Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Metabolic pathways in three dimensions

MOTIVATION Currently a substantial research effort is devoted to automated representation of metabolic and gene networks. Automatic visualization plays a significant role in such efforts, and becomes an important problem on its own. Graphical visualization of metabolic pathways has to be information dense and not 'overloaded', recognizable and unified, close to traditional and algebraically consistent. The use of three-dimensional 'virtual reality' visualizations may help to understand better the intricate topology of metabolic and regulatory networks. RESULTS A system of visualizing metabolic networks as graphs in three-dimensional space by means of Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) is presented. The system is based on an XML-compliant MNV ('Metabolic Network Visualizer') language, and comprises MNV language standard and parser, MNV to VRML translator, and interactive pathway constructor, all unified by the HTML graphic user interface. AVAILABILITY The MNV can be accessed in viewer mode at http://www.patronov. net/sciencevr/mnv/indexview.html or in constructor mode at http://www.patronov. net/sciencevr/mnv/indexmake.html SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION The figures for the paper as well as the Appendices may be found at http://www.patronov. net/sciencevr/mnv/screenshots.html
Congestion Control in Wireless Sensor Networks: A survey

Congestion is a major problem in almost all kinds of wireless networks such as mobile ad-hoc networks; wireless sensor networks (WSNs). There are variety of applications of WSN such as defense, temperature monitoring, health monitoring. Congestion occurs in the sensor network because of limited resources such as low processing power of the sensor node. As all the sensor nodes are battery powered. Hence, congestion in the sensor network results in waste of energy of sensor nodes. All the layers of protocol suite of the network can be involved in the congestion control process. This paper gives a brief idea about various congestion control methods. In some of the schemes, cross-layer design is applied for better results.
Innovation and social entrepreneurship in tourism - A potential for local business development?

Over the past few years, the tourist industry has come to be recognised as a way of providing strategic support for sustainable local business development. In this article we attempt to define an appropriate innovation concept in relation to tourism on the basis of an attractor principle. We then discuss the concept of entrepreneurship in connection with tourism, looking at its significance in its relationship with local business development, thereby positing the premise of social entrepreneurship. This frame of reference is used in five cases in the analysis. The analysis shows that it is possible to innovate and draw up plans for new attractors but that it is considerably more difficult to convert these plans into reality through social entrepreneurship. The conclusion is that we need to focus upon organisation of semi-public tourist organisations, if we want tourism to promote local business development.
Risk Preferences Under Extreme Poverty: A Field Experiment

Until now, the dominant belief concerning the relationship between poverty and risk aversion is that the poor are more risk averse. If the poor are more risk averse, then they will choose “low risk-low return” activities that trap them in poverty. However, both empirical and experimental evidence show no clear pattern such as would suggest that the poor are somehow more averse to risk than others; at times, they even seem to embrace risk, while at other times, there seems to be no difference. Focus has tended to be on extreme behaviors, as these are related to sub-optimal decisions such as have even raised questions whether an individual can be simultaneously both poor and rational. Amongst all the available empirical evidence, there is one bit of evidence of special interest - changes in behavior whenever subsistence is at risk. This paper emerges from the fact that recent experimental evidence in both psychology and economics suggests that certain decisions made under risk respond to reference points. We develop a theory within the traditional stream of rational choices, whereby the references are set by only observable variables, such as prices and family size. According to this theory, extremely poor individuals respond to the income reference that guarantees the consumption of the necessary calories so as to ensure a healthy and longer life. Being in the neighborhood of this reference can incentivize both the seeking of high risk, whenever below the reference, and an aversion to high risk, when above. An experimental exercise was conducted involving 92 individuals from households living in poverty and extreme poverty wherein they participated in a baseline risk experiment that was the one we analyzed. Inasmuch as the treatment was not randomly assigned, but instead was determined based on households’ per-capita incomes, a quasi-experimental approach was used to analyze the results. We use a regression discontinuity design, and find evidence suggesting that being presented with the opportunity of avoiding undernourishment significantly decreases a household’s risk aversion.
Grease or sand the wheel? The effects of individual bribe payments on aggregate productivity growth

