Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Emergence of Cooperative Outcomes : A Stochastic Stability Analysis

The concept of the core capturing allocations that exhaust all possible gains from trade is central in economic theory. Are all allocations included in the core, though, equally likely to emerge in a decentralized exchange economy? We investigate this question by studying the evolution of exchange in such an economy via a dynamic trading process in the spirit of Edgeworths recontracting. Assuming that along this process individual agents might make mistakes with a small probability, we characterize the stochastically stable distribution of the process and use this distribution to obtain a measure of the relative frequency with which each core allocation will emerge in the long run. Based on this measure, we demonstrate that there exist particular allocations inside the core which are more likely to emerge relative to others. These are allocations which are welfare improving for a larger number of agents, or alternatively, allocations which can be reached relatively easily with only a small number of agents involved in trading. Keywords: Core, Edgeworths Recontracting, Stochastic Stability, Housing Economy, Incentives to Trade, Decentralization. JEL Classi cation: C71, C73, D51, D61. We are indebted to Roberto Serrano for his guidance and support throughout this project. We have also bene ted greatly from the valuable input of Amy Greenwald, John Wicks, as well as that of seminar participants at Brown University Economics and Computer Science Departments. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Bank of Japan. yCorresponding Author: Petros Milionis, Department of Economics, Econometrics & Finance, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands, e-mail: P.Milionis@rug.nl.
Back‐up procedures following complicated gastric pull‐up procedure for esophageal reconstruction: Salvage with intestinal flaps

Gastric pull‐up (GPU) is the most common procedure for restoring the continuity of the alimentary tract. Yet, complications because of anastomotic problems are reported to be as high as 25% after this procedure. Managing the neck with anastomotic leakage or stricture following failed GPU and/or radiotherapy is formidable. We report our method, basic algorithm and results with the complicated GPU procedure management with intestinal transfers .
CloudGauge: A Dynamic Cloud and Virtualization Benchmarking Suite

Cloud Computing and virtualization technology are taking the momentum nowadays in data centres, research institutions and IT infrastructure models. Having a reference and performance benchmarks for the dynamic workloads in virtualized and cloud environments is a vital thing to develop. Virtualized workload benchmark will help data center’s architects and administrators to design an elegant data center’s architectural models and establish a workload balance between virtualized and consolidated servers, according to the workload’s analysis and characterization produced by this reference benchmark. In this paper, we will present an overview about CloudGauge, a dynamic and experimental benchmark for virtualized and cloud environments, and the key requirements and characteristics of virtual systems’ performance metrics, evaluation and workload’s characterization which can be considered a step further to implement a production-ready virtual systems and cloud benchmarking suite and performance models.
Effect of different bleaching strategies on microhardness of a silorane-based composite resin

Background. Dentists’ awareness of the effects of bleaching agents on the surface and mechanical properties of restorative materials is of utmost importance. Therefore, this in vitro study was undertaken to investigate the effects of different bleaching strategies on the microhardness of a silorane-based composite resin. Methods. Eighty samples of a silorane-based composite resin (measuring 4 mm in diameter and 2 mm in thickness) were prepared within acrylic molds. The samples were polished and randomly assigned to 4 groups (n=20). Group 1 (controls) were stored in distilled water for 2 weeks. The samples in group 2 underwent a bleaching procedure with 15% carbamide peroxide for two weeks two hours daily. The samples in group 3 were bleached with 35% hydrogen peroxide twice 5 days apart for 30 minutes each time. The samples in group 4 underwent a bleaching procedure with light-activated 35% hydrogen peroxide under LED light once for 40 minutes. Then the microhardness of the samples was determined using Vickers method. Data were analyzed with one-way ANOVA and post hoc Tukey tests (P < 0.05). Results. All the bleaching agents significantly decreased microhardness compared to the control group (P < 0.05). In addition, there were significant differences in microhardness between groups 2 and 4 (P = 0.001) and between groups 3 and 4 (P<0.001). However, no significant differences were detected in microhardness between groups 2 and 3 (P > 0.05). Conclusion. Bleaching agents decreased microhardness of silorane-based composite resin restorations, the magnitude of which depending on the bleaching strategy used.
Induction of protective immunity to Haemophilus ducreyi in the temperature-dependent rabbit model of experimental chancroid.

