation by hierarchical clustering in a Lambda cold dark matter (ΛCDM) universe.
Conferences and Their Literature: A Question of Value

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Spatial fairness in wireless multi-access networks

Multi-access networks exhibit severe unfairness in throughput. Recent studies show that this unfairness is due to local differences in the neighborhood structure: Nodes with less neighbors receive better access. We study the unfairness in tandem networks, and adapt the multi-access protocol to remove the unfairness completely, by choosing the activity rates of nodes appropriately as a function of the number of neighbors.
Labour market policies, strategies and statistics for people with disabilities: A cross-national comparison

In addition to describing different countries’ labour market policies for people with disabilities, this study attempts to establish some initial benchmarks for comparing national policies in this respect for a number of OECD countries. The report systematically compares the countries in order to provide answers as to how they differ with respect to: (1) the target group’s labour force participation and employment rate; (2) what labour market programmes are applied and to what degree; (3) to what extent the regular policy and institutional framework is used to integrate persons with disabilities into the labour market (the degree of mainstreaming). The study is based on a questionnaire to national government departments in all the OECD-countries in 1999. Of the 21 countries which are compared, Sweden, New Zealand, Germany and France have high labour market participation rates, while Spain, Ireland, Poland, Greece and Italy are all below average. Eleven countries provided sufficient information for a thorough cross-national comparison which among other things includes detailed descriptions of each country’s labour market programmes and statistics on the number of participants with disabilities and disability pension recipients. Despite similar labour force participation figures in Great Britain, Australia, Finland, Norway and Austria, the latter two countries have a substantially higher proportion of people in labour market programmes. Likewise, labour force participation in New Zealand is about the same as in Sweden, despite fewer participants in programmes. The proportion of participants with disabilities in various types of programmes specially targeted for people with disabilities and general programmes are compared. In Sweden, almost half the participants with disabilities in labour market programmes are employees with long-term wage subsidies. Almost half the participants in labour market programmes in Finland and Norway are undergoing training. Labour market training is also important in English-speaking countries and so are work experience programmes and, in principle, there are no long-term wage subsidies. Both the proportion of disability pension recipients and the proportion of programme participants are limited in Australia and the United Kingdom, while both proportions are substantial in Sweden and Ireland.