While the Asian Paradox literature evidences a grease-the-wheel effect of corruption on individual firm productivity growth, the results call into question the aggregate effect of individual bribery. A large literature analyzes the drivers of productivity growth at the firm and sector levels, and suggests that corruption may affect these drivers through the resulting less favorable conditions for investment and technological progress, as well as distortions and misallocation in output and inputs markets. We are not aware of any literature that investigate the effects of micro-level corruption on aggregate productivity growth (APG) and its different components (intra-plant productivity growth; market shares reallocation between incumbents; and the effect of firm entry and exit in the industry). Filling this gap is important for understanding the dynamics by which corruption damages countries’ economic performance (Dal Bo and Rossi 2007) as measured by its main driver: productivity growth (Barro and Sala-i-Martin 2003). Using a unique panel dataset covering the population of Indonesian manufacturing establishments over the long period 1975-1995, we assess the cumulated effect of micro-bribe payments to aggregate productivity growth. Following Foster et al. (2001) methodology so as to model and decompose Aggregate Labour Productivity Growth (ALPG), and using establishment-level measures of productivity and bribe payments, we assess the contribution of three different corruption-classes of plants: plants paying zero, low, or high bribes. As a robustness check, and to account for the overestimation of the net entry effect, we use the Melitz and Polanec (2012) modeling approach that is a dynamic version of Olley and Pakes (1996). We demonstrate that the aggregate class of high-corruption plants contributes negatively to aggregate labour productivity growth, while the aggregate class of plants paying zero or low bribes contributes positively. Our results are robust to the use of two different measures of corruption. Thus, this paper shows that the two diverging effects of corruption, that is the grease- and the sand-the-wheel effects, coexist at different aggregation levels and for different classes of plants. While corruption has beneficial effects if kept low, the cost of high corruption in terms of aggregate productivity growth becomes evident.
Ideal Schools for the 21st Century: A Comparative Analysis of American and Chinese Principals’ Views and Visions

The importance of principals to school improvement has been widely recognized, but few studies have focused on principals’ own perceptions of school change and their special roles in reform. This article reports findings from a comparative survey study of American and Chinese school principals’ basic beliefs regarding education and schooling, their views on school reform and the role of the principal in reform, and their visions of ideal schools in the 21st century. Although similarities exist in their perceptions, there are striking contrasts between the American and Chinese views and visions, which point to quite different directions and paths of reform in the two nations. While Americans are busy constructing common standards, developing and using more standardized tests for all students, and moving toward standards-based school reform, the Chinese seem to desire just the opposite—deconstructing uniform standards, moving away from the pressures of national exams, and focusing more on the interests and potentials of each individual student, a goal that has been largely ignored in the past in the Chinese culture and schools.
Evaluating EU Regional Policy: Many Empirical Specifications, One (Unpleasant) Result

Numerous studies have focused on the role of EU regional policy in fostering growth and convergence among European regions, why conducting another one? We argue that two facts are still lacking in the actual academic debate in order to get a sound empirical identification strategy and reliable results: First, one should take the theoretical underpinnings of regional growth models more serious, and second, a likewise careful account of the role of spatial dependence in the underlying data is needed. Though research has increasingly become aware of the latter point as important control factor for regional heterogeneity and omitted variables, in empirical operationalization still the ad-hoc inclusion of a hardly interpretable â€˜catch-all' spatial lag term of the endogenous variable is the first choice. We rather follow the lines of new theoretical and empirical approaches aiming at directly quantifying interregional spillovers associated with the amount of funds granted to lagging regions and their neighborhood. The dataset includes 127 NUTS1/-2 regions within the EU15 over the decade 1997-2007. In the spotlight of the investigation are the Objective 1 payments which are provided for lagging regions with a GDP p.c. of less than 75% of the EU average. These payments shall represent the main instrument to fulfill the central aim of European regional policy, the boost of convergence and harmonic growth over the EU. They represent about two third of the whole European cohesion policy. In our estimations we run a neoclassical convergence model in mainly four different specifications. On the one hand we separate in the aspatial and spatial models. On the other hand we run additive and multiplicative applications in order to consider the right coefficient interpretations. We estimate the model in various econometric specifications to point out the effectiveness of these funding. Our results all hint to the unpleasant result that EU structural funds objective 1 funding has a remarkably little or even negative direct impact on regional growth within the EU15. The spatial funding effects turn into negative significance in the most model specifications.
On the Sample Complexity of Random Fourier Features for Online Learning

We study the sample complexity of random Fourier features for online kernel learning—that is, the number of random Fourier features required to achieve good generalization performance. We show that when the loss function is strongly convex and smooth, online kernel learning with random Fourier features can achieve an O(log T /T) bound for the excess risk with only O(1/λ2) random Fourier features, where T is the number of training examples and λ is the modulus of strong convexity. This is a significant improvement compared to the existing result for batch kernel learning that requires O(T) random Fourier features to achieve a generalization bound O(1/√T). Our empirical study verifies that online kernel learning with a limited number of random Fourier features can achieve similar generalization performance as online learning using full kernel matrix. We also present an enhanced online learning algorithm with random Fourier features that improves the classification performance by multiple passes of training examples and a partial average.
Does Debt Affect Firm Financial Performance? the Role of Debt on Corporate Governance in Indonesia.