The temperature-dependent rabbit model for chancroid, a sexually transmitted disease caused by the fastidious Gram-negative bacterium Haemophilus ducreyi, was used to investigate the abilities of previous infection and immunization with an acellular preparation of H. ducreyi to induce protective immunity. In the first set of experiments, animals were infected intradermally with either the 35000 or Cha-1 strains of H. ducreyi and then rechallenged 30 days later with both the homologous and heterologous strains. In animals infected with the 35000 strain, statistically significant protective immunity occurred only against the homologous strain, whereas protection against both homologous and heterologous challenge was obtained in rabbits previously infected with strain Cha-1. In a separate series of experiments, rabbits were immunized with cell envelopes from either strain 35000 or strain Cha-1 and then challenged with both the homologous and heterologous strains. In rabbits immunized with strain 35000 cell envelopes, significant protective immunity was observed only against challenge with the homologous strain. In animals immunized with strain Cha-1 cell envelopes, protection was obtained against both homologous and heterologous challenge. Histopathologic analysis of sites inoculated with strain 35000 (10(5) CFU) demonstrated that the inflammatory response in control animals was predominantly suppurative (i.e., heterophilic), whereas that of immunized animals was predominantly mononuclear and, at later time points, largely histiocytic. ELISA and Western blot analyses revealed that immunization produced a better humoral immune response than did infection and provided evidence for antigenic cross-reactivity between these two strains. These results provide the experimental basis for continued efforts to identify potential H. ducreyi vaccinogens.
A Coverage-Based Utility Model for Identifying Unknown Unknowns

A classifier’s low confidence in prediction is often indicative of whether its prediction will be wrong; in this case, inputs are called known unknowns. In contrast, unknown unknowns (UUs) are inputs on which a classifier makes a high confidence mistake. Identifying UUs is especially important in safety-critical domains like medicine (diagnosis) and law (recidivism prediction). Previous work by Lakkaraju et al. (2017) on identifying unknown unknowns assumes that the utility of each revealed UU is independent of the others, rather than considering the set holistically. While this assumption yields an efficient discovery algorithm, we argue that it produces an incomplete understanding of the classifier’s limitations. In response, this paper proposes a new class of utility models that rewards how well the discovered UUs cover (or "explain") a sample distribution of expected queries. Although choosing an optimal cover is intractable, even if the UUs were known, our utility model is monotone submodular, affording a greedy discovery strategy. Experimental results on four datasets show that our method outperforms bandit-based approaches and achieves within 60.9% utility of an omniscient, tractable upper bound.
Carbaryl Resistance in Mexican Strains of the Southern Cattle Tick (Acari: Ixodidae)

Abstract Susceptibility to carbaryl in six Mexican strains of the southern cattle tick, Boophilus microplus (Canestrini), was evaluated with the Food and Agricultural Organization larval packet test. Tick strains from the cattle fever tick quarantine zone in Texas were more susceptible to carbaryl than to coumaphos or diazinon. Compared with the susceptible reference (Gonzalez) strain, Mexican tick strains demonstrated 10.9–59.5-fold resistance to carbaryl. Significant cross-resistance was found between carbaryl and the organophosphate acaricides coumaphos and diazinon. Bioassay results with synergists suggested that metabolic detoxification mechanisms did not play a major role in carbaryl resistance. Resistance to carbaryl was likely conferred by insensitive acetylcholinesterase. The implications of carbaryl resistance in tick eradication and control also are discussed.
Growth history, knowledge intensity and capital structure in small firms

This paper explores the financial characteristics of successful Canadian small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME). It asks whether industry membership and early growth history play a role in shaping these financial characteristics. Our study reveals a strong correlation between capital structure and knowledge intensity. In contrast, growth histories are not obvious determinants of financial structure. Results also suggest that leverage strategies are more apparent in low-knowledge industries, in firms with higher expectations of future performance, and in businesses with more balanced financial structures. Industry comparisons are based on production activity and knowledge intensity. Growth distinctions are based on the firm's employment and sales history. We evaluate our hypotheses with survey data from a stratified random sample of 2775 Canadian firms. Proportional weighting techniques are utilized in all analyses.
Modeling Functional Roles Dynamics in Small Group Interactions

The paper addresses the automatic recognition of social and task-oriented functional roles in small-group meetings, focusing on several properties: a) the importance of non-linguistic behaviors, b) the relative time-consistency of the social roles played by a given person during the course of a meeting, and c) the interplays and mutual constraints among the roles enacted by the different participants in a social encounter. In particular, this paper proposes that the Influence Model framework can address these properties of functional roles, and compares the performance obtained by this framework to the performances of models that consider only property (a) (SVM), and to those that address both (a) and (b) (HMM). The results obtained confirm our expectations: the classification of social functional roles improves if models account for temporal dependencies among the roles played by the same subject, for the time properties of the roles played by each individual, and for the mutual constraints among the roles of different group members. The two versions of the Influence Model (IM and newIM), which encode all three properties together, outperform both the SVM and the HMM on most of the figures of merit used. Of particular interest is the capability of the Influence Model to obtain good or very good results on the less-populated classes-Orienteer and Seeker for the task area, and Attacker and Supporter for the socio-emotional area.
Estimating articulated human pose from video using shape context