This research addresses main question of the conditions of debt-constraint expropriation and debt-facilitate expropriation, and the difference between those conditions on type of group ownership (group or no group-affiliate). Agency theory predicts that debt is bonding and monitoring mechanism for managers' perquisites action. Expropriation of minority shareholders by majority shareholders hurts good corporate governance practices. The expropriation also hurts debtholders value. The research argues that the use of debt will minimize the expropriation level and maintain certain control to managers and majority shareholders, on behalf of minority shareholders and debtholders. The problem of majority versus minority and debtholders spreads widely in Indonesia. This research conducts analytical and statistical methods to examine the roles of debt policy as mechanism of good corporate governance practices in Indonesia. This research argues that debt has difference effect on financial performance based on certain debt characteristic. Two characteristics of debt are debt-constraint expropriation (DCE) and debt-facilitate expropriation (DFE). Different types of ownership, which are group and no group-affiliate, are also examined to support the main issues of DCE and DFE. The result will be useful for economic policy makers; firms level policy makers, investors, academician, and researchers in the area of finance, social science, and humanities. The research tests the main question with four hypotheses using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and Wald test for coefficient test. The result shows support for differences in effect on debt to performance for DCE (positive effect) and DFE (negative effect). On DCE, no group-affiliate firms have higher positive effect of debt on performance than group-affiliate firms do. However, on DFE due to risk reduction mechanism, group-affiliate firms have less negative effect of debt on performance than no group-affiliate firms do.
A factor analysis of the SSQ (Speech, Spatial, and Qualities of Hearing Scale)

Abstract Objective: The speech, spatial, and qualities of hearing questionnaire (SSQ) is a self-report test of auditory disability. The 49 items ask how well a listener would do in many complex listening situations illustrative of real life. The scores on the items are often combined into the three main sections or into 10 pragmatic subscales. We report here a factor analysis of the SSQ that we conducted to further investigate its statistical properties and to determine its structure. Design: Statistical factor analysis of questionnaire data, using parallel analysis to determine the number of factors to retain, oblique rotation of factors, and a bootstrap method to estimate the confidence intervals. Study sample: 1220 people who have attended MRC IHR over the last decade. Results: We found three clear factors, essentially corresponding to the three main sections of the SSQ. They are termed “speech understanding”, “spatial perception”, and “clarity, separation, and identification”. Thirty-five of the SSQ questions were included in the three factors. There was partial evidence for a fourth factor, “effort and concentration”, representing two more questions. Conclusions: These results aid in the interpretation and application of the SSQ and indicate potential methods for generating average scores.
Investment, cash flow, and uncertainty: evidence for the Netherlands

Abstract We contribute to the debate on the interpretation of investment-cash flow sensitivities by including uncertainty measures in both a simple theoretical investment model and an empirical illustration for Dutch firm-level data. Using a slightly modified version of the Kaplan-Zingales (1997) model we show that it is likely that firms facing high uncertainty rely more on cash flow. Next we illustrate this result using an investment panel data model of Dutch listed firms. Using a threshold estimator we determine the critical level of stock price, sales, and employment uncertainty. Next we apply a GMM-estimator to correct for the endogeneity of the regressors. The empirical results confirm the notion that higher uncertainty intensifies the use of cash flow.
Exact Solution Analysis of Strongly Convex Programming for Principal Component Pursuit

In this paper, we address strongly convex programming for principal component analysis, which recovers a target matrix that is a superposition of low-complexity structures from a small set of linear measurements. In this paper, we ﬁrstly provide sufﬁcient conditions under which the strongly convex models lead to the exact low-rank matrix recovery. Secondly, we also give suggestions that will guide us how to choose suitable parameters in practical algorithms. Finally, the proposed result is extended to the principal component pursuit with reduced linear measurements and we provide numerical experiments.
Girdin Is an Intrinsic Regulator of Neuroblast Chain Migration in the Rostral Migratory Stream of the Postnatal Brain

In postnatally developing and adult brains, interneurons of the olfactory bulb (OB) are continuously generated at the subventricular zone of the forebrain. The newborn neuroblasts migrate tangentially to the OB through a well defined pathway, the rostral migratory stream (RMS), where the neuroblasts undergo collective migration termed “chain migration. ” The cell-intrinsic regulatory mechanism of neuroblast chain migration, however, has not been uncovered. Here we show that mice lacking the actin-binding Akt substrate Girdin (a protein that interacts with Disrupted-In-Schizophrenia 1 to regulate neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus) have profound defects in neuroblast chain migration along the RMS. Analysis of two gene knock-in mice harboring Girdin mutants identified unique amino acid residues in Girdin's C-terminal domain that are responsible for the regulation of neuroblast chain migration but revealed no apparent requirement of Girdin phosphorylation by Akt. Electron microscopic analyses demonstrated the involvement of Girdin in neuroblast cell–cell interactions. These findings suggest that Girdin is an important intrinsic factor that specifically governs neuroblast chain migration along the RMS.
Asymmetric Growth and Inflation Developments in the Acceding Countries: A New Assessment. NBB Working Paper Nr. 63, November 2004