Recovery of 3D body pose is a fundamental problem for human motion analysis in many applications such as motion capture, vision interface, visual surveillance, and gesture recognition. In this paper, we present a new image-based approach to infer 3D human structure parameters from uncalibrated video. The estimation is example based. First, we acquire a special motion database through an off-line motion capture process. Second, given an uncalibrated motion video, we abstract the viewpoint and then the silhouettes database associated with 3D poses is built by projecting each data of the 3D motion database into 2D plane. Next, with the image silhouettes, the unknown structure parameters are inferred by performing a similarity search in the silhouettes database. We pay more attention on how to retrieving 3D body pose by matching 2D silhouette based on shape context. Through a lot of experiments, the results we got are really satisfying. To accelerate the process of calculating the distance in shape context, we use PCA (principal components analysis) to reduce the computation of complexity. We use trampoline sport, which is an example of complex human motion, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and compare the results with those obtained with Hu moments method
Merging Strategies for Sum-Product Networks: From Trees to Graphs

Learning the structure of sum-product networks (SPNs) - arithmetic circuits over latent and observed variables - has been the subject of much recent research. These networks admit linear time exact inference, and thus help alleviate one of the chief disadvantages of probabilistic graphical models: accurate probabilistic inference algorithms are often computationally expensive. Although, algorithms for inducing their structure from data have come quite far and often outperform algorithms that induce probabilistic graphical models, a key issue with existing approaches is that they induce tree SPNs, a small, inefficient sub-class of SPNs. In this paper, we address this limitation by developing post-processing approaches that induce graph SPNs from tree SPNs by merging similar sub-structures. The key benefits of graph SPNs over tree SPNs include smaller computational complexity which facilitates faster online inference, and better generalization accuracy because of reduced variance, at the cost of slight increase in the learning time. We demonstrate experimentally that our merging techniques significantly improve the accuracy of tree SPNs, achieving state-of-the-art performance on several real world benchmark datasets.
Mood State Relationships and Soccer Team Performance

Morgan’s well-known iceberg profile, characterized by Profile of Mood States (POMS) scores above the population norm on vigor and below the norm on tension, depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion, is said to indicate a successful athlete. Preperformance POMS scores of team members might therefore give a prior indication of the actual team performance. Nine female soccer players from the same team participated in the study. The players completed the POMS before, immediately after, and 2 hours after each game during a season. The outcome of the games greatly affected the players’ mood states. Tension, depression, anger, and confusion scores were lower (ps < .01), and vigor was higher (p < .01) when the team won. Prior to the games, only minor differences in POMS scores were detected, regardless of the actual outcome. Taken together, the results do not support the notion that POMS scores could be helpful in predicting team performance.
Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking as Predictors of Personal and Public Achievement: A Fifty-Year Follow-Up

This article presents the results of the 50-year follow-up of the longitudinal study E. Paul Torrance initiated 5 decades ago. The Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was administered in the late 1950s and personal and public achievement data were obtained 50 years later and used as criteria in analyses reported here. These showed that TTCT scores were moderately correlated with personal, but not with public, achievement. However, an interaction of intelligence and creativity was significantly related to public achievement but not to personal achievement. When a composite was formed from the 4 TTCT indexes (fluency, originality, flexibility, and elaboration), a significant quadratic trend was found with the personal achievement criterion. Three of the indicators (“Love of work,” Tolerance of mistakes, and Minority of one) from the Beyonder instrument developed by Torrance (2003) were related to public achievement. Only one other indicator from the Beyonder measure (“Well-roundedness”) was associated with personal achievement. Men were significantly higher in public achievement than women, but there was no significant gender difference in personal achievement.
Protective Effects of Scutellarin and Breviscapine on Brain and Heart Ischemia in Rats

Scutellarin is an active molecule existing in Erigeron breviscapus (vant.) Hand-Mazz. The present work was designed to study the antiischemic effects of scutellarin and its mixture with another substance, breviscapine, in male Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats. Ligature of left anterior descending arteries was performed to induce acute myocardial infarction (MI), and the middle cerebral artery occlusion was created to induce focal cerebral ischemia. The MI size was significantly reduced by scutellarin (15 and 50 mg/kg) but not by breviscapine (5 to 50 mg/kg); the effect of scutellarin on the anti-MI was dose-dependent. Compared with control group, scutellarin (50 mg/kg) reduced the myocardium cell apoptosis in MI rats. The two drugs together (5 to 50 mg/kg) significantly reduced infarction size in focal brain ischemic rats (P < 0.05). There were no significant differences among the 3 dosages in breviscapine-treated rats, and the effect of scutellarin on the anticerebral ischemia was dose-dependent. The results demonstrate that the protective effects of scutellarin on cardiovascular and cerebrovascular ischemia were better than its mixture, breviscapine, in rats.
Characterization of transport and deposition of terrestrial organic matter in the southern North Sea using the BIT index

We have applied a recently introduced proxy, the BIT (branched and isoprenoid tetraether) index, to determine terrestrial organic matter (TOM) transport from the rivers Rhine and Meuse and their tributaries to the southern North Sea. This index is based on crenarchaeol, an isoprenoidal glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraether (GDGT) predominantly derived from aquatic Crenarchaeota and branched GDGTs produced by soil bacteria. Up to 1.6 ng L‐1 of branched GDGTs were measured in seawater, demonstrating the presence of TOM in the southern North Sea. BIT indices were inversely correlated with salinity, indicating that this TOM was recently supplied by rivers. The substantial amount of branched GDGTs (35 ng L‐1) detected in river water and the high branched GDGT concentration measured in the water of a Swiss peat bog (5,900 ng L‐1) suggest fluvial transport of branched GDGTs from peats and soils to the oceans. The high crenarchaeol concentration measured in river water (4.4 ng L‐1) was probably derived from crenarchaeota living in rivers and organic material from soil and peat. The BIT index, δ13C value, and C : N ratio of surface sediments deposited in the southern North Sea were compared to determine TOM deposition. BIT index (0.07 to 0.26) and δ13C (‐20.6 to ‐22.9%) both showed substantial small‐scale differences in TOM deposition in the southern North Sea, but this pattern was not obvious from the C : N ratios. A good correlation was found between d13C and branched GDGT concentrations, indicating that the absolute GDGT concentrations give additional information to the BIT index.
Teaching Strategies: Continuity among Early Childhood Programs

While children's development is continuous, the samecannotalways be said about their early childhood programs; young children can experience discontinuity due to gaps, overlaps, or mismatches when they move from one program to another (Barbour & Seefeldt, 1993). This issue of continuity among early childhood programs has been a longstandingconcem. Forexample, the theme of the 1908 yearbook of the National Society for the Study ofEducationwas kindergartencontinuity. Continuity affects educators, parents, administrators, policymakers, and young children, and is a concern around the world. My recent visits to early childhood programs in several Pacific Rim countries and the discussions I had with early childhood educators there reinforced my understanding of the importance and pervasiveness of this issue. (Most of the examples used in this article are from Pacific Rim countries.) Continuity between early childhood programs is a complex issue, affecting children and families as well as the programs themselves (Pianta & Cox, 1999; RimmKaufman, Pianta, & Cox, 2000). Continuity can be defined as "the way and degree to which one program relates to and builds on another for the benefit of the children" (Mayfield, 2001,p. 416). It includes philosophical, curricular, developmental, physical, organizational, and administrative continuities. Continuity is an ongoing process, not a series of isolated events. Thus, strategies to foster continuity need to be addressed by multiple groups over time and across settings, including nursery schools, child care centers, kindergartens, and primary classrooms-from the first early childhood program a child experiences through the primary grades. Educators, administrators, parents, and policymakers must recognize the importance of and need for effective strategies to provide smooth and successful continuity between earlychildhood programs for young children.
Cosmopolitanism and the Devil in Malawi

The article contributes to recent attempts to provide historically and ethnographically nuanced accounts of cosmopolitanism. A central argument in the article revolves around the notion of situated cosmopolitanism. While cosmopolitanisms must be envisaged in the plural, common to these diverse cultural projects is an uneasy relation to the home that imposes itself on the subject. Pentecostal Christians in an impoverished township in Malawi consider this-worldly realities as one, ruled by the Devil. Their cosmopolitan vision transcends, therefore, social and spatial boundaries, but it gains its force from their particular existential predicament of impoverishment. The article shows in detail how the Pentecostal belief in the second birth establishes a specific form of cosmopolitan relatedness. It entails a deterritorialized mode of belonging which undermines, among others, the rural–urban distinction.
Parent-Child Discrepancies in the Assessment of Internalizing/Externalizing Behavior

This study focused on informant discrepancies in reports on internalizing/externalizing child behavior and associations with parenting dimensions. The study was based on two longitudinal samples followed from Grade 2 to 4 and from Grade 4 to 6. Internalizing/externalizing symptoms were assessed yearly by childrens self-reports and parent-proxy reports. Responsiveness and behavioral and psychological control assessed by the children and their parents were included as parenting dimensions. Child reports on symptoms were higher than parent-proxy reports. Regarding internalizing symptoms, the discrepancies decreased with childrens age. Relations to parenting were shown mainly for psychological control. If parents perceive themselves as psychologically controlling, the discrepancies are smaller, while discrepancies are larger when children perceive their parents as psychologically controlling. Psychologically controlling parents may have a strong focus on the behavior of their children, leading to a stronger.