In this paper, we use a SVAR model in order to study the asymmetry of growth and inflation developments in the acceding countries vis-a-vis the euro area over the years 1995-2003. The model combines two strands of the literature, the explanation in terms of country-specific and euro area shocks, and a further split between supply and demand shocks. The four structural shocks may all create asymmetries vis-a-vis the euro area. It appears that country-specific shocks are the main source of growth or inflation divergence, rather than the distinct way in which acceding countries react to euro area shocks. But whereas country-specific supply shocks are mainly responsible for growth divergence, country-specific demand shocks are mainly responsible for inflation asymmetry. Hence, a low asymmetry in terms of growth does not necessarily imply a low asymmetry in terms of inflation, although the latter is particularly important for countries aiming to join the euro area. There is some evidence that both asymmetries were on the fall over the last years of the sample.
Minneapolis Public Schools Start Time Study Executive Summary 1998

In the 1997-98 school year, the Center for Applied Research (CAREI) in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota was asked by the Minneapolis School Board to examine the impact of the later start upon its students, staff, families, and community members. The information from that study can be found in "Start Time Study Report of Findings," November 1998, as a bound report provided to Minneapolis School District administrators.
Solution of the polynomial moment problem

In this paper we give a solution of the following ‘polynomial moment problem’ which arose about 10 years ago in connection with Poincaré's center‐focus problem: for a given polynomial P(z) to describe polynomials q(z) orthogonal to all powers of P(z) on a segment [a, b].
Reporting on income distribution and poverty : perspectives from a German and a European point of view

The Development of the Distribution of Income and Wealth in Germany - an Overview. - Income Redistribution: Tax-Financed Versus Contribution-Financed Components. - A Comparison of the Main Household Income Surveys for Germany: EVS and SOEP. - Resources, Standard of Living and Lebenslagen - And What Does All This Have To Do With Poverty? - A Conceptual Framework for Recording Extreme Poverty. - The Poverty and Wealth Report and the National Action Plan (NAPIncl): Mutual Co-ordination and Prospects. - The Case of Great Britain: Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion. - Measuring and Targeting Poverty in Ireland. - Developing Comparable Indicators for Monitoring Social Inclusion in the European Union.
Gemini: An Optical Interconnection Network for Parallel Processing

The Gemini interconnect is a dual technology (optical and electrical) interconnection network designed for use in tightly-coupled multicomputer systems. It consists of a circuit-switched optical data path in parallel with a packet-switched electrical control/data path. The optical path is used for transmission of long data messages and the electrical path is used for switch control and transmission of short data messages. The paper describes the architecture of the interconnection network and related communications protocols. Fairness issues associated with network operation are addressed and a discrete-event simulation model of the entire system is described. Network performance characteristics derived from the simulation model are presented. The results show significant performance benefits when using virtual output queuing and quantify the tradeoffs between throughput and fairness in the system.
An energy efficient and QoS aware multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Enabling real time applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) demands certain delay and bandwidth requirements which pose more challenges in the design of networking protocols. Therefore, enabling such applications in this type of networks requires energy and Quality of Service (QoS) awareness in different layers of the protocol stack. In many of these applications (such as multimedia applications, or real time and mission critical applications), the network traffic is mixed of delay sensitive and reliability demanding data. Hence, QoS routing becomes an important issue. In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient and QoS aware multipath routing protocol (we name it shortly as EQSR) that maximizes the network lifetime through balancing energy consumption across multiple nodes, uses the concept of service differentiation to allow high important traffic (or delay sensitive traffic) to reach the sink node within an acceptable delay, reduces the end to end delay through spreading out the traffic across multiple paths, and increases the throughput through introducing data redundancy. EQSR uses the residual energy, node available buffer size, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to predict the best next hop through the paths construction phase. Based on the concept of service differentiation the EQSR protocol employs a queuing model to handle both real time and non-real time traffic. By means of computer simulations, we evaluated and studied the performance of our routing protocol and compared it with another protocol. Simulation results have shown that our protocol achieves lower average delay and higher packet delivery ratio than the other protocol.